Hearts In Atlantis

29

We came back to school on the Sunday after Thanksgiving in this order: Skip at five (he lived in Dexter, the closest of the three of us), me at seven, Nate at around nine.

I called Franklin Hall even before I unpacked my suitcase. No, the girl on the desk said, Carol Gerber wasn’t back. She was plainly reluctant to say more, but I badgered her. There were two pink LEFT SCHOOL cards on the desk, she said. One of them had Carol’s name and room number on it.

I thanked her and hung up. I stood there a minute, fogging up the booth with my cigarette smoke, then turned around. Across the hall I could see Skip sitting at one of the card-tables, just picking up a spilled trick.

I sometimes wonder if things might have been different if Carol had come back, or even if I’d beaten Skip back, had a chance to get to him before the third-floor lounge got to him. I didn’t, though.

I stood there in the phone-booth, smoking a Pall Mall and feeling sorry for myself. Then, from across the way, someone screamed: “Oh shit no! I don’t fuckin BELIEVE IT!”

To which Ronnie Malenfant (from where I stood in the phone-booth he was out of my view, but his voice was as unmistakable as the sound of a saw ripping through a knot in a pine-branch) hollered gleefully back: “Whoa, look at this—Randy Echolls takes the first Bitch of the post-Thanksgiving era!”

Don’t go in there, I told myself. You are absolutely fucked if you do, fucked once and for all.

But of course I did. The tables were all taken, but there were three other guys—Billy Marchant, Tony DeLucca, and Hugh Brennan— standing around. We could snag a corner, if we so chose.

Skip looked up from his hand and shot me a high five in the smoky air. “Welcome back to the loonybin, Pete.”

“Hey!” Ronnie said, looking around. “Look who’s here! The only asshole in the place who can almost play the game! Where you been, Chuckles?”

“Lewiston,” I said, “fucking your grandmother.”

Ronnie cackled, his pimply cheeks turning red.

Skip was looking at me seriously, and maybe there was something in his eyes. I can’t say for sure. Time goes by, Atlantis sinks deeper and deeper into the ocean, and you have a tendency to romanticize. To mythologize. Maybe I saw that he had given up, that he intended to stay here and play cards and then go on to whatever was next; maybe he was giving me permission to go in my own direction. But I was eighteen, and more like Nate in many ways than I liked to admit. I had also never had a friend like Skip. Skip was fearless, Skip said fuck every other word, when Skip was eating at the Palace the girls couldn’t keep their eyes off him. He was the kind of babe mag-net Ronnie could be only in his dampest dreams. But Skip also had something adrift inside of him, something like a bit of bone which may, after years of harmless wandering, pierce the heart or clog the brain. He knew it, too. Even then, with high school still sticking all over him like afterbirth, even then when he still thought he’d some-how wind up teaching school and coaching baseball, he knew it. And I loved him. The look of him, the smile of him, the walk and talk of him. I loved him and I would not leave him.

“So,” I said to Billy, Tony, and Hugh. “You guys want a lesson?”

“Nickel a point!” Hugh said, laughing like a loon. Shit, he was a loon. “Let’s go! Wheel em and deal em!”

Pretty soon we were in the corner, all four of us smoking furiously and the cards flying. I remembered the desperate cramming I’d done over the holiday weekend; remembered my mother saying that boys who didn’t work hard in school were dying these days. I remembered those things, but they seemed as distant as making love to Carol in my car while The Platters sang “Twilight Time.”

I looked up once and saw Stoke Jones in the doorway, leaning on his crutches and looking at us with his usual distant contempt. His black hair was thicker than ever, the corkscrews crazier over his ears and heavier against the collar of his sweatshirt. He sniffed steadily, his nose dripped and his eyes were running, but otherwise he didn’t seem any sicker than before the break.

“Stoke!” I said. “How are you doing?”

“Oh well, who knows,” he said. “Better than you, maybe.”

“Come on in, Rip-Rip, drag up a milking-stool,” Ronnie said. “We’ll teach you the game.”

“You know nothing I want to learn,” Stoke said, and went thump-ing away. We listened to his receding crutches and a brief coughing fit.

“That crippled-up queer loves me,” Ronnie said. “He just can’t show it.”

“I’ll show you something if you don’t deal some fuckin cards,” Skip said.

“I’m bewwy, bewwy scared,” Ronnie said in an Elmer Fudd voice which only he found amusing. He laid his head on Mark St. Pierre’s arm to show how terrified he was.

Mark lifted the arm, hard. “The fuck off me. This is a new shirt, Malenfant, I don’t want your pimple-pus all over it.”

Before Ronnie’s face lit with amusement and he cawed laughter, I saw a moment of desperate hurt there. It left me unmoved. Ronnie’s problems might be genuine, but they didn’t make him any easier to like. To me he was just a blowhard who could play cards.

“Come on,” I said to Billy Marchant. “Hurry up and deal. I want to get some studying done later.” But of course there was no study-ing done by any of us that night. Instead of burning out over the hol-iday, the fever was stronger and hotter than ever.

I went down the hall around quarter of ten to get a fresh pack of smokes and knew Nate was back while I was still six doors away. “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes” was coming from the room Nick Prouty shared with Barry Margeaux, but from farther down I could hear Phil Ochs singing “The Draft Dodger Rag.”

Nate was deep in his closet, hanging up his clothes. Not only was he the only person I ever knew in college who wore pajamas, he was the only one who ever used the hangers. The only thing I myself had hung up was my high-school jacket. Now I took it out and began to rummage in the pockets for my cigarettes.

“Hey, Nate, how you doing? Get enough of that cranberry dress-ing to hold you?”

“I’m—” he began, then saw what was on the back of my jacket and burst out laughing.

“What?” I asked. “Is it that funny?”

“In a way,” he said, and leaned deeper into his closet. “Look.” He reappeared with an old Navy pea coat in his hands. He turned it around so I could see the back. On it, much neater than my freehand work, was the sparrow-track. Nate had rendered his in bright silver duct tape. This time we both laughed.

“Ike and Mike, they think alike,” I said.

“Nonsense. Great minds run in the same channel.”

“Is that what it is?”

“Well . . . what I like to think, anyway. Does this mean you’ve changed your mind about the war, Pete?”

“What mind?” I asked.

30

Andy White and Ashley Rice never came back to college at all— eight down, now. For the rest of us, there was an obvious change for the worse in the three days before that winter’s first storm. Obvi-ous, that was, to anyone else. If you were inside the thing, burning with the fever, it all seemed just a step or two north of normal.

Before Thanksgiving break, the card quartets in the lounge had a tendency to break up and re-form during the school-week; some-times they died out altogether for awhile as kids went off to classes. Now the groups became almost static, the only changes occurring when someone staggered off to bed or table-hopped to escape Ron-nie’s skills and constant abrasive chatter. This settling occurred because most of the third-floor players hadn’t returned to continue furthering their educations; Barry, Nick, Mark, Harvey, and I don’t know how many others had pretty much given up on the education part. They had returned in order to resume the quest for totally val-ueless “match points.” Many of the boys on Chamberlain Three were in fact now majoring in Hearts. Skip Kirk and I, sad to say, were among them. I made a couple of classes on Monday, then said fuck it and cut the rest. I cut everything on Tuesday, played Hearts in my dreams on Tuesday night (in one fragment I remember dropping T he Bitch and seeing that her face was Carol’s), then spent all day Wednesday playing it for real. Geology, sociology, history . . . all con-cepts without meaning.

In Vietnam, a fleet of B-52s hit a Viet Cong staging area outside Dong Ha. They also managed to hit a company of U.S. Marines, killing twelve and wounding forty—whoops, shit. And the forecast for Thursday was heavy snow turning to rain and freezing rain in the afternoon. Very few of us took note of this; certainly I had no reason to think that storm would change the course of my life.

I went to bed at midnight on Wednesday and slept heavily. If I had dreams of Hearts or Carol Gerber, I don’t remember them. When I woke up at eight o’clock on Thursday morning, it was snowing so heavily I could barely see the lights of Franklin Hall across the way. I showered, then padded down the hall to see if the game had started yet. There was one table going—Lennie Doria, Randy Echolls, Billy Marchant, and Skip. They looked pale and stubbly and tired, as if they had been there all night. Probably had been. I leaned in the doorway, watching the game. Outside in the snow, something quite a bit more interesting than cards was going on, but none of us knew it until later.

31

Tom Huckabee lived in King, the other boys’ dorm in our complex. Becka Aubert lived in Franklin. They had become quite cozy in the last three or four weeks, and that included taking their meals together. They were coming back from breakfast on that snowy late-November morning when they saw something printed on the north side of Chamberlain Hall. That was the side which faced the rest of the campus . . . which faced East Annex in particular, where the big corporations held their job interviews.

They walked closer, stepping off the path and into the new snow—by then about four inches had fallen.

“Look,” Becka said, pointing down at the snow. There were queer tracks there—not footprints but drag-marks, almost, and deep punched holes running in lines outside them. Tom Huckabee said they reminded him of tracks made by a person wearing skis and wielding ski-poles. Neither of them thought that someone using crutches might have made such tracks. Not then.

They drew closer to the side of the dorm. The letters there were big and black, but by then the snow was so heavy that they had to get within ten feet of the wall before they could read the words, which had been posted by someone with a can of spray-paint . . . and in a state of total piss-off, from the jagged look of the message. (Again, neither of them considered that someone trying to spray-paint a message while at the same time maintaining his balance on a set of crutches might not be able to manage much in the way of neatness.)

The message read:

FUCK JOHNSON KILLER PRESIDENT

OUT OF VIETNAM NOW

32

I’ve read that some criminals—perhaps a great many criminals— actually want to be caught. I think that was the case with Stoke Jones. Whatever he had come to the University of Maine looking for, he wasn’t finding it. I believe he’d decided it was time to leave . . . and if he was going, he would make the grandest gesture a guy on crutches could manage before he did.

Tom Huckabee told dozens of kids about what was spray-painted on our dorm; so did Becka Aubert. One of the people she told was Franklin’s second-floor proctor, a skinny self-righteous girl named Marjorie Stuttenheimer. Marjorie became quite a figure on campus by 1969, as founder and president of Christians for College America. The CCA supported the war in Vietnam and at their booth in the Memorial Union sold the little lapel flag-pins which Richard Nixon made so popular.

I was scheduled to work Thursday lunch at the Palace on the Plains, and while I might cut classes, it never crossed my mind to cut my job—I wasn’t made that way. I gave my seat in the lounge to Tony DeLucca and started over to Holyoke at about eleven o’clock to do my dishly duty. I saw a fairly large group of students gathered in the snow, looking at something on the north side of my dorm. I walked over, read the message, and knew at once who’d put it there.

On Bennett Road, a blue University of Maine sedan and one of the University’s two police cars were drawn up by the path leading to Chamberlain’s side door. Margie Stuttenheimer was there, part of a little group that consisted of four campus cops, the Dean of Men, and Charles Ebersole, the University’s Disciplinary Officer.

There were perhaps fifty people in the crowd when I joined it at the rear; in the five minutes I stood there rubbernecking, it swelled to seventy-five. By the time I finished wipedown-shutdown at one-fifteen and headed back to Chamberlain, there were probably two hundred people gawping in little clusters. I suppose it’s hard to believe now that any graffiti could have such a draw, especially on a shitty day like that one, but we are talking about a far different world, one where no magazine in America (except, very occasionally, Popu-lar Photography) would show a nude so nude that the subject’s pubic hair was on view, where no newspaper would dare so much as a whis-per about any political figure’s sex-life. This was before Atlantis sank; this was long ago and far away in a world where at least one comedian was jailed for uttering “fuck” in public and another observed that on The Ed Sullivan Show you could prick your finger but not finger your prick. It was a world where some words were still shocking.

Yes, we knew fuck. Of course we did. We said fuck all the time: fuck you, fuck your dog, go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut, fuck a duck, hey, go fuck your sister, the rest of us did. But there, written in black letters five feet high, were the words FUCK JOHNSON. Fuck the President of the United States! And KILLER PRESIDENT! Someone had called the President of the United States of America a murderer! We couldn’t believe it.

When I came back from Holyoke, the other campus police car had arrived, and there were six campus cops—almost the whole damned force, I calculated—trying to put up a big rectangle of yellow canvas over the message. The crowd muttered, then started booing. The cops looked at them, annoyed. One shouted for them to break it up, go on, they all had places to go. That might have been true, but apparently most of them liked it right there, because the crowd didn’t thin out much.

The cop holding the far left end of the canvas dropcloth slipped in the snow and nearly fell. A few onlookers applauded. The cop who had slipped looked toward the sound with an expression of blackest hate momentarily congesting his face, and for me that’s when things really started to change, when the generations really started to gap.

The cop who’d slipped turned away and began to struggle with the piece of canvas again. In the end they settled for covering the first peace sign and the FUCK of FUCK JOHNSON! And once the Really Bad Word was hidden, the crowd did begin to break up. The snow was changing to sleet and standing around had become uncomfortable.

“Better not let the cops see the back of your jacket,” Skip said, and I looked around. He was standing beside me in a hooded sweatshirt, his hands plunged deep into the pouch in front. His breath came out of his mouth in frozen plumes; his eyes never left the campus cops and the part of the message which still remained: JOHNSON! KILLER PRESIDENT! U.S. OUT OF VIETNAM NOW! “They’ll think you did it. Or me.”

Smiling a little, Skip turned around. On the back of his sweatshirt, drawn in bright red ink, was another of those sparrow-tracks.

“Jesus,” I said. “When did you do that?”

“This morning,” he said. “I saw Nate’s.” He shrugged. “It was too cool not to copy.”

“They won’t think it was us. Not for a minute.”

“No, I suppose not.”

The only question was why they weren’t questioning Stoke already . . . not that they’d have to ask many questions to get the truth out of him. But if Ebersole, the Disciplinary Officer, and Gar-retsen, the Dean of Men, weren’t talking to him, it was only because they hadn’t yet talked to—

“Where’s Dearie?” I asked. “Do you know?” The sleet was falling hard now, rattling through the trees and pinging every inch of exposed skin.

“The young and heroic Mr. Dearborn is out sanding sidewalks and paths with a dozen or so of his ROTC buddies,” Skip said. “We saw them from the lounge. They’re driving around in a real army truck. Malenfant said their pricks are probably so hard they won’t be able to sleep on their stomachs for a week. I thought that was pretty good, for Ronnie.”

