Hearts In Atlantis

“When he fell over it sounded like a nuthouse up there,” I said. “Not a college dorm, a fucking nuthouse.”

“You laughed too, Pete. So did I.”

“I know,” I said. I might not have if I’d been alone, and Skip and I might not have if it had just been the two of us, but how could you tell? You were stuck with the way things played out. I kept thinking of Carol and those boys with their baseball bat. And I thought of the way Nate had looked at me, as if I were a thing below contempt. “I know.”

We walked in silence for awhile.

“I can live with laughing at him, I guess,” I said, “but I don’t want to wake up forty with my kids asking me what college was like and not be able to remember anything but Ronnie Malenfant telling Polish jokes and that poor fucked-up asshole McClendon trying to kill himself with baby aspirin.” I thought about Stoke Jones twirling on his crutch and felt like laughing; thought of him lying beached on the exam table in the infirmary and felt like crying. And you know what? It was, as far as I could tell, exactly the same feeling. “I just feel bad about it. I feel like shit.”

“So do I,” Skip said. The rain poured down around us, soaking and cold. The lights of Chamberlain Hall were bright but not particularly comforting. I could see the yellow canvas the cops had put up lying on the grass, and above it the dim shapes of the spray-painted letters. They were running in the rain; by the following day they would be all but unreadable.

“When I was a little kid, I always pretended I was the hero,” Skip said.

“Fuck yeah, me too. What little kid ever pretended to be part of the lynch-mob?”

Skip looked down at his soaked shoes, then up at me. “Could I study with you for the next couple of weeks?”

“Any time you want.”

“You really don’t mind?”

“Why would I fuckin mind?” I made myself sound irritated because I didn’t want him to hear how relieved I was, how almost thrilled I was. Because it might work. I paused, then said, “This other . . . do you think we can pull it off?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

We had almost reached the north entrance, and I pointed to the running letters just before we went in. “Maybe Dean Garretsen and that guy Ebersole will let the whole thing drop. The paint Stoke used didn’t get a chance to set. It’ll be gone by morning.”

Skip shook his head. “They won’t let it drop.”

“Why not? How can you be so sure?”

“Because Dearie won’t let them.”

And of course he was right.

37

For the first time in weeks the third-floor lounge was empty for awhile as drenched cardplayers dried themselves off and put on fresh clothes. Many of them also took care of some stuff Skip Kirk had sug-gested in the infirmary waiting room. When Nate and Skip and I came back from dinner, however, it was business as usual in the lounge—three tables were up and going.

“Hey, Riley,” Ronnie said. “Twiller here says he’s got a study date. If you want his seat, I’ll teach you how to play the game.”

“Not tonight,” I said. “Got studying to do myself.”

“Yeah,” Randy Echolls said. “The Art of Self-Abuse.”

“That’s right, honey, a couple more weeks of hard work and I’ll be able to switch hands without missing a stroke, just like you.”

As I started away, Ronnie said, “I had you stopped, Riley.”

I turned around. Ronnie was leaning back in his chair, smiling that unpleasant smile of his. For a short period of time, out there in the rain, I had glimpsed a different Ronnie, but that young man had gone back into hiding.

“No,” I said, “you didn’t. It was a done deal.”

“No one shoots the moon on a hold hand,” Ronnie said, leaning back farther than ever. He scratched one cheek, busting the heads off a couple of pimples. They oozed tendrils of yellow-white cream. “Not at my table they don’t. I had you stopped in clubs.”

“You were void in clubs, unless you reneged on the first trick. You played the ace of spades when Lennie played The Douche. And in hearts I had the whole court.”

Ronnie’s smile faltered for just a moment, then came back strong. He waved a hand at the floor, from which all the spilled cards had been picked up (the butty remains of the overturned ashtrays still remained; most of us had been raised in homes where moms cleaned up such messes). “All the high hearts, huh? Too bad we can’t check and see.”

“Yeah. Too bad.” I started away again.

“You’re going to fall behind on match points!” he called after me. “You know that, don’t you?”

“You can have mine, Ronnie. I don’t want them anymore.”

I never played another hand of Hearts in college. Many years later I taught my kids the game, and they took to it like ducks to water. We have a tournament at the summer cottage every August. There are no match points, but there’s a trophy from Atlantic Awards—a loving cup. I won it one year, and kept it on my desk where I could see it. I shot the moon twice in the championship round, but neither was a hold hand. Like my old school buddy Ronnie Malenfant once said, no one shoots the moon on a hold hand. You might as well expect Atlantis to rise from the ocean, palm trees waving.

38

At eight o’clock that night, Skip Kirk was at my desk and deep in his anthro text. His hands were plunged