Free Crazy by William Peter Blatty Page A

thought. But then I saw she was older, in fact a lot older. She quit waving and blew me a kiss.
    “Joey?”
    I turned my head. Pop had cracked open the bedroom door. He was looking kind of down. Almost cranky.
    “Yeah, Pop?”
    He shook his head, looking even more troubled.
    “I am sorry, Joey, very, very sorry, but I cannot sleep in bedroom. I cannot. I do not know what is cause. Maybe noises like you say. I do not know, Joey. Habit, maybe. Something. I have to sleep again on couch. That’s alright? Maybe now you should be always leaving bedroom door open. When they fighting very loud you still be able to hear. It’s okay, Joey? Sorry. Very sorry.”
    “Yeah, that’s fine, Pop. No problem.”
    “I know.”
    So what was that ?
    I watched him peering out at me as he slowly closed the bedroom door, and then I turned to look down at the woman below on the street. But she was gone. Vanished. Not in evidence. I even opened the window and leaned out into the rain, looking this way and that, but there wasn’t any trace of her. Drenched, I shut the window and went on into the kitchen where I poured myself a glass of orange juice and then stood with my back to the icebox, sipping and thinking about the woman blowing me a kiss. There were lots of crazy people in Gotham. Two days before there was a girl walking past me on Second Avenue shouting “Government!” over and over at the top of her voice and not sounding all that terribly pleased. My mind went to Pop and the sleeping arrangements, and, Oh, well, I tried, I thought. I tried. At least that was something . But then as I was lifting the juice to my mouth again, all of a sudden I stopped as I remembered something: Was that a sly smile that I’d seen on Pop’s face when I was watching him close the bedroom door? Now I heard the grinding of a faucet handle being turned and then water running hard in a bathroom sink, and looking off I smiled faintly and nodded as, “Oh, yeah,” I softly murmured. “Oh, yeah.”
    Peruvians. Who among them could you possibly trust?

8
     
    I guess the title of a movie about the next day would be The Lady Vanishes. Most Sundays after twelve o’clock Mass I’d tote grocery bags for tips at the market, but the stupid heavy rain and fierce wind never stopped, as if some Hollywood studio had arranged it to coincide with the release of The Hurricane, a South Seas Jon Hall starrer, so I sat around at home with a three-inch paper scissor cutting out a Barney Google mask from the Journal-American Sunday funnies, thus setting up the reason that at the end of my life my tombstone should be totally blank but for the single word in tall block letters, DUPE! for I’d followed the paper’s instructions that by “thoroughy mixing” flour and water I would wind up with glue. The lying fucks! I also entered a couple of their fraudulent puzzle contests. “Neatness counts!” they always said. Yeah, sure. Well, I gave the right answers to all of the questions in all of the puzzles all of the time, and as for neatness my answers were in perfect block letters, I’d even dust them for flyspecks, for crimminey sakes! But do you think I ever won? Not once! I tried everything, even setting down my answers on paper that I’d cut into the different geometric shapes of the most popular and bestselling bars of soap, and at the end, in humiliating desperation, a bleeding, humongous heart on the back of which I wrote in neat letters, IT FLOATS . Yes. Memories are made of this.

     
    Monday morning Jane wasn’t in school. Bummer. I had so many things to ask her. Come lunchtime I tried to console myself, trudging despondently to Lexington Avenue and 27th where the publishers of Superman comics were ensconced and I wound up talking to some girl in reception and doing my ever so insouciantly charming and engagingly innocent altar boy act while underneath I was seething and basically asking where in freak was the Superman badge I’d written in for, a demand I