Free The Night In Question by Tobias Wolff

bigger and more competent. Ivan had a soft spot for him. After the accident he took to his bed for almost a week straight, then vanished.
    When Tanker was home everybody’d be in the kitchen, sitting around the table and cracking up at his stories. He told stories about himself that I would’ve locked away for good, like the time his bike broke down in the middle of nowhere and a car stopped but instead of giving him a lift the guys inside hit him over the head with a lunch bag full of fresh shit. Then a patrolman arrested him and made him ride to the station in his trunk—all in the middle of a snowstorm. Tanker told that story as if it was the most precious thing that ever happened to him, tears glistening in his eyes. He had lots of friends, wise guys in creaking leather jackets, and he filled the house with them. He could fix anything—plumbing, engines, leaky roofs, you name it. He took Freddy and me on fishing trips in his rattletrap truck, and gave us Indian names. I was Hard-to-Camp-With, because I complained and snored. Freddy was Cheap-to-Feed.
    After Tanker got killed everything changed at Freddy’s. The house had the frozen, echoey quiet of abandonment. Ivan finally came back from wherever he’d disappeared to, but he spent most of his time away on some new enterprise. When Freddy and I got to the house after school it was always dim and still. His mother kept to herself in the back bedroom. Sometimes she came out to offer us a sandwich and ask us questions about our day, but I wished she wouldn’t. I had never seen such sorrow; it appalled me. And I was even more appalled by her attempts to overcome it, because they so plainly, pathetically failed, and in failing opened up the view of a world I had only begun tosuspect, where wounds did not heal, and things did not work out for the best.
    One day Freddy and I were shooting baskets in the driveway when his mother called him inside. We’d been playing horse, and I took advantage of his absence to practice my hook shot. My hook had Freddy jinxed; he couldn’t even hit the backboard with it. I dribbled and shot, dribbled and shot, ten, twenty times; fifty times. Freddy still didn’t come back. It was very quiet. The only sound was the ball hitting the backboard, the rim, the asphalt. I stopped shooting after a while and stood there, waiting, bouncing the ball. The ball was overinflated and rose fast to the hand, making a hollow whang shadowed by a high ringing note that lingered in the silence. It began to give me the creeps. But I kept bouncing the ball, somehow unable to break the rhythm I’d fallen into. My hand moved by itself, lightly palming the pebbled skin and pushing the ball down just hard enough to bring it back. The sound grew louder and larger and emptier, the sound of emptiness itself, emptiness throbbing like a headache. Spooked, I caught the ball and held it. I looked at the house. Nothing moved there. I thought of the woman closed up inside, and Freddy, closed up with her, swallowed by misery. In its stillness the house seemed conscious, expectant. It seemed to be waiting. I put the ball down and walked to the end of the driveway, then broke into a run. I was still running when I reached the park. That was the day the older boys chased me, their blood roused by the spectacle of my rabbity flight. They kept after me for a hundred yards or so and then fell back, though they could’ve caught me if they’d had their hearts in it. But they were running for sport; the seriousness of my panic confused them, put them off their stride.
    Such panic … where did it come from? It couldn’t have been just the situation at Freddy’s. The shakiness of myown family was becoming more and more apparent. At the time I didn’t admit to this knowledge, not for a moment, but it was always there, waiting in the gut: a sourness of foreboding, a cramp of alarm at any sign of misfortune or weakness in others, as if such things were catching.
    Freddy had