Hearts in Atlantis

by Stephen King

It was Carol Gerber up there, Carol Gerber in sneakers and a tennis dress.

And an odd whickering sound in the air, which he at first thought was the wind, although the afternoon was hot and perfectly still.

Sully looked up and saw a lampshade tumbling out of the hazy blue sky, directly at him.

“Carol? Carol Gerber?” The whicker was louder, a sound like someone flicking his tongue repeatedly through his pursed lips, a sound like a helicopter five klicks away. Sully looked up and saw a lampshade tumbling out of the hazy blue sky, directly at him. He dodged backward in an instinctive startle reflex, but he had spent his entire school career playing athletic sports of one kind or another, and even as he was pulling back his head he was reaching with his hand. He caught the lampshade quite deftly. On it was a paddleboat churning downriver against a lurid red sunset. WE’RE DOING FINE ON THE MISSISSIPPI was written above the boat in scrolly, old-fashioned letters. Below it, in the same scrolly caps: HOW’S BAYOU? Where the fuck did this come from? Sully thought, and then the woman who looked like an all-grown-up version of Carol Gerber screamed. Her hands rose as if to adjust the sunglasses propped in her hair and then just hung beside her shoulders, shaking like the hands of a distraught symphony conductor. It was how old mamasan had looked as she came running out of her shitty fucked-up hooch and into the shitty fucked-up street of that shitty fucked-up little ’ville in Dong Ha Province. Blood spilled down over the shoulders of the tennis woman’s white dress, first in spatters, then in a flood. It ran down her tanned upper arms and dripped from her elbows.

“Carol?” Sully asked stupidly. He was standing between a Dodge Ram pickup and a Mack semi, dressed in a dark blue suit, the one he wore to funerals, holding a lampshade souvenir of the Mississippi River (how’s bayou) and looking at a woman who now had something sticking out of her head. As she staggered a step forward, blue eyes still wide, hands still shaking in the air, Sully realized it was a cordless phone. He could tell by the stub of aerial, which jiggled with each step she took. A cordless phone had fallen out of the sky, had fallen God knew how many thousands of feet, and now it was in her head.

Something else fell, whistling, out of the sky.

The whistling rose to a shrill, earsplitting pitch, then stopped as the falling object struck the hood of the Buick, bashing it downward like a fist and popping it up from beneath the windshield. The thing poking out of the Buick’s engine compartment appeared to be a microwave oven.

From all around him there now came the sound of falling objects.

From all around him there now came the sound of falling objects. It was like being caught in an earthquake that was somehow going on above the ground instead of in it. A harmless shower of magazines fell past him—Seventeen and GQ and Rolling Stone and Stereo Review. With their open fluttering pages they looked like shot birds. To his right an office chair dropped out of the blue, spinning on its base as it came. It struck the roof of a Ford station wagon. The wagon’s windshield blew out in milky chunks. The chair rebounded into the air, tilted, and came to rest on the station wagon’s hood. Beyond that a portable TV, a plastic clothes basket, what looked like a clutch of cameras with the straps all tangled together, and a rubber home plate fell on the slow lane and into the breakdown lane. The home plate was followed by what looked like a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. A theater-size popcorn popper shattered into glittering shards when it hit the road.

This time the sound wasn’t a whistle, like a bomb or a mortar-shell, but the sound of a falling plane or helicopter or even a house.

Something else was coming down now, falling close and falling big—bigger than the microwave oven that had bashed in the Buick’s hood, certainly. This time the sound wasn’t a whistle, like a bomb or a mortar-shell, but the sound of a falling plane or helicopter or even a house. In Vietnam Sully had been around when all those things fell out of the sky (the house had been in pieces, granted), and yet this sound was different in one crucial way: it was also musical, like the world’s biggest windchime.

A white grand piano falling out of the Connecticut sky, turning over and over, making a shadow like a jellyfish on the jammed-up cars, making windy music in its cables as air blew through its rolling chest, its keys rippling like the keys of a player piano, the hazy sun winking on the pedals.

