The Free

by Willy Vlautin

  “But I’ve already committed,” he whispered to her.

  They walked through hundreds of passing soldiers to her apartment, men and women, young and old. A sea of soldiers next to the sea. The uniforms were new, as were the packs on their backs and the boots on their feet. They spoke loudly and freely among themselves, and all of them stared as the two civilians walked by. Then Jeanette took Leroy’s hand and led him off the main road and down a side street. They walked up a long hill to where she lived, a brick building from the 1930s that sat alone overlooking the bay.

  The main entrance door was broken-down, as were the windows around it. They stepped over shattered glass and splintered boards and passed busted furniture and bags of trash to get to the stairwell. She led him up six flights until they came to the door of her apartment. She took a key from her coat and opened three bolt locks. Inside, the walls and ceiling of her apartment were ragged, the plaster falling down in patches from water damage. Her front room was simple, just a couch, two wooden chairs, and a bookcase lined with novels and comic books. There was a balcony with a view of the harbor, which held a long row of warships. The walls had old water-stained floral wallpaper and nothing hung from them except a single framed picture of the Portuguese singer Amália Rodrigues.

  “How do you know Amália Rodrigues?” Leroy asked. “I love Amália Rodrigues.”

  Jeanette went to the picture. It was an old black-and-white press photo. She took it from the wall and handed it to him.

  “You’ll think I’m crazy, but one time I had a dream that I was in a trailer. It was like an Airstream trailer but it wasn’t as nice. Inside there was music playing and I was in love. The boy in the dream held me. He was very corny. He would whisper in my ear that he loved me more than anything. He’d say things like, ‘I love you more than a thousand planets. I love you more than all the oceans in the universe and more than all the candy bars ever made . . .’ You should have heard him. He was very funny. So that day we danced while Amália Rodrigues sang to us. There was a record player on a table and he would play her albums for me over and over. He said he would take me to Portugal: he said he’d find her for me even if he had to spend his whole life looking. He would kiss my neck as he told me these things. I had never heard of her before that. I barely knew where Portugal was, but in my dream we fell asleep together in the trailer. He held me on a fold-out bed. While I was sleeping I dreamt that she came to me and told me to find her. When I woke up, I remembered her name, and began looking for her records. It took me a year to find one.”

  “She just came to you in a dream like that?”

  “Yes,” Jeanette said.

  “That’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard. My uncle had a trailer once, and we would sit in it and listen to Amália Rodrigues records every Friday after he got off work . . . See, years before that, after he’d gotten out of high school, there were no jobs. He wasn’t really worried at first, but then everything he applied for he didn’t get. He was going to have to move to a different city to find work, but then he got drafted. The Vietnam War was going full blast by then. In a way he was relieved. At least he’d have money; at least in a way he would have a job. The notice he received said he had three months until he had to report. So his father took him aside and told him he should see something of the world in case he got killed. He gave my uncle his life savings of two thousand dollars and a plane ticket to Europe.

  “My uncle landed in Madrid, Spain. He worked his way to Portugal and one night in a club in Lisbon he heard Amália Rodrigues sing. He said she sang the most heartbreaking songs and had the most beautiful voice he’d ever heard. He stayed in Portugal until his time ran out. He saw her night after night after night.

  “Years later he lived with my mom and me in the backyard of our house. He lived in a trailer, a trailer that looked like an Airstream but wasn’t as nice. On Fridays when the work-week was done, he’d sit down with a twelve-pack of beer and listen to her music. My mom would sometimes yell at him for playing the records so loud, but my mom liked her too, and she liked that there was something her brother still loved. Sometimes you’d go into his trailer and Amália Rodrigues would be singing and he’d be sitting at his table smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, smiling and crying at the same time.”

  “I can’t believe in my dream there was a trailer, and in reality your uncle listened to her in a trailer. That doesn’t make any sense. How would we both like Amália Rodrigues?”

