They didn’t talk about the divorce in front of Billy. Lord save us, Bess would comment good-humoredly while Mitch complained about potholes on Main Street or prices at the grocery store. When Billy went by the house on weekends home, they had Saturday lunch in the kitchen: chicken baked in the oven until it was hard and salty, mashed potatoes, soup beans. Flour gravy Bess made at the stove, Mitch pouring the milk into the pan as she stirred. Afterward she insisted on cleaning up alone. You go on and visit with your father. Back to the sitting room, Billy rolling his sleeves up in the warmth. Mitch taking his usual seat, then talk, generalities with specific meanings. Long pauses, expected, not uncomfortable. Crackling of the coal fire. Billy never mentioned his mother; Mitch never asked. Jean did discuss the divorce; Billy knew it was final in February.
They all wanted to put Billy somewhere safe while things settled and time passed, but he couldn’t cooperate any longer. He’d thought carefully and wondered for weeks; this was the day to go ahead. Withdrawal from the University wasn’t difficult. He’d fill out the form and decide what to do next. At home they’d think it was the divorce, or Vietnam and the times, or Kato—or maybe they thought she was out of the picture. Gone but not forgotten. Whose phrase was that really, who first said it? The bus pulled at a crawl across crowded Stadium Bridge, a one-way wooden lane, and the Student Union was in sight.
Yesterday he’d taken most of the money out of his checking account at a downtown bank—$400. Tuition at the state school was inexpensive, less than two hundred, but Jean must have paid nearly a thousand for room and board at the dorm. He’d get a job here or in Bellington and pay the rest before he went south, or into the army. The army. Supposedly the first few minutes of the lottery drawing in December were going to be broadcast on television. Just like TV, catch it on film up to about number 30.
Well, numbers were pure if television wasn’t. Now it was a matter of numbers, published in a newspaper list. No more dodg’em plans or IS deferments: fuck up, drop your grades, and you’re gone. He’d know once and for all in December; he wouldn’t have to argue it out in his head. It was a joke, really. His birthday—today—written on a white plastic ball and bounced around in a machine. Exactly whose hand would touch the machine? Sometimes Billy dreamed about the lottery, a close-up interior view: hundreds of days of white balls tumbling in a black sphere, silent and very slow, moving as though in accordance with physical laws. A galaxy of identical white planets. No sun. Cold, charged planets, simple, symmetrical, named with months and numbers. Nov. 1, no. 305 of 365. Universe stops. Hand reaches in. Suddenly everything in color, and the black sphere turns midnight blue. Crazy dream. The black and white beginning, when the balls moved around and through each other slowly, must be a Bio I flash: all those films of microorganisms, bacteria, swimming shapes.
Billy wasn’t worried about the lottery, he wasn’t hassled. The lottery was an ingenious system, better than the draft. Having your birthday picked early in the countdown was a completely coincidental happening, like being struck by lightning. Your birthday had been all those cakes and bicycles and new shirts: now pay up. The government could claim near innocence. Of course, they’d set up the system. Supposedly they’d set up the war, too, but Billy wasn’t sure. He didn’t know histories or politics—he didn’t need to know. Knowing wouldn’t change what was going to happen. It had no more to do with him than this bus ride, but maybe it would hurt him a lot worse. And it was two years.
His roommate joked over beer and pretzels. December 1 you’re going to see me drop acid and park in front of the tube in Towers Lounge, watch it all on the big screen. Then, more seriously: Look, Vietnam is practically over. Suppose we do get drafted, might not even go to Nam. Might go to Hawaii. Be fun. Surfboards. That was DeCosto, the loony Italian from Scranton, Pa.
