Free Crooked by Laura McNeal

audiocassettes in the living room.
“Ça va?”
the tape said.
“Ça va,”
her mother replied cheerfully. This was, Clara knew, the French way of asking how things were with you, and it meant, in literal translation, “It goes.”
    There was a gloomier phrase Clara wondered about. It was the French way of saying, “She went.”

10
    DREAMLAND
    Room 623 of St. Stephen’s Hospital. Amos was twitching in his sleep. His eyes were swollen and yellowish black. Above his forehead, there was a long rectangle of shaved scalp where the doctors had stitched together a two-inch gash.
    Amos was dreaming of Charles and Eddie Tripp. In this dream, Amos is strapped into a chair watching Eddie Tripp eating something that Charles hands him one at a time. The food looks like Tater Tots, except Amos knows they aren’t. They are something else. Wooden-faced boys stand nearby and laugh each time Eddie licks his lips, pops one of the Tot-like objects into his mouth, and extends his hand toward Charles for another. While he watches, Amos’s feet feel cold. Finally he looks down. His feet are bare and have only two toes. The others have been cut off. With a sickening sensation, he knows what Eddie Tripp has been eating.
    â€œAmos?” Someone was tugging at his toes. “Amos? Are you off in dreamland?”
    With difficulty, Amos opened his eyes. It was his nurse. It was always his nurse. The protocol was that the nurse would awaken him every two hours, ask him a few questions to make sure he was lucid, and then move on. “What city are you in?” she might ask. “What’s seven times nine?” Today, after Amos had answered several such questions, she’d said, “A hundred percent! A+! Top marks!”
    â€œI’m deeply relieved,” Amos said in a groggy voice, and the nurse departed.
    Left to himself, Amos began again to think of the Tripp brothers. Amos hadn’t told anyone that it was Charles Tripp who’d knocked him gaga with a baseball bat. He hadn’t told the doctor, the police, or his parents. He knew in his heart he
should
say it was the Tripps, but he knew in his gut he wouldn’t. If he did, the Tripps would eventually come looking for him. So he’d said it was too dark, he couldn’t see faces. But somehow the police had suspected the Tripp brothers anyway. The investigator had shown him photographs of Charles Tripp, huge and smirking with his tongue poking his cheek out from inside his mouth, and little curly-headed Eddie, looking blank and almost confused. Amos had waited a long time—too long, he thought later—before saying, No, he couldn’t be certain it was either of them.
    Amos closed his eyes and was just beginning to slip back into sleep when Bruce popped through the door. “Big news,” he said. “Absolutely jumbo.”
    â€œHow jumbo?” Amos said in a slow, thick voice. He was so sleepy. He was so sleepy and so tired of being poked awake every two hours by nurses. He’d been here two days. He wanted to go home.
    Bruce had visited Amos before. He’d seen the injuries. He called it Amos’s slash-and-gash look. “Jumbo squared,” Bruce said. “Jumbo cubed.” He folded his big body into the chair near Amos’s bed and sat for a moment savoring the information he was about to reveal. Then he leaned forward and said, “Jay Foley came to school with pictures of Anne Barrineau naked.”
    Pictures of Anne Barrineau naked
were
big news, and Amos knew he ought to be more interested than he was. It was just that he was so sleepy.
    â€œFoley got ’em with his telephoto Sunday afternoon through her bathroom window right out of the shower,” Bruce said. He sat back. “So, anyway, I figured I owed you one for me calling Clara and saying I was the naked you, so I explained to Foley that you’d acted heroically in defense of a snowman, and after some serious