Hearts in Atlantis(104)

The footfalls stopped. In the shadows I could see his round face looking up at me and the dim held shape of his trunk.

'Frank, what about the draft? If you drop out of school die draft'll get you!'

A long pause, as if he was thinking how to answer. He never did, not with his mouth. He answered with his feet. Their echoey sound resumed. I never saw Frank again.

I remember standing by the stairwell, scared, thinking That could happen to me . . . maybe is happening to me, then pushing the thought away.

Seeing Frank with his trunk was a warning, I decided, and I would heed it. I would do better. I had been coasting, and it was time to turn on the jets again. But from down the hall I could hear Ronnie yelling gleefully that he was Bitch-hunting, that he meant to have that whore out of hiding, and I decided I would do better starting tonight. Tonight would be time enough to re-light those fabled jets. This afternoon I'd play my farewell game of Hearts. Or two. Or forty.

15

It was years before I isolated the key part of my final conversation with Frank Stuart. I had told him he couldn't be so far behind so soon, and he had replied that it happened because he wasn't a quick study. We were both wrong. It was possible to fall catastrophically behind in a short period of time, and it happened to the quick studies like me and Skip and Mark St Pierre as well as to the plodders. In the backs of our minds we must have been holding onto the idea that we'd be able to loaf and then spurt, loaf and then spurt, which was the way most of us had gone through our dozy hometown high schools. But as Dearie Dearborn had pointed out, this wasn't high school.

I told you that of the thirty-two students who began the fall semester on our floor of Chamberlain (thirty-three, if you also count Dearie . . . but he was immune to the charms of Hearts), only fifteen remained to start the spring semester. That doesn't mean the nineteen who left were all dopes, though; not by any means. In fact, the smartest fellows on Chamberlain Three in the fall of 1966 were probably the ones who transferred before flunking out became a real possibility. Steve Ogg and Jack Frady, who had the room just up the hall from Nate and me, went to Chadbourne the first week in November, citing 'distractions' on their joint application. When the Housing Officer asked what sort of distractions, they said it was the usual - all-night bull sessions, toothpaste ambushes in the head, abrasive relations with a couple of the guys. As an afterthought, both added they were probably playing cards in the lounge a little too much. They'd heard Chad was a quieter environment, one of the campus's two or three 'brain dorms.'

The Housing Officer's question had been anticipated, the answer as carefully rehearsed as an oral presentation in a speech class. Neither Steve nor Jack wanted the nearly endless Hearts game shut down; that might cause them all sorts of grief from people who believed

folks should mind their own business. All they wanted was to get the f**k off Chamberlain Three while there was still time to salvage their scholarships.

16

The bad quizzes and unsuccessful little papers were nothing but unpleasant skirmishes. For Skip and me and too many of our cardplaying buddies, our second round of prelims was a full-fledged disaster. I got an A-minus on my in-class English theme and a D in European History, but flunked the Sociology multiple-choicer and the Geology multiple-choicer - soash by a little and geo by a lot. Skip flunked his Anthropology prelim, his Colonial History prelim, and the soash prelim. He got a C on the Calculus test (but the ice was getting pretty thin there, too, he told me) and a B on his in-class essay. We agreed that life would be much simpler if it were all a matter of in-class essays, writing assignments which necessarily took place far from the third-floor lounge. We were wishing for high school, in other words, without even knowing it.

'Okay, that's enough,' Skip said to me that Friday night. 'I'm buckling down, Peter. I don't give a shit about being a college man or having a diploma to hang over the mantel in my rumpus room, but I'll be f**ked if I want to go back to Dexter and hang around f**kin Bowlorama with the rest of the retards until Uncle Sam calls me.'

He was sitting on Nate's bed. Nate was across the way at the Palace on the Plains, chowing down on Friday-night fish. It was nice to know somebody on Chamberlain Three had an appetite. This was a conversation we couldn't have around Nate in any case; my country-mouse roommate thought he'd done pretty well on the latest round of prelims, all C's and B's. He wouldn't have said anything if he'd heard us talking, but would have looked at us in a way that said we lacked gumption. That, although it might not be our fault, we were morally weak.

'I'm with you,' I said, and then, from down the hall, came an agonized cry (' Ohhhhhh . . . FUCK ME! ') that we recognized instantly: someone had just taken The Bitch. Our eyes met. I can't say about Skip, not for sure (even though he was my best friend in college), but I was still thinking that there was time . . . and why wouldn't I think that? For me there always had been.

Skip began to grin. I began to grin. Skip began to giggle. I began to giggle right along with him.

'What the f**k,' he said.

'Just tonight,' I said. 'We'll go over to the library together tomorrow.'

'Hit the books.'

'All day. But right now . . . '

He stood up. 'Let's go Bitch-hunting.'

We did. And we weren't the only ones. That's no explanation, I know; it's only what happened.