Rowing in Eden (14 page)

“I missed you,” Bob Prohaski murmured, then grinned at Roy Hobart in a way that made Franny feel uncomfortably on display.

Roy Hobart snorted. “Take a look at his right hand if you don't believe it.”

Franny backed out of the boy's embrace and took hold of the hand. A series of scrapes marked the knuckles, and the skin around the scrapes blushed with infection. “What happened?”

He squeezed her to him again, so tight it hurt. “Hit a wall,” he said with a surprised laugh.

“He hit a fucking wall!” Roy Hobart dropped onto his belly and began to softly pound the ground with his fists.

Franny tried to break free of Bob Prohaski's grip, asking in pained breathlessness, “But why would you hit a wall?”

“'Cause I missed you!” Bob Prohaski crowed.

Franny struggling to free herself, Bob holding her tight, the pair moved about the yard in a kind of bumbling dance. Behind the mulberry
tree, they went. Past the pump house, up onto the front steps and down again. A dance of resistance and restraint.

“Stop!” Franny pleaded. “My dad may be watching!”

A guffaw rose from deep in Bob Prohaski's chest.

“You might mention you were drunk when you hit that wall, Prohaski!” Roy Hobart called.

“I'm
stopping
, Bob,” Franny said, “
really.
” She leaned deep into his steamy embrace. “Stop!”

Panting happily, he stopped. Placed a damp kiss on her ear. From the house came the sound of piano music. “Cantabiles.” The piece that Franny should have been practicing for this afternoon's lesson.

“Who's in there?” Bob Prohaski asked.

“My
dad.
”

“Christ”—the boy gave a panting laugh—“that sucker does hate my guts!”

Franny shook her head. “Please, don't call him that.”

“What do you want him to call him? ‘Papa'?” Roy Hobart gave Franny a look of shrewd appraisal. Clearly, she disappointed him. She was not the girl he had expected. Bob Prohaski, on the other hand, looked at Franny with new interest, as if she were, perhaps, a pet that had just locked him out of the house; despite the inconvenience, the new trick tickled him, and he smiled, and wrapped her hair around his fist, and pulled her head back so that she had no choice but to look up into his eyes.

“That hurts, Bob!”

“You,” he murmured in her ear. “You—”

“More likely her papa hates your dick than your guts!” said Roy Hobart, and trumpeted on a blade of grass:
Plh! Plh! Plh!

For one moment, Bob Prohaski grinned at Roy Hobart, but then his face grew dour. “Watch your mouth!” He let go of Franny's hair and smoothed his hand down her neck. “Have a little respect, man. This is my girl, and I've been missing her.”

Plh! Plh!
Roy Hobart lowered his blade of grass. “That's why you got drunk, right?”

Franny turned from the boys. The wrong thing to do, she understood immediately. Bob Prohaski would take her turning away as the kind of concerned disapproval that boys expected girls to demonstrate over their antics; really, she just wanted to turn away, get her bearings.

“You mad, Franny?” Bob Prohaski whispered in her ear. From behind, he placed his hands on her waist. She felt like a pioneer woman when he did that. Strong and loving. As if he were the one for whom she waited. But she knew that if she turned around, looked at him, all of that would fade.

“Listen,” he whispered, “I'm going to get you a present. And you know what it is?”

It was good he could not see her face; that she could say, without looking at him, “You don't need to get me anything, Bob. Really. I don't want you spending money on me.”

“Money? No, this is great. I went into Hanson's with my brother to make a payment on his class ring, and they got these watches on chains.” He reached over her shoulder, made claws of his fingertips. “Right near the door, if you know what I mean.”

“No stealing! If you get caught, you'll end up in Eldora!”

“Rod got his girl one.” Bob Prohaski pulled Franny's arm behind her and twisted the wrist. “I'm going to get you one, too.”

Though she did not want to embarrass Bob Prohaski in front of his friend, it occurred to her that, if she had to, she could kick him in just the way he had told her you could kick a man when you needed to “massacre” him, fast, in a fight—which was perhaps the same way her mother meant you could kick a man if he put his hand in some private place.

