by John Irving
They were all there, standing around me, and I thought that if a bomb were to be dropped on one spot in the shower room, Coach Bob's winning season would be over. Athletically, at least, I was the only one who wouldn't have been missed. I was simply not in the same category with Iowa Bob's imported backfield, or with the giant lineman Junior Jones; there were other linemen, of course, but Junior Jones was the main reason Chipper Dove never even fell down. He was the main reason there was always a hole for Chester Pulaski to lead Lenny Metz through; Jones made a hole big enough for them to run through side by side.
'Come on, Junior, think,' Chip Dove said, dangerously -- because the tone of mockery in his voice implied his doubt that Junior Jones could think. 'What is it you like about Franny Berry?' Dove asked.
'She's got nice little feet,' said Harold Swallow. Everyone stared at him, but he just pranced around under the falling water, not looking at anybody.
'She's got beautiful skin,' said Chester Pulaski, helplessly drawing even more attention to his boils.
'Junior!' Chip Dove said, and Junior Jones shut off his shower. He stood and dripped for a while. He made me feel as if I were Egg, years ago, still learning to walk.
'She's just another white girl, to me,' Junior Jones said, and his look paused a second on each of us before moving on. 'But she seems like a good girl,' he added, to me. Then he turned my shower back on and shoved me under it -- it was too cold -- and he walked out of the shower room, leaving a draught.
I was impressed that even Chipper Dove would go only so far with him, but I was more impressed that Franny was in trouble -- and still more impressed that I was helpless to do anything about it.
'That scum Chipper Dove talks about your ass, your tits, even your feet' I told her. 'You watch out for him.'
'My feet?' Franny said. 'What's he say about my feet?'
'All right,' I said. That was Harold Swallow.' Everyone knew Harold Swallow was crazy; in those days, when someone was as crazy as Harold Swallow, we said he was as crazy as a waltzing mouse.
'What did Chip Dove say about me?' Franny asked. 'I just care about him.'
'Your ass is all he cares about,' I told her. 'And he talks about it to everyone.'
'I don't care,' she said. 'I'm not that interested.'
'Well, he's interested,' I said. 'Just stick with Struthers.'
'Oh, kid, let me tell you,' she sighed. 'Struthers is sweet, but he is boring, boring, boring.'
I hung my head. We were in the upstairs hall of what was now only a rented house, although it still felt like the Bates family house to us. Franny rarely came into my room anymore. We did our homework in our own rooms and met outside the bathroom to talk. Frank didn't even seem to use the bathroom. Every day, now, in the hall outside our rooms, Mother would stack up more cartons and trunks; we were getting ready to move to the Hotel New Hampshire.
'And I don't see why you have to be a cheerleader, Franny,' I said. 'I mean, you, of all people -- a cheerleader.'
'Because I like it,' she said.
In fact, it was after a cheerleading practice that I met Franny, not far from our place in the ferns we didn't see so much of -- now that we were students at the school -when we encountered Iowa Bob's backfield. They had accosted someone on the path through the woods that was the shortcut back to the gym; they were working someone over in the large mud puddle that was drilled with football cleats -- holes like machine-gun fire in the mud. When Franny and I saw who they were -- the boys in the backfield -- and that they were beating up on someone, we started to run the other way. That backfield was always beating up on someone. But we hadn't run more than twenty-five yards before Franny caught my arm and stopped me. 'I think it was Frank,' she said. 'They've got Frank.'
So of course we had to go back. For just a second, before we could actually see what was going on, I felt very brave; I felt Franny take my hand and I gave her a strong squeeze. Her cheerleading skirt was so short that the back of my hand brushed her thigh. Then she pulled her hand out of mine and screamed. I was in my track shorts and I felt my legs turn cold.
