Billy Marchant had it on his jacket.
Brad Witherspoon had inked it on his freshman beanie. The beanie was in the back of his closet somewhere, probably beneath the underwear he’d forgotten to take home for his mom to wash.
Nick Prouty said he’d drawn peace signs on his favorite record albums: Meet the Beatles and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. ‘You ain’t got any mind to bend, dinkleballs,’
Ronnie muttered, and there was laughter from behind cupped hands.
Several others reported having the peace sign on books or items of clothing. All claimed to have done this long before the discovery of the graffiti on the north end of Chamberlain Hall.
In a final surreal touch, Hugh stood up, stepped into the aisle, and hiked the legs of his jeans so we could see the yellowing athletic socks climbing his hairy shins. A peace sign had been drawn on both with the laundry-marker Mrs Brennan had sent to school with her baby boy —
it was probably the first time the fuckin thing had been used all semester.
‘So you see,’ Skip said when show-and-tell was over, ‘it could have been any of us.’
Dearie slowly raised his head. All that remained of his flush was a single red patch over his left eye. It looked like a blister.
‘Why are you lying for him?’ he asked. He waited, but no one answered. ‘Not one of you had a peace sign on a single thing before Thanksgiving break, I’d swear to it, and I bet most of you never had one on anything before tonight. Why are you lying for him?’
No one answered. The silence spun out. In it there grew a sense of power, an unmistakable force we all felt. But who did it belong to? Them or us? There was no way of saying. All these years later there’s still no real way of saying.
Then Dean Garretsen stepped to the podium. Dearie moved aside without even seeming to see him. The Dean looked at us with a small and cheerful smile. ‘This is foolishness,’ he said.
‘What Mr Jones wrote on the wall was foolishness, and this lying is more foolishness. Tell the truth, men. ‘Fess up.’
No one said anything.
‘We’ll be speaking to Mr Jones in the morning,’ Ebersole said. ‘Perhaps after we do, some of you fellows may want to change your stories a bit.’
‘Oh man, I wouldn’t put too much trust in anything Stoke might tell you,’ Skip said.
‘Right, old Rip-Rip’s crazy as a shithouse rat,’ Ronnie said.
There was strangely affectionate laughter at this. ‘Shithouse rat!’ Nick cried, eyes shining.
He was as joyful as a poet who has finally found le mot juste. ‘Shithouse rat, yeah, that’s Old Rip!’ And, in what was probably that day’s final triumph of lunacy over rational discourse, Nick Prouty fell into an eerily perfect Foghorn Leghorn imitation: ‘Ah say, Ah say the boy’s craizy! Missin a wheel off his baiby- carriage! Lost two-three cahds out’n his deck! Fella’s a beer shote of a six-pack\ He’s . . . ‘
Nick gradually realized that Ebersole and Garretsen were looking at him, Ebersole with contempt, Garretsen almost with interest, as at a new bacterium glimpsed through the lens of a microscope.
‘ . . . you know, a little sick in the head,’ Nick finished, losing the imitation as self-consciousness, that bane of all great artists, set in. He quickly sat down.
‘That’s not the kind of sick I meant, exactly,’ Skip said. ‘I’m not talking about him being a cripple, either. He’s been sneezing, coughing, and running at the nose ever since he got here.
Even you must have noticed that, Dearie.’
Dearie didn’t reply, didn’t even react to the use of the nickname this time. He must have been pretty tired, all right.
‘All I’m saying is that he might claim a whole lot of stuff,’ Skip said. ‘He might even believe some of it. But he’s out of it.’
Ebersole’s smile had resurfaced, no humor in it now. ‘I believe I grasp the thrust of your argument, Mr Kirk. You want us to believe that Mr Jones was not responsible for the writing on the wall, but if he does confess to having done it, we should not credit his statement.’