Free Crying Wolf by Peter Abrahams Page A

Freedy?”
    â€œNah.” Although he did, once or twice—last game he was eligible, junior year—but not because of the score or anything like that. What he remembered was breaking one of the Hoosac player’s legs on a blind-side block after a fumble recovery—a clip, actually, but missed by the ref—and the sound it made, a real Thanksgiving sound.
    â€œÂ â€™Nother set?” he said.
    â€œNah.” Ronnie’s eyes dipped down at him, still sitting on the bench, checked out those muscles, no doubt about it. “So what’s this chapter shit?”
    â€œForget it, Ronnie. I bought out the other guy and now we’re waiting on the details. End of story.”
    â€œBought him out with what?”
    Money, you asshole
. But Freedy didn’t say it. Because if he did, then the next thing he knew Ronnie would be saying something like
Why’re you selling me your old TV for twenty bucks? Or this old TV that’s supposedly yours?
“Listen to me, Ronnie.”
    â€œI’m listenin’.”
    â€œWhen they do one of these Chapter Elevens it’s like a ref’s time-out.”
    â€œTo discuss the offsetting penalties?”
    â€œYou got it.”
    â€œAnd whiles there’s a time-out nothing can happen. Bank accounts all frozen, that kind of shit.”
    Ronnie glanced at the TV. The little critter was trapped inside the shark’s mouth, but he had a jar of red-hot pepper in his hand, said
Red Hot Pepper Yiaow
right on it. “All frozen,” said Ronnie. “I get it.” Water kept dripping, drip drip, from somewhere nearby.
    Â 
    L iving at home meant being back in the flats. The flats—at the bottom of the north, cold side of College Hill, sunless most winter afternoons, between the old railroad tracks, where nothing ran anymore except the trash train once a week, and the river—hadn’t changed much. It wasn’t like he had to get used to anything new. A few more potholes in the streets, the house fronts more dilapidated, another line or two on his mother’s face.
    She was in the kitchen, pouring lumpy yellow batter into muffin tins. That was what she did: sold her muffins to health stores up and down the valley. Plus cashing her disability checks, welfare, whatever it was, smoking her dope, listening to her music. It was playing right now, and she was swaying to it, there by the counter: Birkenstocks, an Arab kind of robe, thick gray hair almost down to her waist. Freedy disliked all music, but that sixties shit was the worst. He snapped it off.
    She turned, not fast. None of her movements was fast. That was part of being centered. “I was enjoying that, Freedy.”
    â€œYou’ve heard it a million times.”
    She looked at him. She had big dark eyes, deeper-set than they used to be, shadows in shadows. There was also a beauty-mark-sized drop of batter on her chin. “That’s what makes it art,” she said.
    â€œYou call that art?”
    She sucked in her lips, one of her most annoying habits. “I’m a bit of an artist myself, Freedy, as I think you’re aware.”
    He avoided glancing at any of her stuff, which wasn’t easy. Just in the kitchen: her paintings all over the walls, her pottery on the shelves, her macramé hanging from the ceiling, her embroidered place mats, oven mitts, aprons peeking out from every cupboard. All moons and stars and bare trees and cats and longhaired women in serapes.
    â€œSo?” he said.
    â€œSo I’m enough of an artist to know an artist when I hear one,” she said. “And Cat Stevens is an artist. Of the first water.”
    Of the first water? What was she talking about? He could hardly understand her half the time, his own mother. They had nothing in common, didn’t even look alike. She was a wiry little thing; his size must have come from the father, whoever he was—but that was another story. Freedy didn’t