Freedomland

by Richard Price

  Escorting Brenda to Bump’s van, Lorenzo was distracted by an abrupt stream of people racing up the incline behind Four Building. Stepping back through the breezeway he saw that someone had set fire to one of the crated refrigerators in the Bowl, and he knew instantly—by the animated faces around the pyre, by the bellowing to friends, by the dashing to and fro—that unless some cops were posted to guard the Bowl right now, this entire crate-planted arena would be a blazing grid by midnight. Good news for the video shooters, bad for everybody else, people so pissed off, sealed off that, like convicts flooding their toilets and burning their mattresses, they would readily trash their own property to send out a message. And that would be just the start of it.

  Walking backwards to Brenda while radioing in the fire to the central dispatcher, Lorenzo accidentally bumped her into the side of the van, forcing her to thrust out her left hand to catch herself against the door panel. The relatively light pressure of her body leaning into that wrist made her scream so loud that the kids in the concrete sprinkler pond froze midplay the steady chatter of splashing water suddenly a distinct and unchallenged sound.

  A moment later, with Brenda crumpled into a corner of the passenger seat, Lorenzo, feeling both embarrassed and unnerved by the alert yet expressionless faces of the tenants, flew past the Hurley Street checkpoint so heedlessly that the young cop Cooley had to broadjump backwards onto the grass to avoid getting plowed under.

  And a few minutes after that, topping a rise overlooking the medical center, Lorenzo phoned Dr. Chatterjee to give him a heads up. Unable to assess the seriousness of Brenda’s possible reinjury and fearful of the legal ramifications of withheld medical attention, Lorenzo had no choice but to take her back where it all began. The trick would be getting her inside the hospital without the word going out.

  Chatterjee suggested that Lorenzo bring her to the ninth-floor obstetrics ward, where he would be waiting for them, hopefully away from all prying eyes. But there still remained the problem of getting her into the building.

  From his vantage point above the complex, Lorenzo took a moment to ponder his back-door options. Then it came to him: the morgue. It might be the worst judgment call he would ever make in his life, Lorenzo was thinking, or, less likely, just the thing to shake her tree. Still, he balked at the cruelty of it, and to egg himself on, he conjured up a vision of the Armstrong Houses encircled by fire, expanding the circumference of the Bowl in his imagination until it encompassed the six high-rises that stood outside its perimeter. As he began the descent with Brenda to the meat-wagon ramp, he wondered if there was anything—Freon, some kind of motor oil—that would make a refrigerator explode once it had become engulfed by flames.

  Standing by the roll-down gate that fronted the morgue’s vehicle bay, Lorenzo and Brenda found themselves alongside an open Dumpster. It was parked beneath a handwritten sign—DISCARD ALL BLOOD-TAINTED SHEETS AND OTHER MATERIAL BEFORE ENTERING—and decorated with crudely drawn bright yellow happy faces.

  “Is my son here?” Brenda asked in a high, frightened burst, her eyes transfixed by the rippling corrugated gate as it slowly began to rise.

  “No, no, no. This is just the quickest way to get inside to the doctor, you know, as far as getting in private, OK? I swear to you, OK?” As the gate continued its rattling ascent, refrigerated air mingled with the heat of the day, immersing them in alternating waves of stifling humidity and a damp iciness. Lorenzo put a herding hand to the small of her back. “We’re gonna go fast, OK? I want you to keep your eyes on your shoes. We’ll be out and through in a minute, all right?”

  There was a body on a gurney under the digital scale in the receiving area, a tall black teenager wearing matching plaid shorts and shirt, one foot bare, the other sporting a white high-top. His eyes were shut lightly, eyebrows arched, mouth agape as if whatever caused his death came to him as a big surprise. The lone morgue attendant, Humpy, a walleyed chronic mutterer, stood hunched over the gurney, absorbed in measuring the body, one end of an old-fashioned yellow cloth seamstress’s tape inserted between the rigid toes of the naked foot, the other held to the back of the head.

  “Yeah, look at you, you big-foot motherfucker. What they tell you about that shit, huh? You don’t listen to nobody, do you. Yeah, well, who’s sorry now, huh? Who’s sorry now.”

  Lorenzo put his arm around Brenda’s shoulders, his extended hand shading her brow so as to block her view as Humpy leaned over the body to enter his measurements on a clipboard that rested on the dead kid’s chest.

