Hearts In Atlantis (45 page)

“You are not!” I said, a little shocked. “Christ, Frankie, you're getting a college education!”

“I ain't, though, that's the thing.” The hall was gloomy and choked with shadows; it was raining outside. Still, I think I saw color come flushing into Frank's cheeks. I think he was ashamed. I think that was why he'd arranged to leave in the middle of a weekday, when the dorm was at its emptiest. “I ain't doin nothin but playin cards. Not very well, either. Also, I'm behind in all my classes.”

“You can't be
that
far behind! It's only October twenty-fifth!”

Frank nodded. “I know. But I ain't quick like some. Wasn't quick in high school, either. I got to set my feet and bore in, like with an ice-auger. I ain't been doin it, and if you ain't got a hole in the ice you can't catch any perch. I'm goin, Pete. Gonna quit before they fire me in January.”

He went on, plodding down the first of the three flights with his trunk held in front of him by the handles. His white tee-shirt floated in the gloom; when he passed a window running with rain his crewcut glimmered like gold.

As he reached the second-floor landing and his footfalls began to take on an echoey beat, I rushed to the stairwell and looked down. “Frankie! Hey, Frank!”

The footfalls stopped. In the shadows I could see his round face looking up at me and the dim held shape of his trunk.

“Frank, what about the draft? If you drop out of school the draft'll get you!”

A long pause, as if he was thinking how to answer. He never did, not with his mouth. He answered with his feet. Their echoey sound resumed. I never saw Frank again.

I remember standing by the stairwell, scared, thinking
That could happen to me . . . maybe
is
happening to me
, then pushing the thought away.

Seeing Frank with his trunk was a warning, I decided, and I would heed it. I would do better. I had been coasting, and it was time to turn on the jets again. But from down the hall I could hear Ronnie yelling gleefully that he was Bitch-hunting, that he meant to have that whore out of hiding, and I decided I would do better starting tonight. Tonight would be time enough to re-light those fabled jets. This afternoon I'd play my farewell game of Hearts. Or two. Or forty.

It was years before I isolated the key part of my final conversation with Frank Stuart. I had told him he couldn't be so far behind so soon, and he had replied that it happened because he wasn't a quick study. We were both wrong. It
was
possible to fall catastrophically behind in a short period of time, and it happened to the quick studies like me and Skip and Mark St. Pierre as well as to the plodders. In the backs of our minds we must have been holding onto the idea that we'd be able to loaf and then spurt, loaf and then spurt, which was the way most of us had gone through our dozy hometown high schools. But as Dearie Dearborn had pointed out, this wasn't high school.

I told you that of the thirty-two students who began the fall semester on our floor of Chamberlain (thirty-three, if you also count Dearie . . . but he was immune to the charms of Hearts), only fifteen remained to start the spring semester. That doesn't mean the nineteen who left were all dopes, though; not by any means. In fact, the smartest fellows on Chamberlain Three in the fall of 1966 were probably the ones who transferred before flunking out became a real possibility. Steve Ogg and Jack Frady, who had the room just up the hall from Nate and me, went to Chadbourne the first week in November, citing “distractions” on their joint application. When the Housing Officer asked what sort of distractions, they said it was the usual—all-night bull sessions, toothpaste ambushes in the head, abrasive relations with a couple of the guys. As an afterthought, both added they were probably playing cards in the
lounge a little too much. They'd heard Chad was a quieter environment, one of the campus's two or three “brain dorms.”

The Housing Officer's question had been anticipated, the answer as carefully rehearsed as an oral presentation in a speech class. Neither Steve nor Jack wanted the nearly endless Hearts game shut down; that might cause them all sorts of grief from people who believed folks should mind their own business. All they wanted was to get the fuck off Chamberlain Three while there was still time to salvage their scholarships.

