Hearts In Atlantis

If Dearie had noticed that guilty little blink, I believe he would have reached the same conclusion. But he was looking at Skip. Skip looked back at him calmly, and after a few more seconds to make it seem (to himself if not to the rest of us) like his own idea, Dearie let go of Ronnie’s shirt. Ronnie shook himself, brushed at the wrinkles on his shoulders, then began digging in his pockets for small change to pay me with.

“I’m sorry,” Ronnie said. “Whatever has got your panties in a bunch, I’m sorry. I’m sorry as hell, sorry as shit, I’m so sorry my ass hurts. Okay?”

Dearie took a step back. I had been able to feel the adrenaline; I suspected Dearie could feel the waves of dislike rolling in his direc-tion just as clearly. Even Ashley Rice, who looked like a roly-poly bear in a kids’ cartoon, was looking at Dearie in a flat-eyed, unfriendly way. It was a case of what the poet Gary Snyder might have called bad-karma baseball. Dearie was the proctor—strike one.

He tried to run our floor as though it were an adjunct to his beloved ROTC program—strike two. And he was a jerkwad sophomore at a time when sophomores still believed that harassing freshmen was part of their bounden duty. Strike three, Dearie, you’re out.

“Spread the word that I’m not going to put up with a lot of high-school crap on my floor,” Dearie said (his floor, if you could dig it). He stood ramrod-straight in his U of M sweatshirt and khaki pants—pressed khaki pants, although it was Saturday. “This is not high school, gentlemen; this is Chamberlain Hall at the University of Maine. Your bra- snapping days are over. The time has come for you to behave like college men.”

I guess there was a reason I was voted Class Clown in the ’66 Gates Falls yearbook. I clicked my heels together and snapped off a pretty fair British-style salute, the kind with the palm turned mostly out-ward. “Yes sir!” I cried. There was nervous laughter from the gallery, a dirty guffaw from Ronnie, a grin from Skip. Skip gave Dearie a shrug, eyebrows lifted, hands up to the sky. See what you get? it said. Act like an asshole and that’s how people treat you. Perfect elo- quence is, I think, almost always mute.

Dearie looked at Skip, also mute. Then he looked at me. His face was expressionless, almost dead, but I wished I had for once forgone the smartass impulse. The trouble is, for the born smartass, the impulse has nine times out of ten been acted upon before the brain can even engage first gear. I bet that in days of old when knights were bold, more than one court jester was hung upside down by his balls. You don’t read about it in the Morte D’Arthur, but I think it must be true—laugh this one off, ya motley motherfucker. In any case, I knew I had just made an enemy.

Dearie spun in a nearly perfect about-face and went marching out of the lounge. Ronnie’s mouth drew down in a grimace that made his ugly face even uglier; the leer of the villain in a stage melodrama. He made a jacking-off gesture at Dearie’s stiff retreating back. Hugh Brennan giggled a little, but no one really laughed. Stoke Jones had disappeared, apparently disgusted with the lot of us.

Ronnie looked around, eyes bright. “So,” he said. “I’m still up for it. Nickel a point, who wants to play?”

“I will,” Skip said.

“I will, too,” I said, never once glancing in the direction of my geology book.

“Hearts?” Kirby McClendon asked. He was the tallest boy on the floor, maybe one of the tallest boys at school —six-seven at least, and possessed of a long, mournful bloodhound’s face. “Sure. Good choice.”

“What about us?” Ashley squeaked.

“Yeah!” Hugh said. Talk about your gluttons for punishment.

“You’re outclassed at this table,” Ronnie said, speaking with what was for him almost kindness. “Why don’t you start up your own?”

Ashley and Hugh did just that. By four o’clock all of the lounge tables were occupied by quartets of third-floor freshmen, ragtag scholarship boys who had to buy their texts in the Used section of the bookstore playing Hearts at a nickel a point. In our dorm, the mad season had begun.

8

Saturday night was another of my meals on the Holyoke dishline. In spite of my awakening interest in Carol Gerber, I tried to get Brad Witherspoon to switch with me—Brad had Sunday breakfast and he hated to get up early almost as badly as Skip did—but Brad refused. By then he was playing, too, and two bucks out of pocket. He was crazy to catch up. He just shook his head at me and led a spade out of his hand. “Let’s go Bitch-huntin!” he cried, sounding eerily like Ron-nie Malenfant. The most insidious thing about Ronnie was that weak minds found him worth imitating.

I left my seat at the original table, where I had spent the balance of the day, and my place was immediately taken by a young man named Kenny Auster. I was nearly nine dollars ahead (mostly because Ron-nie had moved to another table so I wouldn’t cut into his profits) and should have been feeling good, but I wasn’t. It wasn’t the money, it was the game. I wanted to keep on playing.

I walked disconsolately down the hall, checked the room, and asked Nate if he wanted to eat early with the kitchen crew. He sim-ply shook his head and waved me on without looking up from his his-tory book. When people talk about student activism in the sixties, I have to remind myself that the majority of kids went through that mad season the way Nate did. They kept their heads down and their eyes on their history books while history happened all around them. Not that Nate was completely unaware, or completely dedicated to the study carrels on the sidelines, for that matter. You shall hear.

I walked toward the Palace on the Plains, zipping my jacket against the air, which had turned frosty. It was quarter past four. The Commons didn’t officially open until five, so the paths which met in Bennett’s Run were almost deserted. Stoke Jones was there, though, hunched over his crutches and brooding down at something on the path. I wasn’t surprised to see him; if you had some sort of physical disability, you could chow an hour earlier than the rest of the stu-dents. As far as I remember, that was about the only special treat-ment the handicapped got. If you were physically fucked up, you got to eat with the kitchen help. That sparrow-track on the back of his coat was very clear and very black in the late light.

As I got closer to him I saw what he was looking down at—Intro-duction to Sociology. He had dropped it on the faded red bricks of Bennett’s Walk and was trying to figure a way he could pick it up again without landing on his face. He kept poking at the book with the tip of one crutch. Stoke had two, maybe even three different pairs of crutches; these were the ones that fitted over his forearms in a series of ascending steel collars. I could hear him muttering “Rip-rip, rip- rip” under his breath as he prodded the book uselessly from place to place. When he was plunging along on his crutches, “Rip-rip” had a determined sound. In this situation it sounded frustrated. At the time I knew Stoke (I will not call him Rip-Rip, although many Ronnie-imitators had taken to doing so by the end of the semester), I was fascinated by how many different nuances there could be to any given “Rip-rip.” That was before I found out the Navajos have forty different ways of saying their word for cloud. That was before I found out a lot of things, actually.