“You're hurting me again!” she whispered. “Stop it!”

He did not stop, however, but went on in a rush, “What this watch does—it's a little acorn, see, and you can open up the top and tell what time it is.”

It hurt to break loose from him—the skin on her wrists burned—but then she was running, bounding barefoot across the lawn and around the house and down the concrete stairs to the
dock, where the boards bounced and sang beneath her feet.

The icy temperature of that spring-fed lake momentarily took away her breath, but the water quickly became skin, and her shorts and shirt became the wafting fins of a sea creature, and she swam away from shore.

“Franny!” Bob Prohaski called from the top of the stairs. “Get back here!”

Could she elude nonswimming Bob through the use of pools and lakes and rivers and ponds? She gave a panicky laugh, then choked on a bit of water, which brought her up short, and she turned to look back.

On the dock, Roy Hobart now bent over at the waist, unlacing his shoes.

“No!” she shouted. “I'm coming! Stay there!”

The thought of being in the same body of water as Roy Hobart alarmed her, and she thrashed her arms and legs in a mad effort to return to the shore as quickly as possible.

Bob Prohaski seated himself on the dock as she drew near, and she called to him, hoping to sound gay, “Fancy meeting you here, mister!”

“Jesus.” He pulled off his shoes. “You're a funny girl, Franny!”

She smiled, but did not feel funny or nice or even safe. Since the boys' arrival, the sky had gone beige and granular, like lard. Maybe it was going to rain. She treaded water there at the end of the dock. Parsnips, or some other vegetable grown underground, that was what Bob Prohaski's wan town boy's feet resembled as he dangled them over the edge of the dock. They made Franny pity the boy, and she tugged on his toes to make him laugh again before she hoisted herself from the water.

“Whoa, Franny!” said Roy Hobart.

“Franny.” Bob Prohaski grinned. Tried not to grin, dividing his glances between her and the now leering Roy Hobart. “Here—” He snagged a towel from the seat of the rowboat, and threw it her way. “Put that around you!” he barked, and though she did as he said,
she felt mortified and furious and started up the dock in silence.

They came after her, Bob Prohaski hissing at Roy Hobart to be quiet, just shut up, man, be cool.

Her father was loading a case of empty deposit bottles into the old Mercedes when Franny and the boys came around the side of the house to the driveway, and when he saw the girl, he let the case drop into the trunk with a thump.

“For God's sake! You're making a display of yourself!” he declared.

She flushed, then waved a vague hand toward the boys. “They're just leaving. I'm going in to do my practice.”

Brick slapped his hands together. Something about that slapping—the slow motion of it, and the way he, then, drew a finger up to the edge of his lip and pulled—let her know that he had been drinking while she was outside with the boys. She hoped the boys did not know. It had occurred to her recently that if people knew your father drank too much, you might be less safe in the world.

“Guess he ain't going to offer us a ride to town,” Roy Hobart murmured as Brick disappeared into the garage.

The boys began to work their way across the old baseball diamond, down into the ditch, and, then, up and out to the road. The size of the Nearys' bull, penned in its private triangle of pasture, must have intimidated them for they bent down and took up rocks from the shoulder of Lakeside Drive before sticking out their hitchhiking thumbs.

A green car whizzed past as they started to work their way, backward, down the road. Next: a gray station wagon, empty but for its male driver. Out this far, there were not so many opportunities for rides, and Franny shouted from the drive, “Put down those rocks! You guys look scary!”

Bob Prohaski cupped a hand by his ear.

“The rocks look scary!”

He shook his head—apparently he could not hear what she was saying, and he started toward her.

No! She pantomimed holding something in her hand, crouching, setting the thing down. At her back, Brick's shoes scuffed the drive. “What do they have the rocks for?” he asked.

She hesitated. Bob Prohaski stood in the ditch, holding up his rock-filled hands as if to say,
Now what?
To please her father, it seemed to Franny that all she needed to do was to laugh; to act as if the boys were silly, dismissible, hardly even real. And so she did, saying, “They're scared of the bull.”

