Freedom Road

by William Lashner

  Even before the GPS starts chirping he spots the familiar mailbox at the mouth of the farm’s driveway. The mailbox lists on a rotting post; the drive runs over a steep ravine and then is flanked by bushes and tall weedy trees so overgrown it is impossible to see where the drive leads. It is a dusty dirt path to nowhere. He pulls to the side of the road and stops the truck.

  “Is this it?” asks Ayana.

  “This was it.”

  He leans over the back of the seat and pushes away this bag and that piece of garbage until he finds the urn. He hands it to the girl.

  “Hold this.”

  “What is it?”

  “My wife.”

  “What?”

  “Just hold it,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “Because I need a psychiatrist.”

  She looks at him, at the dog, and then puts the urn atop one of her thighs. With a grunt of satisfaction, Oliver grinds the truck into gear and starts down the rutted dirt path into the mountains.

  He is waiting for the vista to open up from the wild scrub so he can see, wedged within the valley, the long flat expanse of green that constitutes the working part of the farm. But the brush obscures everything except the rocky hills on either side. Stray branches, reaching for the sunlight-baked road, brush against the side of the truck. The sound is like unintelligible warnings from the past.

  Finally they pass the reservoir on the left, the grand old swimming hole, its banks overgrown and untended. In the distance there is an opening in the bushy barrier, and in that gap he spies a familiar tree, the old juniper, twisted now and worn, half its rising trunks shorn of any green at all. He parks in the tree’s uneven shadow, next to a baby-blue Camaro with two stripes down the middle of its hood.

  “This place doesn’t look like much,” says Ayana.

  “It never really did. Piece-of-shit land farmed by idiots.”

  Ayana leaves the urn on the bench seat and steps out of the truck; the dog leaps after her and starts running. Oliver sits there for a moment, taking in the scene.

  The fertile expanse he expected within the high hills on either side, the flat fields of corn and wheat and soy and hay are gone; what’s left is weedy and wild and worthless, planted with bits of strange decoration that make the land look like a junkyard curated by the mad. The orchard in the distance, once so fertile, has become a nest of twisted branches reaching leaflessly to the sky. It’s as if the farm hasn’t been cultivated for years, for decades, except for a small patch of dirt in front of one of the cabins, crossed with scraggly rows of vegetables. The place is a ghost of what it was.

  An old woman, long gray hair falling from a wide straw hat, is sitting in a wooden chair in the middle of the vegetable field. One hand holds a trowel, one hand a thick sheaf of useless weed. She lifts her head, peers at him, and then struggles to stand.

  Beside the woman is a girl who looks like a memory. She holds a hoe and takes a step forward.

  The dog sprints past the two women and jumps around a skinny young man with long hair streaming from beneath a backward baseball cap. He stands stiffly with a metal crutch under one of his tattooed arms. His chest is concave, his chin is pointy, his narrow face is a swollen mess. The dog dances, spins. The man takes the crutch from beneath his arm and bends to grab at Hunter’s snout. A long tongue licks the man’s wrist.

  “Do you see it?” asks Helen. “Do you see it all, my love?”

  “I see it,” grunts Oliver.

  “What do you see?”

  “Desolation.”

  “Oh no, that’s not it, not it at all,” says his dead wife. “It’s a chance, a final chance to make everything right again. To grab hold of life again. To heal the world and make something new.”

  Oliver groans. He was right, dead right; it is all turning to shit.

  III. ELECTRIC LADYLAND

  27

  ASTRAL WEEKS

  He was a boy who knew nothing but freedom.

  He ran naked through the fields beneath the harvest moon. He swung through the orchard trees like an ape-man and jumped into the reservoir before he could swim, thrashing his wild way to the surface. Sometimes he even crapped in the bushes like one of the coyotes that snickered across the fields and terrorized the chickens. His face was dark with sun and dirt, his ruddy hair long and tangled, his teeth twisted like the trunks of the juniper tree at the mouth of the road. At night he would crawl into bed beside his mother and roll his naked body into a ball like a dog as she hugged him tight and sang him to sleep. He smelled like a feral creature of the foothills, and he didn’t talk.

