Freedomland

by Richard Price

  Lorenzo, overwhelmed, in a state of detached awe, stood before the offspring of Brenda Martin’s desperate reflex, a teeming litter of incident and outrage, enough fodder here for a dozen more marches, charges, countercharges, commissions, investigations, indictments, headlines, midnight negotiations, and political swap meets, Lorenzo sagging, so tired, thinking, To Hover and Protect, choosing his words carefully as he addressed himself: It’s an impractical motto.

  As he turned back toward Armstrong, Lorenzo’s mouth abruptly filled with the taste of coins. He lost his sight and slid into a daydream. When his vision returned a few seconds or a few minutes later, he touched his scalp and his hand came away sticky. He took a stagger step backwards and slipped on an unopened glass bottle of Coke covered with blood. Moving like an old man now, he eased himself down on a Martyrs Park bench, looked up, and saw that camo-wearing son of a bitch he had braced before the march, the one he’d asked to drink his soda right then, the one who’d responded, “I ain’t thirsty yet.” The kid, meeting Lorenzo’s brain-drunk gaze, cringed as if in apology, the thrown bottle most likely intended for someone else. Then one of his crew hauled on his arm and he vanished.

  Lorenzo sat there on the bench, blacked out, came to, blacked out, came to again and again, each state lasting only seconds. He saw a number of things, not sure if they were from inside his concussed head or from the real world: he saw the Reverend Longway sitting in the dirt of the park, slump-shouldered and stunned; saw Jesse, in the manner of someone about to spew toothpaste into a sink, thrust her head forward, cheeks bulging, and drool blood into her cupped palms; saw Curious George, ducking the drama, leaning out Miss Dotson’s window, sipping a beer and tapping cigarette ash onto his grandmother’s mound of butts down below; saw Brenda Martin or that Brenda Martin-looking woman as she strolled out along Hurley Street, turned a corner, and disappeared; and finally, just before the last black wave put him to sleep for the better part of the next thirty-six hours, he saw the Conrail train, roaring past Armstrong, and it was on fire.

  He didn’t know if it was truly on fire or if the train was just coming directly out of the sunset, but it appeared to him, right then, as a monstrous flaming arrow, arching toward Newark like an omen, a portent.

  You do what you can do—Lorenzo going down now, his inner voice coming at him, dozy and distant—that’s all you can do…

  Part Four

  Steal Away

  32

  The wake for Cody Martin was held on Saturday, the Fourth of July from nine to noon, restricted to family and friends. The Manganaro Funeral Home looked as if it were hosting a movie premiere, the short red carpet that ran from the curb to the glass doors lined six-deep with media and civilians.

  To be admitted, guests had to wear the orange Velcro disc that had been delivered to their homes the evening before, and this admissions procedure yielded a sparse, erratic procession of gray-faced middle-aged couples—aunts and uncles, Jesse assumed, maybe a few retired cops, cronies of Brenda’s late father. There were also a number of younger, Danny Martin-aged cops, accompanied by their wives or girlfriends. No one brought children.

  Jesse saw at least two reporters sporting pilfered Velcro buttons, both of them heads-down, solemn-faced, as they crashed the show.

  Most of the local people in the crowd, murmuring and nodding, seemed to recognize the invited mourners, but the media response to their arrival was subdued. When Danny Martin finally pulled up front, exiting the car and swinging around the front end to open the door for his mother, there was a great surge forward to preserve the moment on film. Danny wore a bronze-toned, too-long double-breasted suit, the cuffs brushing his knuckles. As a result of his dustup with Curious George, the bridge of his nose was cross-taped and there were broad sepia swaths under his eyes. He seemed to have grown jowls overnight, and he needed a shave.

  Brenda’s mother, Elaine, hid behind makeup and enormous sunglasses as her son escorted her to the door. Jesse noticed that her mouth hung open, like that of an elderly person trying to negotiate breathing and walking at the same time.

