A lot of catching-up to do, that’s what I had. But I didn’t tell Stoke that. Somehow I didn’t think he’d exactly melt with sympathy. “How much of that day do you remember?” I asked him.
“I remember putting the FUCK JOHNSON thing on the dorm—I’d been planning that for a couple of weeks—and I remember going to my one o’clock class. I spent most of it thinking about what I was going to say in the Dean’s office when he called me in. What kind of a
I didn’t answer. He gave me all the time in the world, but I stood on my right to remain silent.
At last Stoke shrugged, the kind of shrug that says okay, let’s drop it. It pulled the johnny he was wearing off one bony shoulder. He tugged it back into place, using his hand carefully—there was an I.V. drip in it. “So you guys discovered the peace sign, huh? Great. You can wear it when you go to see Neil Diamond or fucking Petula Clark at Winter Carnival. Me, I’m out of here. This is over for me.”
“If you go to school on the other side of the country, do you think you’ll be able to throw the crutches away?” Skip asked. “Maybe run track?”
I was a little shocked, but Stoke smiled. It was a real smile, too, sunny and unaffected. “The crutches aren’t relevant,” he said. “Time’s too short to waste,
“Some people know more than they did,” I said . . . but I was trou-bled by thoughts of Nate, who had been worried his mother might see a picture of him getting arrested and had stayed on the curb in consequence. A face in the background, the face of a gray boy on the road to dentistry in the twentieth century.
Dr. Carbury stuck his head in the door. “Time you were on your way, men. Mr. Jones has a lot of rest to catch up on.”
We stood. “When Dean Garretsen comes to talk to you,” I said, “or that guy Ebersole . . .”
“As far as they’ll ever know, that whole day is a blank,” Stoke said. “Carbury can tell them I had bronchitis since October and pneumonia since Thanksgiving, so they’ll have to accept it. I’ll say I could have done anything that day. Except, you know, drop the old crutches and run the four-forty.”
“We really didn’t steal your sign, you know,” Skip said. “We just borrowed it.”
Stoke appeared to think this over, then sighed. “It’s not my sign,” he said.
“No,” I agreed. “Not anymore. So long, Stoke. We’ll come back and see you.”
“Don’t make it a priority,” he said, and I guess we took him at his word, because we never did. I saw him back at the dorm a few times, but only a few, and I was in class when he moved out without both-ering to finish the semester. The next time I saw him was on the TV news almost twenty years later, speaking at a Greenpeace rally just after the French blew up the
As we reached the door he called, “Hey?”
We looked back at a narrow white face on a white pillow above a white sheet, the only real color about him those masses of black hair. The shapes of his legs under the sheet again made me think of Uncle Sam in the Fourth of July parade back home. And again I thought that he looked like a kid with about four months to live. But add some white teeth to the picture, as well, because Stoke was smiling.
“Hey what?” Skip said.
“You two were so concerned with what I was going to say to Gar-retsen and Ebersole . . . maybe I’ve got an inferiority complex or something, but I have trouble believing all that concern is for me. Have you two decided to actually try going to school for a change?”
“If we did, do you think we’d make it?” Skip asked.
“You might,” Stoke said. “There is one thing I remember about that night. Pretty clearly, too.”
I thought he’d say he remembered us laughing at him—Skip thought so, too, he told me later—but that wasn’t it.
“You carried me through the doorway of the exam room by your-self,” he said to Skip. “Didn’t drop me, either.”
“No chance of that. You don’t weigh much.”
“Still . . . dying’s one thing, but no one likes the idea of being dropped on the floor. It’s undignified. Because you didn’t, I’ll give you some good advice. Get out of the sports programs, Kirk. Unless, that is, you’ve got some kind of athletic scholarship you can’t do without.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ll turn you into someone else. It may take a little longer than it took ROTC to turn David Dearborn into Dearie, but they’ll get you there in the end.”
“What do you know about sports?” Skip asked gently. “What do you know about being on a team?”
“I know it’s a bad time for boys in uniforms,” Stoke said, then lay back on his pillow and closed his eyes. But a good time to be a girl, Carol had said. 1966 was a good time to be a girl.
We returned to the dorm and went to my room to study. Down the hall Ronnie and Nick and Lennie and most of the others were chasing The Bitch. After awhile Skip shut the door to block the sound of them out, and when that didn’t entirely work I turned on Nate’s little RCA Swingline and we listened to Phil Ochs. Ochs is dead now—as dead as my mother and Michael Landon. He hanged himself with his belt. The suicide rate among surviving Atlanteans has been pretty high. No surprise there, I guess; when your continent sinks right out from under your feet, it does a number on your head.
41
