Freebird

by John Raymond

  “It wasn’t a very happy time in my life,” he said. And with this, Aaron’s attention was pricked. Was it possible his grandpa was getting into the spirit of disclosure? It seemed unlikely, and yet . . .

  “It was a good thing I met your grandmother,” Grandpa Sam said. “That was the best thing that could have happened to me. Before I met her, I was very unhappy here. All I wanted to do was go back home, to Germany.”

  Aaron sat up straighter. His grandpa had just said “Germany.” Aaron couldn’t remember ever hearing the name of the dread nation coming out of his grandpa’s mouth, let alone hearing it referred to as his home. He wished he had his video camera handy as they stepped onto the hot, uncharted ground.

  “I thought you were born in Poland,” he said. “What do you mean, back home to Germany?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t go back to Poland after the war. No. I could never go back there . . .”

  Aaron watched the ducks, trying to be patient. He didn’t want to disrupt his grandpa’s thought process as he slowly wound toward something.

  “But . . . I guess I thought . . . So you lived in Germany?”

  “I traveled all over Europe after the war. But I ended up in Germany, yes.”

  “Oh.”

  “I rode the trains. I didn’t have money, but this was my ticket.” He lifted his arm and showed his ashen numbers. “The conductors, they would come through the train, and I would roll up my sleeve and show them this, and they would go away. I did the same thing in bakeries and restaurants. For months after the war, no paying for anything. No one would take my money. They knew what this meant. I went everywhere, looking for my family. But I didn’t find anyone. And in the end I went back to Germany.”

  “Why?”

  “In Germany they had the DP camps. Displaced persons. They served three meals a day. They gave us beds with sheets. They even had classes. The DP camp was where I first learned about electrical wiring. I signed up for every class they offered. I knew education was the best way out. The only way out.” He patted Aaron’s knee to punctuate this lesson.

  “And so you were in the DP camp how long?”

  “Two years.”

  “And then here?”

  “Yes.”

  His grandfather breathed heavily, eyes on the ducks, seeming to debate with himself about whether or not to keep going. Maybe it was the smell of the eucalyptus, maybe it was the last glimmer of his flirtation with Kari, but he plowed onward into the past.

  “The camps were very crowded,” he said. “And some of us were moved into houses and apartments. We were the lucky ones. I was put in a home with a young woman, a widow, and she was a very, very nice woman.” He paused as the ducks waddled almost close enough to reach out and throttle, but he only watched them, resigned. “Yes. We got along very nicely. Her husband, he’d died in the war. She had two small children to take care of, and she needed the help. That’s why she took me in. We had a very good relationship. We helped each other very much those years.”

  The lake water was dappled with silver light. A nerd couple, Asian and white, walked down the path, the man’s cape flapping around his feet. Aaron didn’t want to risk breaking the spell, but he also wanted his grandfather to know he was with him.

  “What was she like?”

  “She was a very kind woman. Very warm. She enjoyed cooking very much.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “She made stuffed cabbages every Sunday. She was an expert at stuffed cabbages. She boiled the leaves and filled the leaves with spiced meat and tied them with string. You had a little pile of strings at the end. I remember those strings.”

  “What else, Grandpa?”

  “Oh, I don’t know . . .” Grandpa Sam stared at the water, falling into a memory and rising back out. “Her favorite color was yellow. She loved yellow. Yellow curtains, yellow chairs. She was a wonderful woman. And her children, they were wonderful, too.”

  “And you lived with her before you came to America.”

  “If you had the chance to come to America back then, you came,” he said. “I had the chance. But it wasn’t easy once I got here. I wasn’t happy at all. Oakland was a very hard place to be. I didn’t understand how to make my way. I talked all the time about going back. Going back, going back, that’s all I wanted to do. I had to. So I saved my money, and I went back as soon as I could.”

  “Wait a minute, what?” Aaron wasn’t sure he’d correctly understood what his grandpa was saying. “Are you serious? You came to America, and then you left America and went back to Germany?”

