Hearts In Atlantis

7

That second game was the one that really hooked me. This time it was Ashley instead of Hugh who went skyrocketing toward one hun-dred points, enthusiastically helped along by Ronnie, who dumped The Bitch on Ash’s hapless head at every opportunity. I was dealt the queen only twice that game. The first time I held it for four consecu-tive tricks when I could have bombed Ashley with it. Finally, just as I was starting to think I’d end up eating it myself, Ashley lost the lead to Hugh Brennan, who promptly led a diamond. He should have known I was void in that suit, had been since the start of the hand, but the Hughs of the world know little. That is, I suppose, why the Ronnies of the world so love to play cards with them. I topped the trick with The Bitch, held my nose, and honked at Hugh. That was how we said “Booya!” in the quaint old days of the sixties.

Ronnie scowled. “Why’d you do that? You could have put that dicksnacker out!” He nodded at Ashley, who was looking at us rather vacantly.

“Yeah, but I’m not quite that stupid.” I tapped the score sheet. Ronnie had taken thirty points as of then; I had taken thirty-four. The other two were far beyond that. The question wasn’t which of Ronnie’s marks would lose, but which of the two who knew how to play the game would win. “I wouldn’t mind seeing those Bogie movies myself, you know. Shweetheart.”

Ronnie showed his questionable teeth in a grin. He was playing to a gallery by then; we had attracted about half a dozen specta-tors. Skip and Nate were among them. “Want to play it that way, do you? Okay. Spread your cheeks, moron; you’re about to be corn-holed.”

Two hands later, I cornholed him. Ashley, who started that last hand with ninety-eight points, went over the top in a hurry. The spectators were dead quiet, waiting to see whether I could actually hit Ronnie with six—the number of hearts he’d need to take for me to beat him by one.

Ronnie looked good at first, playing under everything that was led, staying away from the lead himself. When you have good low cards in Hearts, you’re practically bulletproof. “Riley’s cooked!” he informed the audience. “I mean fucking toasty!”

I thought so, too, but at least I had the queen of spades in my hand. If I could drop it on him, I’d still win. I wouldn’t make much from Ronnie, but the other two would be coughing up blood: over five bucks between them. And I’d get to see Ronnie’s face change. That’s what I wanted most, to see the gloat go out and the goat come in. I wanted to shut him up.

It came down to the last three tricks. Ashley played the six of hearts. Hugh played the five. I played the three. I saw Ronnie’s smile fade as he played the nine and took the trick. It dropped his edge to a mere three points. Better still, he finally had the lead. I had the jack of clubs and the queen of spades left in my hand. If Ronnie had a low club and played it, I was going to eat The Bitch and have to endure his crowing, which would be caustic. If, on the other hand . . .

He played the five of diamonds. Hugh played the two of dia-monds, getting under, and Ashley, smiling in a puzzled way that sug-gested he didn’t know just what the fuck he was doing, played void.

Dead silence in the room.

Then, smiling, I completed the trick—Ronnie’s trick—by drop-ping the queen of spades on top of the other three cards. There was a soft sigh from around the card-table, and when I looked up I saw that the half-dozen spectators had become nearly a full dozen. David Dearborn leaned in the doorway, arms folded, frowning at us. Behind him, in the hall, was someone else. Someone leaning on a pair of crutches.

I suppose Dearie had already checked his well-thumbed book of rules—Dormitory Regulations at the University of Maine, 1966–1967 Edition—and had been disappointed to find there was none against playing cards, even when there was a stake involved. But you must believe me when I say his disappointment was nothing compared to Ronnie’s.

There are good losers in this world, there are sore losers, sulky losers, defiant losers, weepy losers . . . and then there are your down-and-out fuckhead losers. Ronnie was of the down-and-out fuckhead type. His cheeks flushed pink on the skin and almost purple around his blemishes. His mouth thinned to a shadow, and I could see his jaws working as he chewed his lips.

“Oh gosh,” Skip said. “Look who got hit with the shit.”

“Why’d you do that?” Ronnie burst out, ignoring Skip—ignoring everyone in the room but me. “Why’d you do that, you numb fuck?”

I was bemused by the question and—let me admit this—absolutely delighted by his rage. “Well,” I said, “according to Vince Lombardi, winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. Pay up, Ronnie.”

“You’re queer,” he said. “You’re a fucking homo majordomo. Who dealt that?”

“Ashley,” I said. “And if you want to call me a cheater, say it right out loud. Then I’m going to come around this table, grab you before you can run, and beat the snot out of you.”

“No one’s beating the snot out of anyone on my floor!” Dearie said sharply from the doorway, but everyone ignored him. They were watching Ronnie and me.

“I didn’t call you a cheater, I just asked who dealt,” Ronnie said. I could almost see him making the effort to pull himself together, to swallow the lump I’d fed him and smile as he did it, but there were tears of rage standing in his eyes (big and bright green, those eyes were Ronnie’s one redeeming feature), and beneath his earlobes the points of his jaw went on bulging and relaxing. It was like watching twin hearts beat in the sides of his face. “Who gives a shit, you beat me by ten points. That’s fifty cents, big fucking deal.”

I wasn’t a big jock in high school like Skip Kirk—debate and track had been my only extracurricular activities—and I’d never told any-one in my life that I’d beat the snot out of them. Ronnie seemed like a good place to start, though, and God knows I meant it. I think everyone else knew it, too. There was a huge wallop of adolescent adrenaline in the room; you could smell it, almost taste it. Part of me—a big part—wanted him to give me some more grief. Part of me wanted to stick it to him, wanted to stick it right up his ass.

Money appeared on the table. Dearie took a step closer, frowning more ponderously than ever, but he said nothing . . . at least not about that. Instead he asked if anyone in the room had shaving-creamed his door, or knew who had. We all turned to look at him, and saw that Stoke Jones had moved into the doorway when Dearie stepped into the room. Stoke hung on his crutches, watching us all with his bright eyes.

There was a moment of silence and then Skip said, “You sure you didn’t maybe go walking in your sleep and do it yourself, David?” A burst of laughter greeted this, and it was Dearie’s turn to flush. The color started at his neck and worked its way up his cheeks and fore-head to the roots of his flattop—no faggy Beatle haircut for Dearie, thank you very much.

“Pass the word that it better not happen again,” Dearie said. Doing his own little Bogie imitation without realizing it. “I’m not going to have my authority mocked.”

“Oh blow it out,” Ronnie muttered. He had picked up the cards and was disconsolately shuffling them.

Dearie took three large steps into the room, grabbed Ronnie by the shoulders of his Ivy League shirt, and pulled him. Ronnie got up on his own so the shirt would not be torn. He didn’t have a lot of good shirts; none of us did.

“What did you say to me, Malenfant?”

Ronnie looked around and saw what I imagine he’d been seeing for most of his life: no help, no sympathy. As usual, he was on his own. And he had no idea why.

“I didn’t say anything. Don’t be so fuckin paranoid, Dearborn.”

“Apologize.”

Ronnie wriggled in his grasp. “I didn’t say nothing, why should I apologize for nothing?”

“Apologize anyway. And I want to hear true regret.”

“Oh quit it,” Stoke Jones said. “All of you. You should see your-selves. Stupidity to the n^th power.”

Dearie looked at him, surprised. We were all surprised, I think. Maybe Stoke was surprised himself.

“David, you’re just pissed off that someone creamed your door,” Skip said.

“You’re right. I’m pissed off. And I want an apology from you, Malenfant.”

“Let it go,” Skip said. “Ronnie just got a little hot under the collar because he lost a close one. He didn’t shaving-cream your fucking door.”

I looked at Ronnie to see how he was taking the rare experience of having someone stand up for him and saw a telltale shift in his green eyes—almost a flinch. In that moment I was almost positive Ronnie had shaving-creamed Dearie’s door. Who among my acquaintances was more likely?

If Dearie had noticed that guilty little blink, I believe he would have reached the same conclusion. But he was looking at Skip. Skip looked back at him calmly, and after a few more seconds to make it seem (to himself if not to the rest of us) like his own idea, Dearie let go of Ronnie’s shirt. Ronnie shook himself, brushed at the wrinkles on his shoulders, then began digging in his pockets for small change to pay me with.

“I’m sorry,” Ronnie said. “Whatever has got your panties in a bunch, I’m sorry. I’m sorry as hell, sorry as shit, I’m so sorry my ass hurts. Okay?”

Dearie took a step back. I had been able to feel the adrenaline; I suspected Dearie could feel the waves of dislike rolling in his direc-tion just as clearly. Even Ashley Rice, who looked like a roly-poly bear in a kids’ cartoon, was looking at Dearie in a flat-eyed, unfriendly way. It was a case of what the poet Gary Snyder might have called bad-karma baseball. Dearie was the proctor—strike one.

He tried to run our floor as though it were an adjunct to his beloved ROTC program—strike two. And he was a jerkwad sophomore at a time when sophomores still believed that harassing freshmen was part of their bounden duty. Strike three, Dearie, you’re out.

“Spread the word that I’m not going to put up with a lot of high-school crap on my floor,” Dearie said (his floor, if you could dig it). He stood ramrod-straight in his U of M sweatshirt and khaki pants—pressed khaki pants, although it was Saturday. “This is not high school, gentlemen; this is Chamberlain Hall at the University of Maine. Your bra-snapping days are over. The time has come for you to behave like college men.”

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 out-ward. “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 elo-quence 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.

8

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 Ron-nie 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 Ron-nie 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 sim-ply shook his head and waved me on without looking up from his his-tory 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 stu-dents. As far as I remember, that was about the only special treat-ment 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—Intro-duction 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 bat-tlers for racial equality were discovering junk bonds, Martha Stew-art 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.

9

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 . . . prob-ably 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 bor-rowed 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 reel-ing away from the dishline that night in the fall of 1966; it was a horny hotdog man standing atop a Matterhorn of Holyoke Com-mons baked beans. A pipe-cleaner wiener jutted jauntily from the appropriate spot. In his hand was a little University of Maine pen-nant, 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 EATMORE MAINE BEANS!

A good deal of edible artwork came along the conveyor belt dur-ing 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.

10

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 play-ing at Hauck tonight. They start at seven. We’ve got time to walk over. Want to go?”

She smoked, not answering me for a moment, but she was still smiling and I knew she was going to say yes. Earlier, all I’d wanted was to get back to the third-floor lounge and play Hearts. Now that I was away from the game, however, the game seemed a lot less important. Had I been hot enough to say something about beating the snot out of Ronnie Malenfant? It seemed I had—the memory was clear enough—but standing out here in the cool air with Carol, it was hard for me to understand why.

“I’ve got a boyfriend back home,” she said at last.

“Is that a no?”

She shook her head, still with the little smile. The smoke from her cigarette drifted across her face. Her hair, free of the net the girls had to wear on the dishline, blew lightly across her brow. “That’s information. Remember that show The Prisoner? ‘Number Six, we want . . . information.’”

“I’ve got a girlfriend back home,” I said. “More information.”

“I’ve got another job, tutoring math. I promised to spend an hour tonight with this girl on the second floor. Calculus. Ag. She’s hope-less and she whines, but it’s six dollars an hour.” Carol laughed. “This is getting good, we’re exchanging information like mad.”

“It doesn’t look good for Bogie, though,” I said. I wasn’t worried. I knew we were going to see Bogie. I think I also knew there was romance in our future. It gave me an oddly light feeling, a lifting-off sensation in my midsection.

“I could call Esther from Hauck and tell her calc at ten o’clock instead of nine,” Carol said. “Esther’s a sad case. She never goes out. What she does mostly is sit around with her hair in curlers and write letters home about how hard college is. We could see the first movie, at least.”

“That sounds good,” I said.

We started walking toward Hauck. Those were the days, all right; you didn’t have to hire a babysitter, put out the dog, feed the cat, or set the burglar alarm. You just went.

“Is this like a date?” she asked after a little bit.

“Well,” I said, “I guess it could be.” We were walking past East Annex by then, and other kids were filling up the paths, heading toward the auditorium.

“Good,” she said, “because I left my purse back in my room. I can’t go dutch.”

“Don’t worry, I’m rich. Won big playing cards today.”

“Poker?”

“Hearts. Do you know it?”

“Are you kidding? I spent three weeks at Camp Winiwinaia on Lake George the summer I was twelve. YMCA camp—poor kids’ camp, my mom called it. It rained practically every day and all we did was play Hearts and hunt The Bitch.” Her eyes had gone far away, the way people’s eyes do when they trip over some memory like a shoe in the dark. “Find the lady in black. Cherchez la femme noire.”

“That’s the game, all right,” I said, knowing that for a moment I wasn’t there for her at all. Then she came back, gave me a grin, and took her cigarettes out of her jeans pocket. We smoked a lot back then. All of us. Back then you could smoke in hospital waiting rooms. I told my daughter that and at first she didn’t believe me.

I took out my own cigarettes and lit us both. It was a good moment, the two of us looking at each other in the Zippo’s flame. Not as sweet as a kiss, but nice. I felt that lightness inside me again, that sense of lifting off. Sometimes your view widens and grows hopeful. Sometimes you think you can see around corners, and maybe you can. Those are good moments. I snapped my lighter shut and we walked on, smoking, the backs of our hands close but not quite brushing.

“How much money are we talking about?” she asked. “Enough to run away to California on, or maybe not quite that much?”

“Nine dollars.”

She laughed and took my hand. “It’s a date, all right,” she said. “You can buy me popcorn, too.”

“All right. Do you care which movie plays first?”

She shook her head. “Bogie’s Bogie.”

“That’s true,” I said, but I hoped it would be The Maltese Falcon.

It was. Halfway through it, while Peter Lorre was doing his rather ominous gay turn and Bogie was gazing at him with polite, amused incredulity, I looked at Carol. She was looking at me. I bent and kissed her popcorn-buttery mouth by the black-and-white moon-light of John Huston’s inspired first film. Her lips were sweet and responsive. I pulled back a little. She was still looking at me. The lit-tle smile was back. Then she offered me her bag of popcorn, I recip-rocated with my box of Dots, and we watched the rest of the movie.

11

Walking back to the Chamberlain-King-Franklin complex of dorms, I took her hand almost without thinking about it. She curled her fin-gers through mine naturally enough, but I thought I could feel a reserve now.

