Hearts In Atlantis

“Look!” Skip called from the table nearest the window. His voice held disbelief and a kind of awe. “Jesus Christ, it’s fuckin Stokely!”

Play stopped. We all swivelled in our chairs to look out the win-dow at the darkening, dripping world below us. The quartet of boys in the corner stood up to see. The old wrought-iron lamps on Ben-nett’s Walk cast weak electric beams through the groundmist, mak-ing me think of London and Tyne Street and Jack the Ripper. From its place on the hill, Holyoke Commons looked more like an ocean liner than ever. Its shape wavered as rain streamed down the lounge windows.

“Fuckin Rip-Rip, out in this crap—I don’t believe it,” Ronnie breathed.

Stoke came rapidly down the path which led from the north entrance of Chamberlain to the place where all the asphalt paths joined in the lowest part of Bennett’s Run. He was wearing his old duffle coat, and it was clear he hadn’t just come from the dorm; the coat was soaked through. Even through the streaming glass we could see the peace sign on his back, as black as the words which were now partly covered by a rectangle of yellow canvas (if it was still up). His wild hair was soaked into submission.

Stoke never looked toward his KILLER PRESIDENT graffiti, just thumped on toward Bennett’s Walk. He was going faster than I’d ever seen him, paying no heed to the driving rain, the rising mist, or the slop under his crutches. Did he want to fall? Was he daring the slushy crap to take him down? I don’t know. Maybe he was just too deep in his own thoughts to have any idea of how fast he was moving or how bad the conditions were. Either way, he wasn’t going to get far if he didn’t cool it.

Ronnie began to giggle, and the sound spread the way a little flame spreads through dry tinder. I didn’t want to join in but was helpless to stop. So, I saw, was Skip. Partly because giggling is conta-gious, but also because it really was funny. I know how unkind that sounds, of course I do, but I’ve come too far not to tell the truth about that day . . . and this day, almost half a lifetime later. Because it still seems funny to me, I still smile when I think back to how he looked, a frantic clockwork toy in a duffle coat thudding along through the pouring rain, his crutches splashing up water as he went. You knew what was going to happen, you just knew it, and that was the funniest part of all—the question of just how far he could make it before the inevitable wipeout.

Lennie was roaring with one hand clutched to his face, staring out between his splayed fingers, his eyes streaming. Hugh Brennan was holding his not inconsiderable gut and braying like a donkey stuck in a mudhole. Mark St. Pierre was howling uncontrollably and saying he was gonna piss himself, he’d drunk too many Cokes and he was gonna spray his fuckin jeans. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t hold my cards; the nerves in my right hand went dead, my fingers relaxed, and those last few winning tricks fluttered into my lap. My head was pounding and my sinuses were full.

Stoke made the bottom of the dip, where the Walk started. There he paused and for some reason did a crazed three-sixty spin, seeming to balance on one crutch. The other crutch he held out like a machine-gun, as if in his mind he was spraying the whole campus— Kill Cong! Slaughter proctors! Bayonet those upperclassmen!

“Annnd . . . the Olympic judges give him . . . ALL TENS!” Tony DeLucca called in a perfect sports announcer’s voice. It was the final touch; the place turned into bedlam on the spot. Cards flew every-where. Ashtrays spilled, and one of the glass ones (most were just those little aluminum Table Talk pie- dishes) broke. Someone fell out of his chair and began to roll around, bellowing and kicking his legs. Man, we just couldn’t stop laughing.

“That’s it!” Mark was howling. “I just drowned my Jockeys! I couldn’t help it!” Behind him Nick Prouty was crawling toward the window on his knees with tears coursing down his burning face and his hands held out, the wordless begging gesture of a man who wants to say make it stop, make it stop before I burst a fuckin blood-vessel in the middle of my brain and die right here.

Skip got up, overturning his chair. I got up. Laughing our brains out, we groped for one another and staggered toward the window with our arms slung around each other’s back. Below, unaware that he was being watched and laughed at by two dozen or so freaked-out cardplayers, Stoke Jones was still, amazingly, on his feet.

“Go Rip-Rip!” Ronnie began to chant. “Go Rip-Rip!” Nick joined in. He had reached the window and was leaning his forehead against it, still laughing.

“Go, Rip-Rip!”

“Go, baby!”

“Go!”

“On, Rip-Rip! Mush those huskies!”

“Work those crutches, big boy!”

“Go you fuckin Rip-Rip!”

It was like the last play of a close football game, except everyone was chanting Go Rip- Rip instead of Hold that line or Block that kick. Almost everyone; I wasn’t chanting, and I don’t think Skip was, either, but we were laughing. We were laughing just as hard as the rest.

Suddenly I thought of the night Carol and I had sat on the milk-boxes beside Holyoke, the night she had shown me the snapshot of herself and her childhood friends . . . and then told me the story of what those other boys had done to her. What they had done with a baseball bat. At first they were joking, I think, Carol had said. And had they been laughing? Probably, yeah. Because that’s what you did when you were joking around, having a good time, you laughed.

Stoke stood where he was for a moment, hanging from his crutches with his head down . . . and then he attacked the hill like the Marines going ashore at Tarawa. He went tearing up Bennett’s Walk, spraying water everywhere with his flying crutches; it was like watching a duck with rabies.

The chant became deafening: “GO RIP-RIP! GO RIP-RIP! GO

RIP-RIP!”

At first they were joking, she had said as we sat there on the milk-boxes, smoking our cigarettes. By then she was crying, her tears sil-ver in the white light from the dining hall above us. At first they were joking and then . . . they weren’t.

That thought ended the joke of Stoke for me—I swear to you that it did. And still I couldn’t stop laughing.

Stokely made it about a third of the way up the hill toward Holyoke, almost back to the visible bricks, before the