‘Are you leaving right from The Corner Pocket?’ Bobby asked as Ted sat down across from him with his own plate of eggs and bacon. ‘You are, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, that will be safest.’ He began to eat, but slowly and with no apparent enjoyment. So he was feeling bad, too. Bobby was glad. ‘I’ll say to your mother that my brother in Illinois is ill. That’s all she needs to know.’
‘Are you going to take the Big Gray Dog?’
Ted smiled briefly. ‘Probably the train. I’m quite the wealthy man, remember.’
‘Which train?’
‘It’s better if you don’t know the details, Bobby. What you don’t know you can’t tell. Or be made to tell.’
Bobby considered this briefly, then asked, ‘You’ll remember the postcards?’
Ted picked up a piece of bacon, then put it down again. ‘Postcards, plenty of postcards. I promise. Now don’t let’s talk about it anymore.’
‘What should we talk about, then?’
Ted thought about it, then smiled. His smile was sweet and open; when he smiled, Bobby could see what he must have looked like when he was twenty, and strong.
‘Books, of course,’ Ted said. ‘We’ll talk about books.’
It was going to be a crushingly hot day, that was clear by nine o’clock. Bobby helped with the dishes, drying and putting away, and then they sat in the living room, where Ted’s fan did its best to circulate the already tired air, and they talked about books . . . or rather Ted talked about books. And this morning, without the distraction of the Albini-Haywood fight, Bobby listened hungrily. He didn’t understand all of what Ted was saying, but he understood enough to realize that books made their own world, and that the Harwich Public Library wasn’t it.
The library was nothing but the doorway to that world.
Ted talked of William Golding and what he called ‘dystopian fantasy,’ went on to H. G.
Wells’s The Time Machine, suggesting a link between the Morlocks and the Eloi and Jack and Ralph on Golding’s island; he talked about what he called ‘literature’s only excuses,’ which he said were exploring the questions of innocence and experience, good and evil. Near the end of this impromptu lecture he mentioned a novel called The Exorcist, which dealt with both these questions (‘in the popular context’), and then stopped abruptly. He shook his head as if to clear it.
‘What’s wrong?’ Bobby took a sip of his rootbeer. He still didn’t like it much but it was the only soft drink in the fridge. Besides, it was cold.
‘What am I thinking?’ Ted passed a hand over his brow, as if he’d suddenly developed a headache. ‘That one hasn’t been written yet.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing. I’m rambling. Why don’t you go out for awhile? Stretch your legs? I might lie down for a bit. I didn’t sleep very well last night.’
‘Okay.’ Bobby guessed a little fresh air — even if it was hot fresh air — might do him good. And while it was interesting to listen to Ted talk, he had started to feel as if the apartment walls were closing in on him. It was knowing Ted was going, Bobby supposed.
Now there was a sad little rhyme for you: knowing he was going.
For a moment, as he went back into his room to get his baseball glove, the keyring from The Corner Pocket crossed his mind — he was going to give it to Carol so she’d know they were going steady. Then he remembered Harry Doolin, Richie O’Meara, and Willie
Shearman. They were out there someplace, sure they were, and if they caught him by himself they’d probably beat the crap out of him. For the first time in two or three days, Bobby found himself wishing for Sully. Sully was a little kid like him, but he was tough. Doolin and his friends might beat him up, but Sully-John would make them pay for the privilege. S-J was at camp, though, and that was that.
Bobby never considered staying in — he couldn’t hide all summer from the likes of Willie Shearman, that would be buggy — but as he went outside he reminded himself that he had to be careful, had to be on the lookout for them. As long as he saw them coming, there would be no problem.