I miss you, Pete. I think our trains are going in different directions,
too, but I’ll never forget the time we spent together. It was the sweetest
and the best (especially the last night). You can write me if you want,
but I sort of ‘wish you ‘wouldn’t. It might not be good for either of us.
This doesn’t mean I don’t care or remember but that I do.
Remember the night I showed you that picture and told you about
how I got beaten up? How my friend Bobby took care of me? He had a
book that summer. The man upstairs gave it to him. Bobby said it was
the best book he ever read. Not saying much when you’re just eleven, I
know, but I saw it again in the high-school library when I was a senior
and read it, just to see what it was like. And I thought it was pretty great.
Not the best book I ever read, but pretty great. I thought you might like
a copy. Although it was written twelve years ago, I sort of think it’s
about Vietnam. Even if it’s not, it’s full of information.
I love you, Pete. Merry Christmas.
PS. Get out of that stupid card-game.
I read it twice, then folded the clipping carefully and put it back in the card, my hands still shaking. Somewhere I think I still have that card … as I’m sure that somewhere ‘Red Carol’
Gerber has still got her little snapshot of her childhood friends. If she’s still alive, that is. Not exactly a sure thing: a lot of her last-known bunch of friends are not.
I opened the package. Inside it — and in jarring contrast to the cheery Christmas paper and white satin ribbon — was a paperback copy of Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. I had somehow missed it in high school, opting for A Separate Peace in Senior Lit instead because Peace looked a little shorter.
I opened it, thinking there might be an inscription. There was, but not the sort I had expected, not at all. This was what I found in the white space on the title page:
My eyes filled with sudden unexpected tears. I put my hands over my mouth to hold in the sob that wanted to come out. I didn’t want to wake Nate up, didn’t want him to see me crying.
But I cried, all right. I sat there at my desk and cried for her, for me, for both of us, for all of us. I can’t remember hurting any more ever in my life than I did then. Hearts are tough, she said, most times hearts don’t break, and I’m sure that’s right . . . but what about then? What about who we were then? What about hearts in Atlantis?
43
In any case, Skip and I survived. We did the makeup work, squeaked through the finals, and returned to Chamberlain Hall in mid-January. Skip told me he’d written a letter to John Winkin, the baseball coach, over the holiday, saying he’d changed his mind about coming out for the team.
Nate was back on Chamberlain Three. So, amazingly, was Lennie Doria — on academic pro but there. His paisan Tony DeLucca was gone, though. So were Mark St Pierre, Barry Margeaux, Nick Prouty, Brad Witherspoon, Harvey Twiller, Randy Echolls . . . and Ronnie, of course. We got a card from him in March. It was postmarked Lewiston and simply addressed to The Yo-Yo’s Of Chamberlain Three. We taped it up in the lounge, over the chair where Ronnie had most often sat during the games. On the front was Alfred E. Neuman, the Mad magazine cover-boy. On the back Ronnie had written: ‘Uncle Sam calls and I gotta go.
Palm trees in my future and who gives a f—k. What me worry. I finished with 21 match points. That makes me the winner.’ It was signed ‘RON.’ Skip and I had a laugh at that. As far as we were concerned, Mrs Malenfant’s foul-mouthed little boy was going to be a Ronnie until the day he died.
Stoke Jones, aka Rip-Rip, was also gone. I didn’t think of him much for awhile, but his face and memory came back to me with startling (if brief) vividness a year and a half later. I was in jail at the time, in Chicago. I don’t know how many of us the cops swept up outside the convention center on the night Hubert Humphrey was nominated, but there were a lot, and a lot of us were hurt — a blue-ribbon commission would a year later designate the event a