  His grandfather nodded, and the ducks stumbled back into the water, plunking in one by one. The water parted behind them, black ripples on the silver, their wakes meshing into a shimmering geometry. Aaron’s grandpa didn’t seem struck by the insanity of his story, but Aaron was agog. To survive the camps and go back? What could possibly make that seem reasonable?

  “So, then what?”

  His grandpa stared at the stilling water. The ducks had scattered into the weeds. “It wasn’t the same when I got back,” he said, without feeling. “Someone had moved into my room. And it was true I could make more money in America. So I came back and, thank God, I met your grandmother.”

  Four hours later, Aaron sat on a bench on Broadway, getting high. He took hit after hit, watching the bud cherry and fade away and the smoke escape from his mouth into the cooling air. Up in the hotel room, his grandfather was watching TV, if not already asleep. The sound of the traffic was abstracted and watery. The last golden light on the top of the eucalyptus was transportingly sad.

  Aaron had never heard of his grandfather’s German war widow before, the German woman he’d loved enough to leave the land of opportunity. The German woman who’d cooked him dinner in her yellow house. The German woman whose children he might have raised. How utterly strange, Aaron thought, the way history could suck a person in, the little whirlpools inside the torrential flow. A whole life could spin off to the side that way. He wondered if his mother knew the story of the war widow. She must.

  He fished out a notebook and attempted to write down the gist of what he’d heard that day, but he was too stoned to concentrate. He couldn’t make it to the end of a sentence without forgetting the start. He’d have to jot his entry in the morning. The important thing to know was that he was making progress, working his way ever deeper, back to Oakland, back to Europe, getting ever nearer to the edge of the sucking black hole at the heart.

  10

  Loading the dishwasher, Anne pondered the many methods of skinning Mark Harris’s cat. There were many skinning strategies one might employ, she realized, but surely one skinning method was the best. Skin it from the head? Skin it from the butt? Peel the whole pelt inside out? If nothing else, the cat skinning was an interesting thought experiment to ponder. If she was going to sell off the rights to the used toilet water of Los Angeles, how would she do it?

  The water of Los Angeles was touched by many agencies and authorities. Fish and Wildlife, Parks and Recreation, the Port. But controlling hegemony over the city’s most precious resource, once it passed down the drain, lay ultimately with the Bureau of Sanitation, as she’d told Mark Harris from the start. Sanitation was also in command of trash, which meant the fleet of 750 trucks hauling more than six thousand tons of refuse a day, and the landfills, and the 6,500 miles of sewer line, mostly leading to Hyperion Treatment Plant and Terminal Island, where the bioslurry was turned into heat-dried fertilizer for nonfood crops in the Valley. All together, the system added up to a sprawling municipal fiefdom, manned by a staff of some 2,800 people, based at a crescent of industry on the waterfront near the airport, and presided over by one Charlie Arnold.

  Anne knew Charlie. Charlie had been in the commissioner’s chair of Sanitation for around five years, and before that he’d been at city hall, and before that, long ago, he’d been at CALPIRG, the environmental canvassing organization. His job at Sanitation had come as an act of flagrant nepotism by the mayor af
ter Charlie’s turns as mayoral campaign manager and mayoral chief of staff, and, although Charlie had always been a competent, dutiful civil servant, he’d surprised everyone by becoming what many now termed a “visionary” of all things eco, a walking PowerPoint presentation on the glories of the green city. He talked about membrane bioreactors, ZeeWeed ultrafiltration membranes, all manner of membranes—internal, external, sidestream, you name it. His greatest triumph was a pilot project whereby tons of bioslurry had been injected into deep fissures in the earth, creating pockets of biogas to later siphon back out as alternative fuel. The program had been regarded as a major success, with write-ups in the industry papers and a New York Times Magazine profile. Shit into energy, a perfect circle, the dream.

  At some point BHC Industries’ permit quest was going to lead to Charlie Arnold’s door. How to convince Charlie that ownership of his precious public wastewater should migrate into the hands of a greenwashing speculative capitalist without any particular conservationist agenda was not immediately clear. Charlie was a staunch protector of the public interest, harboring a nearly violent hatred of polluters of all kinds. He was also an arrogant prick. If anyone comprehended the value of the city’s wastewater and would fight to protect it, it was Charlie.

