Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “See, you ask anybody, I have this reputation of being like a father figure around this city, Dempsy. You know, help all the kids, do antidrug work, put on picnics in the summer, make sure everybody stays in school. People always asking me, people who didn’t know me back in the day, sayin’ to me, ‘Lorenzo, of all the fathers in this city, how come your boy of all…’

  “And I got like this stock response. You know, I say something like, ‘Well, I was so busy being everybody else’s daddy I forgot to be a father to my own blood sons.’ It sounds good, but it’s a lie. Back then I just didn’t care, and now Jason’s in jail and all I can do is be there for him, but it’s kind of late in the game. He’ll most likely be in and out of jail for the rest of his life. Funny thing is, him I get along with. It’s his brother, straight-A student, never in trouble, teaches junior high math down in Camden…It’s Reggie that won’t talk to me, that cut me off dead…You know why?” Lorenzo intended to answer his own question, then realized that he didn’t really know why.

  “Man, I remember one night when Reggie was about eight, Jayce about six… I had walked out of the house about a year earlier and I was working in Secaucus for UPS, drunk more often than not. I get this call—Reggie’s in the hospital, got appendicitis—so I go over to Dempsy Medical Center, and I’m chewing gum, you know, thinking that’s gonna fool everybody. I go up and he’s out of surgery a few hours, laying there, he’s got his moms on one side of the bed holding his right hand, and his moms’s boyfriend, Mark, this guy Mark Bosket, on the left, holding his other hand. This guy’s like, looking all concerned, but it’s for real. I see he’s holding Reggie’s hand, and his thumb is, like, rubbing the boy’s knuckles—like how you kind of, unconsciously touch someone to comfort him? Mark was for real, and I felt so bad, I felt so angry and bad that I just turned on my heel, marched right out the room. So, like, I’m in the hallway now, and there’s little Jason with his grandmother, my mother-in-law, and Jason sees me and, he like… reaches for me… just a little.” Lorenzo stopped, his throat tight.

  “Oh,” Brenda whispered.

  “Just a little gesture, but I was so mad that this other guy was holding Reggie’s hand that I just blew past Jason, down the hallway, out the building. And now, I think back… Reggie, he was covered. His moms is there, Mark is there. He’s covered. But Jason—his big brother’s had surgery, his moms is behind the door in there, everybody all freakin’ out—little Jason, he was scared. He needed me right then.”

  “Oh.”

  “He needed me, and I just…” Lorenzo looked off, blinking rapidly, gritting his teeth. “But let me tell you something,” he plowed on. “With kids? No matter what you did, how badly you messed up, God will find some way of letting you get up to bat again. Might not be with that same child, but…

  “Now, like I told you, these days people think of me out there like some kind of socially responsible Santa Claus or some damn thing. Big Daddy, that’s what they call me. Even the hard-core youngbloods call me that, you know, some of the jugglers. Hell, I know guys in the joint still call me that from when they was little, because I embrace all kids, I try to help ’em all. And I love both my sons now, one in jail, one not talking to me? I love them with more love, now that they’re kind of out of reach, than I ever did when I could’ve picked them both up at the same time and held them in my arms all day long.”

  Lorenzo heard his voice starting to go flutey on him again and he quickly turned away, thinking, You just got all of it, thinking, You owe me.

  “You see, Brenda, God’s grace? It’s like, retroactive. And every little kid out there is Jason for me, and every little kid out there is Reggie. See, we can always make amends, as long as we’re honest, as long as we look in the mirror and say truly what we see. I failed him, I hurt him. I wasn’t there for him. I didn’t mean to, but I came up short. I admit it—I came up short. Right then and there you get your second wind, like God’s breath right in your face, and as long as there’s blood pumping in your veins there’s a way to make it right, there’s a way to make it more than right, because you did the hardest thing in the world, you looked in that mirror and you gave what you saw its rightful name. Hardest thing in the world. Took me years and years to do it, but I got more love in me now than I ever thought possible.” Lorenzo looked at her full on. “Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  She looked straight across the buckled dance floor to the shattered bandshell, gleaming in the moonlight like a crèche of bones, some of the adorning vine leaves fluttering in a sudden gust coming off the bay. Brenda’s eyes were blurred stars, her lips forming half words, the beginnings of thoughts. Lorenzo watched her, waiting, waiting until he got the sense that she had floated off like an untethered balloon, sailing up and out of his grip in this sudden buffet of wind.

