The Hotel New Hampshire (17 page)

Then I realized what was wrong about the soccer goal: the net was gone. End of the season? I thought. But no, if there was one week more of football, surely there was a week more of soccer, too. And I recalled in past years how the nets would stay on the goals until the first snow, as if it took the first storm to remind the maintenance crew what they had forgotten. The nets in the goals held the drifted snow—like spider webs so dense that they trap dust.

“The net’s gone—off the goal,” I said to Franny.

“Big deal,” she said, and we veered into the woods. Even in the dark, Franny and I could find the shortcut, the path the football players always used—and everyone else, because of them, stayed off it.

A Halloween prank? I thought. Stealing a net to a soccer goal ... and then, of course, Franny and I ran right into it. Suddenly the net was over us, and under us, and there were two other people trapped like us: a Dairy School freshman named Firestone, his face as round as a tire and as soft as a kind of cheese, and a small trick-or-treater from town. The trick-or-treater was wearing a gorilla suit, though he was closer, in size, to a spider monkey. His gorilla mask was backwards on his head, so that when you saw the back of his head you saw a monkey, and when you saw his screaming face you saw him for the frightened little boy he was.

It was a jungle trap, and the monkey thrashed in it wildly. Firestone tried to lie down, but the net kept jiggling him out of position—he collided with me and said, “Sorry”; then he collided with Franny and said, “God, awfully sorry.” Every time I tried to get back on my feet, the net would jerk my feet out from under me, or the net over my head would jerk my head back and I’d fall. Franny crouched on all fours, keeping her balance. Inside the net with us was a large brown paper bag, spewing forth the Halloween hoardings of the child in the gorilla suit—candy corn and sticky balls of coagulated popcorn, breaking apart under us, and lollipops with their crinkly cellophane wrappers. The child in the gorilla suit was screaming in that breathless, hysterical way, as if he were about to choke, and Franny got her arms around him and tried to calm him down. “It’s all right, it’s just a dirty trick,” she said to him. “They’ll let us go.”

“Giant spiders!” cried the child, slapping himself all over and twitching in Franny’s grasp.

“No, no,” Franny said. “No spiders. They’re just
people
.”

But I thought I knew
what
people they were; I would have preferred the spiders.

“Got
four
of them!” said someone—a voice with a locker-room familiarity to it. “Got fucking four of them at once!”

“Got a little one and three big ones,” said another familiar voice, a ballcarrier’s voice or a blocking back’s voice—it was hard to tell.

Flashlights, like the blinking eyes of rather mechanical spiders in the night, looked us over.

“Well, look who’s here,” said the voice in command, said the quarterback called Chipper Dove.

“Got pretty little feet,” said Harold Swallow.

“Got beautiful skin,” said Chester Pulaski.

“She has a nice smile, too,” said Lenny Metz.

“And the best ass in the whole school,” said Chipper Dove. Franny rested on her knees.

“Howard Tuck had a heart attack!” I told them all. “We’ve got to get an ambulance!”

“Let the fucking monkey go,” said Chip Dove. The net shifted. The thin black arm of Harold Swallow snatched the kid in the gorilla suit out of the spider’s web and released him into the night. “Trick or treat!” said Harold, and the little gorilla was gone.

“Is that you, Firestone?” Dove asked, and the flashlight shone on the bland boy named Firestone, who looked as if he were trying to fall asleep at the bottom of the net, his knees drawn fetus-tight up to his chest, his eyes closed, his hand over his mouth.

“You fag, Firestone,” said Lenny Metz. “What are you doing?”

“He’s suckin’ his thumb,” said Harold Swallow.

“Let him go,” the quarterback said, and Chester Pulaski’s painful complexion blossomed, momentarily, in the flashlight; he dragged the dormant Firestone from the net. After a slight pounding sound, of flesh on flesh, we heard the awakened Firestone trot away.

“Now look who’s left,” said Chipper Dove.

“A man had a heart attack,” Franny said. “We really
are
going to the infirmary for the ambulance.”

“You’re not going there now,” said Dove. “Hey, kid,” he said to me, holding a flashlight on my face. “You know what I want you to do, kid?”

“No,” I said. And someone kicked me through the net.

