“She could have fucked me good,” Jesse said.
“Who.” Lorenzo asked openly. Jesse realized that he didn’t know of her bogus-child scam on Brenda; no reason to tell him now.
“So what’s on your plate?” she asked, steering him away.
“Me? They’re talking about starting up this curfew program, city-wide curfew for the, the minors—get everybody off the street by 11:00 P.M. Word is the mayor asked for me personally to run the operation, and, like, I’m thinking about it, but I don’t even know if I agree with it. I mean, there’s arguments to be made on either side. I mean, you know, they’re not worried about the Irish or the Italian kids up in the Heights, right? Which leaves who. But I don’t want them fifteen-year-old knuckleheads out on JFK at two in the morning either. But like, we’re talking July August here… Hot, muggy no school, no one wants to stay inside. So, I don’t know, it’s complicated.”
Jesse envisioned it, getting a ride-along on the first night a summertime curfew went into effect, a dream assignment.
“And I’ll tell you, if I do do it? I’m gonna insist that Bump comes in with me on this, ’cause he’s hooked in every bit as good as me out there.”
“He’s OK?”
“Bump? Yeah, he came out the hospital like two days ago. He’s all right. Alls he got to do is wear like these protective goggles out there, you know, like Kareem Abdul Jabbar used to wear? He’s gonna be OK, though.” Lorenzo turned to her then, his voice becoming more personal and slightly chiding. “You ever gonna do that article on his son like you promised?”
“This week.” Jesse crossed her heart, thinking, Maybe. See what comes over the scanner.
Grunting, Lorenzo struggled to his feet, one hand holding his beret in place. “Already I got some people calling me Curfew Council. What do you think of that, Curfew Council.”
“It beats Frenchy,” she said, rising too, swiping the dirt from the rear of her jeans, “I can tell you that much.”
“Yeah, huh?” Lorenzo arched his back, yawned. “As long as those kids up in the Heights is fair game too.”
As they left Freedomtown, Lorenzo saw Ben waiting for his sister and he became knotty at the thought of losing Jesse’s company right now.
“Take a ride with me,” he murmured, touching Jesse’s elbow. To his relief, after she had a brief conversation with her brother, Jesse hopped into the Crown Vic. Despite his need for her company, his need to keep talking, he then felt overcome with an odd shyness and became verbally strangled.
Jesse, apparently under the same choke-mouthed spell, was no help. And for want of any other way to commune with her about the last few days, Lorenzo began cruising past all the stations of the cross—the route of the march in Gannon, Brenda’s apartment complex on Van Loon, the Southern District station house back in Dempsy—hoping for some kind of release, some kind of clearance. But each site now seemed to him a disappointment, seemed in some way over the last couple of days to have physically shriveled.
As he cut across JFK on his way to revisit Armstrong, one of the street shmoes—a stocky blur of a man, late thirties, hanging in front of a bar—caught Lorenzo’s eye, Lorenzo thinking, I don’t need to see this, I do not need to see this. But he was also grateful for the opportunity to open his mouth again, start nibbling on the world again.
“Dexter!” he barked out the window, the car rocking to a stop. The guy got all blinky, managing to rear back and lean forward at the same time, not too happy about seeing Lorenzo either.
“Get over here.” Disengaging himself from two gaunt middle-aged women, Dexter reluctantly shuffled up to the car, his eyes puffed and slitted. “Where the fuck you supposed to be.”
“Jail.” Dexter shrugged and looked away. His crossed hands, dangling inside the window now, were swollen to the size of woolen gloves.
“That’s right,” Lorenzo said. “At what time?”
“Six.”
“Yeah, huh? My watch says ten-thirty.”
“I missed the bus.”
“You supposed to be out here looking for a job. What the fuck you doing hanging on the corner.”
Dexter, still humped into the window, looked off again, gave it another shrug.
“Did you look for a job?” Lorenzo said, coming on like a rolling-pin wife.
“Nope.”
“Why not.”
“Because I had me some sex. I been in County six months. I was over due.”
“Nobody gives a fuck about your sex life. You supposed to be looking for a job.”
“Everything’s closed.”
“McDonald’s ain’t closed.”
“Yeah? You work at McDonald’s.”
Jesse laughed. Lorenzo took a moment to massage his temples, this routine scolding unusually wearing on him right now, like sweeping leaves on a windy day.
Dexter checked out Jesse in the passenger seat. “How you doin’?”
“I’ve been better,” Jesse answered pleasantly, the sound of her voice unexpectedly picking up Lorenzo’s spirits, making him think that she might be getting a little bit of her appetite back too.
“Lorenzo, can you lend me some money for the bus?” Dexter asked. “You right, I gotta get going.”
Lorenzo threw him the thousand-yard stare, then shook his head in disgust. “Get the fuck in back.”
As Lorenzo drove Dexter to jail, the car quickly became saturated with a musk of liquor-scented sweat, the odor such that, despite the air conditioning, Lorenzo had to open his window to breathe. And try as he might, he couldn’t quite recall the powerful allure that alcohol had once held for him. He glared at the fuckup in his rearview, but Dexter was oblivious to the vibrations, his eyes continuously pulled to the passing scenery.
