Hearts In Atlantis (40 page)

Saturday-morning breakfast was one of my meals to work the dishline in Holyoke. It was a good meal to have because the Commons was never busy on Saturday mornings. Carol Gerber, the silverware girl, stood at the head of the conveyor belt. I was next; my job was to grab the plates as the trays came down the belt, rinse them, and stack them on the trolley beside me. If traffic on the conveyor belt was busy, as it was at most weekday evening meals, I just stacked the plates up, shit and all, and rinsed them later on when things slowed down. Next in line to me was the glassboy or -girl, who grabbed the glasses and cups and popped them into special dishwasher grids. Holyoke wasn't a bad place to work. Every now and then some wit of the Ronnie Malenfant sensibility would return
an uneaten kielbasa or breakfast sausage with a Trojan fitted over the end or the oatmeal would come back with
I GO TO FUCK U
written in carefully torn-up strips of napkin (once, pasted on the surface of a soup-bowl filled with congealing meatloaf gravy, was the message
HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER IN A COW COLLEGE
), and you wouldn't believe what pigs some kids can be—plates filled with ketchup, milk-glasses filled with mashed potatoes, splattered vegetables—but it really wasn't such a bad job, especially on Saturday mornings.

I looked out once past Carol (who was looking extraordinarily pretty for so early in the morning) and saw Stoke Jones. His back was to the pass-through window, but you couldn't miss the crutches leaning next to his place, or that peculiar shape drawn on the back of his jacket. Skip had been right; it looked like a sparrow-track (it was almost a year later when I first heard some guy on TV refer to it as “the track of the great American chicken”).

“Do you know what that is?” I asked Carol, pointing.

She looked for a long time, then shook her head. “Nope. Must be some kind of in-joke.”

“Stoke doesn't joke.”

“Oh my, you're a poet and you don't know it.”

“Quit it, Carol, you're killing me.”

When our shift was over, I walked her back to her dorm (telling myself I was just being nice, that walking Carol Gerber back to Franklin Hall in no way made me unfaithful to Annmarie Soucie back in Gates Falls), then ambled toward Chamberlain, wondering who might know what that sparrow-track
was. It occurs to me only at this late date that I never thought of asking Jones himself. And when I reached my floor, I saw something that changed the direction of my thoughts entirely. Since I'd gone out at six-thirty
A.M.
with one eye open to take my place behind Carol on the dishline, someone had shaving-creamed David Dearborn's door—all around the sides, on the doorknob, and with an extra-thick line along the bottom. In this lower deposit was a bare foot-track that made me smile. Dearie opens his door, clad only in a towel, on his way to the shower, and
poosh!
, howaya.

Still smiling, I went into 302. Nate was writing at his desk. Observing the way he kept one arm curled protectively around his notebook, I deduced it was that day's letter to Cindy.

“Someone shaving-creamed Dearie's door,” I said, crossing to my shelves and grabbing my geology book. My plan was to head down to the third-floor lounge and do a little studying for the quiz on Tuesday.

Nate tried to look serious and disapproving, but couldn't help smiling himself. He was always trying for self-righteousness in those days and always falling just a little bit short. I suppose he's gotten better at it over the years, more's the pity.

“You should have heard him yell,” Nate said. He snorted laughter, then put one small fist up to his mouth to stifle any further impropriety. “And
swear
—for a minute there he was in Skip's league.”

“When it comes to swearing, I don't think anyone's in Skip's league.”

Nate was looking at me with a worried furrow between his eyes. “You didn't do it, did you? Because I know you were up early—”

“If I was going to decorate Dearie's door, I would have used toilet paper,” I said. “All my shaving cream goes on my own face. I'm a low-budget student, just like you. Remember?”

The worry-furrow smoothed out and Nate once more looked like a choirboy. For the first time I realized he was sitting there in nothing but his Jockey shorts and that stupid blue beanie. “That's good,” he said, “because David was yelling that he'd get whoever did it and see that the guy was put on disciplinary pro.”

“D.P. for creaming his fucking door? I doubt it, Nate.”

“It's weird but I think he meant it,” Nate said. “Sometimes David Dearborn reminds me of that movie about the crazy ship-captain. Humphrey Bogart was in it. Do you know the one I mean?”

“Yeah,
The Caine Mutiny
.”

