by John Shirley
She cut Buff’s throat. The ground rumbled in approval.
ONE
How long had they been driving? Five hours?
Russ’s dad had picked him up at the San Francisco airport, and they’d started driving north in the old Volvo immediately, heading for a little town on the coast. The town was called Freedom. Russ had never been there. The road, clinging to the cliffs over the sea, was making him sick to his stomach, with all the curves. And Russ had to pee.
He didn’t want to be a baby about it and complain. Probably his dad already thought he was kind of lame, about to turn twenty-one and still living at Mom’s house, back in Akron. Then mom says she’s kicking him out, gets dad to take him in. Even lamer. “Start over fresh in California,” she says. What is this, Mom, 1850?
They had Karen for comparison. His sister, just two years older, was a sharp contrast: a star academic at Brown, a graduate research assistant. Russ had two years vaguely majoring in English with a concentration in American Literature at the University of Akron, and not much to show for it, except he’d read a lot of Steinbeck and Fitzgerald and . . . some Melville.
Why should he care what his old man thought? His father had moved away from Ohio, come out to California—and why? Dad kind of lost his right to judge him, when he moved out, didn’t he?
Only, he was in his dad’s pocket right now. He was broke and his dad had paid his way out here, claiming there was a landscaping job waiting in Freedom. Okay, he’d stay with his dad for a while. Didn’t mean he was a loser.
Not that his dad had ever called him a loser. But “Your life has no direction” was more or less the same, wasn’t it? Last time they’d had that talk, on the phone, it had been like:
RUSS: Dad, what direction have you had? Wandering around the country . . .
DAD: I wasn’t wandering, I went where the work was. I have a degree. I have a job.
RUSS: Degrees are meaningless now. I need to find something that matters to me. I don’t want to just survive.
DAD: You think nothing matters to me?
RUSS: I didn’t say that. But you moved out of state. So . . .
DAD: You don’t know all the facts, Russ—you don’t know what really matters. That’s where you’re confused . . .
Russ had made an excuse and gotten off the phone. Then things got bad with him and Mom, and six weeks later, here he was.
And he still had to pee. “Dad? Is there a rest stop?”
“We’re only about twenty minutes from Freedom.”
Russ crossed his legs more tightly. “Twenty minutes from getting out of this car. That’ll be freedom, all right.”
He glanced at his dad to see if the remark had annoyed him. But Dad was smiling. He was a broad-bodied, tanned, solid man of medium height, stiff brown hair speckled with gray; a man who liked outdoors stuff, was reading a biography of Thoreau, wore thick plaid shirts that Russ associated with lumberjacks. His dad was a long way from being a lumberjack, but he was a contrast to his gangly, pale son, who had gotten his mom’s jet-black hair and brown eyes. Dad liked Hank Williams, 1950s rockabilly, country swing, and folk; Russ liked ironic punk-styled bands—and the smarter hip-hop, like Immortal Technique and Aesop and Juji. Dad liked baseball; Russ hated sports. Dad didn’t drink; Russ liked to get smashed with his friends. That was something he might have inherited from his mom too. Never an obvious alcoholic, she was irritable, in the evening, before getting a couple drinks inside her.
Russ missed his mom and he didn’t miss her, at the same time.
“There’s a wide spot up there,” Dad said, suddenly. “You need me to pull over?”
“For sure.”
Dad pulled over in a wide graveled place in the road and Russ gratefully got out of the musty car, into fresh air and room to move, the small muscles in his legs twitching with the stretch.
He walked a short ways into the fir trees, picked a spot behind a tree. The spot smelled, pleasantly and sharply, of the conifer needles dropped around its trunk. Douglas fir? he wondered, as he peed against the trunk, admiring the patterns of bright green lichen—and a small tree frog, like something carved from emerald, clinging just above the roots. “I’m being careful to miss you, little dude,” he said. “But avoid this side of the tree for a while.”
Halfway back toward the car Russ stopped, just standing there, feeling the ground ripple under him, hearing a distant rumble.
What was that? Big breakers in a sea cave under them? The car was just a hundred feet or so from the edge of a seaside cliff.
