‘Lower him down,’ Ronnie said. We did. Skip grunted once as he took Stoke’s weight, and I saw the veins pop out in his neck. Then we stood back and Skip carried Stoke into the room and laid him on the exam table. The thin sheet of paper covering the leather was immediately soaked. Skip stepped back. Stoke was staring up at him, his face dead pale except for two red patches high on his cheekbones — red as rouge, those patches were. Water ran out of his hair in rivulets.
‘Sorry, man,’ Skip said.
Stoke turned his head away and closed his eyes.
‘Out,’ the doctor told Skip. He had ditched the cigarette somewhere. He looked around at us, a gaggle of perhaps a dozen boys, most still grinning, all dripping on the hall’s tile floor.
‘Does anyone know the nature of his disability? It can make a difference in how we treat him.’
I thought of the scars I’d seen, those tangles of knotted string, but said nothing. I didn’t really know anything. And now that the uncontrollable urge to laugh had passed, I felt too ashamed of myself to speak up.
‘It’s just one of those cripple things, isn’t it?’ Ronnie asked. Actually faced with an adult, he had lost his shrill cockiness. He sounded unsure, perhaps even uneasy. ‘Muscular palsy or cerebral dystrophy?’
‘You clown,’ Lennie said. ‘It’s muscular dystrophy and cerebral — ‘
‘He was in a car accident,’ Nate said. We all looked around at him. Nate still looked neat and totally put together in spite of the soaking he’d taken. This afternoon he was wearing a Fort Kent High School ski-hat. The Maine football team had finally scored a touchdown and freed Nate from his beanie; go you Black Bears. Tour years ago. His father, mother, and older sister were killed. He was the only family survivor.’
There was silence. I looked between Skip and Tony’s shoulders and into the examination room. Stoke still lay streaming on the table, his head turned to the side, his eyes shut. The nurse was taking his blood pressure. His pants clung to his legs and I thought of the Fourth of July parade they used to have back home in Gates Falls when I was just a little kid. Uncle Sam would come striding along between the school band and the Anah Temple Shrine guys on their midget motorcycles, looking at least ten feet tall in his starry blue hat, but when the wind blew his pants against his legs you could see the trick. That’s what Stoke Jones’s legs looked like inside his wet pants: a trick, a bad joke, sawed-off stilts with sneakers poked onto the ends of them.
‘How do you know that?’ Skip asked. ‘Did he tell you, Natie?’
‘No.’ Nate looked ashamed. ‘He told Harry Swidrowski, after a Committee of Resistance meeting. They — we — were in the Bear’s Den. Harry asked him right out what happened to his legs and Stoke told him.’
I thought I understood the look on Nate’s face. After the meeting, he had said. After. Nate didn’t know what had been said at the meeting, because Nate hadn’t been there. Nate wasn’t a member of the Committee of Resistance; Nate was strictly a sidelines boy. He might agree with the C.R.’s goals and tactics . . . but he had his mother to think about. And his future as a dentist.
‘Spinal injury?’ the doctor asked. Brisker than ever.
‘I think so, yeah,’ Nate said.
‘All right.’ Doc began to make shooing gestures with his hands as if we were a flock of geese. ‘Go on back to your dorms. We’ll take good care of him.’
We began to back up toward the reception area.
‘Why were you boys laughing when you brought him in?’ the nurse asked suddenly. She stood by the doctor with the blood-pressure cuff in her hands. ‘Why are you grinning now?’
She sounded angry. Hell, she sounded furious. ‘What was so funny about this boy’s
misfortune that it made you laugh?’
I didn’t think anyone would answer. We’d just stand there and look down at our shuffling feet, realizing that we were still a lot closer to the fourth grade than we had perhaps thought.