“Frank! Frank! Where the hell are you?”
Fuck!
“Frank!”
It was his father, outside, yelling for him.
“Frank! I’m lookin’ for you!”
Fuck me!
Frank turned to stone, his body a Mount Vesuvius victim petrified with his middle finger on the edge of her twat.
“What?” she said.
He couldn’t answer. He was thinking hard. Just do it, he told himself. If they got caught, so what? This was the ultimate. No punishment could make him ever regret this. Boil me in fucking oil, I don’t care, just let me get my pecker inside of her.
But then he thought about her father, and the fact that he had people whacked all the time. Fucking his daughter definitely qualified as a whack-able offense.
“Frank!” she whispered. “Come on! Don’t stop!” She glared at him with crossed brows. She pulled his face to hers, but the moment her tongue found his, King Kong had a spasm, a big one, as if he’d just had a stroke.
Oh, shit!
Frank hadn’t completely shot his wad, but there’d been a spurt. He was sure of it.
Shit!
“Frank! Come on!” She was testy and needy and annoyed.
“Annette?”
They both froze this time. It was her mother. She was in the house, her high-heeled sandals slapping the soles of her feet out in the hallway.
“Annette? Are you okay?”
Frank put his finger to his lips, signaling for her to be quiet. Her mother was going to catch them. She’d tell her husband. Frank would be fucked. He had to get out of there. He looked out the window next to the bed and saw the flat roof of the sun porch. He leapt off the psychedelic bed and opened the window.
“Annette?” her mother called out.
“What’re you doing?” Annette whispered.
“I gotta go.”
“But—“
“I’ll call you.” He had one leg out the window.
“Wait.” She grabbed a paperback off the floor and a pen from the night table, opened the book, and scribbled her phone number in the margin of the first page she came to. She ripped out the page and thrust it into his hand. “That’s my private number.” She pointed to the powder blue princess phone on the floor.
“Good,” he said, but he wasn’t really listening.
He dipped his head and climbed the rest of the way out the window. He crossed the roof, running in a crouch like Groucho. His father was standing in the driveway near the truck, and somehow, like magnets, their eyes met. His father’s brows shot up into his hairline. He bit his bottom lip and shook his fist.
But Frank was less worried about his father than Mrs. Trombetta. If she saw him, she’d tell her husband, and he’d be dead meat. He rushed to the edge of the roof that faced the backyard and thought about trying to lower himself down but couldn’t figure out how to do it without ripping down the rain gutter. He’d have to jump into the flower bed that his father had just planted that morning. But there was no alternative. He picked his spot in the rows of newly planted dusty millers and red-leaf begonias between two arbor vitae bushes. He bent his knees, got into a squat, and jumped. His hair lifted off his scalp as he dropped. He landed on his feet with a crunch, ankle deep in cocoa bean hulls, and immediately stepped out of the bed. Two deep footprints marred the otherwise perfectly spread cocoa beans. His fall had also flattened at least a half dozen brand-new plants.
His father came rushing around the corner of the house. “Jesus Christ! Look what you did? What the hell were you doing up there? What’re you, crazy?”
Frank just stared at him, his head thrumming.
“Oh, Jesus! Look at this!” His father kneeled down at the edge of the bed and tried to rescue the damaged plants. He treated them as if they were little kittens that Frank had stomped on.
“Go get me the little fork and a spade. Hurry up before Mrs. Trombetta sees this.”
Little fork? What the fuck was he talking about?
“The little planting fork I use. And a spade. Hurry up before she comes out.”
Frank wandered around the house and walked toward the truck, amazed that his father was so worried about a few little flowers. It wasn’t as if Mrs. Trombetta didn’t have, like, a billion flowers in her fucking beds.
Flowers in beds, he thought. Annette in bed. Her psychedelic bed. In the sky. With diamonds.
He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the page of the book she’d used to write down her phone number. He stared at her handwriting, the stout rounded numbers like a line of dancing mushrooms. Then he noticed the title of the book at the top of the page. The Scarlet Letter.
Frank laughed out loud. He tried to control himself, but it was too fucking funny. His legs folded under him as he collapsed onto the lawn, laughing his head off.
A breeze blew his hair into his eyes, and he caught a strong whiff of chocolate. All of a sudden he was really hungry. Must be the munchies, he thought with a grin.
“Frank! Hurry up!”
Chapter 13
“But what the hell were you doing up there?” His father shook his head in disbelief and ran his fingers through his hair as he drove the truck. His hair stuck out at the sides like a mad professor. “I don’t know what the hell you were thinking.”
Frank closed his eyes. He was fuzzy, still a little high, and tired of hearing his father’s voice. He sat in the middle, wedged between his father and Raul. They were driving home, finished for the day, heading down Main Street toward Raul’s apartment house in East Orange. His father had been yammering at him all day, going over the same territory again and again. Even Raul was tired of it, even though he was too polite to say anything. He just stared straight ahead through the windshield, zoning out, probably thinking of Uruguay, Frank guessed. Probably thinking of someplace quiet.
“But what the hell were you doing up there with that girl?”