“Dexter,” Jesse said, turning around, glancing at his sausage-fat fingers. “What are you on, work release?”
“Work release?” he said after a while. “Nah, it’s like job-hunt release. They let you out like nine in the morning, you supposed to look for a job for when your sentence is up, then you come back in the evening.”
“Early evening,” Lorenzo scolded—just couldn’t help it.
Lorenzo pulled up to the Dempsy County Correctional Center, and the prisoner exited from the backseat without a word. He shuffled toward the main entrance, Lorenzo muttering, “You’re welcome,” staying put until he had seen the official sign-in through the glass double doors.
With Dexter safely tucked in, Lorenzo headed back toward the streets of Dempsy and felt the muteness come down on him again, felt it come down on Jesse, too, the air heavy with things unsaid. He began slowing down at green lights, stopping at yellows, bewildered, thwarted, resisting the impulse to call it a night.
“Go back to what you were doing,” Jesse said, quietly breaking the ice. “That was good.”
And so Lorenzo resumed their visitation to the stations, cruising the Dempsy Medical Center, then rolling past the now-silent Saint Agnes parking lot, launch site of the Friends of Kent search party, then the haunted grounds of the former Chase Institute itself, the rust-eaten, shatter-ribbed gates creaking and banging, a horror-movie cliché masking a half century’s worth of true horror. Slowly Lorenzo came to understand that what they were really doing now, he and Jesse, was saying good-bye—to Brenda and, in a way, to each other.
Lorenzo pulled up to the Gannon side of Martyrs Park, the scene of the crime, the scene of the melee. They left the car and strolled together through the humid, jungly pocket park to the Armstrong side, the towers there looking both ramshackle and indestructible. Maintaining their silent communion, they walked the length of the cul-de-sac, Lorenzo ducking some kids hanging in the breezeway of Four Building, avoiding the obligatory verbal sparring match. It wasn’t until they approached the Bowl that he felt compelled to speak, the sight of those refrigerators still just sitting out there first disorienting, then enraging him.
“Look at this,” he said, laughing, pissed, as he gestured to the field of crates. “After all that shi
t, right? They still got these goddamned things just laying out here like nothing happened.”
“I hear you,” Jesse said automatically, then, “Listen, on the curfew? When you do your first night roundup…” She was speaking gingerly now. “Do you think I can get a ride along?”
“What?” Lorenzo’s agitation had turned him deaf.
Jesse’s cell phone rang and she stepped back, putting Lorenzo on hold. Grousing to himself, he began stomping through the Bowl, glaring at the refrigerators as if they were responsible for their own immobility. He worked out his exasperation in a crisscross pattern, almost making it to the high end of the slope before his asthma caught up with him and forced him to take a seat on the edge of a scorched crate.
Momentarily done in, his scalp on fire beneath its protective beret, he dropped his head between his knees, then came up and took a hit of spray. Down below on Hurley, he saw Jesse, still on the horn, pacing back and forth across the rubbled cul-de-sac with unappeasable energy.
Sensing a closer presence, Lorenzo sat up a little more and saw a boy—nine, ten years old—perched like a cat on the crate to his immediate left.
“What you doin’ down here?” Lorenzo said, with reflexive sharpness.
“What you doin’ down here?” the boy repeated in pitch-perfect mockery. He had wide, intelligent eyes and a copper cast to his skin.
“It’s eleven o’clock,” Lorenzo wheezed. “Get your behind upstairs.”
“Get your behind upstairs,” the boy said easily.
“If you make me stand up you’re gonna be sorry.”
“You’re gonna be sorry.” The kid aped Lorenzo’s expression, enjoying the conversation, the attention.
Attempting to regain his feet, Lorenzo made it halfway up before he found himself seated again, skull pulsing like a gong, his asthma resurrecting itself past the medication.
“Are you high?” the boy asked, without malice, without judgment.
“I’m OK,” Lorenzo answered quietly, just sitting there now, massaging his temples. “But it’s late,” he added, making a great effort to maintain a gentle tone. “So I want you to go on home…”
About the Author
RICHARD PRICE is the author of six previous novels, the most recent being Samaritan. Clockers was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also written numerous screenplays, including Freedomland, Sea of Love, Ransom, and The Color of Money, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He received a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999, and he had an essay selected for Best American Essays 2002. His work has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times and The New Yorker, and he has taught fiction writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia. He lives with his family in Manhattan.
FREEDOMLAND
A Delta Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Broadway Books hardcover edition published May 1998
Dell mass market edition / May 1999
Delta trade paperback edition / December 2005
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permissions to quote from the following:
True Love Travels on a Gravel Road, by Dallas Frazier and A.L. “Doodle” Owens. © 1968
(Renewed) Unichappell Music Inc. and Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.
(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher, by Gary Jackson, Carl Smith and Raynard
Miner. © 1967 (Renewed) Chevis Music, Inc. Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. and
Unichappell Music Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Warner Bros.
Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1998 by Richard Price
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-010527
Delta is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon
is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-47768-2
v3.0
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