“Are you going to go back for The Caine Mutiny?” she asked. “You could, if you’ve still got your ticket stub. Or I could give you mine.”

“Nah, I’ve got geology to study.”

“Bet you wind up playing cards all night instead.”

“I can’t afford to,” I said. And I meant it; I meant to go back and study. I really did.

“Lonely Struggles, or A Scholarship Boy’s Life,” Carol said. “A heartbreaking novel by Charles Dickens. You’ll weep as plucky Peter Riley throws himself into the river after finding that the Financial Aid Office has revoked his grant package.”

I laughed. She was very sharp.

“I’m in the same boat, you know. If we screw up, maybe we can make it a double suicide. Into the Penobscot with us. Goodbye cruel world.”

“What’s a Connecticut girl doing at the University of Maine, any-way?” I asked.

“That’s a little complicated. And if you ever plan on asking me out again, you should know you’re robbing the cradle. I won’t actually be eighteen until November. I skipped the seventh grade. That was the year my parents got divorced, and I was miserable. It was either study all the time or turn into one of the Harwich Junior High corner girls. They’re the ones who major in French-kissing and usually wind up pregnant at sixteen. You know the kind I mean?”

“Sure.” In Gates you saw them in giggling little groups outside Frank’s Fountain or the Dairy Delish, waiting for the boys to come by in their dropped Fords and Plymouth hemis, fast cars with the fend-erskirts and the decals saying FRAM and QUAKER STATE in the back win-dows. You could see those girls as women down at the other end of Main Street, ten years older and forty pounds heavier, drinking beers and shots in Chucky’s Tavern.

“I turned into a study-grind. My father was in the Navy. He got out on a disability and moved here to Maine . . . Damariscotta, down on the coast?”

I nodded, thinking of Diane Renay’s steady boy, the one who said ship ahoy and joined the Nay-yay-vee.

“I was living in Connecticut with my mother and going to Har-wich High. I applied to sixteen different schools and got accepted by all but three . . . but . . .”

“But they expected you to pay your own way and you couldn’t.”

She nodded. “I think I missed the plum scholarships by maybe twenty SAT-points. An extracurricular activity or two probably wouldn’t have hurt, either, but I was too busy grinding away at the books. And by then I was pretty hot and heavy with Sully-John . . .”

“The boyfriend, right?”

She nodded, but not as though this Sully-John interested her. “The only two schools offering realistic financial aid packages were Maine and UConn. I decided on Maine because by then I wasn’t getting along very well with my mother. Lots of fights.”

“You get along better with your father?”

“Hardly ever see him,” she said in a dry, businesslike tone. “He lives with this woman who . . . well, they drink a lot and fight a lot, let’s leave it at that. But he’s a resident of the state, I’m his daughter, and this is a land-grant college. I didn’t get everything I needed— UConn offered the better deal, frankly—but I’m not afraid of a little work. It’s worth it, just to get away.”

She took a deep breath of the night air and let it out, faintly white. We were almost back to Franklin. Inside the lobby I could see guys sitting in the hard plastic contour chairs, waiting for their girls to come down from upstairs. It looked like quite a rogues’ gallery. Worth it just to get away, she had said. Did that mean the mother, the town, and the high school, or was the boyfriend included?

When we got to the wide double doors at the front of her dorm, I put my arms around her and bent to kiss her again. She put her hands on my chest, stopping me. Not pulling back, just stopping me. She looked up into my face, smiling that little smile of hers. I could get to love that smile, I thought—it was the kind of smile you might wake up thinking of in the middle of the night. The blue eyes and the blond hair too, but mostly the smile. The lips only curved a little, but the corners of the mouth deepened to dimples all the same.

“My boyfriend’s real name is John Sullivan,” she said. “Like the fighter. Now tell me the name of your girlfriend.”

“Annmarie,” I said, not much caring for the sound of it as it came out of my mouth. “Annmarie Soucie. She’s a senior at Gates Falls High this year.” I let Carol go. When I did, she took her hands off my chest and grabbed mine.

“This is information,” she said. “Information, that’s all. Still want to kiss me?”

I nodded. I wanted to more than ever.

“Okay.” She tilted her face up, closed her eyes, opened her lips a little. She looked like a kid waiting at the foot of the stairs for her goodnight kiss from Papa. It was so cute I almost laughed. Instead I bent and kissed her. She kissed back with pleasure and enthusiasm.

There were no tongues touching, but it was a thorough, searching kiss just the same. When she drew back, her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright. “Goodnight. Thanks for the movie.”

“Want to do it again?”

“I have to think about that,” she said. She was smiling but her eyes were serious. I suppose her boyfriend was on her mind; I know that Annmarie was on mine. “Maybe you better, too. I’ll see you on the dishline Monday. What do you have?”

“Lunch and dinner.”

“I have breakfast and lunch. So I’ll see you at lunch.”

“Eat more Maine beans,” I said. That made her laugh. She went inside. I watched her go, standing outside with my collar turned up and my hands in my pockets and a cigarette between my lips, feeling like Bogie. I watched her say something to the girl on the reception desk and then hurry upstairs, still laughing.

I walked back to Chamberlain in the moonlight, determined to get serious about the geosyncline.

12

I only went into the third-floor lounge to get my geology book; I swear it’s true. When I got there, every table—plus one or two which must have been hijacked from other floors—was occupied by a quartet of Hearts-playing fools. There was even a group in the corner, sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring intently at their cards. They looked like half-assed yogis. “We chasin The Cunt!” Ronnie Malenfant yelled to the room at large. “We gonna bust that bitch out, boys!”

I picked up my geology text from the sofa where it had lain all day and night (someone had sat on it, pushing it most of the way down between two cushions, but that baby was too big to hide entirely), and looked at it the way you might look at some artifact of unknown pur-pose. In Hauck Auditorium, sitting beside Carol Gerber, this crazy card-party had seemed like a dream. Now it was Carol who seemed dreamlike—Carol with her dimples and her boyfriend with the boxer’s name. I still had six bucks in my pocket and it was absurd to feel dis-appointed just because there was no place for me in any of the games currently going on.

Study, that was what I had to do. Make friends with the geosyn-cline. I’d camp out in the second-floor lounge or maybe find a quiet corner in the basement rec.

Just as I was leaving with Historical Geology under my arm, Kirby McClendon tossed down his cards and cried, “Fuck this! I’m tapped! All because I keep getting hit with that fucking queen of spades! I’ll give you guys IOUs, but I am honest-to-God tapped out.” He went out past me without looking back, ducking his head as he went through the door—I’ve always thought that being that tall must be a kind of curse. A month later Kirby would be tapped out in a much larger sense, withdrawn from the University by his frightened parents after a men-tal breakdown and a half-assed suicide attempt. Not the first victim of Hearts-mania that fall, nor the last, but the only one to try and off him-self by eating two bottles of orange-flavored baby aspirin.

Lennie Doria didn’t even bother looking after him. He looked over at me instead. “You want to sit in, Riley?”

A brief but perfectly genuine struggle for my soul went on. I needed to study. I had planned on studying, and for a financial-aid boy like me, that was a good plan, certainly more sensible than sit-ting here in this smoky room and adding the effluent from my own Pall Malls to the general fug.

So I said “Yeah, why not?” and sat down and played Hearts until almost one in the morning. When I finally shambled back to my room, Nate was lying on his bed reading his Bible. That was the last thing he did every night before going to sleep. This was his third trip through what he always called The Word of God, he’d told me. He had reached the Book of Nehemiah. He looked up at me with an expres-sion of calm enquiry—a look that never changed much. Now that I think about it, Nate never changed much. He was in pre-dent, and he stayed with it; tucked into his last Christmas card to me was a photo of his new office in Houlton. In the photo there are three Magi stand-ing around a straw-filled cradle on the snowy office lawn. Behind Mary and Joseph you can read the sign on the door: NATHANIEL HOPPEN-STAND, D.D.S. He married Cindy. They are still married, and their three children are mostly grown up. I imagine Rinty died and got replaced.

“Did you win?” Nate asked. He spoke in almost the same tone of voice my wife would use some years later, when I came home half-drunk after a Thursday-night poker game.

“Actually I did.” I had gravitated to a table where Ronnie was playing and had lost three of my remaining six dollars, then drifted to another one where I won them back, and a couple of more besides. But I had never gotten around to the geosyncline or the mysteries of tectonic plates.

Nate was wearing red-and-white-striped pajamas. He was, I think, the only person I ever shared a room with in college, male or female, who wore pajamas. Of course he was also the only one who owned Diane Renay Sings Navy Blue. As I began undressing, Nate slipped between the covers of his bed and reached behind him to turn off the study lamp on his desk.

“Get your geology all studied up?” he asked as the shadows swal-lowed his half of the room.

“I’m in good shape with it,” I said. Years later, when I came in from those late poker games and my wife would ask me how drunk I was, I’d say “I only had a couple” in that same chipper tone of voice.

I swung into my own bed, turned off my own light, and was asleep almost immediately. I dreamed I was playing Hearts. Ronnie Malen-fant was dealing; Stoke Jones stood in the lounge doorway, hunched over his crutches and eyeing me—eyeing all of us—with the dour disapproval of a Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritan. In my dream there was an enormous amount of money lying on the table, hun-dreds of dollars in crumpled fives and ones, money orders, even a per-sonal check or two. I looked at this, then back at the doorway. Carol Gerber was now standing on one side of Stokely. Nate, dressed in his candy-cane pajamas, was on the other side.

“We want information,” Carol said.

“You won’t get it,” I replied—in the TV show, that was always Patrick McGoohan’s reply to Number Two.

Nate said, “You left your window open, Pete. The room’s cold and your papers blew everywhere.”

I couldn’t think of an adequate reply to this, so I picked up the hand I’d been dealt and fanned it open. Thirteen cards, and every one was the queen of spades. Every one was la femme noire. Every one was The Bitch.

13

In Vietnam the war was going well—Lyndon Johnson, on a swing through the South Pacific, said so. There were a few minor setbacks, however. The Viet Cong shot down three American Hueys practi-cally in Saigon’s back yard; a little farther out from Big S, an esti-mated one thousand Viet Cong soldiers kicked the shit out of at least twice that number of South Vietnamese regulars. In the Mekong Delta, U.S. gunships sank a hundred and twenty Viet Cong river patrol boats which turned out to contain—whoops—large numbers of refugee children. America lost its four hundredth plane of the war that October, an F-105 Thunderchief. The pilot parachuted to safety. In Manila, South Vietnam’s Prime Minister, Nguyen Cao Ky, insisted that he was not a crook. Neither were the members of his cabinet, he said, and the fact that a dozen or so cabinet members resigned while Ky was in the Philippines was just coincidence.

In San Diego, Bob Hope did a show for Army boys headed in-country. “I wanted to call Bing and send him along with you,” Bob said, “but that pipe-smoking son of a gun has unlisted his number.” The Army boys roared with laughter.

? and the Mysterians ruled the radio. Their song, “96 Tears,” was a monster hit. They never had another one.

In Honolulu hula-hula girls greeted President Johnson.

At the U.N., Secretary General U Thant was pleading with Amer-ican representative Arthur Goldberg to stop, at least temporarily, the bombing of North Vietnam. Arthur Goldberg got in touch with the Great White Father in Hawaii to relay Thant’s request. The Great White Father, perhaps still wearing his lei, said no way, we’d stop when the Viet Cong stopped, but in the meantime they were going to cry 96 tears. At least 96. (Johnson did a brief, clumsy shimmy with the hula-hula girls; I remember watching that on The Huntley-Brinkley Report and thinking he danced like every other white guy I knew . . . which was, incidentally, all the guys I knew.)

In Greenwich Village a peace march was broken up by the police. The marchers had no permit, the police said. In San Francisco war protesters carrying plastic skulls on sticks and wearing whiteface like a troupe of mimes were dispersed by teargas. In Denver police tore down thousands of posters advertising an antiwar rally at Chau-tauqua Park in Boulder. The police had discovered a statute forbid-ding the posting of such bills. The statute did not, the Denver Chief said, forbid posted bills which advertised movies, old clothes drives, VFW dances, or rewards for information leading to the recovery of lost pets. Those posters, the chief explained, were not political.

On our own little patch, there was a sit-in at East Annex, where Coleman Chemicals was holding job interviews. Coleman, like Dow, made napalm. Coleman also made Agent Orange, botulin com-pound, and anthrax, it turned out, although no one knew that until the company went bankrupt in 1980. In the Maine Campus there was a small picture of the protesters being led away. A larger photo showed one protester being pulled out of the East Annex doorway by a campus cop while another cop stood by, holding the protester’s crutches—said protester was Stoke Jones, of course, wearing his duf-fle coat with the sparrow-track on the back. The cops were treating him kindly enough, I’m sure—at that point war protesters were still more novelty than nuisance—but the combination of the big cop and the staggering boy made the picture creepy, somehow. I thought of it many times between 1968 and 1971, years when, in the words of Bob Dylan, “the game got rough.” The largest photo in that issue, the only one above the fold, showed ROTC guys in uniform march-ing on the sunny football field while large crowds watched. MANEU-

VERS DRAW RECORD CROWD, read the headline.

Closer to home still, one Peter Riley got a D on his Geology quiz and a D-plus on a Sociology quiz two days later. On Friday I got back a one-page “essay of opinion” I had scribbled just before Intro English (Writing) on Monday morning. The subject was Ties (Should/ShouldNot)Be Required for Men in Restaurants. I had chosen Should Not. This little expository exercise had been marked with a big red C, the first C I’d gotten in English since arriving at U of M with my straight A’s in high-school English and my 740 score on the SAT Verbals. That red hook shocked me in a way the quiz D’s hadn’t, and angered me as well. Across the top Mr. Babcock had written, “Your usual clarity is present, but in this case serves only to show what a meatless meal this is. Your humor, although facile, falls far short of wit. The C is actually something of a gift. Sloppy work.”