  Five minutes after Danny and his mother arrived, the Gannon chief of police, the chief of detectives, and the mayor rolled up in separate cars. These men seemed to be the last of the invitees, and the press wound up staring at one another across the red carpet, a few turning to pump one of the funeral directors, who had come outside to check the action. The guy seemed to be enjoying all the drama, but was apologetically unwilling to give any details about what was going on inside the chapel.

  Glancing across the divide of the red carpet to the other half of the crowd, Jesse spotted a vaguely familiar face, an olive-skinned man, late thirties, forty, possibly Latino, whose goatee and short hair were shot through with streaks of gray. As if sensing Jesse’s attention, he looked directly at her, and she recalled who he was—bachelor number two, the second possible deep throat from McCoy’s, the one who had bolted out of the bar when she approached his table. On the heels of this recognition came an intuitive epiphany, Jesse knowing without a doubt that this guy was Ulysses Maldonado, Cody’s biological father, the man who was supposed to be somewhere in Puerto Rico.

  Jesse made a move to cross the carpet, to approach him, but, as if reading her mind, Ulysses locked eyes with her, shook his head no, and held up a hand, signaling her to keep away.

  As she stepped back in place—the other reporters circling the funeral director, trying to squeeze him for details, for images—a tricked-out Range Rover pulled up to the curb, three black men inside. The one in the shotgun seat yelled out, “Yeah, see how many a you motherfuckers gonna show up for Millrose’s funeral,” the driver, leaning across to the passenger window, adding, “That bitch killed Millrose too.”

  The locals reacted instantly, throwing garbage, stones, tin cans, whatever was at hand, and the Range Rover had to floor it.

  Edwin “Millrose” Carter: there would be hell to pay for last night’s lone fatality, not so much for the death itself but for the difficulty in assigning blame. The blow that had caved in Millrose’s skull could have come from a number of things, and although the smart money was on a Gannon baton, he could just as easily have been clocked by a chunk of cement, a hurled bottle like the one that clocked Lorenzo—And eyewitnesses had testified that the victim himself had set off the free-for-all by punching the cop, the coroner adding to the tangle by announcing that the body had close to six shots of hard liquor in its system, or a bottle and a half of wine.

  It had been less than twelve hours since the medical examiner’s pronouncement, but already Jesse could predict that the debate over culpability would go on for years, the trench between the two cities, between the cops and the projects people growing just a little bit wider for it, a little bit deeper.

  A few minutes later, in the wake of the verbal ambush from the men in the Range Rover, a distant report of staccato pops and cracks had some of the crowd turning in anxious circles. Jesse, too, felt a bubble of panic until she heard someone say dryly, “Fourth of July.” Once the crowd, laughing a little, settled down again, Jesse glanced across the carpeted divide to eyeball Ulysses, to mutely plead for a sit-down, but found that he was no longer there. As she brooded over the lost encounter, two of the younger, bulked-up dark-suited mourners emerged from the funeral home to cop a smoke. The cameras drove them back indoors, one of the guys muttering, “Vultures,” the shooter next to Jesse responding, “Original.”

  The Friends of Kent van then pulled up, Louis at the wheel, Karen and the others—Marie, Teenie, and Elaine—piling out. The women all wore dark skirt suits or dresses, gold Friends of Kent pins catching the sun on their shoulders or at their throats. They made no effort to enter the funeral home, just attached themselves to the rear of the crowd and stood in silence.

  Jesse worked her way back to them, touching Karen on the arm. “Hey,” she whispered, feeling slightly breathless.

  “Hey, Jesse,” Karen responded, her voice subdued but still holding an edge of
ownership. The other women nodded and smiled, Marie leaning over and giving Jesse a dry peck on the cheek.

  “Are you going in?” Jesse was still whispering, although they were outdoors at the rear of a thick crowd.

  “Nah.” Karen shrugged.

  “You’re not on the list?”

  “Nope.” Karen shrugged again. “It’s OK. We’ll pay our respects from here. So how are you doing, Jesse?”

  Touched by the inquiry, Jesse began to gush. “Good. Did you read what I, any of what—”

  “No, I’m not, they don’t sell the Register by me.”

  “Good. I got—you know, I’ve been writing about this all along—and actually I got three job offers.” The offers were more like preliminary feelers, but Jesse, hearing herself, was unable to stop her mouth.