Russ hurried back to the car, feeling nervous, unsure why. But noticing the flocks of sea birds flying inward, from the sea, not far overhead, hearing their brassy collective noise. The birds looked like they were in a hurry, something frantic about their winging; their clamoring, piercing calls.
The wind picked up, ruffling his long black hair, making the tip of his prominent nose tingle. He sniffed, wondering, as he got back into the car, if he was getting a cold.
“Feel better?” Dad asked, looking in the side mirror at the road. Jerking the car back on the highway with the abruptness that so annoyed Mom, ten years before. Dad said it was “decisive” driving.
They’d fought about that, her and Dad; about lots of things, but especially, where to live. Dad had wanted to move away from Akron, find someplace rural in California or Oregon. “Somewhere a person can stretch out and breathe,” he’d say.
Russ had been eleven when his parents had broken up: Dad insisting his mom quit drinking; Mom deflecting the drinking issue by claiming he was having an affair. After the divorce, one night, when she was in fact a little drunk, she admitted to Russ that “Dad’s affair” had probably been in her imagination. That little revelation struck Russ hard, right in the pit of his stomach. He’d been sympathizing with Mom, had taken her side. Then it turned out her “imagination” had wrecked the marriage and damaged his relationship with Dad.
Life went on. Dad worked for two more years in Akron, then saw his chance to move to California. He’d taken a job teaching civics at a community college in Santa Clara. The teaching gig eventually ended—Russ had never been clear if Dad had lost the job or quit—and now he had some kind of county statistics job up here, in Deer Creek, and he was just getting by. He had to commute inland from Freedom for more than an hour to get to his office, but didn’t have to make the drive five days a week; he did some of his work from home.
“You know, Freedom’s got its peculiarities,” Dad said, glancing out his window at another noisy flight of birds heading inland.
“You mean the town, right?” Russ smiled.
“Yeah, the town.”
“How come it’s named ‘Freedom’?” Russ asked. “That’s sort of a weird name.”
“They changed the name of the town to Freedom about six years ago. It used to be called Ferry Landing. The town had a ferry, of sorts, long time ago, that went up and down the coast from there, like to Buried Cove and Molly’s Harbor.”
“How come they changed the name?” Russ asked.
“Oh, that’s a long story. Basically—” Dad twisted about in his seat, trying to get more comfortable, audibly cracking his neck. “—basically, it was Lon Ferrara’s idea.”
“Ferrari, like the car?”
“No, Ferrara. Mayor of the town. He owns like four businesses in the area—maybe five or six, I lost count. Kind of guy who hates paying taxes and probably does just about anything to avoid them.”
“Everybody complains about taxes.”
“Yeah, but he says taxation is theft. Ferrara’s extreme about it. He’s a libertarian. Hard core. There’s different kinds of libertarianism, but essentially the concept is to minimize government and maximize individual freedom. That’s the main idea.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard. Sounds good in theory.”
“Doesn’t work very well in real life. Plus Ferrara’s tied in with that teabagger bunch. He’s the local Tea Party chairman. Likes to quote that line of Ronald Reaga
n’s—‘Government doesn’t solve the problem, it is the problem.’ Ferrara’s given his version a fancy monicker—the Decentralization Movement.” He shook his head. “All I know is the schools are barely functioning now. We were supposed to have a privatized fire department here. Never materialized. Mayor sold the firetrucks we had to pay for the Old Town decorations. The privatization of garbage pickup never came through either, so we have to drive our stuff over to the dump ourselves. And he hassled people into voting the town a new name. That’s how we got ‘Freedom’!” Dad shook his head again in disgust. “I wrote a letter to the Ferry Courier, complaining we didn’t have the freedom to say no to naming the town Freedom. They didn’t print the letter, naturally—Ferrara owns the Courier. Which is now called the Freedom Courier.”
Russ snorted. “They’re not, like, skilled at picking up on irony.”
Dad chuckled. “You got that right.” He took another curve, and added, “You know, the libertarians pulled off a win on that Supreme Court case last year and the county’s been going to hell in a handbasket since. Among other things, the Decentralizers have gotten rid of emergency services, dumped search and rescue in this area. Gotten rid of all the cops but two! One and a half, really—one sheriff and a kind of town patrolman up in Buried Cove. Punks running wild . . . ”
“Hey, whoa, what’s wrong with punks?”
