Crying Wolf (3 page)

They were. Or at least this man was quicker than this woman. Before she knew it, even before he knew it, to tell the truth, Freedy had closed the distance between them and grabbed one of those floating breasts. Not
grabbed
. Wrong word—it was much gentler than that, more like the kind of semirough stuff that drove Estrella, for example, wild.

At first Freedy thought it was having the same effect on Bliss, from the way she was screaming. That was the freaky thing about Estrella, or that other girl from Riverside, her name escaping him at the moment. They flat-out screamed with pleasure. But this scream, Bliss's scream, went on a little too long, and there was nothing pleasant about it. She really had an irritating voice. And what was this? She'd bit his arm or something? Bit him? Not a sex kind of bite, but a hurting bite. Like she was resisting. Like she hadn't been dreaming the dream.

And also this funny taste. Blood in his mouth? Meaning he'd bitten her back? Yes, her tit was bleeding, but not much, not much more than Estrella's when they were having a little fun that night after the Marilyn Manson pay-per-view.

But this woman, this woman with the name that didn't fit, was no Estrella, and that screaming was horrible. Freedy did what the hero always had to do to stop hysteria, swatting her a crisp one across the face.

Didn't work. Bliss kept screaming, higher and higher, making him want to shut her off immediately, the way he would if he'd been flicking the remote and come across one of those opera singers with the screeching voices. Freedy reared back to give her another one, and would have, but someone yelled, “Stop.”

A third person. Woman, also with an irritating voice. Freedy looked around, spotted her on the second-floor balcony of the house, a younger woman, his own age or even a few years less, wearing boxers and a sleeveless T-shirt. Dynamite bod, better than Bliss's but a lot like it at the same time. Hair all rumpled, like she'd just got out of bed. And the part that didn't fit: a gun in her hand. Not a little toy, either, but a fucking monster. What was wrong with these people? His hard-on, which had been throbbing underwater like some kind of pumped-up eel, failed completely.

“Stop,” said the woman on the balcony again. Her gun hand was shaking, but the gun was on him, more or less.

Freedy put his hands in the air, not high, but visible. “Everything's cool,” he said. “Just a consensual misunderstanding.”

Bliss, crying, or sobbing, climbed out of the pool, her naked body all exposed as she hoisted herself over the side, but not a turn-on at all, maybe even the opposite, in a funny way like those naked Auschwitz people.

“What should I do, Mom?” said the woman on the balcony.

“Don't let him move,” she said, her voice now up in opera territory. Hysterical, no doubt about it. “Don't let the pervert move. I'm calling the police.” And she stumbled across the patio and into the house.

Freedy looked up at Bliss's daughter. “This is way overblown.”

“You're moving,” she said. “Don't. I took marksmanship at camp.”

Freedy nodded, kept moving, angling toward the corner of the pool nearest the house. At that end of the patio stood a table shaded by a big umbrella. If he could get out of the water, get behind the umbrella, at least she wouldn't be able to see him. Then somehow to cross the open space between the umbrella and the corner of the house. Okay: that was the strategy.

“You're moving,” said the girl.

Freedy held his hands higher now, palms open. He gave her his best smile: he had big white teeth, a dazzling smile, like a movie star, but all natural. “I'm not. Honest.” He kept moving.

The gun went off; Freedy couldn't believe she'd actually fired it on purpose. Something smacked the water right beside him at the same moment. Then he was on the patio, running low behind the umbrella. A stupid time to get stung by a bee, but he felt it in his thigh. Then he saw the rip in the umbrella, heard the pop of the gun. Or maybe he'd got it in the wrong order. Didn't matter; in a few strides he was around the house, had scooped up his boots and his cutoffs, jumped in the van, goosed it. And zoom.

