Hearts in Atlantis(135)

'Oh man, I wouldn't put too much trust in anything Stoke might tell you,' Skip said.

'Right, old Rip-Rip's crazy as a shithouse rat,' Ronnie said.

There was strangely affectionate laughter at this. 'Shithouse rat!' Nick cried, eyes shining. He was as joyful as a poet who has finally found le mot juste. 'Shithouse rat, yeah, that's Old Rip!' And, in what was probably that day's final triumph of lunacy over rational discourse, Nick Prouty fell into an eerily perfect Foghorn Leghorn imitation: 'Ah say, Ah say the boy's craizy! Missin a wheel off his baiby-carriage! Lost two-three cahds out'n his deck! Fella's a beer shote of a six-pack\ He's . . . '

Nick gradually realized that Ebersole and Garretsen were looking at him, Ebersole with contempt, Garretsen almost with interest, as at a new bacterium glimpsed through the lens of a microscope.

' . . . you know, a little sick in the head,' Nick finished, losing the imitation as self-consciousness, that bane of all great artists, set in. He quickly sat down.

'That's not the kind of sick I meant, exactly,' Skip said. 'I'm not talking about him being a cripple, either. He's been sneezing, coughing, and running at the nose ever since he got here. Even you must have noticed that, Dearie.'

Dearie didn't reply, didn't even react to the use of the nickname this time. He must have been pretty tired, all right.

'All I'm saying is that he might claim a whole lot of stuff,' Skip said. 'He might even believe some of it. But he's out of it.'

Ebersole's smile had resurfaced, no humor in it now. 'I believe I grasp the thrust of your argument, Mr Kirk. You want us to believe that Mr Jones was not responsible for the writing on the wall, but if he does confess to having done it, we should not credit his statement.'

Skip also smiled - the thousand-watt smile that made the girls' hearts go giddyup. 'That's it,' he said, 'that's the thrust of my argument, all right.'

There was a moment's silence, and then Dean Garretsen spoke what could have been the epitaph of our brief age. 'You fellows have disappointed me,' he said. 'Come on, Charles, we have no further business here.' Garretsen hoisted his briefcase, turned on his heel, and headed for the door.

Ebersole looked surprised but hurried after him. Which left Dearie and his third-floor charges to stare at each other with mingled expressions of distrust and reproach.

'Thanks, guys.' David was almost crying. 'Thanks a f**king pantload.' He stalked out with his head down and his folder clutched in one hand. The following semester he left Chamberlain and joined a frat. All things considered, that was probably for the best. As Stoke might have said, Dearie had lost his credibility.

40

'So you stole that, too,' Stoke Jones said from his bed in the infirmary when he could finally talk. I had just told him that almost everyone in Chamberlain Hall was now wearing the sparrow-track on at least one article of clothing, thinking this news would cheer him up. I had been wrong.

'Settle down, man,' Skip said, patting his shoulder. 'Don't have a hemorrhage.'

Stoke never so much as glanced at him. His black, accusing eyes remained on me. 'You took the credit, then you took the peace sign. Did any of you check my wallet? I think there were nine or ten dollars in there. You could have had that, too. Made it a clean sweep.' He turned his head aside and began to cough weakly. On that cold day in early December of '66 he looked one f**k of a lot older than eighteen.

This was four days after Stoke went swimming in Bennett's Run. The doctor - Carbury, his name was - seemed by the second of those days to accept that most of us were Stoke's friends no matter how oddly we'd acted when we brought him in, because we kept stopping by to ask after him. Carbury had been at the college infirmary, prescribing for strep throats and splinting wrists dislocated in softball games, for donkey's years and probably knew there was no accounting for the behavior of young men and women homing in on their majority; they might look like adults, but most retained plenty of their childhood weirdnesses, as well. Nick Prouty auditioning Foghorn Leghorn for the Dean of Men, for instance - I rest my case.

Carbury never told us how bad things had been with Stoke. One of the candystripers (half in love with Skip by the second time she saw him, I believe) gave us a clearer picture, not that we really needed one. The fact that Carbury stuck him in a private room instead of on Men's Side told us something; the fact that we weren't allowed to so much as peek in on him for the first forty-eight hours of his stay told us more; the fact that he hadn't been moved to Eastern Maine, which was only ten miles up the road, told us most of all. Carbury hadn't dared move him, not even in the University ambulance. Stoke Jones had been in bad straits indeed. According to the candystriper, he had pneumonia, incipient hypothermia from his dunk, and a temperature which crested at a hundred and five degrees. She'd overheard Carbury talking with someone on the phone and saying that if Jones's lung capacity had been any further reduced by his disability - or if he'd been in his thirties or forties instead of his late teens - he almost certainly would have died.

Skip and I were the first visitors he was allowed. Any other kid in the dorm probably would have been visited by at least one parent, but that wasn't going to happen in Stoke's case, we knew that now. And if there were other relatives, they hadn't bothered to put in an appearance.