Frank was wearing his band uniform. They had stripped the shit-brown pants (with the death-grey stripe down the leg) clean off him. Frank's underwear was yanked down to his ankles. The jacket of his band uniform had been tugged up to the middle of his chest; one silver epaulette floated free in the mud puddle, alongside Frank's face, and his silver cap with the brown braid -- almost indistinguishable from the mud itself -- was squashed under Harold Swallow's knee. Harold held on to one of Frank's arms, fully extended; Lenny Metz stretched Frank's other arm. Frank lay belly down with his balls in the heart of the mud puddle, his astonishing bare ass rising up out of the water and submerging again, as Chipper Dove pushed it down with his foot, then let it up, then pushed it down. Chester Pulaski, the blocking back, sat on the backs of Frank's knees with Frank's ankles locked under this arms.
'Come on, hump it!' said Chipper Dove to Frank. He pushed down on Frank's ass and drove him deep into the mud puddle again. The football cleats left little white indentations on Frank's ass.
'Come on, you mud-fucker,' said Lenny Metz. 'You heard the man -- hump it!'
'Stop it!' Franny screamed at them. 'What are you doing?'
Frank seemed the most alarmed to see her, although even Chipper Dove couldn't conceal his surprise.
'Well, look who's here,' Dove said, but I could tell he was thinking about what to say next.
'We're just giving him what he likes,' Lenny Metz told Franny and me. 'Frank likes to screw mud puddles, don't you, Frank?'
'Let him go,' Franny said.
'We're not hurting him,' Chester Pulaski said; he was forever embarrassed about his complexion and he chose to look at me, not at Franny; he probably couldn't stand to see Franny's fine skin.
'Your brother likes boys,' Chipper Dover told us. 'Don't you, Frank?' he asked.
'So what?' said Frank. He was angry, not whipped; he'd probably stuck his fingers in their eyes -- he'd probably hurt one or two of them, here or there. Frank always put up a fight.
'Putting it up boys' asses,' said Lenny Metz, 'is disgusting.'
'It's like stickin' it in mud,' Harold Swallow explained, but he looked as if he'd really rather be running, somewhere, than holding Frank's arm. Harold Swallow always looked uneasy -- as if he were crossing a busy street, at night, for the first time.
'Hey, no harm done,' said Chipper Dove. He took his foot off Frank's ass and took a step toward Franny and me. I remembered what Coach Bob was always saying about knee injuries; I was wondering if I could take a swipe at Chip Dove's knee before he beat the shit out of me.
I didn't know what Franny was thinking, but she said to Dove, 'I want to talk with you. Alone. I want to be alone with you, right now,' Franny told him.
Harold Swallow shrieked with a laughter as nasal and high-pitched as the song of any waltzing mouse.
'Well, that's possible,' Dove said to Franny. 'Sure, we can talk. Alone. Anytime.'
'Right now,' Franny said. 'I want to do it right now -- or never,' she said.
'Well, right now, sure,' said Dove. He rolled his eyes to his backfield men. Chester Pulaski and Lenny Metz looked mortified with envy, but Harold Swallow was frowning at a grass stain on his football uniform. It was the only mark on him: a small grass stain, where Harold Swallow must have flown too close to the ground. Or perhaps he was frowning because Frank's outstretched body blocked his view of Franny's feet.
'Let Frank go,' Franny told Dove. 'And make the others go -- to the gym,' she said.
'Sure we'll let him go,' Dove said. 'We were just going to, anyway, right?' he said -- the quarterback: giving signals to his backfield. They let Frank go. Frank stumbled getting up and tried to cover his private parts, which were thick and sodden with mud. He dressed himself, furiously, without a word. At that moment I was more afraid of him than I was afraid of any of the others -- they were doing what they'd been told to do, anyway: they were trotting down the path to t
he gym. Lenny Metz turned to leer and wave. Franny gave him the finger. Frank pushed wetly between Franny and me and started tramping home.
'Forget something?' Chip Dove said to him.
Frank's cymbals were in the bushes. He stopped -seemingly more embarrassed for forgetting his band instrument than he appeared to be humiliated for all the rest of it. Franny and I hated Frank's cymbals. I think it was wearing a uniform -- any uniform -- that had attracted Frank to the band. He was not a social creature, but when Coach Bob's winning season prompted the resurrection of a marching band -- no band had marched at Dairy since shortly after. World War II -- Frank could not resist the uniforms. Since he could play nothing, musically, they gave him the cymbals. Other people probably felt foolish with them, but not Frank. He liked marching around, doing nothing, waiting for his big moment to CLASH!
