Hearts In Atlantis

3

I recall quite clearly when the Hearts epidemic started: the first weekend in October. I remember because the semester’s initial round of prelims had just ended and I had survived. Survival was an actual issue for most of the boys on Chamberlain Three; we were at college thanks to a variety of scholarships, loans (most, including my own, courtesy of the National Education Defense Act), and work-study jobs. It was like riding in a Soapbox Derby car which had been put together with paste instead of nails, and while our arrangements var-ied—mostly according to how crafty we were when it came to filling out forms and how diligently our high-school guidance counselors had worked for us—there was one hard fact of life. It was summed up by a sampler which hung in the third-floor lounge, where our marathon Hearts tournaments were played. Tony DeLucca’s mother made it, told him to hang it someplace where he’d see it every day, and sent him off to college with it. As the fall of 1966 wore out and winter replaced it, Mrs. DeLucca’s sampler seemed to glare bigger and brighter with each passing hand, each fall of The Bitch, each night I rolled into bed with my textbooks unopened, my notes unstudied, my papers unwritten. Once or twice I even dreamed about it:

2.5.

That’s what the sampler said, in big red crocheted numerals. Mrs. DeLucca understood what it meant, and so did we. If you lived in one of the ordinary dorms—Jacklin or Dunn or Pease or Chadbourne—you could keep your place in the Class of 1970 with a 1.6 average . . . if, that was, Daddy and Mummy continued to pay the bills. This was the state land-grant college, remember; we are not talking about Harvard or Wellesley. For students trying to stagger through on scholarship-and-loan packages, however, 2.5 was the line drawn in the dust. Score below a 2.5—drop from a C average to a C-minus, in other words—and your little soapbox racer was almost certain to fall apart. “Be in touch, baby, seeya,” as Skip Kirk used to say.

I did okay on that first round of prelims, especially for a boy who was almost ill with homesickness (I had never been away from home in my life except for a single week at basketball camp, from which I returned with a sprained wrist and an odd fungal growth between my toes and under my testes). I was carrying five subjects and got B’s in everything except Freshman English. On that one I got an A. My instructor, who would later divorce his wife and wind up busking in Sproul Plaza on the Berkeley campus, wrote “Your example of ono-matopoeia is actually quite brilliant” beside one of my answers. I sent that test back home to my mother and father. My mother returned a postcard with one word—“Bravo!”—scrawled fervently across the back. Remembering that causes an unexpected pang, something actually close to physical pain. It was, I suppose, the last time I dragged home a school paper with a gold star pasted in the corner.

After that first round of prelims I complacently calculated my GPA-in-progress and came out with a 3.3. It never got near that again, and by late December I realized that the choices had become very simple: quit playing cards and maybe survive to the next semes-ter with my fragile financial-aid package intact, or continue Bitch-hunting beneath Mrs. DeLucca’s sampler in the third-floor lounge until Christmas and then head back to Gates Falls for good.

I’d be able to get a job at Gates Falls Mills and Weaving; my father had been there for twenty years, right up until the accident that cost him his sight, and he’d get me in. My mother would hate it, but she wouldn’t stand in the way if I told her it was what I wanted. At the end of the day she was always the realist of the family. Even when her hopes and disappointments ran her half-mad, she was a realist. For awhile she’d be grief-stricken at my failure to make a go of it at the University, and for awhile I’d be guilt-ridden, but we’d both get over it. I wanted to be a writer, after all, not a damned English teacher, and I had an idea that only pompous writers needed college to do what they did.

Yet I didn’t want to flunk out, either. It seemed the wrong way to start my life as a grownup. It smelled like failure, and all my Whit-manesque ruminations about how a writer should do his work among the people smelled like a rationalization for that failure. And still the third-floor lounge called to me—the snap of the cards, some-one asking if this hand was pass left or pass right, someone else ask-ing who had The Douche (a hand of Hearts begins by playing the two of clubs, a card known to us third-floor addicts as The Douche). I had dreams in which Ronnie Malenfant, the first true bred-in-the-bone asshole I had met since escaping the bullies of junior high, began to play spades one after another, screaming “Time to go Bitch-huntin! We chasin The Cunt!” in his high-pitched, reedy voice. We almost always see where our best interest lies, I think, but sometimes what we see means very little compared to what we feel. Tough but true.

