Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “There just can’t be nothing,” Brenda said. “But how do you know…”

  Jesse eyed three men tricked out in military camo, sporting sunglasses, rakish berets, and sheathed machetes. Another group of men, middle-aged, in jeans and sneakers, pored over Xeroxed maps, each man carrying a fat roll of neon-orange hazard tape. And then there were the kids, maybe two dozen, at least half of them blatantly handicapped. Some had the shuffling, tentative walk and sunken cheekbones that proclaimed Down’s syndrome; others were in wheelchairs, palsied, curled into themselves; still others had something unnameable in the eye, the gait, the manner. Jesse looked away, frightened by them.

  “He’s doing his thing,” Brenda muttered to herself. “Poppa’s got a brand-new bag.”

  “Wait here. Let me get Karen.” Louis left them in the van with the air conditioning running, the dog snuffling, settling into his paws in front of the vents.

  Jesse tracked Louis through the crowd to where the prayer circle had just broken up, the women simultaneously stepping back from one another, eyes opening, chins rising. Louis touched the small of his wife’s back, whispered in her ear. Jesse instantly sought out her brother by the broomsticks, watching him observe these small, unthinking intimacies, the look on his face both pained and fascinated. When she turned her eye back to Karen, the woman was already halfway across the lot, striding toward the van, smiling at and touching, kissing nearly everyone in her path.

  “I’m such a coward,” Brenda said quickly, breathlessly. “I always knew that about myself.”

  Karen rolled back the side panel and put a foot up on the inner step, an elbow across her knee. “How you doin’ today, Brenda?” she asked, with the proprietary heartiness of a nurse just coming on duty. “Hey, Jesse, glad you could come,” she added, cheery and dismissive, not interested in a response.

  Brenda nodded without looking up from her lap. Karen studied her efforts to act as if she were alone, then reached across Jesse to turn off the Discman.

  “Let me look at you.” Brenda slowly raised her eyes, her entire frame jerking with fear of this woman. “OK.” Karen looked down for a moment to organize her rap. “This is what’s happening. I called for a press conference. I want you to issue a statement, an appeal, over there.” She pointed to a corner of the rear wall of the church, where a copse of standing microphones was already set up. “OK? I want you to tell everybody how much you miss your son.”

  “That’s obvious,” Brenda sputtered.

  Karen ignored the impotent protest. “You can address the kidnapper.”

  “He wasn’t kidnapped.”

  “What do you mean?” Karen asked lightly, and then waited out a full minute of stubborn silence.

  “He wasn’t”—Brenda glared at the seat back in front of her—“he wasn’t… The guy just took the car, he didn’t—”

  “OK. So talk to him. Talk to that guy.”

  Brenda looked at the carpet between her feet. “No.” She sounded more dejected than defiant.

  “Yes.” Karen leaned closer to her, eyes wide with determination. Another silence held reign, Jesse unable to look at either of them. “I am trying to help you,” Karen finally said with level forcefulness.

  “Is, is Lorenzo here?” Brenda asked, addressing the carpet.

  “No,” Karen said.

  “Can you get him here?”

  “Why?” Karen looked off for a blink, scratched her nose. “Why, Brenda?”

  “He knows me,” she said, in a small yet willful voice.

  “Do you want to be alone with him?” Karen asked. Jesse knew that she was really asking if Brenda was ready to give it up.

  “No, I don’t need to be alone with him,” Brenda said. “But I won’t leave this van unless I know he’s coming.”

  Making a small show of controlling her impatience, Karen stepped away from the van, borrowed a cell phone from Louis, and at least acted out calling Lorenzo. Left alone for a few minutes, Jesse and Brenda avoided each other’s eyes. Then Karen returned to her roost on the interior step of the open side panel.

  “He’s on his way.”

  Brenda expelled all the air from her frame, her shoulders seeming to drop into her ribs. “What can I say,” she muttered almost in-audibly Jesse didn’t know if it was a question or a comment. Karen didn’t seem to have that problem.

  “To the people here?” she asked. “You can say what’s in your heart. You feel like crying? Cry. Cry your eyes out. Make them cry. Make everybody out there cry. Make them believe you. If you make people believe you, they’ll go all the way for you. They’ll do anything you want, OK? Of course you miss him. Of course you want him back. Of course you love him. Say it. I don’t care how obvious you think it is. People need to hear you say it.”

