Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “Mommy! Mommy!” a voice called from the street. Brenda clutched her temples with padded hands as the singer continued to lament over a reedy organ: “Too many teardrops, for one heart, to carry on.” Jesse jumped up and put an arm around Brenda’s shoulders, battening down the shade with her free hand.

  “Brenda, I want you to try to settle down, OK? I want you to start thinking about getting a little sleep.”

  The music shifted to “Tramp,” Otis and Carla breaking each other’s chops. Brenda just stood there, leaning into Jesse’s side, the two of them facing the couch as if posing for a picture.

  “This song? That’s my other thing. Boy-girl records, you know, where they sing to each other? Otis and Carla, Rufus and Carla, Marvin and Tammi, Billy Vera and Judy Clay, Dick and Dee Dee—did you ever hear Dick and Dee Dee? Even Ike and Tina. You ever hear that song they did, ‘It’s Gonna Work Out Fine’?”

  “I think so,” Jesse said, taking a furtive look at the time. It was six-fifteen and she was desperate to call in, knowing Jose was going batshit by now waiting for the phone to ring. She eyed Brenda’s boombox, stacked with CDs and cassettes, their plastic cases scattered on the floor. The discs were store-bought, but the tapes apparently homemade, the back of each case neatly printed with a list of its contents.

  “I hear these songs, right? And I think, These people, they love each other. And listen! They’re having fun in this song. This is great. And it’s not like I don’t know better, like I’m some kind of moron, but I go with it. Sometimes you just have to go with it.”

  Jesse surprised herself by steering Brenda into an embrace—to comfort her, to shut her up—and Brenda yielded easily, her breath hot against Jesse’s collarbone. Jesse felt the leaden exhaustion in her, but also the bubbling anxiety, a steady, tremulous ripple, as if the woman were standing on a nerve. She led Brenda to the couch, helped her down, and stood behind her, trying to break down knots big as cloves lumped between her shoulder blades. Brenda went with it again, allowing her upper body to roll with the pressure of Jesse’s thumbs, Jesse wanting this woman down and out.

  “Your brother downstairs? Do you think he could buy me a couple of CDs? I’ll give him the money. I left most of my music in Jefferson and I could really, really use hearing them right now.”

  “Sure,” Jesse said, the music shifting to “Steal Away,” a long nasal wail of enticement, the singer begging for it; Jesse thinking, This thing is writing itself.

  “Can I just tell you names?” Brenda twisted around.

  “Sure.” Jesse was grateful for the opportunity to break out the notebook. “Go.”

  “Solomon Burke, Don Covay Arthur Alexander, O. V. Wright, Ruby Johnson, Clarence Carter, Mabel John—any of them, any tape, CD, anything.” Jesse was writing, not recognizing a single name, also writing: “‘96 Tears,’ Dawn, Hair in Sink.”

  “Any of them. It would be so great.”

  “Brenda, is this thing a convertible?” Jesse patted the couch.

  “What? Yeah,” she answered, squinting at the far wall, working something out.

  “Why don’t you let me pull it out for you. Where do you keep the pillows and stuff?”

  “Once last month? I was talking to my son, I said to him, ‘Cody do you love me?’ I don’t know why I said that. It’s a pathetic…” Brenda shrugged. “But, anyways, you know what he said? He’s four, right? He says, ‘Of course I love you, Mommy. Why would you even ask me that?’” She put a slow, exaggeratedly dignified spin on her son’s words, something Jesse’s grandmother used to do when quoting one of her precocious grandchildren to company. “He was a little man,” she whispered.

  “What’s Your Name” filled the room, sweet and husky in Jesse’s ear.

  “He was my little man…”

  The buzzer rang again. Brenda didn’t jump this time, sunk in her thoughts.

  “He had other parents, imaginary parents, Saul and Claire Osterbeck. He told me they lived with the good werewolf at the end of the rainbow. Who’s to say, right?” She tried to laugh but it came out a nervous chirp. “I was a bad mother.”

  “No. What do you mean? You sound like a great mother,” Jesse said, standing in front of her now, writing again: “Knots, Little Man, Photo Slam Down.” She was easing the presence of the open notepad into Brenda’s visual range.

