Freedomland

by Richard Price

  I decide that I’ll worry about this boys possible freak-out down the line.

  Right now, all I know is that I’m aching with tenderness, with wholeness, like a singing in my blood.

  The rest of what Brenda had written was directly addressed to Jesse.

  Dear Jesse,

  I know about the march and I know about the fight by Martyrs Park. All I can do to make amends is lay myself out to people, not to justify or even explain but to show who I am. I believe our true reality lies in our dreams.

  Sincerely,

  Brenda Martin

  Carefully refolding the pages, Jesse was thrown by Brenda’s calling the melee in Martyrs Park a “fight.” She wondered if Brenda knew how intense that fight had been, that a life had been lost. Reflecting on it, she decided that she preferred to think of her as being in the dark on that one; nothing would be gained by making sure Brenda had the full list of casualties.

  Pulling out of the parking lot, Jesse also found herself pondering what Brenda considered the happiest day in her life. If the man at the wake this morning was Ulysses, as Jesse was almost sure that he was, then those remembered golden hours of five years ago were based on a misconception—that Cody’s father was unaware of the boy’s existence, that, as he announced his abrupt travel plans to Brenda that day in the community college stairwell, he was unaware of her pregnancy.

  As for Brenda’s dream-missive, which lay now on the passenger seat, the pages fluttering and trembling in the fan-whipped air like a beating heart, Jesse didn’t know what to make of it beyond the obvious—Brenda’s yearning for some kind of magically instant family rapture. But she did know this: a dream was all that it would ever be, given that Brenda was condemned to live in one glass house or another for as long as she chose to remain on earth.

  33

  Walking into the paper at noon the next day, Jesse saw it in all the faces that stared at her with expectant fascination: Brenda was dead.

  Across the cluttered, windowless expanse of the newsroom, she spotted Jose in silhouette, struggling to his feet behind the frosted glass wall of his office. Before he could enter the open room and lay eyes on her, Jesse was on her way back down the stairs to the street.

  Exiting the building via the freight entrance in order to duck her brother, who was parked out front, Jesse wandered through what remained of Dempsy’s downtown district—a few Moorish movie palaces turned money-hustling revival temples; a flock of beat-up black-and-orange taxis clustered in front of the main PATH station, their Sikh drivers hanging out on the convergence of hoods; a forlorn row of card tables, almost two blocks long, an open market featuring off-brand chocolate bars, tube socks, ski hats, and tin windup frogs.

  A half hour of this walkabout was all Jesse could stand. Leaning against the off-kilter Dutchman in front of City Hall, she reached out to Jose.

  “Jesse?” he said, speaking her name into the phone with uncharacteristic tentativeness.

  “So what happened?” she finally asked.

  The story coming out of County was that Brenda had strangled herself in plain view of her guards. The two-piece cotton scrubs she had worn for Jesse’s visit were loaners, allowed only for that journey out of her cell. Normally she wore a paper jumpsuit meant to foil any plans for hanging herself. But what she had done was to get under her blankets, remove the jumpsuit, tie the arms in a knot to the left side of her bedsprings, and tie the legs tightly around her throat, all this knot work obscured by the blanket pulled up to her chin. Then, once both ends were secured, she had leaned hard to the right, cutting off her air until she blacked out. The choke hold had asphyxiated her within a matter of minutes.

  Despite the suicide watch, Brenda’s death went undiscovered for twelve hours. The guards, thinking she was asleep, had let her go without breakfast, and it wasn’t until the arrival of the lunch tray that anyone tried to rouse her.

  After laying it all out for Jesse, Jose asked if she wanted to write Brenda’s obituary or take a crack at an editorial, some kind of summing up. She declined, and to his credit, he didn’t ask twice. Instead, he simply tossed her back into the pool, briefing her regarding an ongoing situation over the line in Gannon. The owner of the Hair and Now beauty parlor there had apparently flipped and was holding himself hostage, threatening to blow his head off if any of the cops, strung out along the street and on the rooftops opposite, attempted to enter his bankrupt and, as of this morning, self-vandalized salon.

