Hearts in Atlantis(90)

'What bites? Why are you looking at my records?' Nate's botany text was open in front of him. He was drawing a leaf on a piece of graph paper. His blue freshman beanie was cocked back on his head. Nate Hoppenstand was, I believe, the only member of the freshman class who actually wore that stupid blue dishrag until Maine's hapless football team finally scored a touchdown . . . a week or so before Thanksgiving, that was.

Skip went on studying the record album. 'This sucks the rigid c**k of Satan. It really does.'

'I hate it when you talk that way!' Nate exclaimed, but still too stubborn to actually look up. Skip knew Nate hated him to talk that way, which was why he did it. 'What are you talking about, anyway?'

'I'm sorry my language offends you, but I don't withdraw the comment. I can't. 'Cause this is bad. It hurts me, little buddy. It f**kin hurts me.'

'What?' Nate finally looked up, irritated away from his leaf, which was marked as carefully as a map in a Rand McNally road atlas. 'WHAT?'

CHAPTER 17

'This.'

On the album cover Skip was holding, a girl with a perky face and perky little br**sts poking out the front of a middy blouse appeared to be dancing on the deck of a PT boat. One hand was raised, palm out, in a perky little wave. Cocked on her head was a perky little sailor's hat.

'I bet you're the only college student in America that brought Diane Renee Sings Navy Blue to school with him,' Skip said. 'It's wrong, Nate. This belongs back in your attic, along with the wiener pants I bet you wore to all the high-school pep rallies and church socials.'

If wiener pants meant polyester Sansabelt slacks with that weird and purposeless little buckle in the back, I suspected Nate had brought most of his collection with him . . . was, in fact, wearing a pair at that very moment. I said nothing, though. I picked up a framed picture of my own girlfriend and spied my meal ticket behind it. I grabbed it and stuffed it in the pocket of my Levi's.

'That's a good record,' Nate said with dignity. 'That's a very good record. It. . . swings'

'Swings, does it?' Skip asked, tossing it back onto Nate's bed. (He refused to reshelve Nate's records because he knew it drove Nate bugf*ck.) '"My steady boy said ship ahoy and joined the Nay-yay-vee"? If that fits your definition of good, remind me never to let you give me a f**kin physical.'

'I'm going to be a dentist, not a doctor,' Nate said, clipping off each word. Cords were beginning to stand out on his neck. So far as I know, Skip Kirk was the only person in Chamberlain Hall, maybe on the whole campus, who could get under my roomie's thick Yankee skin. 'I'm in pre-dent, do you know what the dent in pre-dent means? It means teeth, Skip! It means - '

'Remind me to never let you fill one of my f**kin cavities.'

'Why do you have to say that all the time?'

'What?' Skip asked, knowing but wanting Nate to say it. Nate eventually would, and his face always turned bright red when he finally did. This fascinated Skip. Everything about Nate fascinated Skip; the Captain once told me he was pretty sure Nate was an alien, beamed down from the planet Good Boy.

'Fuck,' Nate Hoppenstand said, and immediately his cheeks became rosy. In a few moments he looked like a Dickens character, some earnest young man sketched by Boz. 'That.'

'I had bad role models,' Skip said. 'I dread to think about your future, Nate. What if Paul Anka makes a f**kin comeback?'

'You've never heard this record,' Nate said, snatching up Diane Renee Sings Navy Blue from the bed and putting it back between Mitch Miller and Stella Stevens Is in Love!

'Never f**kin want to, either,' Skip said. 'Come on, Pete, let's eat. I'm f**kin starving.'

I picked up my geology text - there was a quiz coming up the following Tuesday. Skip took it out of my hand and slung it back onto the desk, knocking over the picture of my girlfriend, who wouldn't f**k but who would give a slow, excruciatingly pleasant handjob when she was in the mood. Nobody gives a handjob like a Catholic girl. I've changed my mind about a lot of things in the course of my life, but never about that.

'What did you do that for?' I asked.

'You don't read at the f**kin table,' he said. 'Not even when you're eating Commons slop. What kind of barn were you born in?'

'Actually, Skip, I was born into a family where people do read at the table. I know it's hard for you to believe there could be any way of doing things except for the Kirk way of doing them, but there is.'

He looked unexpectedly grave. He took me by the forearms, looked into my eyes, and said, 'At least don't study when you eat. Okay?'

'Okay.' Mentally reserving the right to study whenever I f**king well pleased, or felt I needed to.

'Get into all that ram-drive behavior and you'll get ulcers. Ulcers are what killed my old man. He just couldn't stop ramming and driving.'

'Oh,' I said. 'Sorry.'

'Don't worry, it was a long time ago. Now come on. Before all the f**king tuna surprise is gone. Coming, Natebo?'

'I have to finish this leaf.'

'Fuck the leaf

If anyone else had said this to him, Nate would have looked at him as at something uncovered beneath a rotted log, and turned silently back to his work. In this case, Nate considered for a moment, then got up and took his jacket carefully off the back of the door, where he always hung it. He put it on. He adjusted the beanie on his head. Not even Skip dared to talk about Nate's stubborn refusal to stop wearing his freshman beanie. (When I asked Skip where his own had disappeared to - this was our third day at UM, and the day after I met him - he said, 'Wiped my ass with it and threw the f**ker up a tree.' This was probably not the truth, but I never completely ruled it out, either.)