Some of Billy’s friends had talked to draft counselors. Various tables were set up every weekend outside the Student Union: sorority and fraternity rush sign-ups (GO GREEK), Environment Club ski trip sign-ups (PRAY FOR SNOW), Mobilize Against Strip Mining sign-ups, Draft Counseling (PLAN NOW). DeCosto said he planned every Friday so he could get dates with older women on Saturday nights: most of the draft counselors were women grad students. They wore baggy clothes; they looked pale and studious in their wire-frame glasses, or they were clean and energetic, like campers. Occasionally the counselors were men, a hippie law student or a vet. The Vets were usually skinny, long-haired, never glossy. One guy sat there in a wheelchair at the side of the table. Always—in the milling of students, honking of traffic, barking of mutt dogs wearing bandannas—short, intense conversations took place at the draft-counseling tables. Billy never went near them. He would take his cue from the numbers. He thought he would. Numbers were his plan while the holding pattern held.
The bus pulled up to the Student Union steps. Billy knew that General Studies students had to withdraw from the Dean of Students offices upstairs in the Union. As he left the bus and walked into the building, he wished himself a happy birthday. This might not be his best birthday—not like his sixteenth, the day he took his driver’s test in a blue secondhand Falcon he already owned. Or his eighteenth, when Kato made him a chocolate cake full of melted M&Ms and gave him a watch she must have saved all year to buy. He checked the watch on the way upstairs: one o’clock. But this birthday would be okay; he was doing exactly what he wanted to do. He opened the door marked DEAN OF STUDENTS.
The woman behind the counter looked up expectantly. She was alone in the room. Behind her a carpeted hallway led out of sight. “Can I help you?”
“I want to withdraw from school,” Billy said.
“You want to withdraw now, in November? There’s no refund on tuition this late.”
“I know. Which form do I use?”
She put both hands flat on the counter. “Wait a minute. Mind if I ask—it’s my job to ask—why you’re withdrawing? Are your grades bad?”
“They’re not good, but they’re not bad.” He didn’t think his grades were any of her business. “I’m withdrawing for personal reasons.”
She folded her hands and smiled. “Perhaps I can help you.”
“No, I don’t think so. I’d just like the form, please.” He put his books on the counter near her hands and stood waiting, watching her. He wouldn’t let himself look away.
“Would you like to come into the office? If you’re so sure about doing this, would it hurt to talk it over?”
“I don’t want to talk it over, thanks. If you’ll just give me the form, I’ll fill it out right here.”
She gave him the form, one white sheet in triplicate. He filled in the blanks, signed it, and handed the form back to her.
She looked at his name. “You’ll receive official notification in the mail, Mr. Hampson.”
He nodded. At least she hadn’t called him Billy. “I wanted to ask—will I have to move out of the dorm right away?”
“Well, you’re paid up. If you don’t turn in your key, I suppose you’re free to stay until the end of the term.” She paused. “Look, I hope you’ll re-enroll at some point. Please phone here at the Dean of Students office if we can assist you in any way.”
He thanked her and walked back downstairs, then out the double doors of the Student Union to the street. He waited for some precise feeling to wash over him, but nothing came. Almost out of habit, he crossed the street and entered Sumner Hall for bio class. He was a little late.
The room was a sort of tiered concrete arena, with semicircular rows of desks bolted in place on descending levels all the way to the bottom. There, a graduate proctor sat silently behind a long table, reading a book. Far above him, suspended in both forward corners of the ceiling, were the two thirty-inch televisions that taught the course. MITOSIS, said the screens in black and white. Notebooks shuffled open, lights dimmed slightly. The screens were brighter now, more exclusively boring. Billy resolved to pay close attention, not to “mitosis” but to the room, the people, what they did. He’d watch the screens
as well. Maybe bio was interesting and he hadn’t noticed because he hated the whole setup—or didn’t hate it, thought it was silly. He always sat in the back row; now and then he smoked a joint, which didn’t prevent him from taking notes. Actually, he took more explicit notes when he was a little stoned.
He fixed his gaze on the screen. Here came the definition, printed out a few words at a time. Usual method of cell division. Resolving of the chromatin. Of the nucleus. Into a threadlike form. It was a wierd language really; they should have someone reciting in a sci-fi thriller voice. Instead, a taped professorial drone pronounced the words as they appeared, or lagged a little behind the pictures; the bio department filmed the lessons themselves and narrated the course. Every freshman at the University had to take Bio I and II, and the big room seated five hundred. But it was never full. Billy envisioned the wonderful confusion if all freshmen, each carefully assigned a numbered section of Bio I, showed up for the same class. Billy listened to the scratching of pens and pencils, the ripping open of cellophane bags of junk food. A few students were sleeping. Innumerable others sat doing nothing, watching. He watched. The illustration, cells dividing under the scrutiny of a microscope, proceeded jerkily, in silence. Maybe if they synced in music, rock music, even classical music. Maybe if the films were in color. What color were cells? Billy thought the endless tones of gray were sad as hell.
