“Hold it right there. There’s never been any proof that a fetus is a living human being. You weren’t going to kill a person, just the thought of one. Technically, everytime anyone masturbates they’re killing possible life and—wait a second, did you say marry her?”

I was getting a headache.

“You’d actually marry her?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

“Holy cripes,” Irving said, “I never knew anyone who got married before.”

The next afternoon Irving and I hitched to the Connecticut Yankee. I thought it would feel good to go there again but it was depressing as hell. Joan was on a roll. As soon as her son Billy went into the kitchen, she came over to our table and in a conspiratorial voice said, “I think he might be a fag.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Billy. I think he might be a fag.”

I was horrified for Billy but had to ask, “Why do you say that?”

“Well what do you think when two men take a shower together and lock the door?”

Irving and I looked at each other and then back at Joan.

“Well it’s not conclusive,” Irving said, sympathetically.

On the way home, I said, “Can you imagine poor Billy putting up with that shit his whole life? No wonder he’s a homo.”

“Yes,” Irving said. “That may have contributed to it.”

“I’m surprised he doesn’t just take off.”

“I’m not really.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Irving said, “I suppose he probably loves her. Sometimes you have no control over who you love, Dunph.”

It was Saturday, May 17, three weeks to the day before graduation. At 8:30 that night Jack Rafferty sent word for Wheeler, Irving, Candle, and me to meet him in his room in fifteen minutes. Strange, but what the hell. When we were assembled, Jack unveiled three quarts of Bacardi, two dozen cans of coke, a few limes, and several bags of ice.

When we started boozing, we were hardly speaking and when anyone did speak it was a whisper. Everyone except Jack was on probation so we were forced to use extreme caution. At 10 o’clock someone got hold of a deck of cards and we began playing fifty-cent games of poker. At 10:15 the radio was flipped on, but the volume was kept very low. Jack started to turn it up, but Irving said, “Hey, take it easy, Jack. Just because you’re not on pro.”

By 1:30 in the morning the radio was on full blast; everyone was smoking butts; a bowl of hash was making its twentieth lap around the room; Wheeler, Creature, and Jack were swearing on their mothers’ souls that they’d anted; and two empty rum bottles were lying in pieces on the pavement below the dorm.