‘So,’ I said to Billy, Tony, and Hugh. ‘You guys want a lesson?’
‘Nickel a point!’ Hugh said, laughing like a loon. Shit, he was a loon. ‘Let’s go! Wheel em and deal em!’
Pretty soon we were in the corner, all four of us smoking furiously and the cards flying. I remembered the desperate cramming I’d done over the holiday weekend; remembered my mother saying that boys who didn’t work hard in school were dying these days. I remembered those things, but they seemed as distant as making love to Carol in my car while The Platters sang ‘Twilight Time.’
I looked up once and saw Stoke Jones in the doorway, leaning on his crutches and looking at us with his usual distant contempt. His black hair was thicker than ever, the corkscrews crazier over his ears and heavier against the collar of his sweatshirt. He sniffed steadily, his nose dripped and his eyes were running, but otherwise he didn’t seem any sicker than before the break.
‘Stoke!’ I said. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Oh well, who knows,’ he said. ‘Better than you, maybe.’
‘Come on in, Rip-Rip, drag up a milking-stool,’ Ronnie said. ‘We’ll teach you the game.’
‘You know nothing I want to learn,’ Stoke said, and went thumping away. We listened to his receding crutches and a brief coughing fit.
‘That crippled-up queer loves me,’ Ronnie said. ‘He just can’t show it.’
‘I’ll show you something if you don’t deal some fuckin cards,’ Skip said.
‘I’m bewwy, bewwy scared,’ Ronnie said in an Elmer Fudd voice which only he found amusing. He laid his head on Mark St Pierre’s arm to show how terrified he was.
Mark lifted the arm, hard. ‘The fuck off me. This is a new shirt, Malenfant, I don’t want your pimple-pus all over it.’
Before Ronnie’s face lit with amusement and he cawed laughter, I saw a moment of desperate hurt there. It left me unmoved. Ronnie’s problems might be genuine, but they didn’t make him any easier to like. To me he was just a blowhard who could play cards.
‘Come on,’ I said to Billy Marchant. ‘Hurry up and deal. I want to get some studying done later.’ But of course there was no studying done by any of us that night. Instead of burning out over the holiday, the fever was stronger and hotter than ever.
I went down the hall around quarter of ten to get a fresh pack of smokes and knew Nate was back while I was still six doors away. ‘Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)’ was coming from the room Nick Prouty shared with Barry Margeaux, but from farther down I could hear Phil Ochs singing ‘The Draft Dodger Rag.’
Nate was deep in his closet, hanging up his clothes. Not only was he the only person I ever knew in college who wore pajamas, he was the only one who ever used the hangers. The only thing I myself had hung up was my high-school jacket. Now I took it out and began to rummage in the pockets for my cigarettes.
‘Hey, Nate, how you doing? Get enough of that cranberry dressing to hold you?’
‘I’m
— ‘ he began, then saw what was on the back of my jacket
and burst out laughing.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘Is it that funny?’
‘In a way,’ he said, and leaned deeper into his closet. ‘Look.’ He reappeared with an old Navy pea coat in his hands. He turned it around so I could see the back. On it, much neater than my freehand work, was the sparrow-track. Nate had rendered his in bright silver duct tape. This time we both laughed.
‘Ike and Mike, they think alike,’ I said.
‘Nonsense. Great minds run in the same channel.’
‘Is that what it is?’
‘Well . . . what I like to think, anyway. Does this mean you’ve changed your mind about the war, Pete?’
‘What mind?’ I asked.
30
Andy White and Ashley Rice never came back to college at all — eight down, now. For the rest of us there was an obvious change for the worse in the three days before that winter’s first storm. Obvious, that was, to anyone else. If you were inside the thing, burning with the fever, it all seemed just a step or two north of normal.