Crying Wolf

by Peter Abrahams

  Nat went down the corridor, slowing because it ended at a padlocked steel door with the word Maintenance stenciled on the front. He walked back the way he had come, passing three other padlocked doors, all of which he knew led to storage lockers for the students, and came to another door, lockless. Nat stood in front of that door. He sensed someone on the other side, tried to think of a way he could summon security and stand guard at the same time. Then came a jolt of adrenaline, and he jerked the door open.

  A janitor’s closet, full of brooms, mops, buckets, cleansers. Even empty, it wasn’t big enough for a man with a television, especially one the size of Wags’s. Nat closed the door, went back along the corridor, trying all the padlocks. Fastened, every one.

  Nat stayed in the basement corridor for a minute or two, listening for a sound, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.

  He went upstairs, along the first floor to the main entrance of the dorm. Had he imagined those footsteps on the brick floor, or misinterpreted some sound he had heard? It was one or the other. Nat opened the door to the quad. Surprise.

  White. White everywhere: snow had fallen while he slept, fallen heavily, although it wasn’t snowing now, and the stars shone bright. A foot of snow, maybe more, deep, crisp, even. It bent the branches of the old oaks, gave the statue of Emerson a hulking, steroidal profile, rounded the dorm entry pediments and other architectural features whose names Nat was starting to learn: pure, unmarred whiteness, glowing under the old Victorian lampposts as though lit from below.

  Nat called campus security from his room and was told to file a report in the morning. He locked the door to the hall, went into Wags’s bedroom, took in the disarray, no worse than before, and the coffee cup on the windowsill, still half full but now cold, satisfied himself that nothing else was missing. Back in the outer room, he picked up Wags’s lab notes and piled them neatly on his desk, even trying to arrange them in some sort of order.

  Nat sat on the couch that Bloomingdale’s had delivered after the visit of Wags’s parents and reopened Young Goodman Brown. This time he followed Goodman Brown out of Salem to his meeting in the forest with what Nat supposed was the devil. He paused at the sentence “But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.” Nat read it several times and was reaching for his yellow highlighter when he thought: unmarred.

  Snow unmarred. And therefore? Nat went downstairs, out to the quad. The night was cold and still, the only movement his own rising breath. He circled the dorm, snow up to his knees, sometimes higher. The only footprints were his, a shadow-filled trench he tramped around the building like a moat in miniature. His feet, still in the sneakers he’d slept in, got cold and then cold and wet. Other than that, no result. Back in his room, he called security again.

  This time he reached a recording that gave him a choice between voice mail and an emergency number. Was this an emergency? No footprints except his own: didn’t that mean the thief was still in the dorm, and had been there before the snowfall? A student, then, some other student still on campus, like him, possibly a resident of the dorm, and therefore a freshman, like him, possibly without money to go home, like him. Better to find him in the morning, get him to return the TV without a fuss, without involving security. Nat hung up the phone.

  Were there any freshmen who looked like that, big with ponytails? Nat couldn’t recall any, but there were five hundred people in the class, many he still hadn’t even seen. He flipped through the freshman directory, useless because he’d had only a back view of the thief. He came to his own picture-the graduation picture, wearing Mr. Beaman’s blazer-knew with certainty that he didn’t look at all like that anymore. He checked in the mirror and found that he did.

  Nat thought of calling Wags in Sewickley, but it was almost one, and he could imagine Wags’s mother picking up the phone. He made sure the front door was locked, took off his wet shoes, put them on the radiator to dry, and went to bed.

  Nat’s mother had a funny story she liked to tell about him. When Nattie was very young, before he could talk, he couldn’t bear to go to sleep if any of the dresser drawers in his room were open, even a crack. She didn’t always remember to close them, and would sometimes poke her head in the room to find him laboriously climbing out of his crib and crawling across the floor toward the dresser. Nat thought of this story about half an hour later when he gave up on sleep, unlocked the door, and stepped into the hall.

