Hearts In Atlantis

He heard me coming and snapped his head around so fast he almost fell over anyway. I reached out to steady him. He jerked back, seeming to swim in the old army duffle coat he was wearing.

“Get away from me!” As if he expected me to give him a shove. I raised my hands to show him I was harmless and bent over. “And get your hands off my book!”

This I didn’t dignify, only picked up the text and stuffed it under his arm like a newspaper.

“I don’t need your help!”

I was about to reply sharply, but I noticed again how white his cheeks were around the patches of red in their centers, and how his hair was damp with perspiration. Once again I could smell him— that overworked-transformer aroma—and realized I could also hear him: his breathing had a raspy, snotty sound. If Stoke Jones hadn’t found out where the infirmary was yet, I had an idea he would before long.

“I didn’t offer you a piggyback, for God’s sake.” I tried to paste a smile on my puss and managed something or other. Hell, why shouldn’t I smile? Didn’t I have nine bucks in my pocket that I hadn’t started the day with? By the standards of Chamberlain Three, I was rich.

Jones looked at me with those dark eyes of his. His lips thinned, but after a moment he nodded. “Okay. Point taken. Thanks.” Then he resumed his breakneck pace up the hill. At first he was well ahead of me, but then the grade began to work on him and he slowed down. His snotty-sounding breathing got louder and quicker. I heard it clearly as I caught up to him.

“Why don’t you take it easy?” I asked.

He gave me an impatient are-you-still-here glance. “Why don’t you eat me?”

I pointed to his soash book. “That’s sliding again.”

He stopped, adjusted it under his arm, then fixed himself on his crutches again, hunched like a bad-tempered heron, glaring at me through his black tumbles of hair. “Go on,” he said. “I don’t need a minder.”

I shrugged. “I wasn’t babysitting you, just wanted some company.”

“I don’t.”

I started on my way, nettled in spite of my nine bucks. Us class clowns aren’t wild about making friends—two or three are apt to do us for a lifetime—but we don’t react very well to the bum’s rush, either. Our goal is vast numbers of acquaintances whom we can leave laughing.

“Riley,” he said from behind me.

I turned. He’d decided to thaw a little after all, I thought. How wrong I was.

“There are gestures and gestures,” he said. “Putting shaving cream on the proctor’s door is about one step above wiping snot on the seat of Little Susie’s desk because you can’t think of another way to say you love her.”

“I didn’t shaving-cream Dearie’s door,” I said, more nettled than ever.

“Yeah, but you’re playing cards with the asshole who did. Lending him credibility.” I think it was the first time I heard that word, which went on to have an incredibly sleazy career in the seventies and coke-soaked eighties. Mostly in politics. I think credibility died of shame around 1986, just as all those sixties war protesters and fearless bat-tlers for racial equality were discovering junk bonds, Martha Stew-art Living, and the StairMaster. “Why do you waste your time?”

That was direct enough to rattle me, and I said what seems to me now, looking back, an incredibly stupid thing. “I’ve got plenty of time to waste.”

Jones nodded as if he had expected no more and no better. He got going again and passed me at his accustomed plunge, head down, back humped, sweaty hair swinging, soash book clamped tight under his arm. I waited, expecting it to squirt free again. This time when it did, I’d leave him to poke it with his crutch.

But it didn’t get away from him, and after I’d seen him reach the door of Holyoke, grapple with it, and finally lurch inside, I went on my own way. When I’d filled my tray I sat with Carol Gerber and the rest of the kids on the dishline crew. That was about as far from Stoke Jones as it was possible to get, which suited me fine. He also sat apart from the other handicapped kids, I remember. Stoke Jones sat apart from everybody. Clint Eastwood on crutches.

9

The regular diners began to show up at five o’clock. By quarter past, the dishline crew was in full swing and stayed that way for an hour. Lots of dorm kids went home for the weekend, but those who stayed all showed up on Saturday night, which was beans and franks and cornbread. Dessert was Jell-O. At the Palace on the Plains, dessert was almost always Jell-O. If Cook was feeling frisky, you might get Jell-O with little pieces of fruit suspended in it.

Carol was doing silverware, and just as the rush began to subside, she wheeled away from the pass-through, shaking with laughter. Her cheeks were bright crimson. What came rolling along the belt was Skip’s work. He admitted it later that night, but I knew right away. Although he was in the College of Education and probably destined to teach history and coach baseball at good old Dexter High until he dropped dead of a booze-fueled heart attack at the age of fifty-nine or so, Skip by rights should have been in fine arts . . . prob-ably would have been if he hadn’t come from five generations of farmers who said ayuh and coss ’twill and sh’d smile n kiss a pig. He was only the second or third in his sprawling family (their religion, Skip once said, was Irish Alcoholic) to ever go to college. Clan Kirk could visualize a teacher in the family—barely—but not a painter or a sculptor. And at eighteen, Skip could see no further than they could. He only knew he didn’t quite fit the hole he was trying to slide into, and it made him restless. It made him wander into rooms other than his own, check the LPs, and criticize almost everyone’s taste in music.

By 1969 he had a better idea of who and what he was. That was the year he constructed a papier-mache Vietnamese family tableau that was set on fire at the end of a peace rally in front of the Fogler Library while The Youngbloods played “Get Together” from a bor-rowed set of amps and part- time hippies worked out to the beat like tribal warriors after a hunt. You see how jumbled it all is in my mind? It was Atlantis, that’s all I know for sure, way down below the ocean. The paper family burned, the hippie protesters chanted “Napalm! Napalm! Scum from the skies!” as they danced, and after awhile the jocks and the frat boys began to throw stuff. Eggs at first. Then stones.

It was no papier-mache family that sent Carol laughing and reel-ing away from the dishline that night in the fall of 1966; it was a horny hotdog man standing atop a Matterhorn of Holyoke Com-mons baked beans. A pipe-cleaner wiener jutted jauntily from the appropriate spot. In his hand was a little University of Maine pen-nant, on his head a scrap of blue hanky folded to look like a freshman beanie. Along the front of the tray,