Doubts About Ted. Books Are Like Pumps.

Don't Even Think About It. Sully Wins a Prize. Bobby Gets a Job. Signs of the Low Men.

During the next few weeks, as the weather warmed toward summer, Ted was usually on the porch smoking when Liz came home from work. Sometimes he was alone and sometimes Bobby was sitting with him, talking about books. Sometimes Carol and Sully-John were there, too, the three kids playing pass on the lawn while Ted smoked and watched them throw. Sometimes other kids came by—Denny Rivers with a taped-up balsa glider to throw, soft-headed Francis Utterson, always pushing along on his scooter with one overdeveloped leg, Angela Avery and Yvonne Loving to ask Carol if she wanted to go over Yvonne's and play dolls or a game called Hospital Nurse—but mostly it was just S-J and Carol, Bobby's special friends. All the kids called Mr Brautigan Ted, but when Bobby explained why it would be better if they called him Mr Brautigan when his mom was around, Ted agreed at once.

As for his mom, she couldn't seem to get Brautigan to come out of her mouth. What emerged was always Brattigan. That might not have been on purpose, however; Bobby was starting to feel a cautious sense of relief about his mother's view of Ted. He had been afraid that she might feel about Ted as she had about Mrs Evers, his second-grade teacher. Mom had disliked Mrs Evers on sight, disliked her deeply, for no reason at all Bobby could see or understand, and hadn't had a good word to say about her all year long—Mrs Evers dressed like a frump, Mrs Evers dyed her hair, Mrs Evers wore too much makeup, Bobby had just better tell Mom if Mrs Evers laid so much as one finger on him, because she looked like the kind of woman who would like to pinch and poke. All of this following a single parentteacher conference in which Mrs Evers had told Liz that Bobby was doing well in all his subjects. There had been four other parent—teacher conferences that year, and Bobby's mother had found reasons to duck every single one.

Liz's opinions of people hardened swiftly; when she wrote BAD under her mental picture of you, she almost always wrote in ink. If Mrs Evers had saved six kids from a burning schoolbus, Liz Garfield might well have sniffed and said they probably owed the pop-eyed old cow two weeks” worth of milk-money.

Ted made every effort to be nice without actually sucking up to her (people did suck up to his mother, Bobby knew; hell, sometimes he did it himself), and it worked . . . but only to a degree. On one occasion Ted and Bobby's mom had talked for almost ten minutes about how awful it was that the Dodgers had moved to the other side of the country without so much as a faretheewell, but not even both of them being Ebbets Field Dodger fans could strike a real spark between them. They were never going to be pals. Mom didn't dislike Ted Brautigan the way she had disliked Mrs Evers, but there was still something wrong. Bobby supposed he knew what it was; he had seen it in her eyes on the morning the new tenant had moved in. Liz didn't trust him.

Nor, it turned out, did Carol Gerber. “Sometimes I wonder if he's on the run from something,” she said one evening as she and Bobby and S-J walked up the hill toward Asher Avenue.

They had been playing pass for an hour or so, talking off and on with Ted as they did, and were now heading to Moon's Roadside Happiness for ice cream cones. S-J had thirty cents and was treating. He also had his Bo-lo-Bouncer, which he now took out of his back pocket.

Pretty soon he had it going up and down and all around, whap-whap-whap.

“On the run? Are you kidding?” Bobby was startled by the idea. Yet Carol was sharp about people; even his mother had noticed it. That girl's no beauty, but she doesn't miss much, she'd said one night.

“Stick em up, McGarrigle!” Sully-John cried. He tucked his Bo-lo Bouncer under his arm, dropped into a crouch, and fired an invisible tommygun, yanking down the right side of his mouth so he could make the proper sound to go with it, a kind of eh-eh-eh from deep in his throat. “You'll never take me alive, copper! Blast em, Muggsy! Nobody runs out on Rico!•

“Ah, jeez, they got me!” S-J clutched his chest, spun around, and fell dead on Mrs Conlan's lawn.

That lady, a grumpy old rhymes-with-witch of seventy-five or so, cried: “Boy! Touuu, boy!

Get off there! You'll mash my flowers!”

There wasn't a flowerbed within ten feet of where Sully-John had fallen, but he leaped up at once. “Sorry, Mrs Conlan.”

She flapped a hand at him, dismissing his apology without a word, and watched closely as the children went on their way.

“You don't really mean it, do you?” Bobby asked Carol. “About Ted?”

“No,” she said, “I guess not. But . . . have you ever watched him watch the street?”

“Yeah. It's like he's looking for someone, isn't it?”

“Or looking out for them,” Carol replied.

Sully-John resumed Bo-lo Bouncing. Pretty soon the red rubber ball was blurring back and forth again. Sully paused only when they passed the Asher Empire, where two Brigitte Bardot movies were playing, Adults Only, Must Have Driver's License or Birth Certificate, No Exceptions. One of the pictures was new; the other was that old standby And God Created Woman, which kept coming back to the Empire like a bad cough. On the posters, Brigitte was dressed in nothing but a towel and a smile.

“My mom says she's trashy,” Carol said.

“If she's trash, I'd love to be the trashman,” S-J said, and wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho.

