The Temptations of St. Frank (32 page)

“Hey, I'm just trying to get home. Somebody took me here and left me.” The forlorn lilt of Frank's voice surprised him. He sounded as desperate as he felt.

The man's frown gradually relaxed and wide smile took its place. “Somebody took you for a
ride?
Well, how ‘bout dat!” He slapped the roof repeatedly, cracking up. “They done took you for a
ride
.” He squeezed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, laughing and hissing like a leaky radiator.

“They always take you white boys down here. Scarify y'all with all the big black niggers ready to kick yo' ass and slice you open like a watermelon.” He let out a howl and slapped the car roof again.

Frank just shrugged. What could he say? The man was right.

“Look, I'm just trying to get home. Which way is South Orange Avenue?”

The man nodded down the road in the direction Frank had been walking. “That way.”

“How far?”

“I dunno. ‘Bout a mile.”

“How much farther to Orange?”

“Orange?” The man made it sound as if Frank had said China. “
Long
way. Better start walking, son. Y'all don't wanna be in boogie town after dark. Bad shit happens down here.” He squeezed his nose and cracked up.

Frank didn't want to ask for help, but he had a feeling this might be his only chance to get any. “Can I ask you a favor?”

The man stopped laughing. “What?” He seemed to be offended.

“Can I borrow four cents? So I can take the bus. I only have twenty-one.” It killed Frank to admit that.

The man narrowed his eyes. “Twenty-one cents? You only got twenty-one cents? What kinda fool did yo' mamma raise?”

“All I'm asking—”

“Yo' mamma, yo' daddy, yo' granddaddy, yo' grandmamma—somebody who brought you up has to be responsible for creating a boy so dumb he gets himself taken for a ride to the ghetto with just twenty-one cents in his pocket.”

“All I'm asking for is four cents. I'll pay you back.”

“And when might that be? You gonna come all the way back down here to pay me my four pennies. Shit. I don't think so.”

“Come on. Gimme a break.”

“Let me tell you something, son. Nobody never gives nobody a break. Even when you think they're giving you one, they're not. They be wanting something from you in exchange, even if they don't say so. And it ain't never something you wanna give up.”

Frank immediately thought of the mess he'd made taking Annette to the prom.

“Shit,” the man said. “My girls got more damn sense than you do. They better or they get their asses whipped.”

Frank sighed. “It's just four cents. You can't spare four cents?”

“Nope.” The man shook his head. “I can spare it, but you can't have it.”

Frank looked down at the pavement where someone had drawn a sloppy hopscotch grid in blue chalk.

“Be a man,” the man said.

“What?”

“If you gots twenty-one cents, you gots a dime to call home. Ask your daddy to come pick you up. If I was him, I'd whip your ass for being so goddamn stupid. Teach you a lesson you won't never forget so you don't get yourself in this situation ever again.”

Frank had already considered calling home. But asking to be picked up would only make the shit storm he was going to have to face worse. His parents will definitely go ape shit when they find out what had happened at school that day. His mother will never forgive him for telling a priest off.

The man got back in his car and backed it off the sidewalk.

Frank went to the passenger window. “Do you think you could give me a ride?”

“No.”

“Just to South Orange Avenue?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“There's a pay phone on the next corner. Call home. You're
their
problem.” He threw the transmission into drive and tore off, the Eldorado's muffler leaving a throaty growl in its wake.

Frank watched the emerald-green pimpmobile disappear around the next corner as he fingered the change in his pocket. He didn't want the man to go.

It was after six when Frank finally got home. He'd gotten lost and walked all the way to Irvington before he'd realized he'd gone in the wrong direction. His feet were sore, and he was dead tired as he trudged up the incline of his driveway. He'd taken off his ruined jacket as soon as he got out of the ghetto when he didn't feel the need to look like a crazy person anymore, and it was balled up under his arm now. His father's truck was in the garage, but the car was gone, which meant he was probably out. He'd have to deal with his mother first, and he didn't want her to see the jacket, not right away. She'd freak out if she saw him wearing it, and he didn't want her to freak out any more than she had to because she was definitely going to have a major freakout when she found out about the masturbation-fornication assembly.

