Hearts in Atlantis(113)

She looked judiciously at my car. 'Okay,' she said. 'It's ugly, it desperately needs a wash, but it's transportation. The question is, what're we doing here when I should be reading a Flannery O'Connor story?'

I took out my pocket-knife and opened it. 'Got a nail-file in your bag?'

'As a matter of fact, I do. Are we going to fight? Number Two and Number Six go at it in the Steam Plant parking lot?'

'Don't be a smartass. Just get it out and follow me.'

By the time we got around to the back of the station wagon, she was laughing - not the rueful laugh but the full-out guffaw I'd first heard when Skip's horny hotdog man came down the dishline conveyor belt. She finally understood why we were here.

Carol took one side of the bumper sticker; I took the other; we met in the middle. Then we watched the shreds blow away across the macadam. Au revoir, AuH2O-4-USA. Bye-bye, Barry. And we laughed. Man, we just couldn't stop laughing.

22

A couple of days later my friend Skip, who'd come to college with the political awareness of a mollusk, put up a poster on his side of the room he shared with Brad Witherspoon. It showed a smiling businessman in a three-piece suit. One hand was extended to shake. The other was hidden behind his back, but something clutched in it was dripping blood between his shoes. WAR is GOOD BUSINESS, the poster said. INVEST YOUR SON.

Dearie was horrified.

'So you're against Vietnam now?' he asked when he saw it. Below his chin-out truculence I think our beloved floor-proctor was badly shocked by that poster. Skip, after all, had been a first-class high-school baseball player. Was expected to play college ball, too. Had been courted by both Delta Tau Delta and Phi Gam, the jock frats. Skip was no frog-eyed weirdo like George Oilman, no sickly cripple like Stoke Jones (Dearie Dearborn had also taken to calling Stoke Rip-Rip).

'Hey, all this poster means is that a lot of people are making money out of a big bloody mess,' Skip said. 'McDonnell-Douglas. Boeing. GE. Dow Chemical and Coleman Chemicals. Pepsi Fuckin Cola. Lots more.'

Dearie's gimlet gaze conveyed (or tried to) the idea that he had thought about such issues more deeply than Skip Kirk ever could. 'Let me ask you something - do you think we should just stand back and let Uncle Ho take over down there?'

'I don't know what I think,' Skip said, 'not yet. I only started getting interested in the subject a couple of weeks ago. I'm still playing catch-up.'

This was at seven-thirty in the morning, and a little group outbound for eight o'clock classes had gathered around Skip's door. I saw Ronnie (plus Nick Prouty; by this point the two of them had become inseparable), Ashley Rice, Lennie Doria, Billy Marchant, maybe four or five others. Nate was leaning in the doorway of 302, wearing a tee-shirt and his pj bottoms. In the stairwell, Stoke Jones leaned on his crutches. He had apparently been on his way out and had turned back to monitor the discussion.

Dearie said, 'When the Viet Cong come into a South Viet 'ville, the first thing they look for are people wearing crucifixes, St Christopher medals, Mary medals, anything of that nature. Catholics are killed. People who believe in God are killed. Do you think we should stand back while the commies kill people who believe in God?'

'Why not?' Stoke said from the stairwell. 'We stood back and let the Nazis kill the Jews for six years. Jews believe in God, or so I'm told.'

'Fucking Rip-Rip!' Ronnie shouted. 'Who the f**k asked you to play the piano?'

But by then Stoke Jones, aka Rip-Rip, was making his way down the stairs. The echoey sound of his crutches made me think of the recently departed Frank Stuart.

Dearie turned back to Skip. His hands were fisted on his hips. Lying against the front of his white tee-shirt was a set of dogtags. His father had worn them in France and Germany, he told us; had been wearing them as he lay behind a tree, hiding from the machine-gun fire that had killed two men in his company and wounded four more. What this had to do with the Vietnam conflict none of us quite knew, but it was clearly a big deal to Dearie, so none of us asked. Even Ronnie had sense enough to keep his trap shut.

'If we let them take South Vietnam, they'll take Cambodia.' Dearie's eyes moved from Skip to me to Ronnie . . . to all of us. 'Then Laos. Then the Philippines. One after the other.'

'If they can do that, maybe they deserve to win,' I said.

Dearie looked at me, shocked. I was sort of shocked myself, but I didn't take it back.

23

There was one more round of prelims before the Thanksgiving break, and for the young scholars of Chamberlain Three, it was a disaster. By then most of us understood that we were a disaster, that we were committing a kind of group suicide. Kirby McClendon did his freak-out thing and disappeared like a rabbit in a magic trick. Kenny Auster, who usually sat in the corner during the marathon games and picked his nose when he couldn't decide what card to play next, simply bugged out one day. He left a queen of spades with the words 'I quit' written across it on his pillow. George Lessard joined Steve Ogg and Jack Frady in Chad, the brain dorm.

Six down, thirteen to go.

It should have been enough. Hell, just what happened to poor old Kirby should have been enough; in the last three or four days before he freaked, his hands were trembling so badly he had trouble picking up his cards and he jumped in his seat if someone slammed a door in the hall. Kirby should have been enough but he wasn't. Nor was my time with Carol the answer. When I was actually with her, yes, I was fine. When I was with her all I wanted was information (and maybe to ball her socks oil). When I was in the dorm, though, especially in that goddamned third-floor lounge, I became another version of Peter Riley. In the third-floor lounge I was a stranger to myself.