Crying Wolf (21 page)

“And?”

Nat didn't answer.

“See?” said Grace.

“See what? It has nothing to do with his qualities as a teacher.”

“Nietzsche would disagree,” Grace said.

Nat was thinking about that when Izzie said: “So what's he going to do?”

Nat wasn't sure who she meant.

“About the endowment?” Grace said. “Take his time deciding. Quote.”

Izzie nodded, as though that made sense to her. Nat doubted that either of them really knew what a home mortgage was, but they had no trouble understanding whatever manipulations were going on between Mr. Zorn and Professor Uzig, or Mr. Zorn and the phil department, or Mr. Zorn and Inverness, or whatever it was. Maybe it was a simple matter of Mr. Zorn delaying his decision until after the girls had graduated. Nat discounted that: a small-town, been-nowhere kind of notion; he remembered the gas station owner back home with a son in the Clear Creek football program, and the coach's free fill-ups.

They were both watching him.

“You're not trying to find a way,” Grace said.

“I am.” Nat's voice rose, taking him, taking them all, by surprise.

“You can't just go,” Izzie said. “You're here. You're right here.”

“This kind of thing happens. I'm not the first.”

“So what?” said Grace. She rose. “Let's have a drink. We'll think better.”

She poured from the oldest bottle yet, Domaine des Forges, 1893; Izzie wound up the record player, put on “Caro Nome.” Nat didn't think any better, but probably because he hadn't eaten, the drink's effect was immediate.

“We're lucky,” Izzie said.

“Because we have money?” said Grace. “They say that causes problems of its own.”

“But they're problems of freedom,” Izzie said. “Other people don't even get to those.”

They both turned to him, awaiting confirmation from the land of other people. He suspected it wasn't that simple, but before he could organize his thoughts, Grace said:

“She's right. Home equity, mortgages, all that step-by-step bullshit—by the time most people get past it, life is over. Piss on that. Working for decades just to get—just hoping to get—where Izzie and I are right now.”

“That makes me feel better,” Nat said.

Izzie laughed, then Grace. “Here's to the problems of freedom,” Grace said.

They drank. Izzie restarted “Caro Nome.” “Unless,” she said, turning from the record player, “Nat gets lucky too.”

“In what way?” said Grace.

“I don't know. Writes a best-seller or something.”

Nat was astonished: he'd never mentioned wanting to write to anyone.

Grace and Izzie looked at each other. Nat had the crazy idea that for a moment their brains had hooked up, doubling normal human power.

“That's the point, isn't it?” said Grace.

“This isn't about seven thousand dollars,” said Izzie.

“Or scholarships, home equity, watching our pennies,” said Grace. “It's about getting all that out of the way.”

“In one stroke,” said Izzie.

“I thought of Powerball,” Nat said.

They glanced at him, said nothing. Grace got up, walked over to Izzie by the record player, refilled her glass, came to Nat on the couch, refilled his, started to refill her own—and dropped the bottle. A heavy, cut-glass bottle that just slipped from her hand, smashed at her feet.

She didn't seem to notice. “I'm having a thought,” she said.

“Uh-oh,” said Izzie.

“Shut up,” said Grace. “It's—it's so good. And it's all right here, even the sound track.”

Izzie's eyes widened; maybe she saw it coming. Nat didn't.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“We'll kidnap Izzie.”

“For God's sake.”

“Or me, then. It doesn't matter. We'll kidnap me for ransom.”

“How much?” said Izzie.

“I don't know,” Grace said. “Tuition, room and board, home equity, mortgage, miscellaneous—how about a million dollars?”

“Sure that's enough?” said Izzie.

“In terms of the expenses?” Grace said. “Or do you mean—”

“—what a real kidnapper would ask. It has to look realistic, doesn't it?”

“You're way ahead of me, Izzie.”

Izzie looked pleased.

“This is a joke, right?” Nat said.

“A joke?” said Grace. “Is that still a negative word in your lexicon? Shouldn't our supreme insights—”

“—sound like follies,” Izzie said. She giggled, a little giggle just like Grace's, but that Nat heard now for the first time from her.

“Like follies,” said Grace, “or even crimes.”

