But someone did answer. Skip answered. He even managed to look at her as he did.
‘His misfortune, ma’am,’ he said. ‘That was what it was, you’re right. It was his misfortune that was funny.’
‘How terrible,’ she said. There were tears of rage standing in the corners of her eyes. ‘How terrible you are.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Skip said. ‘I guess you’re right about that, too.’ He turned away from her.
We followed him back to the reception area in a wet and beaten little group. I can’t say that being called terrible was the low point of my college career (‘If you can remember much of the sixties, you weren’t there,’ the hippie known as Wavy Gravy once said), but it may have been. The waiting room was still empty. Little Joe Cartwright was on the tube now, and just as green as his dad. Pancreatic cancer was what got Michael Landon, too — he and my mother had that in common.
Skip stopped. Ronnie, head down, pushed past him toward the door, followed by Nick, Billy, Lennie, and the rest.
‘Hold it,’ Skip said, and they turned. ‘I want to talk to you guys about something.’
We gathered around him. Skip glanced once toward the door leading back to the exam area, verified that we were alone, then began to talk.
36
Ten minutes later Skip and I walked back to the dorm by ourselves. The others had gone ahead. Nate hung with us for a little bit, then must have picked up a vibe that I wanted to talk privately to Skip. Nate was always good at picking up the vibe. I bet he’s a good dentist, that the children in particular like him.
‘I’m done playing Hearts,’ I said.
Skip said nothing.
‘I don’t know if it’s too late to pull up my grades enough to keep my scholarship or not, but I’m going to try. And I don’t care much, one way or the other. The fucking scholarship’s not the point.’
‘No. They’re the point, right? Ronnie and the rest of them.’
‘I think they’re only part of it.’ It was so cold out there as that day turned to dark — cold and damp and evil. It seemed that it would never be summer again. ‘Man, I miss Carol. Why’d she have to go?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘When he fell over it sounded like a nuthouse up there,’ I said. ‘Not a college dorm, a fucking nuthouse.’
‘You laughed too, Pete. So did I.’
‘I know,’ I said. I might not have if I’d been alone, and Skip and I might not have if it had just been the two of us, but how could you tell? You were stuck with the way things played out. I kept thinking of Carol and those boys with their baseball bat. And I thought of the way Nate had looked at me, as if I were a thing below contempt. ‘I know.’
We walked in silence for awhile.
‘I can live with laughing at him, I guess,’ I said, ‘but I don’t want to wake up forty with my kids asking me what college was like and not be able to remember anything but Ronnie
Malenfant telling Polish jokes and that poor fucked-up asshole McClendon trying to kill himself with baby aspirin.’ I thought about Stoke Jones twirling on his crutch and felt like laughing; thought of him lying beached on the exam table in the infirmary and felt like crying. And you know what? It was, as far as I could tell, exactly the same feeling. ‘I just feel bad about it. I feel like shit.’
‘So do I,’ Skip said. The rain poured down around us, soaking and cold. The lights of Chamberlain Hall were bright but not particularly comforting. I could see the yellow canvas the cops had put up lying on the grass, and above it the dim shapes of the spray-painted letters. They were running in the rain; by the following day they would be all but unreadable.
‘When I was a little kid, I always pretended I was the hero,’ Skip said.
‘Fuck yeah, me too. What little kid ever pretended to be part of the lynch-mob?’