Ten minutes later he was bumper-to-bumper on the PCH, like any other citizen, except he wasn't wearing anything and his right outer thigh was bleeding, front and back. But not heavily, more of a seeping than bleeding, and front and back had to be good, had to mean the slug had gone right through. No biggie. In fact, the whole little adventure didn't amount to much. A misunderstanding, like he'd said. And since they weren't even on the schedule, it hadn't really happened, at least not in terms of anything that counted, such as A-1 and his job. Freedy narrowed his eyes, thought hard. Bliss had assumed he was from their regular pool company. Had she seen the van? No. So any investigation would lead to a dead end. And since no real crime had been committed, it would stop there. Plenty of real crimes for the cops to solve. This was LA. Like his mother often said, especially when she was a little stoned: “If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” She was a sucker for philosophical puzzles like that. The Shermans weren't on the schedule. That meant no one in the forest, and no sound.

So it was a normal day. Except for that word
pervert:
what a disgusting thing to say.

Freedy turned into a Rite-Aid, pulled on his cutoffs, gently, although he was barely bleeding now, and checked the schedule. The Goldmans—maybe best to skip them this week—and then some other people up Las Flores. He was five minutes away, would be early, if anything. Nothing to do now but buy bandages, tape himself up, a normal worker on a normal day. Elementary, my dear Watson. Smiling to himself, Freedy had put on his boots and was opening the door when his beeper went off.

His leg began to throb at once, from hip to toe, with an intensity that made him say, “Oh, fuck,” out loud. A woman loading groceries into a Saab convertible glanced back at him. He closed the door.

Freedy checked the number on the beeper: the office. He sat in the van, taking deep breaths, balling his hands tight, trying to control the pain. Then he remembered the meth, less than a teaspoonful probably, in a twist of foil under the seat. Or in the glove box. Or under the other fucking seat. In his rage, he punched something, hard. The cover popped off the ashtray and there was the meth. Abracadabra. A pinch in each nostril, snort snort, zipped an energy dart up his nose into his brain, through his whole body.

Much better. He corrected that rage thing right away. He hadn't been in a rage, more like frustration. Rage wasn't cool. Freedy went to a pay phone and called in.

“A-1,” said one of the office girls.

“Hi there,” said Freedy. “Freedy.”

“Oh. A moment.”

Freedy heard some muffled talking back at the office, but he wasn't really listening. Instead he stared at the sky, a beautiful blue sky with a lone airplane in it, towing a Marlboro-man banner.

“Freedy?” The boss—not the manager, but the boss. A spic too, but he spoke good English, almost like an American.

“Yup,” said Freedy.

“Where are you at this moment, Freedy?” said the boss. He pronounced it
Friddy,
one of the only giveaways that he was a spic.

“At a pay phone.”

“Where is the pay phone?”

“You mean with some precision?” Freedy said, just to show him what a real American could do with the language.

“I do.”

“Hard to say,” said Freedy, “since I'm kind of en route at the moment.”

“From where?”

“Wherever the schedule says. I'm always on schedule, you know that.”

“It says the Goldmans, on Piuma.”

“Then it was the Goldmans.”

Pause. “There's been a slight schedule change, Freedy.”

“Oh yeah?”

“So the best thing would be to return to the office.”

“The office?”

“Something's come up. A big job. Bonuses all around if we're done by nightfall.”

“So why don't I go right wherever it is and get started?” But Freedy was just playing now. He knew it was bullshit; bonuses never happened.

“Because I want you to take the compressor.”

“Right,” said Freedy.

“Pardon?”

“I said right. I'm on my way.” Freedy hung up.

He got back in the van, took two more hits, had a little think, as his mother used to say. He was thinking very clearly, as he always did on meth: different from his mother, the clearly part. Right away he thought about Las Vegas, where he'd never been and always wanted to go. What better time? First he'd stop by his apartment, where he had three hundred dollars in the freezer and a bag of meth. Then drive as far as Bakersfield, say, before abandoning the van and hopping on a bus to Vegas. There: a plan, simple, like all good plans.