“When Dearie comes back—”

“Yeah, when he comes back.” Skip shrugged, as if to say all that was beyond our control. “Meantime, let’s get out of this slop and play some cards, what do you say?”

I wanted to say a lot of stuff about a lot of things . . . but then again I didn’t. We went back inside, and by mid-afternoon the game was in full swing once more. There were five four-handed “sub-games” going on, the room was blue with smoke, and someone had dragged in a phonograph so we could listen to the Beatles and the Stones. Someone else produced a scratched-up Cameo forty-five of “96 Tears” and that spun for at least an hour non-stop: cry cry cry. The windows gave a good view on Bennett’s Run and Bennett’s Walk, and I kept looking out there, expecting to see David Dearborn and some of his khaki buddies staring at the north side of the dorm, perhaps discussing if they should go after Stoke Jones with their car-bines or just chase him with their bayonets. Of course they wouldn’t do anything of the sort. They might chant “Kill Cong! Go U.S.!” while drilling on the football field, but Stoke was a cripple. They would happily settle for seeing his commie-loving ass busted out of the University of Maine.

I didn’t want that to happen, but I didn’t see any way it wouldn’t. Stoke had had a sparrow-track on the back of his coat since the beginning of school, long before the rest of us were hip to what it meant, and Dearie knew it. Plus, Stoke would admit it. He’d deal with the Dean and the Disciplinary Officer’s questions the same way he dealt with his crutches—at a full-out plunge.

And anyway, the whole thing began to seem distant, okay? The way classes did. The way Carol did, now that I understood she was really gone. The way the concept of being drafted and sent away to die in the jungle did. What seemed real and immediate was hunting out that bad Bitch, or shooting the moon and hitting everyone else at your table with twenty-six points at a whack. What seemed real was Hearts.

But then something happened.

33

Around four o’clock the sleet changed to rain, and by four-thirty, when it began to get dark, we could see that Bennett’s Run was under three or four inches of water. Most of the Walk looked like a canal. Below the water was an icy, melting slush Jell-O.

The pace of the games slowed as we watched those unfortunates who were working the dishline cross from the dorms to the Palace on the Plains. Some of them—the wiser ones—cut across the slope of the hillside, making their way through the rapidly melting snow. The others came down the paths, slipping and sliding on their treacher-ous, icy surfaces. A thick mist had begun to rise from the wet ground, making it even harder for people to see where they were going. One guy from King met a girl from Franklin at the place where the paths converged. When they started up Bennett’s Walk together the guy slipped and grabbed the girl. They almost went down together, but managed to keep their combined balance. We all applauded.

At my table we began a hold hand. Ronnie’s weaselly little friend Nick dealt me an incredible thirteen cards, maybe the best pat hand I’d ever gotten. It was a shoot-the-moon opportunity if ever I had one: six high hearts and no really low ones, the king and queen of spades, plus court-cards in the other two suits, as well. I had the seven of hearts, a borderline card, but you can catch people napping in a hold hand; no one expects you to shoot the moon in a situation where you can’t improve your original draw.

Lennie Doria played The Douche to start us off. Ronnie immedi-ately played void, ridding himself of the ace of spades. He thought that was great. So did I; my two court spades were now both win-ners. The queen was thirteen points, but if I got all the hearts, I wouldn’t eat those points; Ronnie, Nick, and Lennie would.

I let Nick take the trick. We spilled three more tricks unevent-fully—first Nick and then Lennie mined for diamonds—and then I took the ten of hearts mixed into a club trick.

“Hearts have been broken and Riley eats the first one!” Ronnie bugled gleefully. “You’re goin down, country boy!”

“Maybe,” I said. And maybe, I thought, Ronnie Malenfant would soon be smiling on the other side of his face. With a successful shoot, I could put the idiotic Nick Prouty over a hundred and cost Ronnie a game he’d been on his way to winning.

Three tricks later what I was doing became almost obvious. As I’d hoped, Ronnie’s smirk became the expression I most enjoyed seeing on his face—the disgruntled pout.

“You can’t,” he said. “I don’t believe it. Not in a hold hand. You ain’t got the fuckin horses.” Yet he knew it was possible. It was in his voice.

“Well, let’s see,” I said, and played the ace of hearts. I was running in the open now, but why not? If the hearts were spread evenly, I could win the game right here. “Let’s just see what we—”

“Look!” Skip called from the table nearest the window. His voice held disbelief and a kind of awe. “Jesus Christ, it’s fuckin Stokely!”

Play stopped. We all swivelled in our chairs to look out the win-dow at the darkening, dripping world below us. The quartet of boys in the corner stood up to see. The old wrought-iron lamps on Ben-nett’s Walk cast weak electric beams through the groundmist, mak-ing me think of London and Tyne Street and Jack the Ripper. From its place on the hill, Holyoke Commons looked more like an ocean liner than ever. Its shape wavered as rain streamed down the lounge windows.

“Fuckin Rip-Rip, out in this crap—I don’t believe it,” Ronnie breathed.

Stoke came rapidly down the path which led from the north entrance of Chamberlain to the place where all the asphalt paths joined in the lowest part of Bennett’s Run. He was wearing his old duffle coat, and it was clear he hadn’t just come from the dorm; the coat was soaked through. Even through the streaming glass we could see the peace sign on his back, as black as the words which were now partly covered by a rectangle of yellow canvas (if it was still up). His wild hair was soaked into submission.

Stoke never looked toward his KILLER PRESIDENT graffiti, just thumped on toward Bennett’s Walk. He was going faster than I’d ever seen him, paying no heed to the driving rain, the rising mist, or the slop under his crutches. Did he want to fall? Was he daring the slushy crap to take him down? I don’t know. Maybe he was just too deep in his own thoughts to have any idea of how fast he was moving or how bad the conditions were. Either way, he wasn’t going to get far if he didn’t cool it.

Ronnie began to giggle, and the sound spread the way a little flame spreads through dry tinder. I didn’t want to join in but was helpless to stop. So, I saw, was Skip. Partly because giggling is conta-gious, but also because it really was funny. I know how unkind that sounds, of course I do, but I’ve come too far not to tell the truth about that day . . . and this day, almost half a lifetime later. Because it still seems funny to me, I still smile when I think back to how he looked, a frantic clockwork toy in a duffle coat thudding along through the pouring rain, his crutches splashing up water as he went. You knew what was going to happen, you just knew it, and that was the funniest part of all—the question of just how far he could make it before the inevitable wipeout.

Lennie was roaring with one hand clutched to his face, staring out between his splayed fingers, his eyes streaming. Hugh Brennan was holding his not inconsiderable gut and braying like a donkey stuck in a mudhole. Mark St. Pierre was howling uncontrollably and saying he was gonna piss himself, he’d drunk too many Cokes and he was gonna spray his fuckin jeans. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t hold my cards; the nerves in my right hand went dead, my fingers relaxed, and those last few winning tricks fluttered into my lap. My head was pounding and my sinuses were full.

Stoke made the bottom of the dip, where the Walk started. There he paused and for some reason did a crazed three-sixty spin, seeming to balance on one crutch. The other crutch he held out like a machine-gun, as if in his mind he was spraying the whole campus— Kill Cong! Slaughter proctors! Bayonet those upperclassmen!

“Annnd . . . the Olympic judges give him . . . ALL TENS!” Tony DeLucca called in a perfect sports announcer’s voice. It was the final touch; the place turned into bedlam on the spot. Cards flew every-where. Ashtrays spilled, and one of the glass ones (most were just those little aluminum Table Talk pie-dishes) broke. Someone fell out of his chair and began to roll around, bellowing and kicking his legs. Man, we just couldn’t stop laughing.

“That’s it!” Mark was howling. “I just drowned my Jockeys! I couldn’t help it!” Behind him Nick Prouty was crawling toward the window on his knees with tears coursing down his burning face and his hands held out, the wordless begging gesture of a man who wants to say make it stop, make it stop before I burst a fuckin blood-vessel in the middle of my brain and die right here.

Skip got up, overturning his chair. I got up. Laughing our brains out, we groped for one another and staggered toward the window with our arms slung around each other’s back. Below, unaware that he was being watched and laughed at by two dozen or so freaked-out cardplayers, Stoke Jones was still, amazingly, on his feet.

“Go Rip-Rip!” Ronnie began to chant. “Go Rip-Rip!” Nick joined in. He had reached the window and was leaning his forehead against it, still laughing.

“Go, Rip-Rip!”

“Go, baby!”

“Go!”

“On, Rip-Rip! Mush those huskies!”

“Work those crutches, big boy!”

“Go you fuckin Rip-Rip!”

It was like the last play of a close football game, except everyone was chanting Go Rip-Rip instead of Hold that line or Block that kick. Almost everyone; I wasn’t chanting, and I don’t think Skip was, either, but we were laughing. We were laughing just as hard as the rest.

Suddenly I thought of the night Carol and I had sat on the milk-boxes beside Holyoke, the night she had shown me the snapshot of herself and her childhood friends . . . and then told me the story of what those other boys had done to her. What they had done with a baseball bat. At first they were joking, I think, Carol had said. And had they been laughing? Probably, yeah. Because that’s what you did when you were joking around, having a good time, you laughed.

Stoke stood where he was for a moment, hanging from his crutches with his head down . . . and then he attacked the hill like the Marines going ashore at Tarawa. He went tearing up Bennett’s Walk, spraying water everywhere with his flying crutches; it was like watching a duck with rabies.

The chant became deafening: “GO RIP-RIP! GO RIP-RIP! GO

RIP-RIP!”

At first they were joking, she had said as we sat there on the milk-boxes, smoking our cigarettes. By then she was crying, her tears sil-ver in the white light from the dining hall above us. At first they were joking and then . . . they weren’t.

That thought ended the joke of Stoke for me—I swear to you that it did. And still I couldn’t stop laughing.

Stokely made it about a third of the way up the hill toward Holyoke, almost back to the visible bricks, before the slippery-slop finally got him. He planted his crutches far in advance of his body— too far for even dry conditions—and when he swung forward, both sticks flew out from under him. His legs flipped up like the legs of a gymnast doing some fabulous trick on the balance beam, and he went down on his back with a tremendous splash. We could hear it even from the third-floor lounge. It was the final perfect touch.

The lounge looked like a lunatic asylum where the inmates had all come down with food-poisoning at the same time. We staggered aimlessly about, laughing and clutching at our throats, our eyes spouting tears. I was hanging onto Skip because my legs would no longer support me; my knees felt like noodles. I was laughing harder than I ever had in my life, harder than I ever have since, I think, and still I kept thinking about Carol sitting there on the milk-box beside me, legs crossed, cigarette in one hand, snapshot in the other, Carol say-ing Harry Doolin hit me . . . Willie and the other one held me so I couldn’t run away . . . at first they were joking, I think, and then . . . they weren’t.

Out on Bennett’s Walk, Stoke tried to sit up. He got his upper body partway out of the water . . . and then lay back, full length, as if that icy, slushy water were a bed. He lifted both arms skyward in a gesture which was almost invocatory, then let them fall again. It was every surrender ever given summed up in three motions: the lying back, the lifting of the arms, the double splash as they fell back wide to either side. It was the ultimate fuck it, do what you want, I quit.

“Come on,” Skip said. He was still laughing but he was also com-pletely serious. I could hear the seriousness in his laughing voice and see it in his hysterically contorted face. I was glad it was there, God I was glad. “Come on, before the stupid motherfuck drowns.”

Skip and I crammed through the doorway of the lounge shoulder to shoulder and sprinted down the third-floor hall, bouncing off each other like pinballs, reeling, almost as out of control as Stoke had been on the path. Most of the others followed us. The only one I know for sure who didn’t was Mark; he went down to his room to change out of his soaked jeans.

We met Nate on the second-floor landing—damned near ran him down. He was standing there with an armload of books in a plastic sack, looking at us with some alarm.

“Good grief,” he said. That was Nate at his strongest, good grief. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Come on,” Skip said. His throat was so choked the words came out in a growl. If I hadn’t been with him earlier, I’d have thought he’d just finished a fit of weeping. “It’s not us, it’s fuckin Jones. He fell down. He needs—” Skip broke off as laughter—great big belly-gusts of it—overtook him and shook him once again. He fell back against the wall, rolling his eyes in a kind of hilarious exhaustion. He shook his head as if to deny it, but of course you can’t deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants. Above us, the stairs began to thunder with descending third-floor cardplayers. “He needs help,” Skip finished, wiping his eyes.

Nate looked at me in growing bewilderment. “If he needs help, why are you guys laughing?”

I couldn’t explain it to him. Hell, I couldn’t explain it to myself. I grabbed Skip by the arm and yanked. We started down the steps to the first floor. Nate followed us. So did the rest.

34

The first thing I saw when we banged out through the north door was that rectangle of yellow canvas. It was lying on the ground, full of water and floating lumps of slush. Then the water on the path started pouring in through my sneakers and I forgot all about sight-seeing. It was freezing. The rain drove down on my exposed skin in needles that were not quite ice.

In Bennett’s Run the water was ankle-deep, and my feet went from cold to numb. Skip slipped and I grabbed his arm. Nate stead-ied us both from behind and kept us from tumbling over backward. Ahead of us I could hear a nasty sound that was half coughing and half choking. Stoke lay in the water like a sodden log, his duffle coat floating around his body and those masses of black hair floating around his face. The cough was deep and bronchial. Fine droplets sprayed from his lips with each gagging, choking outburst. One of his crutches lay next to him, caught between his arm and his side. The other was floating away in the direction of Bennett Hall.

Water slopped over Stoke’s pale face. His coughing took on a strangled, gargling quality. His eyes stared straight up into the rain and fog. He gave no sign that he heard us coming, but when I knelt on one side of him and Skip on the other, he tried to beat us away with his hands. Water ran into his mouth and he began to thrash. He was drowning in front of us. I no longer felt like laughing, but I might still have been doing it. At first they were joking, Carol said. At first they were joking. Put on the radio, Pete, I like the oldies.

“Pick him up,” Skip said, and grabbed one of Stoke’s shoulders. Stoke slapped at him weakly with one wax-dummy hand. Skip ignored this, might not even have felt it. “Hurry, for Christ’s sake.”

I grabbed Stoke’s other shoulder. He splashed water in my face as though we were fucking around in someone’s backyard pool. I had thought he’d be as cold as I was, but there was a sickish heat coming off his skin. I looked across his waterlogged body to Skip.

