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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 infinite cynicism of adult life. They assured Simon that everything was a bad business. WILLIAM GOLDING, Lord of the Flies
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.
If fathers gave things—which they did—it stood to reason that fathers sometimes left things.
The name of the book was Lord of the Flies.
The name of the book was Lord of the Flies. There was no come-on line above the title, not even a discreet one like “A story you will never forget.” All in all, it had a forbidding, unwelcoming look, suggesting that the story lying beneath the cover would be hard. Bobby had nothing in particular against hard books, as long as they were a part of one’s schoolwork. His view about reading for pleasure, however, was that such stories should be easy—that the writer should do everything except move your eyes back and forth for you. If not, how much pleasure could there be in it?
He started to turn the book over. Ted gently put his hand on Bobby’s, stopping him. “Don’t,” he said. “As a personal favor to me, don’t.”
Bobby looked at him, not understanding.
“Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.”
“How long would you prime a water-pump and flail the handle if nothing came out?”
“But what if I don’t like it?” Ted shrugged.
“Then don’t finish it. A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give . . . eventually. Do you go along with that?”
Bobby nodded.
“How long would you prime a water-pump and flail the handle if nothing came out?” “Not too long, I guess.”
“This book is two hundred pages, give or take. You read the first ten percent—twenty pages, that is, I know already your math isn’t as good as your reading—and if you don’t like it by then, if it isn’t giving more than it’s taking by then, put it aside.”
“What’s in it that could get me in trouble?” He looked at Lord of the Flies with new fascination.
Bobby did find out, and it didn’t take him twenty pages to also find out that Lord of the Flies was a hell of a book, maybe the best he’d ever read.
Bobby did find out, and it didn’t take him twenty pages to also find out that Lord of the Flies was a hell of a book, maybe the best he’d ever read. Ten pages into it he was captivated; twenty pages and he was lost. He lived on the island with Ralph and Jack and Piggy and the littluns; he trembled at the Beast that turned out to be a rotting airplane pilot caught in his parachute; he watched first in dismay and then in horror as a bunch of harmless schoolboys descended into savagery, finally setting out to hunt down the only one of their number who had managed to remain halfway human.
He thought Lord of the Flies was about as far from Ring Around the Sun as you could get, but his mom hated science fiction, and if anything would stop her potentially dangerous thumbing, that would.
She was still at the window, but now she was watching him again. He never surprised love on her face at such moments; at best he might see a kind of speculation, sometimes (but not always) affectionate.
“One feels them first in the back of one’s eyes,”
“One feels them first in the back of one’s eyes,” he said in a conversational tone. He spoke clearly; Bobby heard every word.
“Feels what?”
“One feels them first in the back of one’s eyes.” Still staring into space with one hand curled around the handle of the refrigerator, and Bobby began to feel frightened. There seemed to be something in the air, something almost like pollen—it made the hairs inside his nose tingle, made the backs of his hands itch.
“Lord of the Flies wasn’t much like the Hardy Boys, was it?”
“Lord of the Flies wasn’t much like the Hardy Boys, was it?”
Bobby had a momentary image, very clear, of Frank and Joe Hardy running through the jungle with homemade spears, chanting that they’d kill the pig and stick their spears up her arse. He burst out laughing, and as Ted joined him he knew that he was done with the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Rick Brant, and Bomba the Jungle Boy. Lord of the Flies had finished them off. He was very glad he had an adult library card.
“And good books don’t give up all their secrets at once.
“Low men,” Ted said. “I use ‘low’ in the Dickensian sense, meaning fellows who look rather stupid . . . and rather dangerous as well.
Mostly it grew from an unhappy sense of being loved only a little, and needing to protect what love there was.
If you want to learn to lie, Bobby-O, I suppose leaving things out is as good a place to start as any, an interior voice whispered.
“The majority of people don’t even see them unless they’re very, very close. It’s almost as if they have the power to cloud men’s minds, like The Shadow on that old radio program.”
“There are lots of people, quite ordinary ones, we don’t see.
“There are lots of people, quite ordinary ones, we don’t see. The waitress walking home from work with her head down and her restaurant shoes in a paper bag. Old fellows out for their afternoon walks in the park. Teenage girls with their hair in rollers and their transistor radios playing Peter Tripp’s countdown. But children see them. Children see them all. And Bobby, you are still a child.”
“These guys don’t sound exactly easy to miss.”
“These guys don’t sound exactly easy to miss.”
