Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “Brenda,” Lorenzo began again, eyes irresistibly sliding to the time. “I hear everything you’re saying, but right now I’m gonna need you to start talking about three nights ago. You got to start telling me about that.”

  She didn’t respond at first, just sat there staring at Lorenzo’s chest, lips moving, forming words that gradually became audible and coherent.

  “He wouldn’t go down, Cody…I had already dosed him, Billy was waiting in the car, but Cody just wouldn’t go down. And that night, I knew that Billy was just on the verge of breaking it off with me, going back to Felicia whole hog, and I had to get down there. I had to talk to him but Cody just wouldn’t fall asleep, and I just said, Fuck it, I got to go. And the thing of it is, I was even kind of relieved that Billy was finally dumping me. Kind of, you know, taking me out of my misery, so, it was probably the last time I’d ever leave him, my son, alone, it was probably the last…” She went away, came back. “But he wouldn’t go down. He wouldn’t. So after a while I just said to him, ‘I have to go downstairs, you be a good boy and go to sleep.’ And, he was, he was furious. He said to me, ‘I don’t want you to go,’ but like a man would say it. He said, ‘I know where you’re going and I don’t want you to go.’

  “I know where you’re going…” Lorenzo repeated.

  “The thing with Cody? You have to understand what it felt like for him. I had made him the center of my world, right? So like his whole world, was me. He has no father, I wouldn’t let him see his grandmother, I wouldn’t let him—I mean, he wasn’t in school yet. Everything was me. It was not, it was love, but it was like crazy love, and now this wraparound mother, me, his whole world, kind of cut out on him, and he was… He felt it right away with Billy. He got angry, he threw tantrums, he got withdrawn, he knew. He knew maybe not about Billy as Billy, but he knew. He felt it right away.

  “And that night.” She paused, rocking a little now, eyes fluttering. “That night he says, ‘I know where you’re going and I don’t want you to go.’ Like, standing there, kind of punchy with the Benadryl, and I want to say to him, ‘Tonight is the last night. Just give me this one last…’ But I don’t say that, I’m too agitated, I’m, I say, ‘You go to sleep, I’ll be back up soon. I promise.’ And he says to me, he says, ‘If you go you’ll be sorry.’ Says it just like some jealous husband: ‘If you go you’ll be sorry’ And I’m, I almost didn’t go. I almost … I had never heard that tone from him. It was so… If he had only sounded more babyish, or more pathetic, maybe I wouldn’t have, but it was so hard, his voice, and it scared me. It, like, repelled me out of the house—but he was only four years old—nobody has to tell me that. And I remember thinking as I’m going down the stairs, I made him sound like that. I’m making him that way. And for maybe the millionth time since I’m with Billy, I’m thinking, like, just in general, I’m fucking up here, I’m really fucking up. Like, going down the stairs, This is bullshit. Total bullshit…” Her rocking picked up a notch.

  “And I get downstairs, and there’s Billy. And he tells me it’s over. He can’t handle both me and Felicia. And I knew this was coming, but I start yelling and crying, you know: ‘You don’t love her, she doesn’t love you,’ blah, blah, blah. And the thing is, I don’t even know why I was kicking up such a fuss. Like I said, I was kind of relieved, but I guess I thought it was required of me or something, or maybe I just… So, blah, blah, blah, for like an hour, and Billy’s a decent guy. He gives me my hour, he doesn’t just, you know, ‘Bye-bye, bitch.’ He takes it from me. I guess he’s feeling like he owes it to me.

  “So we never leave the parking lot all that time, but finally Billy drives off. I’m, I can’t go upstairs just yet, so I walk around for a while, you know, trying to cry, sort out what I’m supposed to be feeling. But finally I go upstairs and—I don’t see him, Cody.” Brenda’s voice took on a fluttery cast. “I look in the bed, I’m, like, He’s hiding.” Lorenzo saw her legs starting to swing against each other.

  “He’s hiding. And, but, it’s OK, because Billy’s over and done with, and now I’m kind of, of lighthearted about it, relieved, and I know he’s mad at me, Cody, and he’s trying…” Her hands flew to her face, tamping tears. “He’s trying to, you know, scare me or punish me, but it’s OK, it’s OK. I deserve it and, like I said, I’m kind of happy because now we’re… It’s gonna get back now, it’s gonna be better, and I’m going, ‘Cody Cody’ like playing, like, ‘Where are you-ou.’ And then I see him. He’s under the…” Brenda jammed up again, bared her teeth. “He’s under the table and I’m… He’s asleep, lying there. And I get down?”