  Plessey Hall had three floors, ten rooms on each, most of them doubles, a few triples, and a single for the RA. Nat started at number thirty on the third floor. He checked for light leaking under the door, listened for any sound, knocked, tried the knob. No light, no sound, no answer to his knock, door locked. All the rooms were just like that down to number one, except for seventeen, his own.

  Nat went back to bed, first locking the door. He turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes. Once, climbing out of his crib, he’d somehow tangled the back of his Dr. Denton’s on the corner of the guardrail and hung there outside the crib, not strangling or anything, but helpless. He’d heard his parents shouting at each other in the next room. That was Nattie’s earliest memory.

  Peter Abrahams

  Crying Wolf

  4

  All Christmas essays that failed to define rococo in the first sentence will be returned unread. They may be resubmitted at the next class. Grades of such resubmissions will be reduced by 10 percent. Those not resubmitted will receive zero.

  — Greeting on Professor Uzig’s office answering machine

  The next time Nat looked at his bedside clock, it read 10:23. He got out of bed, feeling stiff and sore, as though he’d played some contact sport the previous day, and went to the outer room. Through the window, he saw a morning that could have been painted in a few dull colors: dark gray for the sky and trees, brownish red for the bricks, light gray for the snow, for Emerson, for everything else. One more detail: the footprints. Hard packed, they caught what little light there was, and shone white. Footprints coming and going at the Plessey entrance, crisscrossing between the dorms, meandering over the quad; footprints everywhere. There were even some ski and snowshoe tracks, also white. Had the quad really been unmarred hours before? Nat went into Wags’s bedroom and found the TV still gone. Daytime made it conclusive.

  Nat dressed and went outside, headed for the campus security office. A silent campus: as beautiful as in the brochure, but there was more-a sense of gravity, importance, even power-that the brochure, perhaps trying to be friendly, hadn’t conveyed. Nat told himself he was glad to have this time alone. He needed to catch up with himself, if that made sense. The workload, the assignments, the expectations of the teachers: all so demanding, but the real pressure came from the kids. So smart; and so cool, some of them, which was very different from home, where smart and cool were almost always opposites. And here the others, the not so cool, could be strange and fascinating-like Wags, for example, with the little shrine he’d built to Alfred Hitchcock, and the way Nat would sometimes hear him late at night, lying in bed and muttering whole scenes of movie dialogue from memory. So even as the sky darkened still more while he crossed the quad, draining what little color there was and lowering the temperature in seconds, Nat told himself this solitary Christmas would be good.

  That thought was still in his mind when he saw he wasn’t quite alone. Across the quad, the main door to Lanark Hall-the residence opposite Plessey, the nicest, by reputation, although Nat had never been inside-opened. Two girls came out-women’s studies majors spoke of women and men, but everyone else on campus said girls and guys-sidestepped down the broad snowy stairs facing each other, carrying something. Nat thought TV at once, because of the mission he was on, and from the way they carried it. The problem was its invisibility. There was nothing to see. Were they pretending to carry something? Was it some sort of pantomime? Nat was about to look around for the film crew when one of the girls lost her footing. He heard a little cry; then the girl
s were tumbling down the steps, one after the other, a flurry of kicking legs, waving arms, flapping scarves, airborne hats. The object they carried, now free, spun in the air, became visible: an aquarium. It spilled its water in one perfectly shaped wave, a wave topped by a bar of gold.

  Everything came crashing down. But no. That was what Nat, moving unconsciously closer as though responding to something gravitational, expected. In fact, only the aquarium crashed. Somehow the two girls landed on their feet, like gymnasts, but without the posturing. He lost sight of the gold object.

  The next moment the girls were both on their knees, digging through the snow. Nat reached them in time to hear one say, “Here’s the little bastard.”

  “Gentle,” said the other one.

  The first girl held up the object in both hands, and Nat saw what it was: a fish. A fish, but unlike any fish, or any living thing, he’d ever seen: a dazzling creature, fat and gold with a wide yellow-lipped mouth, now opening and closing desperately, round yellow eyes, indigo fins, and white polka dots from head to its blue-and-gold tail. A dazzling creature that seemed to contain in its little form all the color lacking in the day.

