Crying Wolf

2

Freedy heard a man’s voice from inside the house: “Better put your bathing suit on. The pool boy’s out back.”

Freedy stared up at the house, saw nothing but his own reflection in the glass sliders. He looked buff, ripped, diesel, a fuckin’ animal (except for the intelligence in his face, not visible in the distant reflection, but he knew it was there). The intelligence in his face-according to his mother, he had eyes like the actor, name escaped him at the moment, who played Sherlock Holmes in old black-and-white movies-that intelligence was what separated him from all the other fuckin’ animals out there and made him more of a lady’s man. Women liked brains, no getting around it. Brains meant sensitivity. For example, floating in the water near the filter was a little furry thing. Poor little fella, you could say to some woman who happened to come by the pool. That was all it took: sensitivity.

Combine that with the ripped part, the buff part, the diesel part, so obvious in the window-that bare-chested dude, wearing cutoffs and work boots, the skimmer held loose in his hands, was he himself, after all-and what did you have? The kind of dude women went crazy for, absolutely no denying that. Freedy squeezed the skimmer handle a little and a vein popped up in the reflection of his forearm. Amazing. He was an amazing person. But pool boy. He didn’t like that, not one bit. Would they say it if he was black? Not a chance. That would be racist, and none of these people in their big houses in the hills over the Pacific ever spoke a racist word. They were politically correct. Well, on the panel of the van he drove it said: A-1 Pool Design, Engineering, and Maintenance. So that made pool engineer the correct term, didn’t it? The pool engineer’s out back. That’s what he should have said, the asshole inside the house, Dr. Goldstein or Goldberg or whatever his name was. Freedy swept the little furry thing into the skimmer and tossed it over the ridge.

Thong. He turned back to the house and there was Mrs. Goldstein, Goldberg, whatever, walking across the patio in one of those thong bikinis. What a great invention! About forty, maybe even older, what with that sharp face and turned-down mouth, but the body: all these people with their pools, houses, cars, worked out like crazy, probably harder than he did. Except they didn’t have a bottle of andro in their pocket. Or maybe they did. Nothing surprised him anymore. That was one thing he’d learned almost as soon as he’d come to California, three or four years before, the precise number momentarily unavailable. He’d been in a bar down in Venice when a cigar-smoking guy beside him answered his cell phone, listened for a while, and then said: “Nothing surprises me anymore.” Right on the money. Freedy’d used the expression for the first time himself that very day.

The woman in the thong was talking to him.

“Excuse me?” he said.

She raised her hands to shade her eyes, bringing her breasts into play. “I said, are you new?”

New? What? He’d been doing this pool for six months. Three, anyway. “No,” he said.

“Sorry, I didn’t recognize you. Aren’t you a little early?”

“Columbus Day. Traffic was light.”

She nodded. “What’s your name again?”

“Freedy.”

“Nice to meet you, Freedy. This is when I normally do my laps.”

In a thong? You swim your laps in a thong? Then he got it: Put on your bathing suit. She swam them in the nude.

“Want me to come back some other time?” Pause. “Mrs…”

“Sherman. Bliss Sherman.” From the front of the house came the sound of a car door closing, a car driving off. Had to be hubbie off to work in the Porsche; the Benz didn’t make that throaty sound.

“Nice to meet you too, Bliss.” But Sherman? That was nothing like Goldberg or Goldstein. Freedy dug the schedule out of his pocket: Goldman, 9:00 A.M. He glanced around, noticed a familiar-looking pool house on the next hilltop, about a ten-minute drive away. The Goldmans. He’d come to the wrong house. These Shermans weren’t on the sheet at all. Had he ever been here before? He didn’t think so. They weren’t even clients. Some kind of mistake.

“How long will it take?”

“Take?”

She gave him a closer look; saw the body at last. Now was the moment to hit her with the sensitivity. Freedy checked the pool for more dead rodents, found none.

“To finish up,” said Bliss.

“The pool?”

“Exactly.”