It was not like having a musical member of the family, always practicing and driving the rest of us nuts with the screeching, tooting, or plinking of an instrument. Frank didn't 'practice' the cymbals. Occasionally, at odd hours, we would hear one shattering clang from them -- from Frank's locked room -- and we had to imagine, Franny and I, that Frank had been marching in place in his uniform, sweating in front of his mirror until he couldn't stand the sound of his own breathing and had been inspired to put a dramatic end to it.
The terrible noise made Sorrow bark and, probably, fart. Mother would drop things. Franny would run to Frank's door and pound on it. I would imagine the sound differently: it was remindful of the suddenness of a gun, to me, and I always thought, for an instant, that we had just been startled by the sound of Frank's suicide.
On the path where the backfield had ambushed him, Frank dragged his muddy cymbals from the bushes, clanking them under his arm.
'Where can we go?' Chip Dove asked Franny. To be alone.'
'I know a place,' she said. 'Nearby,' she added. 'It's a place I've known forever.' And I knew, of course, that she meant the ferns -- our ferns. To my knowledge, Franny hadn't even taken Struthers there. I thought she could only be mentioning them this clearly so that Frank and I would know where to find her, and rescue her, but Frank was already heading home, stomping down the path without a word to Franny, or one look at her, and Chip Dove smiled at me with his ice-blue eyes and said, 'Beat it, kid.'
Franny took him by the hand and pulled him off the path, but I caught up to Frank in no time. 'Jesus, Frank,' I said, 'where are you going? We've got to help her.'
'Help Franny?' he said.
'She helped you,' I said to him. 'She saved your ass.'
'So what?' he said, and then he started to cry. 'How do you know she wants our help?' he said, snivelling. 'Maybe she wants to be alone with him.'
That was too terrible a thought for me -- it was almost as bad as imagining Chipper Dove doing things to Franny that she didn't want done to her -- and I grabbed Frank by his one remaining epaulette and dragged him after me.
'Stop crying,' I said, because I didn't want Dove to hear us coming.
'I want to talk with you, just talk!' we heard Franny screaming. 'You rat's asshole!' she yelled. 'You could have been so nice, but you had to go and be such a super shit of a human being. I hate you!' she cried. 'Cut it out!' she screamed.
'I think you like me,' we heard Chipper Dove say.
'I might have,' Franny said, 'but not now. Not ever,' we heard her say, but she stopped sounding angry; suddenly she was crying.
When Frank and I reached the ferns, Dove had his football pants down at the knees. He was having the same trouble with the thigh pads that Franny and I had observed, years ago, while spying on the crapping posture of the fat football player named Poindexter. Franny had her clothes on, but she seemed curiously passive, to me -- sitting in the ferns (where he'd pushed her, she told me later) with her hands over her face. Frank clashed his damn cymbals together -- so startling loud that I thought an airplane was flying into another airplane above us. Then he swung the right-hand cymbal smack into Chip Dove's face. It was the hardest hit the quarterback had taken all season; we could tell he wasn't used to it. Clearly, too, he was impeded by the position of his pants. I dropped straight on him as soon as he was down. Frank continued to clash his cymbals together -- as if this were a ritual dance that our family always practiced prior to slaughtering an enemy.
Dove threw me off him, the way old Sorrow could still knock Egg down -- with a good toss of his big head -- but the clamour Frank was making seemed to paralyze the quarterback. It seemed to awaken Franny from her moment of passivity, too. She made her usual unbeatable move for the private parts of Chipper Dove, and he made the sickly motions of quitting this life, forever, that surely Frank must have recognized -- and, of course, I remembered from the days of Ralph De Meo. She really grabbed him good, and when he was still on his hip in the pine needles, with his football pants still around his knees, Franny pulled his jock and cup halfway down his thighs before releasing it with a snap. For just a second, Frank, Franny and I got to see Dove's small, frightened private parts. 'Big deal!' Franny screamed at Dove. 'You're such a big deal!'