I thought of approaching him after class, then rejected the idea. Mr. Babcock, who wore bowties and big hornrimmed glasses, had made it clear in just four weeks that he considered grade-grubbers the lowest form of academic life. Also, it was noon. If I grabbed a quick bite at the Palace on the Plains, I could be back on Chamber-lain Three by one. All the tables in the lounge (and all four corners of the room) would be filled by three o’clock that afternoon, but at one I’d still be able to find a seat. I was almost twenty dollars to the good by then, and planned to spend a profitable late-October weekend lining my pockets. I was also planning on the Saturday-night dance in Lengyll Gym. Carol had agreed to go with me. The Cumberlands, a popular campus group, were playing. At some point (more likely at several points) they would do their version of “96 Tears.”

The voice of conscience, already speaking in the tones of Nate Hoppenstand, suggested I’d do well to spend at least part of the weekend hitting the books. I had two chapters of geology to read, two chapters of sociology, forty pages of history (the Middle Ages at a gulp), plus a set of questions to answer concerning trade routes.

I’ll get to it, don’t worry, I’ll get to it, I told that voice. Sunday’s my day to study. You can count on it, you can take it to the bank. And for awhile on Sunday I actually did read about in-groups, outgroups, and group sanctions. Between hands of cards I read about them. Then things got interesting and my soash book ended up on the floor under the couch. Going to bed on Sunday night—late Sun-day night—it occurred to me that not only had my winnings shrunk instead of grown (Ronnie now seemed actually to be seeking me out), but I hadn’t really gotten very far with my studying. Also, I hadn’t made a certain phone-call.

If you really want to put your hand there, Carol said, and she had been smiling that funny little smile when she said it, that smile which was mostly dimples and a look in the eyes. If you really want to put your hand there.

About halfway through the Saturday-night dance, she and I had gone out for a smoke. It was a mild night, and along Lengyll’s brick north side maybe twenty couples were hugging and kissing by the light of the moon rising over Chadbourne Hall. Carol and I joined them. Before long I had my hand inside her sweater. I rubbed my thumb over the smooth cotton of her bra-cup, feeling the stiff little rise of her nipple. My temperature was also rising. I could feel hers rising, as well. She looked into my face with her arms still locked around my neck and said, “If you really want to put your hand there, I think you owe somebody a phone-call, don’t you?”

There’s time, I told myself as I drifted toward sleep. There’s plenty of time for studying, plenty of time for phone-calls. Plenty of time.

14

Skip Kirk blew an Anthropology quiz—ended up guessing at half of the answers and getting a fifty-eight. He got a C-minus on an Advanced Calc quiz, and only did that well because his last math course in high school had covered some of the same concepts. We were in the same Sociology course and he got a D-minus on the quiz, scoring a bare seventy.

We weren’t the only ones with problems. Ronnie was a winner at Hearts, better than fifty bucks up in ten days of play, if you believed him (no one completely did, although we knew he was winning), but a loser in his classes. He flunked a French quiz, blew off the little En-glish paper in the class we shared (“Who gives a fuck about ties, I eat at McDonald’s” he said), and scraped through a quiz in some other history division by scanning an admirer’s notes just before class.

Kirby McClendon had quit shaving and began gnawing his fin-gernails between deals. He also began cutting significant numbers of classes. Jack Frady convinced his advisor to let him drop Statistics I even though add-drop was officially over. “I cried a little,” he told me matter-of-factly one night in the lounge as we Bitch-hunted our way toward the wee hours. “It’s something I learned to do in Dramatics Club.” Lennie Doria tapped on my door a couple of nights later while I was cramming (Nate had been in the rack for an hour or more, sleeping the sleep of the just and the caught-up) and asked me if I had any interest in writing a paper about Crispus Atticus. He had heard I could do such things. He’d pay a fair price, Lennie said; he was currently ten bucks up in the game. I said I was sorry but I couldn’t help him. I was behind a couple of papers myself. Lennie nodded and slipped out.

Ashley Rice broke out in horrible oozing acne all over his face, Mark St. Pierre had a sleepwalking interlude after losing almost twenty bucks in one catastrophic night, and Brad Witherspoon got into a fight with a guy on the first floor. The guy made some innocu-ous little crack—later on Brad himself admitted it had been innocu-ous—but Brad, who’d just been hit with The Bitch three times in four hands and only wanted a Coke out of the first-floor machine to soothe his butt-parched throat, wasn’t in an innocuous mood. He turned, dropped his unopened soda into the sandwell of a nearby cig-arette urn, and started punching. Broke the kid’s glasses, loosened one of his teeth. So Brad Witherspoon, ordinarily about as dangerous as a library mimeograph, was the first of us to go on disciplinary pro.

I thought about calling Annmarie and telling her I had met some-one and was dating, but it seemed like a lot of work—a lot of psychic effort—on top of everything else. I settled for hoping that she’d write me a letter saying she thought it was time we started seeing other people. Instead I got one saying how much she missed me and that she was making me “something special” for Christmas. Which prob-ably meant a sweater, one with reindeer on it. Reindeer sweaters were an Annmarie specialty (those slow, stroking handjobs were another). She enclosed a picture of herself in a short skirt. Looking at it made me feel not horny but tired and guilty and put-upon. Carol also made me feel put-upon. I had wanted to cop a feel, that was all, not change my whole fucking life. Or hers, for that matter. But I liked her, that was true. A lot. That smile of hers, and her sharp wit. This is getting good, she had said, we’re exchanging information like mad.

A week or so later I returned from Holyoke, where I’d worked lunch with her on the dishline, and saw Frank Stuart walking slowly down the third-floor hallway with his trunk hung from his hands. Frank was from western Maine, one of those little unincorporated townships that are practically all trees, and had a Yankee accent so thick you could slice it. He was just a so-so Hearts player, usually ducking in second or a close third when someone else went over the hundred-point mark, but a hell of a nice guy. He always had a smile on his face . . . at least until the afternoon I came upon him headed for the stairwell with his trunk.

“You moving rooms, Frank?” I asked, but even then I thought I knew better—it was in the look on his face, serious and pale and downcast.

He shook his head. “Goin back home. Got a letter from my ma. She says they need a caretaker at one of the big lake resorts we got over our way. I said sure. I’m just wastin my time here.”

“You are not!” I said, a little shocked. “Christ, Frankie, you’re get-ting 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 crew-cut 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. T his 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 semes-ter 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. Nei-ther 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.

16

The bad quizzes and unsuccessful little papers were nothing but unpleasant skirmishes. For Skip and me and too many of our card-playing buddies, our second round of prelims was a full-fledged dis-aster. 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 con-versation 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 talk-ing, but would have looked at us in a way that said we lacked gump-tion. 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 ago-nized 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 tomor-row.”

“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. Get-ting 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 busi-ness, 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 some-times; 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 lit-tle 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.

17

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 rem-nants 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 mil-itary 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 ago-nized U.S. soldiers after an ambush or crying Vietnamese children watching their village go up in smoke. There was always some unset-tling 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 hap-pened 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 after-noon. 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 domi-noes 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.

18

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.

There was a kind of baffled anger in Ochs’s voice. I suppose I liked it because most of the time I felt pretty baffled myself. He was like Dylan, but less complicated in his expression and clearer in his rage. The best song on the album—also the most troubling—was the title song. In that song Ochs didn’t just suggest but came right out and said that war wasn’t worth it, war was never worth it. Even when it was worth it, it wasn’t worth it. This idea, coupled with the image of young men just walking away from Lyndon and his Vietnam obsession by the thousands and tens of thousands, excited my imagination in a way that had nothing to do with history or policy or rational thought. I must have killed a million men and now they want me back again but I ain’t marchin anymore, Phil Ochs sang through the speaker of Nate’s nifty little Swingline phono. Just quit it, in other words. Quit doing what they say, quit doing what they want, quit playing their game. It’s an old game, and in this one The Bitch is hunting you.

And maybe to show you mean it, you start wearing a symbol of your resistance—something others will first wonder about and then perhaps rally to. It was a couple of days after Halloween that Nate Hoppenstand showed us what the symbol was going to be. Finding out started with one of those crumpled leftover newspapers in the third-floor lounge.

19

“Son of a bitch, look at this,” Billy Marchant said.

Harvey Twiller was shuffling the cards at Billy’s table, Lennie Doria was adding up the current score, and Billy was taking the opportunity to do a quick scan-through of the News’s Local section. Kirby McClendon—unshaven, tall n twitchy, well on his way to his date with all those baby aspirins—leaned in to take a look.

Billy drew back from him, fluttering a hand in front of his face. “Jesus, Kirb, when did you take your last shower? Columbus Day? Fourth of July?”

“Let me see,” Kirby said, ignoring him. He snatched the paper away. “Fuck, that’s Rip-Rip!”

Ronnie Malenfant got up so fast his chair fell over, entranced by the idea that Stoke had made the paper. When college kids showed up in the Derry News (except on the sports page, of course) it was always because they were in trouble. Others gathered around Kirby, Skip and me among them. It was Stokely Jones III, all right, and not just him. Standing in the background, their faces almost but not quite lost in the clusters of dots . . .

“Christ,” Skip said, “I think that’s Nate.” He sounded amused and astonished.

“And that’s Carol Gerber just up ahead of him,” I said in a funny, shocked voice. I knew the jacket with HARWICH HIGH SCHOOL on the back; knew the blond hair hanging over the jacket’s collar in a pony-tail; knew the faded jeans. And I knew the face. Even half-turned away and shadowed by a sign reading U.S. OUTOF VIETNAM NOW!, I knew the face. “That’s my girlfriend.” It was the first time the word girlfriend had come out of my mouth tied to Carol’s name, although I had been thinking of her that way for a couple of weeks at least.

POLICE BREAK UP DRAFTPROTEST, the photo caption read. No names were given. According to the accompanying story, a dozen or so pro-testers from the University of Maine had gathered in front of the Fed-eral Building in downtown Derry. They had carried signs and marched around the entrance to the Selective Service office for about an hour, singing songs and “chanting slogans, some obscene.” Police had been called and had at first only stood by, intending to allow the demon-stration to run its course, but then an opposing group of demonstra-tors had turned up—mostly construction workers on their lunch break. They had begun chanting their own slogans, and although the News didn’t mention if they were obscene or not, I could guess there had been invitations to go back to Russia, suggestions as to where the demonstrators could store their signs while not in use, and directions to the nearest barber shop.

When the protesters began to shout back at the construction workers and the construction workers began firing pieces of fruit from their dinner-buckets at the protesters, the police had stepped in. Citing the protesters’ lack of a permit (the Derry cops had appar-ently never heard about the right of Americans to assemble peace-ably), they rounded up the kids and took them to the police substation on Witcham Street. There they were simply released. “We only wanted to get them out of a bad atmosphere,” one cop was quoted as saying. “If they go back down there, they’re even dumber than they look.”

The photo really wasn’t much different from the one taken at East Annex during the Coleman Chemicals protest. It showed the cops leading the protesters away while construction workers (a year or so later they would all be sporting small American flags on their hard-hats) jeered and grinned and shook their fists. One cop was frozen in the act of reaching out toward Carol’s arm; Nate, standing behind her, had not attracted their attention, it seemed. Two more cops were escorting Stoke Jones, who was back to the camera but unmistakable on his crutches. If any further aid to identification was needed, there was that hand-drawn sparrow-track on his jacket.

“Look at that dumb fuck!” Ronnie crowed. (Ronnie, who had flunked two of four on the last round of prelims, had a nerve calling anyone a dumb fuck.) “Like he didn’t have anything better to do!”

Skip ignored him. So did I. For us Ronnie’s bluster was already fad-ing into insignificance no matter what the subject. We were fascinated by the sight of Carol . . . and of Nate Hoppenstand behind her, watching as the demonstrators were led away. Nate as neat as ever in an Ivy League shirt and jeans with cuffs and creases, Nate standing near the jeering, fist-shaking construction workers but totally ignored by them. Ignored by the cops, too. Neither group knew my roommate had lately become a fan of the subversive Mr. Phil Ochs.

I slipped out to the telephone booth and called Franklin Hall, sec-ond floor. Someone from the lounge answered and when I asked for Carol, the girl said Carol wasn’t there, she’d gone over to the library to study with Libby Sexton. “Is this Pete?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“There’s a note here for you. She left it on the glass.” This was com-mon practice in the dorms at that time. “It says she’ll call you later.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Skip was outside the telephone booth, motioning impatiently for me to come. We walked down the hall to see Nate, even though we knew we’d both lose our places at the tables where we’d been play-ing. In this case, curiosity outweighed obsession.

Nate’s face didn’t change much when we showed him the paper and asked him about the demonstration the day before, but his face never changed much. All the same, I sensed that he was unhappy, perhaps even miserable. I couldn’t understand why that would be— everything had ended well, after all; no one had gone to jail or even been named in the paper.

I’d just about decided I was reading too much into his usual quiet-ness when Skip said, “What’s eating you?”

There was a kind of rough concern in his voice. Nate’s lower lip trembled and then firmed at the sound of it. He leaned over the neat surface of his desk (my own was already covered in about nineteen layers of junk) and snagged a Kleenex from the box he kept by his record-player. He blew his nose long and hard. When he was finished he was under control again, but I could see the baffled unhappiness in his eyes. Part of me—a mean part—was glad to see it. Glad to know that you didn’t have to turn into a Hearts junkie to have prob-lems. Human nature can be so shitty sometimes.

“I rode up with Stoke and Harry Swidrowski and a few other guys,” Nate said.

“Was Carol with you?” I asked.

Nate shook his head. “I think she was with George Gilman’s bunch. There were five carloads of us in all.” I didn’t know George Gilman from Adam, but that did not prevent me from directing a dart of fairly sick jealousy at him. “Harry and Stoke are on the Com-mittee of Resistance. Gilman, too. Anyway, we—”

“Committee of Resistance?” Skip asked. “What’s that?”

“A club,” Nate said, and sighed. “They think it’s something more— especially Harry and George, they’re real firebrands—but it’s just another club, really, like the Maine Masque or the pep squad.”

Nate said he himself had gone along because it was a Tuesday and he didn’t have any classes on Tuesday afternoons. No one gave orders; no one passed around loyalty oaths or even sign-up sheets; there was no real pressure to march and none of the paramilitary beret-wearing fervor that crept into the antiwar movement later on. Carol and the kids with her had been laughing and bopping each other with their signs when they left the gym parking lot, according to Nate. (Laughing. Laughing with George Gilman. I threw another one of those germ-laden jealousy-darts.)