Skip nodded back at me. “Ready . . . set . . . now.”

We heaved. Stoke came partly out of the water—from the waist up—but that was all. I was astounded by the weight of him. His shirt had come untucked from his pants and floated around his mid-dle like a ballerina’s tutu. Below it I could see his white skin and the black bullethole of his navel. There were scars there, too, healed scars wavering every whichway like snarls of knotted string.

“Help out, Natie!” Skip grunted. “Prop him up, for fuck’s sake!”

Nate dropped to his knees, splashing all three of us, and grabbed Stoke in a kind of backwards hug. We struggled to get him all the way up and out of the soup, but the slush on the bricks kept us off-balance, made it impossible for us to work together. And Stoke, although still coughing and half-drowned, was also working against us, struggling as best he could to be free of us. Stoke wanted to go back in the water.

The others arrived, Ronnie in the lead. “Fucking Rip-Rip,” he breathed. He was still giggling, but he looked slightly awestruck. “You screwed up big this time, Rip. No doubt.”

“Don’t just stand there, you numb tool!” Skip cried. “Help us!”

Ronnie paused a moment longer, not angry, just assessing how this might best be done, then turned to see who else was there. He slipped on the slush and Tony DeLucca—also still giggling— grabbed him and steadied him. They were crowded together on the drowned Walk, all my cardplaying buddies from the third-floor lounge, and most of them still couldn’t stop laughing. They looked like something, but I didn’t know what. I might never have known, if not for Carol’s Christmas present . . . but of course that came later.

“You, Tony,” Ronnie said. “Brad, Lennie, Barry. Let’s get his legs.”

“What about me, Ronnie?” Nick asked. “What about me?”

“You’re too small to help lift him,” Ronnie said, “but it might cheer him up to get his dick sucked.”

Nick stood back.

Ronnie, Tony, Brad, Lennie, and Barry Margeaux slipped past us on either side. Ronnie and Tony got Stoke by the calves.

“Christ Jesus!” Tony cried, disgusted and still half-laughing. “Nothing to him! Legs like on a scarecrow!”

“‘Legs like on a scarecrow, legs like on a scarecrow!’ ” Ronnie cried, viciously mimicking. “Pick him the fuck up, you wop nimrod, this isn’t art appreciation! Lennie and Barry, get under his deprived ass when they do. Then you come up—”

“—when the rest of you guys lift him,” Lennie finished. “Got it.

And don’t call my paisan a wop.”

“Leave me alone,” Stoke coughed. “Stop it, get away from me . . . fucking losers . . .” The coughing overtook him again. He began to make gruesome retching sounds. In the lamplight his lips looked gray and slick.

“Look who’s talkin about being a loser,” Ronnie said. “Fuckin half-drowned crippled-up Jerry’s Kid homo.” He looked at Skip, water running out of his wavy hair and over his pimply face. “Count us off, Kirk.”

“One . . . two . . . three . . . now!”

We lifted. Stoke Jones came out of the water like a salvaged ship. We staggered back and forth with him. One of his arms flopped in front of me; it hung there for a moment and then the hand attached to the end of it arced up and slapped me hard across the face. Whacko! I started laughing again.

“Put me down! Motherfuckers, put me DOWN!”

We staggered, dancing on the slush, water pouring off him, water pouring off us. “Echolls!” Ronnie bawled. “Marchant! Brennan! Jesus Christ, little help here you fuckin brain-dead ringmeats, what do you say?”

Randy and Billy splashed forward. Others—three or four drawn by the shouts and splashing, most still from the third-floor Hearts group—took hold of Stoke as well. We turned him awkwardly, prob-ably looking like the world’s most spastic cheerleading squad, for some reason out practicing in the downpour. Stoke had quit strug-gling. He lay in our grip, arms hanging out to either side, palms up and filling with little cups of rain. Diminishing waterfalls ran out of his sodden jacket and from the seat of his pants. He picked me up and carried me, Carol had said. Talking about the boy with the crew-cut, the boy who had been her first love. All the way up Broad Street on one of the hottest days of the year. He carried me in his arms. I couldn’t get her voice out of my head. In a way I never have.

“The dorm?” Ronnie asked Skip. “We takin him into the dorm?”

“Jeepers, no,” Nate said. “The infirmary.”

Since we’d managed to get him out of the water—that was the hardest part and it was behind us—the infirmary made sense. It was a small brick building just beyond Bennett Hall, no more than three or four hundred yards away. Once we got off the path and onto the road, the footing would be good.

So we carried him to the infirmary—bore him up at shoulder height like a slain hero being ceremonially removed from the field of battle. Some of us were still laughing in little snorts and giggles. I was one of them. Once I saw Nate looking at me as if I was a thing almost below contempt, and I tried to stop the sounds that were coming out of me. I’d do okay for a little while, then I’d think of him spinning on the pivot of his crutch (“The Olympic judges give him . . . ALL TENS!”) and I’d start in again.

Stoke only spoke once as we carried him up the walk to the infir-mary door. “Let me die,” he said. “For once in your stupid greedy-me-me lives do something worthwhile. Put me down and let me die.”

35

The waiting room was empty, the television in the corner showing an old episode of Bonanza to no one at all. In those days they hadn’t really found the handle on color TV yet, and Pa Cartwright’s face was the color of a fresh avocado. We must have sounded like a herd of hippopotami just out of the watering-hole, and the duty-nurse came on the run. Following her was a candystriper (probably a work-study kid like me) and a little guy in a white coat. He had a stethoscope hung around his neck and a cigarette poked in the corner of his mouth. In Atlantis even the doctors smoked.

“What’s the trouble with him?” The doc asked Ronnie, either because Ronnie had an in-charge look or because he was the closest at hand.

“Took a header in Bennett’s Run while he was on his way to Holyoke,” Ronnie said. “Damned near drowned himself.” He paused, then added: “He’s a cripple.”

As if to underline this point, Billy Marchant waved one of Stoke’s crutches. Apparently no one had bothered to salvage the other one.

“Put that thing down, you want to fuckin bonk my brains out?” Nick Prouty asked waspishly, ducking.

“What brains?” Brad responded, and we all laughed so hard we nearly dropped Stoke.

“Suck me sideways, ass-breath,” Nick said, but he was laughing, too.

The doctor was frowning. “Bring him in here, and save that lan-guage for your bull sessions.” Stoke began coughing again, a deep, ratcheting sound. You expected to see blood and filaments of tissue come popping out of his mouth, that cough was so heavy.

We carried Stoke down the infirmary hallway in a conga-line, but we couldn’t get him through the door that way. “Let me,” Skip said.

“You’ll drop him,” Nate said.

“No,” Skip said. “I won’t. Just let me get a good hold.”

He stepped up beside Stoke, then nodded first to me on his right, then to Ronnie on his left.

“Lower him down,” Ronnie said. We did. Skip grunted once as he took Stoke’s weight, and I saw the veins pop out in his neck. Then we stood back and Skip carried Stoke into the room and laid him on the exam table. The thin sheet of paper covering the leather was imme-diately soaked. Skip stepped back. Stoke was staring up at him, his face dead pale except for two red patches high on his cheekbones— red as rouge, those patches were. Water ran out of his hair in rivulets.

“Sorry, man,” Skip said.

Stoke turned his head away and closed his eyes.

“Out,” the doctor told Skip. He had ditched the cigarette some-where. He looked around at us, a gaggle of perhaps a dozen boys, most still grinning, all dripping on the hall’s tile floor. “Does anyone know the nature of his disability? It can make a difference in how we treat him.”

I thought of the scars I’d seen, those tangles of knotted string, but said nothing. I didn’t really know anything. And now that the uncontrollable urge to laugh had passed, I felt too ashamed of myself to speak up.

“It’s just one of those cripple things, isn’t it?” Ronnie asked. Actu-ally faced with an adult, he had lost his shrill cockiness. He sounded unsure, perhaps even uneasy. “Muscular palsy or cerebral dystro-phy?”

“You clown,” Lennie said. “It’s muscular dystrophy and cerebral—”

“He was in a car accident,” Nate said. We all looked around at him. Nate still looked neat and totally put together in spite of the soaking he’d taken. This afternoon he was wearing a Fort Kent High School ski-hat. The Maine football team had finally scored a touch-down and freed Nate from his beanie; go you Black Bears. “Four years ago. His father, mother, and older sister were killed. He was the only family survivor.”

There was silence. I looked between Skip and Tony’s shoulders and into the examination room. Stoke still lay streaming on the table, his head turned to the side, his eyes shut. The nurse was taking his blood pressure. His pants clung to his legs and I thought of the Fourth of July parade they used to have back home in Gates Falls when I was just a little kid. Uncle Sam would come striding along between the school band and the Anah Temple Shrine guys on their midget motorcycles, looking at least ten feet tall in his starry blue hat, but when the wind blew his pants against his legs you could see the trick. That’s what Stoke Jones’s legs looked like inside his wet pants: a trick, a bad joke, sawed-off stilts with sneakers poked onto the ends of them.

“How do you know that?” Skip asked. “Did he tell you, Natie?”

“No.” Nate looked ashamed. “He told Harry Swidrowski, after a Committee of Resistance meeting. They—we—were in the Bear’s Den. Harry asked him right out what happened to his legs and Stoke told him.”

I thought I understood the look on Nate’s face. After the meeting, he had said. After. Nate didn’t know what had been said at the meeting, because Nate hadn’t been there. Nate wasn’t a member of the Committee of Resistance; Nate was strictly a sidelines boy. He might agree with the C.R.’s goals and tactics . . . but he had his mother to think about. And his future as a dentist.

“Spinal injury?” the doctor asked. Brisker than ever.

“I think so, yeah,” Nate said.

“All right.” Doc began to make shooing gestures with his hands as if we were a flock of geese. “Go on back to your dorms. We’ll take good care of him.”

We began to back up toward the reception area.

“Why were you boys laughing when you brought him in?” the nurse asked suddenly. She stood by the doctor with the blood-pressure cuff in her hands. “Why are you grinning now?” She sounded angry. Hell, she sounded furious. “What was so funny about this boy’s mis-fortune that it made you laugh?”

I didn’t think anyone would answer. We’d just stand there and look down at our shuffling feet, realizing that we were still a lot closer to the fourth grade than we had perhaps thought. But someone did answer. Skip answered. He even managed to look at her as he did.

“His misfortune, ma’am,” he said. “That was what it was, you’re right. It was his misfortune that was funny.”

“How terrible,” she said. There were tears of rage standing in the corners of her eyes. “How terrible you are.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Skip said. “I guess you’re right about that, too.” He turned away from her.

We followed him back to the reception area in a wet and beaten little group. I can’t say that being called terrible was the low point of my college career (“If you can remember much of the sixties, you weren’t there,” the hippie known as Wavy Gravy once said), but it may have been. The waiting room was still empty. Little Joe Cartwright was on the tube now, and just as green as his dad. Pan-creatic cancer was what got Michael Landon, too—he and my mother had that in common.

Skip stopped. Ronnie, head down, pushed past him toward the door, followed by Nick, Billy, Lennie, and the rest.

“Hold it,” Skip said, and they turned. “I want to talk to you guys about something.”

We gathered around him. Skip glanced once toward the door leading back to the exam area, verified that we were alone, then began to talk.

36

Ten minutes later Skip and I walked back to the dorm by ourselves. The others had gone ahead. Nate hung with us for a little bit, then must have picked up a vibe that I wanted to talk privately to Skip. Nate was always good at picking up the vibe. I bet he’s a good den-tist, that the children in particular like him.

“I’m done playing Hearts,” I said.

Skip said nothing.

“I don’t know if it’s too late to pull up my grades enough to keep my scholarship or not, but I’m going to try. And I don’t care much, one way or the other. The fucking scholarship’s not the point.”

“No. They’re the point, right? Ronnie and the rest of them.”

“I think they’re only part of it.” It was so cold out there as that day turned to dark—cold and damp and evil. It seemed that it would never be summer again. “Man, I miss Carol. Why’d she have to go?”

“I don’t know.”

“When he fell over it sounded like a nuthouse up there,” I said. “Not a college dorm, a fucking nuthouse.”

“You laughed too, Pete. So did I.”

“I know,” I said. I might not have if I’d been alone, and Skip and I might not have if it had just been the two of us, but how could you tell? You were stuck with the way things played out. I kept thinking of Carol and those boys with their baseball bat. And I thought of the way Nate had looked at me, as if I were a thing below contempt. “I know.”

We walked in silence for awhile.

“I can live with laughing at him, I guess,” I said, “but I don’t want to wake up forty with my kids asking me what college was like and not be able to remember anything but Ronnie Malenfant telling Polish jokes and that poor fucked-up asshole McClendon trying to kill himself with baby aspirin.” I thought about Stoke Jones twirling on his crutch and felt like laughing; thought of him lying beached on the exam table in the infirmary and felt like crying. And you know what? It was, as far as I could tell, exactly the same feeling. “I just feel bad about it. I feel like shit.”

“So do I,” Skip said. The rain poured down around us, soaking and cold. The lights of Chamberlain Hall were bright but not particularly comforting. I could see the yellow canvas the cops had put up lying on the grass, and above it the dim shapes of the spray-painted letters. They were running in the rain; by the following day they would be all but unreadable.

“When I was a little kid, I always pretended I was the hero,” Skip said.

“Fuck yeah, me too. What little kid ever pretended to be part of the lynch-mob?”

Skip looked down at his soaked shoes, then up at me. “Could I study with you for the next couple of weeks?”

“Any time you want.”

“You really don’t mind?”

“Why would I fuckin mind?” I made myself sound irritated because I didn’t want him to hear how relieved I was, how almost thrilled I was. Because it might work. I paused, then said, “This other . . . do you think we can pull it off?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

We had almost reached the north entrance, and I pointed to the running letters just before we went in. “Maybe Dean Garretsen and that guy Ebersole will let the whole thing drop. The paint Stoke used didn’t get a chance to set. It’ll be gone by morning.”

Skip shook his head. “They won’t let it drop.”

“Why not? How can you be so sure?”

“Because Dearie won’t let them.”

And of course he was right.

37

For the first time in weeks the third-floor lounge was empty for awhile as drenched cardplayers dried themselves off and put on fresh clothes. Many of them also took care of some stuff Skip Kirk had sug-gested in the infirmary waiting room. When Nate and Skip and I came back from dinner, however, it was business as usual in the lounge—three tables were up and going.

