Hearts In Atlantis (55 page)

Out on Bennett's Walk, Stoke tried to sit up. He got his upper body partway out of the water . . . and then lay back, full length, as if that icy, slushy water were a bed. He lifted both arms skyward in a gesture which was almost invocatory, then let them fall again. It was every surrender ever given summed up in three motions: the lying back, the lifting of the arms, the double splash as they fell back wide to either side. It was the ultimate fuck it, do what you want, I quit.

“Come on,” Skip said. He was still laughing but he was also completely serious. I could hear the seriousness in his laughing voice and see it in his hysterically contorted face. I was glad it was there, God I was glad. “Come on, before the stupid motherfuck drowns.”

Skip and I crammed through the doorway of the lounge shoulder to shoulder and sprinted down the third-floor hall, bouncing off each other like pinballs, reeling, almost as out of control as Stoke had been on the path. Most of the others followed us. The only one I know for sure who didn't was Mark; he went down to his room to change out of his soaked jeans.

We met Nate on the second-floor landing—damned near ran him down. He was standing there with an armload of books in a plastic sack, looking at us with some alarm.

“Good grief,” he said. That was Nate at his strongest,
good grief
. “What's wrong with
you?
”

“Come on,” Skip said. His throat was so choked the words came out in a growl. If I hadn't been with him earlier, I'd have thought he'd just finished a fit of weeping. “It's not us, it's fuckin Jones. He fell down. He needs—” Skip broke off as laughter—great big belly-gusts of it—overtook him and shook him once again.
He fell back against the wall, rolling his eyes in a kind of hilarious exhaustion. He shook his head as if to deny it, but of course you can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants. Above us, the stairs began to thunder with descending third-floor cardplayers. “He needs help,” Skip finished, wiping his eyes.

Nate looked at me in growing bewilderment. “If he needs help, why are you guys laughing?”

I couldn't explain it to him. Hell, I couldn't explain it to myself. I grabbed Skip by the arm and yanked. We started down the steps to the first floor. Nate followed us. So did the rest.

The first thing I saw when we banged out through the north door was that rectangle of yellow canvas. It was lying on the ground, full of water and floating lumps of slush. Then the water on the path started pouring in through my sneakers and I forgot all about sightseeing. It was freezing. The rain drove down on my exposed skin in needles that were not quite ice.

In Bennett's Run the water was ankle-deep, and my feet went from cold to numb. Skip slipped and I grabbed his arm. Nate steadied us both from behind and kept us from tumbling over backward. Ahead of us I could hear a nasty sound that was half coughing and half choking. Stoke lay in the water like a sodden log, his duffle coat floating around his body and those masses of black hair floating around his face. The
cough was deep and bronchial. Fine droplets sprayed from his lips with each gagging, choking outburst. One of his crutches lay next to him, caught between his arm and his side. The other was floating away in the direction of Bennett Hall.

Water slopped over Stoke's pale face. His coughing took on a strangled, gargling quality. His eyes stared straight up into the rain and fog. He gave no sign that he heard us coming, but when I knelt on one side of him and Skip on the other, he tried to beat us away with his hands. Water ran into his mouth and he began to thrash. He was drowning in front of us. I no longer felt like laughing, but I might still have been doing it. At first they were joking, Carol said. At first they were joking. Put on the radio, Pete, I like the oldies.

“Pick him up,” Skip said, and grabbed one of Stoke's shoulders. Stoke slapped at him weakly with one wax-dummy hand. Skip ignored this, might not even have felt it. “Hurry, for Christ's sake.”

I grabbed Stoke's other shoulder. He splashed water in my face as though we were fucking around in someone's backyard pool. I had thought he'd be as cold as I was, but there was a sickish heat coming off his skin. I looked across his waterlogged body to Skip.

Skip nodded back at me. “Ready . . . set . . . 
now
.”

We heaved. Stoke came partly out of the water—from the waist up—but that was all. I was astounded by the weight of him. His shirt had come untucked from his pants and floated around his middle like a ballerina's tutu. Below it I could see his white skin and the black bullethole of his navel. There were scars there, too, healed scars wavering every whichway like snarls of knotted string.

“Help out, Natie!” Skip grunted. “Prop him up, for fuck's sake!”