Brick shook his head and he laughed, too, but then he did something that left Franny feeling both thankful and betrayed:

He raised a hitchhiker's thumb high in the air for Bob Prohaski to see. He mimicked holding on to a steering wheel, then pointed to himself and, then, to the spot just beyond the Poddigbattes Camp sign, where, sure enough, a minute later, he stopped the old Mercedes in order to give the boys a ride to town.

A
CCORDING TO
M
ARTIE
, F
RANNY WAS IN FOR A TREAT
. M
ARTIE
meant to take Franny somewhere special before driving her to piano lessons—
Hurry it up, I left the car running, we're wasting gas.

Franny sighed on her way to the piano to fetch her books. The truth of the matter: Special trips with Martie often ended in disaster, or at least unpleasantness. There had been numerous occasions in which, supposedly on an outing to the Dairy Queen, Franny found herself endlessly “scooping the loop” or, say, languishing on a pile of automobile tires while Martie visited a certain on-duty gas station attendant. “You should feel privileged Deedee and I let you in on this!” Martie said the time that Franny protested a series of trips back and forth past a rival's house in order to watch the comings and goings of a cinnamon-haired “Donny”—trips that finally did stop when the girl's furious father darted out from behind a tree and snapped off the Mercedes' radio antenna.

“So”—Franny settled herself in the convertible's front seat, piano books on her knees—“where we going?”

“It's a
surprise.
” Martie lowered her sunglasses into place, released a drag of smoke.

“Can I have a cigarette, too, please?”

“
May
I.” Martie handed the girl the pack from her purse. “And as you can see, it's my last one.”

“
May
I. If you stop at Karlins', I'll buy you more.”

“I don't approve. Nor do I approve of you wearing T-shirts anymore. You don't see me wearing T-shirts, do you?”

Franny looked down at the dry clothes into which she had just changed. “I'm not
wearing
a T-shirt.”

Martie frowned. “What?”

“I'm not
wearing
a T-shirt!” Franny hated conversations in the car with the top down, having to raise her voice so everything felt like an argument. “Did
you
tell Mom to get rid of my T-shirts?”

“We discussed it.”

“Sometimes, Martie, you're nuts. I swear to God.”

Martie smiled at the road ahead. “And you, my dear, are rude, crude—and
skewed.
” She leaned forward to turn up the radio. KIOA. From Des Moines. The crackle and hiss were hardly bearable. It had been the ROTC member who had assured Martie—and Franny, too—that KIOA was far superior to the Pynch station, and, even now, Franny felt a little disloyal when, lying in bed at night, she tipped her clock radio this way and that in an attempt to bring in the more famous stations in Chicago, Oklahoma City, Little Rock.

“Horses.” Martie pointed her cigarette toward a pair of bays that stood in the dense shade of an old oak that grew close by the road.

“Pretty,” Franny said.

Martie gave her cigarette a practiced flick out the window. “You've never been around first-rate horses, have you? There's a girl at school—her father's Scotsman Potato Chips—and he bought her a prize Arabian. He sends a trailer back and forth whenever she likes—the way you do if you're a serious horse owner.
I'm
the sort of person who should have a horse like that. I mean, that girl's won awards, but I'm sure I could have, too. If I'd had her horse, and a chance to compete and all. I mean, I love horses more than anybody loves horses, right?”

Franny scrutinized the passing fences, the trees. She refused to do it, to declare,
Yes, Martie, you love horses more than anybody.

“When Dad got rid of my horse—not that it was a great horse—he said I didn't ride enough!” Martie laughed harshly. “How was I supposed to ride if nobody drove me to the stables?”

On their left, a large basswood had been split in two by a recent storm and, for just a moment, Franny thought of reminding Martie
of the time, years ago, that a tree in the vacant lot near their house on Ash Street had been hit in that same way. A group of neighborhood kids—big and small—had spent an entire gray-green misty Saturday puttering around that tree, popping up out of its still leafy branches, sucking on green wood. It had been Martie who introduced Franny and the others to the delicate sweetness to be found in the green wood beneath the bark.

From past experience, however, Franny knew that if she were to mention that day, now, it was unlikely that Martie would remember Franny's presence at the scene at all; instead, Martie would remember only that a boy named Eddie Graham had happened by, and invited Martie on a hayride.