  At first Jesse was grateful to Jose, the embracing of fresh drama the only way she could imagine getting past Brenda right now. But the more she thought about it, the cooler she felt, realizing that making the scene over there would entail hopping into the Benmobile, working the Gannon cops, schmoozing and dry humping her way to the information. She took a pass in order to continue her walkabout, spending the rest of the day alternately envisioning and obliterating Jose’s rendition of Brenda’s final hours, alternately allowing the tragedy to come inside her and reassuring herself that none of it was her fault.

  Her brother found her at the tail end of twilight, coming up in the Chrysler, cruising parallel to her path on the sidewalk, then gassing it a little before stopping a half block ahead and leaning across the front seat to push open the passenger door. Jesse surrendered, letting her brother drive her wherever, and was surprised when he pulled up outside the gates of Freedomtown—surprised by the rightness of his instincts.

  “I hear Lorenzo’s out of the hospital,” he said as Jesse stepped from the car. “Maybe you should call him tonight.” Ben, both obeisant and controlling, on the money.

  “Could you call him for me?” Jesse asked politely, an attempt to take back some control over the moment.

  Even given the darkness—it was pushing nine o’clock by now—Ben didn’t try to escort his sister into the park. He knew to wait, to sit outside the vine-wreathed fence and reread the paper, sip coffee, or do whatever else he did when Jesse had no real need of him.

  Although there were still a few people maintaining a vigil before the Chicago Fire, now known as the Wailing Wall—a young pregnant woman with a serious shiner who sat cross-legged on a blanket; an older man, squatting on his haunches, talking to himself; and a trio of loud, possibly drunk or stoned young reporters, who were animatedly attempting to suss out the exact footpath taken by Billy Williams from his car to the open grave—Jesse was struck by the abject desolation of this spot.

  Gone were the crowds and their sorrowful chatter, gone, too, the buoyant effect of sunlight splashing off a carpet of floral tributes and primary-colored toys. Now it was the moon that held court, its cold albino rays embracing the easel-propped Styrofoam Bibles and crucifixes, making them gleam like scattered bones, that same underworld light finding the silvered balloons and transforming them into a random flotilla of gently bobbling skulls.

  From behind the wall, beyond the clumped, hulking silhouette of the trees, Jesse could hear a sixteen-wheeler growling its way south on an otherwise silent turnpike. From the north, she heard the deep junkyard baying of a large dog, and from directly behind her came the incessant whisper of the black, lapping bay. It was a terrible place—remote, devoid of consolation—and by the time Lorenzo, wearing a beret to cover his stitches, finally showed up, Jesse almost jumped on his back with relief.

  The two of them sat off to one side of the wall and, for a long stretch, quietly watched the visitors who arrived to pray, to deposit small gifts, or just to rubberneck recent history.

  “I heard you went and visited her yesterday,” Lorenzo said.

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Did she know someone had got killed over all this?”

  “I’m not sure,” Jesse said. “Maybe. What was his name? Millrose?”

  “Millrose.” Lorenzo nodded. “Millrose Carter.”

  “They gonna be able to hang that on anybody?”

  Lorenzo shrugged, made a noise. “The state attorney general’s office supposed to be looking at videotape right now but, hey
, you know how it goes. We shall see what we shall see. Meanwhile, the rev and some others are thinking about gearing up for another march through Gannon.”

  “For Millrose?”

  “For Millrose.”

  They drifted into silence. The three boisterous reporters left the park.

  Jesse returned to the moment. “She said for me to tell you that she thought you were kind and patient with her.”

  “OK.” Lorenzo nodded, smiling guardedly.

  “And that she loves, loved you for it.”

  “OK.” He gave another quick nod.

  Jesse stared at the wall again, thinking of Brenda and her son, both gone now, and she started to cry, a crinkled facial spasm that could easily be confused with laughing. “Shit.” She delicately tongued her stitched cheek. “That hurts.”

  “You hear what happened with Danny Martin?” Lorenzo asked. Jesse waited. “Yesterday after the wake? Danny just took off, went on down to the shore, like, Wildwood, Asbury Park, somewheres down there, got himself good and oiled, and about three or four this morning? He got pulled over by state troopers on the Garden State, said he was doing close to ninety and fishtailing all over the place, right? They pull him over, see he’s a cop, so alls they’re gonna do is take him off the road, let him sleep it off at the barracks—you know, like a professional courtesy.

