Bells Above Greens (4 page)

She tilted the umbrella so she could see me.  “Bingo.  I don’t know what would make them schedule a class at graveyard hours.”

“You don’t have to worry about walking in the dark on campus.  It’s safe.”

“The minute you let your guard down is the minute the dogs pounce.  How would you feel if you came next week to walk me again and I didn’t show?  If I suddenly disappeared in the night, never to be seen or heard from again?”

“Are you guilting me into being your bodyguard?”

“Bodyguards are paid.  I have no intention of paying you.”  She tilted the umbrella again, peeking out from under it as if it was a hat pulled low over one eye, and winked at me.

“Where did you get such a small umbrella?”

“It’s part of my plan to not let boys get too close.”

“And how’s it working?”

“It’s very effective.”

When we came to her class building she shook out her umbrella and folded it.

“Here we are,” she said.  “As we agreed?  Same time next week?”

I laughed.

“You won’t forget my name, will you?”

“No,” I said.  We endured a silent pause.

“It’s Liv.”  She smiled at me as she went inside. 

I suppose that’s how all people meet.  A chance encounter of no consequence followed by a small flirt that hints at a second meeting.  You just have to find that second meeting.

That night the bells rang over the empty lawns, giving it an eerie catacomb feeling.  I walked a little faster and tried not to look over my shoulder, keeping myself from breaking into a run.  I walked under the spires of the Basilica and looked up.  The night sky was glowing with rainclouds, and the spires forked upward in a detached, dreamlike floatation as the paper clouds circled overhead.  It was as if the fingers of humanity were reaching for something in Heaven, unable to touch what it needed to, but trusting that it was there, somewhere, beyond the gray glow.  I watched the raindrops fall from the tip of the spire to rest upon my cheek. 

They were the same cold drops I had felt months ago under a foreign sky.  I closed my eyes and remembered the way they split Peter’s hair in thick parts and drained down his face.  We had taken a church and set up a communications camp when Peter’s jeep pulled up.  I was sitting upon the broken rubble, drawing pictures in the wet dirt with a broken stick when I saw him coming up the road, the villagers moving out of the street to make way.

The hood was billowing steam from a dozen bullet holes, the windshield shattered and webbed.  A soldier was leaning from the passenger seat against Peter.  The soldier’s face had frozen in a dead fright, the cords in his neck were torn and exposed, and his shoulder pulled forward at an awkward angle, hanging from its socket by tendons and strings of muscle, visible where his shirt had been shredded and punctured a handful of times.  In the back seat, a gunner sat unmoving, spread over his machine gun, his back dotted with black holes and soaked.  His face was on his machine gun barrel, burned against it and his eyes were open and filled red. 

Peter stepped out of the driver’s seat, his shoulder had ruptured as if it were harpooned, the skin around it mangled.  He looked at me and simply ordered us to gather the equipment and move.

He had an unfailing courage about him at all times.  I had seen it that day and many other days.  He also had a trust in people, which ultimately led to his death when he approached a rice farmer later on for hand-rolled cigarettes.  The farmer, a communist sympathizer, dropped a grenade at his feet instead.

I opened my eyes again to the roll of clouds and the dizzy movement of the spires leaning over me.  The basilica doors, black in the night and shiny with reflecting rain, were larger to me than they had been before, and they appeared to be an entryway I might have difficulty in crossing with conviction. 

My brother had been reliably devout.  As boys our aunt brought us up to attend church each Sunday, and as I entered the University I thought it would be something that would fall by the wayside.  Yet Peter attended each Sunday and I followed. 

He was a senior the last time I had entered, the last time I had knelt in the pews and crossed myself, and I was a junior.  His was a growing name on campus, a talented first-year ballplayer that people only questioned why he had not played earlier.  We sat in the pews behind coach Frank Leahy, who would turn to us to grant us the sign of peace and lean in close to Peter and tell him what a great game he played the day before.

We shipped out that month, Peter never to return, and me to come back and question my faith, question my existence, question why him and not me.  I had come back and was just as aimless now as I was when I had first stepped foot on campus, watching as eager students passed me by, flattening the grass in the Quad ahead of me.

