‘We really didn’t steal your sign, you know,’ Skip said. ‘We just borrowed it.’
Stoke appeared to think this over, then sighed. ‘It’s not my sign,’ he said.
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘Not anymore. So long, Stoke. We’ll come back and see you.’
‘Don’t make it a priority,’ he said, and I guess we took him at his word, because we never did. I saw him back at the dorm a few times, but only a few, and I was in class when he moved out without bothering to finish the semester. The next time I saw him was on the TV
news almost twenty years later, speaking at a Greenpeace rally just after the French blew up the Rainbow Warrior. 1984 or ’85, that would’ve been. Since then I’ve seen him on the tube quite a lot. He raises money for environmental causes, speaks on college campuses from that snazzy red wheelchair, defends the eco-activists in court when they need defending. I’ve heard him called a tree-hugger, and I bet he sort of enjoys that. He’s still carrying the chip.
I’m glad. Like he said, it’s what he’s got.
As we reached the door he called, ‘Hey?’
We looked back at a narrow white face on a white pillow above a white sheet, the only real color about him those masses of black hair. The shapes of his legs under the sheet again made me think of Uncle Sam in the Fourth of July parade back home. And again I thought that he looked like a kid with about four months to live. But add some white teeth to the picture, as well, because Stoke was smiling.
‘Hey what?’ Skip said.
‘You two were so concerned with what I was going to say to Garretsen and Ebersole . . .
maybe I’ve got an inferiority complex or something, but I have trouble believing all that concern is for me. Have you two decided to actually try going to school for a change?’
‘If we did, do you think we’d make it?’ Skip asked.
‘You might,’ Stoke said. ‘There is one thing I remember about that night. Pretty clearly, too.’
I thought he’d say he remembered us laughing at him — Skip thought so, too, he told me later — but that wasn’t it.
‘You carried me through the doorway of the exam room by yourself,’ he said to Skip.
‘Didn’t drop me, either.’
‘No chance of that. You don’t weigh much.’
‘Still . . . dying’s one thing, but no one likes the idea of being dropped on the floor. It’s undignified. Because you didn’t, I’ll give you some good advice. Get out of the sports programs, Kirk. Unless, that is, you’ve got some kind of athletic scholarship you can’t do without.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they’ll turn you into someone else. It may take a little longer than it took ROTC to turn David Dearborn into Dearie, but they’ll get there in the end.’
‘What do you know about sports?’ Skip asked gently. ‘What do you know about being on a team?’
‘I know it’s a bad time for boys in uniforms,’ Stoke said, then lay back on his pillow and closed his eyes. But a good time to be a girl, Carol had said. 1966 was a good time to be a girl.
We returned to the dorm and went to my room to study. Down the hall Ronnie and Nick and Lennie and most of the others were chasing The Bitch. After awhile Skip shut the door to block the sound of them out, and when that didn’t entirely work I turned on Nate’s little RCA Swingline and we listened to Phil Ochs. Ochs is dead now — as dead as my mother and Michael Landon, and Ronnie Malenfant. He hanged himself with his belt. The suicide rate among surviving Atlanteans has been pretty high. No surprise there, I guess; when your continent sinks right out from under your feet, it does a number on your head.
41
A day or two after that visit to Stoke in the infirmary, I called my mother and said that if she could really afford to send a little extra cash my way, I’d like to take her up on her idea about getting a tutor. She didn’t ask many questions and didn’t scold — you knew you were in serious trouble with my mom when she didn’t scold — but three days later I had a money order for three hundred dollars. To this I added my Hearts winnings — I was astonished to find they came to almost eighty bucks. That’s a lot of nickels.