Nothing went wrong with the plan until he turned onto Lincoln, about a block from his place. Freedy had a room over a furniture store on the east side. Parked in front of the furniture store was a cruiser. Two more across the street, and a Paki, that would be the furniture store owner, his landlord, was talking to a cop on the sidewalk. Talking with his fucking hands. That's when it occurred to Freedy that this was a funny kind of speed. Usually he went fast and the world slowed down around him, making it easy to control. This time the world was cranking too.

Freedy spun the wheel, threw the van into a shrieking U-turn, just like the stunt driver whose pool he cleaned on Fridays. In the rearview, he caught a cop glancing up as he floored it. Or maybe not.

But the van—painted the color of the sea, with waves breaking over the fenders—had to go. His own car, his own fucking heap, was in the lot at the office, so that was out. Which left Estrella. She had a Kia, or some shitbox, that she washed and polished twice a week—one of the irritating things about her. Freedy hadn't been seeing Estrella as much lately, had been getting interested in another waitress in the same place, actually, who worked days like he did instead of nights like Estrella. But it was daytime now, and Estrella would be home.

She had a one-bedroom in Reseda, a garden apartment, meaning the entrance was off the alley. The pain was coming back, or at least Freedy thought it might, so he took two more snorts, moderate ones, and popped an andro before getting out of the van. Couldn't hurt. He crossed the alley, heart going pitty-pat, real fast, went through the space where a gate must have been at one time, into the dusty yard.

Across the yard, Estrella stood in her doorway. She rose on her tiptoes to kiss the cheek of a big guy who had his arm around her. A big guy with black hair like Estrella's and copper skin like Estrella's. He wore a white shirt and a black tie, and carried a suitcase. A jolt went through Freedy, as though he'd downshifted at ninety miles an hour. The cause was a combination of things—amazingly, he had that insight into himself even as he took off, but he was an amazing person—and her sleeping with spics was part of it, for sure. He had the grace to admit it.

They looked up. Did Estrella start to smile at the sight of him? He'd got her a good one before he knew. Then the big guy shouted something, “Hey,” maybe, and tried to push him away, or hit him or something. Mistake. The top blew off at that point, like one of those oil well gushers, except it was red. Not long after, maybe seconds, the big guy was on the ground and Estrella was kneeling over him, tears, the whole bit.

“Don't expect any sympathy from me, you whore,” said Freedy.

She gave him a strange look, although it was hard to tell since her face was already swelling up. “Mi hermano,” she cried. “Mi hermano.” Or some gibberish like that.

Freedy walked away, silent as Clint Eastwood after a town square gunfight. Overhead the sky was coppery, much the same as Estrella's skin. The blue sky was on the rich side of town. Freedy had another insight: California sucked.

 

T
hat night, on a bus to Vegas, Freedy had time to reflect. He felt pretty good, considering. His leg hurt, but nothing he couldn't control. He wore new jeans and a new western-style shirt, bought with Vegas in mind. That wad of money on Bliss Sherman's front seat? Turned out to be $650. Win some, lose some. Not a completely bad day. Call it mixed.

His most important accomplishment had been spiritual, if that was the word. He'd realized that California was not for him. That meant it was time to regroup, to center himself. Spiritual, centering: his mother's lingo. She'd been popping into his mind all day. Was there a reason for that? He thought for the first time of going home. He'd told himself he never would, but how could a week or two hurt? Home cooking, lying up for a while, sleep: what was wrong with that?

In Vegas he picked up a schedule. He'd flown out to California on a coast-to-coast one-way ticket from his mother—high-school graduation present, although a few lost credits kept him from walking with his class. The bus route back wasn't as simple: Vegas to Denver. Denver to Omaha. Omaha to Chicago. Chicago to Cleveland. Cleveland to Buffalo. Buffalo to Albany. Albany to Pittsfield. Pittsfield to Inverness.

Freedy caught the midnight bus to Chicago and soon fell asleep. He awoke to the sound of low voices, speaking Spanish across the aisle.

“Hey,” said Freedy.

“Yes?”

“Is there some word, sounds like
hermano
?”

“Si. Hermano.”

“What's it mean?”

“Brother.”

