Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “He’s gone,” she said flatly.

  “Gone.”

  “He drank a bottle of Benadryl.”

  “He what?” She didn’t repeat herself, just stared at the diner entrance across the lot. “When was this?”

  “Two nights ago.”

  “The night you came into the hospital?”

  “The night before that.”

  “OK.” Lorenzo flicked a glance at Karen in the backseat. Eyes downcast, she sat twirling an unlit cigarette between her hands. “You say he drank a bottle of…” Lorenzo faltered. “How do you, did you see him—”

  “No,” she cut him off. “I wasn’t there.” The tone of this was in the spirit more of self-accusation than of alibi.

  “Then how?”

  “I found him.”

  “Was anybody else—”

  “No,” she said, cutting him off again. “He was by himself.” Her voice began to break. “Nobody was there.”

  “So it was an accident,” Lorenzo offered, to keep her verbal, give her at least a temporary out.

  “An accident,” she repeated tonelessly.

  “Where’s he now, Brenda?”

  “In front of the Chicago Fire.”

  “The what?” He was momentarily thrown. “In Freedomtown?” She nodded. Karen snapped her cigarette in two.

  Lorenzo hesitated before his next question. She had not said to him that the boy was dead. “Is he—”

  “Buried there, yeah. Yes.” The words were half throttled, escaping in a stuttery blurt. “Buried there.”

  “OK.” He took a quick hit of Ventolin, smelled his own sweat. “Did you bury him?”

  There was a minute’s hesitation, then, “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  Despite the swelter, he was afraid to turn on the ignition, fearful of anything, any noise or movement, that would distract her, disrupt the flow.

  “Am I under arrest?” she asked, almost apathetically.

  “Whoa, hang on, hang on,” he said easily. “I’m still trying to understand things here.” Lorenzo was intent on stringing her out, keeping her talking as long as possible before having to Mirandize her. At the very least, he wanted to hold off charging her until she had personally taken him to her son’s grave.

  “If I go to jail”—Brenda exhaled the words, raising, then dropping her bandaged hands into her lap—“do I have to see people if they come to visit me?”

  “Whoa, Brenda, you’re way jumping the gun.” Lorenzo made a blurring motion with his hand. “First thing we got to do is give your son a proper burial.”

  “Proper burial,” she repeated.

  “That’s right.” Lorenzo saw Ben roll up to the Friends of Kent van, saw Jesse exit the Blazer, then get in her brother’s ride and just sit there, presumably waiting for Lorenzo to go somewhere.

  “Let me ask you something,” Brenda started out sharply. “How do you properly…” She trailed off, losing heart.

  “Can you take me to him?”

  “I told you where he is.”

  “Brenda, you’re telling me such a different story now than what you told me before. How do I know—”

  “Because you know,” she answered sharply again, and she was right.

  Fearing a confrontation at this delicate stage, Lorenzo moved to start up the car, intending to get her quickly to Freedomtown now, but the ignition wouldn’t catch. “Hang on, just…” He closed his eyes and took another shot. The engine refused to turn over. Soaked through, buzzed with disbelief, Lorenzo tried it a third time, and finally the Crown Vic thrummed to life. He eased out of the parking lot and into traffic as smoothly and cautiously as if there were an open cup of coffee perched on the dashboard.

  “You know, you get a high fever or you come down with a physical illness,” Brenda said to no one in particular. “And you think you know what it is to be sick, but you don’t. You have no clue.”

  Heading toward the ruined park, Lorenzo was afraid to open his mouth, say the wrong thing, make her balk at pointing out the burial site. Point—that was all she had to do. He risked a sideways glance and caught her anxiously stroking the headphone wires that ran down from her shoulders like strands of her hair. In the backseat, Karen stared out the window, her profile furrowed and brooding. But she was keeping it to herself, trying to come off invisible, doing it right.