“What I want you to do, kid,” Chipper Dove said, “is stay right here, in our giant spider web, until one of the spiders tells you you can go. You understand?”

“No,” I said, and someone kicked me again, a little harder.

“Be smart,” Franny said to me.

“That’s right,” said Lenny Metz. “Be smart.”

“And you know what I want
you
to do, Franny?” said Chipper Dove, but Franny didn’t respond. “I want you to show me that place, again,” he said. “That place where we can be alone. Remember?”

I tried to crawl closer to Franny, but someone was tightening the net around me.

“She stays with me!” I yelled. “Franny stays with me.”

I was down on my hip, then, with the net growing tighter and someone was kneeling on my back.

“Leave him alone,” Franny said. “I’ll show you the place.”

“Just stay here and don’t move, Franny,” I said, but she let Lenny Metz pull her from under the net. “Remember what you said, Franny!” I cried to her. “Remember—about the first time?”

“It probably isn’t true,” she said, dully. “It probably isn’t anything.”

Then she must have made a break for it, because I heard a scuffle in the dark, and Lenny Metz cried out, “
Nuff
! Son of a bitch, you bitch!” And there was that familiar sound of pounding—flesh on flesh again—and I heard Franny say, “All right! All right! You bastard.”

“Lenny and Chester are going to
help
you show me the place, Franny,” Chipper Dove said. “Okay?”

“You turd in a birdbath,” Franny said. “You rat’s asshole,” she said, but I heard flesh on flesh again, and Franny said, “Okay! Okay.”

It was Harold Swallow who was kneeling on my back. If the net hadn’t been all tangled around me, I might have been a match for him, but I couldn’t move.

“We’ll be back for you, Harold!” Chipper Dove called.

“Hang in there, Harold!” said Chester Pulaski.

“You’ll get your turn, Harold!” said Lenny Metz, and they all laughed.

“I don’t want no turn,” said Harold Swallow. “I don’t want no trouble,” he said. But they were gone, Franny occasionally cursing—but farther and farther away from me.

“You’re going to
get
in trouble, Harold,” I said. “You
know
what they’re going to do to her.”

“I don’t want to know,” he said. “I don’t get in no trouble. I come to this shit-ass school to get
outa
trouble.”

“Well, you’re in trouble now, Harold,” I said. “They’re going to
rape
her, Harold.”

“That happens,” said Harold Swallow. “But not to me.” I struggled briefly under the net, but it was easy for him to keep me pinned down. “I don’t like to fight, either,” he said.

“They think you’re a crazy nigger,” I told him. “That’s what they think you are. That’s why they’re with her and you’re here, Harold. But it’s the same trouble,” I told him. “You’re in the same trouble they’re in.”

“They never get in no trouble,” Harold said. “Nobody ever tells.”

“Franny will tell,” I said, but I felt the candy corn pressed against my face, and into the damp ground. It was another Halloween to remember, for sure, and I felt as weak and small as I’d ever felt—on every Dairy Halloween I could recall, scared to death by bigger, always
bigger
kids, stuffing my head in my trick-or-treat bag and rattling it until all I heard was cellophane, and then the bag bursting around my ears.

“What did they look like?” Father would always ask us.

But every year they looked like ghosts, gorillas, skeletons, and worse, of course; it was a night for disguises, and nobody ever was caught. Not for tying Frank to the fire escape of the biggest dorm, where he wet his pants; no one ever caught anyone for that. Not for the three pounds of cold, wet pasta someone threw on Franny and me, crying, “Live eels! Run for your lives!” And we lay writhing on the dark sidewalk, the spaghetti sticking to us, beating each other and screaming.

“They’re going to
rape
my sister, Harold!” I said. “You got to help her.”

“I can’t help nobody,” Harold said.

“
Somebody
can help,” I said. “We could run and get somebody. I know you can
run
, Harold.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But who’s going to help you with
those
guys?”

Not Howard Tuck, I knew, and by the sound of sirens, which I heard now—from the campus and the town—I guessed that Father had figured out the police car enough to use its radio for help. So there would be no authorities available to help Franny, anyway. I started to cry, and Harold Swallow shifted his weight on my shoulder.

It was quiet for a second, between the deep breaths the sirens take, and we heard Franny. Flesh on flesh, I thought—but it was different now. Franny made a sound that moved Harold Swallow to remember who
might
help her.

