Secrets and Surprises Part 16

"Who did?"

"The kid I brought to the party. Didn't you see that kid with the skunk streaks down both sides of his hair?" Freed pulled the cardigan back to his shoulders and gestured toward his temples. His hair was full of electricity.

"Yeah. I think I saw him talking with you. Who was he? How do you know he stole your car?"

"He was a hitchhiker. He was going to your home state of Vermont. Put on a big push to come to the party with me when I told him what I was doing. I brought him over here with me, and he tried to put the make on T.W. You missed T.W. taking a swing at him, too. Kid woke me up this morning when I was sleeping in there on the rug and said he wanted cigs, where were my car keys? I didn't even know what time it was, but I thought it was morning. Pulled my keys out of my pocket and handed them up to him. Must have been about four in the morning because when I got up I realized it was still dark. So I came in here and waited for him and he never showed."

"What time is it now?"

Freed pointed to the clock in the stove. It was grease-covered, so he got up to peer into it. It was close to eleven o'clock.

"You tell me how it takes seven hours to go to the corner store for digs."

"Did you call the cops?"

"I don't like the cops."

"I'll ride you down to the store. We can find out if he went there."

"He didn't go there. He stole my car."

"You'll get your car back, Freed. Come on-let's go to the store."

"Wait'll I explain to the cops why I have a Virginia driver's license and New Hampshire plates and live in Maine."

"Come on, Freed."

"I don't know where my jacket is. He stole my jacket."

Perry pointed to something behind Freed. Freed turned and stared down at the thick red nylon jacket hanging from the chair.

"Yeah. That's my jacket. Now where's my car? He f.u.c.king stole my car. I handed him the keys like I knew him, and he got my car."

"Come on, Freed. Let's go down to the store."

Freed stood and pulled on the jacket. It was an exceptionally thick ski jacket, and Freed looked as if he should have a hose trailing out of it and be walking on the moon.

"I hate it when somebody makes a fool of me," Freed said. "It makes me want to kill. I don't mean that as a generalization-I mean it really makes me insanely angry and I want to kill the person."

"Come on, Freed. The door's this way."

"I know where the door is. Don't tell me anything. Just take me to the store so I can make a fool of myself asking if some f.a.ggot stopped there for cigs and drove off in a black Pontiac. Watch how friendly that guy at the store's going to be."

He left the front door open a crack, since he didn't have a key to get back in. Freed walked beside him, his huge red-jacketed arms folded over his chest.

"How are things in Maine?" he asked. Freed taught English, French and German at a private school there.

"Cold. And the little ladies in my cla.s.s look at me while I'm talking with that same vacant look chickens have when they lay eggs."

"So are you going to stay there?"

Freed shrugged. "I'm looking around." Freed picked up a ca.s.sette from the floor and studied the label and pushed it into the machine. It was a live recording of Gatemouth Brown playing "Take the *A' Train."

The store was coming up at the bottom of the hill. He pulled in beside a Ford truck. Freed looked at the store with incomprehension. During the summer, when he first bought the house in Vermont, Freed and several of the others had come up and they had played hide-and-seek. When it came Freed's turn to count, he counted out loud very slowly and then never went looking for anyone. Eventually Francie's laugh boomed through the woods, and all of them peered out from behind trees or bushes or wherever they were hiding, and there stood Freed, stark naked, waiting to be discovered himself.

"You ask," Freed said.

"It's your car."

"I'm a Jew. The guy who runs the store doesn't like Jews."

"Are you putting me on? What has he ever said?"

"I know he doesn't," Freed said.

"Get in there, Freed. Go on."

Freed got out of the car and slammed the door behind him and walked into the store. He was out almost as fast as he went in.

"He doesn't know who bought cigarettes there this morning. He was sick and his mother was at the register, and his mother is eighty-eight and he won't call her at home to ask because she went home to go to sleep. It's stolen," Freed said, looking around. "It's obvious that it's stolen. How am I going to get back to Maine?"

"Maybe back at the house you ought to get some sleep and then call the cops."

"I told you, I don't want to call the cops."

"What do you intend to do-just forget about the car?"

"I need cigarettes myself," Freed said, "and I forgot to buy them."

Perry made a U-turn and went back to the store. Freed didn't thank him for doing it. He got out and slammed the door again. He came back with a newspaper and a pack of Trues. Perry backed out and headed for Francie's house, suddenly remembering clearly the large canvases Francie had painted recently, in greens and grays, of herself, naked. He had come down the weekend she showed them to him determined to sleep with her, but as usual something happened-the showing of the paintings happened-and he thought that it would be cra.s.s if he asked her after she showed him her work.

"What do you hear from Beth Ann?"

"I don't hear anything. Her sister sent me part of a letter Beth Ann sent her, about how she and Zack had managed to borrow the money for a restaurant and how they'd just found a building. It was about a quarter of a piece of paper that her sister cut off for me with pinking shears. On the back was some drivel about the Grand Canyon."

"That was a surprise to you she left," Freed said.

"I thought she was going to New York. I didn't know she was going to Albuquerque, and I had no idea she had any interest in Zack."

Freed shrugged. "None of my business to have brought it up."

"It's okay. I'm not that touchy."

"Yes you are. You've always been touchy. You were p.i.s.sed off at me for months after we went to the baseball game and I rooted for the Red Sox."