“The coats, you mean. The shoes. The loud cars. But those are the very things which cause some people—many people, actually—to turn away. To erect little roadblocks between the eye and the brain. In any case, I won’t have you taking chances. If you do see the men in the yellow coats, don’t approach them. Don’t speak to them even if they should speak to you. I can’t think why they would, I don’t believe they would even see you—just as most people don’t really see them—but there are plenty of things I don’t know about them. Now tell me what I just said. Repeat it back. It’s important.”
“Don’t approach them and don’t speak to them.”
“Even if they speak to you.” Rather impatiently.
“Even if they speak to me, right. What should I do?”
“Come back here and tell me they’re about and where you saw them. Walk until you’re certain you’re out of their sight, then run. Run like the wind. Run like hell was after you.”
“On your travels around town, keep an eye out for lost-pet posters on walls, in shop windows, stapled to telephone poles on residential streets.
“On your travels around town, keep an eye out for lost-pet posters on walls, in shop windows, stapled to telephone poles on residential streets. ‘Lost, a gray tabby cat with black ears, a white bib, and a crooked tail. Call IRoquois 7-7661.’ ‘Lost, a small mongrel dog, part beagle, answers to the name of Trixie, loves children, ours want her to come home. Call IRoquois 7-0984 or bring to 77 Peabody Street.’ That sort of thing.”
I think such posters are a form of communication,
Look for kite tails hanging from telephone lines. Not the kites themselves, but only the tails.
There are other signs that they’re about, but there’s no need to overload you. Personally I believe the posters are the surest clue.”
Dr. Frankenstein’s creature seemed a lot more . . . not real, exactly, but . . . possible.
If anything, the idea that people would communicate with each other via lost-pet posters seemed even crazier in the dark.
When he was a little older it would occur to him that he had always imagined her there—outside doors, in that part of the bleachers where the shadows were too thick to see properly, in the dark at the top of the stairs, he had always imagined she was there.
That was still part of his job, though, crazy or not, and he began doing it that Sunday afternoon. Bobby walked around the block while his mom was napping, looking for either low men in yellow coats or signs of them. He saw a number of interesting things—over on Colony Street a woman arguing with her husband about something, the two of them standing nose-to-nose like Gorgeous George and Haystacks Calhoun before the start of a rassling match; a little kid on Asher Avenue bashing caps with a smoke-blackened rock; liplocked teenagers outside of Spicer’s Variety Store on the corner of Commonwealth
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He couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked remarkably like a kite tail.
On the Wednesday before school let out for the summer, Bobby saw a red strip of cloth hanging from somebody’s TV antenna over on Colony Street. He couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked remarkably like a kite tail. Bobby’s feet stopped dead. At the same time his heart accelerated until it was hammering the way it did when he raced Sully-John home from school.
It’s a coincidence even if it is a kite tail, he told himself. Just a lousy coincidence. You know that, don’t you?
The day after school ended, Carol Gerber’s mom crammed her Ford Estate Wagon with kids and took them to Savin Rock, a seaside amusement park twenty miles from Harwich.
the lure of Savin Rock was too strong to resist.
It occurred to him that she was right—he could take a little of his saved dough to spend at Savin Rock. It might take him an extra month to accumulate the price of the Schwinn, but at least spending this money would feel all right. And there was something else, as well. If he refused to take any money out of the jar, to do anything but hoard it and save it, he’d be like her.
Bobby came upon a carefully printed poster thumbtacked to an elm in Commonwealth Park. PLEASE HELP US FIND PHIL! PHIL is our WELSH CORGI! PHIL is 7 YRS. OLD! PHIL is BROWN, with a WHITE BIB! His EYES are BRIGHT & INTELLIGENT! The TIPS OF HIS EARS are BLACK! Will bring you a BALL if you say HURRY UP PHIL! CALL HOusitonic 5-8337! (OR) BRING to 745 Highgate Avenue! Home of THE SAGAMORE FAMILY! There was no picture of Phil. Bobby stood looking at the poster for a fair length of time. Part of him wanted to run home and tell Ted—not only about this but about the star and crescent moon he’d seen
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Bobby made a promise to himself: he would tell Ted everything next Friday, after his mother was back from her conference or seminar or whatever it was.
That was nevertheless an uneasy week for Bobby Garfield, very uneasy indeed. He saw two more lost-pet posters,
He bared his teeth in a grin that made Bobby think of Jack in Lord of the Flies.
“Howya doin, Sport, howza boy?” Mr. Biderman always called Bobby Sport. “Lug em around back and I’ll slide em in. Women always hafta bring the farm, don’t they? Well, you know the old saying—can’t live with em, can’t shoot em outside the state of Montana.” He bared his teeth in a grin that made Bobby think of Jack in Lord of the Flies. “Want me to take one?”
