Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “Karen’s gonna have a sit-down with Lorenzo tonight, about eight, eight-thirty?” Ben nodded, as if agreeing with himself. “She’s gonna see if her people can be of any help here, and I told her she should meet you, you know, because, like, you spent so much time with her, you know, Brenda,” he said, doing everything but winking at her in Morse code. Ben was taking over here, converting her relationship with Brenda into a three-way.

  Jesse leaned into his window and caught a faint whiff of nail polish and nicotine.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve been with Brenda pretty much since the jump—more than anybody else I know of.”

  Karen nodded and tossed her lipstick-imprinted cigarette butt out the window. “Are you writing about her?” She raised her chin, aiming it at Jesse.

  “That’s what I do,” Jesse said, looking off.

  Karen nodded. “How does she strike you?”

  “What do you mean?” Karen waited. “If you’re asking me if she’s hurting over this, all I can tell you is she hasn’t eaten, hasn’t slept, and she’s been hospitalized for dehydration,” Jesse said, bodysurfing a wave of exhaustion herself. “Now, if all of that’s grief or a guilty conscience, or both, or whatever, your guess is as good as mine.”

  Karen nodded again, stared straight ahead. “You think the boy is findable?”

  “God, I hope so,” Jesse answered easily.

  “Alive?” Karen took another cigarette and her lighter out of a vinyl case.

  “I would like to think so,” Jesse started out cautiously, then shocked herself by adding, “but no, probably not.”

  Karen lit her cigarette off the disposable lighter, the pungency of butane hitting Jesse between the eyes. She noticed the woman wore pressed jeans.

  “OK.” Karen clicked and snapped everything away. “We’re gonna have a sit-down with the detective, and if he gives us the go-ahead, we’re gonna meet with the mother. Your brother here would like you to be at that meeting. Now, I don’t really like being around reporters at this stage of the game, but your brother’s a living ace, he’s never not there for us, and he says we can trust you.”

  “Trust me to what…”

  “To not write anything we need for you to keep under your hat.”

  “Whatever.” Jesse shrugged and looked away again, her anger blossoming at Ben for having gone behind her back, then having the balls to offer her up like this, yanking her out of the driver’s seat and forcing her to her knees, a supplicant.

  “All right.” Karen turned to her with those muddy yet drilling eyes. “So all I have for you is one last question. Would you ever do anything to screw with your brother’s good name?”

  “I have my own good name to worry about,” Jesse drawled, looking off at the POW wall, thinking, I’ll kill him.

  Karen Collucci left Ben’s car to return to the Blazer, and as the Friends of Kent pulled out and passed them, Jesse noticed the silhouetted snout and ears of a German shepherd that was pacing restlessly in the rear of the van.

  “Where the hell do you get the nerve to bring her into this?” Jesse asked Ben, hissing down low, as if Karen could overhear her.

  “Na-h-h,” Ben growled happily as he took off for the medical center. “Karen’s the best.”

  “She’s gonna walk all over me.” Jesse felt herself flushing: Brenda slipping through her fingers.

  “Na-h-h,” he said, the same noise as before, his grin locked in. “Jess, you got to see her work.”

  Jesse lit a cigarette at the wrong end, tossed it out the window. She should have guessed from the start. Her brother and Karen went back three years, to the Gregory Towles disappearance. Ben had responded to a Friends of Kent radio call to search for the boy whose mother claimed he had been abducted from a farmers’ market in Yonkers. They never found the kid, and before his mother could be brought in by the cops for more intensive questioning, she vanished, too, along with her new state-trooper boyfriend. For nine consecutive days, Ben would come at dawn to the church parking lot that served as base camp, and he never came empty-handed. One of his poker pals, a Waldbaums manager in Jersey City, had agreed to pay off his debts with boxes of bakery goods—crullers, cinnamon twists, carrot cakes, rainbow-sprinkled doughnuts—and by day three, the entire search party had become completely fixated on Ben’s arrival.

