Hearts in Atlantis

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S t e p h e n

KING

HEARTS IN

ATLANTIS

Hodder & Stoughton

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the

following copyrighted material:

"Black Slacks" words and music by Joe Bennett and Jimmy Denton.

All Rights Administered by MCA MUSIC PUBLISHING, A Division of

MCA INC., 1755 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

"Tallahassee Lassie" words and music by Frank C. Slay, Bob Crewe and

"Twilight Time" lyrics by Buck Ram; Music by Morty Nevins and Al Nevins.

All rights for the United States of America are controlled by Devon Music, Inc.

All rights for the World outside the United States of America are controlled by

MCA Duchess Music Corporation.

A version of 'Blind Willie' appeared in the final issue

of Antaeus, Autumn 1994.

First published in Great Britain in 1999

by Hodder and Stoughton

A division of Hodder Headline PLC

The right of Stephen King to be identified as the Author of

the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

10 987654321

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

in any form or by any means without the prior written

permission of die publisher, nor be otherwise circulated

in any form of binding or cover other than that in which

it is published and without a similar condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely

coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Hardcover edition ISBN 0 340 73890 1

Trade paperback edition ISBN 0 340 75125 8

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Polmont, Stirlingshire

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Hodder and Stoughton

A division of Hodder Headline PLC

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

This is for Joseph and Leanora and Ethan:

I told you all that to tell you this.

Number 6: What do you want?

Number 2: Information.

Number 6: Whose side are you on?

Number 2: That would be telling. We want information.

Number 6: You won't get it!

Number 2: By hook or by crook . . .we will.

The Prisoner

Simon stayed where he was, a small brown image,

concealed by the leaves. Even if he shut his eyes the sow's

head still remained like an after-image. The half-shut eyes

were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life. They

assured Simon that everything was a bad business.

William Golding

Lord of the Flies

'We blew it.'

Easy Rider

1960: They had a stick

sharpened at both ends.

Low M

ELLOW

OATS

A Boy and His Mother. Bobby's Birthday.

The New Roomer. Of Time and Strangers.

Bobby Garfield's father had been one of those fellows who start losing their hair in their

twenties and are completely bald by the age of forty-five or so. Randall Garfield was spared

this extremity by dying of a heart attack at thirty-six. He was a real-estate agent, and breathed

his last on the kitchen floor of someone else's house. The potential buyer was in the living

room, trying to call an ambulance on a disconnected phone, when Bobby's dad passed away.

At this time Bobby was three. He had vague memories of a man tickling him and then kissing

his cheeks and his forehead. He was pretty sure that man had been his dad. SADLY MISSED, it

said on Randall Garfield's gravestone, but his mom never seemed all that sad, and as for

Bobby himself . . . well, how could you miss a guy you could hardly remember?

Eight years after his father's death, Bobby fell violently in love with the twenty-six-inch

Schwinn in the window of the Harwich Western Auto. He hinted to his mother about the

Schwinn in every way he knew, and finally pointed it out to her one night when they were

walking home from the movies (the show had been The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, which

Bobby didn't understand but liked anyway, especially the part where Dorothy McGuire flopped

back in a chair and showed off her long legs). As they passed the hardware store, Bobby

mentioned casually that the bike in the window would sure make a great eleventh-birthday

present for some lucky kid.

'Don't even think about it,' she said. 'I can't afford a bike for your birthday. Your father

didn't exactly leave us well off, you know.'

Although Randall had been dead ever since Truman was President and now Eisenhower

was almost done with his eight-year cruise, Your father didn't exactly leave us well off was still

his mother's most common response to anything Bobby suggested which might entail an

expenditure of more than a dollar. Usually the comment was accompanied by a reproachful

look, as if the man had run off rather than died.