Had Estrella ever mentioned a brother? Now that he thought about it, maybe she had; an accountant, or something surprising like that, in Tijuana. In case there'd been a misunderstanding, Freedy decided not to dime her out to the INS, which had been his plan. That was his sensitive side coming into play again.

Nietzsche says of the New Testament: “a species of rococo taste in every respect.” Using the Christmas story as text, attack or defend in an essay of no more than two double-spaced pages.

—Assignment one, Philosophy 322

T
he shortest day of the year and therefore the latest dawn, but still it came too soon for Nat. Hunched over his desk in room seventeen on the second floor of Plessey Hall, head almost touching the gooseneck lamp whose similar posture had been mocking him all night, he tried to read faster. The problem was that chapter nine of
Introduction to Macroeconomic Theory: A Post-Keynesian Approach for a Global Polity,
like all the chapters that had gone before it, resisted fast reading. Three times, each slower than the last, he tried and failed to take in “with or without ignoring the realization that a deficit or surplus in the current account cannot be explained or evaluated without simultaneous explanation of an equal surplus or deficit in the capital account.” What kind of sentence contained two
withouts
? The words quivered on the page, threatened to change into something else, mere shapes, although interesting ones: he found himself gazing at a
z
. An unreliable letter, threatening in some obscure way, even unforgiving, or was all that merely the result of its comparative rarity, or association with Zorro?

Association with Zorro? Nat sat back in his chair. What was going on in his mind? What was wrong with him? He'd never studied this hard, at the same time never had a shakier grip on the material, never felt his mind wandering so much. If at all, he began, then stopped himself, aware that he was about to wander some more. He rose, rubbing his eyes, and gazed out his window. Dawn, all over the place. He could almost feel the earth spinning him toward that economics exam.

“They're shooting again,” he said.

No answer.

Turning, he saw that his roommate had fallen asleep on the couch, chem lab notes stacked high on his stomach. “Wags, wake up.”

Wags was silent. Nat went over to him. Wags looked terrible, face unshaven and blotchy, hair wild and oily, eyelids and the pockets under his eyes uniformly dark, as though he'd been using some sort of deathly makeup. But Wags's instructions had been not to let him fall asleep under any circumstances. How long had he been sleeping? Nat didn't know. He touched Wags's shoulder. “Wags.”

Nothing. Nat shook his shoulder gently—Wags felt hot—and when gently didn't work, harder.

Wags smiled, a silvery thread of drool escaping from the corner of his mouth. His eyes remain closed, but he spoke. “I was having the sweetest dream.”

“What about?”

“Can't remember. Helicopters? It's collapsing in little pieces down the sides of my brain.” Wags's concentration on whatever was happening inside his head was so intense that Nat felt his own mind focusing too, without result. Suddenly Wags's eyes snapped open and he sat up abruptly—Nat could smell him—scattering lab notes all over the floor. “My God. What time is it?”

“After seven.”

“After seven? In the morning? Then I'm totally fucked.” He plunged to the floor, snatching up lab notes by the handful, pausing once to glare at Nat. “You want me to flunk out, don't you?”

“Right,” said Nat. “And then all this will be mine.”

All this: the cramped outer room with their desks, computers, the couch, the cigarette-scorched hardwood floor, and off it the two bedrooms barely big enough for the beds. Wags laughed, a single bark, brief and unhappy.

“They're shooting again,” Nat told him.

Wags got up, went to the window. “Just getting some establishing shots,” he said. It was the fourth or fifth film crew on the quad since September—filmmakers in need of an ideal college campus came to Inverness—and Wags had become an expert on their movements, mixing with the crews when he could and even landing a role as an extra in a made-for-TV movie about a fraternity brother in need of a bone marrow transplant, scheduled for broadcast in the spring. “Wait a minute,” he said, leaning closer to the window, leaving another oily nose print on the glass. His voice rose. “Is that Marlo Thomas?”

Nat closed the economics book, shut off the gooseneck lamp, went down the hall to the shower. Wags stayed watching at the window, crumpled lab notes in both hands.

