Free Spirit

by Joshua Safran

  “Lights! Lights!” I was screaming at him. “Turn on the lights!” It was only a matter of seconds until he was going to send us careening off the cliff into the reservoir below. “¡Luces! ¡Luces!” I screamed, pulling the Spanish word out of nowhere. Twin beams of blessed light streamed forth onto the chaotic shifting patchwork of road, trees, and sky swirling in front of us. Leopoldo slowed slightly and pulled the Camaro back into the right lane.

  “You learning!” he said proudly, as he slouched behind the wheel. “You learning Spanish!”

  “Sí, sí,” I assured him. “Español muy bien.”

  He took the turn up Janicki Road more slowly. Slow enough, I thought, that I could make the jump. But I lost my nerve and continued gripping onto the door handle with both hands. The next bend in the road proved too much for Leopoldo. He failed to follow the road, and we slammed into the muddy hillside with a solid thud. Dirt and rocks sprayed across the hood and windshield, and somewhere glass shattered. Wheels spun against the hillside and the smell of burning oil filled the Camaro.

  I wasn’t too bad. I’d smacked one shin pretty hard into the dashboard, but I could tell nothing was broken. Leopoldo was slumped over the wheel for a moment, but then sat up suddenly and launched into a stream of expletives. “Hijo de puta, chingada sucia pinche madre.” His hands slapped at various levers and dials. The windshield-wipers diligently went to work on the dirt obscuring the windshield, and the smooth voice of the DJ from KBRC floated out of the dashboard, promising us more rocking with the oldies. By the time Leopoldo had found the reverse gear, I was out the door and hobbling up the road.

  “Josh! ¡Venga! Come to here!”

  I kept going, rounding the bend and limping my way up the straightaway. All I wanted was to lie down. To zip myself up in my sleeping bag, to bury my face in my pillow. I would have trudged through a minefield to get to bed. Behind me I could hear the wounded Camaro stalking me, huffing and pinging as it came. I stepped down into the ditch at the side of the road and kept sloshing forward. Leopoldo pulled alongside, the passenger side door still open.

  “Josh! Come to get in!” He was waving me in.

  “No. I’m gonna walk.”

  “Josh! Get in to the car!”

  “No.”

  Leopoldo stopped the car, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring straight ahead, his eyes wide open. A deer stood dramatically illuminated in his one remaining headlight. It was a buck, replete with majestic antlers, staring back at him. They stared at each other, deer and man, locked in an impasse. Then Leopoldo began revving the engine. The deer still didn’t move. Leopoldo popped the Camaro into gear, and the car lurched forward. The deer turned and bounded into the forest, Leopoldo screeching after him.

  The chase was on—for about two seconds—and then Leopoldo slammed into a tree. The hood of the Camaro came flying up in a cloud of steam, and the windshield shattered with a pop, sending a spray of broken glass into the air like confetti. Maybe he’s dead, I thought. But he wasn’t. A moment later the wheels were spinning uselessly in reverse as he tried to back himself out of the forest.

  “Josh,” he was yelling again. “Josh, come to help me. Move the car, push the car back. You need to push with me.”

  Up the road ahead of me, a mile or two, was my bed. I limped forward toward that modest dream and didn’t stop until I was safely zipped up in my own sleeping bag.

  Leopoldo slept through most of the next day. I walked down Janicki Road in the afternoon and watched as a sheriff’s deputy tagged the demolished Camaro for towing. When Leopoldo finally recovered from his hangover he didn’t mention the car or the ride home. It was as if it had never happened.

  Well, he could forget about it if he wanted, but I wasn’t going to. When Claudia got back from Seattle, I could barely contain myself, thirsting all day for the opportunity to pull her aside and tell her what had happened. Toward evening I finally got my chance when Leopoldo went down the trail to trim his pot plants.

  “Claudia, did you see the black car crashed down on Janicki Road?”

  “Yes, Leopoldo told me all about it.” Her voice was flat, restrained. She was angry. “He told me everything that happened.”

  “He did?”