The piano plummeted toward the turnpike, the white bench falling right behind it, and behind the bench came a comet’s tail of sheet music, 45-rpm records with fat holes in the middle, small appliances, a flapping yellow coat that looked like a duster, a Goodyear Wide Oval tire, a barbecue grill, a weathervane, a file-cabinet, and a teacup with WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDMA printed on the side.

the reunions were always the same. There was a dj who usually left early because someone wanted to beat him up for playing the wrong records. Until that happened the speakers blasted out stuff like “Bad Moon Rising” and “Light My Fire” and “Gimme Some Lovin’ ” and “My Girl,” songs from the soundtracks of all those Vietnam movies that were made in the Philippines. The truth about the music was that most of the grunts Sully remembered used to get choked up over The Carpenters or “Angel of the Morning.” That stuff was the real bush soundtrack, always playing as the men passed around fatties and pictures of their girlfriends, getting stoned and all weepy-goopy over “One Tin Soldier,” popularly known in the green as “The Theme from Fuckin Billy Jack.” Sully couldn’t remember hearing The Doors once in Vietnam; it was always The Strawberry Alarm Clock singing “Incense and Peppermints.” On some level he had known the war was lost the first time he heard that fuckin piece of shit on the commissary jukebox.

“What’d I say about the old lady?” he asked Dieffenbaker as they sat smoking in the alley beside the chapel. Dieffenbaker shrugged. “Just that you used to see her. You said sometimes she put on different clothes but it was always her, the old mamasan Malenfant wasted. I had to shush you up.”

Next time I see them, he thought, I’ll have to ask if they carry Zippos.

“Ronnie Malenfant’s my mamasan,” Dieffenbaker said. “Sometimes I see him. Not the way you said you see yours, like she’s really there, but memory’s real too, isn’t it?”

“There’s memory and then there’s what you actually see in your mind. Like when you read a book by a really good author and he describes a room and you see that room.

“—and I couldn’t believe it was going to happen. At first I don’t think Malenfant could believe it, either. He just jabbed the bayonet at her a couple of times to begin with, pricking her with the tip of it like the whole thing was a goof . . . but then he went and did it, he stuck it in her. Fuckin A, Sully; I mean fuck-in-A. She screamed and started jerking all around and he had his feet, remember, on either side of her, and the rest of them were running, Ralph Clemson and Mims and I don’t know who else. I always hated that little fuck Clemson, even worse than Malenfant because at least Ronnie wasn’t sneaky, with him what you saw was what you got. Clemson was crazy and sneaky. I was scared to death, Sully, scared to fucking death. I knew I was supposed to put a stop to it, but I was afraid they’d scrag me if I tried, all of them, all of you, because at that precise moment there was all you guys and then there was me. Shearman . . . nothing against him, he went into that clearing where the copters came down like there was no tomorrow, but in that ’ville . . . I looked at him and there was nothing there.” “He saved my life later on, when we got ambushed,” Sully said quietly. “I know. Picked you up and carried you like fucking Superman. He had it in the clearing, he got it back on the trail, but in between, in the ’ville . . . nothing. In the ’ville it was down to me. It was like I was the only grownup, only I didn’t feel like a grownup.” Sully didn’t bother telling him to ...

And Brannigan, he can’t help it. He asks Malenfant if he’s taken the Fifth Step, which is confessing the stuff you’ve done wrong and becoming entirely ready to make amends. Malenfant doesn’t bat an eyelash, just says he took the Fifth a year ago and he feels a lot better.”

“Why were we in Vietnam to begin with?” Sully asked. “Not to get all philosophical or anything, but have you ever figured that out?”

“Because we never got out. We never got out of the green. Our generation died there.”

We’re the generation that invented Super Mario Brothers, the ATV, laser missile-guidance systems, and crack cocaine.

there was a time when it was really all in our hands.

Rather he thought of Carol on the day her mother had taken all of them to Savin Rock.

I loathe and despise my generation, Sully. We had an opportunity to change everything. We actually did. Instead we settled for designer jeans, two tickets to Mariah Carey at Radio City Music Hall, frequent-flier miles, James Cameron’s Titanic, and retirement portfolios. The only generation even close to us in pure, selfish self-indulgence is the so-called Lost Generation of the twenties, and at least most of them had the decency to stay drunk. We couldn’t even do that. Man, we suck.”

You’re in the Delta, leaning back against a tree, stoned and rubbing bug-dope on the back of your neck. Packer’s still the man because it’s still 1969.

But he hadn’t beaten the traffic after all and now a piano was falling toward him, gleaming in the sun and humming to itself as it came.

But he hadn’t beaten the traffic after all and now a piano was falling toward him, gleaming in the sun and humming to itself as it came. Sully fell flat on his stomach and rolled under a car. The piano came down less than five feet away, detonating and throwing up rows of keys like teeth.