He shrugged, a nice slow shrug to show her those delts, in case she’d missed them. “Fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“I suppose I’ll have to wait till you’re done.” She turned and went back into the house, closing the slider. Freedy watched until she was out of sight: how could you not watch a woman like that in a bathing suit like that? Then he went to work, skimming, checking the pH, adding chlorine, oiling the pump. The whole time, his mind toyed with the image of her butt as she walked away; not quite the whole time-once or twice it occupied itself with the furry thing, spinning over the ridge. He didn’t like that exactly, didn’t like that I suppose I’ll have to wait.

Freedy gathered up the vacuum, skimmer, supply box, knocked on the slider. “All set,” he called. He listened for a reply, heard nothing. He knocked again, called, “Finito,” and walked around to the front of the house. Finito, being some other language, went with the sensitivity.

The van was parked beside the Benz in the driveway. He opened the side door, stowed the gear. While he was doing that, he glanced into the Benz and happened to see some money lying on the seat. That was them. He’d be the same way one day, with his intelligence. He’d own A-1 Pool Design, Maintenance, and Engineering himself. Or maybe a whole chain of pool companies, up and down the coast. Pools and California, they went together. Back where he came from, he didn’t remember a single pool in the whole town-excepting the one up at the college, which didn’t count. What opportunity was there for a person like him in a place like that? None. He knew that oh so well.

But here. Another story. He slammed the van door shut, took out the andro, popped one dry. He was going to be rich, so rich he’d never settle for a lousy 300-series Benz like this one. Was it unlocked? He tried the door. Yup. Unbelievable.

And these Shermans weren’t even on the sheet. He’d cleaned their goddamn pool for nothing, even finishing after he’d figured it out, like some kind of saint, or Martin Luther King Jr. Cleaned their pool like Martin Luther King Jr., while that bare-assed bitch had said exactly. Not even on the sheet. In a funny way, that meant none of this was really happening. What an awesome thought: it reminded him of The X-Files. None of this was really happening. That meant it was like a free play in football, where they throw a flag against the defense while the quarterback’s still dropping back, giving him a chance to throw the bomb with no risk. A free play. He wasn’t even there. The Shermans didn’t even exist, not in terms of A-1. Freedy reached into the Benz and grabbed the money.

Throw the bomb. It was that easy. He felt better than he had in months, better maybe than any time since the first few days after he’d come to California. Here on this hilltop under a huge blue sky, he felt huge too, the way he’d felt back then, before his crummy walk-up on Lincoln, the clunker that wouldn’t fucking start half the time, the rent he owed, the advances on his pay he’d already got, all the way to Thanksgiving. On the hilltop with the Valley on one side and the ocean on the other, he knew what it was like to have been one of those conquistadors who’d discovered the place; Spaniards-not the spics he had to work with, even work for, now.

As for the money, he’d earned it, if you wanted to be technical; he’d done the work. Freedy shoved it into the pocket of his cutoffs, down there with the andro. He took a deep breath, felt great. Sober, unstoned, and great. When was the last time that combo had turned up? And how sharp his senses were all of a sudden, even sharper than usual. He smelled a nice plant smell he couldn’t identify, saw a high-flying bird of some kind, heard a distant splash.

Maybe not so distant. Maybe from the other side of the house, where someone might be swimming her laps, back and forth, in a zone and possibly daydreaming about the so-called pool boy the whole time.

The so-called pool boy crept back around the house.

This was what was going to happen. He would take off his work boots, his socks, his cutoffs, cross the patio while she was swimming the other way, lower himself in the pool, and just stand there in the shallow end, waiting for her to bump into him on her way back. Surprise. But a nice surprise. She’d look up, eyes wide, mouth opening, then see who it was. The expression on her face would change in some exciting way, and she’d say, “I was just thinking about you,” or maybe something subtler, like “What a coincidence.” Yeah, that would be it: she was subtle, educated, rich. Freedy remembered the money in his pocket and felt a little badly. No reason he couldn’t toss it back in the Benz later.