  She looked at me, trying to control her emotions, her lips pursed, her watery eyes magnified by her glasses. “Yes, he did. And I am so disappointed in you.”

  “What?”

  “When Leopoldo was your age, he was working a part-time job, taking care of his little brothers and sisters, and helping out around the house. And now, here he is in the First World, trying to take care of you, trying to teach you how to cook, how to cut firewood, how to clean, and you’re running off to Eli’s to play instead of helping. And then he takes you to work with him, to show you how to fix cars, but you were too scared of a dog to help out. A dog!?

  “Then he introduces you to his friends and you didn’t even help clean up. He said that you just sat there watching TV the whole time. Josh, really!? You know how television rots your mind. Then, Leopoldo tells me the roads were icy on the way home and the car slipped into a ditch. And you refused to help him push it back onto the road!? You just said ‘no,’ and walked home!? Josh, that was his car. His friend Rodolfo gave him that car but he didn’t have the papers for it. So now it’s just gone.

  “After all he’s been through, Josh, he doesn’t need someone else exploiting him. Leopoldo’s been talking to me, and he’s right that you need a father. Someone to teach you how to be a man.”

  My chest was so tight I couldn’t breathe. I was crying and gesturing wildly, unable to get out anything more compelling than “He’s lying!”

  “See, Josh, this is what he’s been telling me about. You can’t just cry and get mad every time someone tells you, ‘You have to be more responsible.’ ”

  I slammed the door behind me and ran over to the chopping block. She wanted a man? I would show her I was man enough. I shook with rage, but underneath my indignation was the gnawing possibility that maybe some of what he said about me was true. I stood up a thick piece of wood and brought the ax down with all my strength, but it bounced impotently out of my hands.

  They were fighting again. Yelling and screaming. Leopoldo was convinced my mother was cheating on him. She was sleeping with one or more guys down in Seattle. He knew it. Why else would she spend three nights a week down there? Who were these commune people? What bed did she sleep in? A different bed each time! Why else was she so tired when she got back? He slammed the door. She was crying. I’d try to comfort her, but she was usually inconsolable. He’d be back an hour later and apologize for losing control. He just loved her so much he couldn’t stand to be apart for so long. I used to excuse myself at this point, knowing that the make-up sex was on its way. But it was too cold to go outside now, so I stuffed toilet paper into my ears and focused on my book, trying to read slowly, lest I run out of words before our next trip to the library.

  The only thing worse than these cycles of fighting and fornicating were the intervening days with Comandante Leopoldo as my babysitter. So I had to admit a sense of guilty relief when Claudia finally gave up on her dream of an art therapy degree. She said that she wasn’t giving up, that she was only taking a “maintenance” quarter for now. But she was jeopardizing the scholarship she’d received and, absent a sudden change of fortunes, there was no way she could afford to go back.

  She’d been going to Antioch for almost a year, and I was looking forward to having her back. But so was Leopoldo. Since meeting my mother, the months of intermittent separations he’d had to endure were like a crushing weight on his heart. Now that weight had been lifted, and he was free to love again. And he had so much love to give.

  When he returned from Thrifty Foods, he had red roses for Claudia. He sang to her. He danced with her. He purred: “Oh, honey, after everythings I was been through, the war, the torture. I think I been through it all just so I could meet you. How lucky I am to have your love.” He lit candle
s for her every evening. Admittedly, we lit candles every evening anyway because we didn’t have electricity, but when he lit the candles for her he did it with a sweep of his hand. It made the dinners very romantic. And the dinners were special now because they cooked them together. He showed her how to fry plantains, how to pickle curtido, and how to fold an empanada. He couldn’t show her the secret of frying chicharrones because we were vegetarians, but he taught her how to make pupusas. “If anything happens to me, Honey, and I am killed, you go to another man. He will be happy you can cook this.”

  He loved my mother so much he agreed to read her his poems. These were secret, spiritual incantations that had never before passed through human lips. Her love gave him the strength to read them aloud for the first time. Composed in flowery script, these writings were bordered by pyramids, adorned with ankhs and hieroglyphs, and crowned with the All-Seeing Eye. They spoke of love and war, fire and occultist magic. He gave them utterance and then returned them to the bottom of his footlocker, where they awaited their next summons. He wrote from the heart, she said, and she cried. After everything he’d been through, after everything he’d seen, he had chosen to open his heart to her.