“Dojyow think she's trashy?” Bobby asked Carol.

“I'm not sure what that means, even.”

As they passed out from under the marquee (from within her glass ticket-booth beside the doors, Mrs Godlow—known to the neighborhood kids as Mrs Godzilla—watched them suspiciously), Carol looked back over her shoulder at Brigitte Bardot in her towel. Her expression was hard to read. Curiosity? Bobby couldn't tell. “But she's pretty, isn't she?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“And you'd have to be brave to let people look at you with nothing on but a towel. That's what I think, anyway.”

Sully-John had no interest in la femme Brigitte now that she was behind them. “Where'd Ted come from, Bobby?”

“I don't know. He never talks about that.”

Sully-John nodded as if he expected just that answer, and threw his Bo-lo Bouncer back into gear. Up and down, all around, whap-whap-whap.

In May Bobby's thoughts began turning to summer vacation. There was really nothing in the world better than what Sully called “the Big Vac.” He would spend long hours goofing with his friends, both on Broad Street and down at Sterling House on the other side of the park—they had lots of good things to do in the summer at Sterling House, including baseball and weekly trips to Patagonia Beach in West Haven—and he would also have plenty of time for himself. Time to read, of course, but what he really wanted to do with some of that time was find a part-time job. He had a little over seven rocks in a jar marked BIKE FUND, and seven rocks was a start . . . but not what you'd call a great start. At this rate Nixon would have been President two years before he was riding to school.

On one of these vacation's-almost-here days, Ted gave him a paperback book. “Remember I told you that some books have both a good story and good writing?” he asked. “This is one of that breed. A belated birthday present from a new friend. At leasf T hope I am your friend.”

“You are. Thanks a lot!” In spite of the enthusiasm in his voice, Bobby took the book a little doubtfully. He was accustomed to pocket books with bright, raucous covers and sexy comeon lines (“She hit the gutter . . . AND BOUNCED LOWER!'}; this one had neither. The cover was mostly white. In one corner of it was sketched—barely sketched—a group of boys standing in a circle. The name of the book was Lord of the Flies. There was no come-on line above the title, not even a discreet one like “A story you will never forget.” All in all, it had a forbidding, unwelcoming look, suggesting that the story lying beneath the cover would be hard. Bobby had nothing in particular against hard books, as long as they were a part of one's schoolwork. His view about reading for pleasure, however, was that such stories should be easy—that the writer should do everything except move your eyes back and forth for you. If not, how much pleasure could there be in it?

He started to turn the book over. Ted gently put his hand on Bobby's, stopping him. “Don't,”

he said. “As a personal favor to me, don't.”

Bobby looked at him, not understanding.

“Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map.

Explore it and draw your own map.”

“But what if I don't like it?”

Ted shrugged. “Then don't finish it. A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give . . . eventually. Do you go along with that?”

Bobby nodded.

“How long would you prime a water-pump and flail the handle if nothing came out?”

“Not too long, I guess.”

“This book is two hundred pages, give or take. You read the first ten per cent—twenty pages, that is, I know already your math isn't as good as your reading—and if you don't like it by then, if it isn't giving more than it's taking by then, put it aside.”

“I wish they'd let you do that in school,” Bobby said. He was thinking of a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson which they were supposed to memorize. “By the rude bridge that arched the flood,” it started. S-J called the poet Ralph Waldo Emerslop.

“School is different.” They were sitting at Ted's kitchen table, looking out over the back yard, where everything was in bloom. On Colony Street, which was the next street over, Mrs O'Hara's dog Bowser barked its endless roop-roop-roop into the mild spring air. Ted was smoking a Chesterfield. “And speaking of school, don't take this book there with you. There are things in it your teacher might not want you to read. There could be a brouhaha.”

“A what?”

“An uproar. And if you get in trouble at school, you get in trouble at home—this I'm sure you don't need me to tell you. And your mother . . . “ The hand not holding the cigarette made a little seesawing gesture which Bobby understood at once. Your mother doesn't trust me.

Bobby thought of Carol saying that maybe Ted was on the run from something, and remembered his mother saying Carol didn't miss much.

“What's in it that could get me in trouble?” He looked at Lord of the Flies with new fascination.

“Nothing to froth at the mouth about,” Ted said dryly. He crushed his cigarette out in a tin ashtray, went to his little refrigerator, and took out two bottles of pop. There was no beer or wine in there, just pop and a glass bottle of cream. “Some talk of putting a spear up a wild pig's ass, I think that's the worst. Still, there is a certain kind of grownup who can only see the trees and never the forest. Read the first twenty pages, Bobby. You'll never look back. This I promise you.”

Ted set the pop down on the table and lifted the caps with his churchkey. Then he lifted his bottle and clinked it against Bobby's. “To your new friends on the island.”

“What island?”

Ted Brautigan smiled and shot the last cigarette out of a crumpled pack. “You'll find out,” he said.

Bobby did find out, and it didn't take him twenty pages to also find out that Lord of the Flies was a hell of a book, maybe the best he'd ever read. Ten pages into it he was captivated; twenty pages and he was lost. He lived on the island with Ralph and Jack and Piggy and the littluns; he trembled at the Beast that turned out to be a rotting airplane pilot caught in his parachute; he watched first in dismay and then in horror as a bunch of harmless schoolboys descended into savagery, finally setting out to hunt down the only one of their number who had managed to remain halfway human.

