Hearts in Atlantis(97)

'What about us?' Ashley squeaked.

'Yeah!' Hugh said. Talk about your gluttons for punishment.

'You're outclassed at this table,' Ronnie said, speaking with what was for him almost kindness. 'Why don't you start up your own?'

Ashley and Hugh did just that. By four o'clock all of the lounge tables were occupied by quartets of third-floor freshmen, ragtag scholarship boys who had to buy their texts in the Used section of the bookstore playing Hearts at a nickel a point. In our dorm, the mad season had begun.

8

Saturday night was another of my meals on the Holyoke dishline. In spite of my awakening interest in Carol Gerber, I tried to get Brad Witherspoon to switch for me - Brad had Sunday breakfast and he hated to get up early almost as badly as Skip did - but Brad refused. By then he was playing, too, and two bucks out of pocket. He was crazy to catch up. He just shook his head at me and led a spade out of his hand. 'Let's go Bitch-huntin!' he cried, sounding eerily like Ronnie Malenfant. The most insidious thing about Ronnie was that weak minds found him worth imitating.

I left my seat at the original table, where I had spent the balance of the day, and my place was immediately taken by a young man named Kenny Auster. I was nearly nine dollars ahead (mostly because Ronnie had moved to another table so I wouldn't cut into his profits) and should have been feeling good, but I didn't. It wasn't the money, it was the game. I wanted to keep on playing.

I walked disconsolately down the hall, checked the room, and asked Nate if he wanted to eat early with the kitchen crew. He simply shook his head and waved me on without looking up from his history book. When people talk about student activism in the sixties, I have to remind myself that the majority of kids went through that mad season the way Nate did. They kept their heads down and their eyes on their history books while history happened all around them. Not that Nate was completely unaware, or completely dedicated to the study carrels on the sidelines, for that matter. You shall hear.

I walked toward the Palace on the Plains, zipping my jacket against the air, which had turned frosty. It was quarter past four. The Commons didn't officially open until five, so the paths which met in Bennett's Run were almost deserted. Stoke Jones was there, though, hunched over his crutches and brooding down at something on the path. I wasn't surprised to see him; if you had some sort of physical disability, you could chow an hour earlier than the rest of the students. As far as I remember, that was about the only special treatment the handicapped got. If you were physically f**ked up, you got to eat with the kitchen help. That sparrow-track on the back of his coat was very clear and very black in the late light.

As I got closer to him I saw what he was looking down at - Introduction to Sociology. He had dropped it on the faded red bricks of Bennett's Walk and was trying to figure a way he could pick it up again without landing on his face. He kept poking at the book with the tip of one crutch. Stoke had two, maybe even three different pairs of crutches; these were the ones that fitted over his forearms in a series of ascending steel collars. I could hear him muttering 'Rip-rip, rip-rip' under his breath as he prodded the book uselessly from place to place. When he was plunging along on his crutches, 'Rip-rip' had a determined sound. In this situation it sounded frustrated. At the time I knew Stoke (I will not call him Rip-Rip, although many Ronnie-imitators had taken to doing so by the end of the semester), I was fascinated by how many different nuances there could be to any given 'Rip-rip.' That was before I found out the Navajos have forty different ways of saying their word for cloud. That was before I found out a lot of things actually.

He heard me coming and snapped his head around so fast he almost fell over anyway. I reached out to steady him. He jerked back, seeming to swim in the old army duffle coat he was wearing.

'Get away from me!' As if he expected me to give him a shove. I raised my hands to show him I was harmless and bent over. 'And get your hands off my book!'

This I didn't dignify, only picked up the text and stuffed it under his arm like a newspaper.

'I don't need your help!'

I was about to reply sharply, but I noticed again how white his cheeks were around the patches of red in their centers, and how his hair was damp with perspiration. Once again I could smell him - that overworked-transformer aroma - and realized I could also hear him: his breathing had a raspy, snotty sound. If Stoke Jones hadn't found out where the infirmary was yet, I had an idea he would before long.

'I didn't offer you a piggyback, for God's sake.' I tried to paste a smile on my puss and managed something or other. Hell, why shouldn't I smile? Didn't I have nine bucks in my pocket that I hadn't started the day with? By the standards of Chamberlain Three, I was rich.

Jones looked at me with those dark eyes of his. His lips thinned, but after a moment he nodded. 'Okay. Point taken. Thanks.' Then he resumed his breakneck pace up the hill. At first he was well ahead of me, but then the grade began to work on him and he slowed down. His snotty-sounding breathing got louder and quicker. I heard it clearly as I caught up to him.

'Why don't you take it easy?' I asked.

He gave me an impatient are-you-still-here glance. 'Why don't you eat me?'

I pointed to his soash book. 'That's sliding again.'

He stopped, adjusted it under his arm, then fixed himself on his crutches again, hunched like a bad-tempered heron, glaring at me through his black tumbles of hair. 'Go on,' he said. 'I don't need a minder.'