Freedomland

by Richard Price

  As Lorenzo pulled up alongside the church, he saw that the parking lot was overflowing with volunteers, the primary vibrations coming off that teeming square those of hyped boredom and physical distress, the people more than ready to roll.

  As he hauled himself out of the car, the heat hit him like a hangover. Scanning the scene, he spotted a gaggle of Kenters hovering by the open side panel of their red van. Lorenzo assumed that Brenda was holed up in there, an animal trapped in its own burrow. Searching for Karen, he found Jesse instead, staring at him with concern from across the hood of his car.

  “You look like shit,” she said.

  Lorenzo shrugged, then coughed, his lungs feeling as if they had been scoured with steel wool, the sensation having less to do with the asthma than with the promiscuous overuse of that piece-of-shit inhaler. He stood spread-legged, sun-dazed, staring straight through Jesse and breathing open-mouthed like a beached fish, as if his nostrils were inadequate for the task.

  “Hey.” Karen abruptly materialized before him from out of the mob. “Glad you could come. You ever do this before?”

  Lorenzo wiped the sweat from his eyes. “Found a body in a junkyard once.”

  “Yeah?” Karen squinted. “Were you in Vietnam?”

  “I believe I was.” He massaged his chest. “But if I was, I was too high to remember any of it.”

  “You too, huh?” Karen laughed, a guttery rumble that, despite his distress, kind of piqued his interest.

  “Where she at?” Lorenzo started to move for the red van. “In there?”

  Karen reached out. “Hold on,” she said, snagging his elbow. “We’ll go over, say hello, but then like I told you on the phone, I want you to hang back today, OK? You can stay with me.” Although he understood her motives, Lorenzo shot her a look both quizzical and territorial. “Trust me on this,” she said. “It’s enough she knows you’re here.”

  A moment later, peering into the cool dark of the van, he saw Brenda pretty much as he had imagined her, raccoon-eyed and taut, fending off the world and all its treacherous kindness. “Hey,” he wheezed, stooping over, his palms pressed into his kneecaps.

  “Are you going out?” Brenda asked in a hoarse rasp of her own.

  “I will if you will.” He grinned encouragingly, his lungs feeling both puffed and dented. Standing back up, he tottered sideways, the parking lot coming at him like a dream, Lorenzo thinking, And this stuff here is paved.

  The broad center drive of the Chase Institute campus, which began on the other side of an unlocked mesh fence three blocks from the church, was flanked by low brush; beyond that lay thick woods and the crumbling limestone remains of abandoned cottages. The procession of volunteers and media people stretched in an undulating formation that lurched, pinched, and bulged like heated wax. Despite the humidity-drunk straggle of the line, the volunteers had been specifically assigned placement in the march, shaped up by platoon in the order of designated search areas. Every fifty yards, the front two groups would peel off, one to each side of the road, then hop into their tick suits, broom handles clattering and rolling away from them, as their team leaders gave last-minute lectures.

  Karen’s group, smaller than the others, consisting of Marie, Teenie, Brenda, Jesse, Lorenzo, and Elaine, was at the tail end of the parade. Lorenzo overheard so many roadside briefings as they trudged along that after a while he felt he could lead a search party on his own. Shooters and reporters assigned to groups farther ahead in the procession tended to furtively drag their feet until they found themselves abreast of Brenda, then took some quick footage or barked some hit-and-run questions before Karen chased them off.

  Brenda herself was in Discman mode again, staggering forward, her face opalescent, bubbling with sweat, incapable in Lorenzo’s estimation, of finding a lump of coal in a snowball right now. Sporadically, she would throw him a nervous glance, but Lorenzo abided by Karen’s request and kept his distance, only once getting close enough to hear the music leaking out of her headphones, different from the usual, religious and grand.

  “How long you think this will take,” Lorenzo asked Karen, as they reached the simmering crest of a long, tortuous rise in the road.

  “That depends on Brenda,” Karen said.

  “I’m just asking—” Lorenzo cut himself off to conserve his wind, willing himself to refrain from taking another hit of his spray.