  Karen extended her hand past Jesse’s face toward Brenda. Trapped, trembling, Brenda stood in a crouch to leave the van with her.

  Dropping to the ground, Jesse was smacked again by the heat, wet and heavy. Momentarily dazed, she staggered backwards into the side of the van.

  All activity in the parking lot came to a halt when Brenda appeared. Aware of the eyes, she seemed unable to move, stood rooted to the asphalt, hunched over as if she were still in the act of exiting the van, her eyes bugged and blind.

  Then the shooters came running, though Louis, Ben, and a few of the women fended them off. Jesse heard her brother use his private-security voice—“Fellas, what was the deal here?”—a chiding, gently threatening tone that she hated. But when she caught his eye and threw him what was supposed to be a withering look, Ben, not interested in playing today, simply shrugged it off, leaving Jesse feeling helpless and abandoned.

  Brenda’s headphones began drawing some scowls—people confused, put off—and both Jesse and Karen reached for them at the same time. The press was assembled in a packed wedge facing the microphones, behind which now waited Marie, the intensely tan older woman from the night before, with an assemblage of children ranging in age from roughly four to twelve.

  “What’s with the kids?” Jesse asked Karen, that light-headed sensation growing stronger.

  “They need to see children. I want them to see children,” Karen answered, eyes on Brenda.

  Two of the children on display were the ones with Down’s syndrome; they stood bookended by two black six-year-olds, twin girls with buttery skin and clear eyes. Jesse wondered if they were Karen and Louis’s daughters.

  “What the hell can I possibly say?” Brenda beseeched Karen in a broken whisper.

  “I told you. You say what’s in your heart,” Karen hissed back. “And look at them. You look right at them, otherwise they’ll think you’re hiding something and it’ll come back to haunt you like you don’t believe. Go.” Karen fairly shoved her forward, toward Marie, who opened her arms to gather her in, the choreography making Jesse think of trapeze artists.

  While Brenda stood with her back to the crowd, Marie gently cupping her face, whispering to her eyes, Jesse found herself taking in all the handicapped kids at closer range, the lolling heads, the sunken pupils, the leg braces, the Velcro straps, the involuntary utterances. She felt both repelled and tender, heartbroken: the Friends of Kent knew their game. Weakened by all this pathos, she turned to say something conciliatory to Karen but was distracted by a young boy. He was amber-skinned with deep brown eyes and a soft, high corolla of kinky brown hair, a sober-looking kid, sitting in a wheelchair between her and Karen, studying her from under almost comically furrowed brows. Never knowing how to connect with kids in any natural way Jesse nonetheless found herself smiling, even found herself thinking, Hey, I’m smiling, but then her eyes strayed to the boy’s right hand—a boneless corkscrew of flesh curled into itself, no fingers, no nails, no articulation of any kind, a pigtail at the end of a wrist—and she vomited, dropped into a squat and vomited between her shoes. She stayed down there, eyes smarting.

  People danced away from Jesse’s mess, but the wheelchair stayed put, Jesse on eye level with the boy’s legs
, which were encased in some kind of hard plastic braces. When she finally stood up, ashamed, unable to look at the boy again, his dark, penetrating eyes, she wiped her mouth and turned to Karen.

  “Oh God, I’m so sorry. I haven’t been eating, I haven’t—” She cut it short, cut the shit. “I’m sorry.”

  Karen regarded her with heavy-lidded stoniness. Jesse turned away, ready to move off, around to the other side of the crowd, but still seeing, behind her eyes, that solemn-faced boy with his mud-brown eyes, his tawny complexion. It was Karen’s boy Louis’s boy Jesse realized numbly; she was sure of it. She turned again to Karen—to confirm, to somehow find the words to apologize more deeply and personally. Before she could open her mouth, though, Karen simply gestured for her to turn back to the mikes, the show about to begin, and Jesse was more than willing to comply.

  With Marie kneading her shoulders from behind, Brenda faced the crowd. Despite Karen’s warning, her eyes were trained on the ground. Working her dry lips to no effect, blinking furiously, she clutched a microphone stand, her exhalations rasping out over the lot. Squinting in the heat, people waited patiently for Brenda’s words, the air, Jesse sensed, reasonably free of judgment.

