Hearts in Atlantis(139)

I love you, Pete. Merry Christmas.

PS. Get out of that stupid card-game.

I read it twice, then folded the clipping carefully and put it back in the card, my hands still shaking. Somewhere I think I still have that card ... as I'm sure that somewhere 'Red Carol' Gerber has still got her little snapshot of her childhood friends. If she's still alive, that is. Not exactly a sure thing: a lot of her last-known bunch of friends are not.

I opened the package. Inside it - and in jarring contrast to the cheery Christmas paper and white satin ribbon - was a paperback copy of Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. I had somehow missed it in high school, opting for A Separate Peace in Senior Lit instead because Peace looked a little shorter.

I opened it, thinking there might be an inscription. There was, but not the sort I had expected, not at all. This was what I found in the white space on the title page:

[image of a heart + a peace sign = information]

My eyes filled with sudden unexpected tears. I put my hands over my mouth to hold in the sob that wanted to come out. I didn't want to wake Nate up, didn't want him to see me crying. But I cried, all right. I sat there at my desk and cried for her, for me, for both of us, for all of us. I can't remember hurting any more ever in my life than I did then. Hearts are tough, she said, most times hearts don't break, and I'm sure that's right . . . but what about then? What about who we were then? What about hearts in Atlantis?

43

In any case, Skip and I survived. We did the makeup work, squeaked through the finals, and returned to Chamberlain Hall in mid-January. Skip told me he'd written a letter to John Winkin, the baseball coach, over the holiday, saying he'd changed his mind about coming out for the team.

Nate was back on Chamberlain Three. So, amazingly, was Lennie Doria - on academic pro but there. His paisan Tony DeLucca was gone, though. So were Mark St Pierre, Barry Margeaux, Nick Prouty, Brad Witherspoon, Harvey Twiller, Randy Echolls . . . and Ronnie, of course. We got a card from him in March. It was postmarked Lewiston and simply addressed to The Yo-Yo's Of Chamberlain Three. We taped it up in the lounge, over the chair where Ronnie had most often sat during the games. On the front was Alfred E. Neuman, the Mad magazine cover-boy. On the back Ronnie had written: 'Uncle Sam calls and I gotta go. Palm trees in my future and who gives a f-k. What me worry. I finished with 21 match points. That makes me the winner.' It was signed 'RON.' Skip and I had a laugh at that. As far as we were concerned, Mrs Malenfant's foul-mouthed little boy was going to be a Ronnie until the day he died.

Stoke Jones, aka Rip-Rip, was also gone. I didn't think of him much for awhile, but his face and memory came back to me with startling (if brief) vividness a year and a half later. I was in jail at the time, in Chicago. I don't know how many of us the cops swept up outside the convention center on the night Hubert Humphrey was nominated, but there were a lot, and a lot of us were hurt - a blue-ribbon commission would a year later designate the event a 'police riot' in its report.

I ended up in a holding cell meant for fifteen prisoners - twenty, max - with about sixty gassed-out, punched-out, drugged-out, beat-up, messed-up, worked-over, f**ked-over, blood-all-over hippies, some smoking joints, some crying, some puking, some singing protest songs (from far over in the corner, issuing from some guy I never even saw, came a stoned-out version of 'I'm Not Marchin' Anymore'). It was like some weird penal version of telephone-booth cramming.

I was jammed up against the bars, trying to protect my shirt pocket (Pall Malls), and my hip pocket (the copy of Lord of the Flies Carol had given me, now very battered, missing half its front cover, and falling out of its binding), when all at once Stake's face flashed into my mind as bright and complete as a high-resolution photograph. It came from nowhere, it seemed, perhaps the product of a dormant memory circuit which had gone momentarily hot, joggled by either a nightstick to the head or a revivifying whiff of teargas. And a question came with it.

'What the f**k was a cripple doing on the third floor?' I asked out loud.

A little guy with a huge mass of golden hair - a kind of Peter Frampton dwarf, if you could dig that - looked around. His face was pale and pimply. Blood was drying beneath his nose and on one cheek. 'What, man?' he asked.

'What the f**k was a cripple doing on the third floor of a college dorm? One with no elevator? Wouldn't they have put him on the first floor?' Then I remembered Stoke plunging toward Holyoke with his head down and his hair hanging in his eyes, Stoke muttering 'Rip-rip, rip-rip, rip-rip' under his breath. Stoke going everywhere as if everything was his enemy; give him a quarter and he'd try to shoot down the whole world.

'Man, I'm not following you. What - '

'Unless he asked them to,' I said. 'Unless he maybe right out demanded it.'

'Bingo,' said the little guy with the Peter Frampton hair. 'Got a joint, man? I want to get high. This place sucks. I want to go to Hobbiton.'

44

Skip became an artist, and he's famous in his own way. Not like Norman Rockwell, and you'll never see a reproduction of one of Skip's sculptures on a plate offered by the Franklin Mint, but he's had plenty of shows - London, Rome, New York, last year in Paris - and he's reviewed regularly. There are plenty of critics who call him jejune, the flavor of the month (some have been calling him the flavor of the month for twenty-five years), a trite mind communicating via low imagery with other trite minds. Other critics have praised him for his honesty and energy. I tend in this direction, but I suppose I would; I knew him back in the days we escaped the great sinking continent together, and he has remained my friend; in a distant way he has remained my paisan.