Peter Abrahams - Crying Wolf

“The same kind of thing.”

Izzie took it for a joke, and laughed.

They climbed the rope ladder, started back through the tunnels, Nat leading the way with a flashlight. “A teacher?” said Izzie; he felt her breath on the back of his ear. “Is that really what you want to be?”

He replied with a question of his own. “What did you put?” The rest of the cards had been forgotten after Mrs. Uzig’s appearance.

“Guess.”

“Spearing fish,” Nat said.

Pause. “I wish I had,” Izzie said. “I’m starting to think you know me better than I do.”

He had a troubling thought. “You didn’t put what Grace did?”

“Oh, no.”

“Then what?”

“Now I’m not telling.”

“Even if I guess?”

Somewhere during this dialogue they’d stopped, faced each other, embraced; the flashlight beam pointing here and there without guidance.

Izzie started to reply, then made a little sound, a quick inhale. “Look,” she said, and pointed to the quivering circle of light on the tunnel ceiling.

A bat hung upside down from a plastic pipe, its eyes wide open, liquid, intelligent.

“Our cave,” said Izzie. “Our bat.”

The thing hung motionless.

They climbed into the janitor’s closet in the basement of Plessey, out into the hall, upstairs to the main floor. Late night, snow coming down hard.

“Snow day tomorrow,” Izzie said, “for sure.”

She led him out the door and onto the quad, the snow in her hair, on her eyelashes. “Kiss me,” she said. “Kiss me right now.”

He did. Everything was all right, would be all right; whatever problems there were lost their power, like normal forces on a snow day, just as Izzie had said. He loved her, no doubt about it, and would have said so; but she was already gone, running across the quad toward Lanark, snow falling behind her like curtains.

In the morning snow still fell, but not as hard. Nat put on his boots, warm and waterproof, sixteenth-birthday present from his mom, now a little tight, and walked over to the student union cafeteria. Breakfast smells woke him up. He piled food on his tray-scrambled eggs, bacon, corn flakes, English muffin, banana, milk, juice, coffee. The cashier took his meal card, swiped it through the machine, swiped it again, once more. “Card’s blocked,” she said.

“Blocked?”

“Got a block on it.”

“Why?”

“Have to ask the financial office.”

“But it’s Sunday.”

“Comes to four twenty-five.”

But Nat didn’t have $4.25 on him, had no money at all, and the shoe in his closet was empty. He’d used up all his money getting to the airport and back, would have no more until his next check from the Alumni Office, due the next day.

“Can I owe you?”

“Owe me?”

“I’ll pay tomorrow.”

“The machine don’t allow that.”

All at once he was very hungry. “I could leave a note, and my student ID.”

“Won’t work.” She put a hand on his tray.

Nat abandoned it, walked away. As he went out the door he glanced back, saw the cashier chewing on a piece of his bacon. That put him in a good mood, a mood that lasted all the way home through the snow. He even took off his gloves, made a snowball, and threw it at Emerson, hitting his oxidized copper head from fifty feet.

He sat at his desk, opened Beyond Good and Evil to where he’d left off, part two, “The Free Spirit,” section 30. His mind felt sharp, much sharper than usual, so sharp he noticed the change. Our supreme insights, he read, must-and should! — sound like follies, in certain cases like crimes- Nat’s gaze left the page as he remembered Professor Uzig referring to this same passage on Aubrey’s Cay, and, as it left the page, happened on the blinking phone light, indicating a message in voice mail.

He checked, found one.

His mom. “Nat? Please call as soon as you-when you can. Okay? It’s me. Mom.”

Eight twenty-five, 6:25 at home. Too early to call. But something was wrong; he could hear that much. Then it hit him: Patti. Something’s gone wrong with Patti. She would never do anything to hurt herself, never-say it right-commit suicide, not Patti; but then he recalled a girl at Clear Creek a few years ahead of him who had committed suicide, and how everyone in the halls had said they couldn’t believe it, not someone like her.

He phoned home.

His mom answered in the middle of the first ring; probably the phone on her bedside table, but there was no sleep in her voice. “Nat?” she said. “Nat.”

“Hi, Mom. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“Oh, no, I’ve been up all-no, you didn’t wake me.”

“What’s wrong, Mom? Is it Patti?”

There was a pause. He knew she was doing that long slow blink. “Patti? I haven’t heard from Patti.”

“Then what?”

“Oh, Nat.”

“What, Mom?”

“I’ve let you down.”

“That couldn’t happen, Mom.”

She started crying. “I’m so sorry.”

Nat just waited. He didn’t have a clue.

She got herself under control. “I lost my job.”

That made no sense. She’d worked for Mr. Beaman for fifteen years. “Did Mr. Beaman retire?” Stupid question: Mr. Beaman was much too young to retire.

“He… he let me go.”

Mr. Beaman fired his mom?

“I was getting stale. That’s what he said. He hired someone much fresher. Barely older than you, Nat.”

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“I begged him.”

“Mom.”

“The day after Christmas. That’s when he… he did it. I’ve been looking for work ever since, but there’s nothing. And meanwhile the bank found out-why wouldn’t they, he does all their closings-and they called in the home equity loan.”

Nat found himself doing something he’d never done in his life: the long slow blink. When his eyes opened, he saw that it had stopped snowing.

“This was Monday, the day before I was going to mail the check for the second semester.”

Card’s blocked.

“How can they do that?”

“The bank? Change in financial status-it’s all in the fine print, all legal.” She started crying again. He’d hardly ever heard her cry, not since he was a kid, couldn’t stand it. “I’ve let you down so bad.”

“No you haven’t, Mom. Stop saying that.”

“You don’t understand. I can’t keep you there, Nattie. You have to come home.”

A problem, maybe not like any other; still, a problem, and he was good at solving problems, wasn’t he?

He was hungry. There was only the granola bar untouched by Patti, still lying on the bedside crate. He didn’t want it; a granola bar, yes, even three or four, with a tall glass of cold milk to wash them down, but not this particular granola bar.

Nat dressed in warm clothes, went for a walk. A long walk-temperature cold and dropping, the sky brilliant now, its blue almost glaring-through pockets of the campus he hadn’t yet seen. After some time, he wandered down the north, sunless side of College Hill, across some railroad tracks, and into what they called the flats. A dismal place, he saw, bringing to mind the town he’d come from, although his town couldn’t be called dismal, could it? He thought about the yellow legal pad in the kitchen at home, on which he and his mom had done the figures; he thought about the figures themselves, still clear in his memory. He thought about the home equity loan. He shifted numbers around in his head, began to feel the cold.

His mind kept returning to that home equity loan. He was forgetting something, but what? He walked back up to the campus, trod every path, the wind picking up now from the west, lifting some of the new snow, blowing it around; trod every path and fought the impulse to commit it all to memory. He walked until the western sky turned orange and the tree branches went black, but didn’t solve the home equity loan problem.