There was a hard double rap on the door: pow-pow. So must the Gestapo have rapped on the doors of Jews in 1938 and 1939. ‘Floor meeting!’ Dearie called. ‘Floor meeting in the rec at nine o’clock! Attendance mandatory!’
‘Oh Christ,’ I said. ‘Burn the secret papers and eat the radio.’
Nate turned down Dylan, and we heard Dearie going on up the hall, rapping that pow-pow on every door and yelling about the floor meeting in the rec. Most of the rooms he was hailing were probably empty, but no problem; he’d find the occupants down in the lounge, chasing The Bitch.
Skip was looking at me. ‘Told you,’ he said.
39
Each dorm in our complex had been built at the same time, and each had a big common area in the basement as well as the lounges in the center of each floor. There was a TV alcove which filled up mostly for weekend sports events and a vampire soap opera called Dark Shadows during the week; a canteen corner with half a dozen vending machines; a Ping-Pong table and a number of chess and checkerboards. There was also a meeting area with a podium standing before several rows of folding wooden chairs. We’d had a floor -meeting there at the beginning of the year, at which Dearie had explained the dorm rules and the dire
consequences of unsatisfactory room inspections. I’d have to say that room inspections were Dearie’s big thing. That and ROTC, of course.
He stood behind the little wooden podium, upon which he had laid a thin file -folder. I supposed it contained his notes. He was still dressed in his damp and muddy ROTC fatigues.
He looked exhausted from his day of shovelling and sanding, but he also looked excited . . .
‘turned on’ is how we’d put it a year or two later.
Dearie had been on his own at the first floor-meeting; this time he had backup. Sitting against the green cinderblock wall, hands folded in his lap and knees primly together, was Sven Garretsen, the Dean of Men. He said almost nothing during that meeting, and looked benign even when the air grew stormy. Standing beside Dearie, wearing a black topcoat over a charcoal-gray suit and looking very can-do, was Ebersole, the Disciplinary Officer.
After we had settled in the chairs and those of us who smoked had lit up, Dearie looked first over his shoulder at Garretsen, then at Ebersole. Ebersole gave him a little smile. ‘Go ahead, David. Please. They’re your boys.’
I felt a rankle of irritation. I might be a lot of things, including a creep who laughed at cripples when they fell down in the pouring rain, but I was not Dearie Dearborn’s boy.
Dearie gripped the podium and looked at us solemnly, perhaps thinking (far back in the part of his mind reserved expressly for dreamy dreams), that a day would come when he would address his staff officers this way, setting some great tide of Hanoi-bound troops into motion.
‘Jones is missing,’ he said finally. It came out sounding portentous and corny, like a line in a Charles Bronson movie.
‘He’s in the infirmary,’ I said, and enjoyed the surprise on Dearie’s face. Ebersole looked surprised, too. Garretsen just went on gazing benignly into the middle distance, like a man on a three-pipe high.
‘What happened to him?’ Dearie asked. This wasn’t in the script — either the one he had worked out or the one he and Ebersole had prepared together — and Dearie began to frown.
He was also gripping the podium more tightly, as if afraid it might fly away.
‘Faw down go boom,’ Ronnie said, and puffed up when the people around him laughed.
‘Also, I think he’s got pneumonia or double bronchitis or something like that.’ He caught Skip’s eye and I thought Skip nodded slightly. This was Skip’s show, not Dearie’s, but if we were lucky — if Stoke was lucky — the three at the front of the room would never know it.
‘Tell me this from the beginning,’ Dearie said. The frown was becoming a glower. It was the way he’d looked after discovering his door had been shaving-creamed.