Freedomland

by Richard Price

  The three of them stood there leaning against the far wall, staring at the jacker portrait in silence, as if waiting for it to burst into song.

  Pierre finally broke the spell. “Brenda. On a scale of one to ten,” he said. “How’d I do…”

  “Seven,” she answered hoarsely. Lorenzo was happy with that: nines and tens were unrealistic, ratings given in order to get the hell out of there.

  “You sure he didn’t have a moustache?” Pierre asked, playing with his own.

  “I don’t remember. Maybe.” She turned away.

  “Maybe.” Pierre folded his arms across his chest, made a figure four with a crossed leg, squinting at his handiwork. “Is there anything else we can do to make it more like him?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Crow’s-feet, moles, dimples, pouches, any kind of blemish—”

  “Please,” she begged, “I’m losing my mind.”

  Lorenzo and Pierre stepped outside the room, leaving Brenda behind. Pierre held the drawing by the edges. “What you think?” Lorenzo asked, staring at the face. He swore to himself he had seen this guy before.

  “I think something bad happened out there,” Pierre said. “It was like pulling teeth tonight. I don’t think I ever really got her good and centered in.”

  “You think it’s a good picture?” Lorenzo asked.

  “Check this out,” Pierre murmured, holding the sketch up alongside his own face. It was a damn good self-portrait. “This is the eighth felony I pulled this month, you know what I’m saying?”

  Lorenzo drove Brenda away from BCI in a parks department van to foil the shooters, switching to his own car, which had been driven out for him by Pierre, three blocks away.

  “South 15 to base. Leaving BCI with female vic responding to 16 Van Loon Street, Gannon. Mileage at 32009.”

  “Base to South 15. Time is 04:30.”

  “How you holding up, Brenda?”

  “I wish I could close my eyes and wake up,” she said, gently pressing her bandages to her eyes.

  “I take you home, is there anybody you can get to stay with you?”

  “I don’t want to go home. I can’t go home.”

  “Where you want to go?”

  “To hell,” she said quietly.

  “Ulysses? That’s the father’s name?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ulysses…”

  “Maldonado,” she said, to her lap.

  “Give me his address.”

  “I don’t have a clue.”

  “Is there anyone out there you have problems with?” She didn’t answer. “Anybody at Armstrong? Any of the kids? The parents?”

  “I wasn’t there long enough to make enemies. Can I have my pills back?”

  “You don’t want any more right now.” She leaned the side of her face against the coolness of the window. “Brenda, I can’t stay with you once I get you upstairs. You want to call somebody?”

  “No.”

  “No family?” She held her silence. “Friends?”

  “I want to be alone.”

  “How ’bout Felicia? You tight with Felicia? I’ll bet she’d come right over if you want.”

  “No.”

  “South 15 to base.”

  “Base. Go.”

  “Leaving city limit, mileage at 32013.”

  “Time is 04:40.”

  Lorenzo’s cell phone rang.

  “Yo.” It was Bump.

  “What’s up.”

  “Banging on doors. Where you at?”

  “Just left BCI.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Taking her home.”

  “To her house?”

  Lorenzo sensed something slightly off in the question—in Bump’s tone of voice. “Looks like it.”

  “You coming back here?”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  Gannon was a three-mile-long finger pointing out to sea from Gannon Bay. Whenever he crossed the line, Lorenzo was struck by the abrupt change of scenery, a single stoplight taking him instantly from abandoned storefronts and end-of-the-road public housing into a land of aluminum siding and block after block of functional shopping. One of the features that always got to Lorenzo about Gannon was the travel agencies—at least two to a block, none bigger than a barbershop, and all advertising the usual discount air fares to Florida, Italy, and various pleasure spots in the Caribbean. In contrast, the few travel agencies around Armstrong, around D-Town, tended to feature flights to the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Guyana. And Lorenzo saw this difference in destinations as a basic difference in communities—when Gannon took to the air, it was mostly going on vacation; when D-Town flew, it was flying home.