He finished the book one Saturday the week before school ended for the year. When noon came and Bobby was still in his room—no friends over to play, no Saturday-morning cartoons, not even Merrie Melodies from ten to eleven—his mom looked in on him and told him to get off his bed, get his nose out of that book, and go on down to the park or something.

“Where's Sully?” she asked.

“Dalhouse Square. There's a school band concert.” Bobby looked at his mother in the doorway and the ordinary stuff around her with dazed, perplexed eyes. The world of the story had become so vivid to him that this real one now seemed false and drab.

“What about your girlfriend? Take her down to the park with you.”

“Carol's not my girlfriend, Mom.”

“Well, whatever she is. Goodness sakes, Bobby, I wasn't suggesting the two of you were going to run off and elope.”

“She and some other girls slept over Angle's house last night. Carol says when they sleep over they stay up and hen-party practically all night long. I bet they're still in bed, or eating breakfast for lunch.”

“Then go to the park by yourself. You're making me nervous. With the TV off on Saturday morning I keep thinking you're dead.” She came into his room and plucked the book out of his hands. Bobby watched with a kind of numb fascination as she thumbed through the pages, reading random snatches here and there. Suppose she spotted the part where the boys talked about sticking their spears up the wild pig's ass (only they were English and said “arse,” which sounded even dirtier to Bobby)? What would she make of it? He didn't know. All his life they had lived together, it had been just the two of them for most of it, and he still couldn't predict how she'd react to any given situation.

“Is this the one Brattigan gave you?”

“Yeah.”

“As a birthday present?”

“Yeah.”

“What's it about?”

“Boys marooned on an island. Their ship gets sunk. I think it's supposed to be after World War II or something. The guy who wrote it never says for sure.”

“So it's science fiction.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. He felt a little giddy. He thought Lord of the Flies was about as far from Ring Around the Sun as you could get, but his mom hated science fiction, and if anything would stop her potentially dangerous thumbing, that would.

She handed the book back and walked over to his window. “Bobby?” Not looking back at him, at least not at first. She was wearing an old shirt and her Saturday pants. The bright noonlight shone through the shirt; he could see her sides and noticed for the first time how thin she was, as if she was forgetting to eat or something. “What, Mom?”

“Has Mr Brattigan given you any other presents?”

“It's Brautigan, Mom.”

She frowned at her reflection in the window . . . or more likely it was his reflection she was frowning at. “Don't correct me, Bobby-O. Has he?”

Bobby considered. A few rootbeers, sometimes a tuna sandwich or a cruller from the bakery where Sully's mom worked, but no presents. Just the book, which was one of the best presents he had ever gotten. “Jeepers, no, why would he?”

“I don't know. But then, I don't know why a man you just met would give you a birthday present in the first place.” She sighed, folded her arms under her small sharp breasts, and went on looking out Bobby's window. “He told me he used to work in a state job up in Hartford but now he's retired. Is that what he told you?”

“Something like that.” In fact, Ted had never told Bobby anything about his working life, and asking had never crossed Bobby's mind.

“What kind of state job? What department? Health and Welfare? Transportation? Office of the Comptroller?”

Bobby shook his head. What in heck was a comptroller?

“I bet it was education,” she said meditatively. “He talks like someone who used to be a teacher. Doesn't he?”

“Sort of, yeah.”

“Does he have hobbies?”

“I don't know.” There was reading, of course; two of the three bags which had so offended his mother were full of paperback books, most of which looked very hard.

The fact that Bobby knew nothing of the new man's pastimes for some reason seemed to ease her mind. She shrugged, and when she spoke again it seemed to be to herself rather than to Bobby. “Shoot, it's only a book. And a paperback, at that.”

“He said he might have a job for me, but so far he hasn't come up with anything.”

She turned around fast. “Any job he offers you, any chores he asks you to do, you talk to me about it first. Got that?”

“Sure, got it.” Her intensity surprised him and made him a little uneasy.

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

“Big promise, Bobby.”

He dutifully crossed his heart and said, “I promise my mother in the name of God.”

That usually finished things, but this time she didn't look satisfied.

“Has he ever . . . does he ever . . .” There she stopped, looking uncharacteristically flustered. Kids sometimes looked that way when Mrs Bramwell sent them to the blackboard to pick the nouns and verbs out of a sentence and they couldn't.

“Has he ever what, Mom?”

“Never mind!” she said crossly. “Get out of here, Bobby, go to the park or Sterling House, I'm tired of looking at you.”

Why'd you come in, then? he thought (but of course did not say). I wasn't bothering you, Mom. I wasn't bothering you.

Bobby tucked Lord of the Flies into his back pocket and headed for the door. He turned back when he got there. She was still at the window, but now she was watching him again.

He never surprised love on her face at such moments; at best he might see a kind of speculation, sometimes (but not always) affectionate.

“Hey, Mom?” He was thinking of asking for fifty cents—half a rock. With that he could buy a soda and two hotdogs at the Colony Diner. He loved the Colony's hotdogs, which came in toasted buns with potato chips and pickle slices on the side.