  “Whatever we do better be quick,” said the one holding the fish.

  The aquarium lay shattered, the water it had contained now a melting depression in the snow.

  “Bathtub?” said the second girl.

  “Fresh water,” said the first girl. “Might as well be poison.”

  “Then think of something.”

  “That’s my role.”

  “Not now, Grace, for Christ’s sake.”

  They glanced around, as though seeking help, but didn’t seem to see Nat. The fish chose that moment to make a violent flipping motion, flying free. Nat was ready. He caught it in his cupped hands and said: “The bio lab.”

  Now they saw him. “Where’s that?” They said it in unison. Nat didn’t reply, partly because the route was complicated, mostly because of how stunned he was by their appearance: one-Grace-light blond, the other darker-haired, both-he couldn’t find the right word, something as absolute as amazing, astonishing, beautiful, but more precise.

  He did know where the bio lab was; he was taking a biology course to keep his pre-med option open. Sticking to the beaten footprint tracks and then the plowed paths, he took off as fast as he could with the fish in his hands-around Lanark, up the hill to the chapel, down the other side past the new science complex, across the old quad to the bio lab building. Nat was a good runner, but one girl passed him on the stairs in time to hold the door open, and the other was right beside him.

  Nat ran down the dark-paneled first-floor hall. The bio labs were in the oldest building on campus, originally the entire college, later the science building, now closed off except for the first floor. The labs themselves, lining the hall, had thick wooden doors with windows in them, and he’d peered through them all in the first weeks of the semester.

  “Here,” he said at the end of the hall, and one of the girls banged the door open. The fish was no longer wriggling in his hands, not moving at all; it was coated in some sort of invisible slime, but Nat could feel the rough scales underneath. He went straight to the dozen numbered tanks on the counter at the back wall, began lowering the fish into the nearest one.

  “He can’t be with other fish,” said one of the girls; the darker-haired one.

  “He can’t be with other fish?”

  “Not ones he doesn’t know. They might hurt him.”

  Nat glanced in the tank, saw three brown fish, half the size of the gaudy one, checked the other tanks, all occupied. “Is that something scientific, or just a feeling?”

  “Blah, blah, blah,” said the lighter-haired girl, Grace. She leaned over the aquarium, scooped out the three brown fish with her hand, flipped them into the next tank. “Dump him in,” she said to Nat. He had never seen eyes like hers in his life.

  “Not so fast,” said the darker-haired girl, dipping her finger in the water, tasting. She nodded to him, finger still between her lips. Nat saw eyes unlike any he had ever seen until moments ago. The fish slipped from his hands, fell into the tank.

  “For God’s sake,” said Grace.

  “Sorry.”

  “He’s sensitive, that’s all,” said the darker-haired one.

  The fish sank down in the water, floated there, but upside down.

  “Swim,” said the darker-haired one.

  But the fish just hung upside-down in the tank. Grace reached in, turned him over, swam him vigorously back and forth.

  “You’re hurting him,” said the darker-haired girl.

  “Zip it, Izzie,” said Grace.

  Izzie bit her lip. Grace gave the fish a big push and let go. He drifted forward for a moment, listed to one side, almost capsized. Then one indigo fin began making tentative fanning movements, the blue-and-gold tail flicked to one side, back again, and the fish stabilized itself and swam with increasing strength to the middle of the tank, sending a hazy jet of fecal matter to the bottom.

  “You stud, Lorenzo,” said Grace.

  “The Magnificent,” Nat said.

  They both turned to him, their eyes somewhat similar in color to Lorenzo’s, but toned down.

  “How did you know that?” said Izzie.

  “It fits.”

  “I meant how do you know about Lorenzo the Magnificent?”

  Nat shrugged; it was just one of those things he knew. Their eyes narrowed on him. “What’s your name?” They spoke together, didn’t appear to notice the overlap.

