Hearts In Atlantis

baiby-carriage! Lost two-three cahds out’n his deck! Fella’s a beer shote of a six-pack! He’s . . .”

Nick gradually realized that Ebersole and Garretsen were looking at him, Ebersole with contempt, Garretsen almost with interest, as at a new bacterium glimpsed through the lens of a microscope.

“. . . you know, a little sick in the head,” Nick finished, losing the imitation as self-consciousness, that bane of all great artists, set in. He quickly sat down.

“That’s not the kind of sick I meant, exactly,” Skip said. “I’m not talking about him being a cripple, either. He’s been sneezing, cough-ing, and running at the nose ever since he got here. Even you must have noticed that, Dearie.”

Dearie didn’t reply, didn’t even react to the use of the nickname this time. He must have been pretty tired, all right.

“All I’m saying is that he might claim a whole lot of stuff,” Skip said. “He might even believe some of it. But he’s out of it.”

Ebersole’s smile had resurfaced, no humor in it now. “I believe I grasp the thrust of your argument, Mr. Kirk. You want us to believe that Mr. Jones was not responsible for the writing on the wall, but if he does confess to having done it, we should not credit his statement.”

Skip also smiled—the thousand-watt smile that made the girls’ hearts go giddyup. “That’s it,” he said, “that’s the thrust of my argu-ment, all right.”

There was a moment’s silence, and then Dean Garretsen spoke what could have been the epitaph of our brief age. “You fellows have disappointed me,” he said. “Come on, Charles, we have no further business here.” Garretsen hoisted his briefcase, turned on his heel, and headed for the door.

Ebersole looked surprised but hurried after him. Which left Dearie and his third-floor charges to stare at each other with mingled expressions of distrust and reproach.

“Thanks, guys.” David was almost crying. “Thanks a fucking pantload.” He stalked out with his head down and his folder clutched in one hand. The following semester he left Chamberlain and joined a frat. All things considered, that was probably for the best. As Stoke might have said, Dearie had lost his credibility.

40

“So you stole that, too,” Stoke Jones said from his bed in the infir-mary when he could finally talk. I had just told him that almost everyone in Chamberlain Hall was now wearing the sparrow-track on at least one article of clothing, thinking this news would cheer him up. I had been wrong.

“Settle down, man,” Skip said, patting his shoulder. “Don’t have a hemorrhage.”

Stoke never so much as glanced at him. His black, accusing eyes remained on me. “You took the credit, then you took the peace sign. Did any of you check my wallet? I think there were nine or ten dol-lars in there. You could have had that, too. Made it a clean sweep.” He turned his head aside and began to cough weakly. On that cold day in early December of ’66 he looked one fuck of a lot older than eighteen.

This was four days after Stoke went swimming in Bennett’s Run. The doctor—Carbury, his name was—seemed by the second of those days to accept that most of us were Stoke’s friends no matter how oddly we’d acted when we brought him in, because we kept stopping by to ask after him. Carbury had been at the college infirmary, pre- scribing for strep throats and splinting wrists dislocated in softball games, for donkey’s years and probably knew there was no account-ing for the behavior of young men and women homing in on their majority; they might look like adults, but most retained plenty of their childhood weirdnesses, as well. Nick Prouty auditioning Foghorn Leghorn for the Dean of Men, for instance—I rest my case.

Carbury never told us how bad things had been with Stoke. One of the candystripers (half in love with Skip by the second time she saw him, I believe) gave us a clearer picture, not that we really needed one. The fact that Carbury stuck him in a private room instead of on Men’s Side told us something; the fact that we weren’t allowed to so much as peek in on him for the first forty-eight hours of his stay told us more; the fact that he hadn’t been moved to Eastern Maine, which was only ten miles up the road, told us most of all. Car-bury hadn’t dared move him, not even in the University ambulance. Stoke Jones had been in bad straits indeed. According to the candy-striper, he had pneumonia, incipient hypothermia from his dunk, and a temperature which crested at a hundred and five degrees. She’d overheard Carbury talking with someone on the phone and saying that if Jones’s lung capacity had been any further reduced by his dis-ability—or if he’d been in his thirties or forties instead of his late teens—he almost certainly would have died.

Skip and I were the first visitors he was allowed. Any other kid in the dorm probably would have been visited by at least one parent, but that wasn’t going to happen in Stoke’s case, we knew that now. And if there were other relatives, they hadn’t bothered to put in an appearance.

We told him everything that had happened that night, with one exception: the laugh-in which had begun in the lounge when we saw him spraying his way through Bennett’s Run and continued until we delivered him, semi- conscious, to the infirmary. He listened silently as I told him about Skip’s idea to put peace signs on our books and clothes so Stoke couldn’t be hung out all by himself. Even Ronnie Malenfant had gone along, I said, and without a single quibble. We told him so he could jibe his story with ours; we also told him so he’d understand that by trying to take the blame/credit for the graffiti now, he’d get us in trouble as well as himself. And we told him with-out ever coming right out and telling him. We didn’t need to. His legs didn’t work, but the stuff between his ears was just fine.

“Get your hand off me, Kirk.” Stoke hunched as far away from us as his narrow bed would allow, then began to cough again. I remem-ber thinking he looked like he had about four months to live, but I was wrong about that; Atlantis sank but Stoke Jones is still in the swim, practicing law in San Francisco. His black hair has gone silver and is prettier than ever. He’s got a red wheelchair. It looks great on CNN.

Skip sat back and folded his arms. “I didn’t expect wild gratitude, but this is too much,” he said. “You’ve outdone yourself this time, Rip-Rip.”

His eyes flashed. “Don’t call me that!”

“Then don’t call us thieves just because we tried to save your scrawny ass. Hell, we did save your scrawny ass!”

“No one asked you to.”

“No,” I said. “You don’t ask anyone for anything, do you? I think you’re going to need bigger crutches to haul around the chip on your shoulder before long.”

“That chip’s what I’ve got, shithead. What have you got?”