The Bear Called State O’Maine 10 страница

burying

Sorrow.

“Too late,” Frank whispered to Father, when Mother and Father and Franny and I arrived home—at the Hotel New Hampshire.

“Jesus God, I can walk by myself, you know,” Franny said, because all of us were trying to walk next to her. “Here, Sorrow!” she called. “Come on, boy!”

Mother started to cry and Franny took her arm. “I’m

okay

, Mom,” she said. “Really I am. Nobody touched the

me

inside me, I guess.” Father started to cry and Franny took his arm, too. I had been crying all night, it seemed, and I was all cried out.

Frank pulled me aside.

“What the fuck is it, Frank?” I said.

“Come see,” he said.

Sorrow, still in the trash bag, was under the bed in Frank’s room.

“Jesus God, Frank!” I said.

“I’m going to

fix

him for Franny,” he said. “In time for Christmas!”

“

Christmas

, Frank?” I said. “

Fix

him?”

“I’m going to have Sorrow

stuffed

!” Frank said. Frank’s favourite course at the Dairy School was biology, a weird course taught by an amateur taxidermist named Foit. Frank, with Foit’s help, had already stuffed a squirrel and an odd orange bird.

“Holy cow, Frank,” I said, “I don’t know if Franny will like that.”

“It’s the next-best thing to being alive,” Frank said.

I didn’t know. By the sudden outburst we heard, from Franny, we knew that Father had broken the news to her. A slight distraction to Franny’s grief was caused by Iowa Bob. He insisted on going out and finding Chipper Dove himself, and it took some persuading to talk him out of it. Franny wanted another bath, and I lay in bed listening to the tub filling. Then I got up and went to the bathroom door and asked her if there was anything I could get her.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Just go out and get me yesterday and most of today,” she said. “I want them back.”

“Is that all?” I said. “Just yesterday and today?”

“That’s all,” she said. “Thank you.”

“I would if I could, Franny,” I told her.

“I know,” she said. I heard her sinking slowly in the tub. “I’m okay,” she whispered. “Nobody got the fucking

me

in me.”

“I love you,” I whispered.

She didn’t answer me, and I went back to bed.

I heard Coach Bob, in his rooms above us—doing push-ups, and then some sit-ups, and then a little work with the one-arm curls (the bar-bells” rhythmic clanks and the old man’s enraged breaths)—and I wished he had been allowed to find Chipper Dove, who would have been no match for the old Iowa lineman.

Unfortunately, Dove

was

a match for Junior Jones and the Black Arm of the Law. Dove had gone straight to the girls” dorm, and to the room of a doting cheerleader named Melinda Mitchell. She was called Mindy and she was gaga over Dove. He told her he’d been “fooling around” with Franny Berry, but that when she started fooling around with Lenny Metz and Chester Pulaski, too, it had put him off. “A cock tease,” he called my sister, and Mindy Mitchell agreed. She had been jealous of Franny for years.

“But now Franny’s got the black bunch after me,” Dove told Mindy. “She’s pals with them. Especially Junior Jones,” Dove said, “—that goody-goody spade who’s a fink for the Dean.” So Mindy Mitchell tucked Dove into her bed with her, and when Harold Swallow came whispering at her door (“Dove, Dove—have you seen Dove? Black Arm of the Law wants to know”), she said she didn’t let any boy into her room and she wouldn’t let Harold in, either.

So they didn’t find him. He was expelled from the Dairy School in the morning—along with Chester Pulaski and Lenny Metz. The parents of the gang-bangers, when they heard the story, were grateful enough that nothing criminal was being charged that they accepted the expulsion from school rather graciously. Some of the faculty, and most of the trustees, were upset that the incident couldn’t have been suppressed until after the Exeter game, but it was pointed out that Iowa Bob’s backfield was a less embarrassing loss than losing Iowa Bob himself—for the old man surely would have refused to coach in a game with those three still on his team.

It was an incident that was hushed up in the best private school tradition; it was remarkable, really, how a school as unsophisticated as the Dairy School could at times imitate exactly the decorum of silence in dealing with distasteful matters that the more sophisticated schools had learned like a science.