Freedy reached the corner of the house and stopped. He heard rhythmic splashing sounds, and one soft, female grunt. He peeked around the edge of the wall. Just as he’d imagined. Bliss-right name, in terms of what was going to happen… not psychic but some word about the future like that-naked in the pool, swimming her laps, tan all over. This was happening. It was just like porn, except he was in it. Freedy started to get hard right away, really hard, andro hard. He had an important thought: this is going to be the best experience of my life, so far. That meant he should make it last, appreciate it, savor it. Savor: what a perfect word, a word most people wouldn’t have come up with at a time like this, but he knew it well, from the cooking channel. He was intelligent. He had eyes like whatever his name was who had played Sherlock Holmes, according to his mother.

His mother would be five or ten years older than Bliss Sherman. Had she ever had a body like that? Not even on her best day. But enough about her. What the hell was he doing thinking about his mother right now? His mother’s face, Bliss Sherman’s butt, the spinning furry thing: he shook his head to clear away all that confusion and moved silently across the patio. Silent, not to scare her or anything; he just didn’t want to spoil the surprise.

Freedy slipped into the shallow end. The water was cool and clean, made him tingle all over. Of course it was clean: he’d cleaned it himself. He’d made his bed, in other words, and now he got to lie in it-an expression one of his high-school teachers had liked using on him. Look at me now, teach.

He stood in the shallow end, up to his waist, eyes on Bliss Sherman’s ass, curving up out of the water as she touched the far end, turned. He saw she was wearing goggles; he hadn’t imagined goggles, but they made it better somehow, like high heels on a stripper. Another sign of his intelligence, to make that connection. And now, with Bliss almost upon him, just two or three strokes away, he recalled a fragment of a strange cartoon he’d seen on TV, late-night Mexican TV and him maybe tweaked a bit on crystal meth, which was probably why it was no more than a fragment. Some cartoon animal, a duck or a cat, was swimming in a pool like this one, when all of a sudden from the filter outlet came slithering the arm of a giant squid, wrapping round the little critter in coils that left nothing but the webbed feet sticking out. Must have been a duck, then.

Freedy put his hands on his hips. Bliss took one last stroke, then touched. But she didn’t feel that cold tile at the end of the pool, oh no. Her fingertips brushed his dick instead. Couldn’t have been more perfect. Life was full of fascinating shit, if you just made a little effort. Forget about porn. This was better than any porn he’d ever seen: and he was in it!

Her head jerked up then, and as he’d imagined, her eyes, behind the goggles, opened wide, and her mouth opened wide too, and her face went through exciting changes. Everything as he’d foreseen. Freedy started to smile, a friendly, manly smile, as though they were sharing some mutual joke. Like: hey, you were in the middle of daydreaming about ol’ Mr. Dick here, and now-abracadabra. That kind of joke. Sophisticated.

But she forgot to say what a coincidence, or even the less stylish I was just thinking about you. Instead she sprang back quickly into deeper water, deep enough so that her breasts floated on the surface, and sounded almost annoyed or something when she said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Sharing your dreams, babe.” Now if that wasn’t smooth, if that wasn’t cool, what was? Freedy knew very well it was the kind of remark that made women melt. He had said something like it to Estrella on their date last week, and she had melted, by God.

But Bliss didn’t melt, at least not in any way he knew about. She raised her voice, not a pleasant voice to begin with, he now realized, and said: “Get the fuck off my property.”

Women were crazy and men were stupid-where had he heard that? Hard Copy, maybe. There was some truth in it, but not all men were stupid. Some were just the opposite, some knew that female craziness could be controlled by the use of the right physical… something. He couldn’t come up with the right word, but he knew the right physical something to use in this case. Besides, he liked when women said fuck.

Bliss had moved back quickly, but it wasn’t what would be called quick in terms of what someone like Freedy could do. He was quick on a big-league scale, quick like one of those NBA guards. And he was a man, after all-with andro and crystal meth in reserve-and men were plain quicker than women in the first place, weren’t they?

They were. Or at least this man was quicker than this woman. Before she knew it, even before he knew it, to tell the truth, Freedy had closed the distance between them and grabbed one of those floating breasts. Not grabbed. Wrong word-it was much gentler than that, more like the kind of semirough stuff that drove Estrella, for example, wild.