  “OK, guys.” Karen steered them to the edge of the road. All the squads that had been ahead of them were gone now, having suited up and followed their leaders into the woods.

  Lorenzo watched as Jesse eased the packaged paper suit from beneath Brenda’s elbow, dropped to one knee before her, and flapped it full-length out of its machine-precise fold. “Raise up.” She patted Brenda’s calf, waiting to work one leg of the suit over a sneaker. “Hold on to my shoulder.” As ponderous as a circus elephant, Brenda lifted her left foot, lost her balance, and fell backwards onto a ledge of bramble. Jesse twisted around and looked up at Karen. “She’s in no shape for this.”

  “Why don’t you let Elaine help her out.” Karen nodded to the woman whom Lorenzo considered the eeriest Kenter, trim, humorless, gray-haired, but with a startlingly young face, all eyes and clenched jaw muscles. When he had been introduced to her the night before, she neither shook his hand nor looked him in the eye.

  “Jesse, you go with Teenie and Marie,” Karen said. Jesse seemed stricken by the suggestion but was gently hustled away by the mother-daughter team before she could register a word of protest, the smooth play evoking in Lorenzo the notion of slick bouncers, top-notch people handlers, their one-track sense of mission granting them a kind of psychological brawn.

  “So you never did this before, huh?” Karen asked Lorenzo, as she knelt before him and worked the suit up over a size-thirteen construction boot.

  “Hell, no. I’m a city boy born and bred,” he drawled, embarrassed by Karen’s having to help him suit up. “You do your canvass last night?”

  “Yup.” Karen worked on his second bootie, Lorenzo almost tipping over, his asthma making him feel, as it often did, like his body was some kind of inflated cage.

  “And?”

  “Nothing.”

  Lorenzo grunted.

  “You surprised?” she murmured.

  “Well, I’ll tell you.” He reached down and worked the suit up his legs. “Come this afternoon? FBI’s gonna come in and take over.”

  “The Seventh Cavalry, huh?” Karen worked on her own suit.

  “I don’t know about all that,” he muttered, experiencing once again how truly loath he was to hand Brenda over, call it quits.

  “You see those three idiots with the machetes?”

  Karen pointed out a trio of tricked-out rangers, replete with maroon berets, hacking their way through the brush about fifty yards away. “We always get a few like that,” she said, zipping herself into the suit, then pulling up the hood. “Rambo knives, berets, full camo. I promise you, they’ll be the first to fold. We got retirees out in these woods that are gonna last twice as long as those clowns.”

  Zipping himself in, Lorenzo felt the heat treble, trapped and recirculating inside the paper, felt even his shins dripping, the factory smell of the pulpy-textured material like shredded cedar, adding a layer of suffocation all its own.

  “Yeah, there you go.” Karen pulled up his hood for him, tying the drawstring under his chin. “We have something like a thousand of these in my basement. Didn’t pay a dime. These broomsticks? The Gatorade? The buttons, the coffee, the fruit, the pastry? We pay for them with certificates of appreciation. Everybody wants to go to heaven.”

  Twenty yards away, Elaine was working the elasticized wrists of the suit over Brenda’s bandaged hands. Swaddled in white, Brenda looked like a penitenté. Several yards beyond them, he saw Jesse, eyes trained anxiously on Brenda and Elaine, being worked into a suit by Marie.

  “You sure I got to wear this?” Lorenzo licked his heat-caked lips. “Because I’m feeling a little cl
oudy in the chest.”

  “If you don’t,” Karen said, producing an aerosol can, “you’ll be sorry. Close your mouth and cover your eyes.” She sprayed Lorenzo’s face with insect repellent, then the backs of his hands, Lorenzo getting a taste on his lips, bitter and wrong. “Here you go,” she said, handing him a broomstick. “Walk where I walk.”

  Lorenzo saw, sliding through a break in the brush behind Karen, Elaine leading Brenda by the hand, steering her around brambles and stumps. Elaine was wearing jeans and, despite the heat, a turtle-neck.

  “Where’s her suit?” Lorenzo asked, pointing.

  Karen turned. “Elaine?” She fanned away something with wings. “Elaine doesn’t wear suits. She says they get in the way of her instincts.”