  “Good for you,” Karen said mildly.

  “Yeah, one in Colorado, one—”

  “That’s great.” Karen’s eyes were elsewhere.

  “And,” Jesse went on, begging herself to just shut up, “two in the Sunbelt or something. But I’m not, you know, this is where… it’s flattering, but…”

  “Good for you.”

  “I hope, I think I did you justice.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “You know, maybe, like, I could do a piece on you, the organization. I think it would make, you know…”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “I mean, once the smoke clears,” Jesse said, having no intention of writing something like that. “I think it would help you.”

  “Everything helps.” Karen reached for a tissue, blew her nose.

  “Right, well…” Mortified, Jesse moved away.

  After some time, there was an abrupt exodus from the funeral home—seemingly everybody—Danny and his mother bringing up the rear, the guests offering up mottled and stony faces, no one crying, not one tear but plenty of rage. Puzzled, Jesse checked her watch, confirming that there was still an hour left for the wake. Taking an educated guess about what was happening, she quietly circled around to the rear of the home, where the mortuary wagons made their deliveries, hoisted herself up on a concrete abutment that lay in tree shadow, and waited. To occupy herself, she ran down a postriot tally.

  Last night’s violence had produced only ten arrests. But by this morning, in order to douse any residual embers that might still be glowing out there, the prosecutor had downgraded all the charges to disorderly persons, a matter of desk appearances and fines, seven of the arrestees walking, the remaining three held on outstanding warrants for earlier, unrelated crimes. There were also ten hospitalizations: Lorenzo, concussion; four marchers suffering various cuts and fractures, including a broken ankle and a broken collarbone; three Gannon cops, two treated for back injuries, one for a scratched cornea; Jesse herself, who had received eight stitches inside her cheek; and lastly, that black Dempsy undercover whose spleen had been ruptured by a Gannon baton.

  Hot, fly-buzzed, tired of it all, Jesse let the numbers go and drifted into free association until roughly twenty minutes later, when, as she had anticipated, the Department of Corrections van pulled up to the rear of the mortuary. She watched from the shadows as two sheriffs exited the grill-windowed wagon, came around to the side panel, shoved it back, and literally lifted Brenda, who was shackled at the waist, wrists, and ankles, a single heavy chain running through all the restraint junctions—just hoisted her out of the van and set her down on the asphalt. Two corrections officers came out after her, the four cops together forming a protective diamond. Walking slowly to accommodate her chain-toddling gait, they escorted her to the delivery bay.

  Brenda appeared to be grinning and Jesse was glad that there were no cameras back here, the grin nothing more than a frozen rictus. And, as Danny Martin had seemed to have grown jowls in the last forty-eight hours, Brenda appeared to have greatly thickened through the middle. Jesse was startled by this new bulk before realizing that what had caught her eye was a bulletproof vest.

  Jesse had been hanging around the funeral home since eight o’clock in the morning, figuring that County would have trucked Brenda over then, an hour before the wake was scheduled to begin. That strategy made a lot more sense than showing up in the middle of the service like this, forcing the family to leave the premises, to simply stand around and ponder Brenda, in there all by herself, which only created grief on top of grief, rage on top of rage. Knowing something about the bureaucracy over at the correctional center, though, Jesse could also imagine that Brenda had sat parked in front of the jail for a good couple of hours earlier this morning, waiting for someone to secure a few more signatures on the various temporary release forms.

  Brenda was given exactly twenty-two minutes to say good-bye to her son, and in that time, as word of her arrival leaked out, Jesse was slowly enveloped by the crowd of locals and shooters that had been standing in front. When Brenda finally reappeared with her four-man escort, she was pelted with all the predictable cries: Baby Killer, Bitch, Whore, Die, Baby Killer, Animal, Pig, Die, Die, Baby Killer, Baby Killer.

  Whatever Brenda had experienced inside the Manganaro chapel over the past twenty-two minutes had deepened her involuntary grin, her mouth seeming locked open, her upper and lower jaws slightly askew.

