Freedomland

by Richard Price

  Jesse sucked it in as Brenda eased back on the couch, blinked wetly at the ceiling. “Chase.”

  “Chase it is.” Karen gave the abandoned hospital grounds a second ring of red. “OK, so tomorrow morning Lou and a few of the guys’ll make a quick walk around Chase, maybe Freedomtown or Hudson Park if we can stretch. We’ll do what we can do tonight, and tomorrow we’re all gonna meet in the parking lot of Saint Agnes on Turner and Blossom—all the volunteers. We’ll get organized and hit the grounds, OK? Now, tomorrow…How do you feel about coming out with us.”

  “What?” Brenda hunched forward in dismay.

  “Aw, no” Jesse said, before she could stop herself. Karen and the others ignored her.

  “If you’re up for it, Brenda, I’d kind of like to have you with us.”

  “There’s nothing like maternal radar,” Marie added.

  “Brenda, we’ve been doing this five years, and I’m telling you, I don’t know if it’s God, mother love, the supernatural, or what, but the mom gets out there? This sixth sense kicks in, it’s like nothing else.” Karen massaged Brenda’s neck. “Teenie, tell her about Donna Cord.”

  “This boy Michael Cord, five years old, goes missing over in the Bronx—the family lives near the Bronx Zoo, right? We’re out there twelve hours poking around. The mom? Donna? She was in the hospital. She finally comes out with us at the end of the day… Bang. She finds him in forty-five minutes. He was asleep in a culvert. I don’t know how she did it.”

  “And we had the dog out there too,” Marie added, all of them warming up to the war story.

  “Well, in all fairness to the dog”—Louis finally opened his mouth, shifted his weight—“we were right outside the second-biggest zoo in the country. You know how many different scents were in the wind? The dog almost had a nervous breakdown.”

  “The point I’m trying to make, Brenda.” Karen stroked her hair. “Be it God, love, or whatever, you come out with us, you’re gonna see something, sense something that everybody else is gonna miss.”

  “It could just be like clothes or colors,” Marie added.

  “We’re not gonna shape up much before nine. You can get a good night’s sleep.”

  “Right.” Brenda’s voice was striving for the sarcastic.

  “Will you come with us?” Marie asked.

  Brenda stared blindly at the map, the room descending into another focused silence, the Friends of Kent waiting. Finally, crumpling under the weight of their stares, Brenda issued a quivering “All right.”

  “You OK?” Karen stroked her face, then specifically turned to Jesse. “Can you get her a glass of water?”

  At first Jesse simply returned Karen’s stare. But then, realizing that she was trapped between standing up to this domineering saint in training and appearing unsympathetic to Brenda, she looked to Ben in the kitchen to get the water for her. Ben, in an act of stunning betrayal, returned her look with a silently mouthed “You do it,” giving her a reassuring nod, like there was nothing finer in the world than to kiss someone’s ass. Jesse got the water, put it down on the map.

  Karen said, “Thanks, Jesse,” underlining her name, then plugged in the answering machine, setting it before Brenda on the coffee table. “I want you to leave a message for your son.” Brenda looked away, crunched her eyes. “I want you to leave a message,” Karen said calmly, insistently.

  “Like what.” Brenda refused to turn back to her.

  “Like, ‘Cody if that’s you, Mommy loves you. Mommy misses you. Where are you? I want to come get you right away. I’m not mad. Please tell me where you are. Can you see any people? Can you get someone to the phone?’”

  “I’m not mad?” Brenda exploded in a guttering squawk. “Why would I be mad?”

  “Ssh, Brenda. Kids in this situation, sometimes they feel like they’re in trouble, that the parent could be mad that they’re not home. You have to think like a four-year-old. Of course you’re not mad, we’re just covering all the bases, OK?”

  “Ho God” Brenda gasped.

  Jesse eased her way into the kitchen, touched her brother’s hand. “Get her to stop this,” she murmured through clenched teeth.

  “Watch,” her brother whispered back, his eyes never leaving Karen.

  “Now, can we make that message?” Brenda stared at the machine. “Maybe it would help if you wrote it down first. Do you want to write it down?”

  “Please, God,” Brenda continued to wail. “I just want to die. Please let me die.”