  Lorenzo, fully cognizant of the racial afterblast that would hit the city once Brenda’s story—the fact that she had concocted the black man—leaked out, wondered why he wasn’t feeling any particular anger toward her for what she had put people through, for what was yet to come. He conjectured that maybe, at this point, he was just too busy, physically and mentally to let a particular emotion, a decisive mood, settle in on him regarding Brenda. But he also experienced a distinct foreboding that this sense of ambiguity, this lack of emotional clarity might stay with him indefinitely. He allowed his thoughts to return to the more tangible issues, issues at hand—exhumation, confirmation, racing the media clock.

  “Brenda,” he said, turning to her. “You buried him?” She didn’t answer, just sat there glassy-eyed, her hands curled dead in her lap. “What did you use?”

  “What?”

  “What did you use? What kind of tool?”

  She stared back at him with defiant agitation, and he regretted not waiting with that question until he had her locked in. Then she raised her bandaged hands, palms out, nails curled inward like claws, like prongs on a garden tool.

  Lorenzo had his doubts. He pushed it a little further. “Did you bury him deep?”

  “No,” she whispered, going off, coming back, repeating “No.” Then, after a moment, abruptly leaning forward, her voice wobbly with panic, she asked, “Can you drive faster?”

  Lorenzo got out of the car at the vine-ensnared gate, pulled it wide, then drove over the shattered footpath of Freedomtown to the Chicago Fire. There was a merciful breeze coming off the water, setting the foliage that embraced the boardinghouse facade to trembling, bringing it to life with a whispery sizzle of leaves. The buckshot effigy in the top window looked much more ravaged in the daylight, paint-flaked and weather-gouged like the detached maidenhead of a long-gone clipper ship.

  The three of them got out and stood before the ruin, Lorenzo afloat in a riot of competing preoccupations: get the body up, Devil’s Night to come, and lastly, what was this woman thinking the night before, walking right over her son’s grave as he gave her the history of rhythm and blues? What the fuck was she thinking? Lorenzo studied her as she stood alongside him, stunned and rocking. As he was about to open his mouth, say something to prod her into action, Brenda abruptly lurched forward to the wall, a febrile charge that ended in a dazed halt, her eyes finally coming alive to scan the earth at the base of the facade.

  “Brenda,” Lorenzo called out softly, but she either didn’t hear him or couldn’t be bothered right now.

  Stepping back a few paces from the wall, eyes still roaming the ground, she brought her hands to her temples, whispered, “Please,” then bolted forward again to pace the width of the structure, moving in a humped crouch and wheeling quickly at the borders, like a dog trying to home in on its sweet spot, pacing and wheeling, pacing and wheeling. Lorenzo tried it again: “Brenda.”

  Hearing him this time, she came to a stop and shot upright, her eyes kaleidoscopes of panic. “I can’t find him.”

  “Hold on, hold on,” Lorenzo said, as much to himself as to Brenda, then reached for her arm, pulling her away from the wall, both of them standing back far enough to take in the entire facade without having to compartmentalize their gaze. “Where do you think you…” he said, striving for the right word, “you put him.” Frowning, Karen quietly moved toward the wall.

  “Under the angel,” Brenda answered, eyes into eyes, Lorenzo smelling madness on her breath, thinking, The angel; thinking, Maybe this is all one nightmare of a hoax. “The angel.” She gestured toward the figurehead. “Cody said she was an angel. I would come here
with him.” Her voice went off into a teary warble. “He said that she was an angel. I wanted to bury him under his angel, I swear.”

  “Hold on, hold on, hold on,” Lorenzo chanted, envisioning this place twenty-four hours from now if Brenda couldn’t find the grave—a backhoed pit the size of a bullring. “Hold on.”

  “Come here,” Karen murmured. She was standing directly under the figurehead, her hands in her pockets, the toe of her shoe lightly digging into the earth under a tumbled mound of large oval stones, each one the diameter of a serving platter, most of this slapdash cairn obscured by tall weeds. Lorenzo, still holding Brenda by the elbow, approached the wall. Karen knelt down, slid a hand under the mound, and brought out a pinch of ruddy, crumble-textured dirt. “This is subsoil. It should be two feet under, not on the surface.”