Her mouth did its tightening trick, and he knew this wasn't his day for hotdogs. “Don't ask, Bobby, don't even think about it.” Don't even think about it—one of her all-time faves. “I have a ton of bills this week, so get those dollar-signs out of your eyes.”

She didn't have a ton of bills, though, that was the thing. Not this week she didn't. Bobby had seen both the electric bill and the check for the rent in its envelope marked Mr Monteleone last Wednesday. And she couldn't claim he would soon need clothes because this was the end of the school-year, not the beginning. The only dough he'd asked for lately was five bucks for Sterling House—quarterly dues—and she had even been chintzy about that, although she knew it covered swimming and Wolves and Lions Baseball, plus the insurance.

If it had been anyone but his mom, he would have thought of this as cheapskate behavior. He couldn't say anything about it to her, though; talking to her about money almost always turned into an argument, and disputing any part of her view on money matters, even in the most tiny particulars, was apt to send her into ranting hysterics. When she got like that she was scary.

Bobby smiled. “It's okay, Mom.”

She smiled back and then nodded to the jar marked Bike Fund. “Borrow a little from there, why don't you? Treat yourself. I'll never tell, and you can always put it back later.”

He held onto his smile, but only with an effort. How easily she said that, never thinking of how furious she'd be if Bobby suggested she borrow a little from the electric money, or the phone money, or what she set aside to buy her “business clothes,” just so he could get a couple of hotdogs and maybe a pie a la mode at the Colony. If he told her breezily that he'd never tell and she could always put it back later. Yeah, sure, and get his face smacked.

By the time he got to Commonwealth Park, Bobby's resentment had faded and the word cheapskate had left his brain. It was a beautiful day and he had a terrific book to finish; how could you be resentful and pissed off with stuff like that going for you? He found a secluded bench and reopened Lord of the Flies. He had to finish it today, had to find out what happened.

The last forty pages took him an hour, and during that time he was oblivious to everything around him. When he finally closed the book, he saw he had a lapful of little white flowers.

His hair was full of them, too—he'd been sitting unaware in a storm of apple-blossoms.

He brushed them away, looking toward the playground as he did. Kids were teetertottering and swinging and batting the tetherball around its pole. Laughing, chasing each other, rolling in the grass. Could kids like that ever wind up going naked and worshipping a rotting pig's head? It was tempting to dismiss such ideas as the imaginings of a grownup who didn't like kids (there were lots who didn't, Bobby knew), but then Bobby glanced into the sandbox and saw a little boy sitting there and wailing as if his heart would break while another, bigger kid sat beside him, unconcernedly playing with the Tonka truck he had yanked out of his friend's hands.

And the book's ending—happy or not? Crazy as such a thing would have seemed a month ago, Bobby couldn't really tell. Never in his life had he read a book where he didn't know if the ending was good or bad, happy or sad. Ted would know, though. He would ask Ted.

Bobby was still on the bench fifteen minutes later when Sully came bopping into the park and saw him. “Say there, you old bastard!” Sully exclaimed. “I went by your house and your mom said you were down here, or maybe at Sterling House. Finally finish that book?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it good?”

“Yeah.”

S-J shook his head. “I never met a book I really liked, but I'll take your word for it.”

“How was the concert?”

Sully shrugged. “We blew til everyone went away, so I guess it was good for us, anyway.

And guess who won the week at Camp Winiwinaia?” Camp Winnie was the YMCA's co-ed camp on Lake George, up in the woods north of Storrs. Each year HAC—the Harwich Activities Committee—had a drawing and gave away a week there.

Bobby felt a stab of jealousy. “Don't tell me.”

Sully-John grinned. “Yeah, man! Seventy names in the hat, seventy at least, and the one that bald old bastard Mr Coughlin pulled out was John L. Sullivan, Junior, 93 Broad Street.

My mother just about weewee'd her pants.”

“When do you go?”

“Two weeks after school lets out. Mom's gonna try and get her week off from the bakery at the same time, so she can go see Gramma and Grampy in Wisconsin. She's gonna take the Big Gray Dog.” The Big Vac was summer vacation; the Big Shew was Ed Sullivan on Sunday night; the Big Gray Dog was, of course, a Greyhound bus. The local depot was just up the street from the Asher Empire and the Colony Diner.

“Don't you wish you could go to Wisconsin with her?” Bobby asked, feeling a perverse desire to spoil his friend's happiness at his good fortune just a little.

“Sorta, but I'd rather go to camp and shoot arrows.” He slung an arm around Bobby's shoulders. “I only wish you could come with me, you book-reading bastard.”

That made Bobby feel mean-spirited. He looked down at Lord of the Flies again and knew he would be rereading it soon. Perhaps as early as August, if things got boring (by August they usually did, as hard as that was to believe in May). Then he looked up at Sully-John, smiled, and put his arm around S-J's shoulders. “Well, you're a lucky duck,” he said.

“Just call me Donald,” Sully-John agreed.

They sat on the bench that way for a little while, arms around each other's shoulders in those intermittent showers of apple-blossoms, watching the little kids play. Then Sully said he was going to the Saturday matinee at the Empire, and he'd better get moving if he didn't want to miss the previews.

