Hearts in Atlantis(122)

I took my modified high-school jacket back to school on Sunday packed into my suitcase - despite her freshly voiced doubts about Mr Johnson's and Mr McNamara's war, my mom would have had lots of questions about the sparrow-track, and I didn't have answers to give, not yet.

I felt equipped to wear the jacket, though, and I did. I spilled beer and cigarette ashes on it, puked on it, bled on it, got teargassed in Chicago while wearing it and screaming 'The whole world is watching!' at the top of my lungs. Girls cried on the entwined GF on the left breast (by my senior year those letters were dingy gray instead of white), and one girl lay on it while we made love. We did it with no protection, so probably there's a trace of se**n on the quilted lining, too. By the time I packed up and left LSD Acres in 1970, the peace sign I drew on the back in my mother's kitchen was only a shadow. But the shadow remained. Others might not see it, but I always knew what it was.

CHAPTER 22

29

We came back to school on the Sunday after Thanksgiving in this order: Skip at five (he lived in Dexter, the closest of the three of us), me at seven, Nate at around nine.

I called Franklin Hall even before I unpacked my suitcase. No, the girl on the desk said, Carol Gerber wasn't back. She was plainly reluctant to say more, but I badgered her. There were two pink LEFT SCHOOL cards on the desk, she said. One of them had Carol's name and room number on it.

I thanked her and hung up. I stood there a minute, fogging up the booth with my cigarette smoke, then turned around. Across the hall I could see Skip sitting at one of the card-tables, just picking up a spilled trick.

I sometimes wonder if things might have been different if Carol had come back, or even if I'd beaten Skip back, had a chance to get to him before the third-floor lounge got to him. I didn't, though.

I stood there in the phone-booth, smoking a Pall Mall and feeling sorry for myself. Then, from across the way, someone screamed: ' Oh shit no! I don't f**kin BELIEVE IT!'

To which Ronnie Malenfant (from where I stood in the phone-booth he was out of my view, but his voice was as unmistakable as the sound of a saw ripping through a knot in a pine-branch) hollered gleefully back: 'Whoa, look at this - Randy Echolls takes the fast Bitch of the post-Thanksgiving era!'

Don't go in there, I told myself. You are absolutely f**ked if you do, f**ked once and for all.

But of course I did. The tables were all taken, but there were three other guys - Billy Marchant, Tony DeLucca, and Hugh Brennan - standing around. We could snag a corner, if we so chose.

Skip looked up from his hand and shot me a high five in the smoky air. 'Welcome back to the loonybin, Pete.'

'Hey!' Ronnie said, looking around. 'Look who's here! The only ass**le in the place who can almost play the game! Where you been, Chuckles?'

'Lewiston,' I said, 'f*cking your grandmother.'

Ronnie cackled, his pimply cheeks turning red.

Skip was looking at me seriously, and maybe there was something in his eyes. I can't say for sure. Time goes by, Atlantis sinks deeper and deeper into the ocean, and you have a tendency to romanticize. To mythologize. Maybe I saw that he had given up, that he intended to stay here and play cards and then go on to whatever was next; maybe he was giving me permission to go in my own direction. But I was eighteen, and more like Nate in many ways than I liked to admit. I had also never had a friend like Skip. Skip was fearless, Skip said f**k every other word, when Skip was eating at the Palace the girls couldn't keep their eyes off him. He was the kind of babe magnet Ronnie could be only in his dampest dreams. But Skip also had something adrift inside of him, something like a bit of bone which may, after years of harmless wandering, pierce the heart or clog the brain. He knew it, too. Even then, with high school still sticking all over him like afterbirth, even then when he still thought he'd somehow wind up teaching school and coaching baseball, he knew it. And I loved him. The look of him, the smile of him, the walk and talk of him. I loved him and I would not leave him.

'So,' I said to Billy, Tony, and Hugh. 'You guys want a lesson?'

'Nickel a point!' Hugh said, laughing like a loon. Shit, he was a loon. 'Let's go! Wheel em and deal em!'

Pretty soon we were in the corner, all four of us smoking furiously and the cards flying. I remembered the desperate cramming I'd done over the holiday weekend; remembered my mother saying that boys who didn't work hard in school were dying these days. I remembered those things, but they seemed as distant as making love to Carol in my car while The Platters sang 'Twilight Time.'

I looked up once and saw Stoke Jones in the doorway, leaning on his crutches and looking at us with his usual distant contempt. His black hair was thicker than ever, the corkscrews crazier over his ears and heavier against the collar of his sweatshirt. He sniffed steadily, his nose dripped and his eyes were running, but otherwise he didn't seem any sicker than before the break.

'Stoke!' I said. 'How are you doing?'

'Oh well, who knows,' he said. 'Better than you, maybe.'

'Come on in, Rip-Rip, drag up a milking-stool,' Ronnie said. 'We'll teach you the game.'

'You know nothing I want to learn,' Stoke said, and went thumping away. We listened to his receding crutches and a brief coughing fit.

'That crippled-up queer loves me,' Ronnie said. 'He just can't show it.'

'I'll show you something if you don't deal some f**kin cards,' Skip said.