“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 the 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!”