“Hey, Riley,” Ronnie said. “Twiller here says he’s got a study date. If you want his seat, I’ll teach you how to play the game.”

“Not tonight,” I said. “Got studying to do myself.”

“Yeah,” Randy Echolls said. “The Art of Self-Abuse.”

“That’s right, honey, a couple more weeks of hard work and I’ll be able to switch hands without missing a stroke, just like you.”

As I started away, Ronnie said, “I had you stopped, Riley.”

I turned around. Ronnie was leaning back in his chair, smiling that unpleasant smile of his. For a short period of time, out there in the rain, I had glimpsed a different Ronnie, but that young man had gone back into hiding.

“No,” I said, “you didn’t. It was a done deal.”

“No one shoots the moon on a hold hand,” Ronnie said, leaning back farther than ever. He scratched one cheek, busting the heads off a couple of pimples. They oozed tendrils of yellow-white cream. “Not at my table they don’t. I had you stopped in clubs.”

“You were void in clubs, unless you reneged on the first trick. You played the ace of spades when Lennie played The Douche. And in hearts I had the whole court.”

Ronnie’s smile faltered for just a moment, then came back strong. He waved a hand at the floor, from which all the spilled cards had been picked up (the butty remains of the overturned ashtrays still remained; most of us had been raised in homes where moms cleaned up such messes). “All the high hearts, huh? Too bad we can’t check and see.”

“Yeah. Too bad.” I started away again.

“You’re going to fall behind on match points!” he called after me. “You know that, don’t you?”

“You can have mine, Ronnie. I don’t want them anymore.”

I never played another hand of Hearts in college. Many years later I taught my kids the game, and they took to it like ducks to water. We have a tournament at the summer cottage every August. There are no match points, but there’s a trophy from Atlantic Awards—a loving cup. I won it one year, and kept it on my desk where I could see it. I shot the moon twice in the championship round, but neither was a hold hand. Like my old school buddy Ronnie Malenfant once said, no one shoots the moon on a hold hand. You might as well expect Atlantis to rise from the ocean, palm trees waving.

38

At eight o’clock that night, Skip Kirk was at my desk and deep in his anthro text. His hands were plunged into his hair, as if he had a bad headache. Nate was at his desk, doing a botany paper. I was sprawled on my bed, struggling with my old friend geology. On the stereo Bob Dylan sang: “She was the funniest woman I ever seen, the great-grandmother of Mr. Clean.”

There was a hard double rap on the door: pow-pow. So must the Gestapo have rapped on the doors of Jews in 1938 and 1939. “Floor meeting!” Dearie called. “Floor meeting in the rec at nine o’clock! Attendance mandatory!”

“Oh Christ,” I said. “Burn the secret papers and eat the radio.”

Nate turned down Dylan, and we heard Dearie going on up the hall, rapping that pow-pow on every door and yelling about the floor meeting in the rec. Most of the rooms he was hailing were probably empty, but no problem; he’d find the occupants down in the lounge, chasing The Bitch.

Skip was looking at me. “Told you,” he said.

39

Each dorm in our complex had been built at the same time, and each had a big common area in the basement as well as the lounges in the center of each floor. There was a TV alcove which filled up mostly for weekend sports events and a vampire soap opera called Dark Shad-ows during the week; a canteen corner with half a dozen vending machines; a Ping-Pong table and a number of chess- and checker-boards. There was also a meeting area with a podium standing before several rows of folding wooden chairs. We’d had a floor-meeting there at the beginning of the year, at which Dearie had explained the dorm rules and the dire consequences of unsatisfactory room inspec-tions. I’d have to say that room inspections were Dearie’s big thing. That and ROTC, of course.

He stood behind the little wooden podium, upon which he had laid a thin file-folder. I supposed it contained his notes. He was still dressed in his damp and muddy ROTC fatigues. He looked exhausted from his day of shovelling and sanding, but he also looked excited . . . “turned on” is how we’d put it a year or two later.

Dearie had been on his own at the first floor-meeting; this time he had backup. Sitting against the green cinderblock wall, hands folded in his lap and knees primly together, was Sven Garretsen, the Dean of Men. He said almost nothing during that meeting, and looked benign even when the air grew stormy. Standing beside Dearie, wearing a black topcoat over a charcoal-gray suit and looking very can-do, was Ebersole, the Disciplinary Officer.

After we had settled in the chairs and those of us who smoked had lit up, Dearie looked first over his shoulder at Garretsen, then at Ebersole. Ebersole gave him a little smile. “Go ahead, David. Please. They’re your boys.”

I felt a rankle of irritation. I might be a lot of things, including a creep who laughed at cripples when they fell down in the pouring rain, but I was not Dearie Dearborn’s boy.

Dearie gripped the podium and looked at us solemnly, perhaps thinking (far back in the part of his mind reserved expressly for dreamy dreams) that a day would come when he would address his staff officers this way, setting some great tide of Hanoi-bound troops into motion.

“Jones is missing,” he said finally. It came out sounding portentous and corny, like a line in a Charles Bronson movie.

“He’s in the infirmary,” I said, and enjoyed the surprise on Dearie’s face. Ebersole looked surprised, too. Garretsen just went on gazing benignly into the middle distance, like a man on a three-pipe high.

“What happened to him?” Dearie asked. This wasn’t in the script—either the one he had worked out or the one he and Ebersole had prepared together—and Dearie began to frown. He was also gripping the podium more tightly, as if afraid it might fly away.

“Faw down go boom,” Ronnie said, and puffed up when the peo-ple around him laughed. “Also, I think he’s got pneumonia or double bronchitis or something like that.” He caught Skip’s eye and I thought Skip nodded slightly. This was Skip’s show, not Dearie’s, but if we were lucky—if Stoke was lucky—the three at the front of the room would never know it.

“Tell me this from the beginning,” Dearie said. T he frown was becoming a glower. It was the way he’d looked after discovering his door had been shaving-creamed.

Skip told Dearie and Dearie’s new friends how we’d seen Stoke heading toward the Palace on the Plains from the third-floor lounge windows, how he’d fallen into the water, how we’d rescued him and taken him to the infirmary, how the doctor had said Stoke was one sick puppy. The doc hadn’t said any such thing, but he didn’t need to. Those of us who had touched Stoke’s skin knew that he was run-ning a fever, and all of us had heard that horrible deep cough. Skip said nothing about how fast Stoke had been moving, as if he wanted to kill the whole world and then die himself, and he said nothing about how we’d laughed, Mark St. Pierre so hard he’d wet his pants.

When Skip finished, Dearie glanced uncertainly at Ebersole. Eber-sole looked back blandly. Behind them, Dean Garretsen continued to smile his little Buddha smile. The implication was clear. It was Dearie’s show. He’d better have a show to put on.

Dearie took a deep breath and looked back at us. “We believe Stokely Jones was responsible for the act of vandalism and public obscenity which was perpetrated on the north end of Chamberlain Hall at a time we don’t know when this morning.”

I’m telling you exactly what he said, not making a single word of it up. Other than “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it,” that was perhaps the most sublime example of honcho-speak I ever heard in my life.

I believe Dearie expected us to ooh and aah like the extras in a Perry Mason courtroom finale, where the revelations start coming thick and fast. Instead we were silent. Skip watched closely, and when he saw Dearie draw in another deep breath for the next pro-nouncement, he said: “What makes you think it was him, Dearie?”

Although I’m not completely sure—I never asked him—I believe Skip used the nickname purposely, to throw Dearie even further off his stride. In any case it worked. Dearie started to go off, looked at Ebersole, and recalculated his options. A red line was rising out of his collar. I watched it climb, fascinated. It was a little like watching a Disney cartoon where Donald Duck is trying to control his temper. You know he can’t possibly do it; the suspense comes from not know-ing how long he can maintain even a semblance of reason.

“I think you know the answer to that, Skip,” Dearie finally said. “Stokely Jones wears a coat with a very particular symbol on the back.” He picked up the folder he had carried in, removed a sheet of paper, looked at it, then turned it around so we could look at it, too. None of us was very surprised by what was there. “This symbol. It was invented by the Communist Party shortly after the end of the Second World War. It means ‘victory through infiltration’ and is commonly called the Broken Cross by subversives. It has also become popular with such inner-city radical groups as the Black Muslims and the Black Panthers. Since this symbol was visible on Stoke Jones’s coat long before it appeared on the side of our dorm, I hardly think it takes a rocket scientist to—”

“David, that is such bullshit!” Nate said, standing up. He was pale and trembling, but with anger rather than fear. Had I ever heard him say the word bullshit in public before? I don’t think so.

Garretsen smiled his benign smile at my roommate. Ebersole raised his eyebrows, expressing polite interest. Dearie looked stunned. I suppose the last person he expected trouble from was Nate Hoppenstand.

“That symbol is based on British semaphore and stands for nuclear disarmament. It was invented by a famous British philosopher. I think he might even be a knight. To say the Russians made it up! Goodness’ sake! Is that what they teach you in ROTC? Bullshit like that?”

Nate was staring at Dearie angrily, his hands planted on his hips. Dearie gaped at him, now completely knocked off his stride. Yes, they had taught him that in ROTC, and he had swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. It made you wonder what else the ROTC kids were swallowing.

“I’m sure these facts about the Broken Cross are very interesting,” Ebersole cut in smoothly, “and it’s certainly information worth hav-ing—if it’s true, of course—”

“It’s true,” Skip said. “Bert Russell, not Joe Stalin. British kids were wearing it five years ago when they marched to protest U.S. nuclear subs operating out of ports in the British Isles.”

“Fuckin A!” Ronnie cried, and pumped his fist in the air. A year or so later the Panthers—who never had much use for Bertrand Rus-sell’s peace sign, so far as I know—were doing that same thing at their rallies. And, of course, twenty years or so further on down the line, all us cleaned-up sixties babies were doing it at rock concerts. Broooo-ooooce! Broooo-ooooce!

“Go, baby!” Hugh Brennan chimed in, laughing. “Go, Skip! Go, big Nate!”

“Watch your language while the Dean’s here!” Dearie shouted at Ronnie.

Ebersole ignored the profanity and the cross-talk from the peanut gallery. He kept his interested, skeptical gaze trained on my room-mate and on Skip.

“Even if all that’s true,” he said, “we still have a problem, don’t we? I think so. We have an act of vandalism and public obscenity. This comes at a time when the tax-paying public is looking at Uni-versity youth with an ever more critical eye. And this institution depends upon the tax-paying public, gentlemen. I think it behooves us all—”

“To think about this!” Dearie suddenly shouted. His cheeks were now almost purple; his forehead swarmed with weird red spots like brands, and right between his eyes a big vein was pulsing rapidly.

Before Dearie could say more—and he clearly had a lot to say— Ebersole put a hand out to his chest, shushing him. Dearie seemed to deflate. He’d had his chance and fluffed it. Later he’d perhaps tell himself it was because he was tired; while we’d spent the day in the nice warm lounge, playing cards and shooting holes in our future, Dearie had been outside shovelling snow and sanding walks so brit-tle old psychology professors wouldn’t fall down and break their hips. He was tired, a little slow on the draw, and in any case, that prick Ebersole hadn’t given him a fair chance to prove himself. All of which probably didn’t help much with what was happening right then: he had been set aside. The grownup was back in charge. Poppa would fix.

“I think it behooves us all to identify the fellow who did this and see he’s punished with some severity,” Ebersole continued. Mostly it was Nate he was looking at; amazing as it seemed to me at the time, he had identified Nate Hoppenstand as the center of the resistance he felt in the room.

Nate, God bless his molars and wisdom teeth, was more than up to the likes of Ebersole. He remained standing with his hands on his hips and his eyes never wavered, let alone dropped from Ebersole’s. “How do you propose doing that?” Nate asked.

“What is your name, young man? Please.”

“Nathan Hoppenstand.”

“Well, Nathan, I think the perpetrator has already been singled out, don’t you?” Ebersole spoke in a patient, teacherly way. “Or rather singled himself out. I’m told this unfortunate fellow Stokely Jones has been a walking billboard for the Broken Cross symbol since—”

“Quit calling it that!” Skip said, and I jumped a little at the raw anger in his voice. “It’s not a broken anything! It’s a damn peace sign!”

“What is your name, sir?”

“Stanley Kirk. Skip to my friends. You can call me Stanley.” There was a tense little titter at this, which Ebersole seemed not to hear.

“Well, Mr. Kirk, your semantic quibble is noted, but it doesn’t change the fact that Stokely Jones—and Stokely Jones alone—has been displaying that particular symbol all over campus since the first day of the semester. Mr. Dearborn tells me—”

Nate said, “ ‘Mr. Dearborn’ doesn’t even know what the peace sign is or where it came from, so I think you’d be sort of unwise to trust what he tells you very far. It just so happens I’ve got a peace sign on the back of my own jacket, Mr. Ebersole. So how do you know I wasn’t the one with the spray-paint?”

Ebersole’s mouth dropped open. Not much, but enough to spoil his sympathetic smile and magazine-ad good looks. And Dean Gar-retsen frowned, as if presented with some concept he couldn’t under-stand. One very rarely sees a good politician or college administrator caught completely by surprise. They are moments to treasure. I trea-sured that one then, and find I still do today.

“That’s a lie!” Dearie said. He sounded more wounded than angry. “Why would you lie that way, Nate? You’re the last person on Three I’d expect to—”

“It’s not a lie,” Nate said. “Go on up to my room and pull the pea coat out of my closet if you don’t believe me. Check.”

“Yeah, and check mine while you’re at it,” I said, standing up next to Nate. “My old high-school jacket. You can’t miss it. It’s the one with the peace sign on the back.”

Ebersole studied us through slightly narrowed eyes. Then he asked, “Exactly when did you put this so-called peace sign on the backs of your jackets, young fellows?”

This time Nate did lie. I knew him well enough by then to know it must have hurt . . . but he did it like a champ. “September.”

That was it for Dearie. He went nuclear is how my own kids might express it, only that wouldn’t be accurate. Dearie went Donald Duck. He didn’t quite jump up and down, flapping his arms and going wak-wak-waugh-wak like Donald does when he’s mad, but he did give a howl of outrage and smacked his mottled forehead with the heels of his palms. Ebersole stilled him again, this time by gripping his arm.