For “beating up” Franny Berry—in what was implied to be merely an extension of the general roughhouse quality of a Dairy School Halloween—Chester Pulaski, Lenny Metz, and Chipper Dove were expelled. Dove, it appeared to me, got off scot-free. But Franny and I had not seen the last of him, and perhaps Franny already knew that. We had not seen the last of Junior Jones, either; he became Franny’s friend, if not exactly her bodyguard, for the duration of his stay at Dairy. They went everywhere together, and it was clear to me that Junior Jones was responsible for helping Franny feel that she was, indeed, a good girl—as he was always telling her. We had not seen the last of Jones when we left Dairy, although—once again—his style of rescuing Franny would distinguish itself by his late arrival. Junior Jones, as you know, would play college football at Penn State, and professional football for the Browns—until someone would mess up his knee. He would then go to law school and become active in an organization in New York City—which would be called, at his suggestion, the Black Arm of the Law. As Lilly would say—and one day she would make this clear to us—Everything is a fairy tale.

Chester Pulaski would suffer

his

racist nightmares most of his life, which would be over in a car. The police would say that he must have had his hands all over someone while he was supposed to be paying attention to the steering wheel. The woman was killed, too, and Lenny Metz said he knew her. When his collarbone healed, Metz went right back to carrying the ball; he played college football somewhere in Virginia and introduced Chester Pulaski to the woman he killed over one Christmas vacation. Metz would never be drafted by the pros—for a pronounced lack of quickness—but he was drafted by the U.S. Army, who didn’t care how slow he was, and he died for his country, as they say, in Vietnam. Actually, he was not shot by the enemy; he did not step on a mine. It was another kind of combat that Lenny Metz succumbed to: he was poisoned by a prostitute, whom he had cheated.

Harold Swallow was both too crazy and too fast for me to keep up with. God knows what became of him. Good luck to you, Harold, wherever you are!

Perhaps because it was Halloween, and Halloween’s atmosphere pervades my memory of Iowa Bob’s winning season, they have all become like ghosts and wizards and devils and creatures of magic, to me. Remember, too: it was the first night we slept in the Hotel New Hampshire—not that we slept for most of it. Any night in a new place is a little uneasy—there are the different sounds of the beds to get used to. And Lilly, who always woke up with the same dry cough, as if she were a very old person—and we’d be constantly surprised to see how small she was—woke up coughing differently, almost as if she were as exasperated with her own poor health as Mother was. Egg never woke up unless someone woke him, and then he behaved as if he’d been awake for hours. But the morning after Halloween, Egg woke up by himself—almost peacefully. And I had heard Frank masturbate in his room for years, but it was different hearing him do it in the Hotel New Hampshire—perhaps because I knew that Sorrow was in a trash bag under his bed.

The morning after Halloween, I watched the early light fall in Elliot Park. There’d been a frost, and through the frozen rinds of someone’s mangled pumpkin I saw Frank trudging to the bio lab with Sorrow in the trash bag over his shoulder. Father saw him out the same window.

“Where the hell is Frank going with the garbage?” Father asked.

“He probably couldn’t find the trash barrels,” I said, so that Frank could make good his escape. “I mean, we don’t have a phone that works, and we

were

out of electricity. There probably aren’t any trash barrels, either.”

“There are so,” Father said. “The barrels are out at the delivery entrance.” He stared after Frank and shook his head. “The damn fool must be going all the way to the dump,” Father said. “Jesus, that boy is queer.”

I shivered, because I knew that Father didn’t know that Frank really

was

queer.

When Egg was finally out of the bathroom, Father went to use the facilities and found that Franny had beaten him to the door. She was drawing

another

bath for herself, and Mother told Father, “Don’t you say a word to her. She can take all the baths she wants.” And they went away, arguing—which they rarely did. “I told you we’d need another bathroom,” Mother said.

I listened to Franny, drawing her bath. “I love you,” I whispered at the locked door. But—over the sound of the healing water—it is unlikely that Franny ever heard me.

Merry Christmas, 1956

I remember the rest of 1956, from Halloween to Christmas, as the length of time it took Franny to stop taking three baths a day—and to return to her natural fondness for her own good, ripe smell. Franny always smelled nice to me—although at times she gave off a very strong smell—but from Halloween to Christmas, 1956, Franny did not smell nice to herself. And so she took so many baths that she did not smell at all.

