The Scream

whirr of the tires. He did not look back.

The whole class jumped on him when he said he thought Judas Iscariot wasn't as bad as the Christians made him out to be. Maybe he thought of himself as a whistle-blower, that Jesus wasn't good for the Jewish people-'Too much forgiveness-you know, like the woman who committed adultery.'

'Money, money, money,' students in the back of the room chanted. 'He did it for money.' It was their way of breaking into David's tirade.

'But he didn't want the money. Look what he did with it!' David didn't know what was happening to him to be shooting off like this. He didn't even know how long he'd been on his feet. Father Moran had settled his backside on the edge of the desk and folded his arms like a fat Buddha. He was enjoying himself. He loved it when his boys got their adrenaline flowing. Always his boys-he hadn't yet got used to the presence of girls in the class. 'I don't think Jesus himself was fair to him,' David went on. 'He knew Judas was in trouble. He was the one who said the disciples should pray 'Lead us not into temptation.' Man, did Judas ever get led into temptation. What I'm saying is, Jesus knew. He knew what was going to happen to Judas. Look what he said to Saint Peter: 'Before the cock crows, you'll deny me three times.' And Peter did. And he cried. So did Judas. He went out and wept bitterly.' David lost his train of thought. Actually, it was Peter who went out and wept bitterly.

Father Moran took over. 'Well, Crowley. You certainly got our adrenaline flowing. Watch out the devil doesn't catch up with you. He's always on the lookout for a good advocate.' The priest shifted his weight, from one buttock to the other. 'Tell me, what do you understand to be Iscariot's greater sin-that he betrayed the Lord or that he despaired of being forgiven?'

'Despair is the greatest sin.' It was an answer out of his childhood catechism. 'Why?'

'I don't know, Father.' He did not want to be quizzed like a ten-year-old. His moment of self-assurance was going down the drain.

The back row all had their hands up. The priest nodded to one of the volunteers.

Then David caught hold of another idea. 'But despair is a sin against yourself, isn't it? Being your own judge. Betraying somebody is worse, it seems to me. You're hurting somebody else.'

'Mitchell, you're on,' the priest said to the volunteer, ignoring David's attempted postscript, except to say, 'Thank you, Crowley.'

David tried to listen to Mitchell's definition of despair as a sin against hope, and his denunciation of Judas because he had given up hope. It went on and on. David could have put it in one sentence. Somebody had done that, he realized, which was how it came into his mind: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Meaning hell.

It looked like the class wasn't going to get back on track until everybody had their say on why Judas was so despicable-the kiss, the pieces of silver; somebody said he was jealous of John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. 'I know! He was gay!' one of the girls put in. She covered her mouth and giggled. The giggle was infectious and those around her laughed. David pretended to be amused, but he wasn't. He felt he'd been onto something important and had been cut off before he got to the heart of it. He'd had a question he wanted to ask that he felt would shake up even Father Moran. Now he couldn't remember it.

Between Christian Ethics and his last class, he copied a. friend's notes for Twentieth Century French Literature, the class he had missed that morning, but his mind kept going back to Dennis McGraw and what he called 'the incident' the sheriffs deputy was investigating. You wouldn't call anything serious an incident, would you? Suppose he found out tomorrow that the screaming person had not been hurt, not the least bit hurt, that the scream was an act, would that mean he was not guilty of anything? Look now: Was guilt a matter of luck? Getting caught was, maybe. Wasn't that why he was in ethics, to learn why getting caught was not part of the moral issue? And wasn't getting caught what he was really afraid of? He didn't care about that woman at all. Not for her own sake. The person he cared about was David Crowley.

He tried to focus on the Valery poem in which he was supposed to trace the Symbolist influence, but he couldn't concentrate. It was hopeless, and he was supposed to be good in French. David felt as though something inside him was writhing, a. stomachful of snakes. The day was almost over, but terrible as it had been, he dreaded for it to end. He didn't want to go home. He had to talk to someone. For just a minute he wondered if he should have been such a smart-ass with Dennis McGraw. McGraw wanted to talk to him. McGraw knew something. He didn't.

On his way home he thought about his father and what his mother had said at breakfast, how he could tell his father things he couldn't tell her. He was pretty sure she was talking about sex, but if his father was around would he be able to tell him what he'd done, how he'd run away when he might have hurt somebody? He could see his father going out to the car and saying, 'Get in, David.' He'd order David's mother back into the house and he'd drive straight to the sheriffs office and say, 'My son has a statement to make.' Even so, David thought, he could tell him sooner than he could tell his mother. What he wanted most was not to have to tell anybody, to wake up and find out it was a dream.

He drove around the block twice before turning into the driveway, in case McGraw or someone from the sheriffs office was waiting for him. He saw no one, and when he parked in front of the garage door, the nearest neighbor was coming out of her house. She waved to him, got into her car, and drove off. Perfectly normal. In the house he got the same feeling of normalcy. It made him uneasy, as if he might step where there was nothing for his foot to land on. There were no messages for him on the answering machine. Even the cat ignored him. He looked up Dennis McGraw in the yellow pages. He'd thought he might not be there, but he was, the address the County Building. Something was real, anyway: Dennis McGraw, attorney-at-law. He had an enemy, David thought. For the first time in his life he had a real enemy. That was crazy. All McGraw wanted was to make a buck out of him. Unless you'd like me to represent you… But David hadn't admitted anything, except going home on the County Road. McGraw had looked for him because Deputy Muller had a hunch. Oughtn't car license numbers to be available to the police only? Everybody knew the sheriffs office was corrupt. The patrol shouldn't have just taken the beer away last night, they ought to have chased the kids out of the park or arrested them for bringing beer there in the first place. He wondered if any of the other guys had been approached by McGraw. Whoever took Sally home would have had to use the interstate or the County Road; he hadn't thought of that before. They almost certainly had to go that way, and if they had, it would have been after David's trip home.

He hated to call Sally. He was shaky, and if there was anyone he wanted less than his mother to know what he'd done, it was Sally. He kept putting off calling her until it was almost time for his mother to come home, and then he went out and used the nearest public phone.

'I wanted to be sure you got home all right last night,' he explained.

'You'd have known by now if I didn't. It was real mean of you, David, to go and leave me with that pack of wolves.'

'I didn't leave you! You said… whatever you said. It doesn't matter. What happened?'What almost happened on the way home was worse. We had to go the County Road-the interstate was closed.…'

'I know,' David said. 'What happened to you, I mean?'

'The guys were fooling around. They're sex fiends, and all of a sudden we almost hit a car parked halfway on the highway. No lights, nobody around, like it died and somebody just left it there.'

David saw the whole thing in his mind's eye. 'Did you stop?'

'Why should we have? We didn't hit it or anything. But it cooled off Micky's sex urge. When we got to Oak Forest, he dropped me at our driveway and took off.'

If the car was still there later, what did it mean? What had happened to the woman?

'If I didn't see it,' David said, the words of denial slipping out, 'you must have come home a lot later than me.'

'Not much. I kind of agitated to get us on the road. I'm sorry I said what I did, David. You shouldn't be so sensitive. Women can be frustrated too, you know. You're not crude like those other guys, and I admire that. I admire a lot about you.'

'Thanks,' he murmured.

'What do I have to do to make up for what I said? Ask you for another date? I was the one who asked you last night, you know.'

'I'll call you real soon, Sally.'

'I go back to school on Sunday.' She was on midterm break.

'I'll call you,' he said again.