Freebird

by John Raymond

  Inside, Aaron found his grandfather, as usual, bonded to the leather of the recliner, fast asleep. His mouth was open, and his breathing came in ragged, uneven gasps, between which the whole body seemed to shut down, only to jump-start with the next violent intake of breath. He sucked air, he died, he sucked air, he died. Again and again, the system crashed and rebooted, as flecks of spittle deposited in the edges of his lips, catching in the giant, hairy leech of his mustache.

  Aaron listened to the rolling catastrophe as he strolled through the house, taking stock of the decorations. He peered at the framed photos of his mother and his grandmother on a bench in San Leandro; the hotel painting of the clipper ship in heaving waves; the patently racist ceramic busts of the Irishman, the Mexican, and the Chinaman, the mick, the spic, and the chink. His grandparents had picked them up on a trip to Cancún back in 1955 or so, and they’d remained on the wall through seismic cultural changes, pushing the whole household scene beyond mere boredom, into something like low-grade horror.

  He went outside onto the deck and called his friend Joel, who was deep in a session of Skyrim. Between bone-crushing sword strikes and a blast of dragon breath, he managed to get out that he had a lead on a possible van on Craigslist.

  “It’ll go fast,” Joel said, grunting as the thwip, thwip, thwip of arrows parted the air. “We should check it out today. You got time?”

  “I’m at my grandpa’s,” Aaron said.

  “Nineteen sixty-nine VW,” Joel said. “That’s a superior year, my dad says. They run forever if you treat them right.” He paused for the death groan of an armored sentry. “And this one looks like people were kind. Only four grand.”

  Aaron didn’t have anything near two thousand dollars, and even if he did he still wasn’t sure he wanted to spend it on a Mexico-bound VW bus, but he told Joel to go ahead and send him a picture anyway. He hung up feeling curdled by his own duplicity and indecision. He still hadn’t mentioned anything to Joel about Karl and the sunporch because he still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, and also he didn’t think Joel would even understand the debate. He’d say, What the fuck are you even talking about? Joel didn’t give a shit about bohemian sunporches. He barely even gave a shit about music. Compared with the political mission of driving around Mexico and witnessing firsthand the lives of the campesinos in Michoacán and Chiapas, everything was insignificant.

  At some point, Aaron knew, he needed to tell Joel he might not be going on the fact-finding mission to Mexico. But then he heard the toilet flush, and he quit worrying about it. He was on duty.

  He intercepted his grandfather staggering out of the bathroom, attempting to tie on his sweatpants. There were piss stains on his crotch and some crumbs on his belly from the crackers he’d been eating, and, since his fingers seemed unable to loop the drawstring, Aaron stepped forward and jerked the knot into place.

  “How’s it going, Grandpa?” he said.

  “I was sleeping,” his grandpa said thickly, and yawned, his hot, sour breath enshrouding Aaron’s face. His head was right at Aaron’s chin level, and Aaron had an intimate view of the leathery pate, coated in a few remaining gray hairs, with bits of fluff and dandruff scattered on the surface.

  “Yeah, I got here awhile ago,” Aaron said.

  “Are you hungry, sweetheart?” his grandpa said.

  “I just ate. Thanks.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m good.”

  “You’re sure?”

  His sweatpants safely cinched, Grandpa Sam headed for the kitchen. Trained by generations of Yiddish women to equate food with love, he wanted only to put something in his grandson’s mouth. He opened the fridge and bent over, sticking his head almost all the way inside. “Loaves and Fishes came yesterday,” he said. “I have sandwiches.”

  In fact, Aaron was a little hungry, but he knew he wanted nothing to do with his grandpa’s depressing food supply. He’d seen all the old, corroded pickle jars and squashed, plastic-wrapped sandwiches in the refrigerator, and they were the opposite of appetizing. The much better option today, by his reasoning, would be to fabricate some errand and eat out at a restaurant.

  “So, what do you want to do today, Grandpa?” he said. “You have anything you need? I can drive you wherever. Maybe we should get out of the house. It’s nice out.”