A vast rummage sale was falling out of the sky: tape recorders and rugs and a riding lawnmower with the grass-caked blade whirling in its housing and a black lawn-jockey and an aquarium with the fish still swimming in it.

Sully slid back out from beneath the car, burning his back on the hot tailpipe, and struggled to his feet. He looked north along the turnpike, eyes wide and unbelieving. A vast rummage sale was falling out of the sky: tape recorders and rugs and a riding lawnmower with the grass-caked blade whirling in its housing and a black lawn-jockey and an aquarium with the fish still swimming in it. He saw an old man with a lot of theatrical gray hair running up the breakdown lane and then a flight of steps fell on him, tearing off his left arm and sending him to his knees. There were clocks and desks and coffee tables and a plummeting elevator with its cable uncoiling into the air behind it like a greasy severed umbilicus. A squall of ledgers fell in the parking lot of a nearby industrial complex; their clapping covers sounded like applause. A fur coat fell on a running woman, trapping her, and then a sofa landed on her, crushing her. The air filled with a storm of light as large panes of greenhouse glass dropped out of the blue. A statue of a Civil War soldier smashed through a panel truck. An ironing board hit the railing of the overpass up ahead and then fell into the stalled traffic below like a spinning propeller. A stuffed lion dropped into the back of a pickup truck. Everywhere were running, screaming people. Everywhere were cars with dented roofs and smashed windows; Sully saw a Mercedes with the unnaturally pink legs of a department-store mannequin sticking up from the sunroof. The air shook with whines and whistles.

Sully bent over and picked up the baseball glove which had fallen from the sky, recognizing it at once even after all these years: the deep scratch down the last finger and the comically tangled knots in the rawhide laces of the webbing were as good as fingerprints.

he put the glove over his face, closed his eyes, and inhaled. Leather and neat’s-foot oil and sweat and grass. All the summers that were. The summer of 1960, for instance, when he had come back from his week at camp to find everything changed—Bobby sullen, Carol distant and palely thoughtful (at least for awhile), and the cool old guy who’d lived on the third floor of Bobby’s building—Ted—gone. Everything had changed . . . but it was still summer, he had still been eleven, and everything had still seemed . . . “Eternal,” he murmured into the glove, and inhaled deeply of its aroma again as, nearby, a glass case filled with butterflies shattered on the roof of a bread-van and a stop-sign stuck, quivering, into the breakdown lane like a thrown spear.

Old mamasan in her green pants and orange smock and red sneakers, old mamasan lit up like a bar-sign in hell. “Hey, American, you come me, I keep safe.” And she held out her arms. Sully walked toward her through the noisy hail of falling televisions and backyard pools and cartons of cigarettes and high-heeled shoes and a great big pole hairdryer and a pay telephone that hit and vomited a jackpot of quarters. He walked toward her with a feeling of relief, that feeling you get only when you are coming home.

It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed—not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.

On an afternoon in the last summer before the year 2000, Bobby Garfield came back to Harwich, Connecticut.

He couldn’t remember her name, but she’d come along just in the nick of time . . . the way the Navy guy came along just in time to save Ralph’s bacon at the end of Lord of the Flies.

A lot of people their age had worked very hard to forget who they had been and what they had believed during those years between the murder of John Kennedy in Dallas and the murder of John Lennon in New York City.

“It’s the title-page from a book,” she said, and then laughed. “Lord of the Flies, Bobby! Your favorite!” “Look at the bottom,” he said. “Read what’s there.” “Faber and Faber, Limited . . . 24 Russell Square . . . London.” She looked at him questioningly. “It’s from the Faber paperback edition published in 1960,” Bobby said. “That’s on the back. But look at it, Carol! It looks brand-new. I think the book this page came from might have been in 1960 only weeks ago. Not the glove, that’s a lot more beat-up than when I found it, but the title-page.”

Bobby went to the grove of trees, dropped down on one knee to get beneath a low-hanging branch, and placed his old baseball glove on the grass with the pocket up to the darkening sky. Then he came back to the bench and sat down beside Carol again. “That’s where it belongs,” he said. “Some kid’ll just come along tomorrow and pick it up, you know that, don’t you?” She laughed and wiped her eyes. “Maybe,” he agreed. “Or maybe it’ll be gone. Back to wherever it came from.” As the day’s last pink faded to ash, Carol put her head on Bobby’s shoulder and he put an arm around her. They sat that way without speaking, and from the radio at their feet, The Platters began to sing.