Where You Once Belonged(13)

I first heard about it—or knew about it, that is—when I saw the article in the Colorado Daily. They ran it in a little box on the second page. The article said that another freshman named Curtis Harris had brought charges against Jack and that the student judiciary would convene on Friday to hear the case. The article appeared on Tuesday morning. After reading it I went over to Baker to see if I could find Jack in his dorm room. His roommate, another football player, said he didn’t know where Jack was; he was probably watching TV.

“But doesn’t he have classes?” I said. “It’s the middle of the morning.”

“What classes?” he said. “Jack doesn’t go to classes.”

“You mean today?”

“I mean any day. He hasn’t been to a class in three weeks. He’s going to get in trouble.”

“He’s already in trouble,” I said.

The guy studied me for a moment. “What’s that to you? You know him, or something?”

“I know him,” I said. “And they should have given Wanda Jo Evans a scholarship too if they expected Jack to go to class.”

“Who’s she?”

“You wouldn’t know her.”

“I know some girls.”

“But you wouldn’t know her. Anyway where’s this TV Jack might be watching?”

“Downstairs. Only I don’t know if he’s even there. I’m not his keeper.”

“I’ll go see if I can find him,” I said.

I went back downstairs.

After looking around for a few minutes I found Jack in one of the rooms next to the dormitory lounge. The door was shut. He was the only person in the room and he was lying on a sofa in his blue jeans and gray tee shirt. He was watching a game show on the black-and-white television and his feet were sticking out over the end of the sofa. When I sat down near him he looked over at me and then turned back to the TV.

“Jack,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“I can’t complain.”

“That’s good,” I said. “But what do you think will happen?”

“About what?”

“About this radio you took.”

“How’d you hear about that? You been talking to somebody?”

“It was in the student paper this morning. I came over to see what you’re going to do about it.”

“What the hell is there to do about it?”

“Well. The paper said somebody named Curtis Harris filed charges against you. That you stole his radio.”

“That’s a lie. Hell, he wasn’t using it so I just borrowed it for a while. And then I didn’t give it back to him yet.”

“Are you going to?”

“Not now.”

“How come?”

“Because. I don’t have it no more. The police have it. They took it for evidence.”

“All right, then. But what do you think’s going to happen?”

“I already told you: I don’t know. Besides, what difference does it make?”

“They might kick you out of school. That’s one thing.”

“I’m sick of school.”

“How do you know that? I mean, Jesus, you haven’t even been to classes yet.”

“I’ve been to enough. It’s just talk.”

I continued to look at him. There were dark bruises on his arms from practicing football and there was a scab on his nose between his eyes. Looking at him, he seemed exactly like a kid who’d fallen off a bicycle, like a great big kid who was now consoling himself by watching television from the living room couch.

“But listen,” I said. “Think about it for a minute. Isn’t there something we can do about this?”

He stopped watching TV, briefly. He looked at me. “Yeah,” he said. “You can loan me some money. I missed breakfast. You can do something about that if you want to.”

So I did. I gave him a couple of dollars. I was glad to do that much for him and was ready to do more, although I couldn’t have said then what it might have been. He folded the bills I gave him and put them away in his jeans pocket. I watched him for a while longer. But when he didn’t say anything more I left. He was still lying on the couch watching somebody else win money in a California studio. That seemed to please him.

Then on Friday, when his hearing came up, the student judiciary found against him. It was an open-and-shut case and after they had heard the evidence they recommended that he be expelled from school. There had been a number of thefts on campus already that fall. Consequently the administration accepted the students’ recommendation and decided to make an example of him. But it didn’t matter to Jack what they did; he didn’t contest the charges or even defend himself. In fact he didn’t even attend the hearings. Instead that morning he had gone to the Army recruiter on campus and had enlisted; so now he was obligated to two years of military service, and the Army was glad to have him swell their numbers.

He came over to see me before he went back to Holt. He said he didn’t have to report to boot camp until the end of October and he thought he’d go home in the meantime and work at the elevator and see Wanda Jo Evans. He wasn’t dissatisfied by the turn of events at all.

“Well,” I said. “Maybe it’s for the best.”