Crying Wolf

13

“Freedy?”

He grunted.

“If you’re going to be staying for a while, and of course you’re always welcome, as I’m sure you know-we’re a family, after all, it only takes two, and-”

“Just spit it out.”

“I wondered whether you were considering getting some kind of job. For contributing to the communal pot, to coin a phrase.”

Freedy stared at her across the kitchen table-he was only trying to drink his coffee in peace, for Christ sake, but there she was, head twisted a little, having trouble with the clasp on a huge hoop earring-he stared at her and said nothing. No comment. No comment, at first because he thought he’d heard her asking him to pay for her dope, then when he understood, because it didn’t deserve comment. She was his so-called mother. And look at her. Didn’t she owe him, owe him big-time? And why was it so fucking cold in the house?

Click. The clasp snapped into place. Couldn’t she see how ridiculous she looked, like some gypsy wanna-be? He checked out his own reflection in the little mirror framed with seashells hanging over the sink. No gypsy there: a fuckin’ animal, but with a brain, as the ponytail showed.

She was saying something: “… when you used to help out in the maintenance department, up at the college?”

Was she still on the job kick? “I remember a lot of things.”

A good line. She waited for him to say more, sitting absolutely still. She was good at sitting absolutely still. He remembered a lot of things, but nothing at that moment. Outside the window, an icicle broke off and dropped with a faint thud in the snow.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she said. “The maintenance.”

He thought of answering, No comment. No comment was what people with brains said. But she was pissing him off. “Are you telling me to look for a job?”

“Not telling, Freedy. Nothing like that. And just something temporary. As temporary as you like.”

As temporary as he liked. Was there some meaning in that, some hidden meaning? Freedy was mulling over that when he was hit, from out of nowhere, by an amazing idea, the kind of idea that proved his braininess. It tied things together so nicely, at the same time backing her right against the wall. He showed her that smile of his-a ten-thousand-dollar smile, according to a friend of Estrella’s who worked for a dentist, and said: “Then I’ll need my birth certificate, won’t I?”

“Birth certificate? Why?”

“Job application, what else?” Complete bullshit, of course-all they ever asked for was your license and social, but did she know that? Not a chance: never held down a real job in her life. So now he had her. No surprise there. They weren’t on the same field, not when it came to brainpower. His brainpower came from elsewhere.

She did have one little surprise for him. Freedy had expected the birth certificate would be lost, or unavailable, or not around for some reason or other, but after a minute or two in her bedroom, she came back with it. “Here you go, Freedy.”

He scanned it. Freedy hated official forms. They never made any sense. Like this one, with all these boxes and lines and different size print, even print in different whatever they were called, like old English or something. Standard Certificate of Live Birth: what the hell was that? Like they had certificates of dead births? Didn’t have them for abortions, which he knew for a fact because of Estrella’s. He’d had to drive her. Hours in the waiting room, hours on the freeway going back-flipped-over truck blocking the lanes, he could still see the blood on the pavement-but no certificate.

Freedy’s eyes roamed the stupid form, picked out his own name, and farther down hers, Starry Knight, and down below that was what he was after, must have taken five minutes to find it: FATHER. Full name: Unknown.

Huh? Freedy didn’t say huh — if he did it was real quiet-but that was what he thought. He’d set such a nice trap for her, because Walrus’s real name should have been there, right? Maybe not real name, but the legal one, the way Starry Knight was her legal name. And it wasn’t. The space was blank. Meaning? He looked up at her. She was watching him.

“Don’t lose it, Freedy. It’s the only proof of your existence.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“Yes, Freedy.” Her hand came up a little off the table, as though for defense. “You know the way bureaucrats think.”

“That makes it funny?” But he didn’t know what she was talking about.

They stared at each other across the kitchen table.

A job with maintenance: out of the question. Down in the tunnels with his flashlight, although he almost didn’t need it, knowing his way around so well, Freedy got angry just thinking about the idea. What did she want him to do: go backward in life? That wasn’t the way to financial success. Freedy knew the way to financial success, he and Estrella had watched hundreds of infomercials and she’d figured out what they all had in common: make a plan and stick to it. There was one other part, Freedy recalled as he came to the junction of D36 and Z13-aboveground everything had a fancy name, but down in the tunnels it was just A this and B that, the letters standing for tunnels and the numbers for buildings-one other part to the formula, what was it? Oh, yeah: have an idea. First have an idea, then make a plan, then stick to it. He already had his idea, a big one-own a pool company in Florida. And a plan-raise the money for it by ripping off high-tech shit at the college and unloading it on Saul Medeiros. Sticking to the plan meant doing it a lot.

