Peter Abrahams - Crying Wolf

“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.