Hearts In Atlantis (42 page)

I guess there was a reason I was voted Class Clown in the '66 Gates Falls yearbook. I clicked my heels together and snapped off a pretty fair British-style salute, the kind with the palm turned mostly outward. “Yes
sir!
” I cried. There was nervous laughter from the gallery, a dirty guffaw from Ronnie, a grin from Skip. Skip gave Dearie a shrug, eyebrows lifted, hands up to the sky.
See what you get?
it said.
Act like an asshole and that's how people treat you
. Perfect eloquence is, I think, almost always mute.

Dearie looked at Skip, also mute. Then he looked at me. His face was expressionless, almost dead, but I wished I had for once forgone the smartass impulse. The
trouble is, for the born smartass, the impulse has nine times out of ten been acted upon before the brain can even engage first gear. I bet that in days of old when knights were bold, more than one court jester was hung upside down by his balls. You don't read about it in the
Morte D'Arthur
, but I think it must be true—laugh
this
one off, ya motley motherfucker. In any case, I knew I had just made an enemy.

Dearie spun in a nearly perfect about-face and went marching out of the lounge. Ronnie's mouth drew down in a grimace that made his ugly face even uglier; the leer of the villain in a stage melodrama. He made a jacking-off gesture at Dearie's stiff retreating back. Hugh Brennan giggled a little, but no one really laughed. Stoke Jones had disappeared, apparently disgusted with the lot of us.

Ronnie looked around, eyes bright. “So,” he said. “I'm still up for it. Nickel a point, who wants to play?”

“I will,” Skip said.

“I will, too,” I said, never once glancing in the direction of my geology book.

“Hearts?” Kirby McClendon asked. He was the tallest boy on the floor, maybe one of the tallest boys at school—six-seven at least, and possessed of a long, mournful bloodhound's face. “Sure. Good choice.”

“What about us?” Ashley squeaked.

“Yeah!” Hugh said. Talk about your gluttons for punishment.

“You're outclassed at this table,” Ronnie said, speaking with what was for him almost kindness. “Why don't you start up your own?”

Ashley and Hugh did just that. By four o'clock all of the lounge tables were occupied by quartets of
third-floor freshmen, ragtag scholarship boys who had to buy their texts in the Used section of the bookstore playing Hearts at a nickel a point. In our dorm, the mad season had begun.

Saturday night was another of my meals on the Holyoke dishline. In spite of my awakening interest in Carol Gerber, I tried to get Brad Witherspoon to switch with me—Brad had Sunday breakfast and he hated to get up early almost as badly as Skip did—but Brad refused. By then he was playing, too, and two bucks out of pocket. He was crazy to catch up. He just shook his head at me and led a spade out of his hand. “Let's go Bitch-huntin!” he cried, sounding eerily like Ronnie Malenfant. The most insidious thing about Ronnie was that weak minds found him worth imitating.

I left my seat at the original table, where I had spent the balance of the day, and my place was immediately taken by a young man named Kenny Auster. I was nearly nine dollars ahead (mostly because Ronnie had moved to another table so I wouldn't cut into his profits) and should have been feeling good, but I wasn't. It wasn't the money, it was the game. I wanted to keep on playing.

I walked disconsolately down the hall, checked the room, and asked Nate if he wanted to eat early with the kitchen crew. He simply shook his head and waved me on without looking up from his history
book. When people talk about student activism in the sixties, I have to remind myself that the majority of kids went through that mad season the way Nate did. They kept their heads down and their eyes on their history books while history happened all around them. Not that Nate was completely unaware, or completely dedicated to the study carrels on the sidelines, for that matter. You shall hear.

I walked toward the Palace on the Plains, zipping my jacket against the air, which had turned frosty. It was quarter past four. The Commons didn't officially open until five, so the paths which met in Bennett's Run were almost deserted. Stoke Jones was there, though, hunched over his crutches and brooding down at something on the path. I wasn't surprised to see him; if you had some sort of physical disability, you could chow an hour earlier than the rest of the students. As far as I remember, that was about the only special treatment the handicapped got. If you were physically fucked up, you got to eat with the kitchen help. That sparrow-track on the back of his coat was very clear and very black in the late light.

