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 even have a name for her: when he was little, he’d called her Hama, some Navajo word for mother. Then she’d wanted him to call her by her first name, like they were friends. Her first name, changed legally, was Starry, had to do with van Gogh, if he was the one who cut off his ear, although Freedy couldn’t remember exactly how. She never revealed her real first name; that person no longer existed, was the answer. Starry Knight-it sounded like a joke. Freedy didn’t call her anything.
“Why’s it so cold in here all time?” Freedy said.
“An old house,” she said. “In winter.”
She sat down at the table, reached for pen and paper. He knew what she was about to do-try to make up one of her goddamn poems, this one about an old house in winter. She’d made up lots of poems at one time, back when the Glass Onion, boarded up now for years, had poetry nights. A golden age in her life-she’d actually said that. Freedy went into his bedroom and closed the door, hard, but nothing out of control, not hard enough to break anything.
His childhood bedroom. Freedy had been born right here. She even had a photo album of the birth, with pictures of her with her legs spread, and her hippie friends around her, and the midwife holding up this bloody bawling thing that was him.
He closed the curtains, kept the lights off, made it dark so he wouldn’t have to see the wall paintings he’d grown up with-jungles and unicorns and toadstools and rainbows, with a bunch of elves thrown in, some of them smoking long pipes. And the lion-it was meant to be a lion but it looked more like a giant in a lion costume-holding up a poem on a scroll.
Little Boy
Soft snow cuddles you
In swaddling clothes
While plastic fantastic planet spins
Its wild, wild way
While away all the groovy ways little boy
In the soft snow arms of mother earth.
Freedy had no idea what the poem was supposed to mean, but it had scared the shit out of him every night for years; as had the lion man, and the elves, who turned wicked-looking at night, and all the electric blue, her favorite color. He lay on the bed, heard the music back on. That “Winterlude” song by Bob Dylan. She started playing it on the first snowy day and didn’t knock off till spring. Freedy hated the song, hated Bob Dylan. He pulled a pillow over his head.
It smelled moldy. The whole house smelled like that. Uneven floors, peeling paint, water marks on the ceiling: it was falling apart. All the kids he’d grown up with lived in houses just the same. Only difference was most of them rented, and the ones that didn’t had big mortgages and were always in danger of default, while they-she- had owned their house outright for as long as he could remember. None of these details had interested him back in high school. But now that he knew more of the world, he couldn’t help thinking more maturely about things. Like: what was the house worth on the open market? And: did she have a will? With some other softening questions in between those two, naturally.
What with the pillow over his head and fucking Bob Dylan coming through the walls, Freedy didn’t hear her knocking, didn’t know she was in the room until she touched his shoulder. He sat up, real fast.
She stepped back. “Don’t scare me,” she said. She handed him the phone and left the room, her eyes drawn for a moment to a red frog on the wall, like she was thinking of some change to make.
“Yeah?” Freedy said into the phone.
“Ever meet my uncle Saul?” said Ronnie.
“You got an uncle named Saul?”
“I never mentioned him?”
“What are you saying-you got some Jewish guy for an uncle?”
“He’s not Jewish. It’s just a name they have back in the old country.”
“So?”
“So he’s just, you know, wondering, if you got more extra stuff.”
“What extra stuff?”
“Like TVs and shit. Especially HDTVs-you heard of them?”
“Where d’you think they come from, asshole?”
“Huh?”
“HDTVs. California.”
“Oh. Right. That’s a positive, then. ’Cause my uncle Saul does a little dealing in high tech stuff. HDTVs, PowerBooks, digital notepads-”
“Scanners?”
“Yeah, scanners. Why, you got one?”
“Might.”
“That would interest him, sure.”
“Like how?”
“For buying. Didn’t I say he buys and sells high-tech shit?”
“Where?”
“Down in Fitchville.”
Fitchville was the nearest city, if you could call it a city, just off the pike. “What’s he pay?” Freedy said.
“He pays good. He’s a businessman.” Pause. “Like you, Freedy. Think you can get-think you got more extra stuff hanging around?”
“Maybe.”
“If the answer’s yes, he wants to meet you.”
“Twenty bucks for a Panasonic picture-in-picture, the answer’s no.”
“Not to worry, Freedy. That was just a buddy thing.”
Pause. “You’ve turned into a funny dude, Ronnie.”
“Funny?”
“Humorous, Ronnie. Witty.”
“Yeah?” Ronnie laughed; one of those little laughs like a giggle, when you’re pleased with yourself.
Freedy took an andro from his pocket, popped it dry.
“Freedy? You still there?”
Freedy lowered his voice a little, made it more… intimate. Was that the word? Probably: he had a good vocabulary, went with his brainpower. “ ’Member that time we went one-on-one, Ronnie?”
“In practice?”
“Not in practice. When we had that little… disagreement.”
Long pause. “About Cheryl Ann?” Ronnie said at last.
“Was that her name?”
No answer. Ronnie remembered, all right.
Freedy let the silence go on-controlling it, really, which was pretty cool-then said: “Tell your uncle Saul I’m in the book.”
“But you’re not in the book, Freedy. You’ve been gone for years.”
Freedy hung up.
7
“The noble caste was in the beginning always the barbarian caste: their superiority lay, not in their physical strength, but primarily in their psychical-they were more complete human beings (which, on every level, also means as much as ‘more complete beasts’-).” Attack or defend, with reference to the Kennedy family.
