Hearts in Atlantis(132)

He stood behind the little wooden podium, upon which he had laid a thin file-folder. I supposed it contained his notes. He was still dressed in his damp and muddy ROTC fatigues. He looked exhausted from his day of shovelling and sanding, but he also looked excited . . . 'turned on' is how we'd put it a year or two later.

Dearie had been on his own at the first floor-meeting; this time he had backup. Sitting against the green cinderblock wall, hands folded in his lap and knees primly together, was Sven Garretsen, the Dean of Men. He said almost nothing during that meeting, and looked benign even when the air grew stormy. Standing beside Dearie, wearing a black topcoat over a charcoal-gray suit and looking very can-do, was Ebersole, the Disciplinary Officer.

After we had settled in the chairs and those of us who smoked had lit up, Dearie looked first over his shoulder at Garretsen, then at Ebersole. Ebersole gave him a little smile. 'Go ahead, David. Please. They're your boys.'

I felt a rankle of irritation. I might be a lot of things, including a creep who laughed at cripples when they fell down in the pouring rain, but I was not Dearie Dearborn's boy.

Dearie gripped the podium and looked at us solemnly, perhaps thinking (far back in the part of his mind reserved expressly for dreamy dreams), that a day would come when he would address his staff officers this way, setting some great tide of Hanoi-bound troops into motion.

'Jones is missing,' he said finally. It came out sounding portentous and corny, like a line in a Charles Bronson movie.

'He's in the infirmary,' I said, and enjoyed the surprise on Dearie's face. Ebersole looked surprised, too. Garretsen just went on gazing benignly into the middle distance, like a man on a three-pipe high.

'What happened to him?' Dearie asked. This wasn't in the script - either the one he had worked out or the one he and Ebersole had prepared together - and Dearie began to frown. He was also gripping the podium more tightly, as if afraid it might fly away.

'Faw down go boom,' Ronnie said, and puffed up when the people around him laughed. 'Also, I think he's got pneumonia or double bronchitis or something like that.' He caught Skip's eye and I thought Skip nodded slightly. This was Skip's show, not Dearie's, but if we were lucky - if Stoke was lucky - the three at the front of the room would never know it.

'Tell me this from the beginning,' Dearie said. The frown was becoming a glower. It was the way he'd looked after discovering his door had been shaving-creamed.

Skip told Dearie and Dearie's new friends how we'd seen Stoke heading toward the Palace on the Plains from the third-floor lounge windows, how he'd fallen into the water, how we'd rescued him and taken him to the infirmary, how the doctor had said Stoke was one sick puppy. The doc hadn't said any such thing, but he didn't need to. Those of us who had touched Stake's skin knew that he was running a fever, and all of us had heard that horrible deep cough. Skip said nothing about how fast Stoke had been moving, as if he wanted to kill the whole world and then die himself, and he said nothing about how we'd laughed, Mark St Pierre so hard he'd wet his pants.

When Skip finished, Dearie glanced uncertainly at Ebersole. Ebersole looked back blandly. Behind them, Dean Garretsen continued to smile his little Buddha smile. The implication was clear. It was Dearie's show. He'd better have a show to put on.

Dearie took a deep breath and looked back at us. 'We believe Stokely Jones was responsible for the act of vandalism and public obscenity which was perpetrated on the north end of Chamberlain Hall at a time we don't know when this morning.'

I'm telling you exactly what he said, not making a single word of it up. Other than 'It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it,' that was perhaps the most sublime example of honchospeak I ever heard in my life.

I believe Dearie expected us to ooh and aah like the extras in a Perry Mason courtroom finale, where the revelations start coming thick and fast. Instead we were silent. Skip watched closely, and when he saw Dearie draw in another deep breath for the next pronouncement, he said: 'What makes you think it was him, Dearie?'

Although I'm not completely sure - I never asked him - I believe Skip used the nickname purposely, to throw Dearie even further off his stride. In any case it worked. Dearie started to go off, looked at Ebersole, and recalculated his options. A red line was rising out of his collar. I watched it climb, fascinated. It was a little like watching a Disney cartoon where Donald Duck is trying to control his temper. You know he can't possibly do it; the suspense comes from not knowing how long he can maintain even a semblance of reason.

'I think you know the answer to that, Skip,' Dearie finally said. 'Stokely Jones wears a coat with a very particular symbol on the back.' He picked up the folder he had carried in, removed a sheet of paper, looked at it, then turned it around so we could look at it, too. None of us was very surprised by what was there. ' This symbol. It was invented by the Communist Party shortly after the end of the Second World War. It means 'victory through infiltration' and is commonly called the Broken Cross by subversives. It has also become popular with such inner-city radical groups as the Black Muslims and the Black Panthers. Since this symbol was visible on Stoke Jones's coat long before it appeared on the side of our dorm, I hardly think it takes a rocket scientist to - '

'David, that is such bullshit!' Nate said, standing up. He was pale and trembling, but with anger rather than fear. Had I ever heard him say the word bullshit in public before? I don't think so.