At first Freedy thought it was having the same effect on Bliss, from the way she was screaming. That was the freaky thing about Estrella, or that other girl from Riverside, her name escaping him at the moment. They flat-out screamed with pleasure. But this scream, Bliss’s scream, went on a little too long, and there was nothing pleasant about it. She really had an irritating voice. And what was this? She’d bit his arm or something? Bit him? Not a sex kind of bite, but a hurting bite. Like she was resisting. Like she hadn’t been dreaming the dream.

And also this funny taste. Blood in his mouth? Meaning he’d bitten her back? Yes, her tit was bleeding, but not much, not much more than Estrella’s when they were having a little fun that night after the Marilyn Manson pay-per-view.

But this woman, this woman with the name that didn’t fit, was no Estrella, and that screaming was horrible. Freedy did what the hero always had to do to stop hysteria, swatting her a crisp one across the face.

Didn’t work. Bliss kept screaming, higher and higher, making him want to shut her off immediately, the way he would if he’d been flicking the remote and come across one of those opera singers with the screeching voices. Freedy reared back to give her another one, and would have, but someone yelled, “Stop.”

A third person. Woman, also with an irritating voice. Freedy looked around, spotted her on the second-floor balcony of the house, a younger woman, his own age or even a few years less, wearing boxers and a sleeveless T-shirt. Dynamite bod, better than Bliss’s but a lot like it at the same time. Hair all rumpled, like she’d just got out of bed. And the part that didn’t fit: a gun in her hand. Not a little toy, either, but a fucking monster. What was wrong with these people? His hard-on, which had been throbbing underwater like some kind of pumped-up eel, failed completely.

“Stop,” said the woman on the balcony again. Her gun hand was shaking, but the gun was on him, more or less.

Freedy put his hands in the air, not high, but visible. “Everything’s cool,” he said. “Just a consensual misunderstanding.”

Bliss, crying, or sobbing, climbed out of the pool, her naked body all exposed as she hoisted herself over the side, but not a turn-on at all, maybe even the opposite, in a funny way like those naked Auschwitz people.

“What should I do, Mom?” said the woman on the balcony.

“Don’t let him move,” she said, her voice now up in opera territory. Hysterical, no doubt about it. “Don’t let the pervert move. I’m calling the police.” And she stumbled across the patio and into the house.

Freedy looked up at Bliss’s daughter. “This is way overblown.”

“You’re moving,” she said. “Don’t. I took marksmanship at camp.”

Freedy nodded, kept moving, angling toward the corner of the pool nearest the house. At that end of the patio stood a table shaded by a big umbrella. If he could get out of the water, get behind the umbrella, at least she wouldn’t be able to see him. Then somehow to cross the open space between the umbrella and the corner of the house. Okay: that was the strategy.

“You’re moving,” said the girl.

Freedy held his hands higher now, palms open. He gave her his best smile: he had big white teeth, a dazzling smile, like a movie star, but all natural. “I’m not. Honest.” He kept moving.

The gun went off; Freedy couldn’t believe she’d actually fired it on purpose. Something smacked the water right beside him at the same moment. Then he was on the patio, running low behind the umbrella. A stupid time to get stung by a bee, but he felt it in his thigh. Then he saw the rip in the umbrella, heard the pop of the gun. Or maybe he’d got it in the wrong order. Didn’t matter; in a few strides he was around the house, had scooped up his boots and his cutoffs, jumped in the van, goosed it. And zoom.