  Bracket Charlie.

  The other unavoidable personage through whom the permitting process would go, as she’d also told Mark, was Randy Lowell, the city-council member who putatively oversaw Charlie Arnold’s Sanitation Department. Randy Lowell was in effect Charlie Arnold’s boss, or at least his direct manager, and he was not in any way, by any definition, an eco-visionary. He was the child of old L.A. Anglo stock, scion of Okies, a former cop elected term after term by his district in La Jolla, grounded in a hard-core constituency of corporate donors, city commerce club members, anticrime soccer moms, right-leaning megachurches, and certain nonpublic trade unions. He was a devout pragmatist, in other words, with no interest in high-minded principles of equality, justice, environmentalism, or industrial regulation of any kind. He was a “friend of business,” as they said, a defender of cops and the people who loved cops, with a reputation for doing his homework and yelling. A lot. A lot of yelling.

  Anne had a fine relationship with Randy. Randy liked Anne because she was also someone who did her homework, and they’d shared more than one cutting joke at the expense of some hapless city manager flailing with his Excel spreadsheets. But as to whether Randy was a natural ally? She doubted it. He was not a fan of public giveaways unless he was the one doing the giving, and even if he was a natural ally, it didn’t much matter. Ultimately, it was a personality thing. Both Charlie Arnold and Randy Lowell were going to have to sign off on this permit. And unfortunately, Charlie and Randy despised each other. The natural ally of one was the natural enemy of the other. Such was the needle she had to thread.

  People thought the government was a hierarchy, but in fact that was not the case. The government was a centerless hive of back channels and side alleys, pitted with private dungeons where personal agendas went to be tortured and starved.

  Yes, she thought, folding laundry, downing a second glass of her favorite pink cava, the best avenue was going to be the hardest one. She couldn’t go top-down on this one; she had to go bottom-up. And that meant cracking the hardest nut first, to mix metaphors. She had to recruit Charlie Arnold, the green visionary, and only then could she take the proposal to Randy Lowell, the pragmatist. From there, the project would move to the city attorney (she already knew which one she’d use—Ed Monk, a blathering know-it-all but ultimately pliable and friendly). And finally, she’d let the mayor in on the impending deal. They could possibly circumvent the full council vote, definitely any public hearings. The mayor was a great connoisseur of secret bargains, and if she could get this all the way to his desk without interference, he’d be impressed, and they would likely be fine.

  Mark Harris was going to have to give them all something, of course; it wouldn’t be free, but that wasn’t her concern right now. Paying the tolls on this road was his problem, not hers. She was only holding the map.

  She and Charlie had a traditional place they liked to meet, and when Anne called his office, she reflexively suggested the old spot—a bench in the park near the entrance of the La Brea tar pits. They’d established their meeting ground back during the 1996 Campaign for Clean Air in Schools, during which they’d both served on the regional advisory committee and had put in some ungodly hours dealing with leadership infighting that had threatened to spill into the newspapers. They’d bonded then, recognizing each other as serious people, and they’d continued to encounter each other with genuine affection at every new plateau of their careers. She’d proposed the old bench partly to remind him of their youthful allegiance and also because she knew he probably wanted to avoid crowds at this particular juncture, owing to his current sex scandal.

  This was another factor shaping her scheme, too, if lightly. Normally Charlie would have enjoyed mixing with his constituents and fielding what he seemed to think was their adulation, but this was a strange time for Charlie Arnold. A month ago, he’d been caught in a compromising position—i.e., having sex with an intern—and ever since, he’d been keeping a low profile. The girl was a semi-attractive student from UCLA, the daughter of a politically involved TV agent, and their pathetic mash letters had come out on LA Weekly’s blog, these sad, lewd sex notes between a middle-aged bureaucrat and a teenage striver, since which time numerous parties had been calling for his resignation. Everyone agreed he’d get through it—the girl was of age, the parents seemed almost proud of the tryst, the blog posting had gone relatively unread—but it was probably embarrassing to Charlie nonetheless, and Anne knew enough to avoid that third rail by whatever means necessary. So she was surprised when Charlie sat down and immediately brought up the news himself. They’d barely traded hellos, and all the gnarly details of his sex life were gushing out of his mouth, and there they were, miles from her own day’s agenda.