She opened the leaded-glass cabinet doors, took out another bottle. “Hey,” she said. “Rouge.” She showed it to Nat.

Romanée-Conti, 1917.

“Is it a good one?” Izzie said.

“Who knows?” said Grace, looking around for the corkscrew, not spotting it immediately.

“Wait,” Nat said, because he knew. Mr. Zorn's 1962 bottle of the same wine was worth $2,500. And therefore—

“Not to worry,” said Grace, striking the neck of the bottle sharply against the edge of a table. It snapped off; she found new glasses, poured.

And therefore that might have been tuition, room, and board right there. Was there more, even one bottle? Nat checked the cabinet, found none.

They drank. “My God,” said Grace.

“Like having a drink with the czar or something,” said Izzie.

The things she sometimes said: perfect, at least to his ear.

Grace raised her glass. “To crimes and follies.”

“You're serious,” said Nat.

“Why not?” said Grace.

“Why not? Because it's wrong.”

“Is it?” said Izzie; that surprised him a little; perhaps things would have been different had it been Grace, but it was Izzie. Or if he had eaten more than a granola bar in the past two days, or hadn't been drinking nectar on an empty stomach, or hadn't been drinking at all since he'd never been much of a drinker, or this or that. “First of all, it's not much money,” Izzie said, “nothing at all to him. He wouldn't even notice.”

“It would do him good,” Grace said.

Izzie glanced at her. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

After a pause, Izzie continued. “Take that horse farm—how much do you think that's costing?”

“And we don't even ride anymore,” said Grace.

“Second, there's no victim, no real crime, no one gets hurt or even scared.”

“I just hide down here for a day or two,” said Grace, “there's some sort of ransom demand, Izzie goes to pick up the money, I reappear, ka-boom. Nothing's real.”

“And third,” said Izzie, “it's just.”

“Just?”

“Like land reform in Latin America,” said Grace.

“Exactly,” said Izzie. “What fortune didn't start with a little hanky-panky?”

“Hanky-panky?” said Grace, and started to laugh; then Izzie started too, and finally Nat. It seemed like the funniest combination of syllables ever uttered. They laughed till they cried.

Then they sat quietly for a few moments. Izzie looked at Nat, right into his eyes. “Fourth, you can stay.” Nat met her gaze, the candlelight catching those gold flecks in her irises, kept meeting it until he felt Grace watching.

“The best part, of course,” said Grace. “And all those worries—home equity, mortgage, your mother's job—”

“Finis,” said Izzie.

“So,” said Grace, “how about it?”

Nat was silent. It wasn't the money itself, but the freedom, just as Izzie had said. To be free of that yellow legal pad and future legal pads with their columns of figures adding up to worry, constriction, settling for second-best, or less. What was that cliché? Play the cards you're dealt. He'd been dealt a new hand. He'd entered this world of Grace and Izzie where some words—
money,
for one—had a different meaning.
Money
perhaps the most different of all: a world where a cash machine was no more than a box where you pushed buttons and out came money, as demanded.

“Or maybe this place is a bit too much,” Grace said to Izzie. “Maybe he's not that ambitious.”

Izzie turned to him.

That word: and the stern stuff that went with it. To be sweet and brilliant, a self-defeating combination. And if not sweet and brilliant, at least reasonably kind and fairly smart. He had a horrible vision of dying promise, promise dying, dying down the years, its first stage the long flight home. Come east but hadn't cut it, for one reason or another. The candles, dozens of them, burned, the old wine glowed in the fine glasses, Galli-Curci sang her song from
Rigoletto
, romantic and alien at once: their sound track. If he went home? It would be the end of him and Izzie, he didn't fool himself about that. And other changes: change would follow like falling dominoes. Maybe his mom would never find another job; things like that happened every day. Then he'd be working full time. Living at home. Night school. And then? What could he shoot for, what would he end up as, best-case scenario? A small-time lawyer like Mr. Beaman? A nauseating prospect. He suddenly knew one thing for sure: he wanted the big time. Perhaps the desire had been in him from the very beginning, but distrusted, denied, disowned, buried. He wanted it, more than Mrs. Smith, Miss Brown, the whole town put together. He remembered then a quotation from Nietzsche, one he'd highlighted a few days before, meaning to raise it with Professor Uzig:
The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities
. Ambition wasn't necessarily an evil quality; still, he had no need for the professor's explanation now.