When they got to the Federal Building, some people demon-strated, marching around in circles in front of the Selective Service office door, and some people didn’t. Nate was one of those who didn’t. As he told us that, his usually smooth face tightened in another brief cramp of something that might have been real misery in a less settled boy.

“I meant to march with them,” he said. “All the way up I expected to march with them. It was exciting, six of us crammed into Harry Swidrowski’s Saab. A real trip. Hunter McPhail . . . do you guys know him?”

Skip and I shook our heads. I think both of us were a little awestruck to discover the owner of Meet Trini Lopez and Diane Renay Sings Navy Blue had what amounted to a secret life, includ-ing connections to the sort of people who attracted both cops and newspaper coverage.

“He and George Gilman started the Committee. Anyway, Hunter was holding Stoke’s crutches out the window of the Saab because we couldn’t fit them inside and we sang ‘I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore’ and talked about how maybe we could really stop the war if enough of us got together—that is, all of us talked about stuff like that except Stoke. He keeps pretty quiet.”

So, I thought. Even with them he keeps quite . . . except, presum-ably, when he decides a little credibility lecture is in order. But Nate wasn’t thinking about Stoke; Nate was thinking about Nate. Brood-ing over his feet’s inexplicable refusal to carry his heart where it had clearly wanted to go.

“All the way up I’m thinking, ‘I’ll march with them, I’ll march with them because it’s right . . . at least I think it’s right . . . and if someone takes a swing at me I’ll be nonviolent, just like the guys in the lunch-room sit-ins. Those guys won, maybe we can win, too.’ ” He looked at us. “I mean, it was never a question in my mind. You know?”

“Yeah,” Skip said. “I know.”

“But when we got there, I couldn’t do it. I helped hand out signs saying STOP THE WAR and U.S. OUTOF VIETNAM NOW and BRING THE BOYS HOME . . . Carol and I helped Stoke fix his so he could march with it and still use his crutches . . . but I couldn’t take one myself. I stood on the sidewalk with Bill Shadwick and Kerry Morin and a girl named Lorlie McGinnis . . . she’s my partner in Botany Lab . . .” He took the sheet of newspaper out of Skip’s hand and studied it, as if to confirm again that yes, it had all really happened; the master of Rinty and the boyfriend of Cindy had actually gone to an antiwar demon-stration. He sighed and then let the piece of newspaper drift to the floor. This was so unlike him it kind of hurt my head.

“I thought I would march with them. I mean, why else did I come? All the way down from Orono it was never, you know, a ques-tion in my mind.”

He looked at me, kind of pleading. I nodded as if I understood.

“But then I didn’t. I don’t know why.”

Skip sat down next to him on his bed. I found the Phil Ochs album and put it on the turntable. Nate looked at Skip, then looked away. Nate’s hands were as small and neat as the rest of him, except for the nails. The nails were ragged, bitten right down to the quick.

“Okay,” he said as if Skip had asked out loud. “I do know why. I was afraid they’d get arrested and I’d get arrested with them. That my picture would be in the paper getting arrested and my folks would see it.” There was a long pause. Poor old Nate was trying to say the rest. I held the needle over the first groove of the spinning record, waiting to see if he could. At last he did. “That my mother would see it.”

“It’s okay, Nate,” Skip said.

“I don’t think so,” Nate replied in a trembling voice. “I really don’t.” He wouldn’t meet Skip’s eyes, only sat there on his bed with his prominent chicken-ribs and bare white Yankee skin between his pajama bottoms and his freshman beanie, looking down at his gnawed cuticles. “I don’t like to argue about the war. Harry does . . . and Lorlie . . . George Gilman, gosh, you can’t get George to shut up about it, and most of the others on the Committee are the same. But when it comes to talking, I’m more like Stoke than them.”

“No one’s like Stoke,” I said. I remembered the day I met him on Bennett’s Walk. Why don’t you take it easy? I’d asked. Why don’t you eat me? Mr. Credibility had replied.

Nate was still studying his cuticles. “What I think is that Johnson is sending American boys over there to die for no reason. It isn’t imperialism or colonialism, like Harry Swidrowski believes, it’s not any ism at all. Johnson’s got it all mixed up in his mind with Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone and the New York Yankees, that’s all. And if I think that, I ought to say that. I ought to try to stop it. That’s what I learned in church, in school, even in the darned Boy Scouts of America. You’re supposed to stand up. If you see something happening that’s wrong, like a big guy beating up a little guy, you’re supposed to stand up and at least try to stop it. But I was afraid my mother’d see a picture of me getting arrested and cry.”

Nate raised his head and we saw he was crying himself. Just a lit-tle; wet lids and lashes, no more than that. For him that was a big deal, though.

“I found out one thing,” he said. “What that is on the back of Stoke Jones’s jacket.”

“What?” Skip asked.

“A combination of two British Navy semaphore letters. Look.” Nate stood up with his bare heels together. He lifted his left arm straight up toward the ceiling and dropped his right down to the floor, making a straight line. “That’s N.” Next he held his arms out at forty-five-degree angles to his body. I could see how the two shapes, when superimposed, would make the shape Stoke had inked on the back of his old duffle coat. “This one’s D.”

“N-D,” Skip said. “So?”

“The letters stand for nuclear disarmament. Bertrand Russell invented the symbol in the fifties.” He drew it on the back of his notebook:

“He called it a peace sign.”“Cool,” Skip said.Nate smiled and wiped under his eyes with his fingers. “That’s what I thought,” he agreed. “It’s a groove thing.” I dropped the needle on the record and we listened to Phil Ochs sing. Grooved to it, as we Atlanteans used to say.

20

The lounge in the middle of Chamberlain Three had become my Jupiter—a scary planet with a huge gravitational pull. Still, I resisted it that night, slipping back into the phone-booth instead and calling Franklin again. This time I got Carol.

“I’m all right,” she said, laughing a little. “I’m fine. One of the cops even called me little lady. Sheesh, Pete, such concern.”

How much concern did this guy Gilman show you? I felt like ask-ing, but even at eighteen I knew that wasn’t the way to go.

“You should have given me a call,” I said. “Maybe I would have gone with you. We could have taken my car.”

Carol began to giggle, a sweet sound but puzzling.

“What?”

“I was thinking about riding to an antiwar demonstration in a sta-tion wagon with a Goldwater sticker on the bumper.”

I guessed that was sort of funny.

“Besides,” she said, “I imagine you had other things to do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” As if I didn’t know. Through the glass of the phone-booth and that of the lounge, I could see most of my floor-mates playing cards in a fume of cigarette smoke. And even in here with the door closed I could hear Ronnie Malenfant’s high-pitched cackle. We’re chasing The Bitch, boys, we are cherchez-ing la cunt noire, and we’re going to have her out of the bushes.

“Studying or Hearts,” she said. “Studying, I hope. One of the girls on my floor goes out with Lennie Doria—or did, when he still had the time to go out. She calls it the card-game from hell. Am I being a nag yet?”

“No,” I said, not knowing if she was or not. Maybe I needed to be nagged. “Carol, are you okay?”

There was a long pause. “Yeah,” she said at last. “Sure I am.”

“The construction workers who showed up—”

“Mostly mouth,” she said. “Don’t worry. Really.”

But she didn’t sound right to me, not quite right . . . and there was George Gilman to worry about. I worried about him in a way I didn’t about Sully, the boyfriend back home.

“Are you on this Committee Nate told me about?” I asked her. “This Committee of Resistance whatsit?”

“No,” she said. “Not yet, at least. George has asked me to join. He’s this guy from my Polysci course. George Gilman. Do you know him?”

“Heard of him,” I said. I was clutching the phone too tightly and couldn’t seem to loosen up.

“He was the one who told me about the demonstration. I rode up with him and some others. I . . .” She broke off for a moment, then said with honest curiosity: “You’re not jealous of him, are you?”

“Well,” I said carefully, “he got to spend an afternoon with you. I’m jealous of that, I guess.”

“Don’t be. He’s got brains, plenty of them, but he’s also got a wif-fle haircut and great big shifty eyes. He shaves, but it seems like he always misses a big patch. He’s not the attraction, believe me.”

“Then what is?”

“Can I see you? I want to show you something. It won’t take long. But it might help if I could just explain . . .” Her voice wavered on the word and I realized she was close to tears.

“What’s wrong?”

“You mean other than that my father probably won’t let me back into his house once he’s seen me in the News? He’ll have the locks changed by this weekend, I bet. That’s if he hasn’t changed them already.”

I thought of Nate saying he was afraid his mother would see a pic-ture of him getting arrested. Mommy’s good little pre-dent pinched down in Derry for parading in front of the Federal Building without a permit. Ah, the shame, the shame. And Carol’s dad? Not quite the same deal, but close. Carol’s dad was a steady boy who said ship ahoy and joined the Nay-yay-vee, after all.

“He may not see the story,” I said. “Even if he does, the paper didn’t use any names.”

“The picture.” She spoke patiently, as if to someone who can’t help being dense. “Didn’t you see the picture?”

I started to say that her face was mostly turned away from the camera and what you could see was in shadow. Then I remembered her high-school jacket with HARWICH HIGH SCHOOL blaring across the back. Also, he was her father, for Christ’s sake. Even half-turned away from the camera, her father would know her.

“He may not see the picture, either,” I said lamely. “Damariscotta’s at the far edge of the News’s area.”

“Is that how you want to live your life, Pete?” She still sounded patient, but now it was patience with an edge. “Doing stuff and then hoping people won’t find out?”

“No,” I said. And could I get mad at her for saying that, considering that Annmarie Soucie still didn’t have the slightest idea that Carol Gerber was alive? I didn’t think so. Carol and I weren’t married or anything, but marriage wasn’t the issue. “No, I don’t. But Carol . . . you don’t have to shove the damned newspaper under his nose for him, do you?”

She laughed. The sound had none of the brightness I had heard in her earlier giggle, but I thought even a rueful laugh was better than none at all. “I won’t have to. He’ll find it. That’s just the way he is. But I had to go, Pete. And I’ll probably join the Committee of Resis-tance even though George Gilman always looks like a little kid who just got caught eating boogers and Harry Swidrowski has the world’s worst breath. Because it’s . . . the thing of it is . . . you see . . .” She blew a frustrated I-can’t-explain sigh into my ear. “Listen, you know where we go out for smoke-breaks?”

“At Holyoke? By the Dumpsters, sure.”

“Meet me there,” Carol said. “In fifteen minutes. Can you?”

“Yes.”

“I have a lot more studying to do so I can’t stay long, but I . . . I just . . .”

“I’ll be there.”

I hung up the phone and stepped out of the booth. Ashley Rice was standing in the doorway of the lounge, smoking and doing a lit-tle shuffle-step. I deduced that he was between games. His face was too pale, the black stubble on his cheeks standing out like pencil-marks, and his shirt had gone beyond simply soiled; it looked lived-in. He had a wide-eyed Danger High Voltage look that I later came to associate with heavy cocaine users. And that’s what the game really was; a kind of drug. Not the kind that mellowed you out, either.

“What do you say, Pete?” he asked. “Want to play a few hands?”

“Maybe later,” I said, and started down the hall. Stoke Jones was thumping back from the bathroom in a frayed old robe. His crutches left round wet tracks on the dark red linoleum. His long, crazy hair was wet. I wondered how he did in the shower; certainly there were none of the railings and grab-handles that later became standard in public washing facilities. He didn’t look as though he would much enjoy discussing the subject, however. That or any other subject.

“How you doing, Stoke?” I asked.

He went by without answering, head down, dripping hair plas-tered to his cheeks, soap and towel clamped under one arm, mutter-ing “Rip-rip, rip-rip” under his breath. He never even looked up at me. Say whatever you wanted about Stoke Jones, you could depend on him to put a little fuck-you into your day.

21

Carol was already at Holyoke when I got there. She had brought a couple of milk-boxes from the area where the Dumpsters were lined up and was sitting on one of them, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. I sat down on the other one, put my arm around her, and kissed her. She put her head on my shoulder for a moment, not saying anything.

This wasn’t much like her, but it was nice. I kept my arm around her and looked up at the stars. The night was mild for so late in the sea-son, and lots of people—couples, mostly—were out walking, taking advantage of the weather. I could hear their murmured conversa-tions. From above us, in the Commons dining room, a radio was playing “Hang On, Sloopy.” One of the janitors, I suppose.

Carol raised her head at last and moved away from me a little— just enough to let me know I could take my arm back. That was more like her, actually. “Thanks,” she said. “I needed a hug.”

“My pleasure.”

“I’m a little scared about facing my dad. Not real scared, but a little.”

“It’ll be all right.” Not saying it because I really thought it would be—I couldn’t know a thing like that—but because it’s what you say, isn’t it? Just what you say.

“My dad’s not the reason I went with Harry and George and the rest. It’s no big Freudian rebellion, or anything like that.”

She flicked her cigarette away and we watched it fountain sparks when it struck the bricks of Bennett’s Walk. Then she took her little clutch purse out of her lap, opened it, found her wallet, opened that, and thumbed through a selection of snapshots stuck in those small celluloid windows. She stopped, slipped one out, and handed it to me. I leaned forward so I could see it by the light falling through the dining-hall windows, where the janitors were probably doing the floors.

The picture showed three kids of eleven or twelve, a girl and two boys. They were all wearing blue tee-shirts with the words STERLING HOUSE on them in red block letters. They were standing in a parking lot somewhere and had their arms around each other—an easy pals-forever pose that was sort of beautiful. The girl was in the middle. The girl was Carol, of course.

“Which one is Sully-John?” I asked. She looked at me, a little sur-prised . . . but with the smile. In any case, I thought I already knew. Sully-John would be the one with the broad shoulders, the wide grin, and the tumbled black hair. It reminded me of Stoke’s hair, although the boy had obviously run a comb through his thatch. I tapped him. “This one, right?”

“That’s Sully,” she agreed, then touched the face of the other boy with her fingernail. He had a sunburn rather than a tan. His face was narrower, the eyes a little closer together, the hair a carroty red and mowed in a crewcut that made him look like a kid on a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. There was a faint frown-line on his brow. Sully’s arms were already muscular for a kid’s; this other boy had thin arms, thin stick arms. They were probably still thin stick arms. On the hand not slung around Carol’s shoulders he was wearing a big brown baseball glove.