Frank closed his eyes and tipped his head back. What the fuck do you think, Dad?
“She’s a nice girl. I hope you didn’t do anything to her. Tell me you didn’t do anything to her. Please.”
“I didn’t do anything to her,” Frank said. But I tried. And I was almost there. But then you showed up.
“You know who that girl’s father is, don’t you? I hope you treated her like your sister. That’s how you’re supposed to treat girls. You know that, don’cha?”
Yes, you told me, Dad. A million times you told me.
“You sure you were just listening to records up there?”
“Yes,” Frank said, nodding like a horse. “I told you.”
“In her room.”
“Yes. That’s where her record player is.”
“In her room.”
“That’s where mine is. In my room. That’s where kids keep their stuff.”
“Hey, don’t get smart.”
“I’m not getting smart. I’m just telling you how it is.”
Raul was in a trance, dreaming of the jungles or the mountains or the savannahs or whatever the hell they had down in Uruguay. Maybe he was high, too. Maybe he snuck off and lit up a joint in the woods when his father wasn’t looking. Frank didn’t know for a fact that Raul got high, but it was possible. How else could he stand to be with Frank’s father ten hours a day, six days a week?
His father stopped for a red light across from the First National Bank. A fat black woman in pink stretch pants and her little boy crossed the street in front of them. The kid was no more than five, and he was dawdling, so his mother turned around and swatted his backside. He hardly reacted, but he did pick up his pace. Frank looked sideways at his father, waiting for him to say something racist, which he often did, but he was quiet all of a sudden. Maybe he had talked himself out.
But as soon as the light turned green, and he put the truck into gear, he started up again. “You sure you didn’t touch that girl?”
Frank sighed. “I didn’t do anything to her.”
That counted, he thought.
Making out and feeling her up was nice, but it didn’t count as scoring. An ace in the hole is scoring. Fucking is scoring. Everything else is just an appetizer.
“You know, she’d be a good girl for you. She would.”
Frank looked at him. What the fuck was he talking about?
His father caught his eye in the rearview mirror. “Whattaya looking at me that way for? You need a girlfriend, right? Everybody needs a girlfriend. You’re gonna get married some day. Unless you’re queer. You’re not queer, are you?”
Frank ground his molars and held his tongue.
“Hey, don’t get mad at me. All I’m saying is that this Annette is a nice girl from a nice family. Marrying John Trombetta’s daughter wouldn’t be a bad thing. You wouldn’t be poor.”
“I’m in high school. No one gets married in high school.”
“Wake up, stunade. In my day everybody got married right out of high school. Sometimes right in high school. Girls get knocked up all the time, have to get married. Your grandmother was sixteen when she got married.”
“Did she have to because–?”
His father’s finger shot out like a switchblade. “Don’t even say it? No, she wasn’t”
How do you know? A little grin on Frank’s face. His father would have been that kid.
“You know that’s the problem with sending you and your sister to Catholic school. You don’t know nothing. Not about the real world. You’re too sheltered. Kids in public school know what the world’s all about. The real world. You know, too much school can make you stupid.”
Frank could see where this was going. College is a waste of time. What good is college? What’re you gonna learn in college that you can’t learn on your own? He’d heard it all before, and he didn’t want to hear it again. Except now his father was probably going to add, Get married to Annette Trombetta and her father will give you a good job. As what? A hit man.
The traffic light at the next corner turned red, and his father pulled to a stop.
“I’m gonna get out here,” Frank said. He pointed to the door and gestured for Raul to let him out.
“Where you going?” his father said.
Raul opened the door and got out to let Frank pass. Frank hopped out, and Raul got back in.
“I gotta stop by Dom’s house,” Frank said through the open window.
“Dom’s house? What for?”
“I gotta tell him something.”
“About what you did to that girl? Is that what you gotta tell him?”
“No, Dad.”
“How you gonna get home?”
“I’ll walk. It’s not that far.”
“But—“
Honk!
The light turned green, and the driver behind the truck blew his horn.
“I’ll see you at home.” Frank waved as he trotted across the street to the sidewalk.
He could hear his father cursing at the driver behind him as he revved his engine and popped the clutch, taking off in a cloud of gray exhaust. Frank watched him drive off as he walked down the side street toward the train trestle and the tracks above that divided the town. When he was in grade school, his parents didn’t want him walking under the trestles. They said kids got beat up there, and they were right. But Frank didn’t see anyone on the sidewalk, so he didn’t worry about it.
As he stepped into the shadow of the concrete underpass, he suddenly felt cold. It was always cold and damp under there, even in the summer. The concrete walls had recently been whitewashed to cover the graffiti, but there was already some new graffiti. A brand new canvas for love and anger and racist bullshit.
“RH + MJ” in block-print black marker inside a heart.
“Nelly + Herbie.”
“FUCK YOUR MOTHER” in blue spray paint. “I JUST FUCKED YOURS” in red paint.
“BLOW ME, NIGGER” in the same blue spray paint with a quickly drawn penis with big balls under the words.