“Why don't you come, Bobborino? The Black Scorpion's playing. Monsters galore throughout the store.”

“Can't, I'm broke,” Bobby said. This was the truth (if you excluded the seven dollars in the Bike Fund jar, that was) and he didn't want to go to the movies today anyhow, even though he'd heard a kid at school say The Black Scorpion was really great, the scorpions poked their stingers right through people when they killed them and also mashed Mexico City flat.

What Bobby wanted to do was go back to the house and talk to Ted about Lord of the Flies.

“Broke,” Sully said sadly. “That's a sad fact, Jack. I'd pay your way, but I've only got thirtyfive cents myself.”

“Don't sweat it. Hey—where's your Bo-lo Bouncer?”

Sully looked sadder than ever. “Rubber band snapped. Gone to Bolo Heaven, I guess.”

Bobby snickered. Bolo Heaven, that was a pretty funny idea. “Gonna buy a new one?”

“I doubt it. There's a magic kit in Woolworth's that I want. Sixty different tricks, it says on the box. I wouldn't mind being a magician when I grow up, Bobby, you know it? Travel around with a carnival or a circus, wear a black suit and a top hat. I'd pull rabbits and shit out of the hat.”

“The rabbits would probably shit in your hat,” Bobby said.

Sully grinned. “But I'd be a cool bastard! Wouldn't I love to be! At anything!” He got up.

“Sure you don't want to come along? You could probably sneak in past Godzilla.”

Hundreds of kids showed up for the Saturday shows at the Empire, which usually consisted of a creature feature, eight or nine cartoons, Prevues of Coming Attractions, and the MovieTone News. Mrs Godlow went nuts trying to get them to stand in line and shut up, not understanding that on Saturday afternoon you couldn't get even basically well-behaved kids to act like they were in school. She was also obsessed by the conviction that dozens of kids over twelve were trying to enter at the under-twelve rate; Mrs G. would have demanded a birth certificate for the Saturday matinees as well as the Brigitte Bardot double features, had she been allowed. Lacking the authority to do that, she settled for barking “WHATYEARYABORN?” to any kid over five and a half feet tall. With all that going on you could sometimes sneak past her quite easily, and there was no ticket-ripper on Saturday afternoons. But Bobby didn't want giant scorpions today; he had spent the last week with more realistic monsters, many of whom had probably looked pretty much like him.

“Nah, I think I'll just hang around,” Bobby said.

“Okay.” Sully-John scrummed a few apple-blossoms out of his black hair, then looked solemnly at Bobby. “Call me a cool bastard, Big Bob.”

“Sully, you're one cool bastard.”

“Yes!” Sully-John leaped skyward, punching at the air and laughing. “Yes I am! A cool bastard today! A great big cool bastard of a magician tomorrow! Pow!”

Bobby collapsed against the back of the bench, legs outstretched, sneakers toed in, laughing hard. S-J was just so funny when he got going.

Sully started away, then turned back. “Man, you know what? I saw a couple of weird guys when I came into the park.”

“What was weird about them?”

Sully-John shook his head, looking puzzled. “Don't know,” he said. “Don't really know.”

Then he headed off, singing “At the Hop'. It was one of his favorites. Bobby liked it, too.

Danny and the Juniors were great.

Bobby opened the paperback Ted had given him (it was now looking exceedingly wellthumbed) and read the last couple of pages again, the part where the adults finally showed up.

He began to ponder it again—happy or sad?—and Sully-John slipped from his mind. It occurred to him later that if S-J had happened to mention that the weird guys he'd seen were wearing yellow coats, some things might have been quite different later on.

“William Golding wrote an interesting thing about that book, one which I think speaks to your concern about the ending . . . want another pop, Bobby?”

Bobby shook his head and said no thanks. He didn't like rootbeer all that much; he mostly drank it out of politeness when he was with Ted. They were sitting at Ted's kitchen table again, Mrs O'Hara's dog was still barking (so far as Bobby could tell, Bowser never stopped barking), and Ted was still smoking Chesterfields. Bobby had peeked in at his mother when he came back from the park, saw she was napping on her bed, and then had hastened up to the third floor to ask Ted about the ending of Lord of the Flies.

Ted crossed to the refrigerator . . . and then stopped, standing there with his hand on the fridge door, staring off into space. Bobby would realize later that this was his first clear glimpse of something about Ted that wasn't right; that was in fact wrong and going wronger all the time.

“One feels them first in the back of one's eyes,” he said in a conversational tone. He spoke clearly; Bobby heard every word.

“Feels what?”

“One feels them first in the back of one's eyes.” Still staring into space with one hand curled around the handle of the refrigerator, and Bobby began to feel frightened. There seemed to be something in the air, something almost like pollen—it made the hairs inside his nose tingle, made the backs of his hands itch.

Then Ted opened the fridge door and bent in. “Sure you don't want one?” he asked. “It's good and cold.”

“No . . . no, that's okay.”

Ted came back to the table, and Bobby understood that he had either decided to ignore what had just happened, or didn't remember it. He also understood that Ted was okay now, and that was good enough for Bobby. Grownups were weird, that was all. Sometimes you just had to ignore the stuff they did.

“Tell me what he said about the ending. Mr Golding.”