Frank climbed the brick steps to the porch, and as soon as he opened the front door, he could hear his father playing the piano in his room. That seemed odd—his mother out and his father at home. But maybe this was good, he thought. His father was crazy and irrational but usually not about parental things. That was his mother's freak-out zone. He was kind of a laissez-faire parent, more interested in being a pal than a father. When he wasn't being a full-blown nut job, of course.

Frank walked carefully up the squeaky stairs to his family's half of the house. He didn't want his grandmother to hear him because she'd probably want to feed him, and even though he was hungry, eating her food would be a bad idea. His mother always got pissed when he or his father ate whatever his grandmother made for dinner instead of what she made even though it was always better. It would be mondo stupido to give her something else to be pissed about. Not tonight.

Frank stopped in the middle of the staircase and listened to his father play. It was the same song he always played, the name of which his father said he couldn't remember anymore. It was flowery and romantic and overblown, like those old Neapolitan songs that Mario Lanza sang on TV. His father didn't play badly, considering that he didn't play very often. He was naturally musical, and he could pick up a tune on the piano by just listening to it, a skill that Frank envied. But usually he just fooled around on the piano, playing snippets of songs and never finishing a whole one, hitting high notes with his hand shaped like a pistol, the way Chico Marx did in the movies.

Frank lifted his foot to the next step, but his legs were made of lead. He didn't want to go any farther. But the words of the man in the pimpmoblile were in his head and had been for the past five hours: “Be a man.” It was a scary thought. What exactly was a “man?” A tough-talking pimp? A perpetually pissed off mob boss? Mr. Nunziato? Mr. Dalton? Mr. Pomeroy? Mr. Musso? His other teachers at St. A's? The Walrus King? Monsignor Fitzgerald, God forbid? They were all like puzzle pieces dumped on a coffee table. Not a clear picture, just pieces of a picture. Frank didn't know if he'd ever think of himself as a “man.” Did Greek gods think of themselves as gods? Did saints think of themselves as saints? Did the Beatles think of themselves as Beatles?

He forced himself to climb the rest of the stairs and trudged into the laundry room. He looked through the doorway into his room. His father was sitting at the gold-painted standup piano under the Moby Grape poster, playing away. His mother had spray-painted the old piano, keys and all, years ago in a fit of “sprucing up.” His father's hair was wet, and he was wearing nothing but a pair of black pants. He must have just taken a bath after he'd come home from work. He kept playing that song.

Frank tossed his blazer onto the ironing board before going into his room.

“Hi,” he said, thinking he already sounded guilty.

“Whoa!” His father's eyes shot open. “I didn't know you were there.” He was smiling brightly. The thing about his father was that no matter what he did, it was always 100 percent—100 percent happy or 100 percent pissed off. There was no middle ground with him.

“So how's it going?” he asked. “School okay?”

“Yeah, it's okay.” Frank plopped down on the bed and took off his shoes. He put his feet up. God, that felt good. He slid his tie out of his collar.

His father went back to playing, but it was a different tune. Frank recognized it. “Fascination.” His father was reading from an open music book, one of Frank's books from when he used to take guitar lessons
.

Frank closed his eyes. He could easily fall right to sleep.

“Hey,” his father said. “Why don't you play with me?”

“Huh?”

“You know this song. Play it with me.”

Frank was confused. They'd never played together before. Musically they lived on two different planets. Planet schmaltzy classical and planet rock'n'roll. Intergalactic explorers had yet to reach their respective domains.

“Come on, get your guitar.”

Frank looked at his big Vox amp wedged in the corner between the piano and his dresser, right next to where his father was sitting. “I don't know. It's hard to play soft with that amp.”