  Lorenzo stared straight up the wall. The figurehead, from this point of view, loomed twice as large, the arms protruding from the window frame more like surreal elongated twists of wood than plausible representations of human limbs. Brenda settled on her knees and laid her cheek on one of the oval stones. She stared off into the weeds.

  “This is it, Brenda?” She didn’t answer. “This where you put him?” She closed her eyes. Lorenzo gently pulled her up off the stones.

  “I need you to answer me.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is where he is.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is where you put him.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you dug out this piece here with your hands.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then what.”

  “What?”

  “What did you do after that.”

  “I covered him.”

  “With…”

  “Earth.”

  “Then what.”

  “What?”

  “What you do then.”

  “What…” She was confused.

  “What did you do after you covered him with earth?”

  “I put the rocks on.”

  “You put the rocks on. These rocks?”

  She gaped at him for a beat, then whispered, “Yes.”

  Lorenzo placed a hand on one of the larger stones, could feel its density. “You put all these stones here? All these rocks?”

  “Yes,” she said, sounding more emphatic this time.

  He looked at Karen, who had her back turned to them but remained within earshot. Lorenzo wanted to push it a little, decided it could wait, then overruled himself. One more question. Maybe two.

  “That’s like a lot of work carrying these rocks. Where’d they come from?” Brenda made a vague gesture toward the wilderness behind the wall. “When you were looking for the, the spot, a few minutes ago, what were you looking for?”

  “What? These.” She touched a stone.

  “You were looking for this pile of rocks.”

  “Yes.”

  “This big pile of rocks.” She didn’t answer and Lorenzo gave it a few seconds before adding, “Because if you know they’re here, they’re kind of hard to miss.”

  “My son is here.”

  “OK.” Lorenzo tentatively acknowledged her claim.

  “He’s here.” Lorenzo said nothing, just stared at her, demanding more, demanding the rest of it. Brenda crawled to the base of the wall, flattened a stand of weeds to reveal graffiti: I L Y was written with a black marker on the lowest plank of weather-beaten wood.

  “Ily?” He pronounced it as a word. Brenda mumbled a corrected reading. “Say again?”

  “I love you,” she said in a defeated mutter, then, “I can’t be here.”

  “We can take a walk,” Lorenzo proposed lightly, warily, checking the time: one o’clock.

  “Can we go back to the dance floor?”

  “The what?” Lorenzo worried again, wondering who was home in her.

  “Where the concerts were. Where you took me last night.”

  “Sure, no problem.” Lorenzo offered her his hand.

  Stuporous and wobbly, Brenda led Lorenzo, Karen following, to the old Motown stage, seating herself atop the section of low ledge where she had sat with Lorenzo the night before.

  “This is good?” he asked. Karen took up her post behind them, leaning against a tree.

  “Yeah,” she said gingerly, but as soon as he made a move to sit next to her, she popped up again. “No. I don’t want to leave him.” She began marching back toward the Chicago Fire, Lorenzo and Karen exchanging glances, giving her this one last journey

  She sat cross-legged in front of the grave, and he dropped into a squat alongside her. “You tell me it was an accident, and I have no reason to disbelieve you,” he said.

  “I never said it was an accident.”

  “You said nobody was with him.”

  “That’s right.” She spoke to her hands, then jumped up. “I don’t want to talk now.” Lorenzo vigorously palmed his face and scalp, gearing up to Mirandize her, thinking, Shit, shit. “I can’t be here,” she said, starting to spin in a flat-footed way. “Please.”

  “Hey, I don’t want to be here any more than you do.”

  “Please, I don’t want a lawyer, I’ll tell you everything, please.”

  Lorenzo hesitated, bagging the Mirandizing for now. “Brenda,” he said sorrowfully, “we have to wait for the medical examiner.”

  “What? Why.” She was gray-faced. “You’re not going to make me watch them dig him up.”

  “No, no, no, I just have to show them.”

  “You can’t make me do that.”

