Hearts in Atlantis(105)

At breakfast the next morning, as we worked side by side on the dishline, Carol said: 'I'm hearing there's some kind of big card-game going on in your dorm. Is that true?'

'I guess it is,' I said.

She looked at me over her shoulder, giving me that smile - the one I always thought about when I thought about Carol. The one I think about still. 'Hearts? Hunting The Bitch?'

'Hearts,' I agreed. 'Hunting The Bitch.'

'I heard that some of the guys are getting in over their heads. Getting in grades trouble.'

'I guess that might be,' I said. Nothing was coming down the conveyor belt, not so much as a single tray. There's never a rush when you need one, I've noticed.

'How are your grades?' she asked. 'I know it's none of my business, but I want - '

'Information, yeah, I know. I'm doing okay. Besides, I'm getting out of the game.'

She just gave me the smile, and sure I still think about it sometimes; you would, too. The dimples, the slightly curved lower lip that knew so many nice things about kissing, the dancing blue eyes. Those were days when no girl saw further into a boys' dorm than the lobby . . . and vice-versa, of course. Still, I have an idea that for a little while in October and November of 1966 Carol saw plenty, more than I did. But of course, she wasn't insane - at least not then. The war in Vietnam became her insanity. Mine as well. And Skip's. And Nate's. Hearts were nothing, really, only a few tremors in the earth, the kind that flap the screen door on its hinges and rattle the glasses on the shelves. The killer earthquake, the apocalyptic continent-drowner, was still on its way.

17

Barry Margeaux and Brad Witherspoon both got the Deny News delivered to their rooms, and the two copies had usually made the rounds of the third floor by the end of the day - we'd find the remnants in the lounge when we took our seats for the evening session of Hearts, the pages torn and out of order, the crossword filled in by three or four different hands. There would be mustaches inked on the photodot faces of Lyndon Johnson and Ramsey Clark and Martin Luther King (someone, I never found out who, would invariably put large smoking horns on Vice President Humphrey and print HUBERT THE DEVIL underneath in tiny anal capital letters). The News was hawkish on the war, putting the most positive spin on each day's military events and relegating any protest news to the depths . . . usually beneath the Community Calendar.

Yet more and more we found ourselves discussing not movies or dates or classes as the cards were shuffled and dealt; more and more it was Vietnam. No matter how good the news or how high the Gong body count, there always seemed to be at least one picture of agonized US soldiers after an ambush or crying Vietnamese children watching their village go up in smoke. There was always some unsettling detail tucked away near the bottom of what Skip called 'the daily kill-column,' like the thing about the kids who got wasted when we hit the Cong PT boats in the Delta.

Nate, of course, didn't play cards. He wouldn't debate the pros and cons of the war, either - I doubt if he knew, any more than I did, than Vietnam had once been under the French, or what had happened to the monsieurs unlucky enough to have been in the fortress city of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, let alone who might've decided it was time for President Diem to go to that big rice-paddy in the sky so Nguyen Cao Ky and the generals could take over. Nate only knew that he had no quarrel with those Gongs, that they weren't going to be in Mars Hill or Presque Isle in the immediate future.

'Haven't you ever heard about the domino theory, shitbird?' a banty little freshman named Nicholas Prouty asked Nate one afternoon. My roommate rarely came down to the third-floor lounge now, preferring the quieter one on Two, but that day he had dropped in for a few moments.

Nate looked at Nick Prouty, a lobsterman's son who had become a devout disciple of Ronnie Malenfant, and sighed. 'When the dominoes come out, I leave the room. I think it's a boring game. That's my domino theory.' He shot me a glance. I got my eyes away as fast as I could, but not quite in time to avoid the message: what in hell's wrong with you? Then he left, scuffing back down to room 302 in his fuzzy slippers to do some more studying - to resume his charted course from pre-dent to dent, in other words.

'Riley, your roommate's f**ked, you know that?' Ronnie said. He had a cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth. Now he scratched a match one-handed, a specialty of his - college guys too ugly and abrasive to get girls have all sorts of specialties - and lit up.

No, man, I thought, Mate's doing fine. We're the ones who are f**ked up. For a second I felt real despair. In that second I realized I was in a terrible jam and had no idea at all of how to extricate myself. I was aware of Skip looking at me, and it occurred to me that if I snatched up the cards, sprayed them in Ronnie's face, and walked out of the room, Skip would join me. Likely with relief. Then the feeling passed. It passed as rapidly as it had come.

'Nate's okay,' I said. 'He's got some funny ideas, that's all.'

'Some funny communist ideas is what he's got,' Hugh Brennan said. His older brother was in the Navy and most recently heard from in the South China Sea. Hugh had no use for peaceniks. As a Goldwater Republican I should have felt the same, but Nate had started getting to me. I had all sorts of canned knowledge, but no real arguments in favor of the war . . . nor time to work any up. I was too busy to study my sociology, let alone to bone up on US foreign policy.