Hearts in Atlantis(110)

'What do you say, Pete?' he asked. 'Want to play a few hands?'

'Maybe later,' I said, and started down the hall. Stoke Jones was thumping back from the bathroom in a frayed old robe. His crutches left round wet tracks on the dark red linoleum. His long, crazy hair was wet. I wondered how he did in the shower; certainly there were none of the railings and grab-handles that later became standard in public washing facilities. He didn't look as though he would much enjoy discussing the subject, however. That or any other subject.

CHAPTER 20

'How you doing, Stoke?' I asked.

He went by without answering, head down, dripping hair plastered to his cheeks, soap and towel clamped under one arm, muttering 'Rip-rip, rip-rip' under his breath. He never even looked up at me. Say whatever you wanted about Stoke Jones, you could depend on him to put a little f**k-you into your day.

21

Carol was already at Holyoke when I got there. She had brought a couple of milk-boxes from the area where the Dumpsters were lined up and was sitting on one of them, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. I sat down on the other one, put my arm around her, and kissed her. She put her head on my shoulder for a moment, not saying anything. This wasn't much like her, but it was nice. I kept my arm around her and looked up at the stars. The night was mild for so late in the season, and lots of people - couples, mostly - were out walking, taking advantage of the weather. I could hear their murmured conversations. From above us, in the Commons dining room, a radio was playing 'Hang On, Sloopy.' One of the janitors, I suppose.

Carol raised her head at last and moved away from me a little - just enough to let me know I could take my arm back. That was more like her, actually. 'Thanks,' she said. 'I needed a hug.'

'My pleasure.'

'I'm a little scared about facing my dad. Not real scared, but a little.'

'It'll be all right.' Not saying it because I really thought it would be I couldn't know a thing like that - but because it's what you say, isn't it? Just what you say.

'My dad's not the reason I went with Harry and George and the rest. It's no big Freudian rebellion, or anything like that.'

She flicked her cigarette away and we watched it fountain sparks when it struck the bricks of Bennett's Walk. Then she took her little clutch purse out of her lap, opened it, found her wallet, opened that, and thumbed through a selection of snapshots stuck in those small celluloid windows. She stopped, slipped one out, and handed it to me. I leaned forward so I could see it by the light falling through the dining-hall windows, where the janitors were probably doing the floors.

The picture showed three kids of eleven or twelve, a girl and two boys. They were all wearing blue tee-shirts with the words STERLING HOUSE on them in red block letters. They were standing in a parking lot somewhere and had their arms around each other - an easy pals-forever pose that was sort of beautiful. The girl was in the middle. The girl was Carol, of course.

'Which one is Sully-John?' I asked. She looked at me, a little surprised . . . but with the smile. In any case, I thought I already knew. Sully-John would be the one with the broad shoulders, the wide grin, and the tumbled black hair. It reminded me of Stake's hair, although the boy had obviously run a comb through his thatch. I tapped him. 'This one, right?'

'That's Sully,' she agreed, then touched the face of the other boy with her fingernail. He had a sunburn rather than a tan. His face was narrower, the eyes a little closer together, the hair a carroty red and mowed in a crewcut that made him look like a kid on a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. There was a faint frown-line on his brow. Sully's arms were already muscular for a kid's; this other boy had thin arms, thin stick arms. They were probably still thin stick arms. On the hand not slung around Carol's shoulders he was wearing a big brown baseball glove.

'This one's Bobby,' she said. Her voice had changed, somehow. There was something in it I'd never heard before. Sorrow? But she was still smiling. If it was sorrow she felt, why was she smiling? 'Bobby Garfield. He was my first boyfriend. My first love, I guess you could say. He and Sully and I were best friends back then. Not so long ago, 1960, but it seems long ago.'

'What happened to him?' I was somehow sure she was going to tell me he had died, this boy with the narrow face and the crewcut carrot-top.

'He and his mom moved away. We wrote back and forth for awhile, and then we lost touch. You know how kids are.'

'Nice baseball glove.'

Carol still with the smile. I could see the tears that had come into her eyes as we sat looking down at the snapshot, but still with the smile. In the white light of the fluorescents from the dining hall, her tears looked silver - the tears of a princess in a fairy-tale.

'That was Bobby's favorite thing. There's a baseball player named Alvin Dark, right?'

'There was.'

'That's what kind of a glove Bobby had. An Alvin Dark model.'

'Mine was a Ted Williams. I think my mom rummage-saled it a couple of years ago.'

'Bobby's got stolen,' Carol said. I'm not sure she knew I was there anymore. She kept touching that narrow, slightly frowning face with her fingertip. It was as if she had regressed into her own past. I've heard that hypnotists can do that with good subjects. 'Willie took it.'

'Willie?'

'Willie Shearman. I saw him playing ball with it a year later, down at Sterling House. I was so mad. My mom and dad were always fighting then, working up to the divorce, I guess, and I was mad all the time. Mad at them, mad at my math teacher, mad at the whole world. I was still scared of Willie, but mostly I was mad at him . . . and besides, I wasn't by myself, not that day. So I marched right up to him and said I knew that was Bobby's glove and he ought to give it to me. I said I had Bobby's address in Massachusetts and I'd send it to him. Willie said I was crazy, it was his glove, and he showed me his name on the side. He'd erased Bobby's - best as he could, anyway - and printed his own over where it had been. But I could still see the bby, from Bobby.'