  Jesse was told of other Kent searches, some unhappily successful, others destined to remain agonizing mysteries. Her favorite was the search for a teenager who, as it turned out, had simply run away from home but for which Ben, in exchange for shadowing the wife of a Queens building contractor and delivering to the guy photographic evidence of her motel shenanigans, had secured for the Friends of Kent six Portosans, including installation and daily servicing, to be placed at selected locations along a running path in Cheesequake State Park in southern New Jersey.

  “Jess,” Ben said, trying to placate her. “Jess, let’s say I asked you for your permission before I reached out to Karen, right? You’d’ve said no way, but then, let me tell you, if she didn’t come on board? You’d still be back in that bar right now throwing down Stoli shooters. Please. You have to know I’m thinking about you too.”

  Jesse sat up a bit; how the hell did he know what she had been drinking? “She’s married, Ben,” she said in a burst of impotent nastiness. “Didn’t you see the ring on her finger?” It was a meaningless sputter of a crack, but a shadow passed over her brother’s face, quick as bird flight, then gone, and Jesse knew to shut up.

  Save for the mention of their destination, they drove on in silence. Jesse, chastened by her unintentional blood drawing, mutely pondered her brother’s secret yearnings. The silence continued until Ben pulled up in front of the medical center.

  “Here,” he said curtly, passing over a bag containing sunglasses and a wig. The shades were like twin silvered eggs, futuristic; the hairpiece was shoulder-length and reddish brown.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do with these?” Jesse held one item in each hand.

  “They’re for Brenda.”

  15

  With Brenda laid out over at the medical center and his meeting with Karen Collucci and the Friends of Kent not until the evening, Lorenzo, with Bobby McDonald’s grudging approval, decided to use his free time to hit on Felicia Mitchell, Brenda’s boss at the Study Club. And so, in the late afternoon of this grueling, suffocating day, Lorenzo found himself wheezing and sweating his way to the fifth floor of the elevator-busted Crispus Attucks high-rise in the Jefferson Houses.

  The Study Club, at this time of year more a knock-around day camp than any kind of tutorial center, was situated in two adjoining apartments. Housing had punched through the connecting walls to give the club six large rooms, which were lined up like boxcars, each one having a designated use—computers, free play, homework, pool table, library, and the cool-out corner, this last room bare, except for a few stiff-backed school chairs. Its walls were covered with instructional posters—Argument Rules, Classroom Rules, Homework Rules, Pool Table Rules, Cooperation Rules, Conversation Rules, Fire Drill Rules, Good Health Rules, and How to Express Frustration Rules.

  Normally, on a hot summer day, Felicia and her aides would have been outside with the kids, but because of the media invasion it was decided to make the best of an indoor play day. They had only four portable fans to cover the six rooms, and even with all the windows open it seemed as if the very walls were running with sweat.

  When Lorenzo entered the club, Felicia was bellowing at a nine-year-old boy who was playing Nok-Hockey too close to the pool table. Felicia stood there, arms akimbo, calling him out.

  “Excuse me. Excuse me. What I say to you, hah? What I say…” Despite her harsh tone, Lorenzo could tell she was in a better mood than when he had come upon her earlier in the day, waiting for him outside his mother’s apartment door. “I’m waitin’ for a answer. What I say…”

  The kid shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “What happens if a ball jumps the rail, hah? What happens…?�
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  Before he could respond, she turned on the two players at the pool table, an eight-year-old girl who had a knife scar that ran from under her jaw to her right ear and Curious George Howard, Miss Dotson’s grandson—all six foot one and twenty-one years of him.

  “What happens if that cue ball jumps the rail…?”

  George drew a bead. “He better duck.” He fired too hard and fouled up a bank shot, the three ball hiccuping over a rip in the green fabric as it rolled to a stop in the middle of nowhere.

  Lorenzo surveyed the club. Most of the kids were in the Homework Room, hunched over the tables, building stuff out of white glue and Popsicle sticks or stringing plastic beads. Above their heads hung a bulletin board, the Brag Board, covered with photos of the kids and handwritten two-paragraph compositions, each entitled “What I Like About…” and ending with the name of a kid the author had just fought with. This was Felicia’s tried-and-true conflict resolver. Lorenzo had seen it work with his own eyes, watching the faces of yesterday’s mortal enemies struggle with involuntary grins when they heard positive things about themselves emanate from the mouths of their sworn foes.