  She slipped off the chair and got on all fours, Lorenzo sliding back. “I go over to… First I thought I should just carry him to bed, then, no, I’m gonna wake him, and I crawl over and the smell. And I put my hand in something wet on the carpet. And I just like shot up under the table.” Brenda sat up, unconsciously touching the crusty gash at the back of her head. “But the smell. The smell was, and then I saw the bottle laying there and… I never touched him, I never. The minute I saw that empty bottle I remembered, you know, ‘If you leave you’ll be sorry’ And I knew. I knew.”

  “Was he alive then?” Lorenzo helped her up to her chair, thinking, Aspiration of the stomach, the boy choking on his own vomit. She stared off, mouth working. “Brenda,” he cautiously pushed. “Was he alive?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “How did you know?” Lorenzo said, envisioning the boy blue and cold to the touch.

  “He was not alive.”

  “Did you try to revive him?”

  “He was not alive.”

  “Tell me how you knew he was not alive.”

  “Because I’m his mom.” The words slipped out through clenched teeth, in a savagely peppy singsong, her eyes glittering, Lorenzo thinking, Suicide watch.

  “I’m his mom,” she repeated in that same sensuous, self-lacerating tone. “And us moms, we know these things.”

  “OK,” Lorenzo said, retreating.

  “He said, ‘If you go you’ll be sorry’ And he was right, he was right. What is that, suicide? No. He didn’t know, he didn’t…I set the pace, I showed him the way, taught him how to be, so you charge me with homicide, you charge me, you fuck me. You do whatever—”

  “Whoa, whoa…” Lorenzo lurched forward, trapped her hands in his own, desperate to shut her up, then keep her talking, keep the information coming. “Brenda, Brenda…”

  “He didn’t know! He didn’t know!” Her voice was a raw squawk, her eyes seeming to wobble in the sockets.

  “Brenda!” Lorenzo barked, a verbal slap. “Brenda! Listen to me. You’re talking about an accident. What you described to me, if it’s true, was an accident.” He withheld from her that, yes, she would initially be charged with homicide—to soothe the rage to come out on the streets tonight, to give the prosecutor a leg up on the plea bargaining. “A tragic accident, Brenda. What you say, it breaks my heart.” Lorenzo stared at her, one hand holding both of hers, the other pressed to his chest. “But you can’t go blaming yourself like that.”

  “Don’t you play me,” she snapped. “Don’t you—”

  “Brenda. We need to keep talking.”

  “About what. What else is there.”

  “I need for you to take me through the night.”

  “I’m done,” she said, looking off furiously, vigorously scratching the side of her head. “So you charge me.”

  No way, not yet, Lorenzo thought, scrambling for the right tack. “Brenda, how do you feel about Billy now?”

  “What?”

  “How do you feel about him going to jail?”

  “Why.”

  “Because if we stop talking right now? I have no choice but to lock him up for conspiracy,” he said, leaving out the nature of that conspiracy: to commit murder. Lorenzo was avoiding that word at all costs right now. “Is that what you want to happen?” She sat up, a slow, reflective uncoiling.

  “Now, if all he did was move a b
ody, I need for you to lay it out for me, blow by blow, because I got to pick him up anyhow, and he can either go home tonight with a desk-appearance misdemeanor or he can go to jail.” Lorenzo was lying to her—Billy would be going to County no matter what she revealed. “Now, what’s gonna determine that judgment on my end is how well his story is gonna match yours. But if you don’t give me a story? Then”—Lorenzo raised helpless hands, dropped them back down to his lap—“in he goes.”

  “Billy,” she said.

  Lorenzo gave her a few seconds. “Does he deserve to go to jail?”

  “No,” she said quietly.

  “Then you got to help me keep him out.” Brenda rested her forehead on the rickety card table. “Brenda?”

  “I was driving. All I remember is putting my hand in something wet. I remember the smell and I remember whacking my head under the table, and then I was driving. I don’t know how. I don’t recall, like, leaving the house, but all of a sudden I’m in, I’m like somewhere in Jersey City. But I turn around and start driving home. I was thinking maybe it was a dream, seeing Cody like that, because I didn’t have any memory of leaving the house, so maybe I wasn’t even there, like I hallucinated the whole thing.

