Hearts in Atlantis(93)

Dearie didn't like Ronnie, but Ronnie didn't have to face this disapproval alone; Dearie didn't seem to like any of the boys he was proctoring. We didn't like him, either, and Ronnie outright hated him. Skip Kirk's dislike was edged with contempt. He was in ROTC with Dearie (at least until November, when Skip dropped the course), and he said Dearie was bad at everything except kissing ass. Skip, who had narrowly missed being named to the All-State baseball team as a high-school senior, had one specific bitch about our floor-proctor - Dearie, Skip said, didn't put out. To Skip it was the worst sin. You had to put out. Even if you were just slopping the hogs, you had to f**kin put out.

I disliked Dearie as much as anyone. I can put up with a great many human failings, but I loathe a prig. Yet I harbored a bit of sympathy for him, as well. He had no sense of humor, for one thing, and I believe that is as much a crippling defect as whatever had gone wrong with Stoke Jones's bottom half. For another, I don't think Dearie liked himself much.

'DP won't be an issue if he never finds the culprit,' I told Nate. 'Even if he does, I doubt like hell if Dean Garretsen would agree to slap it on someone for creaming the proctor's door.' Still, Dearie could be persuasive. He might have been Brought Low, but he had that something which said he was still upper crust. That was, of course, just one more thing the rest of us had to dislike about him. 'Trotboy' was what Skip called him, because he wouldn't really run laps on the football field during ROTC workouts, but only go at a rapid jog.

'Just as long as you didn't do it,' Nate said, and I almost laughed. Nate Hoppenstand sitting there in his underpants and beanie, his child's chest narrow, hairless, and dusted with freckles. Nate looking at me earnestly over his prominent case of slender ribs. Nate playing Dad.

Lowering his voice, he said: 'Do you think Skip did it?'

'No. If I had to guess who on this floor would think shave-creaming the proctor's door was a real hoot, I'd say - '

'Ronnie Malenfant.'

'Right.' I pointed my finger at Nate like a gun and winked.

'I saw you walking back to Franklin with the blond girl,' he said. 'Carol. She's pretty.'

'Just keeping her company,' I said.

Nate sat there in his underpants and his beanie, smiling as if he knew better. Perhaps he did. I liked her, all right, although I didn't know much about her - only that she was from Connecticut. Not many work-study kids came from out of state.

I headed down the hall to the lounge, my geology book under my arm. Ronnie was there, wearing his beanie with the front side pinned up so it looked sort of like a newspaper reporter's Fedora. Sitting with him were two other guys from our floor, Hugh Brennan and Ashley Rice. None of them looked as if they were having the world's most exciting Saturday morning, but when Ronnie saw me, his eyes brightened.

'Pete Riley!' he said. 'Just the man I was looking for! Do you know how to play Hearts?'

'Yes. Lucky for me, I also know how to study.' I raised my geology book, already thinking that I'd probably end up in the second-floor lounge . . . if, that was, I really meant to get anything done. Because Ronnie never shut up. Was apparently incapable of shutting up. Ronnie Malenfant was the original motor-mouth.

'Come on, just one game to a hundred,' he wheedled. 'We're playing nickel a point, and these two guys play Hearts like old people f**k.'

Hugh and Ashley grinned foolishly, as if they had just been complimented. Ronnie's insults were so raw and out front, so bulging with vitriol, that most guys took them as jokes, perhaps even as veiled compliments. They were neither. Ronnie meant every unkind word he ever said.

'Ronnie, I got a quiz Tuesday, and I don't really understand this geosyncline stuff.'

'Shit on the geosyncline,' Ronnie said, and Ashley Rice tittered. 'You've still got the rest of today, all of tomorrow, and all of Monday for the geo-f*ckin-syncline.'

'I have classes Monday and tomorrow Skip and I were going to go up to Oldtown. They're having an open hoot at the Methodist church and we - '

'Stop it, quit it, spare my achin scrote and don't talk to me about that folkie shit. Michael can row his f**kin boat right up my ass, okay? Listen, Pete - '

'Ronnie, I really - '

'You two dimbulbs stay right the f**k there.' Ronnie gave Ashley and Hugh a baleful look. Neither argued with him about it. They were probably eighteen like the rest of us, but anyone who's ever been to college will tell you that some very young eighteen-year-olds show up each September, especially in the rural states. It was the young ones with whom Ronnie succeeded. They were in awe of him. He borrowed their meal tickets, snapped them with towels in the shower, accused them of supporting the goals of the Reverend Martin Luther Coon (who, Ronnie would tell you, drove to protest rallies in his Jiguar), borrowed their money, and would respond to any request for a match with 'My ass and your face, monkeymeat.' They loved Ronnie in spite of it all . . . because of it all. They loved him because he was just so . . . college.

Ronnie grabbed me around the neck and tried to yank me out into the hall so he could talk to me in private. I, not at all in awe of him and a bit repelled by the jungle aroma drifting out of his armpits, clamped down on his fingers, bent them back, and removed his hand. 'Don't do that, Ronnie.'

'Ow, yow, ow, okay, okay, okay! Just come out here a minute, wouldja? And quit that, it hurts! Besides, it's the hand I jerk off with! Jesus! Fuck!'