As I got closer to him I saw what he was looking down at—
Introduction to Sociology
. He had dropped it on the faded red bricks of Bennett's Walk and was trying to figure a way he could pick it up again without landing on his face. He kept poking at the book with the tip of one crutch. Stoke had two, maybe even three different pairs of crutches; these were the ones that fitted over his forearms in a series of ascending steel collars. I could hear him muttering “Rip-
rip
, rip-
rip
” under his breath as he prodded the book uselessly from place to place. When he was
plunging along on his crutches, “Rip-
rip
” had a determined sound. In this situation it sounded frustrated. At the time I knew Stoke (I will not call him Rip-Rip, although many Ronnie-imitators had taken to doing so by the end of the semester), I was fascinated by how many different nuances there could be to any given “Rip-
rip
.” That was before I found out the Navajos have forty different ways of saying their word for
cloud
. That was before I found out a lot of things, actually.

He heard me coming and snapped his head around so fast he almost fell over anyway. I reached out to steady him. He jerked back, seeming to swim in the old army duffle coat he was wearing.

“Get away from me!” As if he expected me to give him a shove. I raised my hands to show him I was harmless and bent over. “And get your hands off my book!”

This I didn't dignify, only picked up the text and stuffed it under his arm like a newspaper.

“I don't need your help!”

I was about to reply sharply, but I noticed again how white his cheeks were around the patches of red in their centers, and how his hair was damp with perspiration. Once again I could smell him—that overworked-transformer aroma—and realized I could also
hear
him: his breathing had a raspy, snotty sound. If Stoke Jones hadn't found out where the infirmary was yet, I had an idea he would before long.

“I didn't offer you a piggyback, for God's sake.” I tried to paste a smile on my puss and managed something or other. Hell, why shouldn't I smile? Didn't I have nine bucks in my pocket that I hadn't started the
day with? By the standards of Chamberlain Three, I was rich.

Jones looked at me with those dark eyes of his. His lips thinned, but after a moment he nodded. “Okay. Point taken. Thanks.” Then he resumed his breakneck pace up the hill. At first he was well ahead of me, but then the grade began to work on him and he slowed down. His snotty-sounding breathing got louder and quicker. I heard it clearly as I caught up to him.

“Why don't you take it easy?” I asked.

He gave me an impatient are-you-still-here glance. “Why don't you eat me?”

I pointed to his soash book. “That's sliding again.”

He stopped, adjusted it under his arm, then fixed himself on his crutches again, hunched like a bad-tempered heron, glaring at me through his black tumbles of hair. “Go on,” he said. “I don't need a minder.”

I shrugged. “I wasn't babysitting you, just wanted some company.”

“I don't.”

I started on my way, nettled in spite of my nine bucks. Us class clowns aren't wild about making friends—two or three are apt to do us for a lifetime—but we don't react very well to the bum's rush, either. Our goal is vast numbers of acquaintances whom we can leave laughing.

“Riley,” he said from behind me.

I turned. He'd decided to thaw a little after all, I thought. How wrong I was.

“There are gestures and gestures,” he said. “Putting shaving cream on the proctor's door is about one step above wiping snot on the seat of Little Susie's desk
because you can't think of another way to say you love her.”

“
I
didn't shaving-cream Dearie's door,” I said, more nettled than ever.

“Yeah, but you're playing cards with the asshole who did. Lending him credibility.” I think it was the first time I heard that word, which went on to have an incredibly sleazy career in the seventies and coke-soaked eighties. Mostly in politics. I think
credibility
died of shame around 1986, just as all those sixties war protesters and fearless battlers for racial equality were discovering junk bonds,
Martha Stewart Living
, and the StairMaster. “Why do you waste your time?”

That was direct enough to rattle me, and I said what seems to me now, looking back, an incredibly stupid thing. “I've got plenty of time to waste.”