“This one’s Bobby,” she said. Her voice had changed, somehow. There was something in it I’d never heard before. Sorrow? But she was still smiling. If it was sorrow she felt, why was she smiling? “Bobby Garfield. He was my first boyfriend. My first love, I guess you could say. He and Sully and I were best friends back then. Not so long ago, 1960, but it seems long ago.”

“What happened to him?” I was somehow sure she was going to tell me he had died, this boy with the narrow face and the crewcut carrot-top.

“He and his mom moved away. We wrote back and forth for awhile, and then we lost touch. You know how kids are.”

“Nice baseball glove.”

Carol still with the smile. I could see the tears that had come into her eyes as we sat looking down at the snapshot, but still with the smile. In the white light of the fluorescents from the dining hall, her tears looked silver—the tears of a princess in a fairy-tale.

“That was Bobby’s favorite thing. There’s a baseball player named Alvin Dark, right?”

“There was.”

“That’s what kind of a glove Bobby had. An Alvin Dark model.”

“Mine was a Ted Williams. I think my mom rummage-saled it a couple of years ago.”

“Bobby’s got stolen,” Carol said. I’m not sure she knew I was there anymore. She kept touching that narrow, slightly frowning face with her fingertip. It was as if she had regressed into her own past. I’ve heard that hypnotists can do that with good subjects. “Willie took it.”

“Willie?”

“Willie Shearman. I saw him playing ball with it a year later, down at Sterling House. I was so mad. My mom and dad were always fighting then, working up to the divorce, I guess, and I was mad all the time. Mad at them, mad at my math teacher, mad at the whole world. I was still scared of Willie, but mostly I was mad at him . . . and besides, I wasn’t by myself, not that day. So I marched right up to him and said I knew that was Bobby’s glove and he ought to give it to me. I said I had Bobby’s address in Massachusetts and I’d send it to him. Willie said I was crazy, it was his glove, and he showed me his name on the side. He’d erased Bobby’s—best as he could, anyway— and printed his own over where it had been. But I could still see the bby, from Bobby.”

A creepy sort of indignation had crept into her voice. It made her sound younger. And look younger. I suppose my memory could be wrong about that, but I don’t think it is. Sitting there on the edge of the white light from the dining hall, I think she looked about twelve. Thirteen at the most.

“He couldn’t erase the Alvin Dark signature in the pocket, though, or write over it . . . and he blushed. Dark red. Red as roses. Then—do you know what?—he apologized for what he and his two friends did to me. He was the only one who ever did, and I think he meant it. But he lied about the glove. I don’t think he wanted it, it was old and the webbing was all broken out and it looked all wrong on his hand, but he lied so he could keep it. I don’t understand why. I never have.”

“I’m not following this,” I said.

“Why should you? It’s all jumbled up in my mind and I was there. My mother told me once that happens to people who are in accidents or fights. I remember some of it pretty well—mostly the parts with Bobby in them—but almost everything else comes from what people told me later on.

“I was in the park down the street from my house, and these three boys came along—Harry Doolin, Willie Shearman, and another one. I can’t remember the other one’s name. It doesn’t matter, anyway. They beat me up. I was only eleven but that didn’t stop them. Harry Doolin hit me with a baseball bat. Willie and the other one held me so I couldn’t run away.”

“A baseball bat? Are you shitting me?”

She shook her head. “At first they were joking, I think, and then . . . they weren’t. My arm got dislocated. I screamed and I guess they ran away. I sat there, holding my arm, too hurt and too . . . too shocked I guess . . . to know what to do. Or maybe I tried to get up and get help for myself and couldn’t. Then Bobby came along. He walked me out of the park and then he picked me up and carried me back to his apartment. All the way up Broad Street Hill on one of the hottest days of the year. He carried me in his arms.”

I took the snapshot from her, held it in the light, and bent over it, looking at the boy with the crewcut. Looking at his thin stick arms, then looking at the girl. She was an inch or two taller than he was, and broader in the shoulders. I looked at the other boy, Sully. He of the tumbled black hair and the All-American grin. Stoke Jones’s hair; Skip Kirk’s grin. I could see Sully carrying her in his arms, yeah, but the other kid—

“I know,” she said. “He doesn’t look big enough, does he? But he carried me. I started to faint and he carried me.” She took the picture back.

“And while he was doing that, this kid Willie who helped beat you up came back and stole his glove?”

She nodded. “Bobby took me to his apartment. There was this old guy who lived in a room upstairs, Ted, who seemed to know a little bit about everything. He popped my arm back into its socket. I remember he gave me his belt to bite on when he did it. Or maybe it was Bobby’s belt. He said I could catch the pain, and I did. After that . . . after that, something bad happened.”

“Worse than getting lumped up with a baseball bat?”

“In a way. I don’t want to talk about it.” She wiped her tears away with one hand, first one side and then the other, still looking at the snapshot. “Later on, before he and his mother left Harwich, Bobby beat up the boy who actually used the bat. Harry Doolin.”

Carol put her photograph back in its little compartment.

“What I remember best about that day—the only thing about it worth remembering—is that Bobby Garfield stood up for me. Sully was bigger, and Sully might have stood up for me if he’d been there, but he wasn’t. Bobby was there, and he carried me all the way up the hill. He did what was right. It’s the best thing, the most important thing, anyone has ever done for me in my life. Do you see that, Pete?”

“Yeah. I do.”

I saw something else, too: she was saying almost exactly what Nate had said not an hour before . . . only she had marched. Had taken one of the signs and marched with it. Of course Nate Hop-penstand had never been beaten up by three boys who started out jok-ing and then decided they were serious. And maybe that was the difference.

“He carried me up that hill,” she said. “I always wanted to tell him how much I loved him for that, and how much I loved him for show-ing Harry Doolin that there’s a price to pay for hurting people, espe-cially people who are smaller than you and don’t mean you any harm.”

“So you marched.”

“I marched. I wanted to tell someone why. I wanted to tell some-one who’d understand. My father won’t and my mother can’t. Her friend Rionda called me and said . . .” She didn’t finish, only sat there on the milk-box, fidgeting with her little bag.

“Said what?”

“Nothing.” She sounded exhausted, forlorn. I wanted to kiss her, at least put my arm around her, but I was afraid doing either would spoil what had just happened. Because something had happened. There was magic in her story. Not in the middle, but somewhere out around the edges. I felt it.

“I marched, and I guess I’ll join the Committee of Resistance. My roommate says I’m crazy, I’ll never get a job if a commie student group’s part of my college records, but I think I’m going to do it.”

“And your father? What about him?”

“Fuck him.”

There was a semi-shocked moment when we considered what she had just said, and then Carol giggled. “Now that’s Freudian.” She stood up. “I have to go back and study. Thanks for coming out, Pete. I haven’t ever shown that picture to anyone. I haven’t looked at it myself in who knows how long. I feel better. Lots.”

“Good.” I got up myself. “Before you go in, will you help me do something?”

“Sure, what?”

“I’ll show you. It won’t take long.”

I walked her down the side of Holyoke and then we started up the hill behind it. About two hundred yards away was the Steam Plant parking lot, where undergrads ineligible for parking stickers (fresh-men, sophomores, and most juniors) had to keep their cars. It was the prime makeout spot on campus once it got cold, but making out in my car wasn’t on my mind that night.

“Did you ever tell Bobby about who got his baseball glove?” I asked. “You said you wrote to him.”

“I didn’t see the point.”

We walked in silence for a little while. Then I said: “I’m going to call it off with Annmarie over Thanksgiving. I started to phone her, then didn’t. If I’m going to do it, I guess I better find the guts to do it face to face.” I hadn’t been aware of coming to any such decision, not consciously, but it seemed I had. Certainly it wasn’t something I was saying just to please Carol.

She nodded, scuffing through the leaves in her sneakers, holding her little bag in one hand, not looking at me. “I had to use the phone. Called S-J and told him I was seeing a guy.”

I stopped. “When?”

“Last week.” Now she looked up at me. Dimples; slightly curved lower lip; the smile.

“Last week? And you didn’t tell me?”

“It was my business,” she said. “Mine and Sully’s. I mean, it isn’t like he’s going to come after you with a . . .” She paused long enough for both of us to think with a baseball bat and then went on, “That he’s going to come after you, or anything. Come on, Pete. If we’re going to do something, let’s do it. I’m not going riding with you, though. I really have to study.”

“No rides.”

We got walking again. The Steam Plant lot seemed huge to me in those days—hundreds of cars parked in dozens of moonlit rows. I could hardly ever remember where I left my brother’s old Ford wagon. The last time I was back at UM, the lot was three, maybe even four times as big, with space for a thousand cars or more. Time passes and everything gets bigger except us.

“Hey Pete?” Walking. Looking down at her sneakers again even though we were on the asphalt now and there were no more leaves to scuff.

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t want you to go breaking up with Annmarie because of me. Because I have an idea we’re . . . temporary. All right?”

“Yeah.” What she said made me unhappy—it was what the citi-zens of Atlantis referred to as a bummer—but it didn’t really sur-prise me. “I guess it’ll have to be.”

“I like you, and I like being with you now, but it’s just liking you, that’s all it is, and it’s best to be honest. So if you want to keep your mouth shut when you go home for the holiday—”

“Kind of keep her around at home? Sort of like a spare tire in case we get a flat here at school?”

She looked startled, then laughed. “Touché,” she said.

“Touché for what?”

“I don’t even know, Pete . . . but I do like you.”

She stopped, turned to me, slipped her arms around my neck. We kissed for a little while between two rows of cars, kissed until I got a pretty decent bone on, one I’m sure she could feel. Then she gave me a final peck on the lips and we started walking again.

“What did Sully say when you told him? I don’t know if I’m sup-posed to ask, but—”

“—but you want information,” she said in a brusque Number Two voice. T hen she laughed. It was the rueful one. “I was expecting he’d be angry, or that he might even cry. Sully’s big and he scares the devil out of the football players he matches up against, but his feel-ings are always close to the skin. What I didn’t expect was relief.”

“Relief?”

“Relief. He’s been seeing this girl in Bridgeport for a month or more . . . except my mom’s friend Rionda told me she’s actually a woman, maybe twenty-four or -five.”

“Sounds like a recipe for disaster,” I said, hoping I sounded measured and thoughtful. I was actually delighted. Of course I was. And if pore ole gosh-darned tender-hearted John Sullivan stumbled into the plot of a country-western Merle Haggard song, well, four hundred million Red Chinese wouldn’t give a shit, and that went double for me.

We had almost arrived at my car. It was just one more old heap among all the others, but, courtesy of my brother, it was mine. “He’s got more on his mind than his new love interest,” Carol said. “He’s going into the Army when he finishes high school next June. He’s already talked to the recruiter and got it arranged. He can’t wait to get over there in Vietnam and start making the world safe for democracy.”

“Did you have a fight with him about the war?”

“Nope. What would be the use? For that matter, what would I tell him? That for me it’s all about Bobby Garfield? That all the stuff Harry Swidrowski and George Gilman and Hunter McPhail say seems like smoke and mirrors compared to Bobby carrying me up Broad Street Hill? Sully would think I was crazy. Or say it’s because I’m too smart. Sully feels sorry for people who are too smart. He says being too smart is a disease. And maybe he’s right. I kind of love him, you know. He’s sweet. He’s also the kind of guy who needs someone to take care of him.”

And I hope he finds someone, I thought. Just as long as it’s not you.

She looked judiciously at my car. “Okay,” she said. “It’s ugly, it desperately needs a wash, but it’s transportation. The question is, what’re we doing here when I should be reading a Flannery O’Con-nor story?”

I took out my pocket-knife and opened it. “Got a nail-file in your bag?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. Are we going to fight? Number Two and Number Six go at it in the Steam Plant parking lot?”

“Don’t be a smartass. Just get it out and follow me.”

By the time we got around to the back of the station wagon, she was laughing—not the rueful laugh but the full-out guffaw I’d first heard when Skip’s horny hotdog man came down the dishline con-veyor belt. She finally understood why we were here.

Carol took one side of the bumper sticker; I took the other; we met in the middle. Then we watched the shreds blow away across the macadam. Au revoir, AuH₂O-4-USA. Bye-bye, Barry. And we laughed. Man, we just couldn’t stop laughing.

22

A couple of days later my friend Skip, who’d come to college with the political awareness of a mollusk, put up a poster on his side of the room he shared with Brad Witherspoon. It showed a smiling busi-nessman in a three-piece suit. One hand was extended to shake. The other was hidden behind his back, but something clutched in it was dripping blood between his shoes. WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS, the poster said. INVESTYOUR SON.

Dearie was horrified.

“So you’re against Vietnam now?” he asked when he saw it. Below his chin-out truculence I think our beloved floor-proctor was badly shocked by that poster. Skip, after all, had been a first-class high-school baseball player. Was expected to play college ball, too. Had been courted by both Delta Tau Delta and Phi Gam, the jock frats. Skip was no sickly cripple like Stoke Jones (Dearie Dearborn had also taken to calling Stoke Rip-Rip), no frog-eyed weirdo like George Gilman.

“Hey, all this poster means is that a lot of people are making money out of a big bloody mess,” Skip said. “McDonnell-Douglas. Boeing. GE. Dow Chemical and Coleman Chemicals. Pepsi Fuckin Cola. Lots more.”

Dearie’s gimlet gaze conveyed (or tried to) the idea that he had thought about such issues more deeply than Skip Kirk ever could. “Let me ask you something—do you think we should just stand back and let Uncle Ho take over down there?”

“I don’t know what I think,” Skip said, “not yet. I only started getting interested in the subject a couple of weeks ago. I’m still play-ing catch-up.”

This was at seven-thirty in the morning, and a little group out-bound for eight o’clock classes had gathered around Skip’s door. I saw Ronnie (plus Nick Prouty; by this point the two of them had become inseparable), Ashley Rice, Lennie Doria, Billy Marchant, maybe four or five others. Nate was leaning in the doorway of 302, wearing a tee-shirt and his pj bottoms. In the stairwell, Stoke Jones leaned on his crutches. He had apparently been on his way out and had turned back to monitor the discussion.

