What Hearts Read online

  Dave scolded his mother for messing up a great friendship just when it was starting to get going. His mother said nothing. Dave laughed. He certainly laughed a lot. He did not seem to notice that he was bald.

  By now it was early evening. There was no question about going to the beach; without ceremony or pretense, the three of them had dropped the idea that they had come here so that Asa could splash away his newfound sadness beneath the coppery sunshine, surrounded by sand castles and chortling kids eating bright Popsicles and the whole bit. It had been an idea, and Asa appreciated it as such. His mother was always kind in her ideas. When her plans never really made it off the paper into 3-D, Asa had learned to let the thought stand for something, and pass on.

  Dave pulled up in front of a small square bungalow about the same size as his car. It was posing as a miniature house painted dark red, with a tiny window and shutters and a window box containing pink plastic geranium blossoms but no plastic greenery on the plastic stems. Asa thought perhaps birds had yanked the leaves off for use in their nest building; at home he had watched many songbird species binding their little baskets with leaves, and others using pieces of plastic bags or fishing line found in the trashy nooks people forgot about when they threw things away. Dave heaved his mother’s suitcase and his knapsack out of the car’s trunk, put them onto the macadam that went right up to the bungalow’s front doorjamb, and handed his mother a key on a green plastic triangle.

  She looked at it as if it were something utterly out of place here, a rubber tomahawk, perhaps, or a handful of snails. She appeared to be lost. “But where are you?”

  Dave pointed to the next bungalow. “Number 10.”

  “Is ours 9, or 11?” asked Asa.

  Dave shrugged. “Beats me. Lady just gave me my lucky number and the one next door. Ask her if you like.” He leaned closer and pointed up the macadam drive, past other bungalows lined up like Monopoly houses. “You can find her in the bigger one at the end. She’d love to hear about you being a king and all, I’m sure. After that, you could tell her about the baseball.”

  “David,” said Asa’s mother.

  “Just thought maybe the boy could chat for thirty or forty minutes while we got a basket of fried oysters,” he said. “No harm.” Then he went to his bungalow and opened the door without a key.

  Asa and his mother stood there a minute. The light around them was turning quickly from orange to twilight blue. Some swallows cut through the air above the driveway like tiny scythes. Asa’s mother sighed.

  “David and I went to high school together,” she said. “Back before your father and I met. He’s known me a long time. He’s liked me for a long time. Sometimes that makes him a little possessive.” She smiled in Asa’s direction; her teeth looked luminous in the blue dusk. “A girl likes that, sometimes.” She held her smile, then took a step toward him and held out her hand. “I believe you understand, don’t you?”

  Asa plucked the key from the hand reaching out, and went for the door. “Of course not,” he said.

  FIVE

  After dinner the three of them walked along the boardwalk. To Asa, it was as if he had stepped inside a movie about some kind of carnival: he could smell the roasted popcorn and caramel and cotton candy and cigar smoke, he could hear the squeals of teenagers and the constant thunking of bare heels on the boardwalk; but somehow nothing touched him. He could see bellies protruding over Bermuda-shorts belt lines, with a carroty light seeping through pale Banlon shirts from the sunburned skin beneath, and thick faces full of laughter. But none of the whirling faces looked at him. He was just as glad. He was content just to walk, secure in the growing and marvelous conviction that nothing around him could break through.

  But then Dave stopped and pointed off above their heads. “Now there’s something for the boy,” he said. “Come on.” And he struck off in a new direction, leaving them to follow. Asa could not really see where they were heading, but as they left the main stream of the boardwalk behind them, he noticed a new noise. It was a ratchety rumble that came in surges, curving in and out of loudness. They were moving toward whatever was making it.

  And then they were there. Set off from the boardwalk a bit was a small wooden pier, built on straight black pilings that disappeared into the tilting black water. Underneath, everything was very dark, and although he was up amid the noise, Asa could tell it was silent down there.