  “I don’t need anything,” his grandpa said. He was probably already plotting household chores Aaron could do, little cleanup jobs, yard duties, a thousand insignificant improvements to the domestic sphere. Another reason to go somewhere was to avoid all that business.

  “Come on,” Aaron said. “I can drive. You should use me.”

  His grandpa closed the refrigerator and went back to his recliner and pulled the lever to sweep his legs into the air. He lay there, eyes closed, as the clocks throughout the house ticked out of sequence.

  “Grandpa?”

  Grandpa Sam’s eyes seemed to be closed, but they might have been open, too. Aaron could see a tiny slit of wetness inside the dark lids, a little crevice of gleaming life. It was possible his grandpa’s eyes simply didn’t shut all the way anymore, another small malfunction in the aging machine. Or it was possible he was not asleep, just resting, just staring up at the white ceiling, noting, or not, the strands of cobweb drifting in the sluggish air. The clocks kept ticking. At last he stirred, and his eyes opened all the way, finding Aaron nearby.

  “I guess we could go get my pills,” he said. He didn’t seem to care one way or the other, but if his grandson wanted to go somewhere, he was willing to indulge.

  It took about forty-five minutes to get to the car. Putting on shoes, taking a shit, brushing his teeth, combing his hair, feeding the cat, flattening some boxes in the garage, all took their time.

  At last, Aaron commandeered the driver’s seat and made a show of adjusting the mirrors and repositioning the wheel, knowing his grandpa was a tyrannical backseat driver and not wanting to give him any excuses to get started. He would have turned on the stereo, but he knew that would only cause a snit. His grandpa didn’t like distractions on the road, and that included music, most of which he found jarring and incomprehensible even under the best of circumstances, and, since Aaron already felt a little guilty about forcing him to evacuate his house, he kept his hands off the tuner as he crept out of the dank garage.

  Without music, the main option for entertainment was conversation, and Aaron figured this was probably as good a time as any to begin the inquiry into his grandpa’s horrific life story. The best way to get the ball rolling, he assumed, would be to pose some innocuous questions about current things in hopes they’d naturally lead backward in time. Maybe he’d even end up skipping over the worst part, jumping to the ancient shtetl life in Poland, and then work his way forward again. He’d see. Starting simple seemed like the proper strategy, he thought, because God knew he couldn’t imagine how to broach the topic directly.

  So as the garage door sank and they headed down the street, he asked his grandpa how long he’d been living in this house—a banal but sincere point of clarification. Ever since Aaron could remember, he’d known this to be his grandpa’s home, and he honestly didn’t know what place had come before.

  “What?” his grandpa said. The question struck him as so obtuse as to be nonsensical. To anyone but his grandson, he wouldn’t have bothered responding at all.

  “I mean, how long have you been in this house? A long time?”

  “Eh.” His grandfather gave the air a limp, dismissive flick of his hand. His eyes were glued to the road, his mind solely on judging Aaron’s driving skill. Issues of brake control and signal timing far outweighed any questions of bygone real estate.

  They arrived at an intersection, and Aaron navigated his way to the other side without incident. They slid past the brick fire station and the newly painted elementary school, also without disaster. A few more easy, uneventful blocks elapsed before his grandpa seemed to relax a bit and recollect a question had been asked.r />
  “Long time, I suppose,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” Aaron said. “But how long, exactly?”

  “How old is your mother?”

  “Forty-five?”

  “Forty-three years ago, then. So not very long.”

  To Aaron, it sounded infinitely long. In what universe was forty-three years not long? Forty-three years ago Americans were driving Gremlins and Dodge Darts. Forty-three years ago they were listening to the Temptations and Henry Mancini on top-forty radio. The world had not even witnessed Star Wars yet. Not to mention all the technological stuff.

  “And where’d you live before this, Grandpa?” he asked.

  His grandpa shrugged almost without shrugging. He expressed his shrug without any movement at all. His sweatpants jiggled with the vibration of the car. “Oakland,” he said. “Petaluma. A few places. North.” The memory extraction seemed almost physically painful to accomplish.

