Hearts in Atlantis(124)

They drew closer to the side of the dorm. The letters there were big and black, but by then the snow was so heavy that they had to get within ten feet of the wall before they could read the words, which had been posted by someone with a can of spray-paint . . . and in a state of total piss-off, from the jagged look of the message. (Again, neither of them considered that someone trying to spray-paint a message while at the same time maintaining his balance on a set of crutches might not be able to manage much in the way of neatness.)

The message read:

[image of a scrawl: "Fuck Johnson! Killer President!US Out of Vietnam! NOW!]

32

I've read that some criminals - perhaps a great many criminals - actually want to be caught. I think that was the case with Stoke Jones. Whatever he had come to the University of Maine looking for, he wasn't finding it. I believe he'd decided it was time to leave . . . and if he was going, he would make the grandest gesture a guy on crutches could manage before he did.

Tom Huckabee told dozens of kids about what was spray-painted on our dorm; so did Becka Aubert. One of the people she told was Franklin's second-floor proctor, a skinny self-righteous girl named Marjorie Stuttenheimer. Marjorie became quite a figure on campus by 1969, as founder and president of Christians for College America. The CCA supported the war in Vietnam and at their booth in the Memorial Union sold the little lapel flag-pins which Richard Nixon made so popular.

I was scheduled to work Thursday lunch at the Palace on the Plains, and while I might cut classes, it never crossed my mind to cut my job - I wasn't made that way. I gave my seat in the lounge to Tony DeLucca and started over to Holyoke at about eleven o'clock to do my dishly duty. I saw a fairly large group of students gathered in the snow, looking at something on the north side of my dorm. I walked over, read the message, and knew at once who'd put it there.

On Bennett Road, a blue University of Maine sedan and one of the University's two police cars were drawn up by the path leading to Chamberlain's side door. Margie Stuttenheimer was there, part of a little group that consisted of four campus cops, the Dean of Men, and Charles Ebersole, the University's Disciplinary Officer.

There were perhaps fifty people in the crowd when I joined it at the rear; in the five minutes I stood there rubbernecking, it swelled to seventy-five. By the time I finished wipedown-shutdown at one-fifteen and headed back to Chamberlain, there were probably two hundred people gawping in little clusters. I suppose it's hard to believe now that any graffiti could have such a draw, especially on a shitty day like that one, but we are talking about a far different world, one where no magazine in America (except, very occasionally, Popular Photography) would show a nude so nude that the subject's pubic hair was on view, where no newspaper would dare so much as a whisper about any political figure's sex-life. This was before Atlantis sank; this was long ago and far away in a world where at least one comedian was jailed for uttering f**k in public and another observed that on The Ed Sullivan Show you could prick your finger but not finger your prick. It was a world where some words were still shocking.

Yes, we knew f**k. Of course we did. We said f**k all the time: f**k you, f**k your dog, go take a flying f**k at a rolling doughnut, f**k a duck, hey, go f**k your sister, the rest of us did. But there, written in black letters five feet high, were the words FUCK JOHNSON. Fuck the President of the United States! And KILLER PRESIDENT! Someone had called the President of the United States of America a murderer! We couldn't believe it.

When I came back from Holyoke, the other campus police car had arrived, and there were six campus cops - almost the whole damned force, I calculated - trying to put up a big rectangle of yellow canvas over the message. The crowd muttered, then started booing. The cops looked at them, annoyed. One shouted for them to break it up, go on, they all had places to go. That might have been true, but apparently most of them liked it right there, because the crowd didn't thin out much.

The cop holding the far left end of the canvas dropcloth slipped in the snow and nearly fell. A few onlookers applauded. The cop who had slipped looked toward the sound with an expression of blackest hate momentarily congesting his face, and for me that's when things really started to change, when the generations really started to gap.

The cop who'd slipped turned away and began to struggle with the piece of canvas again. In the end they settled for covering the first peace sign and the FUCK of FUCK JOHNSON! And once the Really Bad Word was hidden, the crowd did begin to break up. The snow was changing to sleet and standing around had become uncomfortable.

'Better not let the cops see the back of your jacket,' Skip said, and I looked around. He was standing beside me in a hooded sweatshirt, his hands plunged deep into the pouch in front. His breath came out of his mouth in frozen plumes; his eyes never left the campus cops and the part of the message which still remained: JOHNSON! KILLER PRESIDENT! OUT OF VIETNAM NOW! 'They'll think you did it. Or me.'

Smiling a little, Skip turned around. On the back of his sweatshirt, drawn in bright red ink, was another of those sparrow-tracks.

'Jesus,' I said. 'When did you do that?'

'This morning,' he said. 'I saw Nate's.' He shrugged. 'It was too cool not to copy.'

'They won't think it was us. Not for a minute.'

'No, I suppose not.'

The only question was why they weren't questioning Stoke already . . . not that they'd have to ask many questions to get the truth out of him. But if Ebersole, the Disciplinary Officer, and Garretsen, the Dean of Men, weren't talking to him, it was only because they hadn't yet talked to-