  On top of the pier, there were six or ten or fifty different rides, with big metal spheres and cabinets and cars spinning and jerking in space, all run by chugging machinery. People were being spun and jerked in the brightly painted cars and spheres; their eyes rolled, their hands waved, their throat muscles convulsed and their mouths stretched open as if to take bites of something just out of reach in the night air, but Asa could hear nothing from them. Only the machinery had a voice.

  They entered the area by stepping through an arch made of pocked tin sheeting painted white, with a couple of hundred small round red light bulbs standing out along its outer edge like hair on end. “Here we go,” said Dave. Now he stayed closer, even sliding an arm around Asa’s shoulders and pulling him along. They wound between the veering armatures and cars of many rides, bearing out toward the end of the pier, where it grew darker, and much quieter. Finally, they arrived at a small platform where a man leaned against a rail, chewing on a piece of pencil as if it were a toothpick, his arms crossed, showing a purple tattoo on each that said FIGHT above a monochrome stars and stripes. There were steps. Dave pushed Asa up them.

  “Got a boy here,” said Dave, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out his wallet. The man did not say anything. Dave pulled out a bill and handed it to him. The man took it and dropped it into a cigar box from which the lid had been torn, sitting on a greasy flat surface among the cogged wheels and oily struts. Without turning toward Asa, he gave a small backhanded wave that Asa knew was meant for him: he had been admitted, he could ride.

  But what was he to ride? He took a look. Up against the edge of the platform stood a train of four cars with thick leather seats inside. They were open on the top, and their sides were cut away in sweeping curves edged with nickel. They looked like the bodies of extremely heavy sleighs, without runners, without winter. Asa looked ahead of the front car. Two rails stretched a short distance, then banked sharply to the right and dipped out of sight. Beyond, where they would have gone had they not fallen away, was the ocean, looking like tar.

  He turned back toward Dave and his mother and the man. Dave smiled and gestured at the cars. “Go ahead,” he said. “Have yourself a ball.” He smiled and gestured, once, twice, three times. Asa did not get in. Dave looked at him straight, took a step toward him, and said in a softer voice, man to man: “Don’t worry. Go on. It’s just for you.” He paused. “You deserve it.”

  Asa got in the third car. Immediately the tattooed man sprang up the steps. He leaned into Asa’s car to lower a chrome bar in front of Asa’s ribs, then he snap-locked a flimsy chain across the flashy curve of the side’s cutaway.

  He hopped off the platform and reached his hand into the darkness of the machinery. Asa saw something move, something upright, surprisingly tall, and his car moved forward six inches with a jolt as something latched onto it just below Asa’s tailbone. The man had hold of a huge wooden lever, perhaps seven feet tall. It looked like a giant oar with its fat end wedged somewhere deep in the cogged wheels. The man held the lever solemnly, looked briefly at Asa, and pulled it, with a precise, decisive yank. Asa’s car bolted forward.

  He could not keep up with any sort of sequence after that. He was flying at the ocean one second, then he was pinned beneath the chrome bar and a thousand pounds of air the next, then he was hurled upward and outward to the left, his thighs straining against the bar, then something as large as the ocean but invisible and dry was pulling him down and to the right, squeezing his face sideways into the leather and nickel. Nothing lasted for more than an instant, and nothing stopped.

  It w
as too big and irresistible to be frightening; there was no point to being scared. Instead, he tried to see things. If he could see a few quick things, even in flickers, he could understand, and if he could understand, he could figure out what he could do and what he could not. He saw the ocean, tilted right, tilted left. He saw the car in front of him, always going in a different direction from the way he was moving. He saw the sky, and when he was thrown toward it he felt he was falling upward. Once, twice, three times he saw heads, arms, and clothes, and he assembled the flashes of them into his mother, Dave, and the tattooed man.

  He wanted to see them more clearly, so he worked at it. He found his body had roughly learned the sequence of thrusts and twists and drops, and he figured out which slingings preceded the glimpse of the three people. He began to prepare for, the instant when he flashed by them, aligning his body with the movements so his head would stay upright, his vision level. Four, five, six times he whizzed by, seeing them longer each time. He was getting a decent look now—he could see three forms, he could see their heads turned toward him. It was okay.