  He could talk, certainly. He had been a jabbermouth as a toddler, poking his voice into every crevice of every conversation. But two years before, at age five or so, he just stopped, as if within the crucible of his freedom he was devolving, or evolving, depending on your view, into a species of his own.

  Hominis bestia.

  The boy was still alert, still listened and understood, still made himself understood, still read picture books from the makeshift schoolroom in the main house, his lips silently mouthing the words.

  “He’ll talk when he’s ready,” said his mother as she painted, daubing a light cerulean blue onto a wild abstract canvas set just outside the old stable the boy’s parents had taken for their home. “We don’t want to force him into inane social chitchat.”

  “What about school?” said Angie, her dark face creased with concern. Angie managed the farm’s homeschool. “He never participates. He just draws with crayons or scratches designs into the floorboards with scissors. I can’t bring him into any of the discussions.”

  “Are they good?”

  “The discussions?”

  “The designs?”

  “Yes, actually. He has an artist’s eye, like his mother. But he could be doing so much more.”

  “He’ll do more when he’s ready.”

  “Like he’ll speak when he’s ready? This isn’t normal.”

  “Is that what we aspire to now?” said the boy’s mother, looking away from the canvas for a moment to gaze at her son. The boy squatted in the dirt under the portico that stretched across the front of the stable. Wearing his paisley tunic and ripped cotton pants, he wasn’t paying attention to the conversation as he used one of his father’s chisels to gouge at the spare piece of wood he was carving into a frog.

  “I’ve been asking around during market day,” said Angie. “There’s a child psychologist who people say good things about.”

  “He’s just a boy. And we don’t have the money.”

  “His grandfather has money.”

  “That’s not what we do.”

  “Maybe you should start. Or why don’t you let Lucius work with him? He is great with the children. His therapies are very spiritual.”

  “Whatever that therapy is, it is not spiritual.”

  “I think your son needs to see somebody.”

  “He sees me,” said his mother. “And his father. And his friends. Maybe he just doesn’t have anything to say. Maybe he’s waiting until he does. And maybe then his words will change the world.”

  “You think he’s a poet?”

  “Or a seer. One never knows.”

  The boy licked the side of his mouth as he gouged out a frog’s eye.

  There was a clutch of children at the farm, but it was Arlo and Sunrise who held the boy’s heart.

  Arlo, twelve years old, was big for his age, with huge rounded shoulders. He talked so slowly you could go to sleep between his words. Sunrise was twice the boy’s age, slender and blonde, and she spoke in a voice so flat and lacking in emotion that it squeezed at the boy’s heart. Sunrise’s father had run off back to the world. Some days the girl would sit for hours in the juniper tree waiting for her father to come back and take her away with him.

  The three friends would play together, adventure together, swim together in the reservoir. After swimming they would lie quietly side by side on the reservoir’s banks, staring at the clou
ds as gnats and dragonflies flitted about them. Sometimes they would hold hands in a chain, with the boy in the middle, and crack whips across the fields. The boy, with a grip as tenacious as an ironworker, would let go only when the force was threatening to tear out his little arms.

  “Let’s go see Crazy Bob,” said Sunrise to Arlo and the boy on the day when everything changed, and off they went.

  The three friends started running together beside the dirt road on the southern edge of the farm that passed the cabins and ran around the orchard before heading for the rise at the far end of the valley. They ran whenever they could, as if running across the surface of the earth was as natural as breathing. As they ran two of the dogs, Skipper and Moonstone, joined them. The sun was high, the air had a snap to it, the ground felt warm under their feet. The three children spun with their arms stretched as the dogs loped around them, barking and keeping pace with ease. They were five now, running wild, as much creatures of the mountains as the striped chipmunks that darted around the edges of the cabins and the peregrine falcons that swooped down to grab the chipmunks in their claws.

  Crazy Bob lived with Toby, who had been in the war, in a small cabin at the westernmost point of the farm where he would make caramels for the children on a wood-burning stove. Crazy Bob had his own special field that he tended, ringed by a post-and-rail fence the boy’s father had built, and a shop behind his cabin for his science work. He didn’t let the children inside his shop but they had spied the whole setup through the window: the white plastic jugs, the oil lanterns, the racks of glasses filled with bubbling liquids.

