Peter Abrahams - Crying Wolf

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.

Romanee-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 cliche? 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 Romanee-Conti 1917 into something thin, tasteless, not wine at all.

Peter Abrahams

Crying Wolf

What 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?