Hearts in Atlantis(123)

'I'm bewwy, bewwy scared,' Ronnie said in an Elmer Fudd voice which only he found amusing. He laid his head on Mark St Pierre's arm to show how terrified he was.

Mark lifted the arm, hard. 'The f**k off me. This is a new shirt, Malenfant, I don't want your pimple-pus all over it.'

Before Ronnie's face lit with amusement and he cawed laughter, I saw a moment of desperate hurt there. It left me unmoved. Ronnie's problems might be genuine, but they didn't make him any easier to like. To me he was just a blowhard who could play cards.

'Come on,' I said to Billy Marchant. 'Hurry up and deal. I want to get some studying done later.' But of course there was no studying done by any of us that night. Instead of burning out over the holiday, the fever was stronger and hotter than ever.

I went down the hall around quarter of ten to get a fresh pack of smokes and knew Nate was back while I was still six doors away. 'Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)' was coming from the room Nick Prouty shared with Barry Margeaux, but from farther down I could hear Phil Ochs singing 'The Draft Dodger Rag.'

Nate was deep in his closet, hanging up his clothes. Not only was he the only person I ever knew in college who wore pajamas, he was the only one who ever used the hangers. The only thing I myself had hung up was my high-school jacket. Now I took it out and began to rummage in the pockets for my cigarettes.

'Hey, Nate, how you doing? Get enough of that cranberry dressing to hold you?'

'I'm - ' he began, then saw what was on the back of my jacket

and burst out laughing.

'What?' I asked. 'Is it that funny?'

'In a way,' he said, and leaned deeper into his closet. 'Look.' He reappeared with an old Navy pea coat in his hands. He turned it around so I could see the back. On it, much neater than my freehand work, was the sparrow-track. Nate had rendered his in bright silver duct tape. This time we both laughed.

'Ike and Mike, they think alike,' I said.

'Nonsense. Great minds run in the same channel.'

'Is that what it is?'

'Well . . . what I like to think, anyway. Does this mean you've changed your mind about the war, Pete?'

'What mind?' I asked.

30

Andy White and Ashley Rice never came back to college at all - eight down, now. For the rest of us there was an obvious change for the worse in the three days before that winter's first storm. Obvious, that was, to anyone else. If you were inside the thing, burning with the fever, it all seemed just a step or two north of normal.

Before Thanksgiving break, the card quartets in the lounge had a tendency to break up and re-form during the school-week; sometimes they died out altogether for awhile as kids went off to classes. Now the groups became almost static, the only changes occurring when someone staggered off to bed or table-hopped to escape Ronnie's skills and constant abrasive chatter. This settling occurred because most of the third-floor players hadn't returned to continue furthering their educations; Barry, Nick, Mark, Harvey, and I don't know how many others had pretty much given up on the education part. They had returned in order to resume the quest for totally valueless 'match points.' Many of the boys on Chamberlain Three were in fact now majoring in Hearts. Skip Kirk and I, sad to say, were among them. I made a couple of classes on Monday, then said f**k it and cut the rest. I cut everything on Tuesday, played Hearts in my dreams on Tuesday night (in one fragment I remember dropping The Bitch and seeing that her face was Carol's), then spent all day Wednesday playing it for real. Geology, sociology, history . . . all concepts without meaning.

In Vietnam, a fleet of B-52s hit a Viet Gong staging area outside Dong Ha. They also managed to hit a company of US Marines, killing twelve and wounding forty - whoops, shit. And the forecast for Thursday was heavy snow turning to rain and freezing rain in the afternoon. Very few of us took note of this; certainly I had no reason to think that storm would change the course of my life.

I went to bed at midnight on Wednesday and slept heavily. If I had dreams of Hearts or Carol Gerber, I don't remember them. When I woke up at eight o'clock on Thursday morning, it was snowing so heavily I could barely see the lights of Franklin Hall across the way. I showered, then padded down the hall to see if the game had started yet. There was one table going - Lennie Doria, Randy Echolls, Billy Marchant, and Skip. They looked pale and stubbly and tired, as if they had been there all night. Probably had been. I leaned in the doorway, watching the game. Outside in the snow, something quite a bit more interesting than cards was going on, but none of us knew it until later.

31

Tom Huckabee lived in King, the other boys' dorm in our complex. Becka Aubert lived in Franklin. They had become quite cozy in the last three or four weeks, and that included taking their meals together. They were coming back from breakfast on that snowy late-November morning when they saw something printed on the north side of Chamberlain Hall. That was the side which faced the rest of the campus . . . which faced East Annex in particular, where the big corporations held their job interviews.

They walked closer, stepping off the path and into the new snow - by then about four inches had fallen.

'Look,' Becka said, pointing down at the snow. There were queer tracks there - not footprints but drag-marks, almost, and deep punched holes running in lines outside them. Tom Huckabee said they reminded him of tracks made by a person wearing skis and wielding ski-poles. Neither of them thought that someone using crutches might have made such tracks. Not then.