His thoughts drifted. Last night Danner had come out to Towers to bring him a birthday cake. She brought a boyfriend with her, Jim his name was, a nice enough guy, and two pints of ice cream. The cake was chocolate with white icing, and Danner put twenty candles on it, one to grow on. They’d set the cake up on the only table in his dorm room, all of them laughing, and when she leaned over, lighting matches, the ends of her long hair had caught fire. Billy put it out fast with his hands, but a few strands near her face were scorched. Danner made a joke about Buddhist protests; no harm was done and they ate cake until most of it was gone. This morning, pulling on his jeans, he’d thought he smelled the acrid odor of burnt hair, and he remembered the scared look on her face as she’d pulled back from the candles. Billy shifted in his seat. There was no smell at all in the bio classroom of Sumner Hall.
The bell rang. All around him books slammed shut, bodies shuffled. Everyone got up at once and moved, a bored herd on its way to cafeteria lines. He sat and let them pass, watching the tiers of seats reassert their emptiness. All summer, he’d waited to come to college. After he was in college, it seemed he was waiting for something else. What was he waiting for now?
He figured he would drive to Bellington. It wasn’t fair if he didn’t tell Jean right away.
The summer before he started college, Billy worked as a lifeguard at the State Park, a wilderness of rhododendron and pine crossed with trails. The trails were steep and rocky above the winding river, dotted with bridges, picnic tables, stone-hewn barbecue pits, fireplaces built in the Depression by CCC men. The river wound or rushed according to season; every spring someone drowned in the rapids, the river twisting violently around boulders and big rocks that created deep pools in the current. Teenagers from nearby towns went camping or tubing; they hiked the trails back along the river, toting beer and food far from the park entrance. They waded out to favorite rocks, awkwardly carrying ice chests, blankets, radios. Couples staked space on a flat rock and swam off the side in summer when the river was calm; they grew drunk slowly and necked in the sun.
Families stayed farther up where there were guards, where the river was cordoned off near the refreshment stand and rest-rooms. Billy sat there in his tall white chair, a silver whistle on a chain around his neck, and watched dragonflies skim across the water. Weekends the park was crowded, the stretch of paved riverbank spread with towels and bathers. Transistor radios blared pop legends. Young mothers, high school girls a few years before, lay insensate, their faces blank. They listened to Top 40 and oiled their thighs. Sometimes they started conversations. Hey there, aren’t you Billy Hampson? What class was it you were in—two years ago, right? Or I knew your sister, she was just three years behind me. Where was it she went off to? Billy watched toddlers in the wading pool, a shallows roped off with plastic cord and multicolored floats. Even on weekends, the young mothers were alone. They were girls whose husbands worked Saturdays or watched TV ballgames; they bought new bathing suits every summer at K-Mart and read romance paperbacks. Already they seemed transformed into an isolated species; groups of boys who came to the park in such numbers never glanced at them. You’re a Hampson. Aren’t you Billy Hampson? I thought you were. They pulled piles of plastic toys from beach bags, watched their charges wade into the water, then lay down and abandoned consciousness for a semiwakeful trance. The older women, whose children were eight and ten and twelve, came in couples and played cards. They refereed their kids’ quarrels, drank iced tea from a thermos, smoked endless cigarettes; they were stolid, asexual, and self-contained. They didn’t notice Billy unless he reprimanded their children, blowing the whistle and signaling them back to the bank for dunking or straying too far. Then the women stood up in their solid-color, one-piece suits, shouting threats and directions, snapping down the legs of the suits to cover a half-moon of sagging derriere.