No bike for his birthday. Bobby pondered this glumly on their walk home, his pleasure at

the strange, muddled movie they had seen mostly gone. He didn't argue with his mother, or try

to coax her — that would bring on a counterattack, and when Liz Garfield counterattacked she

took no prisoners — but he brooded on the lost bike . . . and the lost father. Sometimes he

almost hated his father. Sometimes all that kept him from doing so was the sense, unanchored

but very strong, that his mother wanted him to. As they reached Commonwealth Park and

walked along the side of it — two blocks up they would turn left onto Broad Street, where

they lived — he went against his usual misgivings and asked a question about Randall

Garfield.

'Didn't he leave anything, Mom? Anything at all?' A week or two before, he'd read a Nancy

Drew mystery where some poor kid's inheritance had been hidden behind an old clock in an

abandoned mansion. Bobby didn't really think his father had left gold coins or rare stamps

stashed someplace, but if there was something, maybe they could sell it in Bridgeport. Possibly at

one of the hockshops. Bobby didn't know exactly how hocking things worked, but he knew

what the shops looked like — they had three gold balls hanging out front. And he was sure

the hockshop guys would be happy to help them. Of course it was just a kid's dream, but

Carol Gerber up the street had a whole set of dolls her father, who was in the Navy, had sent

from overseas. If fathers gave things — which they did — it stood to reason that fathers

sometimes left things.

When Bobby asked the question, they were passing one of the streetlamps which ran along

this side of Commonwealth Park, and Bobby saw his mother's mouth change as it always did

when he ventured a question about his late father. The change made him think of a purse she

had: when you pulled on the drawstrings, the hole at the top got smaller.

'I'll tell you what he left,' she said as they started up Broad Street Hill. Bobby already

wished he hadn't asked, but of course it was too late now. Once you got her started, you

couldn't get her stopped, that was the thing. 'He left a life insurance policy which lapsed the

year before he died. Little did I know that until he was gone and everyone — including the

undertaker — wanted their little piece of what I didn't have. He also left a large stack of

unpaid bills, which I have now pretty much taken care of — people have been very

understanding of my situation, Mr Biderman in particular, and I'll never say they haven't

been.'

All this was old stuff, as boring as it was bitter, but then she told Bobby something new.

'Your father,' she said as they approached the apartment house which stood halfway up Broad

Street Hill, 'never met an inside straight he didn't like.'

'What's an inside straight, Mom?'

'Never mind. But I'll tell you one thing, Bobby-O: you don't ever want to let me catch you

playing cards for money. I've had enough of that to last me a lifetime.'

Bobby wanted to enquire further, but knew better; more questions were apt to set off a

tirade. It occurred to him that perhaps the movie, which had been about unhappy husbands

and wives, had upset her in some way he could not, as a mere kid, understand. He would ask

his friend John Sullivan about inside straights at school on Monday. Bobby thought it was

poker, but wasn't completely sure.

'There are places in Bridgeport that take men's money,' she said as they neared the

apartment house where they lived. 'Foolish men go to them. Foolish men make messes, and

it's usually the women of the world that have to clean them up later on. Well . . . '

Bobby knew what was coming next; it was his mother's all-time favorite.

'Life isn't fair,' said Liz Garfield as she took out her housekey and prepared to unlock the

door of 149 Broad Street in the town of Harwich, Connecticut. It was April of 1960, the night

breathed spring perfume, and standing beside her was a skinny boy with his dead father's

risky red hair. She hardly ever touched his hair; on the infrequent occasions when she

caressed him, it was usually his arm or his cheek which she touched.

'Life isn't fair,' she repeated. She opened the door and they went in.

It was true that his mother had not been treated like a princess, and it was certainly too bad

that her husband had expired on a linoleum floor in an empty house at the age of thirty-six,

but Bobby sometimes thought that things could have been worse. There might have been two

kids instead of just one, for instance. Or three. Hell, even four.