  “Well, well, well,” said Crazy Bob, wild haired and long bearded with the face of a samurai. He sat on a rocking chair in the dirt in front of his cabin, fiddling with some little machine. “If it isn’t the three Mouseketeers. Come to spy on Crazy Bob, did you?”

  “What’s that you’re playing with, Crazy Bob?” said Sunrise.

  “It’s called a carburetor.”

  “What’s—what’s,” said Arlo.

  “A carburetor is a thingamajig in an engine that never seems to work right,” said Crazy Bob. “This is from that motorcycle over there.”

  “That’s a big motorcycle,” said Sunrise.

  “It’s a Harley.”

  “What’s its last name?” said Sunrise.

  “Davidson. Harley Davidson. I dated his sister Tina back in the day.”

  It was not strange to see a motorcycle on the farm. They came a lot, the motorcycle people, with their black jackets and vests with pictures of skulls on the back. They were friends with Lucius and Crazy Bob and they always came to the cabin back here when they thundered down the dirt road. The sound of the motorcycles was so loud and throbbing that it scared the boy, especially when they came in the middle of the night, like monsters from another world.

  “Why—handles—so—” said Arlo.

  “Why are those handles so high?” said Crazy Bob. “Because some people are damn fools. You children want some caramels? Course you do, why else would you have come. Other than the spying thing. Here, Fletcher, you hold this for me.”

  Crazy Bob handed the machine to the boy. It was heavy and felt oily and smelled like gasoline, but it had a little flippery thing that was fun to play with. Arlo leaned over and poked at it with a thick finger.

  When he came back, Crazy Bob’s head was wreathed in the smoke of an uneven cigarette that smelled as sweetly sticky as the candy he handed out. Two caramels for each and a couple extra for Wendy if they saw her.

  “But none for them boys with the boots,” said Crazy Bob as he took the machine from the boy and sat back down in his rocking chair. “I don’t want to ruin their pretty white teeth. Fire would pull out my beard by the handfuls, she would.”

  “Thanks, Crazy Bob,” said Sunrise.

  “You kids are welcome anytime. Just so’s you don’t step in my field. I don’t want you crushing any of the tender little shoots. It’s the little shoots that grow so rich.”

  The three children walked back along the northern edge of the farm, chewing on their candies. Even after wiping his hands on his shift, the boy thought the caramels tasted strange, like he had licked the machine. Sunrise couldn’t resist giving Wendy’s caramels to the dogs.

  “Don’t tell,” said Sunrise.

  “We—won’t,” said Arlo. “Promise.”

  While walking through a field of still green hay, letting the blades tickle their faces, they saw Flit riding on a tractor. Arlo let out his famous hoot, like the night call of an owl, and Flit waved. In the distance, Toby and Gracie were working the cornfield. The children climbed through the fence around the cow pasture and walked past the beasts with their heavy udders and their eyes as black and dull as Crazy Bob’s. The cows were chewing, chewing like they had caramels of their own. Sunrise petted one, who ignored her. The dogs loped along outside the fence, while Sam, the farm’s peacock, ambled over and pecked at the ground.

  “Hello there, Sam,” said Sunrise. “Want to put on a show?”

  The kids danced around the peacock urging it to display its feathers. The dance sometimes worked and the peacock would flash his tail, but this time he kept pecking, so they moved on.

  On the other side of the pasture, beyond the barn and next to the little plot of land where Arlo’s mom was buried, the boy’s father was working on the chicken coop.

  “Hello, Oliver,” said Sunrise. “What’cha doing?”

  “Just changing some of the boards that have started going to rot,” said the boy’s father. “I’ve been meaning to get to them for a while, but last night Toby said he saw a coyote trying to paw his way in. The chickens weren’t so happy about that. Hey, Fletcher, you want to help?”

  The boy looked at his father for a moment and then turned away.

  “Come on, Fletcher, don’t be like that. I’ll let you use the plane. You like using the plane. Or we could have a catch after. You want to have a catch? Take some swings with the bat I brought back from Chicago? Just talk to me.”