  “Humpy,” Lorenzo said softly. The morgue man turned to his name. “I got to go through.”

  Humpy stared at Brenda for a long moment before recognizing her. “He ain’t here.”

  “Nah, nah, nah, we just want to shortcut through to the hospital.”

  Humpy took a down-filled nylon baseball jacket from a wall peg—“Dempsy County Morgue” scripted in a sporty chamois across the back—shrugged it over his shoulders, and led them to what appeared to be the stainless-steel door of a restaurant-sized refrigerator.

  “Just keep your eyes down,” Lorenzo murmured to Brenda, hoping she would, hoping she wouldn’t, and through this simple portal they entered a vast and frigid necropolis with the interior dimensions of a church. They beheld what seemed at first an inconceivable number of corpses in open storage, some fresh, some unclaimed, others backlogged for autopsy. More than half, Lorenzo knew, were guests from neighboring Essex County, where the Newark-based morgue had suffered a cooling-system blowout. The bodies were laid out on deep steel shelves, seven high, four across, on either side of a center aisle. Their varying postures and conditions were like an inventory of final exits, the dead lying there on their backs, their bellies, curled on their sides as if cold or frightened, lying there in attitudes of agony, of repose, of resistance, of surrender. Lorenzo walked Brenda down the aisle as if he were giving away the bride, walking her past the headless, the limbless; past bodies purple and bloated, skeletal, pristine, fire-blackened; past bodies nude, clothed, hospital-gowned, all races, all ages. Lorenzo felt overwhelmed, as always when circumstances brought him here, not so much by death itself, which, despite his line of work, had always seemed a little abstract to him, but by the stillness, the unwavering, unvarying, absolute stillness of death, of dozens of assembled deaths. No matter how many times he walked through that steel door, no matter how many times the morgue’s perpetually changing guest list confirmed and reconfirmed that awesome stillness, he forever found himself braced to see the one body that would move, to hear the one voice that would cough, moan, or cry out for a blanket.

  Halfway down the center aisle, their path was blocked by an old woman in an open-backed hospital gown lying on a plastic pallet that itself rested on the front prongs of a parked forklift. They had to back up into one of the storage lanes as Humpy maneuvered her out of their way.

  Standing in silence between a charred adult male, arms bent in pugilistic contraction, and an infant who was wrapped, for some reason, in a shower curtain, Lorenzo could feel the physical pop and ripple of Brenda’s distress through the arm that still lay protectively across her shoulders. He tried to recall the line of reasoning that had made him think that bringing her through here would speed things to a conclusion. Something about burning refrigerators—the rest just wouldn’t come.

  “You OK?” he asked in a whisper, as if the presence of the dead had really turned this room into a chapel.

  “How dare you,” she answered in a teary strangle, her shoulders trembling. “Fuck you.”

  “Brenda, if we had gone in the front door—”

  “Fuck you.”

  He made no effort to finish his explanation. Eyes to the ground, avoiding looking at the shelved bodies that lay on either side of them, they just stood there in silence—listening to the grinding whine of the forklift, Humpy’s never-ending basso mutter—until Lorenzo coughed, cleared his throat.

  “I’m sorry, Brenda.”

  They rode a service e
levator from the morgue to the obstetrics ward, from omega to alpha, and the moment they exited onto a floor full of jazzed parents and squalling newborns, Lorenzo realized that, although Brenda didn’t say anything, this scene up here had to be even more punishing to her than the frozen netherworld they had left behind. And almost as an act of penance, he found himself brooding about Jason, his son in jail, and about his own blown history of failed parenthood.

  Chatterjee was waiting for them in a remote examination room, sitting on a caster-legged stool, his hands clasped around a crossed knee. It must have been early in his shift, because his threads were still immaculate, folds of pink, gold, and chocolate brown flowing softly beneath a blinding white lab coat.

  “Baby Doc,” Lorenzo said.

  Chatterjee stood up and gestured for Brenda to hop onto the examination table. When Lorenzo offered to help her up, she ignored him, although she was unable to boost herself with either hand. Chatterjee solved the impasse by lowering the table with a foot pedal. Gently stripping off the Ace bandage on her reinjured hand, the doctor studied her face.

  “When was the last time you urinated?” Lorenzo automatically turned his back at the question but didn’t leave the room.