“Who are you?” Ebersole asked me. More curt than courteous by now.

“Pete Riley. I put a peace sign on the back of my jacket because I liked the look of Stoke’s. Also to show I’ve got some big questions about what we’re doing over there in Vietnam.”

Dearie pulled away from Ebersole. His chin was thrust out, his lips pulled back enough to show a complete set of teeth. “Helping our allies is what we’re doing, you doofus!” he shouted. “If you’re too stupid to see that on your own, I suggest you take Colonel Ander-son’s Intro Military History Class! Or maybe you’re just another chickenguts who won’t—”

“Hush, Mr. Dearborn,” Dean Garretsen said. His quiet was some-how louder than Dearie’s shouting. “This is not the place for a for-eign policy debate, nor is it the time for personal aspersions. Quite the contrary.”

Dearie dropped his burning face, studied the floor, and began to gnaw at his own lips.

“And when, Mr. Riley, did you put the peace sign symbol on your jacket?” Ebersole asked. His voice remained courteous, but there was an ugly look in his eyes. He knew by then, I think, that Stoke was going to squiggle away, and Ebersole was very unhappy about that. Dearie was small change next to this guy, who was in 1966 a new type on the college campuses of America. Times call the men, Lao-tzu said, and the late sixties called Charles Ebersole. He wasn’t an educator; he was an enforcer minoring in public relations.

Don’t lie to me, his eyes said. Don’t lie to me, Riley. Because if you do and I find out, I’ll turn you into salad.

But what the hell. I’d probably be gone come January 15th, anyway; by Christmas of 1967 I might be in Phu Bai, keeping the place warm for Dearie.

“October,” I said. “Put it on my jacket right around Columbus Day.”

“I’ve got it on my jacket and some sweatshirts,” Skip said. “All that stuff’s in my room. I’ll show it to you, if you want.”

Dearie, still looking down at the floor and red to the roots of his hair, was shaking his head monotonously back and forth.

“I’ve got it on a couple of my sweatshirts, too,” Ronnie said. “I’m no peacenik, but it’s a cool sign. I like it.”

Tony DeLucca said he also had one on the back of a sweatshirt.

Lennie Doria told Ebersole and Garretsen he had doodled it on the endpapers of several different textbooks; it was on the front of his general assignments notebook as well. He’d show them, if they wanted to see.

Billy Marchant had it on his jacket.

Brad Witherspoon had inked it on his freshman beanie. The beanie was in the back of his closet somewhere, probably beneath the underwear he’d forgotten to take home for his mom to wash.

Nick Prouty said he’d drawn peace signs on his favorite record albums: Meet the Beatles and Wayne Fontana and the Mind-benders. “You ain’t got any mind to bend, dinkleballs,” Ronnie mut-tered, and there was laughter from behind cupped hands.

Several others reported having the peace sign on books or items of clothing. All claimed to have done this long before the discovery of the graffiti on the north end of Chamberlain Hall. In a final surreal touch, Hugh stood up, stepped into the aisle, and hiked the legs of his jeans so we could see the yellowing athletic socks climbing his hairy shins. A peace sign had been drawn on both with the laundry-marker Mrs. Brennan had sent to school with her baby boy—it was probably the first time the fuckin thing had been used all semester.

“So you see,” Skip said when show-and-tell was over, “it could have been any of us.”

Dearie slowly raised his head. All that remained of his flush was a single red patch over his left eye. It looked like a blister.

“Why are you lying for him?” he asked. He waited, but no one answered. “Not one of you had a peace sign on a single thing before Thanksgiving break, I’d swear to it, and I bet most of you never had one on anything before tonight. Why are you lying for him?”

No one answered. The silence spun out. In it there grew a sense of power, an unmistakable force we all felt. But who did it belong to? Them or us? There was no way of saying. All these years later there’s still no real way of saying.

Then Dean Garretsen stepped to the podium. Dearie moved aside without even seeming to see him. The Dean looked at us with a small and cheerful smile. “This is foolishness,” he said. “What Mr. Jones wrote on the wall was foolishness, and this lying is more foolishness. Tell the truth, men. ’Fess up.”

No one said anything.

“We’ll be speaking to Mr. Jones in the morning,” Ebersole said. “Perhaps after we do, some of you fellows may want to change your stories a bit.”

“Oh man, I wouldn’t put too much trust in anything Stoke might tell you,” Skip said.

“Right, old Rip-Rip’s crazy as a shithouse rat,” Ronnie said.

There was strangely affectionate laughter at this. “Shithouse rat!” Nick cried, eyes shining. He was as joyful as a poet who has finally found le mot juste. “Shithouse rat, yeah, that’s Old Rip!” And, in what was probably that day’s final triumph of lunacy over rational discourse, Nick Prouty fell into an eerily perfect Foghorn Leghorn imitation: “Ah say, Ah say the boy’s craizy! Missin a wheel off his baiby-carriage! Lost two-three cahds out’n his deck! Fella’s a beer shote of a six-pack! He’s . . .”

Nick gradually realized that Ebersole and Garretsen were looking at him, Ebersole with contempt, Garretsen almost with interest, as at a new bacterium glimpsed through the lens of a microscope.

“. . . you know, a little sick in the head,” Nick finished, losing the imitation as self-consciousness, that bane of all great artists, set in. He quickly sat down.

“That’s not the kind of sick I meant, exactly,” Skip said. “I’m not talking about him being a cripple, either. He’s been sneezing, cough-ing, and running at the nose ever since he got here. Even you must have noticed that, Dearie.”

Dearie didn’t reply, didn’t even react to the use of the nickname this time. He must have been pretty tired, all right.

“All I’m saying is that he might claim a whole lot of stuff,” Skip said. “He might even believe some of it. But he’s out of it.”

Ebersole’s smile had resurfaced, no humor in it now. “I believe I grasp the thrust of your argument, Mr. Kirk. You want us to believe that Mr. Jones was not responsible for the writing on the wall, but if he does confess to having done it, we should not credit his statement.”

Skip also smiled—the thousand-watt smile that made the girls’ hearts go giddyup. “That’s it,” he said, “that’s the thrust of my argu-ment, all right.”

There was a moment’s silence, and then Dean Garretsen spoke what could have been the epitaph of our brief age. “You fellows have disappointed me,” he said. “Come on, Charles, we have no further business here.” Garretsen hoisted his briefcase, turned on his heel, and headed for the door.

Ebersole looked surprised but hurried after him. Which left Dearie and his third-floor charges to stare at each other with mingled expressions of distrust and reproach.

“Thanks, guys.” David was almost crying. “Thanks a fucking pantload.” He stalked out with his head down and his folder clutched in one hand. The following semester he left Chamberlain and joined a frat. All things considered, that was probably for the best. As Stoke might have said, Dearie had lost his credibility.

40

“So you stole that, too,” Stoke Jones said from his bed in the infir-mary when he could finally talk. I had just told him that almost everyone in Chamberlain Hall was now wearing the sparrow-track on at least one article of clothing, thinking this news would cheer him up. I had been wrong.

“Settle down, man,” Skip said, patting his shoulder. “Don’t have a hemorrhage.”

Stoke never so much as glanced at him. His black, accusing eyes remained on me. “You took the credit, then you took the peace sign. Did any of you check my wallet? I think there were nine or ten dol-lars in there. You could have had that, too. Made it a clean sweep.” He turned his head aside and began to cough weakly. On that cold day in early December of ’66 he looked one fuck of a lot older than eighteen.

This was four days after Stoke went swimming in Bennett’s Run. The doctor—Carbury, his name was—seemed by the second of those days to accept that most of us were Stoke’s friends no matter how oddly we’d acted when we brought him in, because we kept stopping by to ask after him. Carbury had been at the college infirmary, pre-scribing for strep throats and splinting wrists dislocated in softball games, for donkey’s years and probably knew there was no account-ing for the behavior of young men and women homing in on their majority; they might look like adults, but most retained plenty of their childhood weirdnesses, as well. Nick Prouty auditioning Foghorn Leghorn for the Dean of Men, for instance—I rest my case.

Carbury never told us how bad things had been with Stoke. One of the candystripers (half in love with Skip by the second time she saw him, I believe) gave us a clearer picture, not that we really needed one. The fact that Carbury stuck him in a private room instead of on Men’s Side told us something; the fact that we weren’t allowed to so much as peek in on him for the first forty-eight hours of his stay told us more; the fact that he hadn’t been moved to Eastern Maine, which was only ten miles up the road, told us most of all. Car-bury hadn’t dared move him, not even in the University ambulance. Stoke Jones had been in bad straits indeed. According to the candy-striper, he had pneumonia, incipient hypothermia from his dunk, and a temperature which crested at a hundred and five degrees. She’d overheard Carbury talking with someone on the phone and saying that if Jones’s lung capacity had been any further reduced by his dis-ability—or if he’d been in his thirties or forties instead of his late teens—he almost certainly would have died.

Skip and I were the first visitors he was allowed. Any other kid in the dorm probably would have been visited by at least one parent, but that wasn’t going to happen in Stoke’s case, we knew that now. And if there were other relatives, they hadn’t bothered to put in an appearance.

We told him everything that had happened that night, with one exception: the laugh-in which had begun in the lounge when we saw him spraying his way through Bennett’s Run and continued until we delivered him, semi-conscious, to the infirmary. He listened silently as I told him about Skip’s idea to put peace signs on our books and clothes so Stoke couldn’t be hung out all by himself. Even Ronnie Malenfant had gone along, I said, and without a single quibble. We told him so he could jibe his story with ours; we also told him so he’d understand that by trying to take the blame/credit for the graffiti now, he’d get us in trouble as well as himself. And we told him with-out ever coming right out and telling him. We didn’t need to. His legs didn’t work, but the stuff between his ears was just fine.

“Get your hand off me, Kirk.” Stoke hunched as far away from us as his narrow bed would allow, then began to cough again. I remem-ber thinking he looked like he had about four months to live, but I was wrong about that; Atlantis sank but Stoke Jones is still in the swim, practicing law in San Francisco. His black hair has gone silver and is prettier than ever. He’s got a red wheelchair. It looks great on CNN.

Skip sat back and folded his arms. “I didn’t expect wild gratitude, but this is too much,” he said. “You’ve outdone yourself this time, Rip-Rip.”

His eyes flashed. “Don’t call me that!”

“Then don’t call us thieves just because we tried to save your scrawny ass. Hell, we did save your scrawny ass!”

“No one asked you to.”

“No,” I said. “You don’t ask anyone for anything, do you? I think you’re going to need bigger crutches to haul around the chip on your shoulder before long.”

“That chip’s what I’ve got, shithead. What have you got?”

A lot of catching-up to do, that’s what I had. But I didn’t tell Stoke that. Somehow I didn’t think he’d exactly melt with sympathy. “How much of that day do you remember?” I asked him.

“I remember putting the FUCK JOHNSON thing on the dorm—I’d been planning that for a couple of weeks—and I remember going to my one o’clock class. I spent most of it thinking about what I was going to say in the Dean’s office when he called me in. What kind of a statement I was going to make. After that, everything fades into little fragments.” He uttered a sardonic laugh and rolled his eyes in their bruised-looking sockets. He’d been in bed for the best part of a week and still looked unutterably tired. “I think I remember telling you guys I wanted to die. Did I say that?”

I didn’t answer. He gave me all the time in the world, but I stood on my right to remain silent.

At last Stoke shrugged, the kind of shrug that says okay, let’s drop it. It pulled the johnny he was wearing off one bony shoulder. He tugged it back into place, using his hand carefully—there was an I.V. drip in it. “So you guys discovered the peace sign, huh? Great. You can wear it when you go to see Neil Diamond or fucking Petula Clark at Winter Carnival. Me, I’m out of here. This is over for me.”

“If you go to school on the other side of the country, do you think you’ll be able to throw the crutches away?” Skip asked. “Maybe run track?”

I was a little shocked, but Stoke smiled. It was a real smile, too, sunny and unaffected. “The crutches aren’t relevant,” he said. “Time’s too short to waste, that’s relevant. People around here don’t know what’s happening, and they don’t care. They’re gray people. Just-getting-by people. In Orono, Maine, buying a Rolling Stones record passes for a revolutionary act.”

“Some people know more than they did,” I said . . . but I was trou-bled by thoughts of Nate, who had been worried his mother might see a picture of him getting arrested and had stayed on the curb in consequence. A face in the background, the face of a gray boy on the road to dentistry in the twentieth century.

Dr. Carbury stuck his head in the door. “Time you were on your way, men. Mr. Jones has a lot of rest to catch up on.”

We stood. “When Dean Garretsen comes to talk to you,” I said, “or that guy Ebersole . . .”

“As far as they’ll ever know, that whole day is a blank,” Stoke said. “Carbury can tell them I had bronchitis since October and pneumonia since Thanksgiving, so they’ll have to accept it. I’ll say I could have done anything that day. Except, you know, drop the old crutches and run the four-forty.”

“We really didn’t steal your sign, you know,” Skip said. “We just borrowed it.”

Stoke appeared to think this over, then sighed. “It’s not my sign,” he said.

“No,” I agreed. “Not anymore. So long, Stoke. We’ll come back and see you.”

“Don’t make it a priority,” he said, and I guess we took him at his word, because we never did. I saw him back at the dorm a few times, but only a few, and I was in class when he moved out without both-ering to finish the semester. The next time I saw him was on the TV news almost twenty years later, speaking at a Greenpeace rally just after the French blew up the Rainbow Warrior, 1984 or ’85, that would’ve been. Since then I’ve seen him on the tube quite a lot. He raises money for environmental causes, speaks on college campuses from that snazzy red wheelchair, defends the eco-activists in court when they need defending. I’ve heard him called a tree-hugger, and I bet he sort of enjoys that. He’s still carrying the chip. I’m glad. Like he said, it’s what he’s got.

As we reached the door he called, “Hey?”

We looked back at a narrow white face on a white pillow above a white sheet, the only real color about him those masses of black hair. The shapes of his legs under the sheet again made me think of Uncle Sam in the Fourth of July parade back home. And again I thought that he looked like a kid with about four months to live. But add some white teeth to the picture, as well, because Stoke was smiling.

“Hey what?” Skip said.

“You two were so concerned with what I was going to say to Gar-retsen and Ebersole . . . maybe I’ve got an inferiority complex or something, but I have trouble believing all that concern is for me. Have you two decided to actually try going to school for a change?”

