Skeleton Crew

"Yes," Garrish said. "It was tough." Now his eyes pulled in the Beaver. He was rubbing a hand across the pimples on his forehead and sweating under his eyes. He was wearing sandals and a 69 T-shirt with a button on the front that said Howdy Doody was a pervert. The Beaver's huge buck teeth loomed in the gloom.

"I was gonna drop it in January," the Beaver said. "I kept telling myself to do it while there was still time.

And then add-drop was over and it was either go for it or pick up an incomplete. I think I flunked it, Curt. Honest to God." The housemother stood in the corner by the mailboxes. She was an extremely tall woman who looked vaguely like Rudolph Valentine. She was trying to push a slip strap back under the sweaty armhole of her dress with one hand while she tacked up a dorm sign-out sheet with the other.

"Tough," Garrish repeated.

"I wanted to bag a few off you but I didn't dare, honest to God, that guy's got eyes like an eagle. You think you got your A all right?"

"I guess maybe I flunked," Garrish said.

The Beaver gaped. "You think you flunked? You think you—"

"I'm going to take a shower, okay?"

"Yeah, sure, Curt. Sure. Was that your last test?"

"Yes," Garrish said. "That was my last test." Garrish crossed the lobby and pushed through the doors and began to climb. The stairwell smelled like an athletic supporter. Same old stairs. His room was on the fifth floor.

Quinn and that other idiot from three, the one with the hairy legs, piled by him, tossing a softball back and forth. A little fella wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a valiantly struggling goatee passed him between four and five, holding a calculus book to his chest like a 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. RoHins's palm was dry, the skin grainy.

Snaking 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.