The Hotel New Hampshire (18 page)

Junior Jones seized me by my armpits and hoisted me up to him, face to face; he leaned me, gently, against the wall. My feet felt a foot or two off the floor; I didn’t struggle.

“Did you say
rape
, man?” he asked.

“Yeah, rape, rape!” said Harold Swallow, darting around us like a bee. “They’re raping his sister, man. They really are.”

“Your
sister
?” Junior asked me, letting me slide to the floor against the wall.

“My sister Franny,” I said, and for a moment I feared he would say, again, “She’s just another white girl, to me.” But he didn’t say anything; he was
crying
—his big face as shiny and wet as the shield of a warrior left out in the rain.

“Please?” I said to him. “We have to hurry.” But Junior Jones started shaking his head, his tears spraying Harold Swallow and me.

“We’re not gonna be in
time
,” Junior said. “No way are we going to be in
time
.”

“There’s
three
of them,” said Harold Swallow. “Three times takes time.” And I felt sick—I felt like Halloween, again and again, with a bellyful of junk and trash.

“And I know
which
three of them, don’t I?” said Junior Jones. I noticed he was getting dressed: I
hadn’t
noticed he’d been naked. He pulled on a baggy gray pair of sweat pants, he pulled on his high-topped white basketball shoes over his huge bare feet. He put on a baseball cap, with the visor turned backwards; that was all he was going to wear, apparently, because he stood in the fifth-floor hall of the dorm and shouted suddenly. “Black Arm of the Law!” he said. Doors opened. “Lion hunt!” Jones yelled. The black athletes, quarantined on the top floor, peered out at him. “Get your shit together,” said Junior Jones.

“Lion hunt!” cried Harold Swallow, flying up and down the hall. “Get your shit together! Black Arm of the Law!”

It was then that it occurred to me that I didn’t know any black students at the Dairy School who
weren’t
athletes—of course: our shit-ass school wouldn’t take them if they couldn’t be of some
use
.

“What’s a lion hunt?” I asked Junior Jones.

“Your sister’s a good girl,” Jones said. “I know she is. Everybody’s own sister is a good girl,” he said, and I agreed with him, of course, and Harold Swallow bumped my arm and said, “You see, man? Everybody’s sister is a good girl.”

And we flew down the stairwell with remarkable silence, considering how many of us there were. Harold Swallow led us, waiting impatiently on every landing. Junior Jones was surprisingly quick for his size. On the second-floor landing we encountered two white students coming home from somewhere; they saw the black athletes descending the stairs and fled down the hall on their floor. “Lion hunt!” they cried. “Fucking Black Arm of the Law!”

Not a door opened; two lights went out. And then we were outside in the Halloween night, heading for the woods and the place just off the footpath that I would recognize and remember all my life. There’s not a day when I couldn’t locate those ferns, where Franny and I were first and always alone.

“Franny,” I cried out, but there was no answer. I led Jones and Harold Swallow into the woods; behind us, the black athletes fanned out along the footpath and entered the woods all up and down the path—shaking the trees, kicking the dead leaves, some of them humming a little tune,
all
of them (I suddenly noticed) wearing those baseball caps turned backwards, all of them bare-chested; two of them wore catchers’ masks. The sound they made coming through the woods was like the whirring of a large rotary blade cutting through a field. Flashlights blinked, and like a swarm of large fireflies we came upon the ferns where Lenny Metz, his pants still off, held my sister’s head pinched between his knees. Metz was kneeling on Franny’s arms, stretched over her head, while Chester Pulaski—who, no doubt, had been third in line-was finishing his turn.

Chipper Dove was gone; he had been first, of course. And like the careful quarterback he was, he hadn’t held the ball too long.

“Of course I knew what he was going to do,” Franny told me, much later. “I was prepared for him, I’d even imagined it—with him. I always knew it would be him—the first time—somehow. But I never thought he’d let the others even
see
me with him. I even
told him
that they didn’t have to force me, that I’d let
him
. But when he
left
me with them—I wasn’t prepared for that at all. I never even imagined that.”

It seemed to my sister that she’d been made to pay disproportionately for her mischief with the lights in the Hotel New Hampshire and her inadvertent contribution to Howard Tuck’s departure from our world. “
Boy
, are you ever made to pay for a little fun,” Franny said.

