Bible, his lips moving in a rosary of logarithms. His eyes were blank as blackboards.
Garrish paused and looked after him, wondering if he wouldn’t be better off dead, but the little fella was now only a bobbing, disappearing shadow on the wall. It bobbed once more and was gone. Garrish climbed to five and walked down the hall to his room. Pig Pen had left two days ago. Four finals in three days, wham-bam and thank-ya-ma’am. Pig Pen knew how to arrange things. He had left only his pinups, two dirty mismatched sweatsocks, and a ceramic parody of Rodin’s Thinker perched on a toilet seat.
Garrish put his key in the lock and turned it.
“Curt! Hey, Curt!”
Rollins, the asinine floor-counselor who had sent Jimmy Brody up to visit the Dean of Men for a drinking offense, was coming down the hall and waving at him. He was tall, well-built, crewcut, symmetrical. He looked varnished.
“You all done?” Rollins asked.
“Yeah. ”
“Don’t forget to sweep the floor of the room and fill out the damage report, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“I slid a damage report under your door last Thursday, didn’t I?”
“Yeah.”
“If I’m not in my room, just slide the damage report and the key under the door.”
“Okay.”
Rollins seized his hand and shook it twice, fast, pumppump. Rollins’s palm was dry, the skin grainy. Shaking hands with Rollins was like shaking hands with a fistful of salt.
“Have yourself a good summer, m’man.”
“Right.”
“Don’t work too hard.”
“No.”
“Use it, but don’t abuse it.”
“I will and I won’t.”
Rollins looked momentarily puzzled and then he laughed. “Take care, now.” He slapped Garrish’s shoulder and then walked back down the hall, pausing once to tell Ron Frane to turn down his stereo. Garrish could see Rollins lying dead in a ditch with maggots in his eyes. Rollins wouldn’t care. Neither would the maggots. You either ate the world or the world ate you and it was okay either way.
Garrish stood thoughtfully, watching until Rollins was out of sight, and then he let himself into his room.
With Pig Pen’s cyclonic clutter gone it looked barren and sterile. The swirled, heaped, drifted pile that had been Pig Pen’s bed was stripped down to the bare-if slightly come-stained—mattress pad. Two Playboy gatefolds looked down at him with frozen two-dimensional come-ons.
Not much change in Garrish’s half of the room, which had always been barracks-neat. You could drop a quarter on the top blanket of Garrish’s bed and it would bounce. All that neat had gotten on Piggy’s nerves. He was an English major with a fine turn of phrase. He called Garrish a pigeonholer. The only thing on the wall above Garrish’s bed was a huge blow-up of Humphrey Bogart that he had gotten in the college bookstore. Bogie had an automatic pistol in each hand and he was wearing suspenders. Pig Pen said pistols and braces were impotency symbols. Garrish doubted if Bogie had been impotent, although he had never read anything about him.
He went to the closet door, unlocked it, and brought out the big walnut-stocked .352 Magnum that his father, a Methodist minister, had bought him for Christmas. He had bought the telescopic sight himself last March.
You weren’t supposed to have guns in your room, not even hunting rifles, but it hadn’t been hard. He had signed it out of the university gun storage room the day before with a forged withdrawal slip. He put it in its waterproof leather scabbard, and left it in the woods behind the football field. Then, this morning around three A.M., he just went out and got it and brought it upstairs through the sleeping corridors.
He sat down on the bed with the gun across his knees and wept a little bit. The Thinker on the toilet seat was looking at him. Garrish put the gun on his bed, crossed the room, and slapped it off Piggy’s table and onto the floor, where it shattered. There was a knock at the door.
Garrish put the rifle under his bed. “Come in.”
It was Bailey, standing there in his skivvies. There was a puff of lint in his bellybutton. There was no future for Bailey. Bailey would marry a stupid girl and they would have stupid kids. Later on he would die of cancer or maybe renal failure.
“How was the chem final, Curt?”
“All right.”
“I just wondered if I could borrow your notes. I’ve got it tomorrow. ”
“I burned them with my trash this morning.”
“Oh. Hey, Jesus! Did Piggy go and do that?” He pointed at the remains of the Thinker.
“I guess so.”
“Why