Hearts In Atlantis (56 page)

“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 misfortune 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. Pancreatic 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.

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 dentist, 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.

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 suggested 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.

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.

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 Shadows
during the week; a canteen corner with half a dozen vending machines; a Ping-Pong table and a number of chess- and checkerboards. 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 inspections. 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 people 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. The 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 running 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.