  “No, I was too anxious for him to like me, so I never disciplined him. I never, I never taught him anything. It was like I was running for office and he was a voter, you know? That’s not good.”

  “Well, you loved him.” Jesse surprised herself by using the past tense, as Brenda was doing.

  “You want to hear how fucked up I was? We used to sleep together on the convertible, right? He’d start out in his room, but by midnight he’d be in here with me. But like about six months ago? He started making it through the night on his own. That’s good, right? He’s growing, learning to feel safe, confident in himself, OK. So what do I do? I miss him coming into bed with me, so I go out and I rent Frankenstein, the original one, and we watch it. I mean I didn t get, like, Halloween Three or Candyman— nothing bloody—but I just wanted him to sleep with me a few more times, get him a little scared, not… We were watching it, and he starts crying. I said, ‘Cody? Are you scared?’ He says, ‘No, Mommy. I’m not scared but I hate this movie. Everybody’s acting so mean to him.’ I say, ‘To who?’ ‘To the monster. He can’t help it, don’t they know that? I hate this movie.’ That was his heart.” Brenda’s voice was falling apart now, shivering with exhaustion. “That was my boy’s heart.”

  “Sounds like he had a beautiful soul,” Jesse said, immediately cringing at her own blather, but Brenda was off somewhere, in no shape to be a critic.

  “You know how he got back at me? He wouldn’t let me turn off the movie. I mean, we were only a half hour into it when he started crying, and now I just want to turn it off, but he wouldn’t let me. He insisted we watch the whole thing, tears and all. So I have to sit there, and I’m dying because I know how much worse it’s going to get for the monster, right? And I know Cody is just gonna get more and more upset, but he wouldn’t let me turn it off. So I had to sit there and watch him suffer.”

  “Did he sleep with you at least?” Jesse asked, scribbling down “Frankenstein.”

  “No. He was too mad at me. He could see right through me.”

  “Rainy Night in Georgia” filled the air. Brenda, nodding to the words, dipped her head below her knees.

  “Brenda, who made this tape?”

  “I did,” she said, straightening up. “I make tapes all the time. If I like somebody, I make them a tape of songs that remind me of them or, you know, songs I think they’d like. I’ll make you a tape if you want.”

  “Thank you,” Jesse said, slightly moved by the offer, keeping herself on a steady course by writing down “Make Me A Tape.”

  “Did you ever make one for Cody?”

  “Frankenstein,” Brenda responded, and Jesse wasn’t sure if she was ignoring the last question or just didn’t hear it. The buzzer rang again, making Jesse jump this time.

  “Do you know how hard it is to get a kid to sit through a black-and-white movie?” Brenda asked. “Well, you should know.”

  “Me?” Jesse was thrown, then remembered her cover story—another surge of adrenaline.

  “What movies does Michael like?”

  “Rocky,” Jesse said. “Four. Rocky Four.”

  “How old is he?”

  “How old?” Jesse scrambled, unable to remember what she had said before. “You know, same as yours.”

  “You know what I bet he’d like?” Brenda was growing desperately animated again. “Big. What else …A League of Their Own, Fried Green Tomatoes, The Secret Garden, Harvey. You ever see that? With the six-foot rabbit? What else … Captains Courageous. Actually, that was too sad, plus it’s black-and-white.”

  “That’s a lot of movies,” Jesse said, wanting to move out of this dogleg in the conversation.

  “Oh,
Jesus, we’d watch one every night, seven nights a week. The guy at this little shitty video store down the block? He gave Cody his own membership card. It was our favorite thing to do. Every night, every night.”

  “Sounds great to me,” Jesse said, and she meant it.

  “We’d do everything together. He used to come in to work with me? I have to show you.” She got up from the couch and walked toward the window. Jesse realized she was going to retrieve the group picture of the Study Club, the one that was now at the Register, and wondered how to play this. But Brenda just seemed to shrug off its absence.

  “Anyways, I’d bring him into Jefferson with me? He’d just get down with the other kids, wouldn’t even bat an eye, the only white kid there. But that’s good, you know, to see how it feels to be the other.”

