Hearts In Atlantis (58 page)

“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, coughing, 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 argument, 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.

“So you stole that, too,” Stoke Jones said from his bed in the infirmary 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 dollars 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, prescribing for strep throats and splinting wrists dislocated in softball games, for donkey's years and probably knew there was no accounting 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. Carbury hadn't
dared
move him, not even in the University ambulance. Stoke Jones had been in bad straits indeed. According to the candystriper, 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 disability—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 without 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 remember 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 troubled 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 bothering 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 Garretsen 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 yourself,” 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.

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.