  The official motto of Gannon was Same As It Ever Was, and that was no lie; Dempsy’s neighbor, a city of predominantly blue-collar white Catholic families, had been living there since the end of the Civil War. There were no mansions and no slums, just modest homes and modest businesses. The only buildings over three stories tall, not counting church steeples, were the old-age home, the public high school, and the Municipal Building, which housed everything governmental—the police department, the mayor’s office, the board of education, the motor vehicles bureau. The church spires numbered eight—two Lutheran, three Roman Catholic, one white Baptist, one black Baptist, and one Russian Orthodox. There was a conservative synagogue, a Christian Science reading room, a VFW hall, two public libraries, three parochial schools. There were two parks and an historical marker outside a soda wholesaler that celebrated the fact that in a Revolutionary-era tavern that had once stood there, George Washington had mapped out the battle of Staten Island.

  As they rolled down Jessup Avenue, the spine of the city, Lorenzo and Brenda were enveloped by an overall stillness, a profound quiet that threw whatever was in motion out there—a cat, a drunk, a tumbleweed of newspaper—into exaggerated clarity. Even the two or three dope corners were dead, which was to say that Gannon, unlike D-Town, actually went to sleep.

  Brenda lived in one of the transitional neighborhoods in Gannon, a strip still inhabited by some of its original Ukrainian and Polish residents, now stranded by the constraints of fixed incomes and increasingly hemmed in by undocumented Mexicans and Ecuadorians who had slipped into town to work in the green-card factories. The small manufacturing plants that existed in the marshy areas of Gannon produced sugar substitutes, bubble wrap, fabric trimmings, and ant traps.

  Lorenzo turned onto Van Loon, a street of liquor stores, lottery ticket vendors, and Laundromats, the only housing structure a two-story thirty-two-unit apartment complex that looked more like a cheap, rambling chain motel than a dwelling requiring multiyear leases. Brenda lived in a corner apartment on the second floor, and as Lorenzo cautiously entered the parking lot he scanned the turf for shooters. Reasonably sure there were none, he got out of the car, came around, and helped Brenda to her feet.

  “Lorenzo.”

  On hearing the voice behind him, he had to smile, finally able to put a finger on Bump’s one-question-too-many phone chat: his partner had been pumping him to set up some kind of swap for himself. He wondered what Jesse Haus could have possibly offered Bump to make him go behind his partner’s back like this.

  “Lorenzo, what’s up?”

  He turned to her as she furtively gave Brenda the once-over. “I’m gonna have to talk to you later, OK?” he said, taking in her eyeliner—looking, as usual, as if it had been applied by a drunk. She had a cell phone in one hand but, surprisingly, no cigarette in the other. Over her shoulder, he searched the parking lot for Ben, spotting him in his big-ass Chrysler, shadowing his sister, as always, and sipping his ever-present container of coffee.

  Brenda, oblivious to the new presence, patted her jeans pockets, then, increasingly distraught, tried to extract her house keys with her swaddled hands. Lorenzo turned to her, feeling jammed, not knowing how to help out. Slightly frazzled, he turned back to Jesse, put out a dismissing hand.

  “Not now. Call
me later, all right?”

  “Brenda? Are you OK?” Jesse asked, ignoring Lorenzo.

  Brenda raised her eyes to the voice, and before Lorenzo could stop her, Jesse did something that no one had done all night—what Lorenzo couldn’t do. She touched her. She stepped in close, reached out, and briefly touched the side of Brenda’s face; gently, proprietarily she flicked back a fringe of hair from Brenda’s eyes, and that was all it took. Brenda crumpled as if Jesse had teased out the knot in the string of her musculature. Lorenzo actually had to catch her by the elbows so that she wouldn’t hit the pavement.

  “You’re Danny Martin’s sister, right?” Jesse asked. “I went to school with him.”

  Lorenzo glared at her, thinking, Fucking Bump. “I said later, all right?”

  “No problem.” Jesse shrugged, stepping off. “Get some sleep, Brenda. You’re in good hands.”

  Lorenzo walked Brenda to the door, then turned back to Jesse. “Come over here for a minute.” Jesse, open-faced, did as she was told. “Can you get that key out of her pocket for her?” Lorenzo requested grudgingly, as if the words were costing him cash money.

