Yet more and more we found ourselves discussing not movies or dates or classes as the cards were shuffled and dealt; more and more it was Vietnam. No matter how good the news or how high the Gong body count, there always seemed to be at least one picture of agonized US soldiers after an ambush or crying Vietnamese children watching their village go up in smoke. There was always some unsettling detail tucked away near the bottom of what Skip called ‘the daily kill-column,’ like the thing about the kids who got wasted when we hit the Cong PT boats in the Delta.
Nate, of course, didn’t play cards. He wouldn’t debate the pros and cons of the war, either
— I doubt if he knew, any more than I did, than Vietnam had once been under the French, or what had happened to the monsieurs unlucky enough to have been in the fortress city of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, let alone who might’ve decided it was time for President Diem to go to that big rice-paddy in the sky so Nguyen Cao Ky and the generals could take over. Nate only knew that he had no quarrel with those Gongs, that they weren’t going to be in Mars Hill or Presque Isle in the immediate future.
‘Haven’t you ever heard about the domino theory, shitbird?’ a banty little freshman named Nicholas Prouty asked Nate one afternoon. My roommate rarely came down to the third-floor lounge now, preferring the quieter one on Two, but that day he had dropped in for a few moments.
Nate looked at Nick Prouty, a lobsterman’s son who had become a devout disciple of Ronnie Malenfant, and sighed. ‘When the dominoes come out, I leave the room. I think it’s a boring game. That’s my domino theory.’ He shot me a glance. I got my eyes away as fast as I could, but not quite in time to avoid the message: what in hell’s wrong with you? Then he left,
scuffing back down to room 302 in his fuzzy slippers to do some more studying — to resume his charted course from pre-dent to dent, in other words.
‘Riley, your roommate’s fucked, you know that?’ Ronnie said. He had a cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth. Now he scratched a match one -handed, a specialty of his — college guys too ugly and abrasive to get girls have all sorts of specialties — and lit up.
No, man, I thought, Mate’s doing fine. We’re the ones who are fucked up. For a second I felt real despair. In that second I realized I was in a terrible jam and had no idea at all of how to extricate myself. I was aware of Skip looking at me, and it occurred to me that if I snatched up the cards, sprayed them in Ronnie’s face, and walked out of the room, Skip would join me.
Likely with relief. Then the feeling passed. It passed as rapidly as it had come.
‘Nate’s okay,’ I said. ‘He’s got some funny ideas, that’s all.’
‘Some funny communist ideas is what he’s got,’ Hugh Brennan said. His older brother was in the Navy and most recently heard from in the South China Sea. Hugh had no use for peaceniks. As a Goldwater Republican I should have felt the same, but Nate had started getting to me. I had all sorts of canned knowledge, but no real arguments in favor of the war .
. . nor time to work any up. I was too busy to study my sociology, let alone to bone up on US
foreign policy.
I’m pretty sure that was the night I almost called Annmarie Soucie. The phone-booth across from the lounge was empty, I had a pocketful of change from my latest victory in the Hearts wars, and I suddenly decided The Time Had Come. I dialed her number from memory (although I had to think for a moment about the last four digits — were they 8146 or 8164?) and plugged in three quarters when the operator asked for them. I let the phone ring a single time, then racked the receiver with a bang and retrieved my quarters when I heard them rattle into the return.