  Nat told them.

  “Well, Nat,” said Grace. “I guess we-”

  “Thanks,” said Izzie.

  “Yeah,” said Grace. “Thanks.”

  “He means a lot to us,” said Izzie. “We caught him.”

  “You caught him?”

  “Grace did,” Izzie said.

  “But Izzie kept the sharks at bay.”

  “The sharks?”

  “With her bangstick.”

  “You’re making this up,” said Nat.

  “Why do you say that?” said Grace. “Sharks are wicked off Bora Bora, common knowledge.”

  “But thanks, is the point,” said Izzie.

  “Right,” said Grace. “You saved the goddamn day.” She reached into the pocket of her jeans, pulled out a wad of bills, removed some without counting or even looking, held them out.

  “What’s this?” said Nat. He felt his face reddening.

  Grace turned to Izzie. “Not enough?” she said in a stage whisper.

  Her eyes on Nat, Izzie said: “I think we’ve made a-”

  “-mistake?” said Grace. She turned to Nat. “You’re not maintenance or something?”

  “I’m a student, actually.” That sounded so stiff, but was how he felt.

  “Yikes. What year?”

  “Freshman.”

  “Oh, God,” said Izzie. “We almost tipped a classmate.”

  “Not PC,” said Grace; and then to Nat: “Well, do you want it?”

  They all laughed, Nat as hard as the girls, although he was aware of, and despising, the little part of him that did want the money. He reddened some more. Izzie stopped laughing; then Grace.

  “Sorry,” Grace said, putting the money back in her pocket.

  “Very,” said Izzie.

  “Hey,” said Nat.

  An awkward moment. Their gazes all went to Lorenzo, the path of least resistance. He fluttered his fins.

  “Will anyone mind if we borrow this one little tank?” Izzie said. “We’ve got to get Lorenzo home for Christmas.”

  “I guess not,” said Nat, turning to the adjacent tank in time to see the remains of the three brown fish spiraling slowly to the bottom, milky gobbets trailing black nerves and threads of blood. A single pink fish, smaller than what any of the brown ones had been in life, was swimming lazily around the tank. There was a silence.

  “Maybe we should leave a note,” Nat said.

  “Saying what?” said Grace.r />
  Izzie patted his arm. Her hand felt neither warm nor cool, meaning they were at exactly the same temperature, a thought he probably would have had nowhere else but in the bio lab. “We’ll bring back some brown ones after vacation,” she said.

  Nat carried Lorenzo’s tank out of the bio lab by himself. “Sure you don’t want help?” Izzie said.

  “It’s not heavy.” But it got heavier, and Nat was glad they were walking ahead of him, unaware that although he was carrying it, and would do so for as long as he had to, he wasn’t doing it with ease. Glancing down, he caught Lorenzo shitting again.

  Grace and Izzie led Nat over the hill, back to the freshman quad, around to the parking lot behind Lanark. There were two cars in the lot; the nearest was one of those second-generation Volkswagen Beetles, a very cool car in Nat’s estimation, and he could easily picture them buzzing around in it. He moved toward it, but they kept going.

  The second car was something Nat had seen only in movies, the kind of movies with big stars and holes in the plot. Huge and creamy-the color of farmer’s cream his mom sometimes brought back from the stand on the edge of town-with the top down, despite the cold, and inside soft red leather and dark gleaming wood.

  Grace held open the rear door. Nat started to set the tank on the floor, but she said, “Seat’s okay,” and so he put it there. The leather didn’t feel like any leather he’d ever come in contact with. It was a perfect car for Lorenzo. That was what Nat thought.

  But what he said was: “I thought freshmen couldn’t have cars on campus.” A dumb remark that came out all by itself.

  “We don’t,” Izzie said, tearing off a length of plastic wrap and covering the tank. “We’d been home for two days before we realized we’d forgotten him.”

  “You had fish for supper?” Nat said.

  A pause. They laughed, first Izzie, then Grace.

  “Dinner,” Grace said.