  But then on one whiz-by, the forms had changed. There were only two. On the next he saw they were Dave and the tattooed man. On the next he saw Dave gesturing, his hand hanging between the men, still as if in a photograph; on the next he saw only the tattooed man, putting something in his pocket.

  Asa heard himself shriek. He could do it now, he could stay upright enough to keep the column of air open from his gut to his mouth, and he called up shriek after shriek and launched them into the air. He was not looking anywhere but up, and he realized that to someone far away he too would seem to be trying to bite something out of the sky, like the people whom he had been unable to hear. But he knew he was being heard. He kept it up.

  And then it was over. The train of cars slowed; everything stopped. He was sitting in the seat, the bar against his ribs. His mouth was open but silent. His mother was grabbing at him from the platform. She grabbed him beneath the arms and tried to pull him out, but the bar kept him in; she was weeping and calling him as if he were not right there. He said nothing. He had not yet adjusted to being free of the grip of the big ride, or perhaps he would have told her, quietly, that it was all right, at least for now.

  SIX

  He and Dave stood outside a telephone booth on a silent street a few blocks inland from the boardwalk. His mother was inside the booth, speaking with his father. She looked a bit raw, and the light inside the booth seemed to fall sharply on her, like an astringent for skinned knees. The boy and the man said nothing as they watched her.

  Asa held a string that led to a pale red balloon. It had been a lustrous ruby color when he had picked it out uninflated, but when the helium expanded it, the color faded. The balloon was a treat bought for him by Dave, but Dave had not especially wanted to give it. Asa’s mother had insisted. Dave had gotten very angry at him for stopping the roller coaster. He had yelled at Asa, Called him a sissy and other things, spun him around by the shoulders, and pushed him back into the roller coaster car, saying he would damn well get right back on the horse. Asa’s mother had intervened, grabbing Dave by the shirt front and telling him a few things. Dave stomped off, first retrieving some money from the tattooed man. They followed, but his mother caught up to Dave and talked to him fiercely, matching him step for step. After a few minutes they bought the balloon.

  Now his mother was talking to his father. Asa waited. There was nothing to say to Dave. He was not certain there was anything to say to his father either, but he would have liked at least to listen to him. He waited for his mother to look up and motion him into the booth, but he did not really expect to be called. He knew there were things he could not be trusted to keep quiet about. It was complicated. It would not just be a boy talking to his father; it would never be just that anymore.

  At some point the balloon simply burst. The string dropped and coiled on his hand, and a red flap of rubber plopped on top of it. Dave looked up. So did his mother, and he saw her mouth slacken for a second, then resume speaking. Asa continued to hold the string and rubber; he liked the color better this way.

  His mother hung up the phone and came out of the booth. She gave a quick smile to Dave, raising her eyebrows, and a longer smile to Asa. She said, “Your father says he knows now that what we’ve done is best, because that’s the first time a balloon of yours has popped and you haven’t cried. He says he knows now you have grown up a lot today.” She regarded him proudly, as if everything in the world had been suddenly settled.

  They went back to the bungalows. Dave saw them to their door, and as Asa was stepping through the doorway, he stuck out his hand, to shake. Asa paused, then moved his string and rubber to his left hand and shook. Dave said, “Never mind getting back on the horse, Sport,” and went to his own bungalow. He did not say good night to Asa’s mother.

  There were two beds. Asa fell asleep in one of them before his mother had even turned out the light. He slept hard and did not dream. Some time later, he woke up.

  It was dark in the bungalow, except for a thin line of light on one edge of the curtain over the small window. Asa listened for his mother’s breathing. He heard only his own. No one else was there.

  His eyes adjusted to the dark, and he got up. The sheet on his mother’s bed was turned down. In the middle of the mattress on the side near Asa’s bed was a round depression, where he supposed she had sat and watched him sleep. Asa found his clothes and got dressed in the dark. He found his mother’s purse and felt around inside for a couple of bills, which he put in his pocket.