Ten minutes later he was bumper-to-bumper on the PCH, like any other citizen, except he wasn’t wearing anything and his right outer thigh was bleeding, front and back. But not heavily, more of a seeping than bleeding, and front and back had to be good, had to mean the slug had gone right through. No biggie. In fact, the whole little adventure didn’t amount to much. A misunderstanding, like he’d said. And since they weren’t even on the schedule, it hadn’t really happened, at least not in terms of anything that counted, such as A-1 and his job. Freedy narrowed his eyes, thought hard. Bliss had assumed he was from their regular pool company. Had she seen the van? No. So any investigation would lead to a dead end. And since no real crime had been committed, it would stop there. Plenty of real crimes for the cops to solve. This was LA. Like his mother often said, especially when she was a little stoned: “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” She was a sucker for philosophical puzzles like that. The Shermans weren’t on the schedule. That meant no one in the forest, and no sound.

So it was a normal day. Except for that word pervert: what a disgusting thing to say.

Freedy turned into a Rite-Aid, pulled on his cutoffs, gently, although he was barely bleeding now, and checked the schedule. The Goldmans-maybe best to skip them this week-and then some other people up Las Flores. He was five minutes away, would be early, if anything. Nothing to do now but buy bandages, tape himself up, a normal worker on a normal day. Elementary, my dear Watson. Smiling to himself, Freedy had put on his boots and was opening the door when his beeper went off.

His leg began to throb at once, from hip to toe, with an intensity that made him say, “Oh, fuck,” out loud. A woman loading groceries into a Saab convertible glanced back at him. He closed the door.

Freedy checked the number on the beeper: the office. He sat in the van, taking deep breaths, balling his hands tight, trying to control the pain. Then he remembered the meth, less than a teaspoonful probably, in a twist of foil under the seat. Or in the glove box. Or under the other fucking seat. In his rage, he punched something, hard. The cover popped off the ashtray and there was the meth. Abracadabra. A pinch in each nostril, snort snort, zipped an energy dart up his nose into his brain, through his whole body.

Much better. He corrected that rage thing right away. He hadn’t been in a rage, more like frustration. Rage wasn’t cool. Freedy went to a pay phone and called in.

“A-1,” said one of the office girls.

“Hi there,” said Freedy. “Freedy.”

“Oh. A moment.”

Freedy heard some muffled talking back at the office, but he wasn’t really listening. Instead he stared at the sky, a beautiful blue sky with a lone airplane in it, towing a Marlboro-man banner.

“Freedy?” The boss-not the manager, but the boss. A spic too, but he spoke good English, almost like an American.

“Yup,” said Freedy.

“Where are you at this moment, Freedy?” said the boss. He pronounced it Friddy, one of the only giveaways that he was a spic.

“At a pay phone.”

“Where is the pay phone?”

“You mean with some precision?” Freedy said, just to show him what a real American could do with the language.

“I do.”

“Hard to say,” said Freedy, “since I’m kind of en route at the moment.”

“From where?”

“Wherever the schedule says. I’m always on schedule, you know that.”

“It says the Goldmans, on Piuma.”

“Then it was the Goldmans.”

Pause. “There’s been a slight schedule change, Freedy.”

“Oh yeah?”

“So the best thing would be to return to the office.”

“The office?”

“Something’s come up. A big job. Bonuses all around if we’re done by nightfall.”

“So why don’t I go right wherever it is and get started?” But Freedy was just playing now. He knew it was bullshit; bonuses never happened.

“Because I want you to take the compressor.”

“Right,” said Freedy.

“Pardon?”

“I said right. I’m on my way.” Freedy hung up.

He got back in the van, took two more hits, had a little think, as his mother used to say. He was thinking very clearly, as he always did on meth: different from his mother, the clearly part. Right away he thought about Las Vegas, where he’d never been and always wanted to go. What better time? First he’d stop by his apartment, where he had three hundred dollars in the freezer and a bag of meth. Then drive as far as Bakersfield, say, before abandoning the van and hopping on a bus to Vegas. There: a plan, simple, like all good plans.

Nothing went wrong with the plan until he turned onto Lincoln, about a block from his place. Freedy had a room over a furniture store on the east side. Parked in front of the furniture store was a cruiser. Two more across the street, and a Paki, that would be the furniture store owner, his landlord, was talking to a cop on the sidewalk. Talking with his fucking hands. That’s when it occurred to Freedy that this was a funny kind of speed. Usually he went fast and the world slowed down around him, making it easy to control. This time the world was cranking too.

