Hearts In Atlantis

“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. “Touche,” she said.

“Touche 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.