  “Where you supposed to be at right now…” Felicia turned on the nine-year-old again. “Where.”

  “I want a snack.” The kid rose to his feet, brushing dirt from his baggy-ass shorts.

  “A snack?” Felicia’s eyebrows jumped. “Last time I come in here with food you greedy little monsters ate it all before I could even get my coat off.”

  “You don’t have no coat today.” The kid smiled, making her laugh. Felicia shooed him away and looked up to see Lorenzo.

  “Whoa!” She jerked back as the kids took him in, too, charging toward his legs. Lorenzo loved when this happened, counted on it happening too.

  “Big Daddy,” the nine-year-old boy said, yanking on his front pants pocket, “give me a dollar.”

  “Shamiel!” Felicia barked.

  Lorenzo laughed. “You sound like my wife.”

  Another kid, about ten, with a weak eyelid muscle that made him look half asleep, punched Shamiel on the arm. “Yo, Big Daddy just called you his bitch.

  “Michael!” Felicia barked.

  “Oh yeah? How you like it I make you my bitch.” Shamiel shoved Michael in the chest.

  “Hey!” Felicia grabbed both of them by the arms. “Y’all sit down right now and write me something for the Brag Board.”

  “What I do?” Michael’s one good eye bugged. “Big Daddy said it, not me.”

  “Now.” Felicia sent them in opposite directions with a cross-armed shove.

  “Haw, haw,” the eight-year-old girl playing pool with Curious George crowed in triumph, “you lose.”

  “What you … Haw, haw. Naw, naw, you lose.” George’s face turned dark.

  “You said eight ball in the corner. It went in the side, so you lose,” the girl said.

  “It don’t make no difference! It don’t make no difference!” George leaned over her, purple with anger.

  “Too bad.” The girl shrugged, brought up the eight ball. “You lose.”

  “Naw, naw, no way.” George snatched the retrieved ball. “You don’t win.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “What the… Git the fuck…” George spluttered.

  “Hey!” Felicia barked at him.

  “You don’t.” He ignored Felicia, then turned to the room at large, the eight ball in one hand, the tipless cue stick in the other.

  “Next!” he bellowed. “Next!”

  “You lost…” The eight-year-old girl walked off.

  “Next!” George bawled, flirting with a coronary.

  In Lorenzo’s estimation, George—despite the outburst—was one of those young men who are at their best in the unthreatening presence of little kids. He had a talent for hearing kids out, for taking them seriously, that was at total odds with the knucklehead qualities that made him game for every play on the street and had so far landed him in jail twice.

  Musing on Army Howard’s less than helpful observation about his cousin’s likeness to the jacker sketch, Lorenzo took in George’s T-shirt: black, with a spray-painted image of a tough-guy mouse smoking a stogie and clutching two moneybags, I GOT BIG PLANS scripted in an arch over the mouse’s head. George had no official job here in the Study Club, but he was not unwelcome.

  “You coming over to talk to Billy tonight, right?” Felicia touched Lorenzo’s arm. “You promised.”

  “Give me a minute,” Lorenzo said, approaching George, who was now playing pool by himself.

  Felicia clucked in frustration, then moved off in the opposite direction.

  “I thought you was supposed to be working at Action Park,” Lorenzo said.

  “I thought so too.” George sank the cue ball. “They din’t have no transportation for me.”

  “Didn’t have…”

  “They was supposed to pick up the Dempsy workers by charter bus—otherwise it’s too hard to get there—but they only hired like three people from Dempsy and they said that’s not enough for a pickup stop.”

  “Where they picking up from closest to here?”

  “Jersey City.”

  “So get your behind to Jersey City.”

  “Too late.” George shrugged, the six ball jumping the rail, bouncing sharply on the floor.

  “Then you best keep looking for a job,” Lorenzo said, glaring at him.

  “Yeah, OK.”

  “And you watch your mouth around these little kids here.”

  “Me!” George squawked. “Daddy, you should hear some of the shit comes out their mouths. Half the time they teaching me.”

