Hearts in Atlantis(140)

There are also critics who have commented on the rage his work so often expresses, the rage I first saw clearly in the papier-mache Vietnamese family tableau he set afire in front of the school library to the amplified pulse of The Youngbloods back in 1969. And yeah. Yeah, there's something to that. Some of Skip's stuff is funny and some of it's sad and some of it's bizarre, but most of it looks angry, most of his stiff-shouldered plaster and paper and clay people seem to whisper Light me, oh light me and listen to me scream, it's really still i()6g, it's still the Mekong and always will be. 'It is Stanley Kirk's anger which makes his work worthy,' a critic wrote during an exhibition in Boston, and I suppose it was that same anger which contributed to his heart attack two months ago.

His wife called and said Skip wanted to see me. The doctors believed it hadn't been a serious cardiac event, but the Captain begged to disagree. My old paisan Captain Kirk thought he was dying.

I flew down to Palm Beach, and when I saw him - white face below mostly white hair on a white pillow - it called up a memory I could not at first pin down.

'You're thinking of Jones,' he said in a husky voice, and of course he was right. I grinned, and at the same moment a cold chill traced a finger down the middle of my back. Sometimes things come back to you, that's all. Sometimes they come back.

I came in and sat down beside him. 'Not bad, O swami.'

'Not hard, either,' he said. 'It's that day at the infirmary all over again, except that Carbury's probably dead and this time I'm the one with a tube in the back of my hand.' He raised one of his talented hands, showed me the tube, then lowered it again. 'I don't think I'm going to die anymore. At least not yet.'

'Good.'

'You still smoking?'

'I've retired. As of last year.'

He nodded. 'My wife says she'll divorce me if I don't do the same ... so I guess I better try.'

'It's the worst habit.'

'Actually, I think living's the worst habit.'

'Save the phrase-making shit for the Reader's Digest, Cap.'

He laughed, then asked if I'd heard from Natie.

'A Christmas card, like always. With a photo.'

'Fuckin Nate!' Skip was delighted. 'Was it his office?'

'Yeah. He's got a Nativity scene out front this year. The Magi all look like they need dental work.'

We looked at each other and began to giggle. Before Skip could really get going, he began to cough. It was eerily like Stoke - for a moment he even looked like Stoke - and I felt that shiver slide down my back again. If Stoke had been dead I'd have thought he was haunting us, but he wasn't. And in his own way Stoke Jones was as much of a sellout as every retired hippie who progressed from selling cocaine to selling junk bonds over the phone. He loves his TV coverage, does Stoke; when O. J. Simpson was on trial you could catch Stoke somewhere on the dial every night, just another vulture circling the carrion.

Carol was the one who didn't sell out, I guess. Carol and her friends, and what about the chem students they killed with their bomb? It was a mistake, I believe that with all my heart - the Carol Gerber I knew would have no patience with the idea that all power comes out of the barrel of a gun. The Carol I knew would have understood that was just another f**ked-up way of saying we had to destroy the village in order to save it. But do you think the relatives of those kids care that it was a mistake, the bomb didn't go off when it was supposed to, sorry? Do you think questions of who sold out and who didn't matter to the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, lovers, friends? Do you think it matters to the people who have to pick up the pieces and somehow go on? Hearts can break. Yes. Hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.

Skip worked on getting his breath back. The monitor beside his bed was beeping in a worried way. A nurse looked in and Skip waved her off. The beeps were settling back to their previous rhythm, so she went. When she was gone, Skip said: 'Why did we laugh so hard when he fell down that day? That question has never entirely left me.'

'No,' I said. 'Me either.'

'So what's the answer? Why did we laugh?'

'Because we're human. For awhile, I think it was between Woodstock and Kent State, we thought we were something else, but we weren't.'

'We thought we were stardust,' Skip said. Almost with a straight face.

'We thought we were golden,' I agreed, laughing. 'And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.'

'Lean over, hippie-boy,' Skip said, and I did. I saw that my old friend, who had outfoxed Dearie and Ebersole and the Dean of Men, who had gone around and begged his teachers to help him, who had taught me to drink beer by the pitcher and say f**k in a dozen different intonations, was crying a little bit. He reached up his arms to me. They had gotten thin over the years, and now the muscles hung rather than bunched. I bent down and hugged him.

'We tried,' he said in my ear. 'Don't you ever forget that, Pete. We tried.'

I suppose we did. In her way, Carol tried harder than any of us and paid the highest price . . . except, that is, for the ones who died. And although we've forgotten the language we spoke in those years - it is as lost as the bell-bottom jeans, home-tie-dyed shirts, Nehru jackets, and signs that said KILLING FOR PEACE is LIKE FUCKING FOR CHASTITY - sometimes a word or two comes back. Information, you know. Information. And sometimes, in my dreams and memories (the older I get the more they seem to be the same), I smell the place where I spoke that language with such easy authority: a whiff of earth, a scent of oranges, and the fading smell of flowers.