  He peeked past the edge of the curtain. The porch light was on. The macadam in front of the bungalow was clear. Quietly he opened the door and slipped out, closing it after him. Without a glance at number 10, he trotted off down the drive.

  He found his way by working toward the glow of lights hanging out over the ocean. The streets were quiet, but the boardwalk still held a stream of people. They were different people this time: slower, without so many prizes and desserts, walking straighter, as if they were looking for something. He thought the aimless people he had seen earlier were all in bed now.

  As he passed through the arch at the pier’s entrance he noticed the red coating was flaking off the surfaces of the small bulbs, and something stirred in his memory, but he did not stop to think. He ran between the rides, most of which were motionless now, out to the end of the pier and the platform for the roller coaster. The man with the tattoos was still there, still leaning. His pencil was gone; he smoked a cigarette instead.

  He arched his eyebrows when Asa stepped up and held out his bills. The man watched him for a second, then said, “What the hell,” and took them, putting them in a pants pocket. He made the same backhanded wave as before, and Asa followed it.

  He took the same car. He pulled the bar down himself this time, and clicked the chain across the cutaway, before the man could even jump up onto the platform. This time he did not watch the man reach into the dark machine and extract the huge lever; he knew what was happening, there was nothing new to see. He stared straight ahead at the sky and the slanting black water, which looked exactly the same as it had before. And as the engine kicked into gear and his car shot forward, he realized the peeling red light bulbs reminded him of radishes, and he had to try to remember that there had been some radishes that were his radishes. Had that been only today? As the car banked hard into the first turn, he realized the things he had left behind were already hiding inside him; now, for the first time, his life had a past, a past that would not get any bigger, that would always be shrinking but would never disappear. Something else: he had always assumed there was only one way for his life to happen. Now he realized there were alternatives. A feeling, an object, a person could seem like one thing but be another; an action could seem as if it were taking one turn, but veer off another way. Anything could happen at any time. He was not on tracks.

  He pushed the chrome bar off his lap. The car swayed out over the ed
ge of the pier, staying on its course by the tightest of tensions. Asa stood up straight into the warm wind and gathered his strength, as if to jump, as if to fly, as if, as if, as if.

  NOT BLUE

  ONE

  Standing in the doorway, looking in past the principal waiting to introduce him, Asa could see that his new fourth-grade class was just starting Rome. On one side of the room the boys were waving cardboard swords and wooden spears with tinfoil points; on the other side, the girls were wrapping themselves in white bedsheets. It had to be Rome. In his previous school they had already whipped through this part of history. But glancing around the room, he sensed a big difference here, a difference that gave him a little boost of excitement. The spears and togas, the number of fat books in the bookcases, the radiant messiness of wild drawings on the art bulletin board, the absence of the cardboard flashcards showing how the alphabet was formed in cursive—these were all good signs. Asa could tell about a classroom’s spirit almost by sniffing the air. Mrs. Brock, a short, plump, young woman who had waved at the principal and finished fastening a spearpoint before coming over, was going to be fine.

  In his previous fourth grade the teacher had not been very good. She would not have dared to split the class up this way into groups. And swords? Never. They had spent two days sitting in their five rows of six desks, talking only about the splendor of Roman banquets, as if the entire civilization had been based on eating a lot while lying down. The other teacher had also been pretty bad at bringing Asa into the class, though he had arrived only four days after the beginning of the school year. She sagged when he came to the door, shaking her head at the rows of neatly occupied desks. He knew she did not dislike him; she was just not up to the task of stirring a new kid into her stew. That’s how it usually was: Two teachers in the second grade, two in the third, and now he was on his second in the fourth: he felt sorry for them all. He wanted to reassure them, the first time he appeared at the doors of their classrooms in the middle of a lesson—he wanted to tell them it was okay if they just let him be: he would find a way in all by himself, just far enough in to satisfy everyone, and then before long he would be gone.