In the Hotel New Hampshire, our family took over another bathroom and sharpened our skills at Father’s first family business. Mother took charge of the cranky pride of Mrs. Urick, and the plain-but-good production of Mrs. Urick’s kitchen; Mrs. Urick took charge of Max, in spite of his being well hidden from her, on the fourth floor. Father handled Ronda Ray—“not literally,” as Franny would say.

Ronda had a curious energy. She would strip and make up all the beds in a single morning; she could serve four tables in the restaurant without botching an order or making anyone wait; she could spell Father at the bar (we were open every evening, except Monday, until eleven) and have all the tables set before breakfast (at seven). But when she retired, to her “dayroom,” she seemed either in hibernation or in a deep stupor, and even at the peak of her energy—when she was getting everything done, on time—she

looked

sleepy.

“Why do we say it’s a

dayroom

?” Iowa Bob asked. “I mean, if Ronda goes back to Hampton Beach, when does she do it? I mean, it’s all right that she lives here, but why don’t we

say

she lives here—why doesn’t

she

say so?”

“She’s doing a good job,” Father said.

“But she’s

living

in her dayroom,” Mother said.

“What’s a dayroom?” Egg asked. It seemed everyone wanted to know that.

Franny and I listened to Ronda Ray’s room on the intercom for hours, but it would be weeks before

we

learned what a dayroom was. At midmornings we would switch on Ronda’s room and Franny would say, after listening to the breathing for a while, “Asleep.” Or sometimes: “Smoking a cigarette.”

Late at night, Franny and I would listen and I would say, “Perhaps she’s reading.”

“Are you kidding?” Franny would say.

Bored, we would listen to the other rooms, one at a time, or all together. Checking out Max Urick’s static, over which we could—occasionally—hear Max’s radio. Checking the stockpots in Mrs. Urick’s basement kitchen. We knew that 3F was Iowa Bob, and we would tune in the sound of his barbells every once in a while—often interrupting him with our own comments, like: “Come on, Grandpa, a little quicker! Let’s really snap those babies up—you’re slowing down.”

“You damn kids!” Bob would grunt; or at other times he would slap two iron weights together, right next to the speaker-receiver box, so that Franny and I would jump and hold our ringing ears. “Ha!” Coach Bob would cry. “Got you little buggers

that

time, didn’t I?”

“Lunatic in 3F,” Franny would broadcast on the intercom. “Lock your doors. Lunatic in 3F.”

“Ha!” Iowa Bob would grunt—over the bench presses, over the push-ups, the sit-ups, the one-arm curls. “This hotel is

for

lunatics!”

It was Iowa Bob who encouraged me to lift weights. What happened to Franny had somehow inspired me to make myself stronger. By Thanksgiving I was running six miles a day, although the cross-country course at Dairy was only two and a quarter miles. Bob put me on a heavy dose of bananas and milk and oranges. “And pasta, rice, fish, lots of greens, hot cereal, and ice cream,” the old coach told me. I lifted twice a day; and in addition to my six miles, I ran wind sprints every morning in Elliot Park.

At first, I just put on weight.

“Lay off the bananas,” Father said.

“And the ice cream,” said Mother.

“No, no,” said Iowa Bob. “Muscles take a little time.”

“Muscles?” Father said. “He’s fat.”

“You look like a cherub, dear,” Mother told me.

“You look like a teddy bear,” Franny told me.

“Just keep eating,” said Iowa Bob. “With all the lifting and running, you’re going to see a change in no time.”

“Before he

explodes

?” Franny said.

I was going on fifteen, as they say; between Halloween and Christmas I gained twenty pounds; I weighed 170, but I was still only five feet six inches tall.

“Man,” Junior Jones told me, “if we painted you black and white, and put circles around your eyes, you’d look like a

panda

.”

“One day soon,” said Iowa Bob, “you’re going to drop twenty pounds and you’ll be hard all over.”

Franny gave an exaggerated shiver and kicked me under the table “Hard all over!” she cried.

“It’s gross,” Frank said. “All of it. The weight lifting, the bananas, the panting up and down the stairs.” In the mornings when it rained, I refused to run wind sprints in Elliot Park; I sprinted up and down the stairs of the Hotel New Hampshire, instead.