An invitation which, of course, Franny remembered, too.

As if she did not live just her own life, no, she lived her sisters' lives as well.

With a swing of the wheel, Martie turned the Wildcat into the tiny lot in front of Karlins' Grocery, pulled past the pair of antiquated gas pumps, and parked.

“
I'll
go in,” Martie said. “You're underage.”

Franny settled back in the convertible. Stared out at the dusty lilac bushes that grew between Karlins' and the now dilapidated former home of her old Sunday school friend Kimmy Estep. Franny had slept in that house once, her first overnight ever, an occasion fraught with strangeness. Mr. Estep had joined the girls at Crazy Eights while Mrs. Estep settled herself on the couch with the baby. The Esteps seemed entertained, but Franny found herself overwhelmed by the idea of a father playing a child's card game with his daughter and his daughter's friend. She felt nervous. Mr. Estep sat in an easy chair while the girls sat on the floor, and each time that he leaned forward to pick up cards from the hassock they used for a card table, the floor lamp turned his bald head into a glowing bulb that looked as if it might melt or explode with its own heat. Franny had never before given a thought to Mr. Estep's appearance, but that night she grasped at straws. She decided Mr. Estep's baldness—or some other terrible vulnerability,
some form of retardation—had made him and his wife outcasts who had nothing to do on a weekend night but stay home with their children—

“‘How's Roz?'” Martie said as she got back into the car, slamming the door shut.

“What?”

“‘How's Roz
?
' I see Al Castor in there, and that's about the first thing he says to me! Anyway”—looking quite keen now, Martie pulled out of the lot and back onto Lakeside—“you want to know where we're going? To a rehearsal of The Craft.”

In order to conceal her interest in what Martie had said, Franny busied herself with lining up the books in her lap (the roughly covered Schaum from which it seemed she would never graduate; the slick
More Etudes
). She stared straight ahead at the causeway. A rehearsal of The Craft. Martie should have warned her. At least Franny could have combed her hair, then.

“You can't tell anyone because it's at a
house.
Which is why I'm taking you. It wouldn't look good if I went alone.”

Franny squinted past the silver sheets of swamp water, as if it were important to hold on to a view of Mother Goose Miniature Golf's plywood Miss Muffett and her dangling spider—both of them now disappearing into the cloud of pesticides with which a masked figure fogged the course's perimeter.

“Well?” Martie cast a sharp glance Franny's way. “What do you say? It's a privilege, you know.”

It would have been nice to be able to show Martie pleasure, but Martie might well decide Franny was too enthusiastic, and then blow up at Franny, and not let her go to the rehearsal at all, and so Franny said only a quiet “Thanks.”

“‘
Thanks
'? Jeez, they're only being courted by Columbia Records, Franny!”

Franny nodded. Would Richie Craft mention Franny's taking the bourbon from the liquor cabinet? “Martie.” Franny pointed ahead to the three-legged setter, now dashing out from the trailer court and toward the road. “There's that dog.”

“Any-
way
,” Martie said, when they were safely past the setter, and it headed toward what Franny assumed was its home, a pink trailer whose artificial geraniums were forever toppling out of their pink window boxes.

Woolf Beach. Then the water tower. As they passed the chain-link fence surrounding the swimming pool of Stanford Fanning Fellow College, Martie stubbed out her cigarette and said, with a shake of her head, “Did you hear Mom and Dad actually suggested I take a summer school course at SFF? In typing, no less!”

“Weird,” Franny said. “Well, you know they're weird.”

In town, the trees grew thicker, and arched over the street, and Franny tilted her head back to stare up at that shuffle of milky sky and green, green, green, but the canopy thinned when Martie turned onto Lincoln Way. The sky opened and Franny straightened in her seat, and looked about herself. She had a vague memory of this area as cornfields, then a clearer memory of days when the gallows of framing stood up against the cerulean sky of a long gone autumn.