4

My roommate didn’t play Hearts. My roommate didn’t have any use for the undeclared war in Vietnam. My roommate wrote home to his girlfriend, a senior at Wisdom Consolidated High School, every day. Put a glass of water next to Nate Hoppenstand and it was the water that looked vivacious.

He and I lived in Room 302, next to the stairwell, across from the Proctor’s Suite (lair of the hideous Dearie) and all the way down the hall from the lounge with its card-tables, stand-up ashtrays, and its view of the Palace on the Plains. Our pairing suggested—to me, at least—that everyone’s most macabre musings about the University Housing Office might well be true. On the questionnaire which I had returned to Housing in April of ’66 (when my biggest concern was deciding where I should take Annmarie Soucie to eat after the Senior Prom), I had said that I was A. a smoker; B. a Young Republi-can; C. an aspiring folk guitarist; D. a night owl. In its dubious wis-dom, the Housing Office paired me with Nate, a non-smoking dentist-in-progress whose folks were Aroostook County Democrats (the fact that Lyndon Johnson was a Democrat made Nate feel no better about U.S. soldiers running around South Vietnam). I had a poster of Humphrey Bogart above my bed; above his, Nate hung photos of his dog and his girl. The girl was a sallow creature dressed in a Wisdom High majorette’s uniform and clutching a baton like a cudgel. She was Cindy. The dog was Rinty. Both the girl and the dog were sporting identical grins. It was fucking surreal.

Nate’s worst failing, as far as Skip and I were concerned, was the collection of record albums he kept carefully shelved in alphabetical order below Cindy and Rinty and just above his nifty little RCA Swingline phonograph. He had three Mitch Miller records (Sing Along with Mitch, More Sing Along with Mitch, Mitch and the Gang Sing John Henry and Other American Folk Favorites), Meet Trini Lopez, a Dean Martin LP (Dino Swings Vegas!), a Gerry and the Pacemakers LP, the first Dave Clark Five album—perhaps the noisiest bad rock record ever made—and many others of the same ilk. I can’t remember them all. It’s probably a good thing.

“Nate, no,” Skip said one evening. “Oh please, no.” This was shortly before the onset of Hearts mania—perhaps only days.

“Oh please no what?” Nate asked without looking up from what he was doing at his desk. He seemed to spend all his waking hours either in class or at that desk. Sometimes I would catch him picking his nose and surreptitiously wiping the gleanings (after careful and thorough inspections) under the middle drawer. It was his only vice . . . if you excepted his horrible taste in music, that was.

Skip had been inspecting Nate’s albums, something he did with absolutely no self-consciousness in every kid’s room he visited. Now he was holding one up. He had the look of a doctor studying a bad X-ray . . . one that shows a juicy (and almost certainly malignant) tumor. He was standing between Nate’s bed and mine, wearing his high-school letter jacket and a Dexter High School baseball cap. Never in college and rarely since have I met a man I thought so American Pie handsome as the Captain. Skip seemed unaware of his good looks, but he couldn’t have been, not entirely, or he wouldn’t have gotten laid as often as he did. It was a time when almost any-body could get laid, of course, but even by the standards of the time Skip was busy. None of that had started in the fall of ’66, though; in the fall of ’66 Skip’s heart, like mine, would belong to Hearts.

“This is bad, little buddy,” Skip said in a gentle, chiding voice. “Sorry, but this bites.”

I was sitting at my own desk, smoking a Pall Mall and looking for my meal ticket. I was always losing the fucking thing.

“What bites? Why are you looking at my records?” Nate’s botany text was open in front of him. He was drawing a leaf on a piece of graph paper. His blue freshman beanie was cocked back on his head. Nate Hoppenstand was, I believe, the only member of the freshman class who actually wore that stupid blue dishrag until Maine’s hap-less football team finally scored a touchdown . . . a week or so before Thanksgiving, that was.

Skip went on studying the record album. “This sucks the rigid cock of Satan. It really does.”

“I hate it when you talk that way!” Nate exclaimed, but still too stubborn to actually look up. Skip knew Nate hated him to talk that way, which was why he did it. “What are you talking about, any-way?”

“I’m sorry my language offends you, but I don’t withdraw the comment. I can’t. ’Cause this is bad. It hurts me, little buddy. It fuckin hurts me.”

“What?” Nate finally looked up, irritated away from his leaf, which was marked as carefully as a map in a Rand McNally road atlas. “WHAT?”

“This.”

