His breath came out of his mouth in frozen plumes; his eyes never left the campus cops and the part of the message which still remained: JOHNSON! KILLER PRESIDENT! OUT OF VIETNAM
NOW! ‘They’ll think you did it. Or me.’
Smiling a little, Skip turned around. On the back of his sweatshirt, drawn in bright red ink, was another of those sparrow-tracks.
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘When did you do that?’
‘This morning,’ he said. ‘I saw Nate’s.’ He shrugged. ‘It was too cool not to copy.’
‘They won’t think it was us. Not for a minute.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
The only question was why they weren’t questioning Stoke already . . . not that they’d have to ask many questions to get the truth out of him. But if Ebersole, the Disciplinary Officer, and Garretsen, the Dean of Men, weren’t talking to him, it was only because they hadn’t yet talked to—
‘Where’s Dearie?’ I asked. ‘Do you know?’ The sleet was falling hard now, rattling through the trees and pinging every inch of exposed skin.
‘The young and heroic Mr Dearborn is out sanding sidewalks and paths with a dozen or so of his ROTC buddies,’ Skip said. ‘We saw them from the lounge. They’re driving around in a real army truck. Malenfant said their pricks are probably so hard they won’t be able to sleep on their stomachs for a week. I thought that was pretty good, for Ronnie.’
‘When Dearie comes back — ‘
‘Yeah, when he comes back.’ Skip shrugged, as if to say all that was beyond our control.
‘Meantime, let’s get out of this slop and play some cards, what do you say?’
I wanted to say a lot of stuff about a lot of things . . . but then again I didn’t. We went back
inside, and by mid-afternoon the game was in full swing once more. There were five four-handed ‘sub-games’ going on, the room was blue with smoke, and someone had dragged in a phonograph so we could listen to the Beatles and the Stones. Someone else produced a scratched-up Cameo forty-five of ’96 Tears’ and that spun for at least an hour non-stop: cry cry cry. The windows gave a good view on Bennett’s Run and Bennett’s Walk, and I kept looking out there, expecting to see David Dearborn and some of his khaki buddies staring at the north side of the dorm, perhaps discussing if they should go after Stoke Jones with their carbines or just chase him with their bayonets. Of course they wouldn’t do anything of the sort. They might chant ‘Kill Cong! Go US!’ while drilling on the football field, but Stoke was a cripple. They would happily settle for seeing his commie-loving ass busted out of the University of Maine.
I didn’t want that to happen, but I didn’t see any way it wouldn’t. Stoke had had a sparrow-track on the back of his coat since the beginning of school, long before the rest of us were hip to what it meant, and Dearie knew it. Plus, Stoke would admit it. He’d deal with the Dean and the Disciplinary Officer’s questions the same way he dealt with his crutches — at a full-out plunge.
And anyway, the whole thing began to seem distant, okay? The way classes did. The way Carol did, now that I understood she was really gone. The way the concept of being drafted and sent away to die in the jungle did. What seemed real and immediate was hunting out that bad Bitch, or shooting the moon and hitting everyone else at your table with twenty-six points at a whack. What seemed real was Hearts.
But then something happened.
33
Around four o’clock the sleet changed to rain, and by four-thirty, when it began to get dark, we could see that Bennett’s Run was under three or four inches of water. Most of the Walk looked like a canal. Below the water was an icy, melting slush Jell-O.
The pace of the games slowed as we watched those unfortunates who were working the dishline cross from the dorms to the Palace on the Plains. Some of them — the wiser ones —