  “So I park in the lot, I go up the stairs and—I don’t go in. He’s, I don’t go in.

  “Then I’m driving again. I’m thinking, Let me just crash, let me just…But I can’t. So what do I do. I think about my mother, my brother, everybody that I have spent my entire life trying to escape from, all of these people staring at me, scrutinizing me, knowing me—everybody, like, converging on me. Like, locking me in. I mean, all my life these people… And I’m telling myself, Just crash the car. I’m, Just fucking die. But then I think, if I die, then he dies in me, within me, like…” She paused, then repeated, quoting herself with disgust, “He dies in me. Jesus Christ.”

  “Hey.” Lorenzo offered her an open hand, restraining himself from saying something like, “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “And I’m in, like, this fog, this fog, and I find myself near Freedomtown. You have to understand, everything I do, everywhere I go, I’m—it’s not like, it’s like an animal. And I go in there, I’m in there, and I’m down on the ground, clawing, you know, making…

  “And then I’m in front of my house again and I go upstairs. I go in, but I don’t look at him. I can’t. And then I’m out, I’m out, and I drive. I’m driving to Billy’s house, his mother’s house, but he’s not there, and then I drive back and I call Felicia’s house, and if—I’m hoping he picks up, because if Felicia picks up, but he does and when I said Cody, what happened to Cody, he hung up on me. He hung up, but he called me back, he called… and he believed me. He didn’t, you know, challenge me. And I told him—I tried to—I think I tried to convince him it was his fault too. I don’t remember exactly. I mean I’m floating, my body is floating, my mouth is floating… But he came, he came. I was watching from across the street and I saw him get out of a cab and I saw him go up to my house, up the stairs, and he came down with… And he got in my car and he drove off and he—I guess I told him where to go because…”

  She made a vague gesture indicating, Lorenzo guessed, Freedomtown.

  “The stones. I guess he did that. Made it proper.” She was crying again. “And he had my car. I don’t know what he did with it. And I couldn’t go back up there. I, even with… So I took a cab to Jersey City and I checked into a motel near the tunnel and I was just sitting there in my room—my head’s like—and I remember I went out about midnight and I’m going—I go into this 7-Eleven and I come out with a bottle of Clorox, I guess to, you know, but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t. And I stayed up and, like, the room had two beds—it was one of those rooms with two big beds—and I just, I laid in one, then I laid in the other, I laid in one, I laid in the other. That’s what I remember, going from bed to bed. I had the Clorox in the bathroom, and every hour or so I’d go in there. I turned on the TV one time, I remember that, you know, to see if… And the next day, I went to work. I just went to work. I had this weird—I just floated through the day. I couldn’t, I was immune from everybody. Just floated. I can’t remember much. I know I called him at his mother’s house, Billy.”

  The thumbtack call, Lorenzo thought, envisioning her in the Study Club that day, her haunches embedded with pushpins, Shamiel crying.

  “And Billy, he was sobbing. He was hysterical, but I can’t tell you anything he said, because I just… And that night, I went back to the motel and I was just sitting there again and the cleaning lady, the maid? She had made the beds and whatever, and she left the Clorox in the bathroom. My bottle of Clorox, and in my mind it was like she knew that it was mine, not the hotel’s, she knew why I had bought it, and she had left it there for me, like, ‘Go ahead, do it, do it.’ And I got so scared of dying, of judgment… and I got out of there and I just did what I did.”

  “What.”