  “Jesus,” Marie muttered, her team catching up to them, Jesse bringing up the rear. “Anything taking a bite out of Elaine’d go insane.”

  “We kind of give Elaine her head,” Teenie added.

  “Yeah?” Lorenzo gasped. “Why is that?” He realized within a few steps that he needed the stick as much for support as for exploration.

  “Because,” Karen said, “Elaine’s son was, was abducted.”

  Lorenzo was surprised that Karen, of all people, had trouble saying that word. Teenie and Marie peeled off again, began staking out their turf, Jesse reluctantly tagging after them.

  “About four years ago, in Nutley?” Karen began, her eyes searching the forest beneath her feet. “It was like our second or third kid. We were pretty raw, but we gave it our all. We combed every goddamned forest, field, drainpipe, creek, bay, everywhere, and she was with us every minute. And, you know, we still post flyers, get, you know, computer-generated portraits with age enhancements posted around, but Elaine, we kind of adopted her. She comes to us, says, ‘If I can’t find mine, let me help find someone else’s,’ goes out on every search, never gets tired, and, you know, off the record? I think we’re the only thing that keeps her from doing herself in. Broke up with her husband, I don’t even think she has custody of the kids. Maybe she does now, I’m not—”

  “Why’d you put her with Brenda?” he asked, inhaling something that flew into his mouth, his eyes instantly filling with tears as he tried to bring it back up.

  “You OK?”

  “Why?” he persisted, in a hoarse strangle.

  “Why?” Karen shrugged. “Sympathy.” Lorenzo hunched over and coughed out something small and black, the effort jacking his pulmonary distress up another notch. “Let me tell you something about searches like this,” Karen said, her eyes still trained on the ground. “This place, Chase, it looks enormous, right? It’s not that bad. When you got a road like the one we just came off of? We usually never look more than two, three hundred feet from that road, you know, on either side.” She poked through a thick mat of last year’s fallen leaves until she hit the unbroken topsoil. “I mean, basically, you just get off the road and look for the first line of heavy cover. You know, brush, overgrowth, whatever…”

  Lorenzo could hear a mosquito singing inside his hood, slapped himself upside the head, then hunched over again, clutching his knees, taking five. Karen waited for him.

  “We figure, somebody’s gonna transport the body, they use a car, need a road. Then they’re gonna have to go in somewheres where they can have privacy for twenty, thirty minutes for the burial. But if it’s more than three hundred feet from the car, they have to be Superman, so they’re going to look for a spot not too far but far enough. So ninety percent of the time? We’re talking two, three hundred feet from the road. On the other hand”—she hesitated, drew a breath—“today I think we’ll go into it a little deeper than usual.”

  “You tell people they’re looking for a body?” He peered up at her from his resting crouch.

  “Hell no. I tell them we’re looking for clothes, we’re looking for signs of human habitation, we’re looking for any kind of, of discordance in nature. You never tell people you’re looking for a body. Never.”

  Lorenzo watched Elaine lead Brenda down a slight berm to a shallow, brackish stream, Elaine clearing it in one stretched stride. Brenda, staring straight ahead, stumbled, went down on one knee into the water, stood up, and staggered on, docile and blind, the leg of her suit streaming a muddy drool.

  “Hey.” Lorenzo touched Karen’s arm, laughed his angry laugh. “You see that? What you doin’ to her?” he said, trying to come off affable.

  “We’re helping find her child,” she answered evenly. “Watch your step.”

  Jesse, Marie, and Teenie came crackling through some underbrush, emerging a few yards from Lorenzo and Karen, mother and daughter tight-lipped with concentration, eyes trained like beams as they poked and sorted through the ground before them. Jesse had eyes only for Brenda, Lorenzo recognizing in her anxious, possessive gaze his own agitated sense of being off balance out here in this world of surly nature and hidden agendas.

  Through the trees, he could see other volunteers, dozens of them working their respective turfs—walking, prodding, cautiously forging ahead in silence, the baggy-hooded white tick suits evoking in Lorenzo’s mind a B-movie impression of soldier-scientists tentatively advancing on a meteorite or a downed spaceship. Karen stopped by a cluster of tin cans, their labels obliterated by a uniform orange coat of rust. Using her stick to separate them, she rejected her find: too old.