"I was just kidding."

"No you weren't. You care a lot about sports and you don't approve of my taste."

He turned onto the unpaved road that went to Francie's house and parked his car beside three bushes that were trimmed in the shape of triangles. Francie had had them shaped a few summers before because she thought it was funny. Nothing else on the property was pruned. "They're pyramids," she said, making her eyes look crazy. "You can walk up to the bushes and derive power from them."

Going into the house, he noticed that T.W.'s car was in the driveway.

The front door was closed, but when he rapped quietly on it, Francie answered. She was wearing her blue nightgown, and somebody's plaid shirt in place of a robe.

"My car was stolen," Freed said.

"What do you mean? Somebody took your car from here?"

"The kid I brought to the party stole it. I've got to call the cops."

"Oh h.e.l.l," Francie said. "Do they have to come here? Have I got to have cops in the house?"

"No. I'll call them from the store and sit there and have a cup of coffee with them while I tell the story."

"Oh Christ," Francie said. "Who was that guy, anyway?"

"Somebody who was. .h.i.tching. I don't know who he was."

"What did you pick him up for?" Francie said. When Francie first woke up she was always argumentative.

"Because I'm stupid," Freed said. "Did you know that T.W. was here in the bedroom?"

"Yeah. He said he was going to come back after he took Katie home."

"Maybe we ought to wake him up. It's noon, isn't it?"

"Go ahead and call the cops," Perry said. "They're going to wonder why it took you so long to report it."

"Good morning," Francie said to Perry.

"Hi," he said.

Freed sighed and unzipped his jacket and went to the kitchen phone.

"Maybe you should wait," Francie called. "Maybe he'll come back with it."

Freed came into the living room and sighed and sat down. He and Francie both saw the puddle of red wine that had seeped into the rug at the same time.

"I don't know why I have parties," Francie said.

Perry remembered Delores' phone call, and wondered if there was any point in mentioning it to Francie. Francie went over to the wine stain and looked down at it. "How do you get wine out of a rug?" she said.

"Don't you transform the wine into blood and the rug into a turnip?" Freed said. "Francie, if you didn't have such drunken parties, my car never would have been stolen."

"I guess you should call them," Francie said. "If he really stole it, he's not going to bring it back."

"Delores called last night from Miami," Perry said. "She was looking for her oak table."

"What oak table?"

"That one with the wide-board top. You used to have it, didn't you?"

"I never had it here. I think it was in my room in the house we rented."

"I think T.W. has that table," Freed said.

Francie took one of Freed's Trues and sat down by the stain. She had on black knee socks that were covered in lint, and she sat so that he could almost see between her legs.

"Or maybe I did have it here. Maybe it's the table I used to stack things on in the kitchen, that Delores took out of here and traded Beth Ann for a chair she wanted. Yeah, that's what happened to it: Beth Ann has it."

"Oh G.o.dd.a.m.n it," Freed said. "G.o.dd.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l. It's freezing out and I've got to start discussing how my f.u.c.king car was stolen with a bunch of New Hampshire cops."

"Let's have some music," Francie said. "Does anybody have a headache, or can we have music?"

The music got T.W. out of bed. He came looking for his shirt, and when Francie had to hand it over, she decided to get dressed herself. Before long they were all dressed, and Freed was down at the store, and Francie and T.W. and Perry were eating eggs Benedict that T.W. fixed and drinking leftover champagne mixed with ginger ale.

"I've got to drive all the way to a job in Stowe," T.W. sighed. "But that's not until tomorrow."

Perry looked out the window and saw his own car gone from the drive. Freed had taken it to go to the store after he called the cops. It had started to snow.

"Why don't we have another party tonight and invite your other set of friends, Francie? There's food left over."

"What other set of friends?"

"Just kidding," T.W. said.

Perry and T.W. went out to the shed and loaded in kindling and wood for the fire.

Nick and Anita came back that night, bringing with them a huge pan of Anita's fried chicken. Francie got out the last gallon of Chablis and they sat by the fire talking about the snow storm and eating and drinking. T.W. and Freed were talking about architecture. They both knew more than Perry, and he kept entering into their conversation, hoping they could tell him some things he needed to know about fixing his house. He had hired people to fix the heating system, but he was doing the carpentry work himself. It was a large house, oddly shaped because it had been added onto without much thought for aesthetics at least twice, and probably three times. T.W. and his band had been up a lot on the weekends, and T.W. had been a lot of help.

"You lonesome up there in the woods?" Anita asked Perry.

"Sometimes."

"Ought to come back to the city," Nick said. (He was kidding; he and Anita lived in a town with a population of three hundred.) "Bring your dirty pictures out," Anita said to Francie.

Francie laughed, embarra.s.sed, knowing that Anita meant the canvases.

"Don't you freeze your b.u.t.t standing in here naked?" Freed said.

"Maybe I should have asked my other friends," Francie said to Perry. He smiled at her, no longer interested in T.W. and Freed's talk about architecture. He was thinking about Francie, in the big house, painting herself.

"Aren't we an artsy bunch?" T.W. said. "Perry a poet and Anita a photographer and Perry a poet-or did I say that?-Francie a painter ..."

Freed moved the jug of wine away from T.W.

"To say nothing of our music maker," T.W. said, touching his chest. He reached for the jug of wine, but Freed was pouring the last of it in his gla.s.s.