  “I took a cab over to Armstrong and I just sat up on the Conrail tracks, and I must’ve figured out what I was going to do but I can’t remember thinking about it. It was like automatic pilot. Like, I don’t know whose handbag that was—you gave me the name. I thought it was empty. I saw it just lying there in the dirt by the parking lot of the motel. I had it with me, but I can’t remember coming on it and thinking, like, Hey, I’ll use that handbag. But I had it with me. I remember when I found it, it looked like someone had already backed over it in the motel lot, and so I took it with me and I was up there on the tracks and at some point I came down to the buildings and I walked over to the park there, Martyrs, and I tossed the bag in the dirt. I got down on my knees there and I just started jamming my hands in the shit. Just started scraping them, like, shoving them into the dirt, like… And they were fucked up from Freedomtown, you know, from digging in Freedom… And I just, just, mauled myself. I got—I wanted every fucking broken, rusted—I wanted it all in my skin, all of it. And then I walked up through the Bowl, and I guess I knew I was headed for the hospital, and I guess I knew what I was going to say when I got there, but I don’t ever remember knowing the story—the, the lie—before it came out of my mouth. I was, I was just so scared of people, like, seeing me and owning me—my mother, my brother, everybody judging me—of being judged, and if I think of it now I would have to say somewhere in my head I knew that Armstrong…” She paused, exhaling heavily. “Judgment on Armstrong had been passed a long time ago.

  “I mean, Armstrong was, like, buckshot with judgment. And so maybe it could absorb just one more hard knock. And that, that nobody, no individual would really get hurt by it, and that I could, like, go on, you know, in some way go on with some kind of life, but, no. No. You can’t.” Brenda shifted gears, spoke to his eyes now. “I never thought that all this would happen. The newspapers, I swear to you.”

  “OK.”

  “I would have never—”

  “OK,” Lorenzo said, not wanting to hear it. For a moment, a silence came down on them so absolute that Lorenzo began to imagine he could hear the breathing, the collective breathing that encircled this room.

  “Billy,” she said, breaking the spell. “The thing about Billy? That night at the hospital, when you came? You took me back to my apartment, and I hadn’t, I hadn’t been there since I saw Cody. And when we came in, I was expecting it to be, to have that smell. To have—I expected to see things there, still there. But the place was clean, it was clean, so Billy, he had to have come back to my place after. He had to have come back and cleaned up for me. I guess so that I wouldn’t have to… that had to have been… he did that. For me. And what did that cost him, you know, take out of him, Billy. If I had to pick someone to get all bent out of shape over—I mean, coming back to my place like that? He had that in him, you see. He had that.”

  Lorenzo’s pager finally went off. He glanced down and saw three twos coming up on his hip.

  “What,” Brenda said, flat and breathless.

  “What?”

  “What was that.
They have Cody?”

  “Brenda.” Lorenzo reached out to touch her arm. “Listen, listen, listen…”

  “Is he OK?”

  “What?”

  “What does he look like?” Brenda inched forward on her chair, the skin around her eyes a papery gray.

  “Brenda.” Lorenzo reached for the tape recorder, thinking, Hurry.

  “What did I do,” she said with hollow awe.

  “Brenda. This is not my call.” Lorenzo quickly slipped in a tape. “This is coming from the prosecutor. But at this point I’m going to have to charge you with homicide. Now, personally, I have no reason to, to, disbelieve anything you told me.”

  “If you think about it, the whole planet is dying,” she said quickly. “What’s out there now. Pollution, AIDS, drugs. This is what’s waiting for them out there.” She was talking to the far wall, Lorenzo again thinking, Hurry.

  “But because of all the, the obstruction you put in our paths, Brenda, this is what’s required of me. Do you understand what I’m saying?” But she was elsewhere, inside herself or back out at the Chicago Fire. “Now, my guess is, in a few days, once the forensics is done? The charge is gonna get downgraded, but—”

  “I think,” Brenda interrupted, “I think I painted my son in kind of an idealized light, you know, because of what I did.” Her voice was high and drifting. “He was a very difficult child, Cody. I’m not saying it was his fault that he was that way, but he was an angry child. He had a lot of anger.”

  “Now here’s the thing.” Lorenzo hurried past her words, rested a hand on the recorder. “We have to go on tape. And the reason we have to do this is because, if I say what your story was, you know, with no proof of your words, no documentation, people are gonna give us both the brush-off. Everybody is gonna say that I’m covering for you, that I feel sorry for you. See, I’m already in some hot water with a lot of people over this. People have been telling me all along I’m some kind of big-time fool for buying your other story. So for both our benefits, we got to get this down on tape, in your own words, OK?” She stared past him, whispering something, Lorenzo knowing he was saying all this just because this was how you did it. “Now, once we get it down, we’ll play it back, listen to it. We can change, correct, add anything you want, OK? But this is the only way I can help you now, all right? Now once I got this going? Alls you got to do is tell me what happened, just like you already did. Just tell me again.”