Max Urick said he was going to throw grenades down the stairwell. And on a very rainy morning, Ronda Ray stopped me on the second-floor landing; she was wearing one of her nightgowns and looking especially sleepy. “Let me tell you, it’s like listening to lovers go at it in the room next to mine,” she said. Her dayroom was nearest the stairwell. She liked to call me John-O. “I don’t mind the sound of the feet, John-O,” she told me. “It’s the breathing that gets me,” she said. “I don’t know if you’re dying or trying to come, but it curls my hair, let me tell you.”

“Don’t listen to any of them,” said Iowa Bob. “You’re the first member of this family who’s taken a proper interest in his body. You’ve got to

get

obsessed and

stay

obsessed,” Bob told me. “And we have to beef you up before we can strip you down.”

Thus it was, and so it is: I owe my body to Iowa Bob—an obsession that has never left me—and bananas.

It would be a while before those extra twenty pounds came off, but they would come off, and they have stayed off ever since. I weigh 150 pounds, all the time.

And I would be seventeen before I finally grew another two inches, and stopped for life. That’s me: five feet eight inches tall and 150 pounds. And hard all over.

In a little while I will be forty, but even now, when I work out, I remember the Christmas season of 1956. Now they have such fancy weight machines; there’s no more sliding the weights on the bar, and forgetting to tighten the screws and having the weights slide together and mash your fingers, or fall off the end of the bar on your toes. But no matter how modern the gymnasium, or the equipment, it only takes a little light lifting to bring back Iowa Bob’s room—good old 3F, and the worn oriental rug where his weights were, the rug Sorrow used to sleep on: after weight lifting on that rug, Bob and I would be covered with the dead dog’s hair. And after I’ve been pushing the weight for a while, and that long-lasting, luxurious ache starts creeping over me, I can bring to mind every scruffy person and every stain on the canvas that dotted the horsehair mats in the weight room of the Dairy School gym, where we would always be waiting for Junior Jones to finish his turn. Jones took all the weights in the room and put them on one barbell, and we would stand there with our empty bars, waiting and waiting. In his days with the Cleveland Browns, Junior Jones weighed 285 and could bench-press 550. He was not

that

strong when he was at the Dairy School, but he was already strong enough to suggest to me a proper goal for the bench press.

“What you weigh?” he’d ask me. “Do you even know?” And when I’d tell him what I weighed, he’d shake his head and say, “Okay, double it.” And when I’d doubled it—and had put 300 pounds or so on the barbell—he’d say, “Okay, down on the mat, on your back.” There were no benches for doing bench presses at the Dairy School, so I’d lie down on the mat on my back and Junior Jones would pick up the 300-pound barbell and place it gently across my throat—there was just enough room so that the bar depressed my Adam’s apple only slightly. I gripped the bar in both hands and I felt my elbows sink down into the mat. “Now lift it over your head,” said Junior Jones, and he’d walk out of the weight room, to get a drink of water, or go take his shower, and I’d lie there under the barbell—trapped. Nothing happened when I tried to lift 300 pounds. Other, bigger people would come into the weight room and see me lying there, under the 300 pounds, and they’d respectfully ask me, “Uh, you gonna be through with that, after a while?”

“Yeah, just resting,” I’d say, puffing up like a toad. And they’d go away and come back later.

Junior Jones would always come back later, too.

“How’s it going?” he’d ask. He’d take off twenty pounds, then fifty, then one hundred.

“Try that,” he’d keep saying; he kept going away, and coming back, until I could extricate myself from under the barbell.

And all 150 pounds of me has never bench-pressed 300 pounds, of course, although twice in my life I have done 215, and I believe that doubling my own weight is not impossible. I can get in a marvellous trance under all that weight.

Sometimes, when I’m really pumping, I can see the Black Arm of the Law moving through the trees, humming their tune, and sometimes I can recall the smell of the fifth floor of the dorm where Junior Jones lived—that hot, jungle nightclub in the sky—and when I run, about the third mile, or the fourth, or sometimes not until the sixth, my own lungs remember, vividly, the feeling of keeping up with Harold Swallow. And the sight of a slash of Franny’s hair, fallen across her open mouth—no sound coming from her—as Lenny Metz knelt on her arms and pinched her head between his heavy, running-back’s thighs. And Chester Pulaski on top of her: an automaton. I sometimes can duplicate his rhythm, exactly, when I am counting out the push-ups (“seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven”). Or the sit-ups (“one hundred and twenty-one, one hundred and twenty-two, one hundred and twenty-three”).