Jones nodded as if he had expected no more and no better. He got going again and passed me at his accustomed plunge, head down, back humped, sweaty hair swinging, soash book clamped tight under his arm. I waited, expecting it to squirt free again. This time when it did, I'd leave him to poke it with his crutch.

But it didn't get away from him, and after I'd seen him reach the door of Holyoke, grapple with it, and finally lurch inside, I went on my own way. When I'd filled my tray I sat with Carol Gerber and the rest of the kids on the dishline crew. That was about as far from Stoke Jones as it was possible to get, which suited me fine. He also sat apart from the other handicapped kids, I remember. Stoke Jones sat apart from everybody. Clint Eastwood on crutches.

The regular diners began to show up at five o'clock. By quarter past, the dishline crew was in full swing and stayed that way for an hour. Lots of dorm kids went home for the weekend, but those who stayed all showed up on Saturday night, which was beans and franks and cornbread. Dessert was Jell-O. At the Palace on the Plains, dessert was almost always Jell-O. If Cook was feeling frisky, you might get Jell-O with little pieces of fruit suspended in it.

Carol was doing silverware, and just as the rush began to subside, she wheeled away from the pass-through, shaking with laughter. Her cheeks were bright crimson. What came rolling along the belt was Skip's work. He admitted it later that night, but I knew right away. Although he was in the College of Education and probably destined to teach history and coach baseball at good old Dexter High until he dropped dead of a booze-fueled heart attack at the age of fifty-nine or so, Skip by rights should have been in fine arts . . . probably would have been if he hadn't come from five generations of farmers who said
ayuh
and
coss 'twill
and
sh'd smile n kiss a pig
. He was only the second or third in his sprawling family (their religion, Skip once said, was Irish Alcoholic) to ever go to college. Clan Kirk could visualize a teacher in the family—barely—but not a painter or a sculptor. And at eighteen, Skip could see no further than they could. He only knew he didn't quite fit the hole he was trying to slide into, and it made him restless. It made him wander into rooms other than his own,
check the LPs, and criticize almost everyone's taste in music.

By 1969 he had a better idea of who and what he was. That was the year he constructed a
papier-mâché
Vietnamese family tableau that was set on fire at the end of a peace rally in front of the Fogler Library while The Youngbloods played “Get Together” from a borrowed set of amps and part-time hippies worked out to the beat like tribal warriors after a hunt. You see how jumbled it all is in my mind? It was Atlantis, that's all I know for sure, way down below the ocean. The paper family burned, the hippie protesters chanted “Napalm! Napalm! Scum from the skies!” as they danced, and after awhile the jocks and the frat boys began to throw stuff. Eggs at first. Then stones.

It was no
papier-mâché
family that sent Carol laughing and reeling away from the dishline that night in the fall of 1966; it was a horny hotdog man standing atop a Matterhorn of Holyoke Commons baked beans. A pipe-cleaner wiener jutted jauntily from the appropriate spot. In his hand was a little University of Maine pennant, on his head a scrap of blue hanky folded to look like a freshman beanie. Along the front of the tray, carefully spelled out in crumbled cornbread, was the message
EAT MORE MAINE BEANS!

A good deal of edible artwork came along the conveyor belt during my time on the Palace dishline, but I think that one was the all-time champ. Stoke Jones would no doubt have called it a waste of time, but I think in that case he would have been wrong. Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn't a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

I punched out at six-thirty, walked down the ramp behind the kitchen with one last bag of garbage, and dropped it into one of the four Dumpsters lined up behind the Commons like snubby steel boxcars.

When I turned around, I saw Carol Gerber and a couple of other kids standing by the corner of the building, smoking and watching the moon rise. The other two started away just as I walked over, pulling my Pall Malls out of my jacket pocket.

“Hey, Pete, eat more Maine beans,” Carol said, and laughed.

“Yeah.” I lit my cigarette. Then, without thinking about it much one way or the other, I said: “There's a couple of Bogart movies playing at Hauck tonight. They start at seven. We've got time to walk over. Want to go?”