  “You’re not in this alone.” Karen stroked her hair again. “We’re here for you.”

  Jesse heard this, thought, No, you’re not. Taking a swipe at her face, she was surprised to see her fingers come away wet.

  “C’mon, Brenda, leave him a message.”

  Brenda struggled to her feet and walked drunkenly to the bathroom, her sudden absence pulling the room into a new and disorienting equation. Jesse experienced a terrible freedom in the air. Surprisingly, no one spoke—nothing of logistics, no strategizing, no hurried assessments. Even more unnerving was that no one even made eye contact, which left Jesse feeling that what was going on here was pure sham, a play for an audience of one, all the players in such perfect communion with one another that they could just shut down for this abrupt intermission, their lines so well memorized that there was no need to do anything but rest.

  The silence was such that whatever was happening in the bathroom of this small apartment should have been easily heard in the living room, but there was an equal stillness on the other side of that door—no water, no flushing, no occupying noises. After five or so minutes, Karen rose from the couch.

  “Brenda? You OK?”

  Receiving no answer, she simply opened the bathroom door to reveal Brenda, fully dressed, sitting on the toilet lid, her face in her hands, hiding in her own home. Karen extended a hand, lifting, then leading Brenda back to the couch. Once seated, she sat rocking before the tape recorder, Karen’s arm around her back. Karen gave her a thirty-second grace period, whispered, “Time is tight,” and pushed Play. Brenda continued to rock.

  “Come on now,” Karen said, a little sternly.

  “Cody, I love you so much,” Brenda abruptly declared, eyelids lightly clamped, as if she were singing a love song.

  The Friends of Kent looked up, down, out, anywhere but at Brenda, out of respect for the intimacy of her words.

  “Where are you, sweetheart,” she said brokenly, clutching her stomach. “I want you with me so bad. I want to come get you. Please tell me how to come get you. I miss you so much. Tell me how to be with you. Tell me how I can be with you.” Brenda brought a hand to her face, dismissed the answering machine with her other, ruddy furrows appearing above her brow.

  Karen stopped the recording, rewound it, played it back, Brenda’s rocking becoming more pronounced as she heard her teary plea. “Would your son respond to that?” Karen asked calmly. Brenda kept her face hidden. “Does that sound like you? Would he hear you in that?” Brenda shrugged. “I think, I think maybe we should take another shot at it, Brenda. You sound pretty upset. You could scare him off.”

  “No,” Brenda said.

  “You feel OK with this?”

  “I’m not doing it again.”

  “No?”

  “She said no.” It just slipped out of Jesse. Karen gave her a quick up and down, a flat-faced promise of retribution.

  “All right, if that’s what you think he’ll respond to best.” Karen put a bit of singsong reproach in it. “And don’t worry about the prank calls. Once they hear that, they’ll just hang up.”

  “OK,” Brenda said quickly, still looking away.

  “If you want, I’ll ask Detective Council to hang a wire on your phone. I’m surprised he didn’t think to do that already.”

  “I don’t care.” Brenda continued to rock.

  “Now one last thing. Lou? He’s a dog trainer. Trains dogs for the Newark police, and we like to use tracking dogs on a search like this. These d
ogs, they can clear a building in five, ten minutes, go through nooks, crannies, darkness, rubble, underbrush, you name it. You know, because for them it’s just scent. It’s kind of like radar. They do ten times the area in a tenth of the time, and it’s safer, too, because sometimes we go through some structures, you know, the floors rotted out or whatnot, and the dogs are pretty light on their feet. I mean, lighter than me at any rate.”

  Ben laughed appreciatively. Jesse was sure of it—her brother was head over heels with this bitch.

  “But in order to use the dog”—Karen pulled a gallon-sized Ziploc bag out of her duffle—“we’re going to need to make a scent bag.”

  “A what?”

  “I want you to go in his room and fill this. I want his pillowcase. I want—do you have some unwashed laundry in there? Separate from yours?”

  Brenda just stared, then said, “In his closet.”

  Karen rose, helped Brenda to her feet. “Do it for me now, OK? So we can get out of your hair.” Brenda looked to Cody’s room, then back at Karen. “Do you want me to come in with you?” Karen offered. Brenda looked to Jesse, Karen tracking her gaze. “Me, you, and Jesse,” Karen said, taking Brenda by the elbow, turning to Jesse.