Freedy spun the wheel, threw the van into a shrieking U-turn, just like the stunt driver whose pool he cleaned on Fridays. In the rearview, he caught a cop glancing up as he floored it. Or maybe not.

But the van-painted the color of the sea, with waves breaking over the fenders-had to go. His own car, his own fucking heap, was in the lot at the office, so that was out. Which left Estrella. She had a Kia, or some shitbox, that she washed and polished twice a week-one of the irritating things about her. Freedy hadn’t been seeing Estrella as much lately, had been getting interested in another waitress in the same place, actually, who worked days like he did instead of nights like Estrella. But it was daytime now, and Estrella would be home.

She had a one-bedroom in Reseda, a garden apartment, meaning the entrance was off the alley. The pain was coming back, or at least Freedy thought it might, so he took two more snorts, moderate ones, and popped an andro before getting out of the van. Couldn’t hurt. He crossed the alley, heart going pitty-pat, real fast, went through the space where a gate must have been at one time, into the dusty yard.

Across the yard, Estrella stood in her doorway. She rose on her tiptoes to kiss the cheek of a big guy who had his arm around her. A big guy with black hair like Estrella’s and copper skin like Estrella’s. He wore a white shirt and a black tie, and carried a suitcase. A jolt went through Freedy, as though he’d downshifted at ninety miles an hour. The cause was a combination of things-amazingly, he had that insight into himself even as he took off, but he was an amazing person-and her sleeping with spics was part of it, for sure. He had the grace to admit it.

They looked up. Did Estrella start to smile at the sight of him? He’d got her a good one before he knew. Then the big guy shouted something, “Hey,” maybe, and tried to push him away, or hit him or something. Mistake. The top blew off at that point, like one of those oil well gushers, except it was red. Not long after, maybe seconds, the big guy was on the ground and Estrella was kneeling over him, tears, the whole bit.

“Don’t expect any sympathy from me, you whore,” said Freedy.

She gave him a strange look, although it was hard to tell since her face was already swelling up. “Mi hermano,” she cried. “Mi hermano.” Or some gibberish like that.

Freedy walked away, silent as Clint Eastwood after a town square gunfight. Overhead the sky was coppery, much the same as Estrella’s skin. The blue sky was on the rich side of town. Freedy had another insight: California sucked.

That night, on a bus to Vegas, Freedy had time to reflect. He felt pretty good, considering. His leg hurt, but nothing he couldn’t control. He wore new jeans and a new western-style shirt, bought with Vegas in mind. That wad of money on Bliss Sherman’s front seat? Turned out to be $650. Win some, lose some. Not a completely bad day. Call it mixed.

His most important accomplishment had been spiritual, if that was the word. He’d realized that California was not for him. That meant it was time to regroup, to center himself. Spiritual, centering: his mother’s lingo. She’d been popping into his mind all day. Was there a reason for that? He thought for the first time of going home. He’d told himself he never would, but how could a week or two hurt? Home cooking, lying up for a while, sleep: what was wrong with that?

In Vegas he picked up a schedule. He’d flown out to California on a coast-to-coast one-way ticket from his mother-high-school graduation present, although a few lost credits kept him from walking with his class. The bus route back wasn’t as simple: Vegas to Denver. Denver to Omaha. Omaha to Chicago. Chicago to Cleveland. Cleveland to Buffalo. Buffalo to Albany. Albany to Pittsfield. Pittsfield to Inverness.

Freedy caught the midnight bus to Chicago and soon fell asleep. He awoke to the sound of low voices, speaking Spanish across the aisle.

“Hey,” said Freedy.

“Yes?”

“Is there some word, sounds like hermano?”

“Si. Hermano.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Brother.”

Had Estrella ever mentioned a brother? Now that he thought about it, maybe she had; an accountant, or something surprising like that, in Tijuana. In case there’d been a misunderstanding, Freedy decided not to dime her out to the INS, which had been his plan. That was his sensitive side coming into play again.

Peter Abrahams

Crying Wolf