  But what could the boy say? There was too much to say. The words caught one on the next before they reached his throat. The flatness of Sunrise’s speech thrilled him because everything she said was bleached of emotion. But for the boy, words were emotions and he was so filled with words that they jammed up against each other, like the bits of ice on the creek leading to the reservoir on the coldest winter days. He looked once more at his father, felt something press at his eyes, and then he walked away.

  The boy joined Sunrise and Arlo, sitting on the ground with Wendy, who was holding a black-feathered chicken in her lap. The dogs were looking on with something sharp in their faces. “Down,” said Wendy, and the dogs lay right down, but their eyes stayed trained on the chicken.

  Wendy was the boy’s friend, too. She was three years older and spent all her time with the cows and chickens, the frogs by the reservoir, the three dogs that roamed free. She even left food out for the coyotes and waited in the weeds with the boy so they could see the creatures up close and give them names. Savage. Lucky. Notail. The coyotes, knowing where their bread was buttered, sometimes followed her as she walked across the fields.

  “She’s not feeling well,” said Wendy about the chicken. “She was just lying on the ground breathing so hard. I think something’s wrong.”

  “What are you going to do?” said Sunrise.

  “Hold her, kiss her. That’s what Mommy does to me when I don’t feel good.”

  “Will—she—let—you?” said Arlo.

  “Of course. She loves me.” Wendy gave the chicken a big kiss on her neck and the hen turned her red-combed head back and forth without any upset, like Wendy’s kiss was as natural as a breath of air. It was strange that the chickens took to her, since the kids had often seen Wendy wring the neck of a chicken when it was time to cook. She would hold its wrinkled little feet and yank down on the head before twisting it upward, fast and hard until the neck gave a snap like Lucius’s knuckles when he cracked them
. And afterward, as the dead chicken kept flapping its wings, Wendy would hug it close and say, “Oh little baby, sweet little baby.”

  “Can—I—hold—it?” said Arlo reaching his hands out for the chicken.

  “Sure you can,” said Wendy, but when she tried to give over the chicken, the hen started fussing and squawking, batting its wings with such fear that Wendy pulled her back again. “Sorry.”

  Just then Lucius appeared.

  He tended to do that, Lucius, just appearing as if out of a puff of Crazy Bob’s smoke.

  He was tall and thin with a long mournful face that seemed to never smile. It was Lucius who, with Gracie, had leased the old unused piece of ranch land from Mr. Oates, brought in the other farm members, and ran the meetings that managed to keep the members fed, the rent paid, and the electricity on. He often had articles printed in the local paper spouting off about this or that. The boy’s father said Lucius was becoming a thing, as if to become a thing was like crapping on the dinner table. Whenever Lucius leaned down to rustle the boy’s hair, the boy would jerk away as if Lucius had fingers made of cactus.

  “I’m glad you finally got to that, Oliver,” said Lucius.

  “It wasn’t really a big deal,” said the boy’s father.

  “Until the chickens started going missing again.”

  “I said I’d get to it.”

  “You say a lot of things, that’s the problem.” Lucius leaned over the circle and rubbed Wendy’s shoulder. “Shouldn’t you children be with Angie?”

  “She gave us the afternoon off,” said Wendy, hugging her chicken, who continued acting as if a predator were near. “It’s laundry day.”

  “How are you feeling, Sunrise?”

  Sunrise looked down at the ground, rubbing a finger in the dirt.

  “Since you have the afternoon off, why don’t we have another session? Did you think on what we talked about?”

  “I suppose,” she said.

  “Okay, good. I’ll see you in the dakhma.”

  They watched as Lucius made his bowlegged way to the main house, where he lived with Desire and the baby Tamara, who liked to touch the boy’s red hair. Desire and the baby were off visiting Desire’s folks in Iowa, so the only one sleeping in the main house just then was Lucius. The main house also held the kitchen, the communal dining room, the little library that also acted as the school, and Lucius’s dakhma, what he called his sacred space. The main building had been the ranch house when the farm was still a ranch and was the only structure on the farm made with stone. Behind the house Angie and Fire were hanging clothes, wet from the washing barrel, on the line.