'Chipper Dove!' sang the boys in the backfield. 'Dove did it first!'
'There you have it,' said Junior Jones to the Dean of Men. 'You got the picture?'
'What did they do -- and to whom?' the Dean asked.
They gang-banged Franny Berry,' said Junior Jones, just as the Dean of Women emerged from the bathroom; she saw the black athletes swaying in the doorway, like a choral society from an African country, and she screamed again; she shut herself back up in the bathroom.
'Now we'll bring you Dove,' said Junior Jones.
'Gently, Junior!' cried the Dean. 'For God's sake, gently!'
I stayed with Franny; Mother and Father came to the infirmary with her clothes. Coach Bob was left to babysit with Lilly and Egg -- like the old days, I thought. But where was Frank?
Frank was out on a 'mission,' Father said mysteriously. When Father had heard that Franny was 'beaten up,' he'd never doubted the worst. And he knew that Sorrow would be the first thing she'd ask for when she was home in her own bed. 'I want to go home,' she would say; and then she'd say, 'I want Sorrow to sleep with me.'
'Maybe it's not too late,' Father had said; he'd left Sorrow at the vet's before the football game. If it had been a busy day for the vet, perhaps the old farter was still alive in some cage. Frank had undertaken the mission to go and see.
But it was like the rescue mission of Junior Jones; Frank arrived too late. He woke up the vet with his pounding on the door. 'I hate Halloween,' the vet probably said, but his wife told him it was one of the Berry boys asking about Sorrow. 'Oh-oh,' the vet said. 'I'm sorry, son,' the vet told Frank, 'but your dog passed away this afternoon.'
'I want to see him,' Frank said.
'Oh-oh,' the vet said. The dog is dead, son.'
'Have you buried him?' Frank asked.
'It's so sweet,' the vet's wife told her husband. 'Let the boy bury his own dog, if that's what he wants.'
'Oh-oh,' the vet said, but he led Frank to the hindmost room of the kennel, where Frank was treated to the sight of three dead dogs in a pile, with a pile of three dead cats beside them. 'We don't bury things on the weekends,' the vet explained. 'Which one is Sorrow?'
Frank spotted the old evil-smeller instantly; Sorrow had begun to stiffen up, but Frank was still able to force the dead black Labrador into a large trash bag. The vet and his wife couldn't have known that Frank had no intention of 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,' s
he 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.