  Lorenzo began to make reassuring noises but was distracted by a blooming movement across the front of her jeans, and, before he could stop himself, he simply said it: “You just wet yourself.” His voice was not unkind but unthinking. Lorenzo winced at his words, but she was oblivious to both the accident and the observation.

  “I won’t see him,” she said, her voice vibrant with terror. “You can’t make me do that.”

  “No, Brenda, please, I wouldn’t. Look.” He reached out to her, registering a thin, alkaline waft as he did. “If you want, we can wait outside the fence.”

  “Please,” she said, her knees trembling now, “because I want to tell you what happened.”

  “OK.” He stood up.

  “I want to.”

  “All right.” He extended his hand to her, but she backed away.

  “Only you, though,” she said, without looking at Karen. Karen stepped away from the painting of a ground-floor window she had been leaning against and waited, eyes to the ground. “I’m not going to say anything as long as she’s here.”

  Without a word, Karen walked off in the direction of the front gate. At least, Lorenzo consoled himself, she could testify that Brenda had voluntarily declined her right to a lawyer.

  “OK?” He smiled tightly, resisting the urge to look at the stain on her jeans again.

  “OK,” she answered shakily.

  “OK.” He hesitated, something not settled in his head. He looked up at the effigy, its arms reaching for the clouds, then dropped his gaze to the burial pile, a collapsed granite igloo, then finally came back to himself, to work.

  “You want to get out of here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Clear something up for me and we’re gone.”

  “No.” She hugged herself. “No more talking here. Take me outside, I’ll tell you—”

  “Brenda,” he said, cutting her off. “You want to leave here, and I want to be able to take you out before the, the exhumation team comes by. I figure we got like twenty minutes at the most.”

  “No.”

  “Just straighten me out on this one thing and we’re gone.”

  “No.”

  “Then here we stay. I’m sorry.” He stood frowning down at the mound of stones, Brenda whirling in the weeds behind him, chained to his intransigence, working her fingertips as if on rosary beads. He looked at his watch—one-twenty—doing the math, something like six hours to wrap this up, then prep
for Armageddon.

  “What…” she blurted with enraged exasperation.

  “Brenda,” he said, turning to her, “you’re gonna tell me the truth, right?” She nodded vigorously. “You’re gonna make a clean breast of it, right?” She nodded again, feverish with distress. He turned back to the stones. “Where’d you say you got these?” She pointed to the woods behind the building front, Lorenzo not even bothering to look, thinking, Fuck it. “Come here for a second.” He turned to her again, extended his hand. She took a step back. “Time is tight.”

  She finally stepped forward, without taking his hand. “He’s there I swear.”

  “Do me…” Lorenzo hesitated, not wanting to tamper with a crime scene, but then thinking, Her word against mine. “Show me how you lifted these.” He sank to his haunches and tapped one of the stones, jagged, mica-flecked. “Pick me up this rock right here.

  Brenda made no move to do as he asked. He gave her a long, appraising glance, then, jerking up the knees of his jeans, he stooped and lifted the stone himself, instantly feeling it in his back, thinking, Seventy-five pounds if an ounce; thinking, Thirteen-inch-screen TV. He waddled over to her, the strain in his shoulders now, too, and held the stone between them.

  “Take it from me.” She looked away, her hands hanging lifeless, and after a long moment he just let it drop to the ground, the dull, muffled impact like a punctuation mark.

  “Brenda,” he said, arching his back, then reaching out to turn her face to him. “I have got to tell you. These last few days here, you have put me and a lot of other people through hell. People I care very much about. But despite what all went down? I swear to you, I also care for you. I feel for you. I don’t know why, but I do. But so now here’s the deal. When you start telling me the whole story? I want you to start by telling me who dug this grave, who put these rocks here, and please don’t tell me it was you, because if you start with a lie? You have just lost the most important ally you ever had in your entire life, and I’m not even gonna bother to take a statement. I’m just gonna charge you and dump you in the system, let you tell your story to your lawyer.” Fearful that he had just shot himself in the foot with this reading of the riot act, Lorenzo found himself sucking wind. Her lack of instantaneous protest, though, told him that he was on the money about a second player.