  Leopoldo wasn’t just a rebel, a refugee, a cook, and a poet. He was also a student of the occult, obsessed with the All-Seeing Eye and the energetic properties of pyramids. He told me he was a disciple of Saint Germain, an “ascended master” who reincarnated often through the centuries. Through his teachings, Leopoldo hoped to learn physics and then the greatest of all arts—alchemy. All he had to do was learn the alphabet in order, and math, and then he’d be turning iron into gold.

  Leopoldo was also a spiritual healer. He’d learned from a medicine man in El Salvador and a real Native American shaman in California, and now he could cure the afflicted with the most ancient of formulas. He told me his antidote to black widow bites was a medicinal brew that included human excrement. When I came down with the flu, he promised that he could cure me overnight if I would submit to inhaling the ashes of cedar bark that he had urinated upon. I managed to prop myself up on one elbow and, through the haze of fever, croaked out: “No, I’m OK. I’m actually feeling all better now.”

  When I recovered from the flu—without the help of urine-based medicine—we went out to eat at a Chinese restaurant in Mount Vernon. As the fortune cookies arrived, he told the waiter: “This my woman. You see how beautiful is she? And this… this my boy!” The waiter replied: “Cash only, no check.” And we walked out of the restaurant with our arms around each other. Then we strolled through the halls of the Skagit Mall like a father and a mother and a son. Like a family.

  The next day Claudia took me with her to the county auditor’s office. We waded into an endless line and shuffled through a sea of poor and desperate people before we finally took our turn at the shabby window. The rotund, pale lady with the thinning hair and generous eye shadow patiently answered Claudia’s questions. I was watching the old man next to us pop his plastic teeth in and out of his mouth, so I wasn’t paying close attention as my mother’s voice started to climb. She was asking something about divorce, which was strange since she wasn’t married. “I don’t know. I have no idea. I haven’t seen the man since 1970.”

  On the way back home she explained that she’d technically never gotten divorced from Frankie Rhys, the Black Panther she’d married when she was twenty. I asked her why she wanted to divorce him now after all those years. She said she wanted closure, but I suspected it was because Leopoldo was jealous. He’d freaked out so dramatically when my mother was spending the night in Seattle, it must be driving him crazy to know that “his woman” was still legally hitched to another man. When we got home I helped her write the requisite legal notice for the divorce. Even though she hadn’t seen Frankie in two decades she still had to place an ad in a newspaper back in Toronto, where she’d last seen him, even if he’d gone off to be a Coptic monk in Ethiopia as she suspected. This farcical process would take two months and almost a hundred dollars, but, in her words, that was the government for you.

  By the light of the smoky kerosene lamp we talked about Frankie. He was half Jewish and half Carib, from Belize. Claudia had thought he was going to be a real revolutionary leader. And he was, in New Haven, where he burnt the draft offices to the ground. But when they slid into Canada to elude the FBI, he became more concerned with screwing grad students down at the jazz club than smashing Capitalism. After Frankie, she thought she’d found the real deal again when she met Uncle Tony, but he was more comfortable discussing Greek mythology than trying to build a new society. And now, at long last, she’d met the genuine article. Leopoldo was Che Guevara and Archbishop Romero all in one.

  We ate out at the Chinese place again the next week. We all savored the warmth in the restaurant, marveling at the way the heat kept rolling out of the wall. When the bill came, Claudia concluded that the three of us weren’t going to survive off of Welfare. She and Leopoldo needed jobs. On the way home we talked about what we were going to do with all the money they’d be making with all the jobs that were waiting for them. With jobs, we could buy a reliable car. Maybe rent a house in town with a heater and running water and electric lights.

  Looking up the snowy trail at our little wood-plank cabin on Cultus Mountain, Washington.

