“Cool,” said Anton.
Nat laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Grace said. She raised an eyebrow, just like Izzie, except it was the left one.
“I was just thinking about Lorenzo.”
Grace laughed too, touched his arm, said: “I know what you mean.” Her touch: it felt cold, meaning there was a temperature difference, one he hadn’t felt with Izzie. There were many possible variables, of course, but he noted it anyway.
He’d told Grace a little lie. It wasn’t the thought of Lorenzo that had made him laugh, but the word cool, and this guy saying it, and the name Anton, and the frothy blue drink, and personal trainers. Things began to come together in Nat’s mind: the drink, for example, was for the woman in the pool and she was not Grace and Izzie’s sister, but their stepmother, Mrs. Zorn, despite how young she was. He could keep up. He was going to enjoy himself.
At that moment, too, he remembered the opposite of claustrophobia: agoraphobia. He didn’t have it. Five minutes later he was down in the street by himself, taking in New York, his mind going like never before.
Peter Abrahams
Crying Wolf
6
“One seeks a midwife for his thoughts, another someone to whom he can be a midwife; thus originates a good conversation.” Thus too does Nietzsche describe both the goal and method of Philosophy 322.
— Course description, Inverness College catalog
Living at home wasn’t perfect, but at least Freedy could see his old friends, old friends like Ronnie Medeiros.
“Give you twenty bucks for it,” Ronnie said, down in his basement.
“Fuck you, Ronnie. It’s a Panasonic. Look-picture-in-picture.” Ronnie had turned it on to make sure it was working.
“Take it or leave it,” Ronnie said.
Freedy took it. What was he going to do? Return the goddamn thing?
They lifted for a while. Ronnie’s place was in the flats, not far from Freedy’s mom’s. Being in the flats was what made the basement so damp, but why was it so cold? “Why’s it so goddamn cold?”
“California made you soft, is all.”
“Right.” Freedy slid another 45 on each end, meaning he was benching 305, the kind of weight Ronnie could pump only in his dreams. Ronnie spotted him, but didn’t have to lay a finger on the bar, not even on the last lift of three times ten. Freedy looked Ronnie in the eye on that last one, as if to say: Soft, you son of a bitch. The charge he got from that moment of silent communication gave him the strength to bust one more.
“What’s California like, anyway?” said Ronnie. Freedy knew what was going on in Ronnie’s mind, could follow his train of thought: California, the fountain of youth, Ponce whoever he was, Muscle Beach. Freedy had always been strong-would have been the captain of the football team if he’d kept up his grades, or maybe just not dropped out-but never strong like this.
He sat up, rubbed his chest. Ripped. Buff. A fuckin’ animal. Not like Ronnie, who had gone soft since high school, with his pot belly, extra chin, receding hairline, and that stupid hairy thing hanging under his lower lip: he’d turned into a Portagee, which was what he was, of course.
“Whole different scene out there, Ronnie.”
“Run into any movie stars?”
“Matter fact, yeah.”
“Like who?”
Freedy named him. “Kind of an asshole.”
“Kind of an asshole? You’re joking.”
“These people are different in real life, Ronnie.”
“You tryin’ to tell me you know him personally?”
Freedy nodded. “Customer of mine.”
“Huh?”
“Told you already.”
“That swimming-pool thing?”
“Business. Not thing. Business. I had a pool business. A-1 Pool Design, Engineering, and Maintenance. Still do, once the lawyers get through with all their bullshit. Why I’m taking this little… what’s the word?”
“Sabbatical?”
“Yeah, sabbatical.” They knew words like that, growing up in a college town.
There was a silence, except for the cartoons on the Panasonic, and water dripping somewhere nearby. On the TV a shark went snapping after some little critter; recalling to Freedy’s mind that Mexican cartoon of the squid arm snaking out from the filter outlet. And now he remembered where he’d seen the cartoon-in a bar in Mexico featuring one of those live sex shows. An Indian guy and two bleached blondes. A dark place, except for the TV behind the bar and the little stage with blue spotlights shining on tits, ass, and the Indian’s enormous dick. Squid arm and Indian dick: basic psychology, some kind of symbol, like the Eiffel Tower, precise word for the symbol escaping him at the moment; and he’d never think of it here, what with Ronnie stroking that stupid hairy thing under his lower lip and asking dumb questions.
