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'Hey, please,' Chipper Dove said softly, to me.

'The main thing,' Frank said, 'is don't move. Don't resist anything. The bear does not appreciate resistance of any kind.'

'Just kind of go with it, man,' Ruthie said, dreamily.

I stepped up to Dove and unbuckled his belt; he started to stop me, but I said, 'No sudden movements.' Susie the bear jabbed her snout into Dove's crotch the instant Dove's pants hit the rug with a soft flop.

'I recommend holding your breath,' Frank advised, from the bedroom.

And that was Lilly's cue. In she came. It looked to Dove as if she just walked in with her own key from the door to the hall.

We all stared at the dwarf nurse; Lilly looked cross.

'I had the feeling you were up to this again, Franny,' Lilly said to her patient. Franny curled up on the couch, putting her back to us all.

'You're her nurse, not her mother,' I snapped at Lilly.

'It's not good for her -- this lunatic raping, raping, raping everyone!' Lilly shouted at me. 'Every time that damn bear is in heat, you just pull anyone you want in here and rape him -- and I'm telling you it's not good for her.'

'But it's all Franny likes,' Frank said, peevishly.

'It's not right that she likes it,' Lilly pointed out, like a stubborn but good nurse, which she was.

'Aw, come on,' I said. 'This one is special. This one raped her!' I cried to Lilly.

'He made me fuck a mud puddle!' Frank wailed.

'If we can just rape this one,' I pleaded with Lilly, 'we won't rape anybody else.'

'Promises, promises,' said Lilly, folding her little arms across her little breasts.

'We promise!' Frank shouted. 'Just one more. Just this one.'

'Earl!' Susie snorted, and I thought Dove was going to faint dead away. Susie snorted violently into Dove's crotch. Susie the bear seemed to be saying that she was especially interested in this one, too.

'Please, please!' Dove started to scream. Susie knocked his legs out from under him and laid her weight over his chest. She put a big paw -- a real paw -- right on his private parts. 'Please!' Dove said. 'Please don't! Please!'

And that was all Lilly wrote. That was where we were supposed to stop. Nobody had any more lines, except Lilly. Lilly was just supposed to say, 'There will be no more rapes, no more -- that's final.' And I was supposed to pick Dove up and dump him out in the hall.

But Franny got up off the couch and pushed everyone away; she walked over to Dove. 'That's enough, Susie,' Franny said, and Susie got off Dove. 'Put your pants back on, Chipper,' Franny said to him. He stood up but he fell; he struggled to his feet again and pulled his pants up. 'And the next time you take your pants off, for anybody,' Franny told Chipper Dove, 'I want you to think of me.'

'Think of all of us,' said Frank, coming out of the bedroom.

'Remember us,' I said to Chipper Dove.

'If you see us again,' big Ruthie told him, 'better go the other way. Any one of us might kill you, man,' she told him, matter-of-factly.

Susie the bear took her bear's head off; she would never need to wear it again. From now on, the bear suit was just for fun. She looked Chipper Dove right in the eye. The number one first-class hysteric named Scurvy got up off the rug and came over to look at Chipper Dove, too. She looked at him as if she was committing him to memory; then she shrugged, and lit a cigarette, and looked away.

'Don't pass any open windows!' Frank called down the hall to Dove, as he left us; he walked away holding the wall of the hall for support. We all couldn't help but notice that he'd wet his pants.

Chipper Dove moved like a man seeking the men's room

in a hospital ward for the disoriented; he moved with the feeble lack of sureness of a man who wasn't sure what experience awaited him in the men's room -- as if, even, he wouldn't be sure what to do when he arrived at the urinal.

But there was, in all of us, that initial sense of letdown that should be documented in any fair study of revenge. Whatever we had done, it would never be as awful as what he had done to Franny -- and if it had been as awful, it would have been too much.

I would feel, for the rest of my life, as if I were still holding Chipper Dove by his armpits -- his feet a few inches off the ground of Seventh Avenue. There was really nothing to do with him except put him down; there never would be anything to do with him, too -- with our Chipper Doves we just go on picking them up and putting them down, forever.