“As best as I can remember, it was something like this: "The boys are rescued by the crew of a battle-cruiser, and that is very well for them, but who will rescue the crew?"” Ted poured himself a glass of rootbeer, waited for the foam to subside, then poured a little more. “Does that help?”

Bobby turned it over in his mind the way he would a riddle. Hell, it was a riddle. “No,” he said at last. “I still don't understand. They don't need to be rescued—the crew of the boat, I mean—because they're not on the island. Also . . . “ He thought of the kids in the sandbox, one of them bawling his eyes out while the other played placidly with the stolen toy. “The guys on the cruiser are grownups. Grownups don't need to be rescued.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Never?”

Bobby suddenly thought of his mother and how she was about money. Then he remembered the night he had awakened and thought he heard her crying. He didn't answer.

“Consider it,” Ted said. He drew deeply on his cigarette, then blew out a plume of smoke.

“Good books are for consideration after, too.”

“Okay.”

“‘Lord of the Flies’ wasn't much like the Hardy Boys, was it?”

Bobby had a momentary image, very clear, of Frank and Joe Hardy running through the jungle with homemade spears, chanting that they'd kill the pig and stick their spears up her arse. He burst out laughing, and as Ted joined him he knew that he was done with the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Rick Brant, and Bomba the Jungle Boy. Lord of the Flies had finished them off. He was very glad he had an adult library card.

“No,” he said, “it sure wasn't.”

“And good books don't give up all their secrets at once. Will you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Terrific. Now tell me—would you like to earn a dollar a week from me?”

The change of direction was so abrupt that for a moment Bobby couldn't follow it. Then he grinned and said, “Gripes, yes!” Figures ran dizzily through his mind; Bobby was good enough at math to figure out a dollar a week added up to at least fifteen bucks by September. Put with what he already had, plus a reasonable harvest of returnable bottles and some summer lawnmowing jobs on the street . . . jeepers, he might be riding a Schwinn by Labor Day. “What do you want me to do?”

“We have to be careful about that. Quite careful.” Ted meditated quietly and for so long Bobby began to be afraid he was going to start talking about feeling stuff in the backs of his eyes again. But when Ted looked up there was none of that strange emptiness in his gaze. His eyes were sharp, if a little rueful. “I would never ask a friend of mine—especially a young friend—to lie to his parents, Bobby, but in this case I'm going to ask you to join me in a little misdirection. Do you know what that is?”

“Sure.” Bobby thought about Sully and his new ambition to travel around with the circus, wearing a black suit and pulling rabbits out of his hat. “It's what the magician does to fool you.”

“Doesn't sound very nice when you put it that way, does it?”

Bobby shook his head. No, take away the spangles and the spotlights and it didn't sound very nice at all.

Ted drank a little rootbeer and wiped foam from his upper lip. “Your mother, Bobby. She doesn't quite dislike me, I don't think it would be fair to say that . . . but I think she almost dislikes me. Do you agree?”

“I guess. When I told her you might have a job for me, she got weird about it. Said I had to tell her about anything you wanted me to do before I could do it.”

Ted Brautigan nodded.

“I think it all comes back to you having some of your stuff in paper bags when you moved in. I know that sounds nuts, but it's all I can figure.”

He thought Ted might laugh, but he only nodded again. “Perhaps that's all it is. In any case, Bobby, I wouldn't want you to go against your mother's wishes.”

That sounded good but Bobby Garfield didn't entirely believe it. If it was really true, there'd be no need for misdirection.

“Tell your mother that my eyes now grow tired quite easily. It's the truth.” As if to prove it, Ted raised his right hand to his eyes and massaged the corners with his thumb and forefinger.

“Tell her I'd like to hire you to read bits of the newspaper to me each day, and for this I will pay you a dollar a week—what your friend Sully calls a rock?”

Bobby nodded . . . but a buck a week for reading about how Kennedy was doing in the primaries and whether or not Floyd Patterson would win in June? With maybe Blondie and Dick Tracy thrown in for good measure? His mom or Mr Biderman down at Home Town Real Estate might believe that, but Bobby didn't.

Ted was still rubbing his eyes, his hand hovering over his narrow nose like a spider.

“What else?” Bobby asked. His voice came out sounding strangely flat, like his mom's voice when he'd promised to pick up his room and she came in at the end of the day to find the job still undone. “What's the real job?”

“I want you to keep your eyes open, that's all,” Ted said.

“For what?”

“Low men in yellow coats.” Ted's fingers were still working the corners of his eyes. Bobby wished he'd stop; there was something creepy about it. Did he feel something behind them, was that why he kept rubbing and kneading that way? Something that broke his attention, interfered with his normally sane and well-ordered way of thinking?

“Lo mein?” It was what his mother ordered on the occasions when they went out to Sing Lu's on Barnum Avenue. Lo mein in yellow coats made no sense, but it was all he could think of.

Ted laughed, a sunny, genuine laugh that made Bobby aware of just how uneasy he'd been.