  “I don’t know,” Leroy said.

  Jeanette took off her coat, turned on a portable heater, and went to the kitchen. She came back with two bottles of Rainier beer.

  Leroy took a bottle and drank from it. “You know what else? This beer is the same beer my uncle used to drink.”

  “I’ve always liked Rainier,” Jeanette said.

  “Me too.”

  “Is your uncle still alive?”

  “No, not anymore,” Leroy said.

  “What was he like?”

  “My uncle was like my father and my brother, except he never gave me a hard time. I think really, he was always just glad to see me. It’s lucky when you know someone and you can tell they’re glad to see you, almost relieved to see you. It doesn’t happen very often, but it sure makes you feel good. My mom says my uncle was one person when he went into the army and another person when he came out. Before he went in, my mother said he was the funniest person she knew, and she’s his sister. She’s supposed to be annoyed by him. But it wasn’t like that. She loved him but she liked him, too. He was a clown and very goofy. But when he came home from the war it was like that part of him was gone. There was no silliness left, the lightness he’d always had had disappeared.”

  As they spoke, they heard a loud siren coming from below. It was followed by the distant sound of sledgehammers breaking down doors. Then came the sounds of yelling and boots running up the stairwell.

  “It’s them,” she cried.

  “Do you have any neighbors who they could be coming for?”

  “I’m the only one left in the building.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she said. She lifted her leg and pulled down her sock. Her skin had the mark, the blue-and-red-and-green mark that looked like a deep bruise.

  “Do you have any place to hide?”

  “No,” she cried and began to hyperventilate.

  “Are you sure there’s nowhere?”

  She shook her head in panic.

  There were fists beating on the door and then a sledgehammer breaking it. They rushed into her apartment. There were three of them in military uniforms. Two men and a woman. They carried rifles and wore bulletproof vests and helmets with spotlights on them.

  “Take her pants off,” the leader of them yelled. He was a young soldier, not even twenty years old.

  “No,” Jeanette cried. “Please don’t.”

  Leroy ran to stop them, but the woman soldier hit him in the chest with the sledgehammer. The pain exploded inside him. He fell to the ground. He couldn’t breathe. It felt like his chest had been ripped open and was being pulled apart. He was unable to move or speak. A fat, middle-aged male soldier, out of breath and sweating, dragged Jeanette to the living room. Leroy could see her from where he lay. The soldier began taking off her clothes. She screamed and kicked at him but he wouldn’t stop. The female soldier went to Jeanette and hit her in the face and then held her down while the other soldier finished stripping her. They left her naked and crying on the floor.

  “She’s got it,” the woman soldier yelled and pointed to her foot. The young commander got on the radio and called it in. He took a pistol from his holster and pointed it at her head. Leroy tried to scream for them to stop but nothing came out. He couldn’t move and the pain in his chest swelled.

  5

  Freddie McCall left the sixth-floor elevator and walked down the long hospital hall to room 9. He found Leroy alone and slowly moving his hands to the tube running down his throat, his eyes wide op
en in panic. Freddie ran to the nurses’ station where a middle aged Filipino nurse sat working on a computer.

  “I think something’s wrong with Leroy,” he said.

  The nurse followed him in. She pulled Leroy’s hands down and used restraints to keep them at his sides. She looked at the chest tubes to make sure there were no blockages and that the fluid level was right. She looked at his medication record and left the room. She came back a minute later and increased the morphine amount on the drip.

  “I know he’s in a lot of pain,” she said as she held Leroy’s head still. “But with a flail chest we have to be careful about the pain meds. I had to confirm it with his doctor. If we give him too much he won’t breathe deeply and we need him to breathe as deep as he can. The mechanical ventilation only assists his breathing right now; he still needs to do some work himself.”

  “What’s a flail chest?” Freddie asked.