“If we did, do you think we’d make it?” Skip asked.

“You might,” Stoke said. “There is one thing I remember about that night. Pretty clearly, too.”

I thought he’d say he remembered us laughing at him—Skip thought so, too, he told me later—but that wasn’t it.

“You carried me through the doorway of the exam room by your-self,” he said to Skip. “Didn’t drop me, either.”

“No chance of that. You don’t weigh much.”

“Still . . . dying’s one thing, but no one likes the idea of being dropped on the floor. It’s undignified. Because you didn’t, I’ll give you some good advice. Get out of the sports programs, Kirk. Unless, that is, you’ve got some kind of athletic scholarship you can’t do without.”

“Why?”

“Because they’ll turn you into someone else. It may take a little longer than it took ROTC to turn David Dearborn into Dearie, but they’ll get you there in the end.”

“What do you know about sports?” Skip asked gently. “What do you know about being on a team?”

“I know it’s a bad time for boys in uniforms,” Stoke said, then lay back on his pillow and closed his eyes. But a good time to be a girl, Carol had said. 1966 was a good time to be a girl.

We returned to the dorm and went to my room to study. Down the hall Ronnie and Nick and Lennie and most of the others were chasing The Bitch. After awhile Skip shut the door to block the sound of them out, and when that didn’t entirely work I turned on Nate’s little RCA Swingline and we listened to Phil Ochs. Ochs is dead now—as dead as my mother and Michael Landon. He hanged himself with his belt. The suicide rate among surviving Atlanteans has been pretty high. No surprise there, I guess; when your continent sinks right out from under your feet, it does a number on your head.

41

A day or two after that visit to Stoke in the infirmary, I called my mother and said that if she could really afford to send a little extra cash my way, I’d like to take her up on her idea about getting a tutor. She didn’t ask many questions and didn’t scold—you knew you were in serious trouble with my mom when she didn’t scold—but three days later I had a money order for three hundred dollars. To this I added my Hearts winnings—I was astonished to find they came to almost eighty bucks. That’s a lot of nickels.

I never told my mom, but I actually hired two tutors with her three hundred, one a grad student who helped me with the mysteries of tectonic plates and continental drift, the other a pot-smoking senior from King Hall who helped Skip with his anthropology (and might have written a paper or two for him, although I don’t know that for sure). This second fellow’s name was Harvey Brundage, and he was the first person to ever say “Wow, man, bummer!” in my pres-ence.

Together Skip and I went to the Dean of Arts and Sciences— there was no way we were going to go to Garretsen, not after that November meeting in the Chamberlain rec—and laid out the prob-lems we were facing. Technically neither of us belonged to A and S; as freshmen we weren’t yet eligible to declare majors, but Dean Randle listened to us. He recommended that we go around to each of our instructors and explain the problem . . . more or less throw ourselves on their mercy.

We did it, loathing every minute of the process; one of the factors that made us powerful friends in those years was being raised with the same Yankee ideas, one of which was that you didn’t ask for help unless you absolutely had to, and maybe not even then. The only thing that got us through that embarrassing round of calls was the buddy system. When Skip was in with his teachers I waited for him out in the hall, smoking one cigarette after another. When it was my turn, he waited for me.

As a group, the instructors were a lot more sympathetic than I ever would have guessed; most bent over backwards to help us not only pass, but pass high enough to hold onto our scholarships. Only Skip’s calculus teacher was completely unreceptive, and Skip was doing well enough there to skate by without any special help. Years later I realized that for many of the instructors it was a moral issue rather than an academic one: they didn’t want to read their ex-students’ names in a casualty list and have to wonder if they had been partially responsible; that the difference between a D and a C-minus had also been the difference between a kid who could see and hear and one sit-ting senseless in a V.A. hospital somewhere.

42

After one of these meetings, and with the end-of-semester exams looming, Skip went to the Bear’s Den to meet his Anthro tutor for a coffee-fueled cram session. I had dishline at Holyoke. When the con-veyor finally shut down for the afternoon, I went back to the dorm to resume my own studies. I stopped in the lobby to check my mailbox, and there was a pink package-slip in it.

The package was brown paper and string, but livened up with some stick-on Christmas bells and holly. The return address hit me in the stomach like an unexpected sucker-punch: Carol Gerber, 172 Broad Street, Harwich, Connecticut.

I hadn’t tried to call her, and not just because I was busy trying to save my ass. I don’t think I realized the real reason until I saw her name on that package. I’d been convinced she’d gone back to Sully-John. That the night we’d made love in my car while the oldies played was ancient history to her now. That I was ancient history.

Phil Ochs was playing on Nate’s record-player, but Nate himself was snoozing on his bed with a copy of Newsweek lying open on his face. General William Westmoreland was on the cover. I sat down at my desk, put the package in front of me, reached for the string, then paused. My fingers were trembling. Hearts are tough, she had said. Most times they don’t break. Most times they only bend. She was right, of course . . . but mine hurt as I sat there looking at the Christ-mas package she had sent me; it hurt plenty. Phil Ochs was on the record-player, but in my mind I was hearing older, sweeter music. In my mind I was hearing The Platters.

I snapped the string, tore the tape, removed the brown paper, and eventually liberated a small white department-store box. Inside was a gift wrapped in shiny red paper and white satin ribbon. There was also a square envelope with my name written on it in her familiar hand. I opened the envelope and pulled out a Hallmark card—when you care enough to send the very best, and all that. There were foil snowflakes and foil angels blowing foil trumpets. When I opened the card, a newspaper clipping fell out onto the present she’d sent me. It was from a newspaper called the Harwich Journal. In the top mar-gin, above the headline, Carol had written: This time I made it— Purple Heart! Don’t worry, 5 stitches at the Emerg. Room & I was home for supper.

The story’s headline read: 6 INJURED, 14 ARRESTED AS DRAFT OFFICE PROTEST TURNS INTO MELEE. The photo was in stark contrast to the one in the Derry News where everyone, even the cops and the construction workers who had started their own impromptu counter-protest, looked sort of relaxed. In the Harwich Journal photo, folks looked raw-nerved, confused, and about two thousand light-years from relaxed. There were hardhat types with tattoos on their bulging arms and hate-ful grimaces on their faces; there were long-haired kids staring back at them with angry defiance. One of the latter was holding his arms out to a jeering trio of men as if to say Come on, you want a piece of me? There were cops between the two groups, looking strained and tense.

To the left (Carol had drawn an arrow to this part of the photo, as if I might have missed it otherwise) was a familiar jacket with HAR-WICH HIGH SCHOOL printed on the back. Once more her head was turned, but this time toward the camera instead of away from it. I could see the blood running down her cheek much more clearly than I wanted to. She could draw joke arrows and write all the breezy comments she wanted to in the margin; I was not amused. That was not chocolate syrup on her face. A cop had her by one arm. The girl in the news photo didn’t seem to mind either that or the fact that her head was bleeding (if she even knew her head was bleeding at that point). The girl in the news photo was smiling. In one of her hands was a sign reading STOP THE MURDER. The other was held out toward the camera, the first two fingers making a V. V-for-victory, I thought then, but of course it wasn’t. By 1969, that V went with the sparrow-track the way ham went with eggs.

I scanned the text of the clipping, but there was nothing there of any particular interest. Protest . . . counter-protest . . . epithets . . . thrown rocks . . . a few fistfights . . . police arrive on the scene. The story’s tone was lofty and disgusted and patronizing all at the same time; it reminded me of how Ebersole and Garretsen had looked that night in the rec. You fellows have disappointed me. All but three of the protesters who had been arrested were released later that day and none were named, so presumably they were all under twenty-one.

Blood on her face. And yet she was smiling . . . triumphant, in fact. I became aware Phil Ochs was still singing—I must have killed a million men and now they want me back again—and a shake of gooseflesh went up my back.

I turned to the card. It bore the typical rhymed sentiments; they always come to about the same, don’t they? Merry Christmas, sure hope you don’t die in the New Year. I barely read them. On the blank side facing the verse, she had written me a note. It was long enough to use up most of the white space.

Dear Number Six,

I just wanted to wish you the merriest of merry Christmases, and to tell you I’m okay. I’m not back in school, although I have been associating with certain school types (see enclosed clip-ping) and expect I will return eventually, probably fall semes-ter next year. My mom is not doing too well, but she is trying, and my brother is getting his act back together. Rionda helps, too. I’ve seen Sully a couple of times, but it’s not the same. He came over to watch TV one night and we are like strangers . . . or maybe what I really mean is that we’re like old acquain-tances on trains going in different directions.

I miss you, Pete. I think our trains are going in different directions, too, but I’ll never forget the time we spent together. It was the sweetest and the best (especially the last night). You can write me if you want, but I sort of wish you wouldn’t. It might not be good for either of us. This doesn’t mean I don’t

care or remember but that I do.

Remember the night I showed you that picture and told you about how I got beaten up? How my friend Bobby took care of me? He had a book that summer. The man upstairs gave it to him. Bobby said it was the best book he ever read. Not saying much when you’re just eleven, I know, but I saw it again in the high-school library when I was a senior and read it, just to see what it was like. And I thought it was pretty great. Not the best book I ever read, but pretty great. I thought you might like a copy. Although it was written twelve years ago, I sort of think it’s about Vietnam. Even if it’s not, it’s full of information.

Carol

I love you, Pete. Merry Christmas.

P.S. Get out of that stupid card-game.

I read it twice, then folded the clipping carefully and put it back in the card, my hands still shaking. Somewhere I think I still have that card . . . as I’m sure that somewhere “Red Carol” Gerber has still got her lit-tle snapshot of her childhood friends. If she’s still alive, that is. Not exactly a sure thing; a lot of her last-known bunch of friends are not.

I opened the package. Inside it—and in jarring contrast to the cheery Christmas paper and white satin ribbon—was a paperback copy of Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. I had somehow missed it in high school, opting for A Separate Peace in Senior Lit instead because Peace looked a little shorter.

I opened it, thinking there might be an inscription. There was, but not the sort I had expected, not at all. This was what I found in the white space on the title page:

My eyes filled with sudden unexpected tears. I put my hands over my mouth to hold in the sob that wanted to come out. I didn’t want to wake Nate up, didn’t want him to see me crying. But I cried, all right. I sat there at my desk and cried for her, for me, for both of us, for all of us. I can’t remember hurting any more ever in my life than I did then. Hearts are tough, she said, most times hearts don’t break, and I’m sure that’s right . . . but what about then? What about who we were then? What about hearts in Atlantis?

43

In any case, Skip and I survived. We did the makeup work, squeaked through the finals, and returned to Chamberlain Hall in mid-January. Skip told me he’d written a letter to John Winkin, the baseball coach, over the holiday, saying he’d changed his mind about coming out for the team.

Nate was back on Chamberlain Three. So, amazingly, was Lennie Doria—on academic pro but there. His paisan Tony DeLucca was gone, though. So were Mark St. Pierre, Barry Margeaux, Nick Prouty, Brad Witherspoon, Harvey Twiller, Randy Echolls . . . and Ronnie, of course. We got a card from him in March. It was post-marked Lewiston and simply addressed to The Yo-Yo’s Of Chamber-lain Three. We taped it up in the lounge, over the chair where Ronnie had most often sat during the games. On the front was Alfred E. Neuman, the Mad magazine cover-boy. On the back Ronnie had written: “Uncle Sam calls and I gotta go. Palm trees in my future and who gives a f—k. What me worry. I finished with 21 match points. That makes me the winner.” It was signed “RON.” Skip and I had a laugh at that. As far as we were concerned, Mrs. Malenfant’s foul-mouthed little boy was going to be a Ronnie until the day he died.

Stoke Jones, aka Rip-Rip, was also gone. I didn’t think of him much for awhile, but his face and memory came back to me with startling (if brief) vividness a year and a half later. I was in jail at the time, in Chicago. I don’t know how many of us the cops swept up outside the convention center on the night Hubert Humphrey was nominated, but there were a lot, and a lot of us were hurt—a blue-ribbon commission would a year later designate the event a “police riot” in its report.

I ended up in a holding cell meant for fifteen prisoners—twenty, max—with about sixty gassed-out, punched-out, drugged-out, beat-up, messed-up, worked-over, fucked-over, blood-all-over hippies, some smoking joints, some crying, some puking, some singing protest songs (from far over in the corner, issuing from some guy I never even saw, came a stoned-out version of “I’m Not Marchin’ Anymore”). It was like some weird penal version of telephone-booth cramming.

I was jammed up against the bars, trying to protect my shirt pocket (Pall Malls), and my hip pocket (the copy of Lord of the Flies Carol had given me, now very battered, missing half its front cover, and falling out of its binding), when all at once Stoke’s face flashed into my mind as bright and complete as a high-resolution photo-graph. It came from nowhere, it seemed, perhaps the product of a dormant memory circuit which had gone momentarily hot, joggled by either a nightstick to the head or a revivifying whiff of teargas. And a question came with it.

“What the fuck was a cripple doing on the third floor?” I asked out loud.

A little guy with a huge mass of golden hair—a kind of Peter Frampton dwarf, if you could dig that—looked around. His face was pale and pimply. Blood was drying beneath his nose and on one cheek. “What, man?” he asked.

“What the fuck was a cripple doing on the third floor of a college dorm? One with no elevator? Wouldn’t they have put him on the first floor?” Then I remembered Stoke plunging toward Holyoke with his head down and his hair hanging in his eyes, Stoke muttering “Rip-rip, rip-rip, rip-rip” under his breath. Stoke going everywhere as if every-thing was his enemy; give him a quarter and he’d try to shoot down the whole world.

“Man, I’m not following you. What—”

“Unless he asked them to,” I said. “Unless he maybe right out demanded it.”

“Bingo,” said the little guy with the Peter Frampton hair. “Got a joint, man? I want to get high. This place sucks. I want to go to Hobbiton.”

44

Skip became an artist, and he’s famous in his own way. Not like Nor-man Rockwell, and you’ll never see a reproduction of one of Skip’s sculptures on a plate offered by the Franklin Mint, but he’s had plenty of shows—London, Rome, New York, last year in Paris—and he’s reviewed regularly. There are plenty of critics who call him jejune, the flavor of the month (some have been calling him the flavor of the month for twenty-five years), a trite mind communicating via low imagery with other trite minds. Other critics have praised him for his honesty and energy. I tend in this direction, but I suppose I would; I knew him back in the day, we escaped the great sinking con-tinent together, and he has remained my friend; in a distant way he has remained my paisan.

