He caught a glimpse of her coming home on the train, huddling by herself, looking into ten thousand back yards between Providence and Harwich so as few people as possible would
see her face; he saw her spying the bright green keyfob on the shelf by the toothglass as Carol slipped into her old blouse; saw her walking Carol home, asking her questions the whole way, one after another, firing them like bullets out of a machine-gun. Carol, too shaken and worn out to dissemble, had answered them all. Bobby saw his mother walking — limping —
down to Commonwealth Park, heard her thinking If only some good could be salvaged from this nightmare, if only some good, anything good —
He saw her sit on a bench in the shade and then get up after awhile, walking toward Spicer’s for a headache powder and a Nehi to wash it down with before going back home.
And then, just before leaving the park, Bobby saw her spy something tacked to a tree. These somethings were tacked up all over town; she might have passed a couple on her way to the park, so lost in thought she never noticed.
Once again Bobby felt like a passenger in his own body, no more than that. He watched his hand reach out, saw two fingers (the ones that would bear the yellow smudges of the heavy smoker in another few years) make a scissoring motion and catch what was protruding from the mouth of her purse. Bobby pulled the paper free, unfolded it, and read the first two lines in the faint light from the bedroom doorway:
HAVE YOU SEEN BRAUTIGANI!
He is an OLD MONGREL but WE LOVE HIM!
His eyes skipped halfway down to the lines that had no doubt riveted his mother and driven every other thought from her head:
We will pay A VERY LARGE REWARD
($ $ $ $)
Here was the something good she had been wishing for, hoping for, praying for; here was A VERY LARGE REWARD.
And had she hesitated? Had the thought ‘Wait a minute, my kid loves that old bastard-ball!’
even crossed her mind?
Nah.
You couldn’t hesitate. Because life was full of Don Bidermans, and life wasn’t fair.
Bobby left the room on tiptoe with the poster still in his hand, mincing away from her in big soft steps, freezing when a board creaked under his feet, then moving on. Behind him his mom’s muttering talk had subsided into low snores again. Bobby made it into the living room and closed her door behind him, holding the knob at full cock until the door was shut tight, not wanting the latch to click. Then he hurried across to the phone, aware only now that he was away from her that his heart was racing and his throat was lined with a taste like old pennies. Any vestige of hunger had vanished.
He picked up the telephone’s handset, looked around quickly and narrowly to make sure his mom’s door was still shut, then dialed without referring to the poster. The number was burned into his mind: HOusitonic 5-8337.
There was only silence when he finished dialing. That wasn’t surprising, either, because there was no HOusitonic exchange in Harwich. And if he felt cold all over (except for his balls and the soles of his feet, which were strangely hot), that was just because he was afraid for Ted. That was all. Just —
There was a stonelike click as Bobby was about to put the handset down. And then a voice said, ‘Yeah?’
It’s Biderman! Bobby thought wildly. Cripes, it’s Biderman!
‘Yeah?’ the voice said again. No, not Biderman’s. Too low for Biderman’s. But it was a
nimrod voice, no doubt about that, and as his skin temperature continued to plummet toward absolute zero, Bobby knew that the man on the other end of the line had some sort of yellow coat in his wardrobe.
Suddenly his eyes grew hot and the backs of them began itching. Is this the Sagamore Family? was what he’d meant to ask, and if whoever answered the phone said yes, he’d meant to beg them to leave Ted alone. To tell them he, Bobby Garfield, would do something for them if they’d just leave Ted be — he’d do anything they asked. But now that his chance had arrived he could say nothing. Until this moment he still hadn’t completely believed in the low men. Now something was on the other end of the line, something that had nothing in common with life as Bobby Garfield understood it.