  “But Danny, Danny’s all like, ‘Kiss my ass,’ and they start getting pissed, but they see he’s way out of control so they’re like, still ready to do him the courtesy, but then he’s like, ‘Keep your fuckin’ hands off me, I’ll kick your teeth down your—’ You know. So this morning the troopers call Gannon, say, ‘Come on down and get him.’

  “So Leo Sullivan goes down to bring him home? Says Danny’s face looked like a bunch of grapes. Those ol’ boys wound up doing a dance on him. They still didn’t charge him, just tuned him up, and when they found out who he was, you know, in relation to this stuff up here? They even felt bad about doing that, but…”

  “Sounds like he was looking to get his ass kicked.”

  “Yeah.” Lorenzo bobbed his head slowly, brought his hands around his raised knees. “I’d go along with that. I think he was looking for some kind of, you know, outlet or something.”

  Lorenzo touched his beret. “You think I look French? Everybody’s calling me Frenchy today, but I tell you, you do not want to see what I got underneath this thing.”

  “She wrote down a dream she had.” Jesse retrieved Brenda’s four-page missive from the rear pocket of her jeans and offered it to Lorenzo. “Do you want to read it?”

  “Nope.” He looked off, smiling. “Not really.”

  They sat in silence again, taking in the flowers and balloons, the wall itself, its lower third still shagged with a white beard of notes, poems, and other outpourings but also, as of this evening, sporting a flyer posted by a carpenter looking for work, his phone number hanging at the bottom on dozens of tear-away fringes.

  “Jesse… Do you believe in the, the psychology of dreams?”

  “You dream about what’s on your mind.” She shrugged.

  “Yeah? Because where I grew up, the only thing dreams was good for was giving you a number to play the next morning.”

  “Huh.” Jesse made an acknowledging noise, Lorenzo’s last comment striking her as a little too self-consciously folksy.

  “But I had me a dream in the hospital?” He exhaled heavily, shook his head once. “Man.”

  “What.”

  Lorenzo hesitated, smiled nervously, then jumped in. “I dreamed that there was this riot goin’ on over in the new county jail? And they were callin’ in everybody. Sheriffs, city police, county police, prosecutor’s office, bosses. I mean, everybody,” he said, sweeping the air with a downturned palm. “It was like, all hands on deck. And I was there, you know, suitin’ up in the reception area along with everybody else, gettin’ ready to go in. And I was scared, because, you know, my son, Jason, is in County. He truly is. In the, the state-run wing.”

  “I know.”

  “And like, here I was, grabbin’ pepper spray, a pellet gun, a, a, billy club. And what if my son…” Lorenzo cleared his throat, passed a quick thumb under his eye.

  “Jesus.” Jesse watched him trying not to cry.

  “But then all of a sudden the warden or somebody high up comes in, says, ‘Hold up, boys, we got like a deal goin’ on.’ Says, ‘The inmates, they say they’ll stop tearin’ up the place and release all hostages if we come meet with them.’ Well, it wasn’t like, meet. It’s like, they wanted to put on a show for us. And we had to go into, like, some kind of dining hall, where they’re gonna put on this show.

  “So all the cops, we go in and there’s like this long runway in there, like a fashion runway, and we sit around this runway, and all these brothers come out. Black, the black inmates, and they’re dressed like African warriors, got on all kinds of shit like Zulu warriors, but it’s just to show us, like, this is who we are, this is where we come from. Like a racial-pride thing, like, ‘Respect us, this is our blood,’ and I’m like, All right, all right, I get it. It’s about respect. The inmates are gonna make us sit there and acknowledge their ethnic heritage or something. But it’s like a fashion show too. It’s all fucked up. Well, shit, it’s a dream, so OK.