  “I hear you.” Jesse came around and took it on herself to pull out the convertible, hoping the visual aid would help Brenda fall out.

  “I mean he was too young to get it, you know, the black-white thing. Most kids, they start to get it about eight, nine years old. That’s when they usually separate out.” She peeked around a crimp in the drawn shade. “It’s raining. He’s out in the rain.”

  “Brenda, where do you keep the pillows and stuff? I want you to rest.” Brenda turned from the window, her eyes shining like wet steel.

  “You know,” she began, her voice feathery, tentative, “I’m still pretty young.” She looked across the room at Jesse as if she couldn’t believe she had just said that. Jesse stared back at her with a cockeyed, spastic grin, telling herself that she would take this moment with her to the end of her days.

  “I really need to sleep now,” Brenda said carefully, shaken sober, her voice deeper now.

  “Good,” Jesse said.

  “Not out here. It’s too bright. I’ll go in Cody’s bed if you can help me with the shade in there.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Jesse had to climb onto the windowsill to reach the tightly furled opaque shade in Cody’s bedroom. It had been raining for a few minutes, nothing more than an early morning sun shower, and she watched the bulk of the crowd down below reluctantly retreat to the shelter of a red-and-yellow bodega awning across the street. A few sodden individuals, including one or two whom Jesse recognized from other papers, were still arguing futilely with Ben—Ben of Gibraltar. The rain was matting his hair down into a monk’s tonsure: Jesse had never realized that he had a bald spot.

  With the shade drawn, the room became dark enough for Jesse to see more fluorescent stickers glowing on the walls, the desk, and the frame of the bunk bed—numbers, letters, dinosaurs, comets—pale green, floating.

  Jesse unbuttoned Brenda’s jeans for her, helped her step out of them, and waited in the bedroom while she used the toilet.

  “Are you going to stay here?” Brenda asked, coming back in and sitting on the lower bunk.

  “I would like to, yeah.”

  “OK,” Brenda said, still hunched over the edge of the bed, her head in her hands.

  “Do you want me to get you a fresh T-shirt or something?”

  “No. And your brother can get me those records? I keep my money in the microwave in the kitchen.”

  “Sure.”

  “They’d come here if they found something, right?”

  Jesse hesitated, confused, the word “something” throwing her for a moment.

  “They’d be here in a flash.”

  “Jesus.” Brenda closed her eyes, her entire face pulling into a pucker in her effort not to cry. “You know, it’s, like, if I keep talking, keep talking, keep talking, I forget for a few minutes, but now I’m really, really tired.” Jesse sat next to her on the bed and gently kneaded her upper back.

  “I used to be afraid of dying,” Brenda said. “Not afraid. More like, it was unthinkable, becoming, you know, just nothing. But I don’t know, I’m not, I don’t feel that way now. I can die. I can see dying.”

  “Nobody’s dying,” Jesse said automatically.

  “You know, the phone’s unplugged, but if you need to call in a story to your paper? Just put the jack back in.”

  “Thanks. Thank you.”

  “Yeah, you don’t have to hide in the bathroom. I know you’re working here. It’s OK.”

  “Why don’t you lie down,” Jesse said softly.

  “I’m good,” Brenda said, gesturing for Jesse to leave her be.

  Jesse moved out to the opened convertible in the living room, punched in Jose on the cell phone, then killed the call before it could ring through. She looked at her cryptic scrawls and started to compose, something she usually left to others. She wrote: “As this tortured night melts into merciless dawn,” then, “In a timeless gesture of grief as old as…” She lit a cigarette, put it out, wrote: “‘96 Tears’ reverberates off the walls of this anguished room.” Her eyelids felt like singed paper. She gave it one last stab: “The bathroom sink in this shabby but proud apartment is a nest of shorn hair, the mother taking scissors to her own locks in an impulsive gesture of otherwise inexpressible anguish.”

  She pulled back from her own paragraph, impressed, and flipped through her notes for another trigger phrase, her eye settling on “Frankenstein” just as a low moan crept through the walls of the apartment. Jesse sat up fast, then skittered into the bedroom to see Brenda, finally on her back, lying there rigid and staring at the bottom panel of the upper bunk.