And it seemed to me that Lenny Metz and Chester Pulaski hardly paid enough for the “fun” they’d had. Metz released my sister’s arms when he first caught sight of Junior Jones; he pulled his pants up and made a break for it—but he was a running back used to good blocking in front of him and a relatively open field. In the dark woods he could barely see the dark bodies of the humming black athletes, and although he ran with power and with some speed, he struck a tree as big around as his thigh and it broke his collarbone. He was surrounded rather quickly then, and was dragged back to the holy ground in the ferns, where Junior Jones ordered all his clothes stripped off him and had him tied to a lacrosse stick; he was then carried, naked, to the Dean of Men. I learned, later, that the lion hunters always delivered up their prey with a certain flair.

Once they’d caught an exhibitionist who’d been bothering the girls’ dorm. They hung him by his ankles to the shower head in the most populated of the girls’ bathrooms—wrapped naked in a transparent shower curtain. Then they called the Dean. “This is the Black Arm of the Law,” said Junior Jones. “This is the sheriff of the fucking fifth floor.”

“Yes, Junior, what is it?” the Dean asked.

“There’s a male nudist in the females’ dorm, first-floor bathroom, on your right,” Jones said. “The lion hunters captured him in the act of exhibiting himself.”

Thus Lenny Metz was lugged to the Dean of Men. Chester Pulaski got there ahead of him. “Lion hunt!” Harold Swallow had screamed in the woods, and when Lenny let go of Franny’s arms, Chester Pulaski slipped out of my sister and made a break for it, too. He was completely undressed, however, and on his tender bare feet he trotted slowly between the trees, not striking them. Every twenty yards or so, he was scared to death by the Black Arm of the Law, the black athletes who crept through the woods, swishing the trees, snapping sticks; and humming their tune. It had been Chesten Pulaski’s first gang bang, and the jungle ritual had completely colored the night for him—he thought the woods were suddenly full of
natives
! (cannibals! he imagined)—and he stumbled whimpering and bent over, appropriate to my imagination of Early Man, not quite upright, mostly on all fours. He was naked and scratched by branches, and mostly on all fours, when he arrived at the dormitory apartment of the Dean of Men.

The Dean of Men had not been happy at the Dairy School since the school had admitted women. Before then he’d been Dean of Students—a prim, fit man with a pipe and a fondness for racquet sports; he had a pert, fit wife of the youthful, cheerleader variety, her age betrayed only by an alarming pouchiness about her eyes; they had no children. “The boys,” the Dean of Students liked to say, “are all my children.”

When the “girls” arrived, he never felt the same about them and quickly appointed, to assist himself, his wife in the role of Dean of Women. His new title, Dean of Men, pleased him, but he despaired at all the new sorts of trouble his boys got into now that there were girls at Dairy.

“Oh no,” he probably said, when he heard Chester Pulaski clawing at his door. “I hate Halloween.”

“I’ll get it,” his wife said, and the Dean of Women went to open the door. “I know, I know,” she said, cheerfully, “trick or treat!”

And there was a naked and cringing Chester Pulaski, the blocking back—blazing with boils, smelling of sex.

The scream of the Dean of Women was said to have awakened the bottom two floors of the dorm the two deans lived in—and even Mrs. Butler, the night nurse, who was sleeping at her desk in the infirmary next door. “I hate Halloween,” she probably said to herself. She went to the infirmary door and saw Junior Jones and Harold Swallow and me; Junior was carrying Franny.

I had helped Franny get dressed in the ferns and Junior Jones had tried to untangle her hair while she cried and cried, and finally he’d said to her, “You want to walk or ride?” It was a question Father used to ask us children when we were years younger, which meant did we want to walk or did we want to take the car. Junior, of course, meant he would carry her, and that’s what Franny wanted—so he did.

He carried her past the spot in the ferns where Lenny Metz was being lashed to a lacrosse stick and prepared for a different kind of travel. Franny cried and cried, and Junior said, “Hey, you’re a
good
girl, I have very good judgment about that.” But Franny kept crying. “Hey, listen,” said Junior Jones. “You know what? When someone touches you and you don’t
want
to be touched, that’s not really
being
touched—you got to believe me. It’s not
you
they touch when they touch you that way; they don’t really
get
you, you understand. You’ve still got
you
inside you. Nobody’s touched you—not really. You’re a really good girl, you believe me? You’ve still got
you
inside you, you believe that?”