There are also critics who have commented on the rage his work so often expresses, the rage I first saw clearly in the papier-mâché Viet-namese family tableau he set afire in front of the school library to the amplified pulse of The Youngbloods back in 1969. And yeah. Yeah, there’s something to that. Some of Skip’s stuff is funny and some of it’s sad and some of it’s bizarre, but most of it looks angry, most of his stiff-shouldered plaster and paper and clay people seem to whisper

Light me, oh light me and listen to me scream, it’s really still 1969, it’s still the Mekong and always will be. “It is Stanley Kirk’s anger which makes his work worthy,” a critic wrote during an exhibition in Boston, and I suppose it was that same anger which contributed to his heart attack two months ago.

His wife called and said Skip wanted to see me. The doctors believed it hadn’t been a serious cardiac event, but the Captain begged to disagree. My old paisan Captain Kirk thought he was dying.

I flew down to Palm Beach, and when I saw him—white face below mostly white hair on a white pillow—it called up a memory I could not at first pin down.

“You’re thinking of Jones,” he said in a husky voice, and of course he was right. I grinned, and at the same moment a cold chill traced a finger down the middle of my back. Sometimes things come back to you, that’s all. Sometimes they come back.

I came in and sat down beside him. “Not bad, O swami.”

“Not hard, either,” he said. “It’s that day at the infirmary all over again, except that Carbury’s probably dead and this time I’m the one with a tube in the back of my hand.” He raised one of his talented hands, showed me the tube, then lowered it again. “I don’t think I’m going to die anymore. At least not yet.”

“Good.”

“You still smoking?”

“I’ve retired. As of last year.”

He nodded. “My wife says she’ll divorce me if I don’t do the same . . . so I guess I better try.”

“It’s the worst habit.”

“Actually, I think living’s the worst habit.”

“Save the phrase-making shit for the Reader’s Digest, Cap.”

He laughed, then asked if I’d heard from Natie.

“A Christmas card, like always. With a photo.”

“Fuckin Nate!” Skip was delighted. “Was it his office?”

“Yeah. He’s got a Nativity scene out front this year. The Magi all look like they need dental work.”

We looked at each other and began to giggle. Before Skip could really get going, he began to cough. It was eerily like Stoke—for a moment he even looked like Stoke—and I felt that shiver slide down my back again. If Stoke had been dead I’d have thought he was haunting us, but he wasn’t. And in his own way Stoke Jones was as much of a sellout as every retired hippie who progressed from selling cocaine to selling junk bonds over the phone. He loves his TV coverage, does Stoke; when

O.J. Simpson was on trial you could catch Stoke somewhere on the dial every night, just another vulture circling the carrion.

Carol was the one who didn’t sell out, I guess. Carol and her friends, and what about the chem students they killed with their bomb? It was a mistake, I believe that with all my heart—the Carol Gerber I knew would have no patience with the idea that all power comes out of the barrel of a gun. The Carol I knew would have understood that was just another fucked-up way of saying we had to destroy the village in order to save it. But do you think the relatives of those kids care that it was a mistake, the bomb didn’t go off when it was supposed to, sorry? Do you think questions of who sold out and who didn’t matter to the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, lovers, friends? Do you think it matters to the people who have to pick up the pieces and somehow go on? Hearts can break. Yes. Hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t.

Skip worked on getting his breath back. The monitor beside his bed was beeping in a worried way. A nurse looked in and Skip waved her off. The beeps were settling back to their previous rhythm, so she went. When she was gone, Skip said: “Why did we laugh so hard when he fell down that day? That question has never entirely left me.”

“No,” I said. “Me either.”“So what’s the answer? Why did we laugh?”“Because we’re human. For awhile, I think it was between Woodstock and Kent State, we thought we were something else, but we weren’t.”

“We thought we were stardust,” Skip said. Almost with a straight face.

“We thought we were golden,” I agreed, laughing. “And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

“Lean over, hippie-boy,” Skip said, and I did. I saw that my old friend, who had outfoxed Dearie and Ebersole and the Dean of Men, who had gone around and begged his teachers to help him, who had taught me to drink beer by the pitcher and say fuck in a dozen differ-ent intonations, was crying a little bit. He reached up his arms to me. They had gotten thin over the years, and now the muscles hung rather than bunched. I bent down and hugged him.

“We tried,” he said in my ear. “Don’t you ever forget that, Pete. We tried.”

I suppose we did. In her way, Carol tried harder than any of us and paid the highest price . . . except, that is, for the ones who died. And although we’ve forgotten the language we spoke in those years—it is as lost as the bell-bottom jeans, home-tie-dyed shirts, Nehru jack-ets, and signs that said KILLING FOR PEACE IS LIKE FUCKING FOR CHASTITY—sometimes a word or two comes back. Information, you know. Information. And sometimes, in my dreams and memories (the older I get the more they seem to be the same), I smell the place where I spoke that language with such easy authority: a whiff of earth, a scent of oranges, and the fading smell of flowers.

1983

Blind Willie

6:15 A.M.

He wakes to music, always to music; the shrill beep-beep-beep of the clock-radio’s alarm is too much for his mind to cope with during those first blurry moments of the day. It sounds like a dump truck backing up. The radio is bad enough at this time of year, though; the easy-listening station he keeps the clock-radio tuned to is wall-to-wall Christmas carols, and this morning he wakes up to one of the two or three on his Most Hated List, something full of breathy voices and phony wonder. The Hare Krishna Chorale or the Andy Williams Singers or some such. Do you hear what I hear, the breathy voices sing as he sits up in bed, blinking groggily, hair sticking out in every direction. Do you see what I see, they sing as he swings his legs out, grimaces his way across the cold floor to the radio, and bangs the button that turns it off. When he turns around, Sharon has assumed her customary defensive posture—pillow folded over her head, noth-ing showing but the creamy curve of one shoulder, a lacy nightgown strap, and a fluff of blond hair.

He goes into the bathroom, closes the door, slips off the pajama bottoms he sleeps in, drops them into the hamper, clicks on his elec-tric razor. As he runs it over his face he thinks, Why not run through the rest of the sensory catalogue while you’re at it, boys? Do you smell what I smell, do you taste what I taste, do you feel what I feel, I mean, hey, go for it.

“Humbug,” he says as he turns on the shower. “All humbug.”

Twenty minutes later, while he’s dressing (the dark gray suit from Paul Stuart this morning, plus his favorite Sulka tie), Sharon wakes up a little. Not enough for him to fully understand what she’s telling him, though.

“Come again?” he asks. “I got eggnog, but the rest was just uggawugga.”

“I asked if you’d pick up two quarts of eggnog on your way home,” she says. “We’ve got the Allens and the Dubrays coming over tonight, remember?”

“Christmas,” he says, checking his hair carefully in the mirror. He no longer looks like the glaring, bewildered man who sits up in bed to the sound of music five mornings a week—sometimes six. Now he looks like all the other people who will ride into New York with him on the seven-forty, and that is just what he wants.

“What about Christmas?” she asks with a sleepy smile. “Humbug, right?”

“Right,” he agrees.

“If you remember, get some cinnamon, too—”

“Okay.”

“—but if you forget the eggnog, I’ll slaughter you, Bill.”

“I’ll remember.”

“I know. You’re very dependable. Look nice, too.”

“Thanks.”

She flops back down, then props herself up on one elbow as he makes a final minute adjustment to the tie, which is a dark blue. He has never worn a red tie in his life, and hopes he can go to his grave untouched by that particular virus. “I got the tinsel you wanted,” she says.

“Mmmm?”

“The tinsel,” she says. “It’s on the kitchen table.”

“Oh.” Now he remembers. “Thanks.”

“Sure.” She’s back down and already starting to drift off again. He doesn’t envy the fact that she can stay in bed until nine—hell, until eleven, if she wants—but he envies that ability of hers to wake up, talk, then drift off again. He had that when he was in the bush— most guys did—but the bush was a long time ago. In country was what the new guys and the correspondents always said; if you’d been there awhile it was just the bush, or sometimes the green.

In the green, yeah.

She says something else, but now she’s back to ugga-wugga. He knows what it is just the same, though: have a good day, hon.

“Thanks,” he says, kissing her cheek. “I will.”

“Look very nice,” she mumbles again, although her eyes are closed. “Love you, Bill.”

“Love you, too,” he says and goes out.

His briefcase—Mark Cross, not quite top-of-the-line but close—is standing in the front hall, by the coat tree where his topcoat (from Tager’s, on Madison) hangs. He snags the case on his way by and takes it into the kitchen. The coffee is all made—God bless Mr. Coffee— and he pours himself a cup. He opens the briefcase, which is entirely empty, and picks up the ball of tinsel on the kitchen table. He holds it up for a moment, watching the way it sparkles under the light of the kitchen fluorescents, then puts it in his briefcase.

“Do you hear what I hear,” he says to no one at all and snaps the briefcase shut.

8:15 A.M.

Outside the dirty window to his left, he can see the city drawing closer. The grime on the glass makes it look like some filthy, gargan-tuan ruin—dead Atlantis, maybe, just heaved back to the surface to glare at the gray sky. The day’s got a load of snow caught in its throat, but that doesn’t worry him much; it is just eight days until Christmas, and business will be good.

The train-car reeks of morning coffee, morning deodorant, morn-ing aftershave, morning perfume, and morning stomachs. There is a tie in almost every seat—even some of the women wear them these days. The faces have that puffy eight o’clock look, the eyes both introspective and defenseless, the conversations half-hearted. This is the hour at which even people who don’t drink look hungover. Most folks just stick to their newspapers. Why not? Reagan is king of America, stocks and bonds have turned to gold, the death penalty is back in vogue. Life is good.

He himself has the Times crossword open in front of him, and although he’s filled in a few squares, it’s mostly a defensive measure. He doesn’t like to talk to people on the train, doesn’t like loose con-versation of any sort, and the last thing in the world he wants is a commuter buddy. When he starts seeing the same faces in any given car, when people start to nod to him or say “How you doin today?” as they go to their seats, he changes cars. It’s not that hard to remain unknown, just another commuter from suburban Connecticut, a man conspicuous only in his adamant refusal to wear a red tie. Maybe he was once a parochial-school boy, maybe once he held a weeping little girl while one of his friends struck her repeatedly with a base-ball bat, and maybe he once spent time in the green. Nobody on the train has to know these things. That’s the good thing about trains.

“All ready for Christmas?” the man in the aisle seat asks him.

He looks up, almost frowning, then decides it’s not a substantive remark, only the sort of empty time-passer some people seem to feel compelled to make. The man beside him is fat and will undoubtedly stink by noon no matter how much Speed Stick he used this morning . . . but he’s hardly even looking at Bill, so that’s all right.

“Yes, well, you know,” he says, looking down at the briefcase between his shoes—the briefcase that contains a ball of tinsel and nothing else. “I’m getting in the spirit, little by little.”

8:40 A.M.

He comes out of Grand Central with a thousand other topcoated men and women, mid-level executives for the most part, sleek gerbils who will be running full tilt on their exercise wheels by noon. He stands still for a moment, breathing deep of the cold gray air. Lex-ington Avenue is dressed in its Christmas lights, and a little distance away a Santa Claus who looks Puerto Rican is ringing a bell. He’s got a pot for contributions with an easel set up beside it. HELP THE HOME-LESS THIS CHRISTMAS, the sign on the easel says, and the man in the blue tie thinks, How about a little truth in advertising, Santa? How about a sign that says HELP ME SUPPORT MYCOKE HABIT THIS CHRISTMAS? Nevertheless, he drops a couple of dollar bills into the pot as he walks past. He has a good feeling about today. He’s glad Sharon reminded him of the tinsel—he would have forgotten to bring it, probably; in the end he always forgets stuff like that, the grace notes.

A walk of ten minutes takes him to his building. Standing outside the door is a black youth, maybe seventeen, wearing black jeans and a dirty red hooded sweatshirt. He jives from foot to foot, blowing puffs of steam out of his mouth, smiling frequently, showing a gold tooth. In one hand he holds a partly crushed styrofoam coffee cup. There’s some change in it, which he rattles constantly.

“Spare a lil?” he asks the passersby as they stream toward the revolving doors. “Spare me a lil, sir? Spare just a lil, ma’am? Just try-ing to get a spot of breffus. Thank you, gobless you, merry Christ-mas. Spare a lil, my man? Quarter, maybe? Thank you. Spare a lil, ma’am?”

As he passes, Bill drops a nickel and two dimes into the young black man’s cup.

“Thank you, sir, gobless, merry Christmas.”

“You, too,” he says.

The woman next to him frowns. “You shouldn’t encourage them,” she says.

He gives her a shrug and a small, shamefaced smile. “It’s hard for me to say no to anyone at Christmas,” he tells her.

He enters the lobby with a stream of others, stares briefly after the opinionated bitch as she heads for the newsstand, then goes to the elevators with their old-fashioned floor dials and their art deco num-bers. Here several people nod to him, and he exchanges a few words with a couple of them as they wait—it’s not like the train, after all, where you can change cars. Plus, the building is an old one; the elevators are slow and cranky.

“How’s the wife, Bill?” a scrawny, constantly grinning man from the fifth floor asks.

“Carol’s fine.”

“Kids?”

“Both good.” He has no kids and his wife’s name isn’t Carol. His wife is the former Sharon Anne Donahue, St. Gabriel the Steadfast Secondary Parochial School, Class of 1964, but that’s something the scrawny, constantly grinning man will never know.

“Bet they can’t wait for the big day,” the scrawny man says, his grin widening and becoming something unspeakable. To Bill Shearman he looks like an editorial cartoonist’s conception of Death, all big eyes and huge teeth and stretched shiny skin. That grin makes him think of Tam Boi, in the A Shau Valley. T hose guys from 2nd Battalion went in looking like the kings of the world and came out looking like singed escapees from hell’s half acre. They came out with those big eyes and huge teeth. They still looked like that in Dong Ha, where they all got kind of mixed together a few days later. A lot of mixing-together went on in the bush. A lot of shake-and-bake, too.

“Absolutely can’t wait,” he agrees, “but I think Sarah’s getting kind of suspicious about the guy in the red suit.” Hurry up, elevator, he thinks, Jesus, save me from these stupidities.

