Bobby thought he would be spending a lot of time with them in the summer ahead. (Sully called this great writer Isaac Ass-Move, but of course Sully was almost totally ignorant about books.)
Going to school he looked for the men in the yellow coats, or signs of them; going to the library after school he did the same. Because school and library were in opposite directions, Bobby felt he was covering a pretty good part of Harwich. He never expected to actually see any low men, of course. After supper, in the long light of evening, he would read the paper to Ted, either on the porch or in Ted’s kitchen. Ted had followed Liz Garfield’s advice and gotten a fan, and Bobby’s mom no longer seemed concerned that Bobby should read to ‘Mr Brattigan’ out on the porch. Some of this was her growing preoccupation with her own adult matters, Bobby felt, but perhaps she was also coming to trust Ted a little more. Not that trust was the same as liking. Not that it had come easily, either.
One night while they were on the couch watching Wyatt Earp, his mom turned to Bobby almost fiercely and said, ‘Does he ever touch you?’
Bobby understood what she was asking, but not why she was so wound up. ‘Well, sure,’ he said. ‘He claps me on the back sometimes, and once when I was reading the paper to him and screwed up some really long word three times in a row he gave me a Dutch rub, but he doesn’t roughhouse or anything. I don’t think he’s strong enough for stuff like that. Why?’
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘He’s fine, I guess. Got his head in the clouds, no question about it, but he doesn’t seem like a . . . ‘ She trailed off, watching the smoke from her Kool cigarette rise in the living-room air. It went up from the coal in a pale gray ribbon and then disappeared, making Bobby think of the way the characters in Mr Simak’s Ring Around the Sun followed the spiraling top into other worlds.
At last she turned to him again and said, ‘If he ever touches you in a way you don’t like,
you come and tell me. Right away. You hear?’
‘Sure, Mom.’ There was something in her look that made him remember once when he’d asked her how a woman knew she was going to have a baby. She bleeds every month, his mom had said. If there’s no blood, she knows it’s because the blood is going into a baby.
Bobby had wanted to ask where this blood came out when there was no baby being made (he remembered a nosebleed his mom had had once, but no other instances of maternal bleeding).
The look on her face, however, had made him drop the subject. She wore the same look now.
Actually there had been other touches: Ted might run one of his big hands across Bobby’s crewcut, kind of patting the bristles; he would sometimes gently catch Bobby’s nose between his knuckles and intone Sound it out! If Bobby mispronounced a word; if they spoke at the same moment he would hook one of his little fingers around one of Bobby’s little fingers and say Good luck, good will, good fortune, not ill. Soon Bobby was saying it with him, their little fingers locked, their voices as matter-of-fact as people saying pass the peas or how you doing.
Only once did Bobby feel uncomfortable when Ted touched him. Bobby had just finished the last newspaper piece Ted wanted to hear — some columnist blabbing on about how there was nothing wrong with Cuba that good old American free enterprise couldn’t fix. Dusk was beginning to streak the sky. Back on Colony Street, Mrs O’Hara’s dog Bowser barked on and on, roop-roop-roop, the sound lost and somehow dreamy, seeming more like something remembered than something happening at that moment.
‘Well,’ Bobby said, folding the paper and getting up, ‘I think I’ll take a walk around the block and see what I see.’ He didn’t want to come right out and say it, but he wanted Ted to know he was still looking for the low men in the yellow coats.