  “I…” Brenda whispered, her body rippling under the accumulation of stares, “I’m…” Then, in a declarative burst: “I am nothing.”

  The crowd held back, poised for more.

  “I am nothing.” The statement was more fluid this time, more ardent, no hint of a second clause. “I am nothing.”

  To Jesse’s eyes, it was as if the flesh obeyed the word, Brenda seeming to physically fade on the spot, her grayish atoms drifting free of one another into the sweltering air. A weighted silence fell over the lot, a moment of absorption punctuated by the swish of passing tires and the tinny report of an all-news radio station from inside the church.

  When it settled over the volunteers that what had just been delivered to them was Brenda’s message in its entirety, a scattered croon broke out, a soft moaning of “No” mingled with cries of support—“We’re with you, Brenda,” “It’s not your fault, Brenda,” “Don’t think like that, Brenda”—these kindly, somewhat bewildered outbursts overlapping a current of murmurous exchanges between some of the searchers, whose faces and words registered confusion and distress. But not one comment within Jesse’s earshot denoted anything but sympathy.

  “Brenda, why are we looking where we’re looking today?” one of the reporters shouted, but she had vacated her physical shell, and the lack of response provoked the pack to take off in a verbal free-for-all, the questions piling up unanswered at her feet.

  Karen signaled for Marie to get Brenda out of there, the gesture, the flat of the hand sliding across the throat, straight out of show biz. As Brenda was escorted back to the van, Karen strode forward and commandeered the mikes.

  “OK, this is great, this is great,” she crowed, looking out over the crowd, the crouched, scuttling shooters. “Thank you. Thank you for coming.”

  With Brenda out of the spotlight, Jesse took in the volunteers, a real summertime mix, kids to seniors, Rambos to Sansabelts. Glancing back toward the van, Jesse saw Brenda being helped inside by Marie, semilifted up the side panel step like an invalid.

  “OK, before I start”—Karen’s voice turned Jesse back around—“does anybody have any second thoughts about going out today,” she said, searching the assembled faces. “It’s hotter than hell, and with what I’m going to make you wear once we get where we’re going? You’re gonna be hotter still. Anyone who wants to take a raincheck? Now’s the time. It’s no shame to back out. Your heart’s in the right place but I would hate for it to stop ticking.” There was a ripple of anxious laughter, the people antsy to just do it, get it on.

  “I don’t want casualties over there, and I don’t want to have to hold up the search to bring someone out, OK? Someone who should’ve known better in the first place, OK?” She scanned the lot. “Anybody.” Karen continued to search the faces of the crowd, as did the women of her inner circle, who stood together behind her, leaning into the rear wall of the church, half of them smoking, two or three with a lazy, protective hand dropped down over the shoulders of their own kids. Teenie’s girl was in a wheelchair too.

  Jesse looked back to the van and saw Brenda in silhouette, slipping on her headphones.

  “Anybody” Karen repeated, and it became clear to Jesse that she wasn’t going to proceed until she had flushed out at least one potential casualty. Finally, three people simultaneously began working their way toward the rear of the parking lot, an elderly couple and an obese teenage girl, who blushed furiously.

  “Just give your names to the sign-in table,” Karen called out, standing on tiptoe, as if they were already miles away, “and thank you for being honest with yourselves. Anybody else…”

  For the first time that morning, Jesse noticed Elaine, the Kenter with the port-wine stain, standing slightly apart from the others by the church wall. Once again, she fixed Jesse with that expressionless stare.

  “Anybody else…”

  Slowly pivoting to avoid Elaine’s flat gaze, Jesse wound up facing Louis, who sat on the low wall that ran behind the row of tables, his legs spread wide to accommodate the width of his son’s wheelchair, which was parked directly beneath him. Louis was scanning the crowd, too, but he wasn’t looking for self-doubters. Retired or not, he still had cop’s eyes and he was looking for the actor. Jesse knew enough about criminal pathology to know that if Cody Martin was abducted purposefully, there was an excellent chance that the actor was in this crowd right now.