Dearie said, “When the Viet Cong come into a South Viet ’ville, the first thing they look for are people wearing crucifixes, St. Christo-pher medals, Mary medals, anything of that nature. Catholics are killed. People who believe in God are killed. Do you think we should stand back while the commies kill people who believe in God?”

“Why not?” Stoke said from the stairwell. “We stood back and let the Nazis kill the Jews for six years. Jews believe in God, or so I’m told.”

“Fucking Rip-Rip!” Ronnie shouted. “Who the fuck asked you to play the piano?”

But by then Stoke Jones, aka Rip-Rip, was making his way down the stairs. The echoey sound of his crutches made me think of the recently departed Frank Stuart.

Dearie turned back to Skip. His hands were fisted on his hips. Lying against the front of his white tee-shirt was a set of dogtags. His father had worn them in France and Germany, he told us; had been wearing them as he lay behind a tree, hiding from the machine-gun fire that had killed two men in his company and wounded four more. What this had to do with the Vietnam conflict none of us quite knew, but it was clearly a big deal to Dearie, so none of us asked. Even Ron-nie had sense enough to keep his trap shut.

“If we let them take South Vietnam, they’ll take Cambodia.” Dearie’s eyes moved from Skip to me to Ronnie . . . to all of us. “Then Laos. Then the Philippines. One after the other.”

“If they can do that, maybe they deserve to win,” I said.

Dearie looked at me, shocked. I was sort of shocked myself, but I didn’t take it back.

23

There was one more round of prelims before the Thanksgiving break, and for the young scholars of Chamberlain Three, it was a disaster. By then most of us understood that we were a disaster, that we were committing a kind of group suicide. Kirby McClendon did his freak-out thing and disappeared like a rabbit in a magic trick. Kenny Auster, who usually sat in the corner during the marathon games and picked his nose when he couldn’t decide what card to play next, sim-ply bugged out one day. He left a queen of spades with the words “I quit” written across it on his pillow. George Lessard joined Steve Ogg and Jack Frady in Chad, the brain dorm.

Six down, thirteen to go.

It should have been enough. Hell, just what happened to poor old Kirby should have been enough; in the last three or four days before he freaked, his hands were trembling so badly he had trouble picking up his cards and he jumped in his seat if someone slammed a door in the hall. Kirby should have been enough but he wasn’t. Nor was my time with Carol the answer. When I was actually with her, yes, I was fine. When I was with her all I wanted was information (and maybe to ball her socks off ). When I was in the dorm, though, especially in that goddamned third-floor lounge, I became another version of Peter Riley. In the third-floor lounge I was a stranger to myself.

As Thanksgiving approached, a kind of blind fatalism set in. None of us talked about it, though. We talked about the movies, or sex (“I get more ass than a merry-go-round pony!” Ronnie used to crow, usually with no warning or conversational lead-in of any kind), but mostly we talked about Vietnam . . . and Hearts. Our Hearts discus-sions were about who was ahead, who was behind, and who couldn’t seem to master the few simple strategic ploys of the game: void your-self in at least one suit; pass midrange hearts to someone who likes to shoot the moon; if you have to take a trick, always take it high.

Our only real response to the looming third round of prelims was to organize the game into a kind of endless, revolving tournament. We were still playing nickel-a-point, but we were now also playing for “match points.” The system for awarding match points was quite complex, but Randy Echolls and Hugh Brennan worked out a good formula in two feverish late-night sessions. Both of them, inciden-tally, were flunking their introductory math courses; neither was invited back at the conclusion of the fall semester.

Thirty-three years have passed since that pre-Thanksgiving round of exams, and the man that boy became still winces at the memory of them. I flunked everything but Sociology and Intro English. I didn’t have to see the grades to know it, either. Skip said he’d flagged the board except for Calc, and there he barely squeaked by. I was taking Carol out to a movie that night, our one pre-break date (and our last, although I didn’t know that then), and saw Ronnie Malenfant on my way to get my car. I asked him how he thought he’d done on his tests; Ronnie smiled and winked and said, “Aced everything, champ. Just like on fuckin College Bowl. I’m not worried.” But in the light of the parking lot I could see his smile wavering minutely at the cor-ners. His skin was too pale, and his acne, bad when we started school in September, was worse than ever. “How ’bout you?”

“They’re going to make me Dean of Arts and Sciences,” I said. “That tell you anything?”

Ronnie burst out laughing. “You fuckin pisspot!” He clapped me on the shoulder. The cocky look in his eyes had been replaced by fright that made him look younger. “Goin out?”

“Yeah.”

“Carol?”

“Yeah.”

“Good for you. She’s a great-lookin chick.” For Ronnie, this was nearly heartrending sincerity. “And if I don’t see you in the lounge later on, have a great turkey-day.”

“You too, Ronnie.”

“Yeah. Sure.” Looking at me from the corners of his eyes rather than straight on. Trying to hold the smile. “One way or another, I guess we’re both gonna eat the bird, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yeah. I guess that pretty well sums it up.”

24

It was hot, even with the engine off and the heater off it was hot, we had warmed up the whole inside of the car with our bodies, the win-dows steamed so that the light from the parking lot came in all diffused, like light through a pebbled-glass bathroom window, and the radio was on, Mighty John Marshall making with the oldies, The Humble Yet Nonetheless Mighty playing The Four Seasons and The Dovells and Jack Scott and Little Richard and Freddie “Boom Boom” Cannon, all those oldies, and her sweater was open and her bra was draped over the seat with one strap hanging down, a thick white strap, bra-technology in those days hadn’t yet taken that next great leap forward, and oh man her skin was warm, her nipple rough in my mouth, and she still had her panties on but only sort of, they were all pushed and bunched to one side and I had first one finger in her and then two fingers, Chuck Berry singing “Johnny B. Goode” and The Royal Teens singing “Short Shorts,” and her hand was inside my fly, fingers pulling at the elastic of my own short-shorts, and I could smell her, the perfume on her neck and the sweat on her temples just below where her hair started, and I could hear her, hear the live pulse of her breath, wordless whispers in my mouth as we kissed, all of this with the front seat of my car pushed back as far as it would go, me not thinking of flunked prelims or the war in Vietnam or LBJ wearing a lei or Hearts or anything, only wanting her, wanting her right here and right now, and then suddenly she was straightening up and straightening me up, both hands planted on my chest, splayed fingers pushing me back toward the steering wheel. I moved toward her again, slipping one of my own hands up her thigh, and she said “Pete, no!” in a sharp voice and closed her legs, the knees coming together loud enough so I could hear the sound they made, that locking sound that means you’re done making out, like it or not. I didn’t like it but I stopped.

I leaned my head back against the fogged-up window on the driver’s side, breathing hard. My cock was an iron bar stuffed down the front of my underwear, so hard it hurt. That would go away soon enough— no hardon lasts forever, I think Benjamin Disraeli said that—but even after the erection’s gone, the blue balls linger on. It’s just a fact of guy life.

We had left the movie—some really terrible good-ole-boy thang with Burt Reynolds in it—early and had come back to the Steam Plant parking lot with the same thing on our minds . . . or so I’d hoped. I guess it was the same thing, except I had been hoping for a little more of it than I’d gotten.

Carol had pulled the sides of her sweater together but her bra still hung over the back of the seat and she looked madly desirable with her breasts trying to tumble out through the gap and half an areola visible in the dim light. She had her purse open and was fumbling her cigarettes out with shaky hands.

“Whooo,” she said. Her voice was as shaky as her hands. “I mean holy cow.”

“You look like Brigitte Bardot with your sweater open like that,” I told her.

She looked up, surprised and—I thought—pleased. “Do you really think so? Or is it just the blond hair?”

“The hair? Shit, no. Mostly it’s . . .” I gestured toward her front. She looked down at herself and laughed. She didn’t do the buttons, though, or try to pull the sides any more closely together. I’m not sure she could have, anyway—as I remember, that sweater was a wonderfully tight fit.

“There was a theater up the street from us when I was a kid, the Asher Empire. It’s torn down now, but when we were kids—Bobby and Sully-John and me—it seemed they were always showing her pictures. I think that one of them, And God Created Woman, must have played there for about a thousand years.”

I burst out laughing and took my own cigarettes off the dash-board. “That was always the third feature at the Gates Falls Drive-In on Friday and Saturday nights.”

“Did you ever see it?”

“Are you kidding? I wasn’t even allowed to go to the drive-in unless it was a Disney double feature. I think I must have seen Tonka with Sal Mineo at least seven times. But I remember the previews. Brigitte in her towel.”

“I’m not coming back to school,” she said, and lit her cigarette. She spoke so calmly that at first I thought we were still talking about old movies, or midnight in Calcutta, or whatever it took to persuade our bodies that it was time to go back to sleep, the action was over. Then it clicked in my head.

“You . . . did you say . . . ?”

“I said I’m not coming back after break. And it’s not going to be much of a Thanksgiving at home, as far as that goes, but what the hell.”

“Your father?”

She shook her head, drawing on her cigarette. In the light of its coal her face was all orange highlights and crescents of gray shadow. She looked older. Still beautiful, but older. On the radio Paul Anka was singing “Diana.” I snapped it off.

“My father’s got nothing to do with it. I’m going back to Harwich. Do you remember me mentioning my mother’s friend Rionda?”

I sort of did, so I nodded.

“Rionda took the picture I showed you, the one of me with Bobby and S-J. She says . . .” Carol looked down at her skirt, which was still hiked most of the way to her waist, and began plucking at it. You can never tell what’s going to embarrass people; sometimes it’s toilet functions, sometimes it’s the sexual hijinks of relatives, sometimes it’s show-off behavior. And sometimes, of course, it’s drink.

“Let’s put it this way, my dad’s not the only one in the Gerber fam-ily with a booze problem. He taught my mother how to tip her elbow, and she was a good student. For a long time she laid off—she went to AA meetings, I think—but Rionda says she’s started again. So I’m going home. I don’t know if I can take care of her or not, but I’m going to try. For my brother as much as my mother. Rionda says Ian doesn’t know if he’s coming or going. Of course he never did.” She smiled.

“Carol, that’s maybe not such a good idea. To shoot your educa-tion that way—”

She looked up angrily. “You want to talk about shooting my edu-cation? You know what I’m hearing about that fucking Hearts game on Chamberlain Three these days? That everyone on the floor is going to flunk out by Christmas, including you. Penny Lang says that by the start of spring semester there won’t be anyone left up there but that shithead proctor of yours.”

“Nah,” I said, “that’s an exaggeration. Nate’ll be left. Stokely Jones, too, if he doesn’t break his neck going downstairs some night.”

“You act as though it’s funny,” she said.

“It’s not funny,” I said. No, it wasn’t funny.

“Then why don’t you quit it?”

Now I was the one starting to feel angry. She had pushed me away and clapped her knees shut, had told me she was going away just when I was starting to not only want her around but need her around, she had left me with what was soon going to be a world-class case of blue balls . . . and now it was all about me. Now it was all about cards.

“I don’t know why I don’t quit it,” I said. “Why don’t you find someone else to take care of your mother? Why doesn’t this friend of hers, Rawanda—”

“Ri-on-da.”

“—take care of her? I mean, is it your fault your mother’s a lush?”

“My mother is not a lush! Don’t you call her that!”

“Well, she’s sure something, if you’re going to drop out of college on her account. If it’s that serious, Carol, it’s sure something.”

“Rionda has a job and a mother of her own to worry about,” Carol said. The anger had gone out of her. She sounded deflated, dispirited. I could remember the laughing girl who had stood beside me, watch-ing the shreds of Goldwater bumper sticker blow away across the macadam, but this didn’t seem like the same one. “My mother is my mother. There’s only Ian and me to take care of her, and Ian’s barely making it in high school. Besides, there’s always UConn.”

“You want some information?” I asked her. My voice was trem-bling, thickening. “I’ll give you some whether you want it or not. Okay? You’re breaking my heart here. That’s the information. You’re breaking my goddam heart.”

“I’m not, though,” she said. “Hearts are tough, Pete. Most times they don’t break. Most times they only bend.”

Yeah, yeah, and Confucius say woman who fly upside down have crackup. I began to cry. Not a lot, but they were tears, all right. Mostly I think it was being caught so utterly unprepared. And okay, maybe I was crying for myself, as well. Because I was scared. I was now flunking or in danger of flunking all but a single subject, one of my friends was planning to push the EJECT button, and I couldn’t seem to stop playing cards. Nothing was going the way I had expected it would once I got to college, and I was terrified.

“I don’t want you to go,” I said. “I love you.” Then I tried to smile. “Just a little more information, okay?”

She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read, then cranked down her window and tossed out her cigarette. She rolled the win-dow back up and held out her arms to me. “Come here.”

I put out my own cigarette in the overflowing ashtray and slipped across to her side of the seat. Into her arms. She kissed me, then looked into my eyes. “Maybe you love me and maybe you don’t. I’d never try to talk anyone out of loving me, I can tell you that much, because there’s never enough loving to go around. But you’re con-fused, Pete. About school, about Hearts, about Annmarie, and about me, too.”

I started to say I wasn’t, but of course I was.

“I can go to UConn,” she said. “If my mother shapes up, I will go to UConn. If that doesn’t work out, I can take courses part-time at Pennington in Bridgeport, or even CED courses at night in Stratford or Harwich. I can do those things, I have the luxury of doing those things, because I’m a girl. This is a good time to be a girl, believe me. Lyndon Johnson has seen to that.”

“Carol—”

She put her hand gently against my mouth. “If you flunk out this December, you’re apt to be in the jungle next December. You need to think about that, Pete. It’s one thing for Sully. He thinks it’s right and he wants to go. You don’t know what you want or what you think, and you won’t as long as you keep running those cards.”

“Hey, I took the Goldwater sticker off my car, didn’t I?” It sounded foolish to my own ears.

She said nothing.

“When are you going?”

“Tomorrow afternoon. I have a ticket on the four o’clock Trailways bus to New York. The Harwich stop isn’t more than three blocks from my front door.”

“Are you leaving from Derry?”

“Yes.”

