Before Thanksgiving break, the card quartets in the lounge had a tendency to break up and re-form during the school-week; sometimes they died out altogether for awhile as kids went off to classes. Now the groups became almost static, the only changes occurring when someone staggered off to bed or table-hopped to escape Ronnie’s skills and constant abrasive chatter. This settling occurred because most of the third-floor players hadn’t returned to continue furthering their educations; Barry, Nick, Mark, Harvey, and I don’t know how many others had pretty much given up on the education part. They had returned in order to resume the quest for totally valueless ‘match points.’ Many of the boys on Chamberlain Three were in fact now majoring in Hearts. Skip Kirk and I, sad to say, were among them. I made a couple of classes on Monday, then said fuck it and cut the rest. I cut everything on Tuesday, played Hearts in my dreams on Tuesday night (in one fragment I remember dropping The Bitch and seeing that her face was Carol’s), then spent all day Wednesday playing it for real. Geology, sociology, history . . . all concepts without meaning.
In Vietnam, a fleet of B-52s hit a Viet Gong staging area outside Dong Ha. They also managed to hit a company of US Marines, killing twelve and wounding forty — whoops, shit. And the forecast for Thursday was heavy snow turning to rain and freezing rain in the afternoon. Very few of us took note of this; certainly I had no reason to think that storm would change the course of my life.
I went to bed at midnight on Wednesday and slept heavily. If I had dreams of Hearts or Carol Gerber, I don’t remember them. When I woke up at eight o’clock on Thursday morning, it was snowing so heavily I could barely see the lights of Franklin Hall across the way. I showered, then padded down the hall to see if the game had started yet. There was one table going — Lennie Doria, Randy Echolls, Billy Marchant, and Skip. They looked pale and stubbly and tired, as if they had been there all night. Probably had been. I leaned in the doorway, watching the game. Outside in the snow, something quite a bit more interesting than cards was going on, but none of us knew it until later.
31
Tom Huckabee lived in King, the other boys’ dorm in our complex. Becka Aubert lived in Franklin. They had become quite cozy in the last three or four weeks, and that included taking their meals together. They were coming back from breakfast on that snowy late-November morning when they saw something printed on the north side of Chamberlain Hall.
That was the side which faced the rest of the campus . . . which faced East Annex in particular, where the big corporations held their job interviews.
They walked closer, stepping off the path and into the new snow — by then about four inches had fallen.
‘Look,’ Becka said, pointing down at the snow. There were queer tracks there — not
footprints but drag-marks, almost, and deep punched holes running in lines outside them.
Tom Huckabee said they reminded him of tracks made by a person wearing skis and wielding ski-poles. Neither of them thought that someone using crutches might have made such tracks.
Not then.
They drew closer to the side of the dorm. The letters there were big and black, but by then the snow was so heavy that they had to get within ten feet of the wall before they could read the words, which had been posted by someone with a can of spray-paint . . . and in a state of total piss-off, from the jagged look of the message. (Again, neither of them considered that someone trying to spray-paint a message while at the same time maintaining his balance on a set of crutches might not be able to manage much in the way of neatness.)
The message read:
32
I’ve read that some criminals — perhaps a great many criminals — actually want to be caught. I think that was the case with Stoke Jones. Whatever he had come to the University of Maine looking for, he wasn’t finding it. I believe he’d decided it was time to leave . . . and if he was going, he would make the grandest gesture a guy on crutches could manage before he did.