“I'll think about it,” he said.

“Think about it?” said Izzie, disappointed, even shocked, as though he'd just revealed some unsuspected and damning flaw. Again: if only that had been Grace's line.

“What do you want me to say?”

Izzie said: “Say yes.”

He said yes.

They drank. The brief exposure to air had turned the Romanée-Conti 1917 into something thin, tasteless, not wine at all.

“God is refuted but the devil is not”—inevitable conclusion of Nietzschean philosophy?

—Topic for class discussion, Philosophy 322

W
hat the fuck?
Freedy almost said it out loud. Bad idea, of course, with him at the spyhole and big sister, little sister, and the college kid on the other side, like in a dollhouse. Freedy knew about dollhouses because there'd been one in his room, his room with the wall paintings and the “Little Boy” poem, when he was very young. Some theory of his mother's about boys' toys and girls' toys, making boys into girls, world peace, more of her crazy shit. He'd smashed it to bits, of course, but only when he'd gotten a little older. Before that, he'd kind of played with it, reaching in, moving the tiny people around, maybe undressing that straw-haired one in the red-and-white checked skirt, and the boy one in the blue overalls, and then . . . His memory got hazy. But the point was he knew about dollhouses, knew about looking down on the world like a giant, hey!—like God. It was pretty cool.

Like God. Amazing.

Pretty cool, to stare through the spyhole, watch a whole kind of movie happening. Hey!—God the movie nut. Amazing. But there was a downside, he knew that already: not an easy job, what with all the information, coming so fast, so confusing, even for someone with his kind of brainpower. He felt a moment's passing respect for God: who'd want to do this forever?

Confusing things, like some situation involving the college kid, impossible to understand. Home equity loans, tuition, rooms, boards, seven grand, a lost checkbook. Didn't add up.

Unless that seven grand was lying around somewhere. Now that would be nice. Freedy was thinking how nice it would be—seven grand, three hundred per laptop, how many laptops was that?—when the college kid looked up, looked him right in the fucking eye. Or almost; his gaze slid up the wall a foot or two, fixed on something Freedy couldn't see.

But a close call.

And then right away, another: he had to sneeze. What was going on? Did he have allergies all of a sudden, like those women whose pools he'd cleaned in California? He put his finger under his nose the way you were supposed to. That worked, or almost worked: the sneeze that came was tiny, made no sound at all.

Except little sister got a funny look on her face. Smash. Ka-boom. He could be through that wall in a second.

But the moment passed. Freedy's muscles relaxed, just hung on his bones, heavy and still. Felt good.

Felt good, but that didn't help him deal with the confusing things. Confusing things, like big sister and little sister were swatting flies or something, and then:
Leo. Leo Uzig
. This name kept popping up. Professor. On his laptop. Taught a course his mother thought Ronnie was taking. Ronnie? How could that be? Had a wife. Helen Uzig. A wife with money. Wife made him . . . made him what? What was that? Shave . . . shave off that—some word he didn't catch and then two words he did—
walrus mustache
.

Something walrus mustache. The something word sounded a bit like
ridiculous
, but wasn't. He tried to recall it exactly, gave up.

But
walrus mustache
: he'd caught that.

Walrus.

Plus it turned out Leo Uzig was famous. And his wife had money.

Confusing: but Freedy was an amazing person. Why? Because, despite all the confusion, with all this information whipping by, the moment he heard that Leo Uzig's wife had money, what was the first thing he thought of? Yes. Money. Specifically, the envelope he'd steamed open, so wisely, it turned out, with the two C's inside.

It was all coming together. Everything had a meaning. He'd heard that. He'd also heard that nothing meant anything. So what? None of that mattered. What mattered was his future. Pool company. Florida. Stick, stick, stick. And as for getting his hands on big sister and little sister, showing them what a man was, a real man, a buff, diesel, andro-popping, meth-tweaking fuckin' animal like him? That would be nice.

Meanwhile, he was missing stuff. Action central, Freedy, action central. Action central, like the room with all the monitors, where you could watch everything coming together.