Freedy took the turn into Z. Building 13-Lanark, was that the name? — was a girls’ dorm on the quad, or maybe coed; they were almost all coed now. He hated those words: coed, quad. He hated the whole college scene, the backpacks, the notices stuck up all over the place, the sitting in the grass and talking. And the football team: biggest hoax of all. His high-school coach had once taken them all to a game. They-the fucking high-school team-could have beaten the shit out of Inverness. And he himself could have wrecked anyone they had out there. A joke. Didn’t mean some of the college girls weren’t all right; some were. But what he’d never been able to figure out back then was how any of them could be interested in those college boys. Now that he’d been around a bit, he could see how growing up isolated in their rich little suburbs meant the girls never had a chance to meet a real man, let alone a fuckin’ animal. Back then, he’d never made a move on any of them. He’d been just a kid-a big kid, but not as big as now, and no ponytail-and besides, there’d been Cheryl Ann. Those blow jobs. Married a doctor. The only two thoughts he had about her. He tried to fit them together and could not. Wasn’t she a townie just like him?

Night: no maintenance guys in the tunnels at night. Freedy followed Z tunnel under the campus. He hadn’t liked working maintenance but he liked it down in the tunnels. On slow days the workers would sometimes curl up in corners here and there and sleep, but not him; he’d always roamed around till quitting time.

Freedy liked the sounds too. There were sounds down in the tunnels, but not his. He moved silently. Just another one of his skills. He moved silently, heard switches click, the skittering of tiny animals, and sometimes voices from up top, carried weirdly down by the pipes. Like now, at the junction of N, he heard someone laughing. That was kind of weird too, because the sound was louder than the human sounds he remembered, too loud to have been carried by the pipes. He glanced down N, saw it all screened off with cobwebs, remembered it had always been like that, at least as far back as the time he was a summer worker. N led to the old field house, torn down long ago, and beyond that to building 41, now heated with gas. The college was always doing something new, building, tearing down, switching the distro systems, buying up Cheryl Ann’s old house. What gave them the right? Freedy stood there at the junction of Z and N for a minute or so, listening for that laugh again-a woman’s laugh-but it didn’t come.

Freedy moved on. Z did a funny little thing just before building 13. It came to a sort of drop-off, like one of those manholes, except uncovered. No railing or anything, just a sudden black hole in the floor. The tunnel continued straight down for thirty feet or so, maybe more, and you had to pivot and climb down a steel ladder bolted to the walls. The maintenance guys-old drunks, most of them-liked to scare the high-school boys with their stupid stories. Freedy didn’t remember this particular story-something about a broken neck-but he remembered the drop-off and had his beam on it in plenty of time. He climbed down the ladder, crossed a brick floor, shut off his light, put his ear to the door and listened in the perfect darkness.

Silence; not complete, with that low humming of machine noise, but no human sounds. He opened the door a crack, saw little zones of machine glow in the shadows. All systems go. Freedy stepped into the utilities room in the sub-basement of building 13, silent as, as some animal known for silence-tiger? wolf? — but much, much smarter.

He shone his light around, spotted a fridge in one corner, a small fridge where the maintenance guys would keep their lunches and snacks. Freedy opened it. Each shelf bore a different name tag; he remembered the way they kept their food to themselves. Workies. Freedy helped himself to a ham sandwich intended for someone named Griff. A thick sandwich, the kind wifey might pack for hubbie, but mustard instead of mayo; what kind of wifey was that, Griff? He took a bite or two and dropped the rest in the trash on his way out.

Not out right away of course, but after a careful wolf- or tiger-like peek both ways, and into the sub-basement hall under building 13. Widely spaced low-voltage bulbs in the ceiling cast a dim light. No switches. This was new: had to be a security thing. Freedy didn’t worry. No one around, no reason for anybody but maintenance to be down here-and what difference would it make if anyone did see him? They’d take him for a student, or somebody’s date. It was safe, at least going in. Going out, with the goods-that was a little different. But all of it, the in part and the out part: fun. Yes. At that moment, Freedy understood why people got into skydiving or climbing Mt. Everest. On Everest, though, you wouldn’t have to put up with any of the college shit, like this flyer taped by the stairway: Curious? Come to the weekly Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Club Dance. Music! Food! Prizes! He tore the sheet off the wall, crumpled it up-the sound of the crumpling so clear in contrast to the silent way he’d been moving, clear like the sound system he’d once checked out at some Hollywood guy’s place when no one was home-and went upstairs, into building 13. Lanark, or whatever they called it, a residence, and all the residences had a basement lounge. Freedy checked it out.

TV-but not HDTV; VCR-dying technology, DVD was what the market wanted; microwave-who gave a shit about microwaves? What he had a hankering for, maybe because of the recollection of that killer sound system, was one of those compact stereos, the new kind that hung on a wall, and a laptop or two for dessert. For dessert! That was funny, unlike so-called jokes about bureaucrats. Idea, plan, stick, stick, stick. Freedy left the lounge and went up to the dorm rooms, where the real goodies were.

Stone stairs, each step worn with a depression marking the tread of feet over a hundred years or more; the kind of thing that should have been repaired but was instead considered a point of pride. College shit-they had no idea what the country was all about. Freedy, maybe because of the Everest thing, maybe because he got a little zoned out planting his feet in those depressions, went all the way to the top floor, the third, and entered the hall. Three rooms on each side, all with closed doors but the two at the end; blue light leaked out of one, yellow light, very faint, from the other. Freedy, tiger, wolf, but much, much smarter-there was a word for that kind of animal, started with p, it would come to him-treaded silently down the hall. He peeked into the yellow-lit room.