“Uh-huh. And David . . . well, let's just say that for him, handing out D.P. is what being floor-proctor is all about.”

In the University's code of rules and behavior, expulsion was the big gun, reserved for offenses like theft, assault, and possession/use of drugs. Disciplinary probation was a step below that, punishment for such offenses as having a girl in your room (having one in your room after Women's Curfew could tilt the penalty toward expulsion, hard as that is to believe now), having alcohol in your room, cheating on exams, plagiarism. Any of these latter offenses could theoretically result in expulsion, and in cheating cases often did (especially if the cases involved mid-term or final exams), but mostly it was disciplinary pro, which you
carried with you for an entire semester. I didn't like to believe a dorm proctor would try to get a D.P. from Dean of Men Garretsen for a few harmless bursts of shaving cream . . . but this was Dearie, a prig who had so far insisted on weekly room inspections and carried a little stool with him so he could check the top shelves of the thirty-two closets which he seemed to feel were a part of his responsibility. This was probably an idea he got in ROTC, a program he loved as fervently as Nate loved Cindy and Rinty. Also he had gigged kids—this practice was still an official part of school policy, although it had been largely forgotten outside the ROTC program—who didn't keep up with their housework. Enough gigs and you landed on D.P. You could in theory flunk out of school, lose your deferment, get drafted, and wind up dodging bullets in Vietnam because you repeatedly forgot to empty the trash or sweep under the bed.

David Dearborn was a loan-and-scholarship boy himself, and his proctor's job was—also in theory—no different from my dishline job. That wasn't Dearie's theory, though. Dearie considered himself A Cut Above the Rest, one of the few, the proud, the brave. His family came from the coast, you see; from Falmouth, where in 1966 there were still over fifty Blue Laws inherited from the Puritans on the books. Something had happened to his family, had Brought Them Low like a family in an old stage melodrama, but Dearie still dressed like a Falmouth Prep School graduate, wearing a blazer to classes and a suit on Sundays. No one could have been more different from Ronnie Malenfant, with his gutter mouth, his prejudices, and his brilliance with numbers. When they passed in the hall you could almost see Dearie
shrinking from Ronnie, whose red hair kinked over a face that seemed to run away from itself, bulging brow to almost nonexistent chin. In between were Ronnie's perpetually gum-caked eyes and perpetually dripping nose . . . not to mention lips so red he always seemed to be wearing something cheap and garish from the five-and-dime.

Dearie didn't like Ronnie, but Ronnie didn't have to face this disapproval alone; Dearie didn't seem to like
any
of the boys he was proctoring. We didn't like him, either, and Ronnie outright hated him. Skip Kirk's dislike was edged with contempt. He was in ROTC with Dearie (at least until November, when Skip dropped the course), and he said Dearie was bad at everything except kissing ass. Skip, who had narrowly missed being named to the All-State baseball team as a high-school senior, had one specific bitch about our floor-proctor—Dearie, Skip said, didn't put out. To Skip it was the worst sin. You had to put out. Even if you were just slopping the hogs, you had to fuckin put out.

I disliked Dearie as much as anyone. I can put up with a great many human failings, but I loathe a prig. Yet I harbored a bit of sympathy for him, as well. He had no sense of humor, for one thing, and I believe that is as much a crippling defect as whatever had gone wrong with Stoke Jones's bottom half. For another, I don't think Dearie liked himself much.

“D.P. won't be an issue if he never finds the culprit,” I told Nate. “Even if he does, I doubt like hell if Dean Garretsen would agree to slap it on someone for creaming the proctor's door.” Still, Dearie could be persuasive. He might have been Brought Low, but he had that
something which said he was still upper crust. That was, of course, just one more thing the rest of us had to dislike about him. “Trotboy” was what Skip called him, because he wouldn't really run laps on the football field during ROTC workouts, but only go at a rapid jog.

“Just as long as you didn't do it,” Nate said, and I almost laughed. Nate Hoppenstand sitting there in his underpants and beanie, his child's chest narrow, hairless, and dusted with freckles. Nate looking at me earnestly over his prominent case of slender ribs. Nate playing Dad.

Lowering his voice, he said: “Do you think Skip did it?”

“No. If I had to guess who on this floor would think shave-creaming the proctor's door was a real hoot, I'd say—”

“Ronnie Malenfant.”

“Right.” I pointed my finger at Nate like a gun and winked.