“Huh?” said Freedy.
“A-1,” said Ronnie. “The name of this so-called business.”
“What about it?”
“Sounds like one of those outfits that try to get their name first in the yellow pages.”
“So?”
“Not what you’d call, you know, creative.”
“Creative?” said Freedy. “You turned into some kind of fag, or what?” He whipped out his wallet, flashed his business card at Ronnie. A-1 Pool Design, Engineering, and Maintenance, Friedrich Knight, Representative. Maybe Ronnie wouldn’t catch that representative bit. That was Freedy’s first thought. His second thought was: maybe the whole A-1 trip should have been kept out of the conversation. By that time, Ronnie had the card in his hand.
“Says here representative, ” said Ronnie. “That’s like rep, right?”
Freedy snatched the card back; not snatched, more like took back swiftly. “Which was before the buyout. The new cards haven’t been delivered. They’re so fuckin’ useless you wouldn’t believe it.”
Ronnie blinked. “Who?”
Freedy slipped the card in his pocket. “Printers, for Christ sake. You not listenin’? And now we’re in this Chapter Eleven shit, and everything’s on hold.”
“Chapter Eleven?”
“Technicality, Ronnie. Ties things up for a while.”
“What things?”
Freedy sighed. “Like in football.”
“Football?”
“Offsetting penalties.”
“Holding and pass interference?”
“That kind of thing.”
“I still think of the fucking Hoosac game,” Ronnie said. “Remember that pussy?”
“Who fumbled on the one?”
“He was on the goal line, Freedy. I was right there.”
“Faculty kid,” said Freedy. The college professors’ kids usually went away to boarding school, but this one hadn’t.
“Cost us the Hoosac game,” Ronnie said. “Thanksgiving, what year was that?”
A long time ago, four, five years, Freedy couldn’t remember.
“You ever think of that game, Freedy?”
“Nah.” Although he did, once or twice-last game he was eligible, junior year-but not because of the score or anything like that. What he remembered was breaking one of the Hoosac player’s legs on a blind-side block after a fumble recovery-a clip, actually, but missed by the ref-and the sound it made, a real Thanksgiving sound.
“ ’Nother set?” he said.
“Nah.” Ronnie’s eyes dipped down at him, still sitting on the bench, checked out those muscles, no doubt about it. “So what’s this chapter shit?”
“Forget it, Ronnie. I bought out the other guy and now we’re waiting on the details. End of story.”
“Bought him out with what?”
Money, you asshole. But Freedy didn’t say it. Because if he did, then the next thing he knew Ronnie would be saying something like Why’re you selling me your old TV for twenty bucks? Or this old TV that’s supposedly yours? “Listen to me, Ronnie.”
“I’m listenin’.”
“When they do one of these Chapter
Elevens it’s like a ref’s time-out.”
“To discuss the offsetting penalties?”
“You got it.”
“And whiles there’s a time-out nothing can happen. Bank accounts all frozen, that kind of shit.”
Ronnie glanced at the TV. The little critter was trapped inside the shark’s mouth, but he had a jar of red-hot pepper in his hand, said Red Hot Pepper Yiaow right on it. “All frozen,” said Ronnie. “I get it.” Water kept dripping, drip drip, from somewhere nearby.
Living at home meant being back in the flats. The flats-at the bottom of the north, cold side of College Hill, sunless most winter afternoons, between the old railroad tracks, where nothing ran anymore except the trash train once a week, and the river-hadn’t changed much. It wasn’t like he had to get used to anything new. A few more potholes in the streets, the house fronts more dilapidated, another line or two on his mother’s face.