  The stairway walls were cheap and smudged; a faint odor of Brussels sprouts or cabbage lingered in the hall. As soon as Lorenzo opened the apartment door for her, she bolted past him, racing for the bathroom. Fearful that she was on her way to clean something up, he got there first, saying, “Hang on,” hitting the switch, and throwing an arm across the doorway to block her from entering. The porcelain surfaces—tub, sink, bowl—were unstained, and nothing worse than women’s underwear and a sweater hung from the shower curtain bar. Brenda pushed his arm away and dove for the toilet, dropping to her knees, banging up the lid, and vomiting bubbling islands of brown and orange, not much else, most likely the Coke and the codeine tablets.

  The bathroom was tiny, made even smaller by the matching royal blue of the curtain, the rug, the towels, the toilet and tank covers. There were two toothbrushes, one with Fred Flintstone on the grip. A spoor of striped toothpaste lay clotted on the edge of the sink, a scatter of plastic Transformer creatures lined the tub—no blood, no chaos.

  “Please,” Brenda yawped in a voice scraped raw, waving him away as she embraced the curve of the bowl.

  Closing the bathroom door, he quickly hit the lamps, lighting up a small, glum living room of secondhand furniture and spotted gray wall-to-wall carpet. Lorenzo squatted, fingering the stains, which were dry old, the wrong color. He looked around the room—nothing overturned, spilled, ajar; no sign of a struggle or a hasty exit; no burned-down cigarettes with long ashes, no dishes on the dining table, no puddled liquid.

  Over a small round dining table, a movie poster for 101 Dalmations was pushpinned to the wall. Above the television, a T-shirt emblazoned with a computer-generated photo of Brenda and her son hung splayed and pinned like a butterfly. There were other photos around—of Brenda and Cody together at the Liberty Science Center, at Action Park, at the Jefferson Houses with the Study Club and of Cody alone or with other adults, shaking hands with the Hamburgler at McDonald’s, sitting with an older woman whom Lorenzo took to be his grandmother, feeding a black-nippled bottle of milk to a goat at some petting zoo. There were no photos of Brenda by herself or with anyone but her son.

  There were old plastic child guards on the corners of the coffee table, which sat in front of a ratty-looking sofa. In the small kitchen, separated from the living room by a serve-through cutout in the wall, the dishes were unwashed but neatly stacked in the sink—no bloody cutlery, no broken glass. There were both ant traps and roach motels in all corners of the floor. The imitation wood-grain cabinets held a sugarland of kiddie cereals, a few cans of soup on a spin-tray and a few plastic-sealed six-packs of soy milk. The refrigerator held a slab of raw chuck steak in its Styrofoam wrapper, a hardened wedge of white rice uncovered on a plate but still molded in the shape of its take-out container, and a half dozen silver-foiled Hershey’s Kisses, nesting in the egg tray inside the refrigerator door. So far, the apartment struck him as more sad-ass than sinister.

  She seemed to have stopped throwing up. Lorenzo heard running water now from behind the bathroom door, and he was torn between getting her in sight and continuing to examine her world unhindered. Crossing the living room again on his way to check out the lone bedroom, he noticed a five-and-dime composition book on top of the television. Opening it, he saw the name CODY scripted in an unwavering adult hand, maybe five, six hundred times—seven continuous pages of CODY, like a written chant. Lorenzo was caught up short, trailing his fingertips down page after page, as if he could decipher meaning through his sense of touch. There was nothing else written on any other page.

  She came out of the bathroom finally, staggering to the couch and dropping, her head almost touching her knees. He wanted to ask her about the composition book, but he was thrown by her sudden appearance. There was something different about her now.

  “How you feeling?”

  She didn’t answer.

  The bathroom smelled of synthetic fruit from the room spray she had used, and when he reached in to close the door and cut off that canned scent he saw that the sink was filled with clumps of hair. He looked at her again, finally registering the hacked, uneven coif that now barely framed her face. She had the dazed, hounded look of a collaborator who had been seized by partisans.