His dad grinned. Russ had been in an Akron neo-punk band. “Not those kind of punks.”
“I was just playin’. You mean the, uh . . . ”
“Yeah, the drug dealing, thieving kind. Hey, check it out—up ahead, that’s Seaward Road. It’s a highway, really. We go east on Seaward and then turn right on Ferry Lane and we’ll be home. My apartment. Not much, but it’s warm. Just a block from the new apartment building I got you the landscaping work on, right down the street from us.”
They passed a sign:
WELCOME TO
FREEDOM, CALIFORNIA
Pop. 2200
Lon Ferrara was holding court in The Bobbing Buoy Bar and Barbecue when Jenkins first started yelling about the advisory. Ferrara stood at the end of the bar, one boot on the old-fashioned brass foot rail, facing half a dozen bar customers, five assorted men and one woman. He was hoisting a schooner of Doublehit from his own microbrewery up in Buried Cove, slopping some on the bar as he gestured in emphasis. “Privatization is efficiency!” he said, trying to ignore Old Jenkins. The haggard, white-bearded old man had worked for the government meteorological station for seventeen years, though he was no meteorologist himself—just a drunken retiree, really, at this point. Jenkins was stumping up and down the wooden sidewalk outside, pausing to wave his aluminum cane, bellowing about the warning he’d gotten on the Internet at the senior center, and how Monterey and Santa Cruz were on some kind of advisory or “seismo alert” or some fucking thing. Christ, Monterey and Santa Cruz were a long damn ways south, south of the Bay Area, even, what did that have to do with Freedom?
“Privatization is efficiency,” Ferrara repeated, liking the phrase, looking around with satisfaction at the bar; sawdust on the sagging wooden floor, dark wood trimming around the high, patterned-tin ceiling. A hundred thirty years old, this place—a monument to the nineteenth century’s way of doing things. Make your own rules. “Privatization changes everything,” Ferrara went on. “No government waste. No inflated bureaucratic wages. And if we want firefighter services that’s how we’ll get them. We’ll get our emergency services—they’ll be privatized. I’m working on that one.” Ferrara was a big-shouldered man with short legs and a long, heavy torso, dyed dark brown hair—the most difficult-to-spot hair plugs money could buy. He had dark, quizzical eyes, a tweedy blazer. “But to make it happen right you need competition for the service! Competition is practically synonymous with efficiency!”
“Synonymous,” Hilly said, nodding, one hand combing his iron-gray beard, his rheumy eyes flicking questioningly at his whiskey glass. Like he was wondering how it had emptied itself.
Mario Ferrara, the bartender—an older, jowlier, aproned version of his brother Lon—came over with a bar towel and sopped up the ale without comment. Lon could slop all of the beer in the place, if he wanted. He owned the bar, and nearly owned his brother too, at this point.
“If competition makes for efficiency,” Jill said, “then how come there’s never any competition when private companies take over public services?” Jill Hushbeck was a willowy woman with gray streaks showing in her long, straight dark-blond hair; her hazel eyes were difficult to see behind her thick glasses. Why didn’t she wear contacts, for crying out loud? She was almost legally blind without those heavy-duty specs. But Ferrara could feel her watching him attentively. Waiting to get the rhetorical jump on him. “There’s just one company taking over—usually pre-arranged—and no one to compete with them once they’ve started.”
“Well, Jill . . . I’ll tell you . . . ” He paused to look her over. Hard to read her face behind those Coke-bottle glasses.
They’d gotten in a lot of debates, him and this woman, last time he campaigned for mayor—to Ferrara she stood for the shrinking Old Guard liberal element around town. Which was why he’d eased her out of the editorial job at the newspaper. Now she worked full-time trying to sell real estate and she was barely hanging on in this market.
But despite the thick glasses, she was an attractive woman; a tall woman in her forties, she filled out the black turtleneck sweater and those designer jeans nicely. Her long, delicate fingers toyed with the stem of her glass, swirling her chardonnay. He’d never seen her drink two glasses of wine in one sitting.