Iowa Bob simply introduced me to the equipment; Junior Jones added his advice, and his own marvellous example; Father had already taught me how to run—and Harold Swallow, how to run harder. The technique and routine—and even Coach Bob’s diet—were easy. The hard part, for most people, is the discipline. As Coach Bob said, you’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. But for me, this was also easy. Because I did it all for Franny. I’m not complaining, but it was all for Franny—and she knew it.

“Listen, kid,” she told me—from Halloween to Christmas, 1956—“you’re going to throw up if you don’t stop eating bananas. And if you don’t stop eating oranges, you’re going to have a vitamin overdose. What the hell are you pushing so hard for? You’ll never be as fast as Harold Swallow. You’ll never be as big as Junior Jones.”

“Kid, I can read you like a book,” Franny told me. “No way is it going to happen

again

, you know. And if it does—and you actually are strong enough to save me—what makes you think you’ll even

be

there? If it happens again, I’ll be someplace far away from you—and I’ll hope you never know about it, anyway. I promise.”

But Franny took the purpose of my workouts too literally. I wanted strength, stamina, and speed—or I desired their illusions. I never wanted to feel, again, the helplessness of another Halloween.

There was still the evidence of a mangled pumpkin or two—one at the curb of Pine Street and Elliot Park, and another that had been thrown from the bleachers and burst upon the cinder track around the football field—when Dairy hosted Exeter for the last game of Iowa Bob’s winning season. Halloween was still in the air, although Chipper Dove, Lenny Metz, and Chester Pulaski were gone.

The second-string backfield appeared under the influence of a spell: they did everything in slow motion. They ran to the holes that Junior Jones had opened, after the holes had closed; they lobbed passes into the sky, and the passes took forever to come down. Waiting for one such pass, Harold Swallow was knocked unconscious and Iowa Bob wouldn’t let him play the rest of the long day.

“Somebody rang your bell, Harold,” Coach Bob told the speedster.

“I ain’t got no bell,” Harold Swallow complained. “Who rang?” he asked. “What somebody?”

At the half, Exeter led 24-0. Junior Jones, playing both offence and defence, had been involved in a dozen tackles; he caused three fumbles and recovered two; but the second-string Dairy backfield had coughed up the ball three times, and two looping passes had been intercepted. In the second half, Coach Bob started Junior Jones at a running-back position, and Jones made three consecutive first downs before the Exeter defence adjusted. The adjustment was simply recognizing that as long as Junior Jones was

in

the backfield, he would carry the ball. So Iowa Bob put Junior back in the line, where he had more fun, and Dairy’s only score, which came late in the fourth quarter, was properly credited to Jones. He broke into the Exeter backfield and took the ball away from an Exeter running back and ran into the Exeter end zone with it—and with two or three Exeter players clinging to him. The extra point was wide to the left and the final score was Exeter 45, Dairy 6.

Franny missed Junior’s touchdown: she had come to the game only because of him, and she had gone back to being a cheerleader for the Exeter game only to yell her lungs out for Junior Jones. But Franny got involved in an altercation with another cheerleader, and Mother had to take her home. The other cheerleader was Chipper Dove’s hiding place, Mindy Mitchell.

“Cock tease,” Mindy Mitchell called my sister.

“Dumb cunt,” Franny said, and whacked Mindy with her cheerleader’s megaphone. It was made of cardboard, and it looked like a large shit-brown ice cream cone with a death-grey

D

for Dairy painted on it. “

D

is for Death,” Franny always said.

“Smack in the boobs,” another cheerleader told me. “Franny hit Mindy Mitchell with the megaphone smack in the boobs.”

Of course I told Junior Jones, after the game”, why Franny wasn’t there to walk with him back to the gym.

“What a good girl she is!” Junior said. “You tell her, won’t you?”

And of course I did. Franny had taken

another

bath and was all dressed up to help Ronda Ray wait on tables; she was in a pretty good mood. Despite the rather landslide conclusion to Iowa Bob’s winning season, nearly everyone seemed in a good mood. It was opening night at the Hotel New Hampshire!