Then Franny and I had to restrain Frank from going on and on with his banging cymbals; it seemed that the sound might kill the trees and drive small animals from the forest. Chipper Dove lay on his side with one hand cupping his balls and the other hand holding one ear shut against the noise; his other ear was pressed to the ground.
I saw Dove's helmet in the ferns and took it with me when we left him there to recover himself. Back at the mud puddle, on the path, Frank and Franny filled the quarterback's helmet with mud. We left it brimming full for him.
'Shit and death,' Franny said, darkly.
Frank couldn't stop tapping his cymbals together, he was so excited.
'Jesus, Frank,' Franny said. 'Please cut it out.'
'I'm sorry,' he told us. And when we were nearer home, he said, Thank you.'
Thank you, too,' Franny said. 'Both of you,' she said, squeezing my arm.
'I really am queer, you know,' Frank mumbled.
'I guess I knew,' Franny said.
'It's okay, Frank,' I said, because what else could a brother say?
'I was thinking of a way to tell you,' Frank said.
And Franny said, 'This was a quaint way.'
Even Frank laughed; I think it was the first time I'd heard Frank laugh since the time Father discovered the size of the fourth-floor toilets in the Hotel New Hampshire -- our fourth-floor 'outhouse for elves.'
We sometimes wondered if living in the Hotel New Hampshire would always be like this.
What seemed more important to know was who would come to stay in our hotel after we moved in and opened it for business. As that time approached, Father became more emphatic about his theories for the perfect hotel. He had seen an interview, on television, with the head of a hotel-management school -- in Switzerland. The man said that the secret to success was how quickly a new hotel could establish a pattern of advance bookings.
'Advance Bookings!' Father wrote on a shirt cardboard and stuck it to the refrigerator of Mother's soon-to-be-abandoned family house.
'Good morning, Advance Bookings!' we would greet each other at breakfast, to tease Father, but he was rather serious about it.
'You laugh,' he told us one morning. 'Well, I already have two.'
'Two what?' Egg asked.
'Two advance bookings,' Father said, mysteriously.
We were planning to open the weekend of the Exeter game. We knew that was the first 'advance booking.' Every year the Dairy School concluded its miserable football season by losing to one of the big schools, like Exeter or Andover, by a big score. It was always worse when we had to travel to those schools and play them on their own well-kept turf. Exeter, for example, had a real stadium; both Exeter and Andover had smart uniforms; they were both all-boys' schools then -- and the students wore coats and ties to classes. Some'of them even wore coats and ties to the football games, but even if they were informally attired, they looked bette
r than we did. It made us feel terrible to see students like that -- altogether clean and cocky. And every year our team stumbled out on the field, looking like shit and death -- and when the game was over, that was how we all felt.
Exeter and Andover traded us off; each one liked to use us for their next-to-last game -- a kind of warm-up exercise -- because their last game of the season was with each other.
But for Iowa Bob's winning season we were playing at home, and this year it would be Exeter. Win or lose, it would be a winning season, but most people -- even my father and Coach Bob -- thought that this year's Dairy team had a chance of going all the way; undefeated, and with a last-game victory over Exeter, a team the Dairy School had never beaten. With a winning season, even the alumni were coming back, and the Exeter game was made a parents' weekend. Coach Bob wished he had new uniforms to go with his imported backfield, and Junior Jones, but it pleased the old man to imagine that his tattered shit-and-death squad just might knock Exeter's crisp white uniforms with crimson letters, and crimson helmets, all over the field.
Exeter wasn't having too hot a year, anyway; they were poking along about 5-3 -- against better competition than we usually saw, to be sure, but it was not one of their great teams. Iowa Bob saw that he had a chance, and my father took the entire football season as a good omen for the Hotel New Hampshire.
The weekend of the Exeter game was booked in advance -- every room reserved, for two nights; and reservations for the restaurant on Saturday were already closed.