The Heat of the Sun

as his popularity grew. Le Vol professed himself disgusted with Trouble, and I agreed. Springs would judder as Le Vol, in the cubicle next to mine, shifted
restlessly on his cot, struggling to read Mr Wells or Mr Adams as Sophie Tucker boomed out. One night he strode to Trouble’s cubicle and shouted, halfway through ‘Nobody Loves a Fat
Girl, But Oh How a Fat Girl Can Love’, that Senator B. F. Pinkerton (Democrat, New York) was a capitalist lackey, a criminal, and a liar.
    Acolytes clustered in Trouble’s cubicle: crushed together on the trunk or cross-legged on the floor. I pictured them – the Townsend twins, Earl Pritchard, Ralph Rex, Jr –
twisting their necks towards their idol in unison as he clapped his hands, whooped, and declared that Le Vol had to be his friend: ‘You hate the senator? Marvellous! But so do I.’
    Defeated, Le Vol stalked away.
    ‘What I don’t get,’ he said to me later, ‘is the Scranway angle.’
    ‘What angle?’ I said.
    ‘On Trouble.’
    Le Vol often brought up Trouble: I never did. We hunched, bored, across a library table, hearing cries from the playing fields. The sky outside glimmered like steel. There could be no prospect
of Nirvana, even had we been willing to go there again. Something, it seemed, had ended for us, or had never really begun.
    ‘Scranway hasn’t done a thing,’ Le Vol went on. ‘It’s odd. Trouble’s a prime candidate for Pussy in the Well.’
    ‘Somehow,’ I said, ‘I can’t see it. He’s no Billy Billicay.’
    ‘Don’t believe it. Scranway’s biding his time.’
    Those last weeks of that fall term were Trouble’s season, his time of greatness. The trick with eccentricity is to carry it off with brusque elan, as if unaware of it as
eccentricity at all. Trouble was the type who, in his admirable self-absorption, his superlative egotism, simply acted as he wished to act, and found that weaker types fell in with him avidly.
    No doubt his father had shown him the way. Curious, I studied the papers in the library, searching for news of the great man. I found it frequently. Week after week, Senator B. F. Pinkerton
(Democrat, New York) fulminated on the floor of the Senate, urging America to join the war in Europe. His reasons interested me little; what intrigued me was the respect, the awe in which the world
appeared to hold him. A large, florid man with a stern centre parting, pince-nez and a carefully cultivated moustache, he resembled his son only in his look of formidable self-possession. He
pictured himself, I imagined, as a statesman in the Roman mould – not as the bluff, blustering walrus in a starched collar that I saw.
    Likewise, B. F. Pinkerton II never acknowledged what was, to others, his defining characteristic: his size. He was uncommonly small. Perhaps that was why he had made himself into an athlete of
formidable prowess. Often he was seen going to and from the gym, a pair of boxing gloves dangling from his neck. Strange to think of him slamming at a punching bag, even swinging a fist at a heavy
opponent!
    From a window in the library, I could see the tennis courts, crisscrossed through a mesh of wiry fences. Once I watched as Trouble slammed through set after set with a willowy fellow from Iowa
called ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins. When Trouble served, he propelled the ball across the net with a force that suggested it was an enemy to be vanquished; when Hoppy sent a shot back high, Trouble
leaped explosively and his shirt rode up, exposing the hollow of his barely fleshed belly, the hard downward arch of his ribs.
    Picture Trouble at an impromptu game of baseball: hunched forward, feet shifting, bat prodding the air behind his shoulders, tongue stuck in a corner of his mouth in a parody of concentration.
When Earl Pritchard rockets the ball towards him, Trouble strikes at it like an uncommonly graceful lumberjack, connects with an explosive crack, and pelts from base to base as if he is flying.
Always, when I think of Trouble in those days, it is of a little man in motion: clattering downstairs, no hand on the banister; darting across the quadrangle, hailing an acolyte; on the lawns,
running against the wind on a windy day.
    Trouble’s greatness came to a head on the night before we left for Christmas vacation. We had stayed up late in McManus II, freed already from the constraints of term.
Fellows played cards, wrestled, roared with laughter. Some sang dirty songs. Some smoked. Some took turns on the landing,