  Claudia found a job as a care worker at the Monte Vista nursing home, where she rolled incontinent old people in and out of beds. She changed them and she powdered them. She hoisted them into a wheelchair and stuck them in front of the TV. Then she did it all over again. They gave her so little time with each patient that she sometimes had to leave the folks who’d merely pissed themselves to languish in wet sheets. She came home exhausted, smelling of ammonia and degradation. Leopoldo had a harder time finding work. He worked a couple of odd jobs but the bosses always disrespected him too much for anything to pan out. He eventually found part-time employment at an auto body shop. We tried to bring him lunch there one day but he waved us away, annoyed at our surprise visit. He didn’t want us to see him that way. Just one of many little illegal immigrants sweating in oversized blue jumpsuits and face masks, coated in Bondo and white dust. It was one of the rare occasions I saw him looking powerless. The auto body job didn’t last through its second week.

  During this time, I had been attending a one-room New Age private school where we wrote poems and used a geode to interpret each other’s dreams, but when our money ran out, I was back home with my least favorite babysitter. I wasn’t the only one unhappy with the new arrangement. Leopoldo was in the corner, clenching a cigarette to his face, pulling disturbing images out of the smoke. “She cheat on me,” he concluded to himself. “She fuck with the other mens.” It seemed like a good time to pay a visit to my friend Eli, and I slipped down the mountain.

  When I came back, Leopoldo was in Claudia’s face, snarling with paranoia. “Where you was!? Why you was so late!? You go to someone house? Me and the boy waiting and waiting for you.” My mother turned away from him, her face blank as she transferred her salad fixings to another corner of the driftwood that served as a counter. Leopoldo whipped around her, shoving his face back into hers. “You no talk with me now? You no tell me la verdad!”

  “Honey,” she explained to him like he was a child, “I told you. I went to work. Then I went to the co-op to buy veggies.” She offered up her paper bag brimming with carrot tops as her alibi. “Are you jealous of the lettuce or the carrots?”

  “You went to the co-op?”

  “Yes. And now I’m tired and hungry for salad.”

  Leopoldo took a step back like a cat releasing a motionless mouse, and eyed her carefully, waiting for a deceitful movement. Claudia stood in silence, peeling carrots robotically, one after the other, until they were all smooth and innocent. Leopoldo went out for a cigarette. When he stepped back in from the forest, he partook of the salad, and all was forgotten.

  Until the next day when the whole thing repeated itself again. Rifling through her ab
alone shell of trinkets, Leopoldo held up her used costume jewelry from the thrift store. “You know how much this cost in El Salvador? Only the rich peoples have this kind of thing! Who giving this to you? You boyfriend?”

  I was up in the loft, skimming across the Marvel microverse. Uncle Tony’s latest package of Micronauts comic books had arrived, and it would take more than a little shouting to distract me from Acroyear’s duel with Psycho-Man. In the background somewhere, Claudia was shouting back: “You think after washing old people’s asses all day, I’m going to pop by some guy’s house to have sex for ten minutes before coming home to make dinner!?” And then reality pulled me back from inner space with a new sound. “Ow!” Claudia’s voice was high pitched and startled. “Ow! Stop it! You’re hurting me!” A chair hit the floor. “Stop it!” A long volley of Spanish expletives rang out, ending with pinche, dirty, and the slamming of the door.

  “You all right?” I called down.

  “Yes, I’m fine.” The chair was righted below me and silence prevailed.

  In the morning, I was summoned to help push my mother’s car out of the ditch. Leopoldo had almost made it home the night before, but the combination of twelve beers and that last curve in the road proved to be too much for him. The car still ran, even with the busted headlight and leaking radiator. But Leopoldo didn’t want Claudia to drive with it in that condition. “It no safe.” And there was no way he was going to let her take it to a mechanic. Pay a stranger to do what he could do for free!? It was crazy.

  One missed day of work turned to two, with Leopoldo and Claudia passing the time by arguing. First they bickered over how long it would take him to fix the car, then they moved on to how annoying it was for her to keep nagging him. On the third day, Claudia made an executive decision and limped the car into town on her own. The last of our savings went to the mechanic.