Peter Abrahams - Crying Wolf

In the darkness, but very near, a few feet away, no more, Freedy said: “Come and get me.”

Izzie made a savage noise.

Lights flashed on. Red ceiling lights, the color of exit signs, recessed behind mesh screens. In the light, Nat saw a sort of snapshot. They’d come to a sheer drop-off in the tunnel. Grace lay on the edge of it. Freedy clung to a ladder bolted to the brick wall, leading down, just his head and shoulders visible. And Izzie had stepped, or charged, right over his head, and was now turning to look back, poised in midair, the switchblade in her hand, her eyes wild. The piece of eight Grace had found in Professor Uzig’s cake floated weightless around her neck.

No one can remain poised in midair. She fell out of sight, and it was far, far too long before the thud.

“The beauty part,” said Freedy, and started up.

Nat kicked at him, kicked right at his head. An alarm started ringing, not far away, distracting Freedy for a moment, probably the only reason the kick landed at all. Not on his head, but his shoulder, the right shoulder.

Freedy cried out in pain. “Call that fair?” he said. “That’s my bad shoulder.” He lunged up the ladder, swiped at Nat with his left hand, got hold of one of Nat’s legs. With his other leg, Nat kicked that bad shoulder again, hard as he could. Freedy lost his grip on the ladder, held nothing but Nat’s leg. He dug his fingers into Nat’s flesh, trying to somehow kill him that way. Nat kicked him one more time, without compunction.

Nat heard, or felt, a faint flicking sound: Freedy’s fingernails, snapping off. Freedy looked surprised. Then he fell. Another expression, a vengeful one, was coming into his eyes when he disappeared from view.

Nat looked over the edge. A long drop to a brick floor. Freedy lay beside Izzie, both of them in postures the living can’t adopt.

He turned to Grace, lying in the tunnel.

She opened her eye. “Nat?”

Her face was so bad he could hardly look at her. But he did. And when he did, he noticed something strange. Under the matted blood, her hair was the same light brown color as Izzie’s.

He thought of things: body temperatures, raised eyebrows, Clairol bottles, Grand Central Station. How stupid could he be?

“Izzie?” he said.

She closed her eye.

Then came running feet, loud voices, people in uniform: firemen, police, maintenance workers. It was getting very hot. He saw flames behind them.

“There are lights here?” he said.

“In master control,” said someone. “Think we wander around in the dark?”

Nat didn’t know what to think, not then, not when dental records proved that the dead twin was Grace, not for a long time after.

Peter Abrahams

Crying Wolf

Nat got two years for attempted extortion, all but four months suspended. His public defender was surprised that the case was prosecuted at all, then surprised at the verdict, and finally the sentence. She sensed some force working against them. Nat knew what it was. Mr. Zorn wanted someone to pay.

Nat paid. He wasn’t the only one. Mr. Zorn never endowed a chair in philosophy at Inverness, but he did donate a new residence in Grace’s name. The college accepted Professor Uzig’s resignation the day before the announcement. Philosophy 322 was deleted from the catalog.

Nat served his sentence in a minimum-security prison not far from Boston. It wasn’t too bad. His facial bones knit well after surgery. He had unlimited daytime access to the exercise yard with its basketball hoop. He started taking his foul shots again, hundreds and hundreds a day, sometimes thousands. Despite all this practice, he never exceeded 60 percent, not close to what he’d done in high school. He’d lost that soft touch, didn’t even enjoy it anymore. The ball, which had always wanted to go in for him, no longer did. But Nat kept shooting: part of the sentence he was giving himself.

He wrote the clock poem, a few others, started sending them to journals he found in the prison library. A review in Chicago accepted one of them. The payment was six free copies of the issue his poem appeared in. Nat showed it to Wags when he came to visit.

“Pretty cool,” said Wags. Wags was feeling a lot better, had applied for transfer to the film program at a few schools, was waiting to hear. The TV movie shot at Inverness, the one about the fraternity brother and the bone marrow transplant, was broadcast during Nat’s term. Wags had made the final cut, was visible for five or ten seconds, roasting marshmallows at a tailgate party.

Nat had other visitors. His mom came. She’d found a new job. It meant selling the house and moving to Denver, but the pay was better. Maybe not but but and, since she seemed to be looking forward to the move.

Patti came too, on the way to Fort Dix with her boyfriend, who’d been called up. The boyfriend was real, not a creation of Grace’s-Nat could see him through the chain-link fence, waiting in the rental car. But the question of who the father had been remained open in Nat’s mind. Patti didn’t bring it up and Nat didn’t ask. Did it even matter now? She brought him a present, a book of inspirational advice currently on the best-seller list. He donated it to the library, unread.

And Izzie.

She looked pretty good. Her eyes weren’t quite symmetrical anymore and she walked with a limp, but less of one every day, she said.

Izzie explained the switch. It was about what Nat had thought. At the last minute, after Izzie had called her father saying Grace had been kidnapped, Grace decided she should be the one up top, dealing with him. She hadn’t liked how Izzie handled the call. Izzie had gone down to the cave; Grace had dyed her hair, come up to Nat’s room playing the role of her sister. It was just a question of Grace being more capable when it came to thinking on her feet.

“She was,” Izzie said.

Nat was silent; he knew there was more to it than that.

“Better in every way,” Izzie said. “She was the special one.”

That saying people had when someone close to them died, the one about a part of them dying too: Nat realized it was true in Izzie’s case, maybe even literally. He took her hand. He hadn’t intended to do anything of the kind.

Izzie had rented an apartment in Paris for the year, was planning to take a few courses, maybe do some skiing when she felt stronger. She was leaving in a few weeks.

“There’s lots of room,” she said.

He didn’t speak.

“Why don’t you come?”

A dump near the prison attracted seagulls. Chased by a second gull, one flew over now, something shiny in its beak.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Say yes.”