Nate dropped to his knees, splashing all three of us, and grabbed Stoke in a kind of backwards hug. We struggled to get him all the way up and out of the soup, but the slush on the bricks kept us off-balance, made it impossible for us to work together. And Stoke, although still coughing and half-drowned, was also working against us, struggling as best he could to be free of us. Stoke wanted to go back in the water.

The others arrived, Ronnie in the lead. “Fucking Rip-Rip,” he breathed. He was still giggling, but he looked slightly awestruck. “You screwed up big this time, Rip. No doubt.”

“Don't just stand there, you numb tool!” Skip cried. “Help us!”

Ronnie paused a moment longer, not angry, just assessing how this might best be done, then turned to see who else was there. He slipped on the slush and Tony DeLucca—also still giggling—grabbed him and steadied him. They were crowded together on the drowned Walk, all my cardplaying buddies from the third-floor lounge, and most of them still couldn't stop laughing. They looked like something, but I didn't know what. I might never have known, if not for Carol's Christmas present . . . but of course that came later.

“You, Tony,” Ronnie said. “Brad, Lennie, Barry. Let's get his legs.”

“What about me, Ronnie?” Nick asked. “What about me?”

“You're too small to help lift him,” Ronnie said, “but it might cheer him up to get his dick sucked.”

Nick stood back.

Ronnie, Tony, Brad, Lennie, and Barry Margeaux slipped past us on either side. Ronnie and Tony got Stoke by the calves.

“Christ Jesus!” Tony cried, disgusted and still half-laughing. “Nothing to him! Legs like on a scarecrow!”

“ ‘Legs like on a scarecrow, legs like on a scarecrow!' ” Ronnie cried, viciously mimicking. “Pick him the fuck up, you wop nimrod, this isn't art appreciation! Lennie and Barry, get under his deprived ass when they do. Then you come up—”

“—when the rest of you guys lift him,” Lennie finished. “Got it. And don't call my
paisan
a wop.”

“Leave me alone,” Stoke coughed. “Stop it, get away from me . . . fucking losers  . . .” The coughing overtook him again. He began to make gruesome retching sounds. In the lamplight his lips looked gray and slick.

“Look who's talkin about being a loser,” Ronnie said. “Fuckin half-drowned crippled-up Jerry's Kid homo.” He looked at Skip, water running out of his wavy hair and over his pimply face. “Count us off, Kirk.”

“One . . . two . . . three . . . 
now!
”

We lifted. Stoke Jones came out of the water like a salvaged ship. We staggered back and forth with him. One of his arms flopped in front of me; it hung there for a moment and then the hand attached to the end of it arced up and slapped me hard across the face. Whacko! I started laughing again.

“
Put me down! Motherfuckers, put me
DOWN!
”

We staggered, dancing on the slush, water pouring off him, water pouring off us. “Echolls!” Ronnie
bawled. “Marchant! Brennan!
Jesus Christ, little help here you fuckin brain-dead ringmeats, what do you say?
”

Randy and Billy splashed forward. Others—three or four drawn by the shouts and splashing, most still from the third-floor Hearts group—took hold of Stoke as well. We turned him awkwardly, probably looking like the world's most spastic cheerleading squad, for some reason out practicing in the downpour. Stoke had quit struggling. He lay in our grip, arms hanging out to either side, palms up and filling with little cups of rain. Diminishing waterfalls ran out of his sodden jacket and from the seat of his pants.
He picked me up and carried me
, Carol had said. Talking about the boy with the crewcut, the boy who had been her first love.
All the way up Broad Street on one of the hottest days of the year. He carried me in his arms
. I couldn't get her voice out of my head. In a way I never have.

“The dorm?” Ronnie asked Skip. “We takin him into the dorm?”

“Jeepers, no,” Nate said. “The infirmary.”

Since we'd managed to get him out of the water—that was the hardest part and it was behind us—the infirmary made sense. It was a small brick building just beyond Bennett Hall, no more than three or four hundred yards away. Once we got off the path and onto the road, the footing would be good.

So we carried him to the infirmary—bore him up at shoulder height like a slain hero being ceremonially removed from the field of battle. Some of us were still laughing in little snorts and giggles. I was one of them. Once I saw Nate looking at me as if I was a thing almost below contempt, and I tried to stop the
sounds that were coming out of me. I'd do okay for a little while, then I'd think of him spinning on the pivot of his crutch (“
The Olympic judges give him
 . . . 
ALL TENS!
”) and I'd start in again.