  “What?”

  “Just what I said.”

  Brenda stared at a tray of scissors. “This morning?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I guess.”

  “Do you need to go now?”

  “No.”

  Chatterjee removed the last of the Ace bandage and began unwrapping the Curlex. “Open your mouth.”

  Brenda did as she was told, and Chatterjee cast a cursory glance at her chalky tongue. “Are they still looking for your son?” he asked in a businesslike tone.

  “Yes.”

  He slipped his palm under her armpit, then probed the soft nodules above her collarbone. “You’re dehydrated, did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “It’s ninety-nine degrees out there. Look at this man,” Chatterjee said, gesturing to Lorenzo. “He’s soaked right through his shirt. You’re dry as a bone.”

  Brenda shrugged as if he were criticizing her.

  “We have to get some fluids into you, OK?”

  Brenda shrugged again, indifferent to her condition.

  “Ninety-nine degrees.” Chatterjee grunted. “Let me ask you something. With this weather, the trauma room, you’d think we’d be pretty busy right now, yes?”

  “What?”

  “Assaults, knifings, shootings—you’d think this is the weather to bring that out, correct?” She stared at him uncomprehendingly. Lorenzo, on the other hand, had heard this speech before. “Well, let me tell you. It’s as quiet as a church in there right now, would you believe it?” He took off the last of the Curlex. The back of Brenda’s left hand was soft, swollen, and blue. “It’s ninety-nine degrees outside, but I could sit in there and read the five Books of Moses from beginning to end without being disturbed. Do you know why?”

  Brenda shrank back in distress. “What are you talking about?” she said, her voice breaking.

  “It’s too hot!” the doctor crowed in triumph. “There’s no energy out there. Maiming takes energy. Rage takes energy. But I promise you, three days from now, when this heat wave passes? We’ll be up to our chins in blood. The first cool night after a heat wave is the deadliest night of the year. Ask the detective here.” Chatterjee nodded to Lorenzo, who nodded back halfheartedly.

  “What happened to the back of your hand? You didn’t have this injury last night.”

  “I hit a door frame,” she whispered. Lorenzo perked up, curious.

  “I want some X rays,” he said, as he began stripping the Ace bandage from the right hand. “History responds to weather, too, did you know that?”

  Brenda took a deep, dejected breath. “I need something for the pain.”

  “If you replace the word humidity with the word oppression… Let me put it to you like this. Without opening a history book, when do you think people are most likely to rise up against an oppressive regime? When the abuse becomes the most unbearable, right? Wrong. The people are too weak then, they’re demoralized, terrified, depressed. No. Revolution comes about when the liberals come to power, the accommodationists, the reformers. As soon as the underdogs start to feel a little breeze between their necks and the yoke? Get some snap back into their spines? That is when heads begin to roll. Russia, France, Africa, Asia. What do they say here? It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.”

  Lorenzo always felt thrown by Chatterjee’s little theories and history lessons, not because they didn’t make sense but because he could never figure out which side the doctor was on.

  “OK.” He held both her hands palms-up, last night’s punctures and abrasions dyed tobacco brown. “I want to get some X rays, then I want to put you to bed. I’m going to get some fluids into you with an IV drip, shoot you up with a little Valium, and pull down the shades. Yes?”

  Brenda stared at him for a moment, then looked off without responding. Chatterjee turned to Lorenzo. “Yes?”

  Worried about Brenda’s getting a second wind, Lorenzo hesitated but then thought of all the people he would be free to hit on while she slept.

  “How long would she be out?”

  “Four, five hours, maybe more,” Chatterjee answered, then took another shot at Brenda. “Doesn’t that sound good?”

  “I just want my son back,” she said, exhausted.

  “If there’s any news we’ll wake you,” Chatterjee said. “Right?” He looked to Lorenzo, who nodded.

  “I like you.” Chatterjee finally smiled at her, gently taking her hands again. “I think you’re an agent of history.”

  Returning to the van, which was parked outside the morgue, Lorenzo was surprised and somewhat annoyed to see Ben leaning against the driver’s door, reading the Village Voice.

  “Whoa.” Lorenzo forced himself to laugh. “Man, you should be with the CIA.”

  “Hey!” Ben grinned, folding the paper. “How are you?”

  “You follow me?”

