Peter Abrahams - Crying Wolf

“Fuck,” said Paolo, even making that word sound almost pretty. He spoke to the driver in Italian; the driver passed him a handkerchief, and Paolo dabbed at his pant leg.

Izzie kissed him on the cheek. In the rearview mirror, Nat saw Grace’s eyes narrow. “Sorry,” Izzie said.

“It’s nothing,” Paolo said. He dabbed some more.

Grace extended the bottle over the seat to Nat. Nat wasn’t much of a drinker, and had made a promise to his mom never to mix drinking and cars, so the reply no thanks formed automatically in his mind. But he hadn’t tasted champagne, and, what the hell, it was Christmas Eve. He drank. It was good, very, very good. He was alive and he knew it, like never before. The driver kept his eyes on the road.

Paolo took them to parties. There was more champagne, at first very, very good, later simply cold and fizzy, after that just wet.

Parties. A Brazilian party where Nat, wedged next to the conga drums, fell under the illusion that the drumskins were playing the drummer’s hands, and not the other way around.

A party in a dance club where they were ushered in past a long line at the door, and where he danced first with Izzie, then with Grace, then with an older woman who had an intense face and cords sticking out on her neck; he shared a frozen rum drink with her and she wriggled her hip against him. He felt immensely strong, strong enough to pick her up and set her on the bar in one easy motion, which he did. She threw back her head and laughed and laughed, the cords in her neck sticking out even more, her stiletto-heeled foot sliding up his leg; Izzie, no, it was Grace, he could tell by her temperature even before he checked the hair, drew him away.

A party in Greenwich Village where he found himself in a bathroom with seven or eight people, where a photograph of the party givers having sex hung over the bathtub, and where a Thai stick, something he’d heard of but never seen, went round and round, with him declining every time until Izzie spoke into his ear: “You’re pretty cute, you know that?” No: it was Grace. This time he had to look; their voices were identical, deeper than most girls’ and a little ragged at the edges, as though they’d been up all night, or had been singing at the top of their lungs, or were fighting some infection. Grace’s tongue tasted smoky.

But how did he know that?

Later, somewhere else, he and Paolo urinated side by side, a bottle of champagne perched on Paolo’s urinal. “Ah, Nat,” said Paolo, pronouncing the name with great care, almost adding a second syllable: Nat-te. “You know what is everyone asking me tonight, Nat-te?” Paolo said.

“Where your scepter is?”

Paolo regarded him from the corner of his eye. For a moment Nat thought Paolo was going to take a swing at him. But Paolo was in the middle of pissing-they both were-and it would have been messy, and Nat knew from the handkerchief episode that Paolo didn’t like messes. “What everyone is asking me, Nat-te, is which one dyes the hair. Because there is one way only to know for sure, if you are following.” Paolo winked at him.

Nat had heard a lot about diversity, had answered test questions about it and written his SAT writing sample on the subject, but he hadn’t understood how different human beings could be, one from the other, until that moment. He thought of Christmas Eve at home: Mom always made an oyster stew, a few friends came over, Patti and her dad the last two years, everyone opened one present, they drank eggnog from little clear-glass cups that appeared only at Christmas, Mom sat at the piano and they sang a few carols. With the time difference, it might still be going on. He turned his wrist to check the time and found his watch was gone.

“I am having a bad feeling you miss the import of the question,” said Paolo, shaking off. “Identical genes, therefore the hair must be identical, therefore one is an artificer. Do I say that right?”

“They’re two different people,” Nat said. “There are other ways to tell them apart.”

“Don’t be silly. Is there no biology studies in America? Even their father cannot tell-which is the reason why the hair color in the first place.” He zipped up. “So we have a big question, and everyone is asking the person in a position to know. To know beyond a shadow of the doubt. Useless to ask, of course, so don’t you bother, Nat-te. I am what used to be called a gentleman.”

“What’s it called now?” said Nat.

But too late: Paolo was gone. Nat went to the sink. It turned out that counts didn’t wash their hands. Maybe he said it aloud. “Counts don’t wash their hands.” He washed his, laughing to himself. Then he thought he heard someone crying, went still, heard nothing but the running water. In the mirror, he saw that now he did look different, a lot.

Nat was still staring at his image, kind of stunned, when one of the stalls behind him opened and Izzie stepped out. She didn’t look at him, either in the mirror or in life, but went out, not speaking.

“Izzie?” Nat hurried after her, but had trouble with the door, somehow locking it for a few seconds, or maybe a minute or two, and when he emerged into a hall swarming with people, she was gone.

“Ever smoked one of these before?” said someone.

“What is it?” said Nat.

“ ‘What is it?’ Who are you, Inspector Gadget?”

Nat didn’t remember anything after that.

He awoke in the night with someone breathing against his ear.

“You’re pretty cute.”

“Izzie?”

“Bzzzz.”

“Grace?”

“Boinggg.” She slipped her hand inside his shirt; no, he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

He sat up; no, tried to. “Where are we?”

“Home is the hunter.”

Her hand moved lower. He might not have been wearing pants either. Her hand, so different from Patti’s hand; knew exactly what it was doing, for one thing. Nat thought that moment of the conga drummer’s hands, a mixed-up thought that went away. He put his hand on hers to stop her.

“How did we get here?”

“Public transportation, like good little citizens. You gave up your seat to a transvestite. Tres galant.”

Surely she was making that up. “What time is it?”

“Night.”

“I think I lost my watch.”

“You talk too much.” She put her mouth on his, got her hand free, down between his legs.

Nat turned his head away. “I really can’t, Grace.”

“Different opinion down here.”

Nat tried to see her in the dark, couldn’t. “It’s not that,” he said. “We don’t know each other.”

“I know you.”

“I meant we don’t know each other well enough.”

“If everyone waited for well enough, we’d be extinct.”

Nat laughed. “I know, but-”

“But what?”

“I have this-I have a girlfriend.”

Grace stopped what she was doing. “At school?”

“Inverness, you mean?”

“What other school do you go to?”

“No,” Nat said, “she’s not at Inverness.”

Grace started up again. “Still on the prairie, then. What’s her name?”

“Patti. And there’s no prairie.”

“Let me guess-she spells it with an i. When do we meet her?”

Nat pulled her hand away, sat up, succeeded in sitting up this time, felt dizzy and a little sick. “Yes,” he said, “she does spell it with an i.”

His voice sounded strange to him: harsh and maybe even powerful. Powerful. Was this the immensely strong effect he’d experienced at the dance club, still with him from the champagne? He felt Grace moving away, heard her stand up.

“What convenient morals you have, Grandma,” she said.

“Convenient?”

She snorted. “Playing dumb’s not you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”