  “You coming?”

  Brenda stood before Cody’s open closet: three pairs of jeans on hangers, a few shirts, two pair of high-top sneakers on the floor, a dozen or so battered board games stacked haphazardly, and, in an open wicker laundry basket, a tumble of T-shirts, socks, shorts, and a New Jersey Nets tank top. It might just be the power of suggestion, but Jesse still felt staggered by the overwhelming reek of boy-ness.

  Brenda stood before the open door, making no effort to reach for the laundry. “Can you do it?” she pleaded to Karen.

  “I can’t. The dog knows my scent. I’ll throw him off.”

  “I’ll do it.” Jesse reached for the bag, but Karen intercepted her.

  “I really think Brenda needs to do it.”

  “Have you looked at her hands tonight?” Jesse’s voice came out sharp and hard, fed up.

  “Can I talk to you a second, Jesse?”

  Karen put out her hand, as if to corral her by the shoulders, and Jesse moved for the door to avoid her touch.

  Three steps outside the room, Karen came up on her like a shadow, Jesse turning, her eyes on the level of the other woman’s mouth.

  “I want to tell you something.” Karen spoke in a whispery sizzle. “In the last five years I have found twelve missing children, four living, eight dead. I find missing children. That’s what I do and right now I don’t give a flying fuck about anybody but that little boy. I will find him and I will find out what happened to him. Now, you don’t like me? Fine. If it’s any comfort to you, you’re not alone. But if you ever get in my face again on this, I swear to Christ I’ll ruin you. You know I will, and you know how I’ll do it.”

  Jesse felt breathless, trying to return the anger but too overwhelmed by the precision of Karen’s fury.

  “Now, Brenda seems to need you, so you go be with her, but you best have what I just said to you memorized for the duration of this or I’ll bounce your ass from here to the river, you got that?”

  Despite herself, Jesse nodded yes. For some reason she couldn’t begin to understand, she lost all dislike for this woman, was actually consumed, at least for the moment, with a desire to gain Karen’s respect. She followed her back into Cody’s room, where Brenda was still standing in front of the closet, the empty Ziploc bag dangling from her right hand.

  “C’mon, Brenda,” Karen said, “time is tight.” Dropping to her knees, Brenda began to fill the bag, working slowly because of her bandages, using her fingers like chopsticks, plucking the articles of clothing one by one, her face twisted in distress.

  “You need the pillowcase too?” Jesse said to Karen, careful of her tone. “Because I don’t think she’ll be able to get it off the pillow by herself.”

  Karen said, “Don’t worry about it,” not even looking at Jesse, her eyes on Brenda, taking her measure. Jesse sensed that Karen considered her neutralized, not even worth eye contact, and that powerful new craving for this woman’s respect or approval was replaced by the old loathing—now doubled because Karen had scrambled her heart.

  Brenda put the last pair of underpants in the scent bag, but instead of handing it over to Karen she held it to her midsection and eased herself down to the floor of the closet, sitting there cross-legged, clutching the bag and staring out into the room. “You know what I’d do sometimes when I couldn’t get him to do what I wanted? I’d cry. You know, say he won’t eat his breakfast or won’t go to bed. I’d pretend to cry, like ‘Boo-hoo, Cody doesn’t love me no more,’ real head-fuck stuff, and he was so smart, he’d get so angry at me, he’d, like, run at me, ‘Mommy! That’s a pretend cry! Stop it! Stop it right now!’ and I’d be laughing inside, because it was such a hokey bullshit cry but I wouldn’t stop it, because I knew if I kept it up long enough, whatever he knew about it, how phony it was, it would still get to him and eventually he’d start to cry too and, you know, do what I had asked him to do to begin with. I’d win, you see. I don’t know if it’s all little kids these days or just him, but I don’t ever remember being that perceptive, you know, reading my parents like he could read me.”

  Karen stood in the closet door, hands crossed over her belt, alert, waiting for more, and Jesse suppressed the impulse to tell Brenda to shut up.