The basilica doors leaned over me, highlighted by the sky above it, and I thought for a brief moment how I could, if I could, enter those doors again when the lack of spirit in my heart would show upon my face and give me away.  The spires stabbed upward and it crossed my mind what a fall it might be if one were to climb among the slippery pikes, the iron shafts and dark peaks, and jump.

The campus was quiet and I circled the buildings all night, searching my thoughts, unable to give up and lay dead upon a cot in a tomblike basement.  To fall asleep is to relinquish the day, to relinquish your handle on memory and nightmare, to resolve your thoughts for another day’s light.  I had no purpose beyond that night, no worry of direction or future, keeping a class schedule now only because I could not let Peter see me turn away.  In death, one becomes louder to the living. 

I walked until I heard the noise from a fraternity house, the occupants of which mirrored my desire to stretch the night and rob it of sleep.

“Over here,” someone called out to me on the lawn.  He called again, and I walked over to where two students stood drinking under the shelter of a large maple.

“What are you doing out here, poor devil?” one of them said.  “You look like a homeless person standing out here.”  He was as small and frail as a girl, and he hid behind the lens of a camera, snapping a photo of me and dropping the camera to hang from his neck.  I blinked away the flash.

“He may well be homeless,” the other said.  He stood with one hand on his hip, his jacket pulled back behind it in a pretentious way.  I quickly saw that he was leaning backward with his belly pushed out not for conceit, but for balance.

The first boy tipped up a beer.  “What on earth are you doing standing in the rain?”

“Nothing,” I said.  “Passing time.”

“I’m Myles,” he said.  He slapped the chest of the other student.  “And this is Jude Miller.”

Jude wavered in drunkenness at the slap.  “Have a beer, old boy.”

“No,” I said.  He handed me one from his jacket pocket and I took it.

“Don’t let his vernacular fool you,” Myles said.  “He’s a farm boy in hiding.  He doesn’t belong on campus.  Jude the Obscure, I call him.”

I gave a small laugh and Myles looked at me, pleased with his joke.

“A goat could stand in for him at roll call,” he said.

“I say, old boy,” Jude’s words were half mumbled.  With his forced accent I could hardly understand him.  “I thought you were about to climb the spires like Quasimodo.”

I shrugged.  “Maybe I was.”

Jude smiled and staggered.

“Watch him,” Myles giggled like a girl and quickly focused his camera in on the teetering drunk.  “Just watch now.”

Jude fell to his knees and did not put his arms out to cushion his face.  He began to breathe the rich grass and I could hear rainwater snorkeling in his nose.

“Oh, golly.  This boy.  He can’t hold a drink.”

Myles touched at my elbows and motioned for me to gather his shoulders.  He took his feet as one takes a wheelbarrow.

“He’ll sleep ‘til noon, this one.”

We carried him across the lawn, Myles tripping several times along the way.  I swung Jude over my shoulders, his dead limbs swinging like ropes, and carried him toward the house. 

“Where are you taking him?” Myles said.

“Inside.”

“Just set him up against the wall.  He’ll do the same thing wherever you put him.  He’s gone for the night.”

I set him with his back to the fraternity house wall under an overhang.  He quickly slumped to the side and curled up comfortably in blank dreams. 

“Leave him there,” Myles said.  “The stray dogs will tear him apart and I’ll be out of a roommate.  Oh well.  He brings a squeeze bottle of vodka to his classes.  He’s hopeless.”

This boy Myles entertained himself immensely.  I thought he could be immune to solitary confinement.  He sat on a wet rock, his fist under his jaw like a thinker, and began to ask questions.  What year are you?  How do you like Notre Dame?  You’re a soldier, aren’t you?  I can tell by your haircut.  You’ve let it grow out a bit so it hardly gives you away.  But I can see it.

“I know you,” he said.

“Do you?”

“I know your type.  The type who stands in the rain and contemplates death.”  When I didn’t reply, he continued.  “I know this because I am the same way.”

The girlishness was gone from his body, the androgyny in his voice had disappeared. 

“Tell me I’m right,” he said.  “A happy man does not stand in the rain and stare up at the cathedral if he is not questioning his life upon earth.”

“I was studying the clouds,” I said.  “I’m a meteorologist.”