“I don’t know,” Franny whispered, and went on crying. One of her arms lolled down Junior’s side and I took her hand; she squeezed; I squeezed back. Harold Swallow, darting through the trees, guiding us like a hush up the path, found the infirmary and opened the door.

“What’s all this?” said the night nurse, Mrs. Butler.

“I’m Franny Berry,” said my sister, “and I’ve been beaten up.”

“Beaten up” would remain Franny’s euphemism for it, although everyone knew she had been raped. “Beaten up” was all Franny would admit to, although no one missed the point; this way it would never be a
legal
point, however.

“She means she was raped,” Junior Jones told Mrs. Butler. But Franny kept shaking her head. I think that her way of interpreting Junior’s kindness to her, and his version of how the
her
in her had not been touched, was to convert her sexual abuse into the terms of a mere fight she had lost. She whispered to him—he still held her against his chest and in his arms—and then he put her down on her feet and said to Mrs. Butler, “Okay, she was beaten up.” Mrs. Butler knew what was meant.

“She was beaten up
and
raped,” said Harold Swallow, who couldn’t stand still, but Junior Jones cooled him down with a look and said to him, “Why don’t you fly away, Harold? Why don’t you fly off and find
Mr. Dove
?” That put the gleam back in Harold’s eye, and he flew away.

I called Father, before I remembered there was no working phone in the Hotel New Hampshire. Then I called Campus Security and asked them to give Father the message: Franny and I were at the Dairy School Infirmary; Franny had been “beaten up.”

“It’s just another Halloween, kid,” Franny said, holding my hand.

“The worst one, Franny,” I said to her.

“The worst one so far,” she said.

Mrs. Butler took Franny off, to fix her—among other things—a bath, and Junior Jones explained to me that if Franny cleaned herself there would be no evidence that she was raped, and I went after Mrs. Butler to explain it to her, but Mrs. Butler had already explained this to Franny, who wanted to let it go. “I’ve been beaten up,” she said, although she would listen to Mrs. Butler’s advice about checking, later, to see if she was pregnant (she wasn’t)—or infected with a venereal disease (someone had passed on a little something, which was eventually cured).

When Father arrived at the infirmary, Junior Jones had gone to lend his assistance to the delivery of Lenny Metz to the Dean, Harold Swallow was combing the campus, like a hawk, looking for a dove—and I was sitting in an all—white hospital room with Franny, fresh from her bath, her hair in a towel, an ice pack on her left cheekbone, her right ring finger bandaged (she’d torn out a nail); she wore a white hospital smock and was sitting up in bed. “I want to go home,” she told Father. “Tell Mother I just need some clean clothes.”

“What did they do to you, darling?” Father asked her, and sat beside her on the bed.

“They beat me up,” Franny said.

“Where were
you
?” Father asked me.

“He got help,” Franny said.

“Did you see what happened?” Father asked me.

“He didn’t see anything,” Franny said.

I saw the Third Act, I wanted to tell Father, but although we
all
knew what “beaten up” meant, I would remain faithful to Franny’s term for it.

“I just want to go home,” Franny said, although the Hotel New Hampshire seemed, to me, to be a large and unfamiliar place to curl up in. Father went to get her clothes.

It was a pity he missed seeing Lenny Metz trussed up on the lacrosse stick and carried through the campus to the Dean like a poorly prepared piece of meat on a spit. And a pity Father didn’t witness the precociousness of Harold Swallow searching for Dove, gliding up to every dorm room like a shadow. Until Harold ascertained that Chipper Dove could only be in the girls’ dorm. After that, he thought, it would be just a matter of time until he found whose room Dove was hiding in.

The Dean of Men, covering Chester Pulaski with his wife’s camel’s-hair coat—it was the nearest thing handy—cried out, “Chester, Chester, my boy!
Why
? Only a
week
before the Exeter game!”

“The woods are full of niggers,” Chester Pulaski said, mournfully. “They’re taking over. Run for your life.”