  “Look at her, she’s laughing,” the woman standing next to Jesse sputtered.

  Brenda raised her face to that, looked directly at Jesse without really seeing her. Jesse impulsively whispered, “Hi,” her heart tumbling with incontestable love, the woman saying it again: “She’s laughing.” Jesse ignored Brenda’s jagged joker mouth, stared at her eyes instead; they were wild, like trapped birds, desperate to escape their imprisoning sockets.

  After the wake, not wanting to go home and be alone, Jesse came into the newsroom for the first time in a week. There were a few staffers who congratulated her on her work of the last few days, but most kept their distance, a time-conditioned response to her lone-wolf routine. On some days, the cold shoulder bothered her, on others she couldn’t care less; today it felt bad.

  Jose was not around. She sat in her cubicle and reread the last installment of her at-home vigil with Brenda, scheduled to run in that evening’s edition. She scanned her account of the visit from Karen Collucci and the Friends of Kent—the slow collection of Cody’s clothes for the scent bag, Brenda being persuaded to leave a message for her dead son on the tape recorder, the surprise appearance of the cadaver dog. In hindsight, every uttered word, every glance, every tormented second of Brenda’s lie came back to her in excruciatingly precise detail, and she was awed by Brenda’s having held out on her confession for as long as she had.

  She recalled Paul Rosenbaum’s expression, “engine of denial”; at the time, it had seemed easy to dismiss as the facile hyperbole of a media manipulator. Over the last four days, Jesse had never thought that Brenda was doing anything but straight-out, conscious lying. But as she reviewed her written observations now, in the aftermath of the confession, the march, the riot, the wake, Jesse wondered for the first time if she had understood anything at all of what Brenda experienced at 16 Van Loon Street or in the steaming ruins of the Chase Institute.

  After a few moments of reflection, the ringing of the phone came as a relief.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey.” It was Ben.

  “What.”

  “Nothing. I’m at the hospital. They have to resew me, the guy fucked up the stitches or something.” Jesse waited. “You know who I ran into here? That cop, Bump. He’s getting out tomorrow We got to talking. Nice guy.”

  “And…” Jesse lit a cigarette.

  “Jess?” he began gingerly. “Did you ever, you didn’t ever…it’s not my place, but did you ever interview his son? You kind of promised.”

  “Tell him I need a day or two.”

  “I mean, it’s not my place—”

  “I can’t talk now, I’m working.”

  A few seconds later the phone rang again. Annoyed, expecting her brother again, Jesse picked up. S
he heard a computer-generated female-toned word collage telling her she had a collect call from—and then a small razzle of static, punctuating the transition to a true voice, coming through now, hesitant and small—“Brenda Martin.”

  Jesse arrived at the county jail visitors’ center at three o’clock that afternoon. As the sergeant pored over her credentials, a corrections van backed up to a heavy door and unloaded six young black women in royal-blue prison scrubs, each with a rolled Islamic prayer rug under her arm. Jesse guessed that they were returning from sentence hearings, the three of them flashing fingers to another female inmate, who was swabbing the floor around the reception desk. Jesse guessed again that the number of fingers signified the number of years they had just received. One heavyset woman shot out two, in a peace sign; another, looking stunned, splayed out a full five.

  Because of Brenda’s celebrity, the visit was set up in the privacy of the guards’ lounge. Jesse was escorted into the harshly lit room, deserted for the moment, the walls lined with vending machines, pay phones, and three bulletin boards, all heavily papered with union-related notices, announcements of schedule changes, and jail-theme cartoons clipped from various newspapers and magazines. Her escort set up two facing folding chairs as far away as possible from the other furniture, then stepped back and gestured for her to have a seat.

  Physically isolated, enveloped by silence, Jesse sat dry-mouthed, fingers fluttering. By the time that Brenda, escorted by two guards, shuffled into the room, Jesse had dropped her pen four times.

  Wearing the same royal-blue scrubs as the women Jesse had seen coming off the prison van, Brenda looked like an exhausted surgeon, her skin unhealthily pearlescent. But the tea-stained pouches under her eyes seemed to have receded.