Stoke only spoke once as we carried him up the walk to the infirmary door. “Let me die,” he said. “For once in your stupid greedy-me-me lives do something worthwhile. Put me down and let me die.”

The waiting room was empty, the television in the corner showing an old episode of
Bonanza
to no one at all. In those days they hadn't really found the handle on color TV yet, and Pa Cartwright's face was the color of a fresh avocado. We must have sounded like a herd of hippopotami just out of the watering-hole, and the duty-nurse came on the run. Following her was a candystriper (probably a work-study kid like me) and a little guy in a white coat. He had a stethoscope hung around his neck and a cigarette poked in the corner of his mouth. In Atlantis even the doctors smoked.

“What's the trouble with him?” The doc asked Ronnie, either because Ronnie had an in-charge look or because he was the closest at hand.

“Took a header in Bennett's Run while he was on his way to Holyoke,” Ronnie said. “Damned near drowned himself.” He paused, then added: “He's a cripple.”

As if to underline this point, Billy Marchant waved one of Stoke's crutches. Apparently no one had bothered to salvage the other one.

“Put that thing down, you want to fuckin bonk my brains out?” Nick Prouty asked waspishly, ducking.

“What brains?” Brad responded, and we all laughed so hard we nearly dropped Stoke.

“Suck me sideways, ass-breath,” Nick said, but he was laughing, too.

The doctor was frowning. “Bring him in here, and save that language for your bull sessions.” Stoke began coughing again, a deep, ratcheting sound. You expected to see blood and filaments of tissue come popping out of his mouth, that cough was so heavy.

We carried Stoke down the infirmary hallway in a conga-line, but we couldn't get him through the door that way. “Let me,” Skip said.

“You'll drop him,” Nate said.

“No,” Skip said. “I won't. Just let me get a good hold.”

He stepped up beside Stoke, then nodded first to me on his right, then to Ronnie on his left.

“Lower him down,” Ronnie said. We did. Skip grunted once as he took Stoke's weight, and I saw the veins pop out in his neck. Then we stood back and Skip carried Stoke into the room and laid him on the exam table. The thin sheet of paper covering the leather was immediately soaked. Skip stepped back. Stoke was staring up at him, his face dead pale except for two red patches high on his cheekbones—red as rouge, those patches were. Water ran out of his hair in rivulets.

“Sorry, man,” Skip said.

Stoke turned his head away and closed his eyes.

“Out,” the doctor told Skip. He had ditched the cigarette somewhere. He looked around at us, a gaggle
of perhaps a dozen boys, most still grinning, all dripping on the hall's tile floor. “Does anyone know the nature of his disability? It can make a difference in how we treat him.”

I thought of the scars I'd seen, those tangles of knotted string, but said nothing. I didn't really know anything. And now that the uncontrollable urge to laugh had passed, I felt too ashamed of myself to speak up.

“It's just one of those cripple things, isn't it?” Ronnie asked. Actually faced with an adult, he had lost his shrill cockiness. He sounded unsure, perhaps even uneasy. “Muscular palsy or cerebral dystrophy?”

“You clown,” Lennie said. “It's muscular dystrophy and cerebral—”

“He was in a car accident,” Nate said. We all looked around at him. Nate still looked neat and totally put together in spite of the soaking he'd taken. This afternoon he was wearing a Fort Kent High School ski-hat. The Maine football team had finally scored a touchdown and freed Nate from his beanie; go you Black Bears. “Four years ago. His father, mother, and older sister were killed. He was the only family survivor.”

There was silence. I looked between Skip and Tony's shoulders and into the examination room. Stoke still lay streaming on the table, his head turned to the side, his eyes shut. The nurse was taking his blood pressure. His pants clung to his legs and I thought of the Fourth of July parade they used to have back home in Gates Falls when I was just a little kid. Uncle Sam would come striding along between the school band and the Anah Temple Shrine guys on their midget motorcycles, looking at least ten feet tall
in his starry blue hat, but when the wind blew his pants against his legs you could see the trick. That's what Stoke Jones's legs looked like inside his wet pants: a trick, a bad joke, sawed-off stilts with sneakers poked onto the ends of them.