In One Person

mean Donna,” I said.
    “Yeah, that’s her,” El said.
    “What about her?” I asked.
    “She’s not doing too well—that’s what I heard,” El told me.
    “Oh.”
    “I didn’t say she was
sick
,” El said. “I just heard she’s not doing too well, whatever that means. I guess she was someone
special
to you, huh? I heard that, too.”
    I didn’t do anything with this information, if you could call it that. But that night was when I got the call from Uncle Bob about Herm Hoyt dying at age ninety-five. “The coach is gone, Billy—you’re on your own with the duck-unders,” Bob said.
    No doubt, that must have distracted me from following up on El’s story about Donna. The next morning, Elaine and I had to open all the windows in the kitchen to get rid of the smoke from Raymond burning his frigging toast, and I said to Elaine: “I’m going to Vermont. I have a house there, and I’m going to try living in it.”
    “Sure, Billy—I understand,” Elaine said. “This is too much house for us, anyway—we should sell it.”
    That clown Raymond just sat there, eating his burned toast. (As Elaine would say later, Raymond was probably wondering where he was going to live next; he must have known it wouldn’t be with Elaine.)
    I said good-bye to El—either that same day or the next one. She wasn’t very understanding about it.
    I called Richard Abbott and got Mrs. Hadley on the phone. “Tell Richard I’m going to try it,” I told her.
    “I’ve got my fingers crossed for you, Billy—Richard and I would
love
it if you were living here,” Martha Hadley said.
    That was why I was living in Grandpa Harry’s River Street house, now mine, on the morning Uncle Bob called me from the office of Alumni Affairs at the academy.
    “It’s about Big Al, Billy,” Bob said. “This isn’t an obituary I would ever run, unedited, in
The River Bulletin
, but I gotta run the unedited version by you.”
    It was February 1990 in First Sister—colder than a witch’s tit, as we say in Vermont.
    Miss Frost was the same age as the Racquet Man; she’d died from injuries she suffered in a fight in a bar—she was seventy-three. The injuries were mostly head injuries, Uncle Bob told me. Big Al had found herself in a barroom brawl with a bunch of airmen from Pease Air Force Base in Newington, New Hampshire. The bar had been in Dover, or maybe in Portsmouth—Bob didn’t have all the details.
    “What’s ‘a bunch,’ Bob—how many airmen were there?” I asked him.
    “Uh, well, there was one airman first-class, and one airman basic, and a couple more who were only identified by the
airmen
word—that’s all I can tell you, Billy,” Uncle Bob said.
    “
Young
guys, right?
Four
of them? Were there four of them, Bob?” I asked him.
    “Yes, four. I assume they were young, Billy—if they were enlisted men and still in service. But I’m just guessing about their ages,” Uncle Bob told me.
    Miss Frost had probably received her head injuries after the four of them finally managed to get her down; I imagine it took two or three of them to hold her down, while the fourth man had kicked her in the head.
    All four men had been hospitalized, Bob told me; the injuries to two of the four were listed as “serious.” But none of the airmen had been charged; at that time, Pease was still a SAC base. According to Uncle Bob, the Strategic Air Command “disciplined” its own, but Bob admitted that he didn’t truly understand how the “legal stuff’ (when it came to the military) really worked. The four airmen were never identified by name, nor was there any information as to
why
four young men had a fight with a seventy-three-year-old woman, who—in their eyes—may or may not have been acceptable
as a woman
.
    My guess, and Bob’s, was that Miss Frost might have had a past relationship—or just a previous meeting—with one or more of the airmen. Maybe, as Herm Hoyt had speculated to me, one of the fellas had objected to the
intercrural
sex; he might have found it insufficient. Perhaps, given how young the airmen were, they knew of Miss Frost only “by reputation”; it might have been enough provocation to them that she was, in their minds, not a
real
woman—it might have been only that. (Or they were frigging homophobes—it might have been
only that
, too.)
    Whatever led to the altercation, it was apparent—as Coach Hoyt had predicted—that Big Al would never back down from a fight.
    “I’m sorry, Billy,”