 

A
fter the exam—it had gone better than he'd expected—Nat went to the gym and took his hundred free throws, hitting ninety-one, despite how drained he was. The best he'd done since coming to the school: no explaining it. As he sank the last one,
swish,
barely disturbing the net, he realized that his answer to the last question had been completely wrong. Monetarism had nothing to do with it, completely irrelevant; they'd wanted all that current and capital account stuff, the two
withouts.
An essay question, worth one-third of the total grade. The mark of Zorro: he'd done not better than he'd expected, but worse, much worse. He hadn't pushed himself, not hard enough, not nearly.

Nat stood at the foul line, bouncing the ball. The workload, the speed, how smart everyone was. He thought of Arapaho State, where Patti was getting straight A's, and where he could be playing on the team instead of entering data in the fund-raising office every afternoon for $5.45 an hour. He thought of the Inverness varsity, whose home games he had watched—they were now one and three—knowing he was good enough to play for them; not start, maybe, but get in for more than garbage time. He thought of his street, his house, the kitchen, his mom.

The sudden feeling that someone was watching him made him turn. Not only no one watching him, but the gym was empty. He'd never seen it like that before. No one on the court, jogging on the track above, lifting behind the glass walls of the weight room. He went into the lobby, also deserted, looked through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the Olympic-sized pool. Empty too, the water still.

Outside the same thing: not a person on the quad except him, not a sound from the surrounding dorms—no hip-hop, no techno or industrial, no Lilith Fair. For a moment he felt light-headed. Was he coming down with something? Then it hit him. This morning was the last period on the exam schedule. The departure of the students, the teachers, even the film crew, all vanishing at once like characters in a fairy tale, probably happened just this way every Christmas.

The church bell—the top of the chapel tower visible over the gold-domed roof of Goodrich Hall, weathervane pointing north—tolled the hour. At the same time, a cold wind began to blow; from the west, Nat noticed, despite the weathervane. No snow had fallen yet, but everyone said the Inverness Valley was one of the snowiest places in the east. Nat looked up, saw a line of clouds closing over the sky.

He wasn't going anywhere for Christmas. There'd been money for only one trip home that semester, and he'd chosen Thanksgiving, although it was shorter, because Patti's birthday had been the day after. He crossed the quad and went into Baxter to check his mail. Standing before the rows of brass letter boxes, he realized he was still holding the basketball.

Nat put it down, turned the dial to J3, took out a letter.

Dear Nat
    
I'm so sorry about that little insident at Julie's party. I don't know what came over me. I'll never drink like that again. For sure. You were so great about it. At least that's what Julie said the next day. Joke. Everythings ok but I miss you so much and not looking forward to Xmas at all.
    
One other thing I think I missed my period—but don't worry, I maybe just got mixed up.
    
I love you soooo much.
    
Patti
    
ps—my present should be there by now.

Nat reached back into the box, found a small package. He took it back to the dorm. Wags's lab notes still lay all over the floor of the outer room. Nat heard voices in Wags's bedroom, glanced in the open door. No Wags. Clothes trailing over everything, and the TV on. One of those movie channels Wags liked to watch. An actor from the thirties or forties whose name Wags would know at once but Nat didn't stared thoughtfully into his glass while an offscreen actress asked what they were doing that night. Nat smelled coffee, noticed a steaming cup on the windowsill, half full. He left the TV on, went to his own bedroom, put Patti's gift on the bed.

Tacked on the wall was a list of what he wanted to accomplish during the holiday:

clean room

laundry

write home

work out

get to know town and surroundings

→on next semester

That last one being the most important: Nat had registered for an American novel course that required reading a book a week, and he'd never keep up, would fall behind in everything, without a head start. Book one,
Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories,
already borrowed from the library, was waiting on the orange crate that served as his bedside table.