  “The fall he took was so severe that part of his chest wall separated. Three of his ribs were fractured in multiple places due to the blunt trauma of his injury. They became displaced and were moving independently of the chest wall. This also caused three lacerations in one lung and the other collapsed. The mechanical ventilation helps him breathe; it makes sure he breathes enough per minute and that his lung volume isn’t too shallow. That’s why he’s intubated. We have the chest tubes to help push out air, blood, and fluids. He’ll settle down soon.”

  “Don’t shoot her,” Leroy cried, and this time his voice was heard. He was shaky but he had the strength to stand. He staggered to the living room to see the young commander pushing his pistol into Jeanette’s forehead. He pulled the trigger but the gun didn’t fire.

  “Christ!” he yelled. “It jammed again.”

  “Please let her go,” Leroy begged.

  “Use mine,” offered the woman soldier. As she handed him her pistol, Leroy went for the gun. The middle-aged soldier saw what was happening and hit him in the chest, and again he fell to the ground in breathless agony.

  “Hurry up,” the woman soldier said. “Finish it and then check him.”

  The young commander put the new gun to her head, but as he did so a woman came into the room. She had long, black hair and brown eyes. She wore the dress of a working-class woman from the 1930s.

  “It’s Amália Rodrigues!” Jeanette cried.

  The woman began yelling at the soldiers in Portuguese. She screamed and hissed and cast spells on them, and one by one the soldiers disappeared until they were all gone. She then kneeled to the floor and held Leroy in her arms. She sang gently and softly, and a great euphoria rushed into him.

  Leroy’s eyes closed, his breathing steadied, and he quit moving. The nurse went back to her station and Freddie sat down and turned on the TV. He went through the channels until he found an episode of Gunsmoke. As he watched, he thought for a moment that it was his youngest daughter, Virginia, in the hospital bed again and not Leroy. Parts of him even wished it were so. That she was right there next to him and not in a different state living in a new house with a new father. He watched the show for twenty minutes as Leroy slept, and then he left for work.

  A half-mile from the group home he passed a large crate full of scrap wood. Next to the crate was a handwritten sign that read “FREE WOOD.” He looked at his watch and turned around. He moved his car beside the box and began loading in broken pallets, scrap two-by-fours, and chunks of four-by-fours. He filled the trunk until he couldn’t close it, then stacked more in the backseat and in the passenger seat, and went to work.

  Julie Norris was in the kitchen doing dishes when he came in. She filled him in on the day: Hal had vomited during dinner and might have the flu, and Rolly and Donald got into a fight but nothing came of it. The carpet in front of the stairs had been professionally cleaned, but the blood stains, although faded, were permanent. The drain in the bathroom sink had clogged, but her boyfriend had come by earlier and fixed it. Everyone was now in bed asleep, she told him, and then she started the dishwasher, put on her coat, and left.

  Freddie did the series of chores he did every night and then lay down on the couch exhausted and passed out. He woke two hours later to Donald standing over him, naked and shaking him. Freddie put on his glasses and sat up. As he did, Donald ran up and down the hallway screaming. Freddie calmly went to the kitchen, took a cup from the cupboard, and filled it with milk. He poured chocolate syrup into it, stirred it, and put it in the microwave. He walked to the living room and waited until Donald came running back toward him.

  “You’re going to wake up the whole house,” Freddie told him quietly. “How about you quit yelling, and I’ll get you a hot chocolate?”

  Donald heard the words “hot chocolate” and stopped.

  “But to get the hot chocolate you have to get dressed first,” he said and led him down the hall. Inside Donald’s room there was a dresser, a twin bed, and four basketball posters on the wall. Freddie found his pajamas on the floor and helped him back into them. He led him to the kitchen and took the cup from the microwave and gave it to him. Donald drank it standing in front of the refrigerator. When he’d finished, Freddie put him back to bed and the house was again quiet. He went to the couch, turned on the TV, and tried to sleep.