On the album cover Skip was holding, a girl with a perky face and perky little breasts poking out the front of a middy blouse appeared to be dancing on the deck of a PT boat. One hand was raised, palm out, in a perky little wave. Cocked on her head was a perky little sailor’s hat.

“I bet you’re the only college student in America that brought Diane Renay Sings Navy Blue to school with him,” Skip said. “It’s wrong, Nate. This belongs back in your attic, along with the wiener pants I bet you wore to all the high-school pep rallies and church socials.”

If wiener pants meant polyester Sansabelt slacks with that weird and purposeless little buckle in the back, I suspected Nate had brought most of his collection with him . . . was, in fact, wearing a pair at that very moment. I said nothing, though. I picked up a framed picture of my own girlfriend and spied my meal ticket behind it. I grabbed it and stuffed it in the pocket of my Levi’s.

“That’s a good record,” Nate said with dignity. “That’s a very good record. It . . . swings.”

“Swings, does it?” Skip asked, tossing it back onto Nate’s bed. (He refused to reshelve Nate’s records because he knew it drove Nate bugfuck.) “ ‘My steady boy said ship ahoy and joined the Nay-yay-vee’? If that fits your definition of good, remind me never to let you give me a fuckin physical.”

“I’m going to be a dentist, not a doctor,” Nate said, clipping off each word. Cords were beginning to stand out on his neck. So far as I know, Skip Kirk was the only person in Chamberlain Hall, maybe on the whole campus, who could get under my roomie’s thick Yankee skin. “I’m in pre-dent, do you know what the dent in pre-dent means? It means teeth, Skip! It means—”

“Remind me to never let you fill one of my fuckin cavities.”

“Why do you have to say that all the time?”

“What?” Skip asked, knowing but wanting Nate to say it. Nate eventually would, and his face always turned bright red when he finally did. This fascinated Skip. Everything about Nate fascinated Skip; the Captain once told me he was pretty sure Nate was an alien, beamed down from the planet Good Boy.

“Fuck,” Nate Hoppenstand said, and immediately his cheeks became rosy. In a few moments he looked like a Dickens character, some earnest young man sketched by Boz. “That.”

“I had bad role models,” Skip said. “I dread to think about your future, Nate. What if Paul Anka makes a fuckin comeback?”

“You’ve never heard this record,” Nate said, snatching up Diane Renay Sings Navy Blue from the bed and putting it back between Mitch Miller and Stella Stevens Is in Love!

“Never fuckin want to, either,” Skip said. “Come on, Pete, let’s eat. I’m fuckin starving.”

I picked up my geology text—there was a quiz coming up the fol-lowing Tuesday. Skip took it out of my hand and slung it back onto the desk, knocking over the picture of my girlfriend, who wouldn’t fuck but who would give a slow, excruciatingly pleasant handjob when she was in the mood. Nobody gives a handjob like a Catholic girl. I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things in the course of my life, but never about that.

“What did you do that for?” I asked.

“You don’t read at the fuckin table,” he said. “Not even when you’re eating Commons slop. What kind of barn were you born in?”

“Actually, Skip, I was born into a family where people do read at the table. I know it’s hard for you to believe there could be any way of doing things except for the Kirk way of doing them, but there is.”

He looked unexpectedly grave. He took me by the forearms, looked into my eyes, and said, “At least don’t study when you eat. Okay?”

“Okay.” Mentally reserving the right to study whenever I fucking well pleased, or felt I needed to.

“Get into all that ram-drive behavior and you’ll get ulcers. Ulcers are what killed my old man. He just couldn’t stop ramming and driving.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry, it was a long time ago. Now come on. Before all the fucking tuna surprise is gone. Coming, Natebo?”

“I have to finish this leaf.”

“Fuck the leaf.”

If anyone else had said this to him, Nate would have looked at him as at something uncovered beneath a rotted log, and turned silently back to his work. In this case, Nate considered for a moment, then got up and took his jacket carefully off the back of the door, where he always hung it. He put it on. He adjusted the beanie on his head. Not even Skip dared to say much about Nate’s stubborn refusal to stop wearing his freshman beanie. (When I asked Skip where his own had disappeared to—this was our third day at UM, and the day after I met him—he said, “Wiped my ass with it and threw the fucker up a tree.” This was probably not the truth, but I never completely ruled it out, either.)

