What Hearts (2 page)

Asa stared. His mother repeated her last sentence, about how he would like Dave very much. Then she stopped again, looking frightened by Asa's stare.

“You will like Dave,” she tried a third time.

Asa said nothing. He stared her down. The cab made a left turn, then a right. The city bumped by. Finally, as they slipped over the banks of the Potomac onto the 14th Street bridge and left D. C. behind, Asa spoke. “Yes,” he said, “maybe so. Maybe I will like him. But the question is—will I respect him?”

His mother said; “Oh!” and slapped him across the mouth, and lunged across his lap in a heap, chuckling out sobs that seemed to come from someone he didn't know. He patted her hair as faintly as possible while her back heaved up and down. Heat came from her scalp. Asa looked up and met the pained eyes of the driver in the rearview mirror.

“It is all right, sir?” asked the driver.

“No,” said the boy. “It is not all right at all.”

FOUR

Dave was nearly bald. This surprised Asa, and right away he felt sorry for the man, as if thinning hair were a crippling strike of fate to be borne with bravery. The boy found himself feeling it was too easy to dislike someone who was bald, so he also found himself making a fabulous effort in the other direction, toward fondness. As they walked through the small airport and across a hot parking lot to Dave's old car, Asa gabbed straight to him with startling chipperness—about the flight, about Washington, about the taxi drive, and, in the greatest detail, about a school play that had ended the first grade in triumph that very afternoon, a play in which he had brilliantly played the lead part of The Prince—a play that in fact had not, as he was perfectly aware, taken place at all.

Dave seemed a little perplexed at the boy's zippy attack of goodwill; he pulled himself askance a bit, nodding or grunting without comment, unencouraging but mildly congenial.
But Asa's mother watched her son with glowing beatitude, as if she had always known the two would get along just
fine
.

A couple of times, in the car, Dave had to interrupt Asa's chatter to say something about their destination. Whenever this happened, Asa, who was standing on the hump in the floor just behind the middle of the front seat, jounced up and down and resumed his narrative at the earliest verbal opening. In a way, he wasn't involved with this frantic speech; his intelligence seemed to be standing back, watching the show and wondering when it would stop. His mother, whose bliss had begun to lose its glow fast, held her hands to her temples, then brought them down sharply and turned on him. She remembered to smile, barely. Asa was in the middle of a description of his last season as the center fielder for a D. C. Little League team called the Jaguars, telling Dave with keen detail how he had caught a would-be last-inning grand-slam home run by toppling over the fence, then trotted dejectedly as if with an empty glove into the infield as if the game were
over—and then touched second and first with the ball revealed in his mitt, for the world's only unassisted triple play by an outfielder. Considering he did not even own a baseball glove, it was an excellent bit of storytelling.

“Honey,” his mother said. Asa went into his jiggling pause. “Honey, Dave is tired.” She looked at Dave as if for confirmation.

But Dave grinned straight ahead and said, “Oh, I don't know. I'm feeling pretty fresh, actually. Love to hear if maybe the kid ever hit a big home run, or maybe starred in a movie. I bet he has. I bet he could remember if he thinks back.
Love
to hear that one.” He grinned even harder, and flicked a glance at Asa's mother. Asa caught an edge of the glance. He was surprised to see that it was completely, unmistakably, mean. In that instant all of Asa's energy swooped away from him, and he was left silent, calm and relieved. He was free to hate Dave now. He sat back.

Dave made a couple of comments to goad him into stretching out again, but Asa looked out the window. They were passing a beach. He stared at the ocean, and when a motel
interposed itself between him and the ocean he tried to keep his eyes focused on the distance, so that when the ocean came back into view it would be clear. It was a strange game, and he could do it, but he couldn't figure out how he did it.

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 was 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.