Crying Wolf Page 32

  “Feel like a little spin?” he said to her.

  She just lay there.

  “Get up,” he said, louder and not so friendly.

  They heard him. On the other side of the wall, Izzie turned sideways, raised one foot high like a trained Thai kick boxer, precisely as Grace had done the night they found the tunnels, and kicked in the wooden paneling in the big room of the old social club. Nat shone his flash through the opening, and there they were in a little square room lit by a single tall candle balanced on the dirt floor, Grace on her back, hair matted with blood, Freedy crouched over her.

  Izzie saw her sister’s face and made a horrible sound. The next instant she was diving through the hole in the wall, switchblade glinting in the candlelight, so quick. But Freedy was quicker. Somehow he was already up, already slapping at her arm as though he’d known what was coming. The next moment, she was down. By that time, Nat was in the little room too, flashlight raised high, striking with all his strength at the back of Freedy’s head.

  He never connected. Without even looking, Freedy jabbed with his elbow, a pistonlike blow that caught Nat just under the rib cage, knocking the wind out of him, knocking him down. The candle fell, started rolling, rolled through the hole in the wall, dropped down into the big room on the other side. Then Freedy’s fist started landing, although Nat couldn’t see a thing, flashlight smashed, candle gone. He took a punch in the back, scrambled away, felt Grace. He found her hand, not warm, not cold, the same temperature as his.

  Nat held on to her, would hold on to her at any cost; but then came that fist, and again, and he felt her slipping, slipping away, and gone.

  Total darkness. Didn’t bother Freedy. This was his territory. Freedy slung the girl over his shoulder and carried her out of the little square room and into F. Had he ever felt stronger? No. This kind of challenge or whatever it was brought out the best in him. He headed down F, the girl on his shoulder, at a fast walking pace, almost trotting in total darkness. Didn’t bother him. He turned into Z, invisible Z, without breaking stride. Z, on the way to building 13: now came the beauty part.

  Total darkness: until flames shot up on the other side of the wall. Nat felt heat flowing in through the hole. He rose. Izzie was already up, the knife, half the blade snapped off, in her hand. They stepped out into a tunnel they didn’t know, heard a grunt in the distance, hurried after the sound. Flickering light followed them for a few yards, dwindled to nothing. They kept going, almost running in the darkness. Nat kept one hand on the wall; he didn’t know how Izzie was doing it. She was a little ahead, then more so.

  Suddenly his hand felt nothing but empty space. He froze. “This way,” she called from somewhere on his right. “Another tunnel.” He followed her. She moved so fast, almost as though she could see in the dark. He heard another grunt, Freedy’s grunt, much closer now.

  And another, closer still, followed by a moan, a female moan. Nat caught up with Izzie, brushed against her, took her hand: ice cold. He felt something else, a sort of breeze, a damp breeze, blowing in his face from the direction they were headed. “Wait,” he said in Izzie’s ear.

  “Piss on that,” she said, shook him off, kept going. He went after her, stumbled on something soft.

  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

  32

  What do we have in common with the rosebud, which trembles because a drop of dew lies on it?

  — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

  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, bu
t 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.”

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