We clattered down the three flights of stairs and went out into the mild October dusk. From all three dorms students were headed toward Holyoke Commons, where I worked nine meals a week. I was a dishline boy, recently promoted from silverware boy; if I kept my nose clean, I’d be a stackboy before the Thanksgiving break. Cham-berlain, King, and Franklin Halls were on high ground. So was the Palace on the Plains. To reach it, students took asphalt paths that dipped into a hollow like a long trough, then joined into one broad brick way and climbed again. Holyoke was the biggest of the four buildings, shining in the gloom like a cruise-ship on the ocean.

The dip where the asphalt paths met was known as Bennett’s Run—if I ever knew why I have long since forgotten. Boys from King and Chamberlain came along two of these paths, girls from Franklin along the other. Where the paths joined, boys and girls did likewise, talking and laughing and exchanging looks both frank and shy. From there they moved together up the wide brick path known as Bennett’s Walk to the Commons building.

Coming the other way, cutting back through the crowd with his head down and the usual closed-off expression on his pale, harsh face, was Stokely Jones III. He was tall, but you hardly realized it because he was always hunched over his crutches. His hair, a perfect glossy black with not so much as a single observable strand of anything lighter, spilled over his forehead in spikes, hid his ears, inked a few stray strands diagonally across his pale cheeks.

This was the heyday of the Beatle haircut, which for most boys consisted of no more than combing carefully down instead of care-fully up, thus hiding the forehead (and a good crop of pimples, more often than not). Stoke Jones was capped off by nothing so prissy. His medium-length hair just went where it wanted to. His back was hunched in a way that would soon be permanent, if it wasn’t already. His eyes were usually cast down, seeming to trace the arcs of his crutches. If those eyes happened to rise and meet your own, you were apt to be startled by their wild intelligence. He was a New England Heathcliff, only wasted away to a bare scrawn from the hips down. His legs, which were usually encased in huge metal braces when he went to class, could move, but only feebly, like the tentacles of a dying squid. His upper body was brawny by comparison. The combi-nation was bizarre. Stoke Jones was a Charles Atlas ad in which BEFORE and AFTER had somehow been melted into the same body. He ate every meal as soon as Holyoke opened, and even three weeks into our first semester we all knew he did it not because he was one of the handicaps but because he wanted, like Greta Garbo, to be alone.

“Fuck him,” Ronnie Malenfant said while we were on our way to breakfast one day—he’d just said hello to Jones and Jones had simply crutched his way past without even a nod. He’d been muttering under his breath, though; we all heard it. “Crippled-up hopping ass-hole.” That was Ronnie, always sympathetic. I guess it was growing up amid the puke-in-the-corner beerjoints on lower Lisbon Street in Lewiston that gave him his grace and charm and joie de vivre.

“Stoke, what’s up?” Skip asked on this particular evening as Jones plunged toward us on his crutches. Stoke went everywhere at that same controlled plunge, always with his Bluto Blutarsky upper half leaning forward so that he looked like a ship’s figurehead, Stoke con-tinually saying fuck you to whatever it was that had creamed his lower half, Stoke continually giving it the finger, Stoke looking at you with his smart wild eyes and saying fuck you too, stick it up your ass, sit on it and spin, eat me raw through a Flavr Straw.

He didn’t respond but did raise his head for a moment and locked eyes with Skip. Then he dropped his chin and hurried on past us. Sweat was running out of his crazed hair and down the sides of his face. Under his breath he was muttering “Rip-rip, rip-rip, rip-rip,” as if keeping time . . . or articulating what he’d like to do to the whole walking bunch of us . . . or maybe both. You could smell him: the sour acrid tang of sweat, there was always that because he wouldn’t go slow, it seemed to offend him to go slow, but there was something else, too. The sweat was pungent but not offensive. The undersmell was a lot less pleasant. I ran track in high school (forced as a college freshman to choose between Pall Malls and the four-forty, I chose the coffin-nails) and had smelled that particular combination before, usually when some kid with the flu or the grippe or a strep throat forced himself to run anyway. The only smell like it is an electric-train transformer that’s been run too hard for too long.

Then he was past us. Stoke Jones, soon to be dubbed Rip-Rip by Ronnie Malenfant, free of his huge leg-braces for the evening and on his way back to the dorm.

“Hey, what’s that?” Nate asked. He had stopped and was looking over his shoulder. Skip and I also stopped and looked back. I started to ask Nate what he meant, then saw. Jones was wearing a jeans jacket. On the back of it, drawn in what looked like black Magic Marker and just visible in the declining light of that early autumn evening, was a shape in a circle.