  “OK,” Karen finally relented. “Moving on. Does everybody have a team designation?” She raised a gin hand’s worth of various-colored Post-its. “Everybody hold up your cards.”

  The crowd responded, raising a rainbow field of paper squares. Ben, still by the barrel of broomsticks, held up a green one.

  “OK, anybody not assigned? No? OK. Now. These fellas here?” Karen swung a hand behind her to introduce the ten middle-aged men who had been poring over maps earlier. Most of them were balding, bespectacled, potbellied—indistinguishable from the other older men in the parking lot. “These fellas are your team leaders. Some of these guys go back with us five years, OK? They’re Vietnam vets, they’re cops, they’re firemen, they’re hunters. They know what they’re doing. They know how to track, they know how to read the ground. You listen to them, they’ll teach you how to use your eyes in there, OK? Now, what are we looking for. The boy? Sure. But anything. Clothes. Tin cans. Cigarette butts. Any sign of human habitation. Any sign of human, disruption. I’ll leave it to your team leaders to break it down for you once you get in your groups, but there are a few things I need to say to you while we’re all together.”

  Jesse forced herself to look back across the lot to Karen’s son, who was sitting on his mobile throne between his father’s knees. The hand didn’t look that bad now, just a little goof-up. Jesse was disgusted with herself.

  “One.” Karen held up a finger, waited for silence. “Once you’re out there? Stay, with your group. The group stays together. Always. Going into those woods? It’s pretty, it’s peaceful, it’s dangerous. Stay, together.”

  Looking back to the van again, Jesse saw a ponytailed reporter in knee socks and Bermuda shorts rapping on the side panel, trying to get at Brenda, coming on like the big, bad wolf. Jesse turned to signal Ben, but he was no longer over by the barrels. When she turned back to the van, she saw him already eighty-sixing the reporter, chest-bumping him backwards, toddling from side to side as the guy heatedly pleaded his case.

  “Two.” Karen raised her fingers in a peace sign. “It’s high tick season right now, and Lyme disease is no joke. So you’re going to be using insect repellent, you’re gonna be stuffing your cuffs into your socks, and you’re going to be wearing this…” She slipped a paper body suit out of its cellophane wrapper and flapped it out full-length, booties to hood, a thin, pulp-textured outfit with a white plastic, crotch-t
o-throat zipper and elasticized wrists.

  “One size fits all. Anybody trying to lose weight? Well, honey, just walk around in one of these for a few days and you’ll be ten pounds lighter in no time at all, believe me,” Karen said, patting her own hips, “I know.”

  That provoked another eager laugh from the crowd, the inner circle joining in this time, everyone but Louis and Elaine. Despite her tedious attempts at humor, Karen’s grin never reached her eyes.

  Jesse looked back to the van and saw three more reporters sniffing around like bears at a Dumpster.

  “OK, we’re almost, I’m almost finished. If you find an article of clothing or something that looks like it shouldn’t be where it is? Whatever. Don’t, touch. It’s potential evidence. Do not, touch. Half of the group will stay with it, the other half will go and get help.

  “Tape.” Karen held up a roll of the neon-orange plastic. “You search an area? Tag it. I don’t want three teams of searchers looking over the same stretch of woods. Let us know you been there. Your team leader will show you how. Another thing, very important. Look, up. I want at least one member of each team to look up, at branches, treetops. It’s natural to look down, but like we all have seen in the movies, the party you might be looking down for might be looking down at you. Anything could be hanging in those trees—clothes, tools … You see a tree branch on the ground? How’d it break? Who broke it? Look, up.

  “Sticks.” She now pointed to the three barrels of broom handles. “Everyone will be issued a stick. Use it. Poke around. Push things aside, test the give of the ground. Never use your hands when you can use the stick.

  “And heroes. A word for all you heroes out there. Remember, a hero ain’t nothing but a sandwich. Stay, together. If you don’t have a good feeling about something you’re about to do? Don’t do it. You’re a little leery about someplace you’re about to go? Don’t, go. I don’t want heroes, and I don’t want martyrs.” The inner circle all nodded on this one. “We have had broken legs, broken ankles, dog bites, rat bites, stitches. We’ve come up on pot parties, liquor parties, crack parties, people getting high in what we thought were deserted buildings—you name it. No, heroes.