  “What the hell did you do?” Before she could answer, his pager went off. Bobby McDonald most likely, wanting an update. Lorenzo realized that he had forgotten to log in with the dispatcher, cover his ass about coming up here alone with the victim. Her answer about the haircut was lost to the static in his head. “What?” he asked.

  “I said because my head is killing me” There were tears in her voice again, and she started rocking.

  Looking out the lone living room window, Lorenzo saw a dark blue van with New York plates slowly trolling her street. He also saw Big Ben, still sitting in his Chrysler, Jesse in the passenger seat talking on her cell phone. The woman didn’t quit.

  “Is that the boy’s room or yours?” he asked, taking a step toward the bedroom.

  “His.”

  “Can you show me?”

  “You can go in.” She waved him on, holding her head, making no effort to rise. The room held a bunk bed, both beds made, a chest of drawers with yellowed decals that must have been applied decades ago, and a small Formica-topped school desk. The walls were covered with centerfolds of steroid-ripped wrestlers, and plastic wrestler dolls were scattered about the floor. Lorenzo returned to the living room.

  “You have another child?”

  “No. The bunk bed was free, so we have a bunk bed.”

  “Can I ask you something? I saw that notebook there, you know, laying open?” He lied. “Did you write that in there, you know your son’s—”

  “It helps me sleep writing something over and over. It’s like counting sheep.”

  “Huh. When did you write that?”

  “I don’t know. Yesterday, day before.”

  “You do it a lot?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You always write his name?”

  “No.”

  Lorenzo tried to couch his next question as lightly as he could. “Can I see some of the other things you wrote? You know, names?”

  “Why?” His beeper went off again. “I don’t keep them or anything,” she added. “What do you want to know?”

  “Just…” He trailed off, telling himself it would keep. He had to go. “I need to get somebody up here with you.”

  “No. I want to be alone.”

  “Let me call Felicia.”

  “I said no.” Her voice was sharp yet pleading.

  The phone rang. She stared at him. He made a move for it but then balked, not wanting to scare off the caller. He gestured for her to pick it up.

  “Hello?” Her voice was floating away. Gently Lorenzo pried the receiver a few inches off her face so that he could listen in.

  “Who’
s dis, Mommy?” The voice was white, male, adult. “Mommy, come get me!” The caller broke into sniggers, and Lorenzo could hear at least two others laughing in the background. “Mommy, I’m fuckin’ out here. Where the hell are you, you fuckin’ bitch.” More sniggers, somebody in the background gurgling, “Hang up, asshole.” The caller said, “Here, you talk to her,” then hung up.

  Lorenzo took the phone from Brenda and set it down. “You have Caller ID?” he asked, knowing she didn’t. His gut reaction was that the caller and his buddies were nothing but stoned or drunk morons getting high with the TV news on—having some fun.

  She pinched the phone wire between her fingers and freed it from its jack. “I guess I don’t want to be alone.”

  “Good,” Lorenzo said, stooping to retrieve the phone wire. “Let me call Felicia.”

  “No.”

  “How about your neighbors? You close to any neighbors?”

  “Who’s that downstairs?” She had hardly moved since he had taken the receiver from her hand.

  “Downstairs?”

  “That woman down there.”

  “She’s a reporter.”

  “She knows my brother?”

  “She says she does, but—”

  “Can she come up?”

  “Brenda, she’s a reporter.” Brenda shrugged, nervously running a hand through her butchered hair. “Brenda,” Lorenzo began again. Then he just gave up. Fucking Bump.

  Lorenzo went downstairs and hung inside the vestibule. When the dark blue van completed yet another pass of the house, he stuck his head out and gestured to the Chrysler. Jesse came out the passenger door and strolled over, casting casual glances around the sleeping parking lot, as if she were about to commit a crime.

  “Here’s the deal,” Lorenzo said, towering over her in the overripe hallway.

  “Go ahead.” Jesse’s cell phone, wrapped in a folded fax of Pierre’s jacker sketch, peeked out of a front pocket of her jeans, and she held an unlit cigarette like a pool cue between the braided fingers of her left hand.

  “Now I can scotch this if I have to, all right?”