  “And what were you doing up there?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  The car glided along Vineland, and his grandpa took refuge in the changing sights. He seemed sad, although maybe not sad, too. Maybe he just couldn’t remember anything. The sign for Jack in the Box came and went. They passed a row of frowsy palms. Aaron was giving up on getting any more information when his grandpa dispensed another random batch:

  “In Petaluma, I worked on a chicken farm,” he said.

  Aaron received the information quietly. He didn’t want to rattle his grandpa with too much enthusiasm, but he was pleased by the fresh nugget. He’d never heard of a chicken farm before. He knew about Oakland—the place where his grandpa had met his grandma and where his mom had been born—but that was the extent of his American family history. Auschwitz–Oakland. That was the jump cut. The notion of his grandfather raising chickens in between was a new and bizarre sidebar. The idea of his grandfather standing on dirt was bizarre, for that matter. In Aaron’s mind, his grandfather was a creature solely of the suburban sidewalk, the strip-mall parking lot, not raw, organic earth.

  “The owner of the farm, he hired Jews from the city,” his grandpa went on, not entirely displeased with the memory himself. “Cheap labor. But he was a good man. We became very good friends while I was there.”

  “You fed the chickens? And killed chickens? And everything? Really?”

  “I drove a truck.”

  Aaron pondered his young grandfather, fresh from war-torn Europe, hot wind blowing in the window of his International Harvester, chicken feathers floating onto the road shoulder. Up in Petaluma, wine country, with that same mustache, darker hair, younger muscles, more oomph. It was a hard picture to muster as they joined a line of cars waiting to turn onto Strathern, and far from the ugly stuff he was really seeking, but he was glad to have it nonetheless. After seventeen years, they’d finally started down the road.

  They had to go to the Walgreens for the pills. In the water aisle, they got trapped comparing prices on bottles and pallets and then ran into a woman his grandpa knew, a rouged scarecrow who laughed timidly at all his moth-eaten jokes about nuns falling down stairs and priests in airplanes. After filling the prescription, his grandpa wanted to drive past his friend Rick’s house for some reason, and they drove by his front lawn three times in hopes that someone would be standing outside, but no one was. And then his grandpa had some banking to do, though it didn’t seem like any money actually changed places. He only wanted to sit across the desk from the bank manager and talk about average interest rates.

  For lunch, they returned to the Walgreens strip mall and ate at the Black Bear Diner, a pancake-and-hamburger chain decorated with many sculpted bears. It wouldn’t have been Aaron’s first choice, but it was the only place deemed properly inexpensive, and thus there was no argument in the matter. Aaron could have tried to convince his grandpa that the food one ate, the substance that nourished one’s body and soul, might possibly be worth spending an extra dollar or two on sometimes, but it wasn’t a debate he wanted to take up.

  Chewing on his dry Swiss mushroom burger, he worked to fabricate some further inquiries into the past. More details about chicken farming? The Oakland years? His beginning in the electrical engineering career? For no particular reason, he decided to go with Oakland. There had to be more images to pluck from that era.

  “So,” he said, shaking a fresh puddle of ketchup onto his plate, “tell me about Oakland, Grandpa.”

  “Mmmphh,” his grandpa said, his mouth loaded with French-dip sandwich.

  “You were in Oakland after the chicken farm, right?”

  “Yes.” He wiped his napkin across his oily chin. “Before and after.”

  “Where were you in Oakland, exactly?”

  “McKinley Avenue.”

  “What years were you there?”

  “Oh. I can’t remember that.”

  “But what years? Approximately?”

  His grandfather took another bite, beef broth drizzling over his lips, and chewed patiently. His face registered no contemplation. At last, wiping his chin again, he said, almost gruffly, “It was in the years just after the war.”

  The sentence sent a mild charge into the far shoals of Aaron’s fingers and toes. He wasn’t prepared for the word “war”—not so quickly, anyway. After the war, Grandpa Sam had said. Here they were, only two hours into their day, already knocking on the iron door. Aaron chewed on his burger, playing it cool. The word “war,” even in this silly, bear-infested chain restaurant, summoned evil meanings, mud smells, frozen limbs, and Aaron was aware that he was talking no longer to his grandpa but to the spirit of history itself, that whatever words came out of his grandpa’s mouth next should be remembered for the sake of posterity. He informed his brain to open the deepest vault to receive.

