Low men in yellow coats by Stephen King

Moonlight fell on his narrow child’s chest, squared in four by the shadows of the window muntins.

If he had thought about it (he hadn’t), he would have expected Ted’s low men to become more real once he was alone in the dark, with only the tick of his wind-up Big Ben and the murmur of the late TV news from the other room to keep him company. That was the way it had always been with him — it was easy to laugh at Frankenstein on Shock Theater, to go fake-swoony and cry ‘Ohhh, Frankie!’ when the monster showed up, especially if Sully-John was there for a sleepover. But in the dark, after S-J had started to snore (or worse, if Bobby was alone), Dr Frankenstein’s creature seemed a lot more . . . not real, exactly, but . . .

possible.

That sense of possibility did not gather around Ted’s low men. If anything, the idea that people would communicate with each other via lost-pet posters seemed even crazier in the dark. But not a dangerous crazy. Bobby didn’t think Ted was really, deeply crazy, anyhow; just a bit too smart for his own good, especially since he had so few things with which to occupy his time. Ted was a little . . . well . . . cripes, a little what? Bobby couldn’t express it.

If the word eccentric had occurred to him he would have seized it with pleasure and relief.

But . . . it seemed tike he read my mind. What about that?

Oh, he was wrong, that was all, mistaken about what he thought he’d heard. Or maybe Ted had read his mind, read it with that essentially uninteresting adult ESP, peeling guilt off his face like a wet decal off a piece of glass. God knew his mother could always do that . . . at least until today.

But —

But nothing. Ted was a nice guy who knew a lot about books, but he was no mind-reader.

No more than Sully-John Sullivan was a magician, or ever would be.

‘It’s all misdirection,’ Bobby murmured. He slipped his hands out from under his pillow, crossed them at the wrists, wagged them. The shadow of a dove flew across the moonlight on his chest.

Bobby smiled, closed his eyes, and went to sleep.

The next morning he sat on the front porch and read several pieces aloud from the Harwich Sunday Journal. Ted perched on the porch glider, listening quietly and smoking Chesterfields. Behind him and to his left, the curtains flapped in and out of the open windows of the Garfield front room. Bobby imagined his mom sitting in the chair where the light was best, sewing basket beside her, listening and hemming skirts (hemlines were going down again, she’d told him a week or two before; take them up one year, pick out the stitches the following spring and lower them again, all because a bunch of poofers in New York and London said to, and why she bothered she didn’t know). Bobby had no idea if she really was

there or not, the open windows and blowing curtains meant nothing by themselves, but he imagined it all the same. When he was a little older it would occur to him that he had always imagined her there — outside doors, in that part of the bleachers where the shadows were too thick to see properly, in the dark at the top of the stairs, he had always imagined she was there.

The sports pieces he read were interesting (Maury Wills was stealing up a storm), the feature articles less so, the opinion columns boring and long and incomprehensible, full of phrases like ‘fiscal responsibility’ and ‘economic indicators of a recessionary nature.’ Even so, Bobby didn’t mind reading them. He was doing a job, after all, earning dough, and a lot of jobs were boring at least some of the time. ‘You have to work for your Wheaties,’ his mother sometimes said after Mr Biderman had kept her late. Bobby was proud just to be able to get a phrase like ‘economic indicators of a recessionary nature’ to come off his tongue. Besides, the other job — the hidden job — arose from Ted’s crazy idea that some men were out to get him, and Bobby would have felt weird taking money just for doing that one; would have felt like he was tricking Ted somehow even though it had been Ted’s idea in the first place.