Or suppose she had to work some really hard job to support the two of them? Sully's mom

worked at the Tip-Top Bakery downtown, and during the weeks when she had to light the

ovens, Sully-John and his two older brothers hardly even saw her. Also Bobby had observed

the women who came filing out of the Peerless Shoe Company when the three o'clock whistle

blew (he himself got out of school at two-thirty), women who all seemed way too skinny or

way too fat, women with pale faces and fingers stained a dreadful old-blood color, women

with downcast eyes who carried their work-shoes and -pants in Total Grocery shopping bags.

Last fall he'd seen men and women picking apples outside of town when he went to a church

fair with Mrs Gerber and Carol and little Ian (who Carol always called Ian-the-Snot). When

he asked about them Mrs Gerber said they were migrants, just like some kinds of birds —

always on the move, picking whatever crops had just come ripe. Bobby's mother could have

been one of those, but she wasn't.

What she was was Mr Donald Biderman's secretary at Home Town Real Estate, the

company Bobby's dad had been working for when he had his heart attack. Bobby guessed she

might first have gotten the job because Donald Biderman liked Randall and felt sorry for her

— widowed with a son barely out of diapers — but she was good at it and worked hard. Quite

often she worked late. Bobby had been with his mother and Mr Biderman together on a

couple of occasions — the company picnic was the one he remembered most clearly, but

there had also been the time Mr Biderman had driven them to the dentist's in Bridgeport when

Bobby had gotten a tooth knocked out during a recess game — and the two grownups had a

way of looking at each other. Sometimes Mr Biderman called her on the phone at night, and

during those conversations she called him Don. But 'Don' was old and Bobby didn't think

about him much.

Bobby wasn't exactly sure what his mom did during her days (and her evenings) at the

office, but he bet it beat making shoes or picking apples or lighting the Tip-Top Bakery ovens

at four-thirty in the morning. Bobby bet it beat those jobs all to heck and gone. Also, when it

came to his mom, if you asked about certain stuff you were asking for trouble. If you asked,

for instance, how come she could afford three new dresses from Sears, one of them silk, but

not three monthly payments of $11.50 on the Schwinn in the Western Auto window (it was

red and silver, and just looking at it made Bobby's gut cramp with longing). Ask about stuff

like that and you were asking for real trouble.

Bobby didn't. He simply set out to earn the price of the bike himself. It would take him

until the fall, perhaps even until the winter, and that particular model might be gone from the

Western Auto's window by then, but he would keep at it. You had to keep your nose to the

grindstone and your shoulder to the wheel. Life wasn't easy, and life wasn't fair.

When Bobby's eleventh birthday rolled around on the last Tuesday of April, his mom gave him

a small flat package wrapped in silver paper. Inside was an orange library card. An adult

library card. Goodbye Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Don Winslow of the Navy. Hello to all

the rest of it, stories as full of mysterious muddled passion as The Dark at the Top of the

Stairs. Not to mention bloody daggers in tower rooms. (There were mysteries and tower

rooms in the stories about Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, but precious little blood and

never any passion.)

'Just remember that Mrs Kelton on the desk is a friend of mine,' Mom said. She spoke in her

accustomed dry tone of warning, but she was pleased by his pleasure — she could see it. 'If

you try to borrow anything racy like Peyton Place or Kings Row, I'll find out.'

Bobby smiled. He knew she would.

'If it's that other one, Miss Busybody, and she asks what you're doing with an orange card,

you tell her to turn it over. I've put written permission over my signature.'

'Thanks, Mom. This is swell.'

She smiled, bent, and put a quick dry swipe of the lips on his cheek, gone almost before it

was there. 'I'm glad you're happy. If I get home early enough, we'll go to the Colony for fried

clams and ice cream. You'll have to wait for the weekend for your cake; I don't have time to

bake until then. Now put on your coat and get moving, sonnyboy. You'll be late for school.'

They went down the stairs and out onto the porch together. There was a Town Taxi at the

curb. A man in a poplin jacket was leaning in the passenger window, paying the driver.

Behind him was a little cluster of luggage and paper bags, the kind with handles.