She was in the kitchen, pouring lumpy yellow batter into muffin tins. That was what she did: sold her muffins to health stores up and down the valley. Plus cashing her disability checks, welfare, whatever it was, smoking her dope, listening to her music. It was playing right now, and she was swaying to it, there by the counter: Birkenstocks, an Arab kind of robe, thick gray hair almost down to her waist. Freedy disliked all music, but that sixties shit was the worst. He snapped it off.
She turned, not fast. None of her movements was fast. That was part of being centered. “I was enjoying that, Freedy.”
“You’ve heard it a million times.”
She looked at him. She had big dark eyes, deeper-set than they used to be, shadows in shadows. There was also a beauty-mark-sized drop of batter on her chin. “That’s what makes it art,” she said.
“You call that art?”
She sucked in her lips, one of her most annoying habits. “I’m a bit of an artist myself, Freedy, as I think you’re aware.”
He avoided glancing at any of her stuff, which wasn’t easy. Just in the kitchen: her paintings all over the walls, her pottery on the shelves, her macrame hanging from the ceiling, her embroidered place mats, oven mitts, aprons peeking out from every cupboard. All moons and stars and bare trees and cats and longhaired women in serapes.
“So?” he said.
“So I’m enough of an artist to know an artist when I hear one,” she said. “And Cat Stevens is an artist. Of the first water.”
Of the first water? What was she talking about? He could hardly understand her half the time, his own mother. They had nothing in common, didn’t even look alike. She was a wiry little thing; his size must have come from the father, whoever he was-but that was another story. Freedy didn’t even have a name for her: when he was little, he’d called her Hama, some Navajo word for mother. Then she’d wanted him to call her by her first name, like they were friends. Her first name, changed legally, was Starry, had to do with van Gogh, if he was the one who cut off his ear, although Freedy couldn’t remember exactly how. She never revealed her real first name; that person no longer existed, was the answer. Starry Knight-it sounded like a joke. Freedy didn’t call her anything.
“Why’s it so cold in here all time?” Freedy said.
“An old house,” she said. “In winter.”
She sat down at the table, reached for pen and paper. He knew what she was about to do-try to make up one of her goddamn poems, this one about an old house in winter. She’d made up lots of poems at one time, back when the Glass Onion, boarded up now for years, had poetry nights. A golden age in her life-she’d actually said that. Freedy went into his bedroom and closed the door, hard, but nothing out of control, not hard enough to break anything.
His childhood bedroom. Freedy had been born right here. She even had a photo album of the birth, with pictures of her with her legs spread, and her hippie friends around her, and the midwife holding up this bloody bawling thing that was him.
He closed the curtains, kept the lights off, made it dark so he wouldn’t have to see the wall paintings he’d grown up with-jungles and unicorns and toadstools and rainbows, with a bunch of elves thrown in, some of them smoking long pipes. And the lion-it was meant to be a lion but it looked more like a giant in a lion costume-holding up a poem on a scroll.
Little Boy
Soft snow cuddles you
In swaddling clothes
While plastic fantastic planet spins
Its wild, wild way
While away all the groovy ways little boy
In the soft snow arms of mother earth.
Freedy had no idea what the poem was supposed to mean, but it had scared the shit out of him every night for years; as had the lion man, and the elves, who turned wicked-looking at night, and all the electric blue, her favorite color. He lay on the bed, heard the music back on. That “Winterlude” song by Bob Dylan. She started playing it on the first snowy day and didn’t knock off till spring. Freedy hated the song, hated Bob Dylan. He pulled a pillow over his head.
It smelled moldy. The whole house smelled like that. Uneven floors, peeling paint, water marks on the ceiling: it was falling apart. All the kids he’d grown up with lived in houses just the same. Only difference was most of them rented, and the ones that didn’t had big mortgages and were always in danger of default, while they-she-had owned their house outright for as long as he could remember. None of these details had interested him back in high school. But now that he knew more of the world, he couldn’t help thinking more maturely about things. Like: what was the house worth on the open market? And: did she have a will? With some other softening questions in between those two, naturally.
