“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
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
“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
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
“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?”