“Can I drive you to the depot? I could pick you up at your dorm around three.”

She considered it, then nodded . . . but I saw a shaded look in her eyes. It was hard to miss, because those eyes were usually so wide and guileless. “That would be good,” she said. “Thank you. And I didn’t lie to you, did I? I told you we might be temporary.”

I sighed. “Yeah.” Only this was a lot more temporary than I had been expecting.

“Now, Number Six: We want . . . information.”

“You won’t get it.” It was hard to sound as tough as Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner when you still felt like crying, but I did my best.

“Even if I ask pretty please?” She took my hand, slipped it inside her sweater, placed it on her left breast. The part of me which had begun to swoon snapped immediately back to attention.

“Well . . .”

“Have you ever done it before? I mean, all the way? That’s the information I want.”

I hesitated. It’s a question most boys find difficult, I imagine, and one most lie about. I didn’t want to lie to Carol. “No,” I said.

She slipped daintily out of her panties, tossed them over into the back seat, and laced her fingers together behind my neck. “I have. Twice. With Sully. I don’t think he was very good at it . . . but he’d never been to college. You have.”

My mouth felt very dry, but that must have been an illusion, because when I kissed her our mouths were wet; they slipped all around, tongues and lips and nipping teeth. When I could talk I said, “I’ll do my best to share my college education.”

“Put on the radio,” she said, unbuckling my belt and unsnapping my jeans. “Put on the radio, Pete, I like the oldies.”

So I put on the radio and I kissed her and there was a spot, a cer-tain spot, her fingers guided me to it and there was a moment when I was the same old same old and then there was a new place to be. She was very warm in there. Very warm and very tight. She whis-pered in my ear, her lips tickling against the skin: “Slow. Eat every one of your vegetables and maybe you’ll get dessert.”

Jackie Wilson sang “Lonely Teardrops” and I went slow. Roy Orbi-son sang “Only the Lonely” and I went slow. Wanda Jackson sang “Let’s Have a Party” and I went slow. Mighty John did an ad for Brannigan’s, Derry’s hottest bottle club, and I went slow. Then she began to moan and it wasn’t her fingers on my neck but her nails digging into it, and when she began to move her hips up against me in short hard thrusts I couldn’t go slow and then The Platters were on the radio, The Platters were singing “Twilight Time” and she began to moan that she hadn’t known, hadn’t had a clue, oh gee, oh Pete, oh gee, oh Jesus, Jesus Christ, Pete, and her lips were all over my mouth and my chin and my jaw, she was frantic with kisses. I could hear the seat creaking, I could smell cigarette smoke and the pine air-freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, and by then I was moaning, too, I don’t know what, The Platters were singing “Each day I pray for evening just to be with you,” and then it started to happen. The pump turns on in ecstasy. I closed my eyes, I held her with my eyes closed and went into her that way, that way you do, shaking all over, hearing the heel of my shoe drumming against the driver’s-side door in a spastic tattoo, thinking that I could do this even if I was dying, even if I was dying, even if I was dying; thinking also that it was information. The pump turns on in ecstasy, the cards fall where they fall, the world never misses a beat, the queen hides, the queen is found, and it was all information.

25

The next morning I had a brief meeting with my Geology instructor, who told me I was “edging into a grave situation.” That is not exactly new information, Number Six, I thought of telling him, but didn’t. The world looked different this morning—both better and worse.

When I got back to Chamberlain I found Nate getting ready to leave for home. He had his suitcase in one hand. There was a sticker on it that said I CLIMBED MT. WASHINGTON. Slung over his shoulder was a duffel full of dirty clothes. Like everything else, Nate looked different now.

“Have a good Thanksgiving, Nate,” I said, opening my closet and starting to yank out pants and shirts at random. “Eat lots of stuffing. You’re too fuckin skinny.”

“I will. Cranberry dressing, too. When I was at my most homesick that first week, my mom’s dressing was practically all I could think about.”

I filled my own suitcase, thinking that I could take Carol to the bus depot in Derry and then just keep on going. If the traffic on Route 136 wasn’t too heavy, I could be home before dark. Maybe even stop in Frank’s Fountain for a mug of rootbeer before heading up Sabbatus Road to the house. Suddenly being out of this place— away from Chamberlain Hall and Holyoke Commons, away from the whole damned University—was my number-one priority. You’re confused, Pete, Carol had said in the car last night. You don’t know what you want or what you think, and you won’t as long as you keep running those cards.

Well, this was my chance to get away from the cards. It hurt to know Carol was leaving, but I’d be lying if I said that was foremost in my mind right then. At that moment, getting away from the third-floor lounge was. Getting away from The Bitch. If you flunk out this December, you’re apt to be in the jungle next December. Be in touch, baby, seeya, as Skip Kirk usually put it.

When I latched the suitcase shut and looked around, Nate was still standing in the doorway. I jumped and let out a little squeak of surprise. It was like being visited by Banquo’s fucking ghost.

“Hey, go on, bug out,” I said. “Time and tide wait for no man, not even one in pre-dent.”

Nate only stood there, looking at me. “You’re going to flunk out,” he said.

Again I thought of how weirdly alike Nate and Carol were, almost male and female sides of the same coin. I tried to smile, but Nate didn’t smile back. His face was small and white and pinched. The perfect Yankee face. You see a skinny guy who always burns instead of tanning, whose idea of dressing up includes a string tie and a lib-eral application of Vitalis, a guy who looks like he hasn’t had a decent shit in three years, and that guy was most likely born and raised north of White River, New Hampshire. And on his deathbed his last words are apt to be “Cranberry dressing.”

“Nah,” I said. “Don’t sweat it, Natie. All’s cool.”

“You’re going to flunk out,” he repeated. Dull, bricky color was rising in his cheeks. “You and Skip are the best guys I know, there wasn’t anybody in high school like you guys, not in my high school at least, and you’re going to flunk out and it’s so stupid.”

“I’m not going to flunk out,” I said . . . but since last night I had found myself accepting the idea that I could. I wasn’t just edging into a grave situation; man, I was there. “Skip, either. It’s under control.”

“The world’s falling down and you two are flunking out of school over Hearts! Over a stupid fuckin card-game!”

Before I could say anything else he was gone, headed back up the county for turkey and his mom’s stuffing. Maybe even a through-the-pants handjob from Cindy. Hey, why not? It was Thanksgiving.

26

I don’t read my horoscope, have rarely watched The X-Files, have never called the Psychic Friends Hotline, but I nevertheless believe that we all get glimpses of the future from time to time. I got one that afternoon, when I pulled up in front of Franklin Hall in my brother’s old station wagon: she was already gone.

I went inside. The lobby, where there were usually eight or nine gentlemen callers sitting in the plastic chairs, looked oddly empty. A housekeeper in a blue uniform was vacuuming the industrial-strength rug. The girl behind the counter was reading a copy of McCall’s and listening to the radio. ? and The Mysterians, as a mat-ter of fact. Cry cry cry, baby, 96 tears.

“Pete Riley for Carol Gerber,” I said. “Can you buzz her?”

She looked up, put her magazine aside, and gave me a sweet, sym-pathetic look. It was the look of a doctor who has to tell you gee, sorry, the tumor’s inoperable. Bad luck, man, better make friends with Jesus. “Carol said she had to leave early. She took the Black Bear Shuttle to Derry. But she told me you’d be by and asked me to give you this.”

She handed me an envelope with my name written across the

front. I thanked her and left Franklin with it in my hand. I wentdown the walk and stood for a moment by my car, looking across toward Holyoke Commons, fabled Palace on the Plains and home of the horny hotdog man. Below it, in Bennett’s Run, leaves flew before the wind in rattling drifts. The bright colors had gone out of them; only November’s dark brown was left. It was the day before Thanksgiving, the doorstep of winter in New England. The world was all wind and cold sunshine. I had started crying again. I could tell by the warmth on my cheeks. 96 tears, baby; cry cry cry.

I got into the car where I had lost my virginity the night before and opened the envelope. There was a single sheet of paper inside. Brevity is the soul of wit, according to Shakespeare. If it’s true, then Carol’s letter was witty as hell.

Dear Pete,

I think we ought to let last night be our goodbye—how could we do any better? I may write to you at school or I may not, right now I’m so confused I just don’t know (hey, I may even change my mind and come back!). But please let me be the one to get in touch, okay? You said you loved me. If you do, let me be the one to get in touch. I will, I promise.

Carol

P.S. Last night was the sweetest thing that’s ever happened to me. If it gets any better than that, I don’t see how people can live thru it.

P.P.S. Get out of that stupid card-game.

She said it was the sweetest thing that had ever happened to her, but she hadn’t put “love” at the bottom of the note, only her signa-ture. Still . . . If it gets any better than that, I don’t see how people can live thru it. I knew what she meant. I reached over and touched the side of the seat where she had lain. Where we had lain together.

Put on the radio, Pete, I like the oldies.

I looked at my watch. I had gotten to the dorm early (that halfconscious premonition at work, maybe), and it had just gone three now. I could easily get to the Trailways depot before she left for Con-necticut . . . but I wasn’t going to do it. She was right, we had said a brilliant goodbye in my old station wagon; anything more would be a step down. At best we would find ourselves going over the same ground; at worst, we’d splash mud over last night with an argument.

We want information.

Yes. And we had gotten it. God knew we had.

I folded her letter, stuck it into the back pocket of my jeans, and drove home to Gates Falls. At first my eyes kept blurring and I had to keep wiping at them. Then I turned on the radio and the music made things a little better. The music always does. I’m past fifty now, and the music still makes things better; it’s the fabled automatic.

27

I got back to Gates around five-thirty, slowed as I drove past Frank’s, then kept on going. By then I wanted to get home a lot more than I wanted a draft Hires and a gossip with Frank Parmeleau. Mom’s way of saying welcome home was to tell me I was too skinny, my hair was too long, and I hadn’t been “standing close enough to the razor.” Then she sat in her rocking chair and had a little weep over the return of the prodigal son. My dad put a kiss on my cheek, hugged me with one arm, and then shuffled to the fridge for a glass of Mom’s red tea, his head poking forward out of the neck of his old brown sweater like the head of a curious turtle.

We—my mom and me, that is—thought he had twenty per cent of his eyesight left, maybe a bit more. It was hard to tell, because he so rarely talked. It was a bagging-room accident that did for him, a terrible two-story fall. He had scars on the left side of his face and his neck; there was a dented-in patch of skull where the hair never grew back. The accident pretty much blacked out his vision, and it did something to his mind, as well. But he was not a “total ijit,” as I once heard some asshole down at Gendron’s Barber Shop say, nor was he mute, as some people seemed to think. He was in a coma for nineteen days. After he woke up he became mostly silent, that much is true, and he was often terribly confused in his mind, but sometimes he was still there, all present and accounted for. He was there enough when I came home to give me a kiss and that strong one-armed hug, his way of hugging for as long as I could remember. I loved my old man a lot . . . and after a semester of playing cards with Ronnie Malenfant, I had learned that talking is a wildly overrated skill.

I sat with them for awhile, telling them some of my college stories (not about chasing The Bitch, though), then went outside. I raked fallen leaves in the twilight—the frosty air on my cheeks felt like a blessing—waved at the passing neighbors, and ate three of my mom’s hamburgers for supper. After, she told me she was going down to the church, where the Ladies’ Aid was preparing Thanksgiv-ing meals for shut-ins. She didn’t think I’d want to spend my first evening home with a bunch of old hens, but I was welcome to attend the cluckfest if I wanted. I thanked her and said I thought I’d give Annmarie a call instead.

“Now why doesn’t that surprise me?” she said, and went out. I heard the car start and then, with no great joy, I dragged myself to the telephone and called Annmarie Soucie. An hour later she drove over in her father’s pickup, smiling, her hair down on her shoulders, mouth radiant with lipstick. The smile didn’t last long, as I guess you can probably figure out for yourself, and fifteen minutes after she came in, Annmarie was out of the house and out of my life. Be in touch, baby, seeya. Right around the time of Woodstock, she married an insurance agent from Lewiston and became Annmarie Jalbert. They had three kids, and they’re still married. I guess that’s good, isn’t it? Even if it isn’t, you have to admit it’s pretty goddam American.

I stood at the window over the kitchen sink, watching the tail-lights of Mr. Soucie’s truck disappear down the road. I felt ashamed of myself—Christ, the way her eyes had widened, the way her smile had faded and begun to tremble—but I also felt shittily happy, dis-gustingly relieved; light enough to dance up the walls and across the ceiling like Fred Astaire.

There were shuffling steps from behind me. I turned and there was my dad, doing his slow turtle-walk across the linoleum in his slip-pers. He went with one hand held out before him. The skin on it was beginning to look like a big loose glove.

“Did I just hear a young lady call a young gentleman a fucking jerk?” he asked in a mild just-passing-the-time voice.

“Well . . . yeah.” I shuffled my feet. “I guess maybe you did.”

He opened the fridge, groped, and brought out the jug of red tea. He drank it without sugar. I have taken it that same way on occasion, and can tell you it tastes like almost nothing at all. My theory is that my dad always went for the red tea because it was the brightest thing in the icebox, and he always knew what it was.

“Soucie girl, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, Dad. Annmarie.”

“All them Soucies have the distemper, Pete. Slammed the door, didn’t she?”

I was smiling. I couldn’t help it. It was a wonder the glass was still in that poor old door. “I guess she did.”

“You trade her in for a newer model up there t’the college, did you?”

That was a fairly complicated question. The simple answer—and maybe the truest, in the end—was no I hadn’t. That was the answer I gave.

He nodded, set out the biggest glass in the cabinet next to the fridge, and then looked like he was getting ready to pour the tea all over the counter and his own feet, anyway.

“Let me do that for you,” I said. “Okay?”

He made no reply but stood back and let me pour the tea. I put the three-quarters-full glass into his hands and the jug back in the fridge.

“Is it good, Dad?”

Nothing. He only stood there with the glass in both hands, the way a child holds a glass, drinking in little sips. I waited, decided he wasn’t going to reply, and fetched my suitcase out of the corner. I’d thrown my textbooks in on top of my clothes and now took them out.

“Studying on the first night of break,” Dad said, startling me—I’d almost forgotten he was there. “Gorry.”