The house before which Martie brought the Wildcat to a stop was a ranch-style. White shutters with a purely decorative function. The overgrown yard in front and around the sides of the place was a wild patch amidst the neighborhood's trim green lawns. According to Martie—now putting her sunglasses in their case, and the case in her purse; making an effort to appear very businesslike and grown up, Franny thought—according to Martie, Richie Craft's parents had moved to Arizona the summer before, but had kept the Pynch Lake house so that Richie could finish his last year of high school with his band. “Isn't that cool?” she asked Franny. “That kind of support for your kid?”

“Turn On Your Love Light” was the song the band played. The bass thumped in Franny's chest as she and Martie approached the home's ivied entry. Franny could not help grinning—just the way she grinned when the drums in a parade passed by—but when Martie saw that grin, she flared her nostrils at the girl.

“You sure you can behave yourself?”

Franny resisted the urge to scoff. She stared at a tendril of ivy that had worked its way under the brass street numbers—630—affixed to the entry wall.

“Remember who you are, where you are, what you are,” Martie murmured. “We sit quiet. We listen to the music. If anything seems inappropriate—if anybody offers us a drink or anything—we get up and go. Immediately.”

Franny pointed to a tiny plastic box lit up by a tiny lightbulb: the doorbell button. Martie shook her head. “He said just to come in.”

The front hall of The Craft house was dark but it was possible to see the grimy path that cut through the celery green carpet and the gouges in the wallpaper.

Wide-eyed, Martie brought her mouth close to Franny's ear to say, “Would Mom and Dad kill us if we did something like this to a house of theirs, or what?”

It was not far from the front door to the wide portal that opened on what had clearly been the family's living room. Now the room contained nothing but the band members and their musical instruments and beat-up boxes and trunks and cords and electric fans that stirred the heavy white drapes that hung, closed, at the windows. On the carpet, her back against the living room wall, sat Richie Craft's beautiful girlfriend, the caramel-corn girl from Stacey's Sweets. In her lap lay a yellow cat. A perfect picture, but the girl quickly disturbed it by jumping to her feet and striding past Franny and Martie in a huff.

Franny tried not to gawk, but weren't those baby-doll pajamas she wore? In the middle of the afternoon?

Also: Did a person look at the hands of band members while they played their instruments? Did she portion out her glances: a glance at the drummer, then the boy guitarist, the piano player, the trumpeter, then Richie?

At the break, Richie Craft mumbled an apology for the behavior of his girlfriend. He tucked a slice of his dark and shiny hair behind his ear, then pulled it out again. “She's just in one of her moods.”

Martie nodded agreeably. “That's okay. Oh, and this is my little sister, Richie.”

“I remember,” Richie said with a smile, “sure.” Then, so he and Martie would not find her in the way, Franny knelt to pet the fat gold cat now rubbing up against her legs.

The Craft's possible contract with Columbia was the topic of Martie and Richie's discussion. And The Craft's manager, Tony Zanios, brother to Mike Zanios. Was Tony any good, and how was Richie supposed to know? Maybe he stunk. What'd Martie think of the horns they'd added? Were horns good?

Martie began to talk about the days when Richie Craft had played with a group called The Countrymen. “‘Scotch and Soda,'” Martie said. “I loved that!”

“And ‘Green Fields,'” said Franny. “You guys came to a chili supper at my grade school and you played ‘Green Fields.'”

“Hey, Phil,” Richie Craft called to a prematurely balding young man just then fiddling with a portable organ in the corner, “this one liked our ‘Green Fields.'”

Phil smiled at Franny and nodded, then asked Martie if there might be a party out at the house that weekend, he'd heard there had been some good parties. Martie said, yeah, there had been, but they were taking a little break from parties just now, and then Richie turned to talk to a boy at work on an amplifier, and Franny slipped off to find a bathroom, and maybe a comb—

How odd that house felt! Every curtain had been drawn against the day, and the strained light that came through the white cloth reminded Franny of the nursing homes to which she and her seventh-grade Y-Teens group had gone caroling at the holidays. Two thin slabs of the kitchen counters' olive Formica were missing, which gave the counters the look of an incomplete puzzle. The oven door lay on the table in the breakfast nook. Still, the sink was not piled with dirty dishes. Trash did not spill out of bags. It could have been worse.