His father made a face. “Not the electric. Your other guitar. I never see you play that anymore.” He was talking about the blond acoustic Guild archtop that he had bought for Frank after he'd taken lessons for about a year. “Come on. You play the chords.”

Frank dragged himself off the bed and knelt on the floor, pulling out his electric guitar's gray pickle case so he could get to the acoustic's black case. It was covered in dust. Frank hadn't played it in a while. He opened the latches and lifted the lid. It smelled a little musty inside. He thought of his father's violin in the cellar and wondered if someday someone would find this guitar in the same state of neglect. It was a sad thought. This was a really nice guitar. It just wasn't electric.

Frank pulled it out and found a pick on the dresser. He went over to the piano and stood behind his father with his foot up on the bench. When he strummed the open strings, he winced. It was way out of tune.

“E, right?” his father said.

“Yeah.”

His father hit an E on the piano, and Frank tuned his low E string.

“A,” Frank said.

His father hit an A, and Frank tuned the A string.

They went through all the notes until Frank had the guitar tuned to the out-of-tune piano.

His father pointed to the first bar on the page. “Okay. I'll start off with this.” He played the first four rising notes. “Then you come in with the G chord.”

“Okay.”

His father started playing and Frank jumped in a little late, forgetting that this was in waltz time not 4/4 time. He stumbled on the next chord, Gmaj7, because he hadn't played it in a while. He couldn't remember ever seeing a major seventh chord in a rock song, and that's all he'd been playing since he stopped taking lessons. But it was an easy fingering—one finger on the second fret, first string—and he quickly got back on track.

They got into a groove, and Frank didn't stumble on the Am7 chord when it came around, which pleased him because he didn't play minor sevenths very often either. “Fascination” was kind of a corny song, but Frank had forgotten how much he liked it. He liked anything in waltz tempo. It was calming.

“Go through it again,” his father said as they came to the end.

They sounded better on the second go-round, more together, and his father improvised on the melody, adding trills and flourishes that weren't in the written music. Frank wished he knew how to do that.

When they got to the end, they went right back to the beginning without having to say anything. Despite the piano's less-than-perfect tuning, they sounded terrific. They sounded together. Frank and Dom had never sounded this good.

“You play the melody,” his father said when they came to the end again.

Frank played the written music, picking single notes and strumming single chords. He flubbed a lot of notes, but the next time around he was much better, his father couching his notes in subdued piano chords.

“Okay, go back to the chords,” his father said. This time around, he played louder with a lot of melodramatic feeling, sort of the way he played his other song. When they got to the end, he built up to a thundering crescendo, and they both knew it was time to stop. They each held the last chord so that it hung in the air for a while. They should do this more often, Frank thought.

His father lifted his fingers from the keys. “We got a call from your school today.”

Frank's jaw drooped. He'd forgotten about that while they were playing. Shit.

“That Mr. Whalley, the disciplinarian. He told us the whole story. Did you really jump out a window?”

Frank mumbled. “Yeah.”

“Like Errol Flynn?”

Frank shrugged. The jig was up. He was fucked.

But his father was laughing. “I didn't think you did stuff like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“You read, you listen to your records, you play guitar. You know what I mean?”

That I'm a candy-ass? Frank thought.

“And is it true, you really told that priest off? The monsignor?”

“Yeah… I guess.” Frank wasn't sure he wanted to explain everything. His father probably wouldn't understand.

“I can't believe you did that.” His father was still smiling, shaking his head as if he were proud.

“You're not mad?”

He stopped smiling. “Am I supposed to be? Grandpa took the call. He was up here fixing a leaky faucet for your mother. She was out shopping. She doesn't know anything about this yet. Grandpa told me what that guy Whalley said.”

Frank was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“You should have seen your grandfather. He was clapping his hands, doing a little dance.” His father whispered. “You know how he feels about the church.”