‘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.’
I shrugged. ‘I wasn’t babysitting you, just wanted some company.’
‘I don’t.’
I started on my way, nettled in spite of my nine bucks. Us class clowns aren’t wild about making friends — two or three are apt to do us for a lifetime — but we don’t react very well to the bum’s rush, either. Our goal is vast numbers of acquaintances whom we can leave laughing.
‘Riley,’ he said from behind me.
I turned. He’d decided to thaw a little after all, I thought. How wrong I was.
‘There are gestures and gestures,’ he said. ‘Putting shaving cream on the proctor’s door is about one step above wiping snot on the seat of Little Susie’s desk because you can’t think of another way to say you love her.’
‘ I didn’t shaving-cream Dearie’s door,’ I said, more nettled than ever.
‘Yeah, but you’re playing cards with the asshole who did. Lending him credibility.’ I think it was the first time I heard that word, which went on to have an incredibly sleazy career in the seventies and coke-soaked eighties. Mostly in politics. I think credibility died of shame around 1986, just as all those sixties war protesters and fearless battlers for racial equality were discovering junk bonds, Martha Stewart living, and the StairMaster. ‘Why do you waste your time?’
That was direct enough to rattle me, and I said what seems to me now, looking back, an incredibly stupid thing. ‘I’ve got plenty of time to waste.’
Jones nodded as if he had expected no more and no better. He got going again and passed me at his accustomed plunge, head down, back humped, sweaty hair swinging, soash book clamped tight under his arm. I waited, expecting it to squirt free again. This time when it did, I’d leave him to poke it with his crutch.
But it didn’t get away from him, and after I’d seen him reach the door of Holyoke, grapple with it, and finally lurch inside, I went on my own way. When I’d filled my tray I sat with Carol Gerber and the rest of the kids on the dishline crew. That was about as far from Stoke Jones as it was possible to get, which suited me fine. He also sat apart from the other
handicapped kids, I remember. Stoke Jones sat apart from everybody. Glint Eastwood on crutches.
9
The regular diners began to show up at five o’clock. By quarter past, the dishline crew was in full swing and stayed that way for an hour. Lots of dorm kids went home for the weekend, but those who stayed all showed up on Saturday night, which was beans and franks and cornbread. Dessert was Jell-O. At the Palace on the Plains, dessert was almost always Jell-O.
If Cook was feeling frisky, you might get Jell-O with little pieces of fruit suspended in it.
Carol was doing silverware, and just as the rush began to subside, she wheeled away from the pass-through, shaking with laughter. Her cheeks were bright crimson. What came rolling along the belt was Skip’s work. He admitted it later that night, but I knew right away.