  Jesse dropped to her knees. “What,” she said, following Brenda’s gaze to that white panel, alive now with fluorescent planets, animals, lightning bolts, an entire cosmos of swarming imagery. Jesse finally saw what tore at Brenda’s eyes: in a clearing ringed by giraffes and shooting stars, four letters floated in a wobbly, childish line, hovering directly over the mother’s face, luminous, insistent: C O D Y.

  Part Two

  96 Tears

  9

  Lorenzo returned to the projects just as dawn was beginning to break, washing Armstrong in a flat, sourceless light. A long train of container cars sat quietly on the tracks overlooking the houses—no matter how many times those booty boxes were broken into overnight, Conrail never learned its lesson. Lorenzo himself had partaken in a raid or two in his teen years, getting away with a box of turtleneck dickeys the first time, four cartons of kitty litter the next. He would have gone back again if one of his partners in crime hadn’t lost a leg to a suddenly mobile train on a night when Lorenzo had been grounded.

  At this hour, the media settlement alongside the silent train had taken on the aspect of a nineteenth-century military encampment. The electronic gear hung on the fence like cartridge belts and canteens, the swirling dawn making ghosts of the few still-standing shooters, moving stiff and slow, working out night kinks. Others huddled over coffeepots hooked up to power sources in the satellite trucks. A few of the shooters had slept outdoors, were still asleep now, sprawled on folding lawn chairs, blankets to their chins. But Lorenzo spied one guy, in construction boots and tinted shades, doing jumping jacks in the gravel, and another, in bandanna and khakis, swiveling and crouching his way through early-morning tai chi.

  Armstrong itself was quiet, the only action at the exit points, where cars were stacked up, waiting for permission to leave. Some of the drivers stood outside their rides, pacing, fuming, late for work, as the cops ran through everybody’s papers—registration, driver’s licenses, tags—looking for outstanding violations or, worse, outstanding warrants, searching trunks and crawling into backseats as if Hurley and Gompers were international borders.

  The sun, coming up over New York, briefly peeked out through the filmy dawn, slashing the Bowl with light. It illuminated the refrigerators on the high end, closest to the Gompers exit, converting the field into a massive druidic sundial. Lorenzo stared at this mysterious transformation a full minute before he saw Danny Martin sitting alone on the edge of a crate in the center of the Bowl. Elbows on knees, Danny had a huge 7-Eleven coffee cup in one hand, the police sketch of the jacker dangling from the other. The c
up was held limply enough for there to be a constellation of coffee spatters on one of his rubber-thonged feet, and when he slowly raised his head at Lorenzo’s approach his eyes were like pale red stars.

  “What you got?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” Lorenzo took a seat a few feet away on the same refrigerator, deciding to hold off on any discussion of Danny’s punching out Teacher.

  “Yup.” Danny nodded. Then, without looking Lorenzo in the face, he extended his hand.

  “I was way off base last night and I apologize.”

  Lorenzo gave it a few seconds before taking the offered hand. “Yeah, well, you were under some crazy mad stress there, boss.”

  “Thanks.” Danny took a sip of coffee. “Thank you.” He offered the container to Lorenzo. When Lorenzo passed, he tossed the contents of the cup into the dirt. “Me and you, we always got on, right?” Lorenzo refrained from answering, the truth being yes and no. “So, nothing, right?” Danny slowly rolled his head from shoulder to shoulder. “I shook every fuckin’ tree in the forest.”

  “Same here, boss.” The sun withdrew, the light turning milky again; a scent of rain was in the air. “You know the father?” Lorenzo asked.

  “Some PR, made a beeline back to the island the minute the rabbit died. Don’t waste your time, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “OK,” Lorenzo said noncommittally.

  “In fact, next time you see Brenda? Ask her if she remembers the guy’s name. I’d be curious.”

  “She does, Danny,” Lorenzo said, flipping his notes. “Ulysses Maldonado.”

  “Ulysses!” Danny barked mockingly, then recanted. “Shit.” He looked away, disgusted with himself.

  “You close to the boy?”