“Junior Jones could handle those guys,” Harold said. “Junior Jones don’t take no shit from
nobody
.”

“Yes!” I said. “And he’s your friend, isn’t he? He likes you better than them, doesn’t he?”

“He don’t like
nobody
,” said Harold Swallow, admiringly; but suddenly his weight was off me, and he was pawing at the net, unwinding it from around me. “Get up off your ass,” he said. “Junior
does
like somebody.”

“Who’s he like?” I asked.

“He likes everybody’s sister,” said Harold Swallow, but this thought did not reassure me.

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“Get up on your feet!” said Harold Swallow. “Junior Jones likes everybody’s sister—he told me so, man. He said, ‘Everybody’s sister is a good girl’—and that’s just what he said.”

“But what’s he
mean
?” I said, trying to keep up with him now, because he was the
fastest
organization of human flesh at the Dairy School. As Coach Bob said, Harold Swallow could fly.

We ran toward the light at the end of the footpath; we ran past where I knew I’d last heard from Franny—where the ferns were, where Iowa Bob’s backfield was taking turns. I stopped there; I wanted to run into the woods there, and find her, but Harold Swallow pulled me along.

“You can’t do nothing to those guys, man,” he said. “We got to get Junior.”

Why Junior Jones would help us, I didn’t know. I only thought that I would die before I found out trying to keep up with Harold Swallow—and I thought that if Jones—indeed liked “everybody’s sister,” as he apparently claimed, that didn’t necessarily mean good news for Franny.

“
How
does he like everybody’s sister?” I panted to Harold Swallow.

“He likes them like he likes his
own
sister,” Harold Swallow said. “Man!” he said to me. “Why are you so
slow
? Junior Jones has got a sister
himself
, man,” Harold said. “And some dudes raped her. Shit,” he said. “I thought everybody knew that!”

“There’s a lot you miss, not living in the dorms,” Frank was always saying.

“Did they catch them?” I asked Harold Swallow. “Did they catch the guys who raped Junior’s sister?”

“Shit,” said Harold Swallow. “
Junior
caught them! I thought everybody knew that.”

“What’d he do to them?” I asked Harold Swallow, but Harold had beaten me to Junior Jones’s dorm. He was flying up the stairwell and I was easily a full flight of stairs behind him.

“Don’t ask!” Harold Swallow yelled down to me. “Shit,” he said. “Nobody knows what he did to them, man. And nobody asks.”

Where the hell does Junior Jones
live
? I wondered, passing the third floor and climbing higher, my lungs breaking, Harold Swallow nowhere in sight. But Harold was waiting for me at the landing of the fifth and topmost floor.

Junior Jones lives in the
sky
, I thought, but Harold explained to me that most of the black athletes at the Dairy School were quartered on the top floor of this one dorm. “Where we’re out of sight, you know?” Harold asked me. “Like fucking birdies in the nests in the tippy-tops of the trees, man,” said Harold Swallow. “That’s where the black people get put at this shit-ass school.”

The fifth floor of the dorm was dark and hot. “Heat rises, don’t you know?” said Harold Swallow. “Welcome to the fuckin’ jungle.”

Every light in every room was out, but
music
was playing and escaping from under the doors; the fifth floor of that dorm was like a tiny street of nightclubs and bars in a city observing blackout conditions; and from the rooms I heard the unmistakable shuffling of feet—dancing and dancing in the dark.

Harold Swallow pounded on a door.

“What you want?” said the terrifying voice of Junior Jones. “You want to die?”

“Junior, Junior!” said Harold Swallow, pounding harder.

“You
do
want to die, don’t you?” said Junior Jones, and we heard a series of locks, as if from a jail cell, unlocking the door from inside.

“If some mother wants to die,” said Junior Jones, “
I’ll
help him.” More locks unlocked; Harold Swallow and I stepped back from the door. “Which one of you wants to die first?” said Junior Jones. Heat and a saxophone throbbed from his room; he was backlit by a candle burning on his desk, which was draped—like the coffin of a President—with the American flag.

“We need your help, Junior,” said Harold Swallow.

“You sure do,” said Junior Jones.

“They’ve got my sister,” I said to him. “They’ve got Franny,” I said. “And they’re raping her.”