  “Sure enough, here comes the next crew out on the runway, and this time it’s the Hispanics, the Latinos, and these guys, they’re all dressed up like Zorro or matadors or, or, I don’t know, what do you call them? Conquistadors and, and Indian chiefs, Indian warriors, and it’s like, ‘This is who we are,’ and hey,” Lorenzo said, chin to his chest, “anything’s better than violence in my book. So, we’re all sittin’ there, like, no problem, on with the show, and then out comes this third bunch, and these guys—”

  Lorenzo broke off to cough, and Jesse once again had the sense that he was masking the impulse to cry.

  “These guys, they were wearin’—at first I thought they were wearin’ dresses, like, dirty white dresses, and so I figured they were representing the women in there, the Maytags, you know what I’m saying? And then I saw, I saw my son come out in one of those dresses, and I’m, like, ‘Oh my God, he’s done turned into a jailhouse woman,’ and it’s, like, the worst. And then I look in his face and there’s no expression on it, no, no light in it. I mean, Jason—” Lorenzo coughed again. “Jason sometimes has got, like, this light in his face, but—and then I see none of these jailhouse women got any kind of light, or life in their eyes. And I take a closer look at what they’re wearing?”

  He waited it out, swallowing, “They ain’t women, and they ain’t wearing dresses. They’re wearing winding sheets. They’re wearing shrouds. They’re the dead.” Lorenzo abruptly started bawling. “They’re the dead, and there’s Jason, there’s my son, and he’s walking, talking, but he’s dead. And I can’t do anything for him. I can’t help him, I can’t save him, I can’t teach him. I mean, there was a time when yes, but I fucked up, I fucked up…”

  Lorenzo sneezed tears, a congestion of grief, Jesse looking away.

  “And now he’s out of reach. He’s right there in front of me, but he’s stone out of reach.”

  “But he’s OK?” Jesse’s voice was lighter than air, the question meaningless, polite, and Lorenzo rightly ignored it.

  “You know this past week, all this week people were saying to me, ‘Big Daddy, what’s up with you and that child killer, man? Stop strokin’ and start swingin’”. He rubbed his swollen face, getting himself under control. “Well, yeah, I knew what she did. Shit, I knew before anybody. But I knew how she felt too. And like, that story she threw us? That was like, unconscionable, and I cannot tell you why she said it except it was like a white-mind reflex, but I am telling you—she started paying for it right from the door. Believe me, I know. And hey, I’m sorry…” He momentarily lost control again, his voice catching. “I’m sorry, but my heart went out to her. I mean, there was no way she was gonna walk on this, and, well, now she’s dead, you
can’t get much more payback than that. So now everybody can just shut the fuck up about it and get on with their lives, you know what I’m saying? I mean, politically, we’ll see what kind of water we can squeeze out of the rock, but—”

  Lorenzo stopped cold, seemed to look at himself through Jesse’s eyes. “I can’t believe you had me crying.” He began to laugh now, playing.

  “Me?” Jesse squawked, grateful for the change-up.

  “That’s more intimate than sex.”

  Jesse thought about it for a moment—her and Lorenzo. No. “Yeah, I heard you guys rather punch than munch.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You figure it out.”

  Exhausted by the talk, they took a breather, watching three white teenagers plop down on the grass, one of them firing up a fat blunt, taking a deep hit, and passing it to his left.

  “So I hear you got a job offer out in Tombstone, Arizona,” Lorenzo said calmly, eyeing that joint, the smell reaching them.

  “Tucson,” Jesse said, then corrected herself. “I mean Phoenix.”

  Lorenzo laughed. “You sure, now.”

  “Nope.”

  “When you going?”

  “Never.”

  “Well, if you did decide to go, I’d miss you,” he said, with no bantering undertone.

  “Me too,” Jesse fumbled, thrown by Lorenzo’s sincerity.

  “Let me ask you. If you did decide to, you know, go there, start over, would you bring your brother with you?”

  “Nope.” Safe to say, since she wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Uh-oh! Uh-oh!” Lorenzo shifted gears again, throwing all his ragged emotions into animated clowning now, the three stoned kids looking their way.

  “Hey birds got to swim, fish got to fly.”

  “Yeah, I hear you,” he said, calming down. Then he called out to the kids, “I’m gonna count to ten. If that blunt ain’t shredded and stomped on, your ass is mine,” not bothering to show any ID, his tone of voice his ID, the three of them complying, then vanishing.