  At the far end of the double apartment, Felicia Mitchell yelled out, “Fruit salad!” precipitating a stampede to the Free Play Room, followed a moment later by a massive scraping of chairs. George, peering down the barrel of doorways, started to move to join the younger kids. Then, realizing that Lorenzo was watching him, he flushed with embarrassment, stutter-stepped back to the pool table, to the window, and then, without a word or glance, left the Study Club altogether.

  Felicia worked her way back to Lorenzo from the Free Play Room, and he gently took her wrist. “I need for you to help me here with Brenda’s boy” he said quietly. “Anything you can think of.”

  “I don’t know, Lorenzo, it’s sad.” Felicia leaned against the cinder-block wall. “She loves that child, she brings him in here all the time. Look.”

  She led him back to the Homework Room, empty now, except for a Latino girl working on a Popsicle house. Scanning the Brag Board, she said, “Where’d that… here.” She liberated a Polaroid of Brenda with Cody on her lap, the two of them encircled by the children of the Study Club, everyone smiling at the camera with flash-starred eyes.

  From the distant Free Play Room Lorenzo heard the loud rote voice of an aide: “Why do we play fruit salad…?” The children answered in a not quite monotone chorus: “To provide focus on positive attention.”

  “See this here?” Felicia offered him a stack of homemade cards, each one designed by a childish hand. “The kids, they all made her cards today. You know, like, get well cards. It wasn’t even my idea. They just done it on their own.”

  Lorenzo skimmed a few. I HOPE YOUR OK; DON’T WORRY HE’S OK; DEAR BRENDA I LOVE YOU AND CODY—that one bearing a crude drawing of Brenda and Cody running toward each other from opposite ends of the paper, Cody saying, MOM! I’M BACK! in a wobbly word balloon, Brenda’s balloon encircling THANK GOD!

  “She’s very good here, Lorenzo. She gives it her all,” Felicia said.

  “She have any problems with anybody?”

  From the Free Play Room, a kid shouted “Tangerines!” provoking a hectic rumble and squeal, the momentary chaos of musical chairs.

  “Not really. Well, yeah, once, but… See, there was this little girl we had coming here? Tamika Jackson—you know her?”

  “Nope.”

  “She showed up here one day and she had all these bruises and we’re
, like, thinking maybe she was abused, but we didn’t know, ’cause her family had just moved in from the Roosevelt Houses. So I put a call in to my supervisor, you know, June? Ask how we should deal with this. But Brenda? I’m still waiting for June to call me back, Brenda disappears. She just went right up to Tamika’s apartment on eight and, like, straight out confronted her mother. I mean, whoa.” Felicia put a palm to her chest. “You don’t do that. Even if you’re right. That lady, Miss Jackson, she threatened to sue Housing for false accusations. Now, I don’t know if she did it, her boyfriend did it, or nobody did it. The girl, she just said she fell or something, but the thing is, Lorenzo, we ain’t never gonna find out because that lady took her daughter right out of here and, like, even if she was gettin’ hit? We were here for her, we gave her a place to go, and Brenda just threw out the baby with the bathwater. I mean, I know she did it out the goodness of her heart but you know, step back, do it right.”

  “Apples!” someone shouted, and the walls shook with the reaction.

  Gazing out the window, Lorenzo saw Eight-Ball Iovakas down on the street, leaning against his double-parked cruiser, and saw Curious George exit the building.

  Eight-Ball gestured for George to come on over, and after a moment’s hesitation, George complied.

  “See, Brenda…” Felicia touched Lorenzo’s arm to get him back. “She’s like a real contradiction. I mean, she’s scared of doing simple things, like tell so and so’s mother that they got to start making sure their child’s got better grooming habits ’cause the other children are starting to make fun of them. I mean, yeah, that could be tricky, but it ain’t that hard to find some nice way to say it, you know, some positive way. But Brenda, she gets so nervous in advance she can’t do it without putting out all these confrontation vibes. So usually I talk to them myself, but I’ll tell you, when Brenda decides to bust a move on someone? She goes all the way. Like with Miss Jackson. I mean, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression of her. Mainly she does positive things, like she had started bringing in people to talk to the kids, you know, positive role models. She brought in this one guy worked for the Reverend Al Sharpton, sort of like his aide or something, talked to the kids about staying in school.”