  At 5:30 AM the alarm on his phone woke him. He washed his face and made a pot of coffee. Dale arrived on time at 6:00 and Freddie drove home, unloaded the wood onto his front lawn, put on his Logan’s Paint Store uniform, and left. He drove the two miles to Heaven’s Door Donuts and parked.

  “You’re doing good this morning,” Mora said leaning against the glass counter. She glanced at the clock hanging above the door. “You have seven minutes.”

  “I can relax,” Freddie said and smiled. “How was your dentist appointment? I forgot to ask.”

  “I have to get the tooth pulled.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Pham’s loaning me the money. Now I just have to get my nerve up.”

  “At least it won’t hurt anymore after that.”

  “Let’s hope it won’t. It would be a pretty mean tooth to hurt me when it’s in the garbage somewhere.” Mora smiled and then moved her large body backward and bent down. She set four glazed donut holes in a plastic basket and poured a cup of coffee. She set it all on the counter in front of him.

  “Sorry about the game last night,” he told her. “I heard part of it.” He took a drink from the cup and ate a donut hole. Mora opened two pink boxes and began putting donuts inside. Behind them on a counter sat an old radio playing. He could see Pham in the back room lowering a batch of donuts into the fryer.

  “My poor boys,” Mora said as she worked. “They get beaten up all series, and now Leipsic’s been suspended for three games.” She stopped and looked at him. “I hate saying this, but you look worse every day I see you, Freddie. It really worries me. Are you getting any sleep at all?”

  “I’m sleeping some.”

  “How many hours?”

  He ate another donut hole. “Three or four.”

  “That’s not enough,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Are you eating?”

  “I have to eat better.”

  “That’s all you’re going to say about it?”

  “I’ll sleep more this weekend,” he said and smiled.

  “How are the girls?”

  “They’re okay. Kathleen hates the school. She’s in the third grade. How can you hate the third grade?”

  “School’s always hard, you know that. Does Ginnie like kindergarten?”

  “I think so, but Marie hasn’t been taking her to physical therapy because the place is twenty miles away.”

  “But she’s got to,” Mora said and shook her head.

  “I know. She promised she’d do it. We’ll see. To be honest I’m just having a hard time thinking of what to say to them. My own daughters and I don’t know what to say. I run out of questions. I wish I could go down there, just once even. Then I would know what to ask. But I d
on’t know what their house looks like or their neighborhood. I don’t know anything about their school or Las Vegas. When I ask them to describe it, they just quit talking. All day long I think of things to ask them but when I talk to them I don’t know what to say.”

  “Little kids are always bad on the phone,” Mora said.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “What else is going on?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You’re a great conversationalist today. Now I know who your daughters get it from.”

  Freddie laughed. He put the last donut hole in his mouth and finished the coffee.

  “At least get some sleep tonight, okay?”

  “I will,” Freddie said.

  “I put an extra twist in for you.”

  “Thanks,” Freddie said.

  She handed him the boxes. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Mora.”

  He opened the store on time and drank three cups of coffee until the morning rush ended at eleven. He called Pat and told him the morning numbers, and Pat told him he wasn’t coming in. Freddie hung up the phone, leaned the chair back against the wall, and fell asleep. He was startled awake twenty minutes later when two old painters came in. They saw him asleep and quietly went to the counter. They waited for a moment and then looked at each other and shouted “Freddie!” as loud as they could. Freddie yelped as he woke and fell off the chair. The two painters doubled over laughing.

  “Jesus!” Freddie yelled from the ground.

  “We’re sorry, Freddie,” they both said.

  “It’s alright,” he said and got up.

  “We didn’t mean to scare you that bad,” one of the men said, still laughing, and set down a piece of stained trim board.

  “It’s alright, Paul,” Freddie said. “What do you guys need?”

  “Can you match the stain on this piece by tomorrow, and we’ll need twenty gallons of Super Spec, same color as this morning. Plus we’re doing an old lath-and-plaster job, and Andy said you knew how to make the cracks disappear without re-texturing the whole wall.”