The bad quizzes and unsuccessful little papers were nothing but unpleasant skirmishes. For Skip and me and too many of our cardplaying buddies, our second round of prelims was a full-fledged disaster. I got an A-minus on my in-class English theme and a D in European History, but flunked the Sociology multiple-choicer and the Geology multiple-choicer—soash by a little and geo by a lot. Skip flunked his Anthropology prelim, his Colonial History prelim, and the soash prelim. He got a C on the Calculus test (but the ice was getting pretty thin there, too, he told me) and a B on his in-class essay. We agreed that life would be much simpler if it were all a matter of in-class essays, writing assignments which necessarily took place far from the third-floor lounge. We were wishing for high school, in other words, without even knowing it.

“Okay, that's enough,” Skip said to me that Friday night. “I'm buckling down, Peter. I don't give a shit about being a college man or having a diploma to hang over the mantel in my rumpus room, but I'll be fucked if I want to go back to Dexter and hang around fuckin Bowlarama with the rest of the retards until Uncle Sam calls me.”

He was sitting on Nate's bed. Nate was across the way at the Palace on the Plains, chowing down on Friday-night fish. It was nice to know somebody on Chamberlain Three had an appetite. This was a conversation we couldn't have around Nate in any case; my country-mouse roommate thought he'd done pretty well on the latest round of prelims, all C's and B's. He wouldn't have
said
anything if he'd heard us talking, but would have looked at us in a way that said we lacked gumption. That, although it might not be our fault, we were morally weak.

“I'm with you,” I said, and then, from down the hall, came an agonized cry (“
Ohhhhhh . . . 
.
FUCK ME
!
”) that we recognized instantly: someone had just taken The Bitch. Our eyes met. I can't say about Skip, not for sure (even though he was my best friend in college), but I was still thinking that there was time . . . and why wouldn't I think that? For me there always had been.

Skip began to grin. I began to grin. Skip began to giggle. I began to giggle right along with him.

“What the fuck,” he said.

“Just tonight,” I said. “We'll go over to the library together tomorrow.”

“Hit the books.”

“All day. But right now  . . .”

He stood up. “Let's go Bitch-hunting.”

We did. And we weren't the only ones. That's no explanation, I know; it's only what happened.

At breakfast the next morning, as we worked side by side on the dishline, Carol said: “I'm hearing there's some kind of big card-game going on in your dorm. Is that true?”

“I guess it is,” I said.

She looked at me over her shoulder, giving me that smile—the one I always thought about when I thought about Carol. The one I think about still. “Hearts? Hunting The Bitch?”

“Hearts,” I agreed. “Hunting The Bitch.”

“I heard that some of the guys are getting in over their heads. Getting in grades trouble.”

“I guess that might be,” I said. Nothing was coming down the conveyor belt, not so much as a single tray. There's never a rush when you need one, I've noticed.

“How are
your
grades?” she asked. “I know it's none of my business, but I want—”

“Information, yeah, I know. I'm doing okay. Besides, I'm getting out of the game.”

She just gave me the smile, and sure I still think about it sometimes; you would, too. The dimples, the slightly curved lower lip that knew so many nice things about kissing, the dancing blue eyes. Those were days when no girl saw further into a boys' dorm than the lobby . . . and vice-versa, of course. Still, I have an idea that for a little while in October and November of 1966 Carol saw plenty, more than I did. But of course, she wasn't insane—at least not then. The war in Vietnam became
her
insanity. Mine as
well. And Skip's. And Nate's. Hearts were nothing, really, only a few tremors in the earth, the kind that flap the screen door on its hinges and rattle the glasses on the shelves. The killer earthquake, the apocalyptic continent-drowner, was still on its way.

Barry Margeaux and Brad Witherspoon both got the Derry
News
delivered to their rooms, and the two copies had usually made the rounds of the third floor by the end of the day—we'd find the remnants in the lounge when we took our seats for the evening session of Hearts, the pages torn and out of order, the crossword filled in by three or four different hands. There would be mustaches inked on the photodot faces of Lyndon Johnson and Ramsey Clark and Martin Luther King (someone, I never found out who, would invariably put large smoking horns on Vice President Humphrey and print
HUBERT THE DEVIL
underneath in tiny anal capital letters). The
News
was hawkish on the war, putting the most positive spin on each day's military events and relegating any protest news to the depths . . . usually beneath the Community Calendar.