Weekdays were long, lazy, the park nearly empty and the swimming area frequented only by a country family or two. The men were present then: they were truckers between hauls, or miners or plant workers on night shift, or they were out of work. Never less than five or six kids, and the parents middle-aged on wool blankets. The kids wore shorts and T-shirts; the babies went naked. They brought big rubber intertubes and tires instead of toys. No radios, no plastic bottles of oil. There was little talk and easy silence; the kids could all swim and were usually obedient, and the older ones took care of the younger. Billy sat all day in the swoony heat. By four in the afternoon everyone was gone from the swimming area; he put away life jackets and guard poles, checked the bathrooms, picked up litter. He would lock up at five. Just before, he knelt by the river with a set of corked vials to take a water sample. The river was getting dirtier; mine drainage striped the rocks orange just a few miles up. In a year, two years, swimming would be officially disallowed. Billy held the vials to the sun, watched the water cloud, then wrote dates and acidity registration in the record book. The days smelled of pollen. Close insects sounded, faint stirrings, dollop of a fish breaking. Billy would dump the vials, rinse them, put them back in the case and shut the lid. He stood looking at the water and then went in, swimming underwater. He cleared the river to the opposite bank in five powerful strokes and long glides, surfaced, and moved back across with a regular butterfly stroke, hearing only the quick, flat impact of his limbs cutting water.
Often on the way home he stopped at a small beer joint called Bartley’s. It was a peaceful red-neck bar not big enough for fights or dancing. The interior was just nine bar stools, the bar itself, and five square tables arranged across the slanted wood floor in front. A closet to the right of the bar held a stained toilet. The insulbricksided building had been some worker’s shanty house back in the days when there were lumber mills. Narrow secondary roads near the park were dotted with such houses, some of them fallen away to frames and inverted roofs, the struts pointing into air. Trees grew up through the floors where there was sun enough.
At Bartley’s the sun was muted by brown paper blinds; the blinds were old and faded and strained the light to a dull gold. Unhurried conversations continued at the tables. The patrons were mostly men in their fifties or sixties who lived nearby in Hampton or Volga, rural settlements begun as mill towns along the river. Billy’s grandfather had built Hampton, had owned a mill. But the man, his mother’s father, had died when Jean was a girl; Hampton had died before he did. Even then, it must have been steamy in summer. Country near the State Park was brushy and still forested, valleys overhung by hills. The old air conditioner at Bartley’s wheezed over the entrance, and a small rotating fan, its face no bigger than a pie plate, stood on the bar
. Billy drank one or two cold beers in tall Stroh’s glasses, and wondered about Kato with little urgency. He thought in terms of ‘getting rid of her,’ getting her out of his mind. But four years back, things referred to her. Summers, winters, high school, movie houses. His car reminded him of her. His friends reminded him. Girls he went out with now reminded him; even the best ones seemed coy and mannered. They were willing to different degrees but wanted something in exchange for their loyalty, their favors—some assurance. They all had plans, secretarial school or college, and they believed in their plans as though the future were cast in iron. His sister, Danner, was a little like that too, but Danner was smart enough it seemed reasonable she have plans. And she could veer off course suddenly. Most girls around Bellington didn’t. And to Billy, who’d been sleeping with Kato for nearly two years, the proceeding and backing off in parked cars, the lines drawn, the expectations, seemed a waste of time. He wouldn’t make any promises.
Kato hadn’t needed promises. He guessed they might have slept together even sooner if he’d tried. Somehow his getting a car had started them off. He wasn’t the first; Kato told him candidly she’d been with another boy before, twice. She attached no judgments and neither did Billy. He took her to school every morning and took her home in the afternoon, except during football season, when he was team manager and stayed late. Afternoons, she worked with her father in the billiard room, doing food orders for customers while Shinner poured drafts and saw to the tables. Billy played pool or shot the bull with Shinner until he had to go home to supper. Later, he phoned. Saturday nights they went to the movies at the Colonial, then walked across the street and upstairs to Kato’s room. They were always alone then and they didn’t have to hurry. Sometimes Billy fell asleep afterward, as though her bedroom were his own, then got up and left after midnight.
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