What with the pillow over his head and fucking Bob Dylan coming through the walls, Freedy didn’t hear her knocking, didn’t know she was in the room until she touched his shoulder. He sat up, real fast.
She stepped back. “Don’t scare me,” she said. She handed him the phone and left the room, her eyes drawn for a moment to a red frog on the wall, like she was thinking of some change to make.
“Yeah?” Freedy said into the phone.
“Ever meet my uncle Saul?” said Ronnie.
“You got an uncle named Saul?”
“I never mentioned him?”
“What are you saying-you got some Jewish guy for an uncle?”
“He’s not Jewish. It’s just a name they have back in the old country.”
“So?”
“So he’s just, you know, wondering, if you got more extra stuff.”
“What extra stuff?”
“Like TVs and shit. Especially HDTVs-you heard of them?”
“Where d’you think they come from, asshole?”
“Huh?”
“HDTVs. California.”
“Oh. Right. That’s a positive, then. ’Cause my uncle Saul does a little dealing in high tech stuff. HDTVs, PowerBooks, digital notepads-”
“Scanners?”
“Yeah, scanners. Why, you got one?”
“Might.”
“That would interest him, sure.”
“Like how?”
“For buying. Didn’t I say he buys and sells high-tech shit?”
“Where?”
“Down in Fitchville.”
Fitchville was the nearest city, if you could call it a city, just off the pike. “What’s he pay?” Freedy said.
“He pays good. He’s a businessman.” Pause. “Like you, Freedy. Think you can get-think you got more extra stuff hanging around?”
“Maybe.”
“If the answer’s yes, he wants to meet you.”
“Twenty bucks for a Panasonic picture-in-picture, the answer’s no.”
“Not to worry, Freedy. That was just a buddy thing.”
Pause. “You’ve turned into a funny dude, Ronnie.”
“Funny?”
“Humorous, Ronnie. Witty.”
“Yeah?” Ronnie laughed; one of those little laughs like a giggle, when you’re pleased with yourself.
Freedy took an andro from his pocket, popped it dr
y.
“Freedy? You still there?”
Freedy lowered his voice a little, made it more… intimate. Was that the word? Probably: he had a good vocabulary, went with his brainpower. “ ’Member that time we went one-on-one, Ronnie?”
“In practice?”
“Not in practice. When we had that little… disagreement.”
Long pause. “About Cheryl Ann?” Ronnie said at last.
“Was that her name?”
No answer. Ronnie remembered, all right.
Freedy let the silence go on-controlling it, really, which was pretty cool-then said: “Tell your uncle Saul I’m in the book.”
“But you’re not in the book, Freedy. You’ve been gone for years.”
Freedy hung up.
7
“The noble caste was in the beginning always the barbarian caste: their superiority lay, not in their physical strength, but primarily in their psychical-they were more complete human beings (which, on every level, also means as much as ‘more complete beasts’-).” Attack or defend, with reference to the Kennedy family.
— Essay assignment, Philosophy 322
“This is very thoughtful of you, uh…”
“Nat,” said Nat, handing the gift bottle of pink zinfandel-all wrapped up in red and gold from the wine store, the thickest, shiniest wrapping paper he’d ever seen-to Mr. Zorn.
“Nat what, again?” said Mr. Zorn.
Nat repeated his last name. He and Mr. Zorn shook hands for the second time. Mr. Zorn: whose hand felt small in Nat’s; who didn’t look particularly distinguished-nothing as impressive as Albert, Mrs. Zorn’s personal assistant, or Anton, her personal trainer; who stood shorter than Nat by a few inches, perhaps the same height as Grace and Izzie, but not lean like them, not fair like them; who did have their blue-green eyes, but without the gold flecks that changed the whole effect.
“Nat’s the hero du jour,” said Grace.
“Yesterday’s hero du jour,” said Izzie.
“The hero d’hier, then,” said Mr. Zorn; a minor witticism, if one at all, and not spoken loudly, but Nat heard laughter from all parts of the room.
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