  “It’s kind of like ants. They say that ants can lift like a hundred times their weight and, like, you know, proportionately ants are the strongest things on earth. That was like Cody with reading people. He was so, smart for his age, so, so out of proportion to his size. But despite all that? I could still make him cry. He was four years old. I mean, you look at an ant and say, ‘Wow, strongest creature for its size.’ But it’s still an ant.”

  “Brenda.” Karen dropped into a squat to be on eye level. “What are you trying to tell me right now?”

  “He was just a baby.” She began to weep. “How could he know?”

  “Know what…” Karen said.

  “The world,” Brenda said, almost inaudibly “You know…”

  When they returned to the living room, both Jesse and Brenda were startled to see a German shepherd on a short leash, Louis giving the dog no more than nine inches from fist to collar.

  Karen broke out into a smile. “Hey-y Sherlock!” she said, then turned to Brenda. “Sherlock’s our secret weapon. He can sniff out a daisy in a cyclone.”

  “I hope you don’t mind I brought him up for a second.” Louis patted the dog’s shimmering flank, its tongue hanging out in a panting grin. “I had him in the car. I’m just worried with the heat and all.”

  Brenda stared at the animal as if it were a wolf. Jesse assumed it was a cadaver dog, an animal trained on buried pig fetuses and tennis balls coated with Cadaverine, a chemical solution that simulated the scent of human decomposition. She had seen them in action once or twice over the years. Nothing successful, but she had heard some amazing stories.

  “Do you think I could get, like, a dish of water for him?” Louis asked.

  “I’ll get it,” Ben said.

  Karen put her arm around Brenda’s shoulder and turned her away from the dog. “From now on, Brenda? We’re gonna be with you all the way. We never abandon our mothers.”

  Or the dog might be cross-trained, Jesse thought, able to find lost or disabled people, too, the living as well as the dead, maybe even sniff out drugs or dig up buried weapons. She was almost sure of it, though—working for a group like this, whatever else he might be, Sherlock was a cadaver dog.

  “Kent? That boy Kent?” Brenda said to Karen, her back to the room. “When you found him? Was he dead or alive?”

  “Dead,” Karen said flatly.

  Ben put a dish before the dog, who stared at it but made no move to drink. Jesse absently reached out to pat the animal’s flawless coat and was startled when Louis roughly stayed her hand.

&
nbsp; With Brenda for the moment turned away from him on the far side of the room, Louis quickly knelt alongside the panting, patient dog, lifted its head by the snout, whispered, “Body,” a flat command into the peaked ear, then quickly unclipped the leash, Jesse thinking, Nothing like an early start.

  17

  After agreeing to keep his distance from the Friends of Kent sit-down with Brenda Martin, Lorenzo, overwhelmed but with nothing really to do, mindlessly cruised JFK Boulevard. He felt impotent and desperate. Every facet of the investigation seemed to elude his grasp. Military occupations, civic demonstrations, wrongful arrests, civilian search parties, baby-sitting journalists, outraged families—Lorenzo felt unable to control or prevent any of it.

  Of all the spinouts and misfires of the last twenty-four hours, the most painful and maddening for him was the arrest of Curious George Howard. Gannon had tossed George into the system, and that move would simply have to play itself out. Even if Gannon could be coaxed into dropping the child support charge for the time being, George had apparently broken Danny Martin’s nose, and there you had it. An Armstrong youngblood swinging on Leo Sullivan, swinging on Danny Martin like that was what Lorenzo usually called “going and getting stupid on yourself.” But there was nothing “usual” about the last twenty-four hours, so all street-survival lectures were suspended until further notice.

  To make matters worse, as Lorenzo had anticipated, the media had been quick to announce that a suspect was in custody, and George’s sisters, subbing for the star of the show, had taken to the cameras like preachers to a pulpit, bitterly complaining about racist cops, police brutality, and the persecution of the innocent. And it wasn’t just the Howard sisters who were doing the talking. Despite the termination of the blockade, a lot of the Armstrong tenants had embraced the cameras by now, going on about poor housing conditions, about the city’s turning its back on Armstrong and the other projects, about racial double standards, about broken campaign promises by the mayor, about municipal contempt for the underclass in general, about the absence of full-time employment, the absence of summer jobs for teenagers, the absence of recreation programs, the absence or presence of this, that, and the other, each bitter complaint taking this thing further and further away from the alleged crime that started it all.