“Well, I’m a little behind in a couple of classes. The teachers move a lot faster than the ones in high school.”

“College,” he said. A long pause. “You’re in college.”

It seemed almost to be a question, so I said, “That’s right, Dad.”

He stood there awhile longer, seeming to watch me as I stacked my books and notebooks. Maybe he was watching. Or maybe he was just standing there. You couldn’t tell, not for sure. At last he began to shuffle toward the door, neck stretched out, that defensive hand slightly raised, his other hand—the one with the glass of red tea in it—now curled against his chest. At the door he stopped. Without looking around, he said: “You’re well shut of that Soucie girl. All Soucies has got bad tempers. You can dress em up but you can’t take em out. You can do better.”

He went out, holding his glass of tea curled to his chest.

28

Until my brother and his wife showed up from New Gloucester, I actually did study, half caught up on my sociology, and slogged through forty pages of geology, all in three brain-busting hours. By the time I stopped to make coffee, I’d begun to feel faint stirrings of hope. I was behind, disastrously behind, but maybe not quite fatally behind. I felt like an outfielder who has tracked a ball back and back to the left-field wall; he stands there looking up but not giving up, knowing that the ball’s going to carry over but also knowing that if he times his leap just right, he can catch it as it does. I could do that. If, that was, I could stay out of the third-floor lounge in the future.

At quarter of ten my brother, who arrives nowhere while the sun is still up if he can help it, drove in. His wife of eight months, glamorous in a coat with a real mink collar, was carrying a bread pudding; Dave had a bowl of butter-beans. Only my brother of all people on earth would think of transporting butter-beans across county lines for Thanksgiving purposes. He’s a good guy, Dave, my elder by six years and in 1966 an accountant for a small hamburger chain with half a dozen “shoppes” in Maine and New Hampshire. By 1996 there were eighty “shoppes” and my brother, along with three partners, owned the company. He’s worth three million dollars—on paper, at least—and has had a triple bypass. One bypass for each million, I guess you could say.

Hard on Dave and Katie’s heels came Mom from the Ladies’ Aid, dusted with flour, exhilarated from good works, and overjoyed to have both of her sons in the house. There was a lot of cheerful babble. Our dad sat in the corner listening to it without adding anything . . . but he was smiling, his odd, big-pupiled eyes going from Dave’s face to mine and then back to Dave’s. It was actually our voices his eyes were responding to, I suppose. Dave wanted to know where Ann-marie was. I said Annmarie and I had decided to cool it for awhile. Dave started to ask if that meant we were—

Before he could finish the question, both his mother and his wife gave him those sharp little female pokes that mean not now, buddy, not now. Looking at Mom’s wide eyes, I guessed she would have her own questions for me later on. Probably quite a few of them. Mom wanted information. Moms always do.

Other than being called a fucking jerk by Annmarie and wondering from time to time how Carol Gerber was doing (mostly if she had changed her mind about coming back to school and if she was sharing her Thanksgiving with old Army-bound Sully-John), that was a pretty great holiday. The whole family showed up at one time or another on Thursday or Friday, it seemed, wandering through the house and gnawing on turkey-legs, watching football games on TV and roaring at the big plays, chopping wood for the kitchen stove (by Sunday night Mom had enough stovelengths to heat the house all winter with just the Franklin, if she’d wanted). After supper we ate pie and played Scrabble. Most entertaining of all, Dave and Katie had a huge fight over the house they were planning to buy, and Katie hucked a Tupper-ware dish of leftovers at my brother. I had taken a few lumps at Dave’s hands over the years, and I liked watching that plastic container of squash bounce off the side of his head. Man, that was fun.

But underneath all the good stuff, the ordinary joy you feel when your whole family’s there, was my fear of what was going to happen when I went back to school. I found an hour to study late Thursday night, after the fridge had been stuffed full of leftovers and everyone else had gone to bed, and two more hours on Friday afternoon, when there was a lull in the flow of relatives and Dave and Katie, their dif-ferences temporarily resolved, retired for what I thought was an extremely noisy “nap.”

I still felt I could catch up—knew it, actually—but I also knew I couldn’t do it alone, or with Nate. I had to buddy up with someone who understood the suicidal pull of that third-floor lounge, and how the blood surged when someone started playing spades in an effort to force The Bitch. Someone who understood the primitive joy of man-aging to sock Ronnie with la femme noire.

It would have to be Skip, I thought. Even if Carol were to come back, she would never be able to understand in the same way. It had to be Skip and me, swimming out of deep water and in toward the shore. I thought if we stuck together, we could both pull through. Not that I cared so much about him. Admitting that feels scuzzy, but it’s the truth. By Saturday of Thanksgiving break I’d done lots of soul-searching and understood I was mostly concerned about myself, mostly looking out for Number Six. If Skip wanted to use me, that was fine. Because I sure wanted to use him.

By noon Saturday I’d read enough geology to know I needed help on some of the concepts, and fast. There were only two more big test-periods in the semester: a set of prelims and then final exams. I would have to do really well on both to keep my scholarships.

Dave and Katie left at around seven on Saturday night, still bick-ering (but more good-naturedly) about the house they planned to buy in Pownal. I settled down at the kitchen table and started read-ing about out-group sanctions in my soash book. What it seemed to amount to was that even nerds have to have someone to shit on. A depressing concept.

At some point I became aware I wasn’t alone. I looked up and saw my mother standing there in her old pink housecoat, her face ghostly with Pond’s Cold Cream. I wasn’t surprised that I hadn’t heard her; after twenty-five years in the same little house, she knew where all the creaks and groans were. I thought she had finally gotten around to her questions about Annmarie, but it turned out that my love-life was the last thing on her mind.

“How much trouble are you in, Peter?” she asked.

I thought of about a hundred different answers, then settled for the truth. “I don’t really know.”

“Is it any one thing in particular?”

This time I didn’t tell the truth, and looking back on it I realize how telling that lie was: some part of me, alien to my best interests but very powerful, still reserved the right to frog-march me to the cliff . . . and over the edge.

Yeah, Mom, the third-floor lounge is the problem, cards are the problem—just a few hands is what I tell myself every time, and when I look up at the clock it’s quarter of midnight and I’m too tired to study. Hell, too wired to study. Other than play Hearts, all I’ve really managed to do this fall is lose my virginity.

If I could have said at least the first part of that, I think it would have been like guessing Rumpelstiltskin’s name and then speaking it out loud. But I didn’t say any of it. I told her it was just the pace of college; I had to redefine what studying meant, learn some new habits. But I could do it. I was sure I could.

She stood there a moment longer, her arms crossed and her hands deep in her housecoat sleeves—she looked sort of like a Chinese Mandarin when she stood that way—and then she said, “I’ll always love you, Pete. Your father, too. He doesn’t say it, but he feels it. We both do. You know that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know that.” I got up and hugged her. Pancreatic cancer was what got her. That one’s quick, at least, but it wasn’t quick enough. I guess none of them are when it’s someone you love.

“But you have to work hard at your studies. Boys who don’t work hard at them have been dying.” She smiled. There wasn’t much humor in it. “Probably you knew that.”

“I heard a rumor.”

“You’re still growing,” she said, tilting her head up.

“I don’t think so.”

“Yes. At least an inch since summer. And your hair! Why don’t you cut your hair?”

“I like it the way it is.”

“It’s as long as a girl’s. Take my advice, Pete, cut your hair. Look decent. You’re not one of those Rolling Stones or a Herman’s Her-mit, after all.”

I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. “I’ll think about it, Mom, okay?”

“You do that.” She gave me another hard hug, then let me go. She looked tired, but I thought she also looked rather beautiful. “They’re killing boys across the sea,” she said. “At first I thought there was a good reason for it, but your father says it’s crazy and I’m not so sure he isn’t right. You study hard. If you need a little extra for books—or a tutor—we’ll scrape it up.”

“Thanks, Mom. You’re a peach.”

“Nope,” she said. “Just an old mare with tired feet. I’m going to bed.”

I studied another hour, then all the words started to double and triple in front of my eyes. I went to bed myself but couldn’t sleep. Every time I started to drift I saw myself picking up a Hearts hand and beginning to arrange it in suits. Finally I let my eyes roll open and just stared up at the ceiling. Boys who don’t work hard at their studies have been dying, my mother had said. And Carol telling me that this was a good time to be a girl, Lyndon Johnson had seen to that.

We chasin The Bitch!

Pass left or right?

Jesus Christ, fuckin Riley’s shootin the moon!

Voices in my head. Voices seeming to seep out of the very air. Quitting the game was the only sane solution to my problems, but even with the third-floor lounge a hundred and thirty miles north of where I was lying, it had a hold on me, one which had little to do with sanity or rationality. I’d amassed twelve points in the uber tour-ney; only Ronnie, with fifteen, was now ahead of me. I didn’t see how I could give those twelve points up, just walk away and leave that windbag Malenfant with a clear field. Carol had helped me keep Ronnie in some sort of perspective, allowed me to see him for the creepy, small-minded, bad-complexioned gnome that he was. Now that she was gone—

Ronnie’s also going to be gone before long, the voice of reason interposed. If he lasts to the end of the semester it’ll be a blue-eyed miracle. You know that.

True. And in the meantime, Ronnie had nothing else but Hearts, did he? He was clumsy, potbellied, and thin-armed, an old man wait-ing to happen. He wore a chip on his shoulder to at least partially hide his massive feelings of inferiority. His boasting about girls was ludicrous. Also, he wasn’t really smart, like some of the kids cur-rently in danger of flunking out (Skip Kirk, for instance). Hearts and empty brag were the only things Ronnie was good at, so far as I’d been able to tell, so why not just stand back and let him run the cards and run his mouth while he still could?

Because I didn’t want to, that was why. Because I wanted to wipe the smirk off his hollow, pimply face and silence his grating blare of a laugh. It was mean but it was true. I liked Ronnie best when he was sulking, when he was glowering at me with his greasy hair tumbled down over his forehead and his lower lip pushed out.

Also, there was the game itself. I loved playing. I couldn’t even stop thinking about it here, in my childhood bed, so how was I sup-posed to stay away from the lounge when I got back? How was I sup-posed to ignore Mark St. Pierre yelling at me to hurry up, there was a seat empty, everyone stood at zero on the scorepad and the game was about to commence? Christ!

I was still awake when the cuckoo clock in the parlor below me sang two o’clock. I got up, threw on my old tartan robe over my skivvies, and went downstairs. I got myself a glass of milk and sat at the kitchen table to drink it. There were no lights on except for the fluorescent bar over the stove, no sounds except for the sough of the furnace through the floor-grates and my father’s soft snores from the back bedroom. I felt a little nutso, as if the combination of turkey and cramming had set off a minor earthquake in my head. And as if I might next fall asleep around, oh, say St. Patrick’s Day.

I happened to glance into the entry. There, hung on one of the hooks above the woodbox, was my high-school jacket, the one with the big white GF entwined on the breast. Nothing else but the ini-tials; I hadn’t been much of a jock. When Skip asked me, shortly after we met at the University, if I’d lettered in anything, I’d told him I had the big M for masturbation—first team, the short overhand stroke my specialty. Skip had laughed until he cried, and maybe that was when we’d started being friends. Actually, I guess I could have gotten a D for debate or dramatics, but they don’t give letters in those things, do they? Not then and not now.

High school seemed far in the past to me on that night, almost in another planetary system . . . but there was the jacket, a birthday pres-ent from my folks the year I turned sixteen. I crossed to the entry and took it off the hook. I put it up to my face and smelled it and thought of Period 5 study-hall with Mr. Mezensik—the bitter aroma of pencil- shavings, the girls whispering and giggling under their breath, faint shouts from outside as the phys ed kids played what the jocks called Remedial Volleyball. I saw that the place where the jacket had hung on the hook continued to stick up in a kind of dimple; the damned thing probably hadn’t been worn, even by my mother to go out to grab the mail in her nightgown, since the previous April or May.

I thought of seeing Carol frozen in newsprint dots, her face shadowed by a sign reading U.S. OUTOF VIETNAM NOW!, her ponytail lying against the collar of her own high-school jacket . . . and I had an idea.

Our telephone, a Bakelite dinosaur with a rotary dial, was on a table in the front hall. In the drawer beneath it was the Gates Falls phonebook, my mom’s address book, and a litter of writing imple-ments. One was a black laundry-marker. I took it back to the kitchen table and sat down again. I spread my high-school jacket over my knees, then used the marker to make a large sparrow-track on the back. As I worked I felt the nervous tension draining out of my mus-cles. It occurred to me that I could award myself my own letter if I wanted, and that was sort of what I was doing.

When I was done I held the jacket up and took a look. In the faint white light of the fluorescent bar, what I’d drawn looked harsh and declamatory and somehow childish:

But I liked it. I liked that motherfucker. I wasn’t sure what I thought about the war even then, but I liked that sparrow-track quite a lot. And I felt as if I could finally go to sleep; drawing it had done that much for me, anyway. I rinsed out my milk-glass and went upstairs with my jacket under my arm. I stuck it in the closet and then lay down. I thought of Carol putting my hand inside her sweater and the taste of her breath in my mouth. I thought of how we had been only ourselves behind the fogged-up windows of my old station wagon, maybe our best selves. And I thought of how we had laughed as we stood watching the tatters of my Goldwater sticker blow away across the Steam Plant parking lot. I was thinking about that when I fell asleep.

I took my modified high-school jacket back to school on Sunday packed into my suitcase—despite her freshly voiced doubts about Mr. Johnson’s and Mr. McNamara’s war, my mom would have had lots of questions about the sparrow-track, and I didn’t have answers to give, not yet.

I felt equipped to wear the jacket, though, and I did. I spilled beer and cigarette ashes on it, puked on it, bled on it, got teargassed in Chicago while wearing it and screaming “The whole world is watch-ing!” at the top of my lungs. Girls cried on the entwined GF on the left breast (by my senior year those letters were dingy gray instead of white), and one girl lay on it while we made love. We did it with no protection, so probably there’s a trace of semen on the quilted lining, too. By the time I packed up and left LSD Acres in 1970, the peace sign I drew on the back in my mother’s kitchen was only a shadow. But the shadow remained. Others might not see it, but I always knew what it was.