  “Why Oakland?” he asked. “How did you end up there?”

  “Oakland was the first place they sent me,” his grandpa said.

  “But why?”

  “Who knows?” He didn’t seem pleased to be remembering any longer, but Aaron felt secure in his responsibility to keep pressing. He didn’t have to lead him much farther right now, just enough to lay the groundwork. They were only plotting the eventual path, pacing out the perimeter of the fence topped with concertina wire. They didn’t have to open the gate today, but they would return to this place when the time was right.

  “Come on, Grandpa,” he urged.

  “The temple in Oakland sponsored me,” his grandpa said. “To come to America then, you had to have a sponsor. The temple had all the paperwork done. They said I had a job with one of their members. That’s why Oakland. It could have been anywhere.”

  “And was there a job?”

  “No. But I found one. I worked in a bread factory for a number of years. But this is all ancient history now, sweetheart. I don’t know why you want to know these things.”

  “You’re my grandpa. I want to know.”

  If he’d expected a warm smile of appreciation for his dutiful, grandsonly curiosity, he was disappointed. His grandfather didn’t smile but simply stopped talking and returned to his sandwich. Watching him put the food in his mouth, the stray bits falling out and scattering near his plate, it occurred to Aaron that he’d possibly never seen his grandfather truly smile before. Had he ever seen him laugh out loud? Surely not. He could see now from his grandfather’s bleary, tired eyes it was time to let the questions rest.

  On the way out, Aaron dropped three extra dollars onto the table to supplement his grandpa’s meager tip. Grandpa Sam might have been to hell and back in his lifetime, but that didn’t mean he knew you left twenty percent.

  Back home, Aaron helped his grandfather up the path and eased him into the warm embrace of his La-Z-Boy. He placed the remote in his palm and put the glass of water nearby, using the newspaper as a coaster. He laid out a snack of turkey slices.

  He still had some time to fill, so he did some dusting and sweeping, the kinds of chores that let him keep up his own stream of thoughts. He wandered
around the house tearing ropy cobwebs from the high corners of the rooms, composing speeches to Karl and Joel in his head. He had such high regard for both of them, he wished he could split himself in two and take both journeys. He also answered all the questions he didn’t want to discuss with his family. Yes, he’d told his mom, I’m skipping college, at least for now. Why? Because I want to drive around and drink mezcal in workingman’s cantinas. I want to wake up in tiled gardens with parrots and iguanas. Was he going to say any of that out loud? No.

  His dad would be okay with the plan, but in a way that only made matters worse. His mom had long ago chalked up Barry as the most lazy, self-absorbed, insecure (or maybe overly secure, it was hard to say—insecure or overconfident, they kind of panned out the same in the end, by her reasoning) bum she’d ever met, with no earning power or sense of duty to his family and his community whatsoever. The youthful chemistry they’d once felt—the love that had created Aaron, no less—she openly admitted had been almost entirely carnal, the case of a hot stud walking into her estrogen cloud at exactly the right time. But for all her shit-talking, Aaron respected his dad and understood he’d come a long way in his life. As the son of a midwestern rancher deep into belt whipping and Jesus, Barry was almost heroic in his unflappable passivity. He may have been an eighthgeneration hippie, among the last dudes to discover the fashions of Haight-Ashbury and the sonics of Frank Zappa, but he was the first generation in his bloodline to get there, and that counted for something.

  As for his grandfather, none of these questions would even make any sense. To be born a Jew, with the weight of that history, and to drive around Mexico? A person should never go out seeking experience. People should consider themselves lucky if they never had an experience at all. That was the lesson of his grandfather’s life. How could Aaron possibly explain that he might skip college in pursuit of this nebulous experience, that he wanted to throw away all the hard work of his ancestors and become something unheard of, something even he didn’t yet understand? What would his grandpa say to the prospect of his wasting every privilege he’d ever been given? How would he feel knowing his grandson only wanted to burn his time in the most useless, unredeemable way possible? And yet that was what Aaron could feel rising in him, that wasteful, destructive urge.