  He tracked her gaze. She was looking beyond the bandshell to the upper windows of the Chicago Fire tenement facade, suddenly visible now through the wind-wafted upper branches of the trees. From where they were sitting, the mannequin in the third-story window seemed to sway with the foliage that alternately revealed and obscured her.

  “Brenda, I got that… I got your handbag back from the forensics lab today?” She looked at him, attentive. “They couldn’t really get any kind of prints off it. Not even yours. It was pretty smashed up.”

  “Huh.”

  “But they did find something, unusual about it.” Lorenzo dug in, making her ask.

  “What,” she said, the word sounding like “Huh.”

  “Well, there’s this hidden compartment, like this zippered… Well, you know what I’m talking about.”

  “What.” Breathless.

  “I don’t know how we missed this, and I don’t know who to blame, myself or Crime Scenes… I mean, it was right there.”

  “What.”

  Lorenzo took a breath. “Who’s…” He looked at the name scrawled on the cover of his notebook. “Who’s Magda Bello?”

  “What,” she said yet again, ignoring the question, demanding the punch line.

  “You know anybody named Magda Bello? See, because they found a Social Security card and a driver’s license for her in that zippered compartment.”

  “What are you saying…” She cocked her head, eyes fever-bright. Lorenzo kept silent. “What are you saying…” she asked again, this time a small catch in the back of her throat, a chirrup of tears.

  “I’m just wondering how that could be.”

  “That’s my bag,” she said, sounding both hysterical and numb. “It’s mine.”

  “Yeah, OK, well then, just tell me how those IDs got in there,” he persisted, asking her almost tenderly.

  “I don’t know. How should I know.”

  She began to look around her immediate area with jerky intensity, as if she had just lost an earring, looking everywhere but at him.

  “Brenda…” He laid a light hand on her arm. “This is kind of like our last, quiet talk … Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “I didn’t do it,” she said so flatly that at first Lorenzo thought he had misheard her.

  “What?” he asked, then, “I never said you did.” Then, with the sound of his own heartbeat drumming in his ears, he added, almost as an afterthought, “Didn’t do what?”

  18

  A young boy, hands at his sides, stood on his head in a corner of Cody Martin’s bedroom. Staring at him from under the covers of the lower bunk, Jesse was unable to move, too frightened by the child’s unblinking upside-down eyes—doll’s eyes, devil’s eyes. Wrenching herself awake with a moan, she attempted both to seize the vision before it evaporated and to pry herself free of its exquisite grip. It was 5:00 A.M., the apartment so still she could hear it breathing.

  The night before, when Lorenzo took Brenda out at around eleven o’clock, Jesse had quickly scanned over her first dispatch on Brenda, published in that evening’s Register. Not a word of the Jose-filtered account stuck in her mind.

  She had then prowled through
the rooms, closets, and cabinets of the apartment like a thief, her major find a child’s composition book in which Cody’s name had been scripted, in precise columns, on seven continuous pages. The eighth page was torn out, the ninth blank but bearing the impression from the missing sheet of another word, not quite legible, that word, too, scripted in neat, obsessive rows.

  Also in those exclusive hours, having finished pondering the notebook, Jesse had gotten down on all fours like the cadaver dog and sniffed that spot under the small dining table, absorbing a slight chemical pungency, some cleaning solution, a rug shampoo or deodorizer, any other scent beneath that too fine for her to pick up. As she crawled around the living room, she discovered that no other area of the carpet had quite that same synthetic tang.

  At around midnight, with Lorenzo and Brenda still out, Danny Martin had called. Jesse had listened to his voice coming over Brenda’s Friends of Kent answering machine, teary and raw: “Brenda, I’m going fucking crazy. Please talk to me. Please, Brenda, I love you. I’m sorry for whatever. Please let me help you. Please.”