Bobby was enthralled by the story, understanding even before the first five minutes were over that it was a real story, the way Lord of the Flies had been a real story.
George was really sort of ripshit, in a weird English way. In the words of Denny Rivers, old George knew how to lay chilly. He wore special cool ties and combed his hair back tight to his skull. He didn’t look as though he could beat up a bunch of saloon baddies or anything, but he was the only guy from Midwich the Children of the Damned would have anything to do with; in fact they drafted him to be their teacher.
Bobby couldn’t imagine Randolph Scott or Audie Murphy teaching a bunch of super-smart kids from outer space anything.
That was the only place where the Children—Bobby understood in some vague way that they were only supernatural versions of Jack Merridew and his hunters in Lord of the Flies—were all together.
There was a yellow length of kite tail hanging from one of the electrical wires crossing the street farther up. It dangled in a curve that looked sort of like a question mark.
He thought of Lord of the Flies again—Ralph running from Jack and the others. At least on Golding’s island there had been jungle.
“It seems like there are these two little families of cave people wandering around, and one family is smarter. But the other family, the dumb family, they’re the heroes. I almost gave up, but now it’s getting more interesting. I guess I’ll stick with it.”
“How do you like The Inheritors?”
Bobby was so deep into his own thoughts that Ted’s voice made him jump. On TV, Keenan Wynn was standing in front of a bulldozer and saying he’d walk a mile for a Camel.
“It’s a lot harder than Lord of the Flies,” he said. “It seems like there are these two little families of cave people wandering around, and one family is smarter. But the other family, the dumb family, they’re the heroes. I almost gave up, but now it’s getting more interesting. I guess I’ll stick with it.”
“The family you meet first, the one with the little girl, they’re Neanderthals. The second family—only that one’s really a tribe, Golding and his tribes—are Cro-Magnons. The Cro-Magnons are the inheritors. What happens between the two groups satisfies the definition of tragedy: events tending toward an unhappy outcome which cannot be avoided.”
This isn’t a good day at all. I never should have gone out of the apartment. In fact, I should have stayed in bed.
This isn’t a good day, Bobby thought, watching his hand reach out and pull the poster off the telephone pole. Beyond it, hanging from a bulb on the marquee of the Harwich Theater, he saw a dangling blue kite tail. This isn’t a good day at all. I never should have gone out of the apartment. In fact, I should have stayed in bed.
HOusitonic 5-8337, just like on the poster about Phil the Welsh Corgi . . . except if there was a HOusitonic exchange in Harwich, Bobby had never heard of it.
Maybe it had started as a joke and gotten out of hand. Wasn’t that pretty much what had happened in Lord of the Flies? Things had just gotten a little out of hand?
Ted gently pulled her blouse up on that side. Bobby hissed in air over his lower lip when he saw the bruise which lay diagonally across her ribcage. He recognized the baseball-bat shape of it at once. He knew whose bat it had been: Harry Doolin’s, the pimply galoot who saw himself as Robin Hood in whatever stunted landscape passed for his imagination. He and Richie O’Meara and Willie Shearman had come upon her in the park and Harry had worked her over with his ball-bat while Richie and Willie held her. All three of them laughing and calling her the Gerber Baby. Maybe it had started as a joke and gotten out of hand. Wasn’t that pretty much what had happened in Lord of the Flies? Things had just gotten a little out of hand?
Ted’s door stood open; the room beyond it was almost empty. The few things of his own he’d put up—a picture of a man fishing at sunset, a picture of Mary Magdalene washing Jesus’ feet, a calendar—were gone. The ashtray on the table was empty, but sitting beside it was one of Ted’s carryhandle bags. Inside it were four paperback books: Animal Farm, The Night of the Hunter, Treasure Island, and Of Mice and Men. Written on the side of the paper bag in Ted’s shaky but completely legible handwriting was: Read the Steinbeck first. “Guys like us,” George says when he tells Lennie the story Lennie
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He managed three more steps toward the kitchen, then caught a glimpse of something so terrible his breath froze
in his throat like ice: HAVE YOU SEEN BRAUTIGAN! He is an OLD MONGREL but WE LOVE HIM!
Have you seen Brautigan, Bobby thought. He is an old mongrel but we love him. Have you seen . . .
“Mumma-Daddy havin a fight,” Dianne said. “She says he got a girlfriend.” She laughed and her sister joined in, but their eyes were frightened. They reminded Bobby of the littluns in Lord of the Flies.