  “It’s all true,” he said, wheezing from the effort of mounting the small knoll of grass to their appointed spot. He was looking a little thicker around the middle, she noticed, if not downright soft, and his face was getting puffy, a mealy blankness threatening to swallow his thin lips and small eyes. He needed a haircut, too. And his shoes looked fifteen years old. And yet, against all this evidence of decline, his swagger also suggested he still imagined himself as an irresistibly handsome specimen. This was both the annoying and tragically endearing thing about Charlie’s character, the desperate self-love that made him at once human and such an asshole.

  “In case you were wondering or anything. God, I was stupid, Anne. So fucking stupid! I still just can’t believe I went there, you know? She’s not even that hot or anything. Just young, is all. I’m so old, I can’t even tell if a person is hot anymore. I just see the youngness, and I’m, like, Gaahhhcck. I knew it was stupid, but I was just an idiot. What else can I say?”

  “Yeah, well, what are you going to do, right?” Anne said, working to strike the right note between disinterest and sympathy. Who Charlie fucked was his own business. For once, she didn’t want to hear all the salacious details.

  “Never thought it’d happen to me,” he said, intent on wallowing. “I thought I was a different kind of fish. But there you go. It happens, all right. And, I mean, of course it does, you know? Look how busy we all are. We’re all giving everything we’ve got. You pull your head out of your desk and look around, there’s no time for dating. You take what’s standing there.”

  Anne nodded. Already, she could see, his apology was curdling into rank anger and blame. The slide from self-flagellation to self-justification had taken all of forty-five seconds. She worried it was a mere prelude to long-winded score settling, and she was right. He began with a broadside against reporters, a rant about his newfound sympathy for celebrities, and then went on and on, about sex with interns, sex with married people, sex with ex-lovers, sex on first dates. Maybe, Charlie
theorized, people his and Anne’s age were consigned to sleep with only the people they’d already slept with in their twenties. There was only returning to old beds now, never finding new beds. Then a diatribe about his recent computer-dating adventures, the depressing activity of updating his profile, the silly antics of avoiding women after the failure of their outings. He’d literally jumped into a bush in Silver Lake in order to dodge a conversation with a woman he’d reluctantly screwed the week before.

  Mostly she just watched the people entering the tar pits, letting his confessions wash over her. There was only a smattering of families and a few tourists out today, shuffling to the ticket booth under the weight of their backpacks and diaper bags. She watched them punching their debit codes, siphoning into the quiet gates. God, how Aaron had loved this place as a kid. They’d gone almost every month to ogle the ancient, blackened bones. What was it about the mastodons that kids found so fascinating? She had to think it was the aura of death they emanated. These tremendous creatures had once ruled the earth, and now they were nothing but dead bones. The kids came to this museum to get their first, happy glimpse at their own unimaginable demise.

  A flock of schoolchildren approached the gate, chaperoned by three harried grown-ups, and Anne watched them all congregate at the fence while the teachers counted them off, and then the yelping crowd of princess pink and Spider-Man red descended en masse into the devouring maw, down to mastodon Valhalla. The world just kept making more of these kids. Why had she assumed the world would stop after she’d had hers?

  Anne could feel the clock ticking on the meeting’s end. Charlie was still being his funny, oversharing self, but surely he had meetings stacked up through the afternoon, and this one had to be low on the priority list. If she wanted to get to the main subject without rushing him, she had to make a move, but she wasn’t sure how.

  Thankfully, Charlie had his own inner clock ticking. He was a professional, after all. And, as the more powerful member of their duo, he was secretly the one in charge here. It was possible the sexual confessions were even a simple assertion of that power, an imposition of his private life into their mutual head space. It was LBJ taking a shit with his aides in tow. But once he’d deigned the time was right, the lesson imposed, he snapped back into business mode with surprising alacrity.