A brief but perfectly genuine struggle for my soul went on. I needed to study. I had planned on studying, and for a financial-aid boy like me, that was a good plan, certainly more sensible than sitting here in this smoky room and adding the effluent from my own Pall Malls to the general fug.
So I said ‘Yeah, why not?’ and sat down and played Hearts until almost one in the morning.
When I finally shambled back to my room, Nate was lying on his bed reading his Bible. That was the last thing he did every night before going to sleep. This was his third trip through what he always called The Word of God, he’d told me. He had reached the Book of Nehemiah. He looked up at me with an expression of calm enquiry — a look that never
changed much. Now that I think about it, Nate never changed much. He was in pre-dent, and he stayed with it; tucked into his last Christmas card to me was a photo of his new office in Houlton. In the photo there are three Magi standing around a straw-filled cradle on the snowy office lawn. Behind Mary and Joseph you can read the sign on the door: NATHANIEL
HOPPENSTAND, DOS. He married Cindy. They are still married, and their three children are mostly grown up. I imagine Rinty died and got replaced.
‘Did you win?’ Nate asked. He spoke in almost the same tone of voice my wife would use some years later, when I came home half-drunk after a Thursday-night poker game.
‘Actually I did.’ I had gravitated to a table where Ronnie was playing and had lost three of my remaining six dollars, then drifted to another one where I won them back, and a couple of more besides. But I had never gotten around to the geosyncline or the mysteries of tectonic plates.
Nate was wearing red-and-white-striped pajamas. He was, I think, the only person I ever shared a room with in college, male or female, who wore pajamas. Of course he was also the only one who owned Diane Renee Sings Navy Blue. As I began undressing, Nate slipped between the covers of his bed and reached behind him to turn off the study lamp on his desk.
‘Get your geology all studied up?’ he asked as the shadows swallowed his half of the room.
‘I’m in good shape with it,’ I said. Years later, when I came in from those late poker games and my wife would ask me how drunk I was, I’d say ‘I only had a couple’ in that same chipper tone of voice.
I swung into my own bed, turned off my own light, and was asleep almost immediately. I dreamed I was playing Hearts. Ronnie Malenfant was dealing; Stoke Jones stood in the lounge doorway, hunched over his crutches and eyeing me — eyeing all of us — with the dour disapproval of a Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritan. In my dream there was an enormous amount of money lying on the table, hundreds of dollars in crumpled fives and ones, money orders, even a personal check or two. I looked at this, then back at the doorway.
Carol Gerber was now standing on one side of Stokely. Nate, dressed in his candy-cane pajamas, was on the other side.
‘We want information,’ Carol said.
‘You won’t get it,’ I replied — in the TV show, that was always Patrick McGoohan’s reply to Number Two.
Nate said, ‘You left your window open, Pete. The room’s cold and your papers blew everywhere.’
I couldn’t think of an adequate reply to this, so I picked up the hand I’d been dealt and fanned it open. Thirteen cards, and every one was the queen of spades. Every one was la femme noire. Every one was The Bitch.
13
In Vietnam the war was going well — Lyndon Johnson, on a swing through the South Pacific, said so. There were a few minor setbacks, however. The Viet Cong shot down three American Hueys practically in Saigon’s backyard; a little farther out from Big S, an estimated one thousand Viet Cong soldiers kicked the shit out of at least twice that number of South Vietnamese regulars. In the Mekong Delta, US gunships sank a hundred and twenty Viet Cong river patrol boats which turned out to contain — whoops — large numbers of refugee children. America lost its four hundredth plane of the war that October, an F-1O5