“You’re a boy come home from war who’s trying to pick up the pieces.”

“You a psychology major?”

“No,” he said.  He held his head low.  “I haven’t nailed that part down yet.  I may be a career student at this rate.”

“Join the club.”

“You carried Jude like he was wounded on the battlefield.”

“He’s not heavy.”

He looked at me with narrow eyes.  “No.  You’re the literary type.  Jude the Obscure.  Thomas Hardy.  Bravo.  Very good.  That joke was meant just for me.”

“I read that one.”

“You must carry on then.  The mind is a terrible thing to waste, as they say.”

“I don’t know what to carry on toward.”  It came of my mouth without thought, and I felt then that I had shared too much with this boy I hardly knew.

“The only thing people like us can do is keep moving forward,” he said. “Keep going and let life figure itself out for us.  We’re along for the ride, you and I.  Tell me I’m wrong.”

In the glistening shadow his face was somber, and I saw a flash of myself sitting on a rock doing the same thing.  It was a flash I’d rather not see again. 

“You’re right.”

“Of course I am.”

He stood and walked inside, pausing to kneel and photograph Jude Miller in the proper light and angle before leaving him to sleep the night away against the wall, his legs outstretched in the rain.

Chapter Five

The rest of the week I divided between catching up on classes and working the rooftops to earn some spending money.  For whatever they were worth, the words of a wet stranger with a beer in his own questioning grip stayed in my mind.  I wasn’t going to be a boy on a wet rock. 

Emery went to Blarney’s alone and I kept myself busy.  Friday was the pep rally in the Quad. 

It had nearly escaped my mind entirely.  I was walking alone when I found myself among a swarm of students running ahead of me.  The sun was bright and gave golden highlights to the bouncing heads, their destination blotted out in the distance by sun spots, but I heard band music ahead of them.  Lemmings to the piper.

There was a small wooden stage built in the center of the Quad, a student atop speaking through a cone.  I found myself in the tide of students that crept up to the stage.  At the front, greenfaced leprechauns led the cheers through cupped hands, cheerleaders were tossed, flipping into the sky, the students replied in mobbed excitement, pumped fists and painted faces, dyed coifs done up in fanatic gel, stomped feet and gorilla chants from the jungle echoing against the building walls. 

I felt knuckles at my elbow.

“You remember this, don’t you?” Emery asked me.  He was wearing his thick glasses, his eyes looking huge behind them, his handsomeness spoiled.

“Yes.”

“Rich in tradition.  That’s why I came to school here.  See her?”  He pointed to a brunette cheerleader standing upon stretched arms with her fist in the air.  “I like her.”

“Know her?”

“No.  Seen her around.”

The student with the cone was big, his shoulders mounded at his neck.  He had blonde hair that waved back upon his skull, a big face with stumped jaws like uncarved stone, his neck jutting outward beyond the faceline.  He held a watermelon in his hand, palming it above his head, and the golden-hearted gorillas pounded in frenzy.  The green filled behind us.

“Seen him before?” Emery asked, yelling over the noise.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Second-team fullback.  Carries linebackers like children.”

“He’ll be something next year.  He’s a sophomore.  He’s in my drama class.”

“Nice guy?”

Emery nodded.  “He’s one of the boys.  Professor makes him sit up front where he can keep an eye on him.  Likes to have fun.”

“You made it out of the rain.”  The voice came from under me.  I looked over his head first, then found him at my shoulder.  It was Myles.  Jude Miller was with him.

“Good to see you dry,” Myles said.  He had his camera hanging from his neck, his fingers at the ready.  “I thought you might have gills by now.  I saw you from across the Quad.  I called for you.”

“I’m Jude Miller.”  He held his hand out to me.

“I know.”

He looked at me funny, not remembering me.  Emery looked over at them and didn’t say anything.

“This your friend?” Myles asked, pointing to Emery.

“This is Emery.  Emery; Myles and Jude.”

Emery shook their hands quickly and returned to his pockets.  He watched the cheerleader.  “She is
some
thing.”

“Who is?” Myles asked.

Emery motioned with his chin toward the girl.

“I love seeing you boys go whirling over girls.”  He snapped a photo of the cheerleader.  “It’s so funny.”