  When Lorenzo had finally returned Brenda to the apartment a little before one, neither of them had looked at or spoken to Jesse—Lorenzo sullen and mute, immediately doing an about-face and leaving; Brenda, dazed and tottering, her eyes registering the tension of someone poised at the lip of a cliff. Within minutes of her return, Brenda dropped facedown on the pulled-out couch and plummeted into sleep.

  At five o’clock, the bedroom had gathered enough light for Jesse to scratch out her nightmare vision of an inverted Cody, then review her postmidnight notes: “Boy’s name written like a mantra. Other Name??? Ask. Danny on tape Please Please Please.”

  As the early hour attempted to reclaim her, Jesse’s chicken scratch beginning to blur, she became aware of a soft hissing from the living room—whispered words, both intimate and fierce.

  “I got more love in me now than I ever thought possible… ever thought possible.”

  Rolling out of bed, Jesse eased her way across the room. Standing in the doorway, she peered into the living room to see Brenda sitting cross-legged on the sheeted couch, rocking, gesturing, addressing the chalky darkness.

  “… ever thought possible. I got more love in me now…”

  Jesse backstepped to the bunks, reached for her notebook, but then decided it would keep until true daylight.

  By eight o’clock, even with the shades drawn, the sunlight powered its way into the living room like a brass band.

  “Anything else going on out there?” Jesse half whispered into the phone. She sat perched on the arm of the opened convertible, Brenda staring at the far wall, laid out alongside her under multiple blankets.

  “In the world or with this,” Jose said, yawning.

  “With this.” Jesse dropped a hand into Brenda’s hair, fingers sifting through the tangled crop to stroke the damp scalp underneath. Her stomach lurched as she came upon the crusted bump at the top of Brenda’s head.

  “Well.” Jose yawned again. “Some cop got tuned up in Strongarm last night.”

  “Who.”

  “Chuck Rosen? Works the houses?”

  “Bump? The guy they call Bump?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Yeah? Is he OK?” Jesse held back her connection to Bump and his son.

  “He’ll live.”

  “Who’s the actor?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “They catch the guy?”

  “Guys, and nope.”

  “Shit. Why him?”

  “It’s the big pay back. Gotta git revenge.”

  “But why him?”

  “Why ask why? Hey, I’m writing a book, When Good Things Happen to Bad People. What do you think?”

  “What else.”

  “Well, you made the papers.”

  “Which.” Her stomach hovered.

  “Jersey Journal, New York Post.”

  “Why.”

  “You, the cop, Rolonda Watts, preferential treatment.”

  “What else.” She couldn’t pin down what she was asking for right now, the thing that was causing her to panic.

  “What else? What else you looking for?”

  “Read it to me.”

  “Don’t have it. It’s just sour grapes, forget about it. You going out with her on the search?”

  “They’re picking us up at nine.”

  “Don’t lose her.”

  Jesse heard the clatter and snap of Brenda’s Discman revving up. “Gotta go.”

  Twenty minutes later, after helping her get dressed, Jesse escorted Brenda down the gloomy stairs. Five sport-jacketed men carrying metallic suitcases passed them in the vestibule on their way up.

  Brenda dug in by the mailboxes. “Are they here for me?”

  Jesse, recalling the dull, molten look in Lorenzo’s eyes when he returned Brenda to her apartment last night, knew that they were. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, thinking, Phase 2: The Search Warrant. She was sure that by the end of the day, there would be a press leak regarding the difficulty officials were having confirming Brenda’s version of events.

  Turning up the volume of her Discman for her, Jesse looped an arm through the crook of Brenda’s elbow and walked her out into the sun. The press was barking blood from behind a police barricade, all questions and commentary melding into a vaguely hostile tumult of words. The day was blinding. Jesse raised a shading hand to her brow and was promptly whacked in the gut with a folded Jersey Journal flung newsboy-style, someone in the mob drawling, “Read all about it.”

  Without relinquishing her grip on Brenda’s elbow, Jesse stooped to retrieve the paper, then scoured the crowd, not for the assailant but for their ride out of here. She spotted Louis, Karen’s husband, sidestepping through the press, the sunlight bouncing off his brilliantined hair, turning it fluid and sparkling.