Frank had heard that some parents give their kids the “sex talk” when they hit puberty. The birds-and-the-bees talk. Frank never got it. Just about everything he knew about sex he’d learned from graffiti, and the walls of the trestle underpasses in town were an encyclopedia of information, some graphic, some cryptic. It was his Kinsey Report.
As he came out of the underpass, the sun warmed his bare arms. He felt dirty and grungy from work, fuzzy from the pot, and horny as hell from being denied his best chance yet to have real sex. All he could think about was Annette and how close he’d come. His dick had been semi-hard to hard ever since. It was the worst feeling he’d ever had. Much worse that masturbatus interruptus. He had to get home to jerk off. It was medicinal. If he didn’t do it soon, he was afraid he might die.
He spotted his church up ahead, Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, its tall spire reaching into the sky and looming over the submerged highway that bisected the town. The convent and grammar school were in separate buildings next door, all of them made out of the same kind of orange bricks. Frank thought of them as Catholic bricks. Every Catholic school and almost every church he’d ever seen in New Jersey was made out of these orange bricks. The Catholic Church must’ve owned the orange brick factory, but apparently they didn’t sell to outsiders because he had never seen an orange-brick synagogue or an orange-brick apartment house or an orange-brick city hall.
Frank stared at his old school. He had gone there from kindergarten through eighth grade. He’d been an altar boy, too. He considered the time he’d spent at Perpetual Sorrow his Dark Ages. Nuns from hell, and priests worthy of the Spanish Inquisition. More religion was taught in those classrooms than reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Frank crossed the street and headed toward the church. If he cut through the parking lot where he used to play kickball when he was a little kid, he could squeeze through the hedges, cut through the hospital property next door, and slip through the broken fence behind his house. It would get him home sooner. To his bedroom and sweet release. He knew he’d better take care of that before his father got home. He was pretty sure his father wasn’t finished interrogating him about Annette.
He walked across the highway overpass, cars and trucks zooming under his feet. The highway had been built during his grammar school years. The kids just got used to the sound of tenement buildings being demolished and bulldozers digging a deep trough across the landscape. It took years to finish the highway, which connected Newark to the suburbs, bypassing neighborhoods like Frank’s that were urban but in no way cosmopolitan. Crime and congestion but no culture.
His old school was locked and quiet, which was no surprise for a late Saturday afternoon, and the convent, a two-story shoe box of a building, was always ominously still. No one but the nuns passed through those doors, and God knows what kind of shaved-head, self-flagellation, sado-maso-lesbo perversions went on in there.
The driveway between the convent and the church had a ten-foot wall of hemlock bushes on one side. Great for hide-and-seek, Frank remembered as he walked by. He could see the hospital up ahead. His house was on the other side of that parking lot. When he got home, he’d go straight to the bathroom for a shower, but before he did that, he’d sit on the toilet and take care of business—
“Sssshhh!”
Frank jumped, startled by the insistent voice. What the–?
“Quiet. Pigeons.” Father Ugo was hiding in the hemlocks, aiming his BB gun at the roof of the church.
“So many pigeons,” he whispered in his thick Italian accent. “They shit in the gutter, clog it up. Rain come, it make the leaks in the church. Lots of money to fix.”<
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Father Ugo was from Sardinia, which was unusual. Most of the Italians who had immigrated to this part of New Jersey were from southern Italy, and parish priests usually reflected their community—Irish priests for the Irish, Polish priests for the Poles, Sicilians for the Sicilians, and southern Italians for the southern Italians. But for some reason the Church had sent Father Ugo to Perpetual Sorrow. Maybe it was penance for something he’d done. He was proud to tell anyone who’d listen that he’d been a great hunter in Sardinia and had bagged his first wild pig before he made his First Holy Communion. He stopped hunting when he entered the seminary, but he still loved to shoot at pigeons. To save the parish money, he claimed.
“I use the rock salt,” he whispered to Frank. “Burns under the skin. They remember not to come back.”
Frank wasn’t sure if Father Ugo knew his name, but he probably remembered him from his altar boy days. One time when Frank was in fifth grade, Father Ugo chewed him out royally for putting too much incense in the censor during a funeral and smoking up the whole church, the family coughing through their tears of grief. Frank had done it on purpose because he’d overheard his father saying that the dead guy was a real son of a bitch. Frank was just trying to please his old man.
“Don’t move,” Father Ugo said, squinting down the barrel, pointing it nearly straight up at a flock of pigeons nesting in the rain gutter. He squeezed the trigger, and the BB gun made a small phoop instead of a big POW like a regular gun. The pigeons fluttered their wings and abandoned the gutter. Except for one. It flapped its wings frantically but fell like a shot and hit the small concrete driveway next to the rectory entrance. It almost crashed into the navy-blue Chevy Impala that the priests shared.
Father Ugo was already setting up his next shot, sighting down the barrel. “Frank,” he said, “when you go to confession last time?”
Frank was shocked that he remembered his name. He figured the priest had just forgotten about him now that he had graduated and wasn’t an altar boy anymore. Was it possible that he knew Frank hadn’t been to church in months?
The Temptations of St. Frank Page 14