Good choice. Freedy saw something nice, real nice. The room itself, the living room, sitting room, whatever the hell they called it, wasn’t lit at all; the yellow light came through the partly open bedroom door at the back. And through that opening, Freedy saw a woman, a college girl. A fat college girl, maybe, or if not fat, still far from perfect; and she wore glasses. But that wasn’t the point: the point was she wore jeans and nothing else. Even more-she was doing something interesting. The college girl, kind of fat, glasses, was standing sideways, from Freedy’s viewpoint, and facing a mirror. Freedy couldn’t see a mirror from his angle, but he knew it had to be there, possessed as he was of a brain capable of mental leaps. This girl, not too fat, really, had one of her tits cupped in both hands, was shifting it around a little, gazing at the mirror Freedy couldn’t see; a few moments later, she went through the same routine with the other tit, like she was checking to see if they were identical. Did girls do that? Learned something new every day. An up-close-and-personal moment: it was like they knew each other already, no bullshit, no expense. Add to that the fact of her not being perfect, meant she was probably lonely for a man. In her wildest dreams would she ever think she’d have a chance with a man like him, diesel, buff, a man like him a matter of a few feet away? If he cleared his throat right now, for example: wow. One other thing, an image, a memory. Wasn’t the mind funny, the way it worked? This image Freedy recalled from a porn video, maybe seen on that trip to Mexico, or else the time he’d rented one to watch with Estrella, but she’d been grossed out, letting him down bad. This video memory: a girl with glasses Action central. The girl turned abruptly toward the door, toward him. Started to turn would be more accurate, because Freedy, so quick, was out of sight in the hall almost before the movement began.

But why? Shouldn’t he have stayed where he was, let her see him? He could have delivered some line, like: They both look pretty good to me. How cool was that? Then: Come in, big boy. The college girl saying that, not the video girl. His reflexes had gotten the better of him. He was about to make up for it, to step back into the room and hit her with that line, when the door closed. Then the lock clicked. And some kind of fucking bolt slid into place. Not hard, not frantic, she hadn’t spotted him, simply noticed the open door. Shut out, just like that, by seconds, or tenths of a second. Bad luck, nothing more.

But Freedy was getting tired of bad luck. Now he was in a bad mood. Idea, plan, stick, stick, stick. They made it seem so easy.

Freedy took a deep breath, a trick he’d learned from Estrella, or maybe from the other waitress, the one who worked days, and got a grip. Stick, stick, stick. Meant doing it again and again. Meant sucking it up, being a man. He knew how to do all that, had learned in high-school football. A fucking leg breaker, a Thanksgiving crackerjack. Freedy dug down deep, stuck his head into the blue-lit room.

No one there. He walked right in, on a mission now, in search of stuff and plenty of it.

The blue light came from a computer, a laptop, sitting on a desk. Dessert, but he was in a bad mood, and the joke had lost its appeal. The laptop’s light illuminated another laptop-a second helping, to put it in dessert terms, but he didn’t see the humor in that either-this one closed, on the adjoining desk; a sound system, but not the kind that hung on a wall; a cell phone and a regular phone; and something else, reflecting blue light in the corner. He went closer, saw that this something else was a fish tank. In the fish tank hovered a single fish, bigger than a goldfish and not gold. Some other colors-Freedy didn’t really notice. What he noticed were its eyes, blue from the reflection, focused on him like it was watching. Freedy wished he had something sharp to stick right through them, but not because he was unkind to animals-he’d owned a dog, a pit bull, for a few months after his arrival in LA, and fed it practically every day. He was in a bad mood, period. Could happen to anyone.

Cheer up, he told himself. The laptops, the cell phone: a decent night’s work. Freedy walked over to the open laptop, read what was on the screen:

To: Phil. 322

From: Prof. L. Uzig

Re: Due to the late arrival of the Kaufman edition of Zarathustra, the assignment due

And other college bullshit that he would have stopped reading even if he hadn’t heard a sound. A voice; distant, female. He ripped the plug out of the machine, snapped it shut, glanced out into the hall. Saw nothing, but heard footsteps, faint then less faint, on the stone stairs at the far end. He banged through the exit at his endEmergency Only, Alarm Will Sound, but it didn’t, the college kids disabling everything they could-and zoomed down, two, three, even four stairs at a time.

Easy for him. His body handled it; his mind was elsewhere, working on something important. If he had a problem with women, and that was debatable, it had always been getting past the first step or two in meeting a certain type. Only get past that hurdle, begin from a position already inside their lives, as he had been on the point of doing with the college girl in the yellow-lit room, then they’d see him for what he really was, a stud on the road to big success. After that, well who wouldn’t jump at the chance to hook up with the CEO of a major pool corporation in Florida, maybe the entire Southeast one day? Freedy reminded himself to keep financial control out of greedy little hands, to draw up one of those agreements-prenups, there’d been an infomercial on that too-if he ever got married. Damn: he thought of everything.

Freedy’s bad mood lifted just like that. Out into the night, laptop under his arm. He felt good again.