“Low men,” Ted said. “I use "low" in the Dickensian sense, meaning fellows who look rather stupid . . . and rather dangerous as well. The sort of men who'd shoot craps in an alley, let's say, and pass around a bottle of liquor in a paper bag during the game. The sort who lean against telephone poles and whistle at women walking by on the other side of the street while they mop the backs of their necks with handkerchiefs that are never quite clean. Men who think hats with feathers in the brims are sophisticated. Men who look like they know all the right answers to all of life's stupid questions. I'm not being terribly clear, am I? Is any of this getting through to you, is any of it ringing a bell?”

Yeah, it was. In a way it was like hearing time described as the old bald cheater: a sense that the word or phrase was exactly right even though you couldn't say just why. It reminded him of how Mr Biderman always looked unshaven even when you could still smell sweet aftershave drying on his cheeks, the way you somehow knew Mr Biderman would pick his nose when he was alone in his car or check the coin return of any pay telephone he walked past without even thinking about it.

“I get you,” he said.

“Good. I'd never in a hundred lifetimes ask you to speak to such men, or even approach them. But I would ask you to keep an eye out, make a circuit of the block once a day—Broad Street, Commonwealth Street, Colony Street, Asher Avenue, then back here to 149—and just see what you see.”

It was starting to fit together in Bobby's mind. On his birthday—which had also been Ted's first day at 149—Ted had asked him if he knew everyone on the street, if he would recognize (sojourners faces of those unknown) strangers, if any strangers showed up. Not three weeks later Carol Gerber had made her comment about wondering sometimes if Ted was on the run from something.

“How many guys are there?” he asked.

“Three, five, perhaps more by now.” Ted shrugged. “You'll know them by their long yellow coats and olive skin . . . although that darkish skin is just a disguise.”

“What . . . you mean like Man-Tan, or something?”

“I suppose, yes. If they're driving, you'll know them by their cars.”

“What makes? What models?” Bobby felt like Barren McGavin on Mike Hammer and warned himself not to get carried away. This wasn't TV. Still, it was exciting.

Ted was shaking his head. “I have no idea. But you'll know just the same, because their cars will be like their yellow coats and sharp shoes and the greasy perfumed stuff they use to slick back their hair: loud and vulgar.”

“Low,” Bobby said—it was not quite a question.

“Low,” Ted repeated, and nodded emphatically. He sipped rootbeer, looked away toward the sound of the eternally barking Bowser . . . and remained that way for several moments, like a toy with a broken spring or a machine that has run out of gas. “They sense me,” he said.

“And I sense them, as well. Ah, what a world.”

“What do they want?”

Ted turned back to him, appearing startled. It was as if he had forgotten Bobby was there . . . or had forgotten for a moment just who Bobby was. Then he smiled and reached out and put his hand over Bobby's. It was big and warm and comforting; a man's hand. At the feel of it Bobby's half-hearted reservations disappeared.

“A certain something I happen to have,” Ted said. “Let's leave it at that.”

“They're not cops, are they? Or government guys? Or—”

“Are you asking if I'm one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted, or a communist agent like on I Led Three Lives? A bad guy?”

“I know you're not a bad guy,” Bobby said, but the flush mounting into his cheeks suggested otherwise. Not that what he thought changed much. You could like or even love a bad guy; even Hider had a mother, his own mom liked to say.

“I'm not a bad guy. Never robbed a bank or stole a military secret. I've spent too much of my life reading books and scamped on my share of fines—if there were Library Police, I'm afraid they'd be after me—but I'm not a bad guy like the ones you see on television.”

“The men in yellow coats are, though.”

Ted nodded. “Bad through and through. And, as I say, dangerous.”

“Have you seen them?”

“Many times, but not here. And the chances are ninety-nine in a hundred that you won't, either. All I ask is that you keep an eye out for them. Could you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Bobby? Is there a problem?”

“No.” Yet something nagged at him for a moment—not a connection, only a momentary sense of groping toward one.

“Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

“All right. Now, here is the question: could you in good conscience—in fair conscience, at least—neglect to mention this part of your duty to your mother?”

“Yes,” Bobby said at once, although he understood doing such a thing would mark a large change in his life . . . and would be risky. He was more than a little afraid of his mom, and this fear was only partly caused by how angry she could get and how long she could bear a grudge. Mostly it grew from an unhappy sense of being loved only a little, and needing to protect what love there was. But he liked Ted . . . and he had loved the feeling of Ted's hand lying over his own, the warm roughness of the big palm, the touch of the fingers, thickened almost into knots at the joints. And this wasn't lying, not really. It was leaving out.

“You're really sure?”

If you want to learn to lie, Bobby-0, I suppose leaving things out is as good a place to start as any, an interior voice whispered. Bobby ignored it. “Yes,” he said, “really sure. Ted . . . are these guys just dangerous to you or to anybody?” He was thinking of his mom, but he was also thinking of himself.

“To me they could be very dangerous indeed. To other people—most other people—probably not. Do you want to know a funny thing?”

“Sure.”

“The majority of people don't even see them unless they're very, very close. It's almost as if they have the power to cloud men's minds, like The Shadow on that old radio program.”

“Do you mean they're . . . well . . . “ He supposed supernatural was the word he wasn't quite able to say.

“No, no, not at all.” Waving his question away before it could be fully articulated. Lying in bed that night and sleepless for longer than usual, Bobby thought that Ted had almost been afraid for it to be spoken aloud. “There are lots of people, quite ordinary ones, we don't see.

