‘Okay,’ he said as if Skip had asked out loud. ‘I do know why. I was afraid they’d get arrested and I’d get arrested with them. That my picture would be in the paper getting arrested and my folks would see it.’ There was a long pause. Poor old Nate was trying to say the rest. I held the needle over the first groove of the spinning record, waiting to see if he could. At last he did. ‘That my mother would see it.’
‘It’s okay, Nate,’ Skip said.
‘I don’t think so,’ Nate replied in a trembling voice. ‘I really don’t.’ He wouldn’t meet Skip’s eyes, only sat there on his bed with his prominent chicken-ribs and bare white Yankee skin between his pajama bottoms and his freshman beanie, looking down at his gnawed cuticles. ‘I don’t like to argue about the war. Harry does . . . and Lorlie . . . George Gilman, gosh, you can’t get George to shut up about it, and most of the others on the Committee are the same.
But when it comes to talking, I’m more like Stoke than them.’
‘No one’s like Stoke,’ I said. I remembered the day I met him on Bennett’s Walk. Why don’t you take it easy? I’d asked. Why don’t you eat me? Mr Credibility had replied.
Nate was still studying his cuticles. ‘What I think is that Johnson is sending American boys over there to die for no reason. It isn’t imperialism or colonialism, like Harry Swidrowski believes, it’s not any ism at all. Johnson’s got it all mixed up in his mind with Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone and the New York Yankees, that’s all. And if I think that, I ought to say that. I ought to try to stop it. That’s what I learned in church, in school, even in the darned Boy Scouts of America. You’re supposed to stand up. If you see something happening that’s wrong, like a big guy beating up a little guy, you’re supposed to stand up and at least try to stop it. But I was afraid my mother’d see a picture of me getting arrested and cry.’
Nate raised his head and we saw he was crying himself. Just a little; wet lids and lashes, no more than that. For him that was a big deal, though.
‘I found out one thing,’ he said. ‘What that is on the back of Stoke Jones’s jacket.’
‘What?’ Skip asked.
‘A combination of two British Navy semaphore letters. Look.’ Nate stood up with his bare heels together. He lifted his left arm straight up toward the ceiling and dropped his right down to the floor, making a straight line. ‘That’s N.’ Next he held his arms out at forty-five-degree angles to his body. I could see how the two shapes, when superimposed, would make the shape Stoke had inked on the back of his old duffle coat. ‘This one’s D.’
‘N-D,’ Skip said. ‘So?’
‘The letters stand for nuclear disarmament. Bertrand Russell invented the symbol in the fifties.’ He drew it on the back of his notebook:
‘He called it a peace sign.’
‘Cool,’ Skip said.
Nate smiled and wiped under his eyes with his fingers. ‘That’s what I thought,’ he agreed.
‘It’s a groove thing.’
I dropped the needle on the record and we listened to Phil Ochs sing. Grooved to it, as we Atlanteans used to say.
20
The lounge in the middle of Chamberlain Three had become my Jupiter — a scary planet with a huge gravitational pull. Still, I resisted it that night, slipping back into the phone-booth instead and calling Franklin again. This time I got Carol.
‘I’m all right,’ she said, laughing a little. ‘I’m fine. One of the cops even called me little lady. Sheesh, Pete, such concern.’
How much concern did this guy Oilman show you? I felt like asking, but even at eighteen I knew that wasn’t the way to go.
‘You should have given me a call,’ I said. ‘Maybe I would have gone with you. We could have taken my car.’
Carol began to giggle, a sweet sound but puzzling.
‘What?’
‘I was thinking about riding to an antiwar demonstration in a station wagon with a Goldwater sticker on the bumper.’