“Yeah, yeah, it happens,” the scrawny man says. His grin fades for a moment, as if they were discussing cancer instead of Santa. “How old’s Sarah now?”

“Eight.”

“Seems like she was just born a year or two ago. Boy, the time sure flies when you’re havin fun, doesn’t it?”

“You can say that again,” he says, fervently hoping the scrawny man won’t say it again. At that moment one of the four elevators finally gasps open its doors and they herd themselves inside.

Bill and the scrawny man walk a little way down the fifth-floor hall together, and then the scrawny man stops in front of a set of oldfashioned double doors with the words CONSOLIDATED INSURANCE written on one frosted-glass panel and ADJUSTORS OF AMERICA on the other. From behind these doors comes the muted clickety-click of keyboards and the slightly louder sound of ringing phones.

“Have a good day, Bill.”

“You too.”

The scrawny man lets himself into his office, and for a moment Bill sees a big wreath hung on the far side of the room. Also, the win-dows have been decorated with the kind of snow that comes in a spray can. He shudders and thinks, God save us, every one.

9:05 A.M.

His office—one of two he keeps in this building—is at the far end of the hall. The two offices closest to it are dark and vacant, a situation that has held for the last six months and one he likes just fine. Printed on the frosted glass of his own office door are the words WESTERN STATES LAND ANALYSTS. There are three locks on the door: the one that was on when he moved into the building, plus two he has put on himself. He lets himself in, closes the door, turns the bolt, then engages the police lock.

A desk stands in the center of the room, and it is cluttered with papers, but none of them mean anything; they are simply window dressing for the cleaning service. Every so often he throws them all out and redistributes a fresh batch. In the center of the desk is a telephone on which he makes occasional random calls so that the phone company won’t register the line as totally inactive. Last year he purchased a copier, and it looks very businesslike over in its corner by the door to the office’s little second room, but it has never been used.

“Do you hear what I hear, do you smell what I smell, do you taste what I taste,” he murmurs, and crosses to the door leading to the sec-ond room. Inside are shelves stacked high with more meaningless paper, two large file-cabinets (there is a Walkman on top of one, his excuse on the few occasions when someone knocks on the locked door and gets no answer), a chair, and a stepladder.

Bill takes the stepladder back to the main room and unfolds it to the left of the desk. He puts his briefcase on top of it. Then he mounts the first three steps of the ladder, reaches up (the bottom half of his coat bells out and around his legs as he does), and carefully moves aside one of the suspended ceiling panels.

Above is a dark area which cannot quite be called a utility space, although a few pipes and wires do run through it. There’s no dust up here, at least not in this immediate area, and no rodent droppings, either—he uses D-Con Mouse-Prufe once a month. He wants to keep his clothes nice as he goes back and forth, of course, but that’s not really the important part. The important part is to respect your work and your field. This he learned in the Army, during his time in the green, and he sometimes thinks it is the second most important thing he’s ever learned in his life. The most important is that only penance replaces confession, and only penance defines identity. This is a lesson he began learning in 1960, when he was fourteen. That was the last year he could go into the booth and say “Bless me father for I have sinned” and then tell everything.

Penance is important to him.

Gobless, he thinks there in the stale-smelling darkness of the util-ity space. Gobless you, gobless me, gobless us every one.

Above this narrow space (a ghostly, gentle wind hoots endlessly through it, bringing a smell of dust and the groan of the elevators) is the bottom of the sixth floor, and here is a square trapdoor about thirty inches on a side. Bill installed it himself; he’s handy with tools, which is one of the things Sharon appreciates about him.

He flips the trapdoor up, letting in muted light from above, then grabs his briefcase by the handle. As he sticks his head into the space between floors, water rushes gustily down the fat bathroom conduit twenty or thirty feet north of his present position. An hour from now, when the people in the building start their coffee breaks, that sound will be as constant and as rhythmic as waves breaking on a beach. Bill hardly notices this or any of the other interfloor sounds; he’s used to them.

He climbs carefully to the top of the stepladder, then boosts him-self through into his sixth-floor office, leaving Bill down on Five. Up here he is Willie again, just as he was in high school. Just as he was in Vietnam, where he was sometimes known as Baseball Willie.

This upper office has a sturdy workshop look, with coils and motors and vents stacked neatly on metal shelves and what looks like a filter of some kind squatting on one corner of the desk. It is an office, however; there’s a typewriter, a Dictaphone, an IN/OUT bas-ket full of papers (also window dressing, which he periodically rotates like a farmer rotating crops), and file-cabinets. Lots of file-cabinets.

On one wall is a Norman Rockwell painting of a family praying over Thanksgiving dinner. Behind the desk is a framed studio por-trait of Willie in his first lieutenant’s uniform (taken in Saigon shortly before he won his Silver Star for action at the site of the helicopter crash outside of Dong Ha) and next to it is a blow-up of his honor-able discharge, also framed; the name on the sheet is William Shear-man, and here his decorations are duly noted. He saved Sullivan’s life on the trail outside the ’ville. The citation accompanying the Silver Star says so, the men who survived Dong Ha said so, and more important than either of those, Sullivan said so. It’s the first thing he said when they wound up in San Francisco together at the hospital known as the Pussy Palace: You saved my life, man. Willie sitting on Sullivan’s bed, Willie with one arm still bandaged and salve all around his eyes, but really okay, yeah, he was cruisin, it was Sullivan who had been badly hurt. That was the day the AP photographer took their picture, the photo that appeared in newspapers all over the country . . . including the Harwich Journal.

He took my hand, Willie thinks as he stands there in his sixth-floor office with Bill Shearman now a floor down. Above the studio portrait and his discharge is a poster from the sixties. This item, not framed and starting to yellow at the edges, shows the peace sign. Below it, in red, white, and blue, is this punchline: TRACK OF THE GREATAMERICAN CHICKEN.

He took my hand, he thinks again. Yes, Sullivan had done that, and Willie had come within an ace of leaping to his feet and running back down the ward, screaming. He had been positive that Sullivan would say I know what you did, you and your friends Doolin and O’Meara. Did you think she wouldn’t tell me?

Sullivan had said nothing like that. What he’d said was, You saved my life, man, from the old home town and you saved my life. Shit, what are the odds? And we used to be so scared of the boys from St. Gabe’s. When he said that, Willie had known for sure that Sulli-van had no idea of what Doolin, O’Meara, and he had done to Carol Gerber. There was no relief in knowing he was safe, however. None. And as he smiled and squeezed Sullivan’s hand, he had thought: You were right to be scared, Sully. You were right to be.

Willie puts Bill’s briefcase on the desk, then lies down on his stom-ach. He pokes his head and arms into the windy, oil-smelling dark-ness between floors and replaces the ceiling panel of the fifth-floor office. It’s locked up tight; he doesn’t expect anyone anyway (he never does; Western States Land Analysts has never had a single cus-tomer), but it’s better to be safe. Always safe, never sorry.

With his fifth-floor office set to rights, Willie lowers the trapdoor in this one. Up here the trap is hidden by a small rug which is Super-Glued to the wood, so it can go up and down without too much flop-ping or sliding around.

He gets to his feet, dusts off his hands, then turns to the briefcase and opens it. He takes out the ball of tinsel and puts it on top of the Dictaphone which stands on the desk.

“Good one,” he says, thinking again that Sharon can be a real peach when she sets her mind to it . . . and she often does. He relatches the briefcase and then begins to undress, doing it carefully and methodically, reversing the steps he took at six-thirty, running the film backward. He strips off everything, even his undershorts and his black knee-high socks. Naked, he hangs his topcoat, suit jacket, and shirt carefully in the closet where only one other item hangs—a heavy red jacket, not quite thick enough to be termed a parka. Below it is a boxlike thing, a little too bulky to be termed a briefcase. Willie puts his Mark Cross case next to it, then places his slacks in the pants press, taking pains with the crease. The tie goes on the rack screwed to the back of the closet door, where it hangs all by itself like a long blue tongue.

He pads barefoot-naked across to one of the file-cabinet stacks. On top of it is an ashtray embossed with a pissed-off-looking eagle and the words IF I DIE IN A COMBATZONE. In the ashtray are a pair of dogtags on a chain. Willie slips the chain over his head, then slides out the bottom drawer of the cabinet stack. Inside are underclothes. Neatly folded on top are a pair of khaki boxer shorts. He slips them on. Next come white athletic socks, followed by a white cotton tee-shirt—roundneck, not strappy. The shapes of his dogtags stand out against it, as do his biceps and quads. They aren’t as good as they were in A Shau and Dong Ha, but they aren’t bad for a guy who is closing in on forty.

Now, before he finishes dressing, it is time for penance.

He goes to another stack of cabinets and rolls out the second drawer. He thumbs rapidly through the bound ledgers there, passing those for late 1982, then thumbing through those from this year: Jan–April, May–June, July, August (he always feels compelled to write more in the summer), September–October, and at last the cur-rent volume: November–December. He sits at his desk, opens the ledger, and flicks rapidly through pages of densely packed writing. There are small variations in the writing, but the essence is always the same: I am heartily sorry.

He only writes for ten minutes or so this morning, pen scratching busily, sticking to the basic fact of the matter: I am heartily sorry. He has, to the best of his reckoning, written this over two million times . . . and is just getting started. Confession would be quicker, but he is willing to take the long way around.

He finishes—no, he never finishes, but he finishes for today—and puts the current ledger back between those finished and all those yet to be filled. Then he returns to the stack of file-cabinets which serve as his chest of drawers. As he opens the one above his socks and skivvies, he begins to hum under his breath—not “Do You Hear What I Hear” but The Doors, the one about how the day destroys the night, the night divides the day.

He slips on a plain blue chambray shirt, then a pair of fatigue pants. He rolls this middle drawer back in and opens the top one. Here there is a scrapbook and a pair of boots. He takes the scrapbook out and looks at its red leather cover for a moment. The word MEMO-RIES is stamped on the front in flaking gold. It’s a cheap thing, this book. He could afford better, but you don’t always have a right to what you can afford.

In the summer he writes more sorries but memory seems to sleep. It is in winter, especially around Christmas, that memory awakens. Then he wants to look in this book, which is full of clippings and photos where everyone looks impossibly young.

Today he puts the scrapbook back into the drawer unopened and takes out the boots. They are polished to a high sheen and look as if they might last until the trump of judgment. Maybe even longer. They aren’t standard Army issue, not these—these are jumpboots, 101st Airborne stuff. But that’s all right. He isn’t actually trying to dress like a soldier. If he wanted to dress like a soldier, he would.

Still, there is no more reason to look sloppy than there is to allow dust to collect in the pass-through, and he’s careful about the way he dresses. He does not tuck his pants into his boots, of course—he’s headed for Fifth Avenue in December, not the Mekong in August, snakes and poppy-bugs are not apt to be a problem—but he intends to look squared away. Looking good is as important to him as it is to Bill, maybe even more important. Respecting one’s work and one’s field begins, after all, with respecting one’s self.

The last two items are in the back of the top drawer of his bureau stack: a tube of makeup and a jar of hair gel. He squeezes some of the makeup into the palm of his left hand, then begins applying it, work-ing from forehead to the base of his neck. He moves with the uncon-cerned speed of long experience, giving himself a moderate tan. With that done, he works some of the gel into his hair and then recombs it, getting rid of the part and sweeping it straight back from his fore-head. It is the last touch, the smallest touch, and perhaps the most telling touch. There is no trace of the commuter who walked out of Grand Central an hour ago; the man in the mirror mounted on the back of the door to the small storage annex looks like a washed-up mercenary. There is a kind of silent, half-humbled pride in the tanned face, something people won’t look at too long. It hurts them if they do. Willie knows this is so; he has seen it. He doesn’t ask why it should be so. He has made himself a life pretty much without ques-tions, and that’s the way he likes it.

“All right,” he says, closing the door to the storage room. “Lookin good, trooper.”

He goes back to the closet for the red jacket, which is the reversible type, and the boxy case. He slips the jacket over his desk chair for the time being and puts the case on the desk. He unlatches it and swings the top up on sturdy hinges; now it looks a little like the cases street salesmen use to display their knockoff watches and questionable gold chains. There are only a few items in Willie’s, one of them broken down into two pieces so it will fit. There is a sign. There is a pair of gloves, the kind you wear in cold weather, and a third glove which he used to wear when it was warm. He takes out the pair (he will want them today, no doubt about that), and then the sign on its length of stout cord. The cord has been knotted through holes in the cardboard at either side, so Willie can hang the sign around his neck. He closes the case again, not bothering to latch it, and puts the sign on top of it—the desk is so cluttery, it’s the only good surface he has to work on.

Humming (we chased our pleasures here, dug our treasures there), he opens the wide drawer above the kneehole, paws past the pencils and Chap Sticks and paperclips and memo pads, and finally finds his stapler. He then unrolls the ball of tinsel, placing it carefully around the rectangle of his sign. He snips off the extra and staples the shiny stuff firmly into place. He holds it up for a moment, first assessing the effect, then admiring it.

“Perfect!” he says.

The telephone rings and he stiffens, turning to look at it with eyes which are suddenly very small and hard and totally alert. One ring.

Two. T hree. On the fourth, the machine kicks in, answering in his voice—the version of it that goes with this office, anyway.

“Hi, you’ve reached Midtown Heating and Cooling,” Willie Shearman says. “No one can take your call right now, so leave a mes-sage at the beep.”

Bee-eep.

He listens tensely, standing over his just-decorated sign with his hands balled into fists.

“Hi, this is Ed, from the NYNEX Yellow Pages,” the voice from the machine says, and Willie lets out a breath he hasn’t known he was hold-ing. His hands begin to loosen. “Please have your company rep call me at 1-800-555-1000 for information on how you can increase your ad space in both versions of the Yellow Pages, and at the same time save big money on your yearly bill. Happy holidays to all! Thanks.”

Click.

Willie looks at the answering machine a moment longer, almost as if he expects it to speak again—to threaten him, perhaps to accuse him of all the crimes of which he accuses himself—but nothing happens.

“Squared away,” he murmurs, putting the decorated sign back into the case. This time when he closes it, he latches it. Across the front is a bumper sticker, its message flanked by small American flags. I WAS PROUD TO SERVE, it reads.

“Squared away, baby, you better believe it.”

He leaves the office, closing the door with MIDTOWN HEATING AND COOLING printed on the frosted-glass panel behind him, and turning all three of the locks.