  They rode in the back of the Friends of Kent van, the German shepherd in the shotgun seat. The dog stared at them crinkled-eyed, his tongue hanging out of his panting mouth, quivering and wet, like a dying fish. Already exhausted by the day, Brenda sat hunched over, burying herself in the music. Big Maybelle’s “Candy” came through the phones loud enough for Louis to look back at them through his rearview mirror, his expression somewhere between suspicious and intrigued.

  Ignoring both of them, Jesse pored over the Journal, looking to name her dread, skimming articles about the arrest of Curious George Howard, the liberation march in Armstrong, the prosecutor giving another press conference, Bump getting pounded. Jesse lingered over that one, stalling on the word “hospitalized,” searching for the specific injuries. Then her eye caught the header she was really looking for, REPORTER-DETECTIVE LINK QUESTIONED, and she anxiously speed-read the graphs, the tone of the piece an objective whine. Coming to the end of it, she felt almost embarrassed, having feared that her childlessness would be newsworthy. Paranoia, in her experience, was almost always grandiose.

  “Is the, is Lorenzo going to be there?” Brenda asked Jesse.

  “I think he’s busy doing other stuff on this today.”

  Brenda nodded.

  “Hey Brenda?” Jesse eased into it. “I saw you had this notebook lying out last night. You know, with Cody’s name in it? Was there another name in there? I couldn’t—”

  “It wasn’t lying out,” she said, low-keyed but sharp.

  “I’m sorry, I was just, I just came across it, but was there another, you know…”

  Brenda let a half mile roll past before speaking again. “There’s three parts to your life,” she announced quietly. “Before you have a child, after you have a child… and when you have a child no more.”

  When Louis pulled into the parking lot of Saint Agnes Church, Jesse took in what appeared to be a massive combination yard sale, bake sale, and voter registration drive. From her vantage point in the rear of the parked van, she began scrawling a quick inventory of what she saw—perhaps two hundred people, hemmed in by card tables laden with coffee, pastrie
s, Gatorade, pyramids of insect repellent, and stacks of cellophane-wrapped white paper jumpsuits. There were two registration tables manned by elderly women, the sign-in sheets bordered by piles of Cody-feeding-the-goat buttons. A third table was covered with first aid supplies—salt tablets, disinfectants, and various-sized gauze wrappings and bandages.

  “I think I’d like Lorenzo to be here,” Brenda said gingerly. “His name’s Lorenzo, right?”

  “Yeah, well, like I said, I believe he’s doing his thing today,” Jesse said.

  “Doing his thing,” Brenda repeated with faint bitterness.

  Louis sat patiently in the driver’s seat, the three of them waiting for Karen to come out of a hand-holding prayer circle with the other women who had come to Brenda’s house last night. This solemn ceremony was taking place now in a far corner of the lot.

  Jesse eyed a gray-haired woman in jeans standing to the side of the medical supplies table, who seemed to be taking medical histories and occasional blood pressure readings.

  There were priests and Portosans, satellite trucks and shooters. A soundman tripped and knocked over a cardboard barrel stuffed with headless broomsticks, and Jesse was startled when Ben materialized out of the crowd to right the merchandise. The barrel bore a gummed label: GOD BLESS CODY MARTIN—TRUE VALUE HARDWARE.

  “Do you believe in heaven and hell?” Brenda asked calmly.

  “Me?” Jesse asked. “Why?”

  “Jews don’t believe in heaven and hell, right?”

  “To tell you the truth? I have no idea. Why?” Brenda shrugged, closed her eyes.

  From behind the lightly tinted window of the van, Jesse recognized herself in the other print reporters, every one of them looking slagged out, with faces the color of pancake batter, pants hanging wrinkled and shapeless over their shoes, as if they had been slept in. Clutching notebooks and Styrofoam cups of coffee, crullers, bananas, and muffins, they staggered around stuffing their faces with whatever was on the tables, eating and drinking as if by reflex—for strength, out of boredom.