The Hotel New Hampshire

“Don’t ask!” Harold Swallow yelled down to me. “Shit,” he said. “Nobody knows what he did to them, man. And nobody asks.”

Where the hell does Junior Jones live? I wondered, passing the third floor and climbing higher, my lungs breaking, Harold Swallow nowhere in sight. But Harold was waiting for me at the landing of the fifth and topmost floor.

Junior Jones lives in the sky, I thought, but Harold explained to me that most of the black athletes at the Dairy School were quartered on the top floor of this one dorm. “Where we’re out of sight, you know?” Harold asked me. “Like fucking birdies in the nests in the tippy-tops of the trees, man,” said Harold Swallow. “That’s where the black people get put at this shit-ass school.”

The fifth floor of the dorm was dark and hot. “Heat rises, don’t you know?” said Harold Swallow. “Welcome to the fuckin’ jungle.”

Every light in every room was out, but music was playing and escaping from under the doors; the fifth floor of that dorm was like a tiny street of nightclubs and bars in a city observing blackout conditions; and from the rooms I heard the unmistakable shuffling of feet—dancing and dancing in the dark.

Harold Swallow pounded on a door.

“What you want?” said the terrifying voice of Junior Jones. “You want to die?”

“Junior, Junior!” said Harold Swallow, pounding harder.

“You do want to die, don’t you?” said Junior Jones, and we heard a series of locks, as if from a jail cell, unlocking the door from inside.

“If some mother wants to die,” said Junior Jones, “I’ll help him.” More locks unlocked; Harold Swallow and I stepped back from the door. “Which one of you wants to die first?” said Junior Jones. Heat and a saxophone throbbed from his room; he was backlit by a candle burning on his desk, which was draped—like the coffin of a President—with the American flag.

“We need your help, Junior,” said Harold Swallow.

“You sure do,” said Junior Jones.

“They’ve got my sister,” I said to him. “They’ve got Franny,” I said. “And they’re raping her.”

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 grey 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 surprisngly 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!”