Like to get in there, he thought. Get a piece of that.
But she’d never go for it. Maybe he could make some kind of real estate deal for her, maybe that’d make her more pliable. But he doubted it, even then. Anyway, his wife had moved out, gone to live in Monterey with her sister, was plotting a divorce, and he didn’t want to give Wilamina any ammunition to use against him in court. He’d lose too much money if she got the divorce she wanted. He was already overextended.
“I’ll tell you what, Jill,” Ferrara said at last, “I don’t know what sources of information you’re trusting, but privatization has got to be more efficient. It’s in the nature of things.”
“Around here—who are we supposed to get to be the privatized fire control company, Mayor? Your company, that’s what we’ll get—no one else around to do it. Where’s the free-market competition for that?”
“Heh, she got you there,” Mario said, chuckling. “She—”
Ferrara shot his brother a glare and Mario, realizing he was risking his meal ticket, shut up quick—Mario owed his brother about sixty thousand dollars. Lon had bought out Mario’s failed night club in North Beach. Sold it, and paid off his debts.
“You’re just misinformed, Jill . . . ” He paused, feeling the floor shivering under him. What the hell was that buzzing in the floor? Termites?
“Gotta stay informed, stay on the smart side,” Hilly said loyally, vigorously nodding, toying significantly with his empty glass.
Ferrara ignored him, not in the mood to be nudged into buying Hilly’s drinks. “The fact is . . . ”
He broke off, frowning, as Old Jenkins stumped by the window again, then paused to bang on it with the rubber tip of his cane.
“You people listening in there?” Jenkins yelled, his voice muted by the window. “We got an advisory!”
“You break that window you’ll pay for it, Jenkins!” Ferrara boomed back at him. “Senile old prick.”
Some of the others laughed. Jill put her wine glass down, crossed to the front door, peered out, shading her eyes from the lowering sun.
“What’s going on, Mr. Jenkins?” she asked.
He nattered something back at her, Ferrara caught the words warning, evacuation, earthquake, global warming clustershake . . .
“What horseshit,” Ferrara said. “Back to this global warming nonsense.”
Mario opened his mouth
like he was going to argue—they’d lost some beachland to the sea rising right here, it was true, the beach was narrower than it used to be; the cliffs a little shorter. Then there was the crazy weather variance around the world. So what—global warming could be a natural cycle caused by sunspots—you get some variation.
“I heard those clustershakes around the oceans are a real thing,” Mario said, shrugging. “Just saying.”
“The whole idea that global warming could trigger earthquakes, tidal waves, and shit—” Ferrara laughed “—makes no goddamn sense! What’s one got to do with the other?”
Jill came back into the bar, chewing a lip worriedly. “Mr. Jenkins is pretty certain there’s an advisory for this part of the coast . . . ”
Ferrara rolled his eyes. “Like we wouldn’t have heard. Okay, Mario, put on the television.”
Mario nodded, used a remote to switch on the television over the bar. It got its feed from a satellite and right now it was showing a rugby game. Mario had a thing about rugby.
“No emergency broadcast on there,” Ferrara observed. “You see? Gimme another Doublehit, Mario . . . and what the hell, another drink for Hilly.”
TWO
Russ was leaning on the redwood railing of the apartment’s balcony, looking down at the town of Freedom and the sea beyond. The air did seem clean, bracing, aromatic here. Smelling of brine, and wood smoke, and the fallen leaves under the oaks flanking the apartment building.
There were binoculars on the railing—Dad was a “birder”—and Russ picked them up, thinking he’d look out to sea, but he held the binoculars against his chest, just looking around . . .
Two hills overlooked the sea, which was a bit more than a quarter mile away; the higher hill to the north, Russ’s right, was ringed with old wooden houses, along a winding street—an almost ziggurat effect—set off by those seaside trees that seemed to lean back from the ocean, spruces shaped by years of exposure to the steady wind so they were sculpted like bonsai. A saddle dipped, where Seaward Road passed between the two hills. Ferry Lane circled south from Seaward, to the lower hill, with newer apartments and condos. Dad said a lot of them were owned by Lon Ferrara.