  Picking up the drone of a nonstop mutter, Lorenzo turned to see Elaine, several yards to the left, leading Brenda by the wrist now and maintaining some kind of monologue. Brenda trailed her with a floppy skip, trying not to fall again. A finger of sweat sluiced its way from the nape of Lorenzo’s neck to the waist of his boxers, then ran horizontally along the damp band. He took a small hit of spray, which did nothing but set his already inflamed bronchial passages on fire.

  “You want to know how to look?” Karen asked, eyeing a downed candelabra of branches, then squinting up at the tree from which it had broken off. “It’s easy, it’s like meditation. You do it enough, your brain can go off, have sex or something, your eyes’ll go on automatic pilot. First thing, you look for contrast—dark, light, smooth, rough. You look for rich grass, deep green, greasy-looking, fertile-looking, in a place where all the other grass is pale and scrubby. You look for flowers where you shouldn’t expect to see them. Like here…” Karen took Lorenzo by the elbow, brought him over to a clump of tiger lilies growing on a slant off the raised lip of a depression. “What the hell are these doing here?” Karen asked, frowning at their ruddy splay. “It’s not the kid. He’s not going to grow flowers after only a few days, but that’s the idea, see?”

  She began to move on, but suddenly she backtracked to the tiger lilies, a scowl on her face. “Well, something’s making this grow.” She tore off two feet of orange hazard tape and tied it to the nearest tree. “We’ll just put a dog-ear on that, come back later.”

  “Whoo…” Lorenzo exhaled softly, a cry for help made ineffective by pride.

  “And you look for heel marks.” Karen said, continuing her lesson. “A body is heavy. The guy’s gonna sink a little carrying it, even if it’s a child, because you got to remember they’ve been carrying that kid all the way from the car, so they’re gonna start getting a little lead in the legs.”

  “Huh,” Lorenzo said, seeing Brenda through the dapple, the very thought of breaking her down right now, the stamina that would require, making him buckle at the knees.

  “You look for reddish soil—that’s subsoil—clay balls. Guy digs a grave, he’s flipping the layers of soil. You see any color that’s different from the surrounding earth? Could be, could be. That’s how we found Kent. I saw the, the red, I saw the clay balls, I saw—” Karen cut herself off, made the sign of the cross so quickly Lorenzo almost didn’t catch it.

  “See, let me explain something. Most people, they say we’re trying… they say, like, we’re crackpots. They try to cubbyhole us, try to dismiss our, our, commitment.”

  “Huh,” Lorenzo grunted, not really list
ening, just trying to breathe.

  “They say we’re bored housewives, we’re compensating, we’re trying to make our own lives a little more interesting to ourselves. Well, I will grant them this. Finding a lost child? Alive occasionally? It does kind of make your day.”

  Off to the left, Lorenzo saw Brenda flop on a stump, her head between her knees, Elaine standing over her, mouth still going. Lorenzo could faintly pick up the monotonal flow, as steady and driving as the heat.

  “Bored,” Karen said acidly. “You see Teenie over there? Her daughter, her girl, has got Down’s syndrome, OK? Teenie’s brothers? She’s got two brothers. Bobby, he’s a lawyer, and James, he’s retarded, he still lives at home with Marie, his mom. Another woman, Grace? She’s in the hospital right now, her kid’s got CP. My son, Pete?” Karen shot a quick glance in Jesse’s direction, her face tightening. “The point is, Kent? The first boy we found? He had Down’s syndrome too. Are you hearing this, Lorenzo? Down’s syndrome, cerebral palsy, retardation—don’t you think that each and every one of us has our hands full at home? Don’t you think each and every one of us wouldn’t kill for some kind of vacation? Go out, get bombed, sleep late, have a sex life, for Christ’s sakes… But with Kent, with our own kids, it’s the helplessness that gets to you. Some bastard taking advantage of that helplessness. So we do it out of rage… And we do it out of love.”