The waitress walking home from work with her head down and her restaurant shoes in a paper bag. Old fellows out for their afternoon walks in the park. Teenage girls with their hair in rollers and their transistor radios playing Peter Tripp's countdown. But children see them.

Children see them all. And Bobby, you are still a child.”

“These guys don't sound exactly easy to miss.”

“The coats, you mean. The shoes. The loud cars. But those are the very things which cause some people—many people, actually—to turn away. To erect little roadblocks between the eye and the brain. In any case, I won't have you taking chances. If you do see the men in the yellow coats, don't approach them. Don't speak to them even if they should speak to you. I can't think why they would, I don't believe they would even see you—just as most people don't really see them—but there are plenty of things I don't know about them. Now tell me what I just said. Repeat it back. It's important.” “Don't approach them and don't speak to them.”

“Even if they speak to you.” Rather impatiently. “Even if they speak to me, right. What should I do?” “Come back here and tell me they're about and where you saw them. Walk until you're certain you're out of their sight, then run. Run like the wind. Run like hell was after you.”

“And what will you do?” Bobby asked, but of course he knew. Maybe he wasn't as sharp as Carol, but he wasn't a complete dodo, either. “You'll go away, won't you?”

Ted Brautigan shrugged and finished his glass of rootbeer without meeting Bobby's eyes.

“I'll decide when that time comes. If it comes. If I'm lucky, the feelings I've had for the last few days—my sense of these men—will go away.”

“Has that happened before?”

“Indeed it has. Now why don't we talk of more pleasant things?”

For the next half an hour they discussed baseball, then music (Bobby was startled to discover Ted not only knew the music of Elvis Presley but actually liked some of it), then Bobby's hopes and fears concerning the seventh grade in September. All this was pleasant enough, but behind each topic Bobby sensed the lurk of the low men. The low men were here in Ted's third-floor room like peculiar shadows which cannot quite be seen.

It wasn't until Bobby was getting ready to leave that Ted raised the subject of them again.

“There are things you should look for,” he said. “Signs that my . . . my old friends are about.”

“What are they?”

“On your travels around town, keep an eye out for lost-pet posters on walls, in shop windows, stapled to telephone poles on residential streets. "Lost, a gray tabby cat with black ears, a white bib, and a crooked tail. Call IRoquois 7-7661." "Lost, a small mongrel dog, part beagle, answers to the name of Trixie, loves children, ours want her to come home. Call IRoquois 7-0984 or bring to 77 Peabody Street." That sort of thing.”

“What are you saying? Jeepers, are you saying they kill people's pets? Do you think . . .”

“I think many of those animals don't exist at all,” Ted said. He sounded weary and unhappy.

“Even when there is a small, poorly reproduced photograph, I think most are pure fiction. I think such posters are a form of communication, although why the men who put them up shouldn't just go into the Colony Diner and do their communicating over pot roast and mashed potatoes I don't know.

“Where does your mother shop, Bobby?”

“Total Grocery. It's right next door to Mr Biderman's real-estate agency.”

“And do you go with her?”

“Sometimes.” When he was younger he met her there every Friday, reading a TV Guide from the magazine rack until she showed up, loving Friday afternoons because it was the start of the weekend, because Mom let him push the cart and he always pretended it was a racing car, because he loved her. But he didn't tell Ted any of this. It was ancient history. Hell, he'd only been eight.

“Look on the bulletin board every supermarket puts up by the checkout registers,” Ted said.

“On it you'll see a number of little hand-printed notices that say things like CAR FOR SALE BY OWNER. Look for any such notices that have been thumbtacked to the board upside down. Is there another supermarket in town?”

“There's the A&P, down by the railroad overpass. My mom doesn't go there. She says the butcher's always giving her the glad-eye.”

“Can you check the bulletin board there, as well?”

“Sure.”

“Good so far, very good. Now—you know the hopscotch patterns kids are always drawing on the sidewalks?”

Bobby nodded.

“Look for ones with stars or moons or both chalked near them, usually in chalk of a different color. Look for kite tails hanging from telephone lines. Not the kites themselves, but only the tails. And . . .”

Ted paused, frowning, thinking. As he took a Chesterfield from the pack on the table and lit it, Bobby thought quite reasonably, quite clearly, and without the slightest shred of fear: He's crazy, y'know. Crazy as a loon.

Yes, of course, how could you doubt it? He only hoped Ted could be careful as well as crazy. Because if his mom heard Ted talking about stuff like this, she'd never let Bobby go near him again. In fact, she'd probably send for the guys with the butterfly nets . . . or ask good old Don Biderman to do it for her.

“You know the clock in the town square, Bobby?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“It may begin ringing wrong hours, or between hours. Also, look for reports of minor church vandalism in the paper. My friends dislike churches, but they never do anything too outrageous; they like to keep a—pardon the pun—low profile. There are other signs that they're about, but there's no need to overload you. Personally I believe the posters are the surest clue.”

“"If you see Ginger, please bring her home."”

“That's exactly r—”

“Bobby?” It was his mom's voice, followed by the ascending scuff of her Saturday sneakers.

“Bobby, are you up there?”

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 717