Read Online The Night In Question by Tobias Wolff - Free Book Online Page B

from the table. Hesmiled shyly. “Hi,” he said, and I said “Hi” back. It came hard. We hadn’t spoken in almost a year, since he went into the hospital. Freddy’s mother came in behind us and said, “Sit down, boys. Take off your coats. Freddy, put some of those cookies on a plate.”
    “I can’t stay long,” Clark said, but nobody answered him and he finally hung his jacket on a chair and pulled up to the table. It was a round table that took up most of the kitchen. Freddy’s brother, Tanker, had carved pictures all over the tabletop,
Field and Stream
-type depictions of noble stags and leaping fish, eagles with rabbits in their talons, cougars crouched above mountain goats. He always kept his Barlow knife busy while he drank Olympia and told his stories. Like the stories, the pictures all ran together. They would’ve covered the whole table by now if Tanker hadn’t been killed.
    The air smelled like laundry, and the windows were misted up. Freddy shook some Oreos onto a plate and handed it to me. I passed it on to Clark without taking any. The plate was dingy. Not encrusted, no major food groups in evidence—just dingy. Business as usual. I never ate at Freddy’s unless I was starving. Clark didn’t seem to notice. He grabbed a handful, and after a show of indecision Freddy’s mother took one. She was a thin woman with shoulder blades that stuck out like wings when she hunched over, as she did now, nibbling at her Oreo. She turned to me, her eyes so sad I had to force myself not to look away. “I can’t get over how you’ve grown,” she said. “Freddy, hasn’t he grown?”
    “Like a weed,” Freddy said.
    “By leaps and bounds,” I said, falling into our old game in spite of myself.
    Clark looked back and forth between us.
    Freddy’s mother said, “I understand you boys are building an airplane.”
    “We’re just getting started,” Clark said.
    “Well, that’s just wonderful,” Freddy’s mother said. “An airplane. Think of that.”
    “Right now we’re looking for a canopy,” Clark said.
    Nobody spoke for a while. Freddy’s mother crossed her arms over her chest and bent down even farther. Then she said, “Freddy, you should tell your friends what you were telling me about that fellow in your book.”
    “That’s okay,” Freddy said. “Maybe later.”
    “About the mountains of skulls.”
    “Human skulls?” I said.
    “Mountains of them,” Freddy’s mother said.
    “Tamerlane,” Freddy said. And without further delay he began to describe Tamerlane’s revenge on the Persian cities that had resisted his progress. It was grisly stuff, but he did not scrimp on details or try to hide his pleasure in them, or in the starchy phrases he’d picked up from whatever book he was reading. That was Freddy for you. Gentle as a lamb, but very big on the Vikings and Aztecs and Genghis Khan and the Crusaders, all the great old disembowelers and eyeball-gougers. So was I. It was an interest we shared. Clark listened, looking a little stunned.
    I never found out exactly how Tanker got killed; it was a motorcycle accident outside Spokane, that was all Freddy told me. You had to know Tanker to know what that meant. This was a very unlucky family. Bats took over their attic. Their cars laid transmissions like eggs. They got caught switching license plates and dumping garbage illegally and owing back taxes, or at least Ivan did. Ivan was Freddy’s stepfather and a world of bad luck all by himself. He wasn’t vicious or evil, but full of cute ideas that got him in trouble and made things even worse than they already were, like not paying property taxes on the basis of some veterans’ exemption he’d heard about but didn’t bother to read up on, and that turned out not to apply to him. Thatbrilliant stroke almost cost them the house, which Freddy’s father had left free and clear when he died. Tanker was the only one in the family who could stand up to Ivan, and not just because he was