  “Nah, I was just driving by, saw the van. I thought I’d see if you needed anything. How’s it going?”

  “Just driving by the morgue.” Lorenzo smiled, a gimlet-eyed grin, waiting.

  “Listen.” Ben grimaced as he rubbed the hollows under his eyes. “I made some calls and I think I found somebody can speed things up for you.”

  “Speed things up…”

  “You know, help Brenda out. Make her remember details and such. This individual I know…”

  Lorenzo waited for more. “Lorenzo,” Ben said, touching his arm. “You know me a little bit. I’d never waste your time at a time like this.”

  “What, a hypnotist?” Ben jerked back in disdain. “One of your PI buddies?”

  “Please.” Ben waved him off.

  “Well, what we gonna do, play Twenty Questions? I thought you said you wouldn’t waste my time.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  Lorenzo stared at him for a long moment, then burst out laughing at the balls on this guy. “What, you want me to put Jesse back in the catbird seat, right?”

  “I thought they got on very well.”

  “Yeah, I’m glad to hear that.” Lorenzo shook his head in amazement and moved around Ben to unlock the door.

  “Lorenzo, my friend gets involved, it’s gonna be all over in twenty-four hours.”

  Lorenzo straightened up despite himself. “Your friend knows Brenda?”

  “Not yet,” Ben said brightly.

  Irritated, Lorenzo found himself going into a stare down, but he really didn’t have the time. Besides, Ben’s unflappably pleasant resolve was, in its own way, worse than any jailhouse glare. Tempted, Lorenzo opened his mouth, then checked himself and got into his car.

  “I tell you what,” Ben said, scrawling a number on the back of a business card. “I totally understand, but if you change your mind?” He handed the card, embossed on the front with the
particulars of a place called Phatso’s Lounge, to Lorenzo, who flipped it over to check Ben’s chicken scratch on the back. “If you change your mind, I’ll be at the Quality Inn by the Holland Tunnel, Room 303. I’m doing a favor for an associate. Just call. I’ll be there for like the next three hours. After that…” He shrugged, the sales-pitch coming to an end.

  “Base to SI 15 on 2.”

  Driving back to Armstrong, Lorenzo reached for the handset. “SI 15 to base.”

  “Call Investigator 13 forthwith.”

  Lorenzo pulled over to a pay phone on JFK. From one end of the block to the other, he could see over a dozen storefronts, all derelict except for a congressman’s office.

  “Bump, what’s up?” Lorenzo waved to two elderly women passing by, one, he had heard, an old girlfriend of his father’s.

  “You headin’ back to Armstrong?”

  “Yup.”

  “I just wanted to give you a heads up. We got a function at the junction over here. Longway is getting ready to do a presser by the Conrail tracks. I think he’s gonna blow the house down, so you might or might not want to make the scene here.”

  “What the hell you talking about? I just saw him go out of there couldn’t be two hours ago.”

  “That was two hours ago,” Bump said.

  “How the fuck he get it together so fast?” Lorenzo said, hearing the unsorted anger growing in his voice.

  “Hey, the people are primed. Each one phone one. The cameras are right there anyhow, right? Alls you gots to do is step on up.”

  Lorenzo watched an orange-and-black butterfly spasming by.

  “Who’s he got with him…” He asked it grudgingly.

  “Like, everybody—Jesus, Allah, half the city council, the Mommy Squad, you name it. It’s goin’ down, Big Daddy, and frankly I think it’s about fuckin’ time.”

  Ten minutes later, Lorenzo pulled up across the tracks from Longway and the press camp, about a dozen yards from the action, and, windows down, AC blasting, watched from inside the van as the reverend paced back and forth in the gravel, short, brisk ten-step loops, hands on hips, collecting himself before addressing the media people, who were assembled before him in a compressed wedge of microphones and Betacams. Standing behind Longway were many of the major minority players in town—five ministers, four black, one Latino; two Islamic leaders; two city council members; three tenant representatives to the city Public Housing Authority; the head of the YMCA; the formerly airborne Tariq Wilkins, sporting a plaster cast on his broken leg; Tariq’s grandmother Yvonne; Teacher Timmons, minus one tooth; and Teacher’s mom, Frieda, head of the Armstrong tenants council. On the projects side of the train fence, the tenants were packed three-deep to the mesh, the chain link sprouting fingers and knuckles by the hundreds.