'That must be the man who just rented the room on the third floor,' Liz said. Her mouth had

done its shrinking trick again. She stood on the top step of the porch, appraising the man's

narrow fanny, which poked toward them as he finished his business with the taxi driver. 'I

don't trust people who move their things in paper bags. To me a person's things in a paper

sack just looks slutty?

'He has suitcases, too,' Bobby said, but he didn't need his mother to point out that the new

tenant's three little cases weren't such of a much. None matched; all looked as if they had

been kicked here from California by someone in a bad mood.

Bobby and his mom walked down the cement path. The Town Taxi pulled away. The man

in the poplin jacket turned around. To Bobby, people fell into three broad categories: kids,

grownups, and old folks. Old folks were grownups with white hair. The new tenant was of

this third sort. His face was thin and tired-looking, not wrinkled (except around his faded blue

eyes) but deeply lined. His white hair was baby-fine and receding from a liverspotted brow.

He was tall and stooped-over in a way that made Bobby think of Boris Karloff in the Shock

Theater movies they showed Friday nights at 11:30 on WPIX. Beneath the poplin jacket were

cheap workingman's clothes that looked too big for him. On his feet were scuffed cordovan

shoes.

'Hello, folks,' he said, and smiled with what looked like an effort. 'My name's Theodore

Brautigan. I guess I'm going to live here awhile.'

He held out his hand to Bobby's mother, who touched it just briefly. 'I'm Elizabeth

Garfield. This is my son, Robert. You'll have to pardon us, Mr Brattigan — '

'It's Brautigan, ma'am, but I'd be happy if you and your boy would just call me Ted.'

'Yes, well, Robert's late for school and I'm late for work. Nice to meet you, Mr Brattigan.

Hurry on, Bobby. Tempus fugit.'

She began walking downhill toward town; Bobby began walking uphill (and at a slower

pace) toward Harwich Elementary, on Asher Avenue. Three or four steps into this journey he

stopped and looked back. He felt that his mom had been rude to Mr Brautigan, that she had

acted stuck-up. Being stuck-up was the worst of vices in his little circle of friends. Carol

loathed a stuck-up person; so did Sully-John. Mr Brautigan would probably be halfway up

the walk by now, but if he wasn't, Bobby wanted to give him a smile so he'd know at least

one member of the Garfield family wasn't stuck-up.

His mother had also stopped and was also looking back. Not because she wanted another

look at Mr Brautigan; that idea never crossed Bobby's mind. No, it was her son she had

looked back at. She'd known he was going to turn around before Bobby knew it himself, and

at this he felt a sudden darkening in his normally bright nature. She sometimes said it would

be a snowy day in Sarasota before Bobby could put one over on her, and he supposed she was

right about that. How old did you have to be to put one over on your mother, anyway?

Twenty? Thirty? Or did you maybe have to wait until she got old and a little chicken-soupy

in the head?

Mr Brautigan hadn't started up the walk. He stood at its sidewalk end with a suitcase in each

hand and the third one under his right arm (the three paper bags he had moved onto the grass of

149 Broad), more bent than ever under this weight. He was right between them, like a tollgate

or something.

Liz Garfield's eyes flew past him to her son's. Go, they said. Don't say a word. He's new, a

man from anywhere or nowhere, and he's arrived here with half his things in shopping bags. Don't

say a word, Bobby, just go.

But he wouldn't. Perhaps because he had gotten a library card instead of a bike for his

birthday. 'It was nice to meet you, Mr Brautigan,' Bobby said. 'Hope you like it here. Bye.'

'Have a good day at school, son,' Mr Brautigan said. 'Learn a lot. Your mother's right —

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StephenKINGHEARTSINATLANTISHodder&StoughtonGratefulacknowledgmentismadeforpermissiontoreprintexcerptsfromthefollowingcopyrightedmaterial:"BlackSlacks"wordsandmusicbyJoeBennettandJimmyDenton.©Copyright1957byDuchessMusicCorporation.Copyrightrenewed.AllRightsAdministeredbyMCAMUSICPUBLISHING,ADivisionof...

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