Someone else's name came up, a name even stranger than Uzig; sounded Chinese maybe, Ni Chi. One of them, Uzig or Ni Chi, was a fake, but before Freedy could sort that out, the dolls in the dollhouse were drinking and talking about money again.

Fine with him, except that the music started up, with that horrible singing.

Turned out that big sister and little sister had money, possibly from hitting the Powerball number. Seven grand meant nothing to them, chicken feed. Why would it, you hit the Powerball number? Maybe this was a celebration. That would explain the wild look on big sister's face—she was something, drop-dead, fuck-you and wild. Was she a little drunk too? Or a lot. She dropped the bottle; it shattered on that thick purple rug with the blue flowers, but none of them seemed to notice.

And then. Whoa. Kidnapping? A million dollars? They were afraid of kidnappers, because of the Powerball score? No, no no. They . . . they weren't afraid of kidnappers—they were planning a kidnapping of their own! To get their hands on the Powerball money? And kidnapping who, exactly? That had to be important.

What was this? They were planning to kidnap one of themselves? Which one? Little sister? Big sister? Before he could get a handle on that, they shifted to the home equity thing again. Out came another bottle. More breaking glass. Were they all stoked on drugs or something? What drugs? Freedy wanted to know.

Something was going down. Big sister and little sister were hot. They were
physical.
Couldn't keep still. Freedy could see that. The college kid, he was the still one. Dragging his feet about something or other. A wimp, of course, and so breakable in two. First Freedy would let him have a good one, right in the gut. Then—

A million dollars wasn't much money?

No victim? No crime?

Big sister? They were going to kidnap big sister? Maybe yes, maybe no. A strange kind of kidnapping. Big sister was . . . going to hide out right here, down in the dollhouse? Did he get that right?

And then what? Little sister picks up the money?

Ka-boom?
Big sister said
ka-boom
, the exact same word that had been on his mind at the exact same moment. Had to be an omen, an omen of the very best kind.

Then: they were laughing their heads off. Why?
A little hanky-panky
. They were going to get naked and fuck each other's brains out, after all, as he'd secretly hoped, all of them this time, and, for Christ sake, let it be right there in the big room, instead of sneaking off to the bedroom the way little sister and the college kid had last time, where Freedy couldn't see, not even hear very well.

Freedy waited for the hanky-panky to begin. They took their sweet time. A little bit of talk, mostly silence and waiting. Waiting for what? Waiting for the college kid to stop dragging his feet. That was it. Freedy got it now: as soon as the college kid said yes to whatever they wanted him to say yes to, the sisters would come across.

Say it, you asshole.
To get those two to come across who wouldn't say whatever it took?
Yes
was easy.

The college kid said it. Finally. And guess what? They didn't come across. Women. Did the college kid know how to handle that, did he get pissed, slap them around? No. Instead they all had another drink, like the best of friends, then started blowing out the candles, climbing that rope ladder, clearing out. Next minute, they were gone, leaving nothing but the blackness, the smell of melting wax, the horrible singing. Nothing had happened, nothing at all. Was it just some sort of game, more college shit? What the fuck?

 

M
aybe because of all these questions, all this confusion, Freedy got a little lost on his way out of the tunnels. He thought he was in F, headed for the subbasement of building 87, at the edge of the backside of the campus and therefore closest to home. Problem was, it took way too long. He finally flicked on his light to see where he was. Good thing: he was in Z, two steps—two goddamn steps—before the drop-off near building 13. He shone the light over the edge, illuminating the steel ladder bolted to the wall and the brick floor thirty feet below, at least, where some workie had broken his neck long ago.

Don't think he was scared or anything like that. First, his instincts—he was a fuckin' animal—had protected him, always would. Second, even if he fell, so what? Think he wouldn't land on his feet, bounce right up? 'Course he would. He shut the light off immediately, just to show the kind of . . . started with
p
—
predator!
Yes! The kind of predator he was, like the wolf or the tiger.

Freedy climbed out of a ventilation hood behind the hockey rink. The snow had stopped falling but lay all over the place, on every roof and tree branch, and piled high on the ground. He hated snow. He hated the cold. A cold wind was blowing from the west, right in his face as he left the campus, started down the Hill. The west, where California was: explain why California was warm while the wind that came from it was cold. There was a lot of shit they didn't know.