“Dunno,” Skip said. “It looks like a sparrow-track.”

The boy on the crutches merged into the crowds on their way to another Commons dinner on another Thursday night in another October. Most of the boys were clean-shaven; most of the girls wore skirts and Ship ’n’ Shore blouses with Peter Pan collars. The moon was rising almost full, casting orange light on them. The full-blown Age of Freaks was still two years away, and none of the three of us realized we had seen the peace sign for the first time.

5

Saturday-morning breakfast was one of my meals to work the dish-line 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 lean-ing 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 impro-priety. “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 Gar-retsen 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 respon-sibility. 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 repeat-edly 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 Fal-mouth Prep School graduate, wearing a blazer to classes and a suit on Sundays. No one could have been more different from Ronnie Malen-fant, with his gutter mouth, his prejudices, and his brilliance with num-bers. 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 dis-approval 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 sym-pathy 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 some-thing 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 peo-ple fuck.”

Hugh and Ashley grinned foolishly, as if they had just been com-plimented. 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 Mar-tin 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 whis-per. “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.

“But there’s a big problem, Pete. Three-handed Hearts is risky. Who dares shoot the moon when you got that one fucking leftover card to worry about?”

“How are you playing? Game over at a hundred, all losers pay the winner?”

“Yeah. And if you come in, I’ll kick back half what I win. Plus I give back what you lose.” He sunned me with a saintlike smile.

“Suppose I beat you?”

Ronnie looked momentarily startled, then smiled wider than ever. “Not in this life, shweetheart. I’m a scientist at cards.”

I glanced at my watch, then in at Ashley and Hugh. They really didn’t look much like real competition, God love them. “Tell you what,” I said. “One game straight up to a hundred. Nickel a point. Nobody kicks back anything. We play, then I study, and everyone has a nice weekend.”

“You’re on.” As we went back into the lounge he added: “I like you, Pete, but business is business—your homo boyfriends back in high school never gave you a fucking like I’m going to give you this morning.”

“I didn’t have any homo boyfriends in high school,” I said. “I spent most of my weekends hitching up to Lewiston to ass-bang your sister.”

Ronnie smiled widely, sat down, picked up the deck of cards, began to shuffle. “I broke her in pretty good, didn’t I?”

You couldn’t get lower than Mrs. Malenfant’s little boy, that was the thing. Many tried, but to the best of my knowledge no one ever actually succeeded.

6

Ronnie was a bigot with a foul mouth, a cringing personality, and that constant monkey-fungus stink, but he could play cards, I give him that. He wasn’t the genius he claimed to be, at least not in Hearts, where luck is a big part of the game, but he was good. When he was concentrating full on he could remember almost every card that had been played . . . which was why, I suppose, he didn’t like three-handed Hearts, with that extra card. With the kicker card gone, Ronnie was tough.

Still, I did all right that first morning. When Hugh Brennan went over a hundred in the first game we played, I had thirty-three points to Ronnie’s twenty-eight. It had been two or three years since I’d played Hearts, it was the first time in my life I’d played it for money, and I thought two bits a small price to pay for such unexpected entertainment. That round cost Ashley two dollars and fifty cents; the unfortunate Hugh had to cough up three-sixty. It seemed Ronnie had won the price of a date after all, although I thought the girl would have to be a real Bogart fan to give him a blowjob. Or even a kiss goodnight, for that matter.

Ronnie puffed up like a crow guarding a fresh piece of roadkill. “I got it,” he said. “I’m sorry for guys like you who don’t, but I got it, Riley. It’s like it says in the song, the men don’t know but the little girls understand.”

“You’re ill, Ronnie,” I said.

“I wanna go again,” Hugh said. I think P. T. Barnum was right, there really is one like Hugh born every minute. “I wanna get my money back.”

“Well,” Ronnie said, revealing his dingy teeth in a big smile, “I’m willing to at least give you a chance.” He looked my way. “What do you say, sporty?”

My geology text lay forgotten on the sofa behind me. I wanted my quarter back, and a few more to jingle beside it. What I wanted even more was to school Ronnie Malenfant. “Run em,” I said, and then, for the first of at least a thousand times I’d speak the same words in the troubled weeks ahead: “Is this a pass left or pass right?”

“New game, pass right. What a dorkus.” Ronnie cackled, stretched, and watched happily as the cards spun out of the deck. “God, I love this game!”