“I saw you walking back to Franklin with the blond girl,” he said. “Carol. She's pretty.”

“Just keeping her company,” I said.

Nate sat there in his underpants and his beanie, smiling as if he knew better. Perhaps he did. I liked her, all right, although I didn't know much about her—only that she was from Connecticut. Not many work-study kids came from out of state.

I headed down the hall to the lounge, my geology book under my arm. Ronnie was there, wearing his beanie with the front pinned up so it looked sort of like a newspaper reporter's fedora. Sitting with him were two other guys from our floor, Hugh Brennan and Ashley Rice. None of them looked as if they were
having the world's most exciting Saturday morning, but when Ronnie saw me, his eyes brightened.

“Pete Riley!” he said. “Just the man I was looking for! Do you know how to play Hearts?”

“Yes. Lucky for me, I also know how to study.” I raised my geology book, already thinking that I'd probably end up in the second-floor lounge . . . if, that was, I really meant to get anything done. Because Ronnie never shut up. Was apparently
incapable
of shutting up. Ronnie Malenfant was the original motor-mouth.

“Come on, just one game to a hundred,” he wheedled. “We're playing nickel a point, and these two guys play Hearts like old people fuck.”

Hugh and Ashley grinned foolishly, as if they had just been complimented. Ronnie's insults were so raw and out front, so bulging with vitriol, that most guys took them as jokes, perhaps even as veiled compliments. They were neither. Ronnie meant every unkind word he ever said.

“Ronnie, I got a quiz Tuesday, and I don't really understand this geosyncline stuff.”

“Shit on the geosyncline,” Ronnie said, and Ashley Rice tittered. “You've still got the rest of today, all of tomorrow, and all of Monday for the geo-fuckin-syncline.”

“I have classes Monday and tomorrow Skip and I were going to go up to Oldtown. They're having an open hoot at the Methodist church and we—”

“Stop it, quit it, spare my achin scrote and don't talk to me about that folkie shit. Michael can row his fuckin boat right up my ass, okay? Listen, Pete—”

“Ronnie, I really—”

“You two dimbulbs stay right the fuck there.” Ronnie gave Ashley and Hugh a baleful look. Neither argued with him about it. They were probably eighteen like the rest of us, but anyone who's ever been to college will tell you that some very young eighteen-year-olds show up each September, especially in the rural states. It was the young ones with whom Ronnie succeeded. They were in awe of him. He borrowed their meal tickets, snapped them with towels in the shower, accused them of supporting the goals of the Reverend Martin Luther Coon (who, Ronnie would tell you, drove to protest rallies in his Jiguar), borrowed their money, and would respond to any request for a match with “My ass and your face, monkeymeat.” They loved Ronnie in spite of it all . . . 
because
of it all. They loved him because he was just so . . . 
college
.

Ronnie grabbed me around the neck and tried to yank me out into the hall so he could talk to me in private. I, not at all in awe of him and a bit repelled by the jungle aroma drifting out of his armpits, clamped down on his fingers, bent them back, and removed his hand. “Don't do that, Ronnie.”

“Ow, yow, ow, okay, okay, okay! Just come out here a minute, wouldja? And quit that, it hurts! Besides, it's the hand I jerk off with! Jesus! Fuck!”

I let go of his hand (wondering if he'd washed it since the last time he jerked off) but let him pull me out into the hall. Here he took hold of me by the arms, speaking to me earnestly, his gummy eyes wide.

“These guys can't play,” he said in a breathless, confidential whisper. “They're a couple of afterbirths, Petesky, but they love the
game. Fuckin love the game, you know? I don't love it, but unlike them, I can
play
it. Also I'm broke and there's a couple of Bogart movies tonight at Hauck. If I can squeeze em for two bucks—”

“Bogart movies? Is one of them
The Caine Mutiny
?”

“That's right,
The Caine Mutiny
and
The Maltese Falcon
, Bogie at his fuckin finest, here's lookin at
you
, shweetheart. If I can squeeze those two afterbirths for two bucks, I can go. Squeeze em for four, I call some scagola from Franklin, take her with me, maybe get a blowjob later.” That was Ronnie, always the gosh-darned romantic. I had an image of him as Sam Spade in
The Maltese Falcon
, telling Mary Astor to drop and gobble. The idea was enough to make my sinuses swell shut.