Nat sat on the bed, picked up the book, but first reread Patti's letter. He tried to see what she'd crossed out, partially distinguishing only one word—
kissed, pissed,
or
missed—
but nothing else. He swung his feet up on the bed, overcame the urge to take off his sneakers. No time for sleep: two hundred pages of
Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories
before dinner was the goal. He read the letter one more time. There, in the center of all those unusual silences—his room, the dorm, the whole campus—he could almost hear Patti's voice. What had happened at Julie's party didn't bother him at all; what bothered him was the spelling. That, and the way she dotted the
i
in her name with a heart. Had she always? If so, it hadn't mattered before. Why should it matter now?

Nat opened
Young Goodman Brown
. The title page showed a woodcut of a young man striding down a country road. Someone had drawn a bottle of beer in his hand and a fat joint in his mouth. Nat turned the page.

Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street at Salem village. . . .

 

N
at opened his eyes. It was dark. His gaze went to the window, but there was no window, at least not where he was looking. He'd forgotten he wasn't in his bedroom at home. Rolling over, he checked the clock, read the numbers—11:37—but before he could make sense of them he heard footsteps in the outer room.

“Wags?” he called, but his throat was thick with sleep; he cleared it and tried again. “Wags?” At that moment he remembered that he'd been leaning out of a helicopter in his dream.

Silence from the other room. Then the door to the hall closed. 11:37
P.M.
Wouldn't Wags be home in Pittsburgh by now? Not Pittsburgh exactly, but someplace nearby called Sewickley, as Wags's parents had mentioned a couple of times on the Parents' Day visit in October, the significance lost on Nat at the time. Since then he'd learned that the country hid a network of Sewickleys with names like Greenwich, Chagrin Falls, Dover, Lake Forest, Grosse Pointe; that many students at Inverness came from those places; that Wags knew people they knew, and they knew people he knew.

He sat up. Had the door to the hall simply closed, or had it been something else, more of a slam? Nat rose, switched on the lights, peered into the outer room, saw everything as it had been earlier, Wags's lab notes still strewn on the floor, the screen savers of both computers in motion. He opened the door.

A man was walking away toward the stairs at the far end of the hall, a big man carrying something heavy. Nat took in a ponytail swinging behind his head and an electrical cord trailing between his legs, two dangling things that his half-sleeping mind, still following the logic of dreams, tried to relate. By the time he realized there was no relationship other than the visual one he'd seen at first glance, the man had disappeared down the stairs. Nat went back into Wags's bedroom. Wags's TV was gone.

Nat ran into the hall, yelled, “Hey!” He kept running, fully awake now, down the stairs to the first floor. No one there, but he picked up the sound of descending footsteps. Nat followed, heard the clicking of hard shoes on the old brick floor of the basement corridor. He yelled “Hey” again, took the last flight in one leap, swung around the banister post into the basement corridor. No one there.

Nat went down the corridor, slowing because it ended at a padlocked steel door with the word
Maintenance
stenciled on the front. He walked back the way he had come, passing three other padlocked doors, all of which he knew led to storage lockers for the students, and came to another door, lockless. Nat stood in front of that door. He sensed someone on the other side, tried to think of a way he could summon security and stand guard at the same time. Then came a jolt of adrenaline, and he jerked the door open.

A janitor's closet, full of brooms, mops, buckets, cleansers. Even empty, it wasn't big enough for a man with a television, especially one the size of Wags's. Nat closed the door, went back along the corridor, trying all the padlocks. Fastened, every one.

Nat stayed in the basement corridor for a minute or two, listening for a sound, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.

He went upstairs, along the first floor to the main entrance of the dorm. Had he imagined those footsteps on the brick floor, or misinterpreted some sound he had heard? It was one or the other. Nat opened the door to the quad. Surprise.

White. White everywhere: snow had fallen while he slept, fallen heavily, although it wasn't snowing now, and the stars shone bright. A foot of snow, maybe more, deep, crisp, even. It bent the branches of the old oaks, gave the statue of Emerson a hulking, steroidal profile, rounded the dorm entry pediments and other architectural features whose names Nat was starting to learn: pure, unmarred whiteness, glowing under the old Victorian lampposts as though lit from below.