“Call somebody!” Father said, but there was no working phone in our unlikely house. Father looked at the puzzling maze of wires and switches and ear—and mouthpieces in the squad car. “Hello? Hello!” he said into something, pushing something else. “How the fuck does this thing work?” he cried.
“Who’s this?” said a voice out of the tubes of the car.
“Get an ambulance to Elliot Park!” my father said.
“Halloween alert?” said the voice. “Halloween trouble? Hello. Hello.”
“Jesus God, it’s Halloween!” Father said. “Goddamn silly machine!” he cried, slamming the dashboard of the squad car with one hand; he gave a fairly hard thump to the quiet chest of Howard Tuck with his other hand.
“We can get an ambulance!” Franny said. “The school ambulance!”
And I ran with her through Elliot Park, which was now glowing in the stunning light that poured from the Hotel New Hampshire. “Holy cow,” said Iowa Bob, when we ran into him at the Pine Street entrance to the park; he was looking at the bright hotel as if the place had opened for business without him. In the unnatural light, Coach Bob looked years older to me, but I suppose he really looked only as old as he was—a grandfather and a retiring coach with one more game to play.
“Howard Tuck had a heart attack!” I told him, and Franny and I ran on toward the Dairy School—which was always up to heart-attack tricks of its own, especially on Halloween.
4
Franny Loses a Fight
On Halloween, the Police Department of the town of Dairy sent old Howard Tuck to Elliot Park, as usual, but the State Police sent two cars to cruise the campus of the Dairy School, and the campus security force was doubled; although short on tradition, the Dairy School had a considerable Halloween reputation.
It had been Halloween when one of the token cows had been tied to the goal at the Thompson Female Seminary. It had been another Halloween when another cow had been led to the Dairy School field house and indoor swimming pool, where the beast suffered a violent reaction to the chlorine in the water and drowned.
It had been Halloween when four little kids from the town had made the mistake of going trick-or-treating in one of the Dairy dorms. The children were kidnapped for the night; they had their heads shaved by a student costumed as an executioner, and one child was unable to speak for a week.
“I hate Halloween,” Franny said, as we noted there were few trick-or-treaters on the streets; the little kids of Dairy were frightened of Halloween. An occasional cringing child, with a paper bag or a mask on its head, cowered as Franny and I ran by; and a group of small children—one dressed as a witch, one as a ghost, and two as robots from a recent film about a Martian invasion—fled into the safety of a lit doorway as we charged up the sidewalk toward them.
Cars with anxious parents were parked here and there along the street—spotting for would-be attackers as their children cautiously approached a door to ring a bell. The usual anxieties about the razor blades in apples, the arsenic in the chocolate cookies, were no doubt passing through the parked parents” minds. One such anxious father put his headlights on Franny and me and leaped from his car to give chase. “Hey, you!” he yelled.
“Howard Tuck had a heart attack!” I called to him, and that seemed to stop him—cold. Franny and I ran through the open gate, like the gate to a cemetery, that admitted us to the playing fields of the Dairy School; past the pointed iron bars, I tried to imagine the gate for the Exeter weekend—when they would be selling pennants and blankets and cowbells to bash together at the game. It was a rather cheerless gate, now, and as we ran in, a small horde of children rushed by us, running out—the other way. They were running for their lives, it seemed, and a few of their terrified faces were as shocking as the Halloween masks some of the other kids had managed to keep on. Their plastic black-and-white and pumpkin-coloured costumes were in shreds and tatters, and they wailed like a children’s hospital ward—great gagging snivels of fear.
“Jesus God,” Franny said, and they fled away from her—as if she were in costume and I wore the worst mask of all.
I grabbed a small boy and asked him, “What’s happening?” But he writhed and screamed in my hands, he tried to bite my wrist—he was wet and trembling and he smelled strange, and his skeleton costume came away in pieces in my hands, like soggy toilet paper or a decomposing sponge. “Giant spiders!” he cried, witlessly. I let him go.
“What’s happening?” Franny called to the children, but they were gone as suddenly as they’d appeared. The playing fields stretched in front of us, dark and empty; at the end of them, like tall ships across a harbour shrouded by fog, the dorms and buildings of the Dairy School seemed sparsely lit—as if everyone had gone to bed early, and only a few good students were burning, as they say, the midnight oil. But Franny and I knew that there were very few “good” students at Dairy, and on a Halloween Saturday night we doubted that even the good ones were studying—and we doubted that any of the dark windows meant that anyone was sleeping. Perhaps they were drinking in the blackness of their rooms, perhaps they were violating each other, and some captured children, in their dark dorms. Perhaps there was a new religion, the rage of the campus, and the religion required total night for its rituals—and Halloween was its day of reckoning.
Something was wrong. The white wooden goal at the near end of the soccer field seemed too white, to me, although it was the darkest night I had been in. Something was too stark and apparent about the goal.
“I wish Sorrow was with us,” Franny said.
Sorrow will be with us, I thought—knowing what Franny didn’t know: that Father had taken Sorrow to the vet’s this very day, to have the old dog put to sleep. There had been a sober discussion—in Franny’s absence—of the need for this. Lilly and Egg weren’t with us, either. Father had told Mother, Frank, and me—and Iowa Bob. “Franny won’t understand,” Father had said. “And Lilly and Egg are too young. There’s no point in asking their opinion. They won’t be rational.”
Frank did not care for Sorrow, but even Frank seemed saddened by the death sentence.
“I know he smells bad,” Frank said, “but that’s not exactly a fatal disease.”
“In a hotel it is,” Father said. “That dog has terminal flatulence.”
“And he is old,” Mother said.
“When you get old,” I told Mother and Father, “we won’t put you to sleep.”
“And what about me?” Iowa Bob said. “I suppose I’m the next one to go. Got to watch my farting, or it’s off to the nursing home!”
“You’re no help at all,” Father told Coach Bob. “It’s only Franny who really loves the dog. She’s the one who’s really going to be upset, and we’ll just have to make it as easy for her as we can.”
Father no doubt thought that anticipation was nine-tenths of suffering: he was not really being cowardly by not seeking Franny’s opinion; he knew what her opinion would be, of course, and he knew that Sorrow had to go.
And so I wondered how long we would be moved into the Hotel New Hampshire before Franny would notice the old farter’s absence, before she would start sniffing around for Sorrow—Father would have to put all his cards on the table.
“Well, Franny,” I could imagine Father beginning. “You know that Sorrow wasn’t getting any younger—or any better at controlling himself.”
Passing the dead-white soccer goal, under the black sky, I shuddered to think how Franny would take it. “Murderers!” she would call us all. And we would all look guilty. “Franny, Franny,” Father would say, but Franny would make an awful fuss. I pitied the strangers in the Hotel New Hampshire who would waken to the variety of sounds Franny was capable of.