Hearts in Atlantis(130)

There was silence. I looked between Skip and Tony's shoulders and into the examination room. Stoke still lay streaming on the table, his head turned to the side, his eyes shut. The nurse was taking his blood pressure. His pants clung to his legs and I thought of the Fourth of July parade they used to have back home in Gates Falls when I was just a little kid. Uncle Sam would come striding along between the school band and the Anah Temple Shrine guys on their midget motorcycles, looking at least ten feet tall in his starry blue hat, but when the wind blew his pants against his legs you could see the trick. That's what Stoke Jones's legs looked like inside his wet pants: a trick, a bad joke, sawed-off stilts with sneakers poked onto the ends of them.

'How do you know that?' Skip asked. 'Did he tell you, Natie?'

'No.' Nate looked ashamed. 'He told Harry Swidrowski, after a Committee of Resistance meeting. They - we - were in the Bear's Den. Harry asked him right out what happened to his legs and Stoke told him.'

I thought I understood the look on Nate's face. After the meeting, he had said. After. Nate didn't know what had been said at the meeting, because Nate hadn't been there. Nate wasn't a member of the Committee of Resistance; Nate was strictly a sidelines boy. He might agree with the C.R.'s goals and tactics . . . but he had his mother to think about. And his future as a dentist.

'Spinal injury?' the doctor asked. Brisker than ever.

'I think so, yeah,' Nate said.

'All right.' Doc began to make shooing gestures with his hands as if we were a flock of geese. 'Go on back to your dorms. We'll take good care of him.'

We began to back up toward the reception area.

'Why were you boys laughing when you brought him in?' the nurse asked suddenly. She stood by the doctor with the blood-pressure cuff in her hands. 'Why are you grinning now?' She sounded angry. Hell, she sounded furious. 'What was so funny about this boy's misfortune that it made you laugh?'

I didn't think anyone would answer. We'd just stand there and look down at our shuffling feet, realizing that we were still a lot closer to the fourth grade than we had perhaps thought. But someone did answer. Skip answered. He even managed to look at her as he did.

'His misfortune, ma'am,' he said. 'That was what it was, you're right. It was his misfortune that was funny.'

'How terrible,' she said. There were tears of rage standing in the corners of her eyes. 'How terrible you are.'

'Yes, ma'am,' Skip said. 'I guess you're right about that, too.' He turned away from her.

We followed him back to the reception area in a wet and beaten little group. I can't say that being called terrible was the low point of my college career ('If you can remember much of the sixties, you weren't there,' the hippie known as Wavy Gravy once said), but it may have been. The waiting room was still empty. Little Joe Cartwright was on the tube now, and just as green as his dad. Pancreatic cancer was what got Michael Landon, too - he and my mother had that in common.

Skip stopped. Ronnie, head down, pushed past him toward the door, followed by Nick, Billy, Lennie, and the rest.

'Hold it,' Skip said, and they turned. 'I want to talk to you guys about something.'

We gathered around him. Skip glanced once toward the door leading back to the exam area, verified that we were alone, then began to talk.

36

Ten minutes later Skip and I walked back to the dorm by ourselves. The others had gone ahead. Nate hung with us for a little bit, then must have picked up a vibe that I wanted to talk privately to Skip. Nate was always good at picking up the vibe. I bet he's a good dentist, that the children in particular like him.

'I'm done playing Hearts,' I said.

Skip said nothing.

'I don't know if it's too late to pull up my grades enough to keep my scholarship or not, but I'm going to try. And I don't care much, one way or the other. The f**king scholarship's not the point.'

'No. They're the point, right? Ronnie and the rest of them.'

'I think they're only part of it.' It was so cold out there as that day turned to dark - cold and damp and evil. It seemed that it would never be summer again. 'Man, I miss Carol. Why'd she have to go?'

'I don't know.'

'When he fell over it sounded like a nuthouse up there,' I said. 'Not a college dorm, a f**king nuthouse.'

'You laughed too, Pete. So did I.'

'I know,' I said. I might not have if I'd been alone, and Skip and I might not have if it had just been the two of us, but how could you tell? You were stuck with the way things played out. I kept thinking of Carol and those boys with their baseball bat. And I thought of the way Nate had looked at me, as if I were a thing below contempt. 'I know.'

We walked in silence for awhile.

'I can live with laughing at him, I guess,' I said, 'but I don't want to wake up forty with my kids asking me what college was like and not be able to remember anything but Ronnie Malenfant telling Polish jokes and that poor f**ked-up ass**le McClendon trying to kill himself with baby aspirin.' I thought about Stoke Jones twirling on his crutch and felt like laughing; thought of him lying beached on the exam table in the infirmary and felt like crying. And you know what? It was, as far as I could tell, exactly the same feeling. 'I just feel bad about it. I feel like shit.'