Mrs. Urick had outdone herself at plainness-but-goodness; even Max was wearing a white shirt and tie, and Father was absolutely beaming behind the bar—the bottles winking in the mirror, under his fast-moving elbows and over his shoulders, were like a sunrise Father had always believed was coming.

There were eleven couples and seven singles for overnight guests, and a divorced man from Texas had come all the way to see his son play against Exeter; the kid had gone out of the game in the first quarter with a sprained ankle, but even the Texan was in a good mood. Compared to him, the couples and the singles seemed a little shy—not knowing each other, just having children at the Dairy School in common—but after the kids went back to their dorms, the Texan got everyone talking to each other in the restaurant and bar. “Isn’t it

great

having kids?” he asked. “God, it’s something how they all grow up, isn’t it?” Everyone agreed. The Texan said, “Why don’t you all pull your chairs over here to my table and have a drink on me!” And Mother stood anxiously in the kitchen doorway, with Mrs. Urick and Max, and Father stood poised but confident behind the bar; Frank ran out of the room; Franny held my hand and we held our breath; Iowa Bob looked as if he were suppressing an enormous sneeze. And one by one the couples and the singles got up from where they were sitting and attempted to pull their chairs over to the Texan’s table.

“Mine’s stuck!” said a woman from New Jersey, who’d had a little too much to drink; she had a sharp, squeaky giggle of the mindless quality of hamsters running miles and miles on those little wheels in their cages.

A man from Connecticut turned bright red in the face, trying to lift his chair, until his wife said, “It’s nailed down. There are nails that go right into the floor.”

A man from Massachusetts knelt on the floor by his chair. “Screws,” he said. “Those are

screws

—four or five of them, for each chair!”

The Texan knelt down on the floor and stared at his chair.

“

Everything’s

screwed down here!” Iowa Bob shouted, suddenly. He had not spoken to anyone since after the game, when he told the scout from Penn State that Junior Jones could play anywhere. His face was unfamiliarly red and shining, as if he’d had one more drink than he usually allowed himself—or the sense of his own retirement had finally come to him. “We’re all on a big ship!” said Iowa Bob. “We’re on a big cruise, across the world!”

“Ya-

hoo

!” the Texan shouted. “I’ll drink to that!”

The woman from New Jersey clutched the back of her screwed-down chair. Some of the others sat down.

“We’re in danger of being swept away, at any time!” Coach Bob said, and Ronda Ray came swishing back and forth between Bob and the Dairy parents poised at their well-fastened seats; she was passing out the coasters, and the cocktail napkins again, and flicking a damp towel over the edges of the tables. Frank peeked in from the door to the hall; Mother and the Uricks seemed paralyzed in the kitchen doorway; Father had lost none of the glitter he absorbed from the bar mirror, but he stared at his father, old Iowa Bob, as if he feared that the retired coach was about to say something crazy.

“Of

course

the chairs are screwed down!” Bob said, sweeping his arm toward the sky, as if he were giving his last halftime speech—and this were the game of his life. “At the Hotel New Hampshire,” said Iowa Bob, “when the shit hits the fan, nobody gets blown away!”

“Ya-

hoo

!” the Texan cried again, but everyone else seemed to have stopped breathing.

“Just hold on to your seats!” said Coach Bob. “And nothing will ever hurt you here.”

“Ya-

hoo

! Thank

God

the chairs are screwed down!” the big-hearted Texan cried. “Let’s all drink to that!”

The wife of the man from Connecticut gave an audible sigh of relief.

“Well, I guess, we’ll just have to speak up if we’re all going to be friends and

talk

to each other!” the Texan said.

“Yes!” said the New Jersey woman, a little breathlessly.

Father was still staring at Iowa Bob, but Bob was just fine—he turned and winked at Frank in the hall doorway, and bowed to Mother and the Uricks, and Ronda Ray came through the room again and gave the old coach a saucy stroke across his cheek, and the Texan watched Ronda as if he’d forgotten all about chairs—screwed down or not screwed down. Who cares if the chairs can’t be moved? he was thinking to himself—because Ronda Ray had more moves than Harold Swallow, and she was into the spirit of opening night, like everyone else.

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