Yet more and more we found ourselves discussing not movies or dates or classes as the cards were shuffled and dealt; more and more it was Vietnam. No matter how good the news or how high the Cong body count, there always seemed to be at least one picture of agonized U.S. soldiers after an ambush or crying Vietnamese children watching their village go
up in smoke. There was always some unsettling detail tucked away near the bottom of what Skip called “the daily kill-column,” like the thing about the kids who got wasted when we hit the Cong PT boats in the Delta.

Nate, of course, didn't play cards. He wouldn't debate the pros and cons of the war, either—I doubt if he knew, any more than I did, that Vietnam had once been under the French, or what had happened to the
monsieurs
unlucky enough to have been in the fortress city of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, let alone who might've decided it was time for President Diem to go to that big rice-paddy in the sky so Nguyen Cao Ky and the generals could take over. Nate only knew that he had no quarrel with those Congs, that they weren't going to be in Mars Hill or Presque Isle in the immediate future.

“Haven't you ever heard about the domino theory, shitbird?” a banty little freshman named Nicholas Prouty asked Nate one afternoon. My roommate rarely came down to the third-floor lounge now, preferring the quieter one on Two, but that day he had dropped in for a few moments.

Nate looked at Nick Prouty, a lobsterman's son who had become a devout disciple of Ronnie Malenfant, and sighed. “When the dominoes come out, I leave the room. I think it's a boring game. That's
my
domino theory.” He shot me a glance. I got my eyes away as fast as I could, but not quite in time to avoid the message: what in hell's
wrong
with you? Then he left, scuffing back down to Room 302 in his fuzzy slippers to do some more studying—to resume his charted course from pre-dent to dent, in other words.

“Riley, your roommate's fucked, you know that?” Ronnie said. He had a cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth. Now he scratched a match one-handed, a specialty of his—college guys too ugly and abrasive to get girls have all sorts of specialties—and lit up.

No, man
, I thought,
Nate's doing fine. We're the ones who are fucked up
. For a second I felt real despair. In that second I realized I was in a terrible jam and had no idea at all of how to extricate myself. I was aware of Skip looking at me, and it occurred to me that if I snatched up the cards, sprayed them in Ronnie's face, and walked out of the room, Skip would join me. Likely with relief. Then the feeling passed. It passed as rapidly as it had come.

“Nate's okay,” I said. “He's got some funny ideas, that's all.”

“Some funny
communist
ideas is what he's got,” Hugh Brennan said. His older brother was in the Navy and was most recently heard from in the South China Sea. Hugh had no use for peaceniks. As a Goldwater Republican I should have felt the same, but Nate had started getting to me. I had all sorts of canned knowledge, but no real arguments in favor of the war . . . nor time to work any up. I was too busy to study my sociology, let alone to bone up on U.S. foreign policy.

I'm pretty sure that was the night I almost called Annmarie Soucie. The phone-booth across from the lounge was empty, I had a pocketful of change from my latest victory in the Hearts wars, and I suddenly decided The Time Had Come. I dialed her number from memory (although I had to think for a moment about the last four digits—were they 8146 or 8164?) and plugged in three quarters when the operator
asked for them. I let the phone ring a single time, then racked the receiver with a bang and retrieved my quarters when I heard them rattle into the return.

A day or two later—shortly before Halloween—Nate got an album by a guy I'd only vaguely heard of: Phil Ochs. A folkie, but not the blunk-blunk banjo kind who used to show up on
Hootenanny
. The album cover, which showed a rumpled troubadour sitting on a curb in New York City, went oddly with the covers of Nate's other records—Dean Martin looking tipsy in a tux, Mitch Miller with his sing-along smile, Diane Renay in her middy blouse and perky sailor cap. The Ochs record was called
I Ain't Marchin' Anymore
, and Nate played it a lot as the days shortened and turned chilly. I took to playing it myself, and Nate didn't seem to mind.