A million. A cool million. Freedy understood the expression now. A million made you cool, inside and out, simple as that. He pictured his corporate HQ, a blue tower, blue being the color of water, eight or nine stories high, with a gym on the roof, overlooking the ocean. And the name: he needed a name. Freedy's Fine Pool Business. Freedy's First-Rate Pools and Maintenance. What was that expression she used? First water. Freedy's First Water Corporation. Nah. Then it hit him.
Aqua
—or was it
agua?
—meant water, didn't it? The Aqua Group. The classiness of that
Group
part! Or maybe the Agua Group. Which sounded better? He tried them out loud, several times, as he passed the Glass Onion, crossed the tracks, entered the flats, turned onto the old street. Someone was having septic problems, often happened down by the river; he could smell their shit through all that snow.

Freedy went into the kitchen. A fuckin' mess. Every dish dirty, hardened yellow batter caked to this and that, fridge door hanging open. Why should he close it? Had a pig for a mother. He sniffed once or twice: a pot-smoking pig. And the ants were out, ants in winter, which was pretty unusual.

He switched on the lights in his bedroom, tried to ignore the wall paintings—unicorns, toadstools, dopehead elves, the lion man, the poem with that planet spinning, out of fucking control. He was so busy ignoring things that at first he didn't notice that the laptop, which he'd left on the bed, was gone.

That laptop was worth three hundred bucks. More important, much more important now, he wanted to have another look at what was on the screen. So where was it? Not there. Crash. Or there. Splatter. So where the fuck was it? Was it possible that someone had ripped him off? Ripped
him
off? A good way to die. Oh, to get his hands on whoever it was: a killing desire swelled rapidly inside him, like he would burst, and what was this? He had: blood was seeping out of his hand. Or maybe it was just a cut, by-product of the laptop search. Still, a mystical moment: everything did have meaning.

He went into the hall. Next door was the bathroom, next door to that her bedroom. He knocked. No answer. No light shone under the door, but he could hear music, tinny and faint, the way it sounded leaking from headphones, and he could smell pot, stronger than in the kitchen. He opened the door.

Lights out. A good thing: darkness hid the paintings on
her
walls, paintings he hadn't seen in years, and never wanted to again. One of them was the picture of his birth, based on that photo she had. A circle of women, all naked, although it couldn't have been that way in real life, all naked like witches with their unshaved legs and armpits, and in the middle her with her legs spread, and one of the witches holding him up, bawling and red.

His eyes adjusted to the weak light penetrating the shade from the street lamp. She lay in bed, eyes closed, singing along to the music in the headphones, singing that came and went, more like muttering, but he identified it: “Winterlude,” fucking Bob Dylan song he hated. Every winter, from the first flake till the last melting patch in the trees, “Winterlude.” He thought of ripping the headphone jack out of the machine, was seriously considering it, when he noticed the green light flashing under her bed. He bent down—so close he could smell her breath, but there was no chance of her hearing him, not with Bob Dylan in her ears—and retrieved the laptop.

Freedy took the laptop to his room, opened it, pressed the on button. Words popped up on the screen, but nothing about Leo Uzig:

snow falls like velvet down

More of her poetry shit. Were all poets ignorant? Down, for example: everyone knew it was made from goose or duck feathers, not velvet. He hit various keys, combinations of keys, trying to make the poetry go away, trying to find out what the computer knew about Leo Uzig. For example, he typed
Leo Uzig
, spelling both names several ways since he couldn't remember exactly what he'd glimpsed on the screen that first time, then hitting control; or hitting control first and then the names. But he couldn't even make the poetry disappear. He closed the thing, not hard, but hard enough to send a message.

Why should he be a computer expert? Soon, very soon, he'd be hiring them. On the other hand, he needed one now. What about Ronnie? It was possible.

 

F
reedy walked over to Ronnie's, less than a mile away, its yard backing onto the river. The river showed through the gaps between the low shadows of the unlit houses, frozen whiteness under a black sky. Late, probably very late, but Freedy wasn't the least bit tired; full of energy, in fact. The whole town sacked out except for him: showed how much stronger he was, stronger than the whole town. They'd all faded, collapsed, passed out, while he still patrolled the streets.