Freedom Road

by William Lashner

  In years past he would sweep into that house and up the stairs and grab the girls in his arms and rub his rough face on their cheeks. He would play dolls with the baby, and read picture books to Erica, and teach them both protest songs. “If I Had a Hammer” they would sing, or “Blowing in the Wind,” or, when he was feeling particularly pessimistic, he would try to teach them “Eve of Destruction,” though that never went well. Too many words.

  He even began showing Erica some simple chords on the small guitar he and Helen had bought for her. “The D is like this, then stretch your fingers for the G, and then press these three strings right here for the A, and then you go back to the D,” which was all you needed to play “This Land Is Your Land.” And while she strummed the song, taking interminable time for each chord change, he told her the story of Woody Guthrie and his beat old guitar with the sticker that read, “This Machine Kills Fascists.”

  “What’s a fascist, Grandpop?”

  “It’s like a banker, sweetie, only worse,” he said.

  “Is Daddy a fascist?”

  “No, your father’s not a fascist.”

  “Good.”

  “He only works for them.”

  After his piss, he puts on his reading glasses and checks the plastic prescription bottles in the medicine cabinet. Adderall™. Ativan™. OxyContin™, two bottles, both empty. All prescribed to Erica Cross. She was stuffing into her craw almost as many drugs as he does, and he could guess exactly why they had been prescribed. Adderall to keep her studying hard enough to get into an Ivy League college; Ativan to keep her smiling while she danced at the debutante ball; OxyContin to keep her numb enough to follow all the rules and ask no questions. Fletcher had been worried about Erica’s marijuana use, but all the while he was pumping her full of ever more powerful poisons whose main purpose is to fill the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies—the same companies Fletcher undoubtedly represents in their labor negotiations.

  No wonder she ran. Oliver would have been disappointed if she hadn’t.

  In Erica’s room he scans the smiling photographs of friends and family taped to the wall among the posters and magazine covers of singers and sallow-faced celebrities whom Oliver has never heard of. On the wall behind him is a mural of a smiling zebra on a carousel that Helen painted when the girl was still a baby.

  The photographs are like a timeline, showing Erica as the young girl he remembered and then growing ever taller and ever more beautiful, often with her sister. What is her name, the sister, Oliver’s other granddaughter? Christ, he is getting old. Too many bonks on the head, too many drugs. Or maybe not enough. It hurts to look at the most recent pictures because of Erica’s resemblance to a dream: red hair, green eyes, a splash of freckles across her nose and high cheekbones, she is the girl behind the dumpster, the girl he left his life for, she is Helen to a tee.

  On the table by the bed, like a memorial, sits a framed photograph of Oliver’s wife. Helen’s hair in the photograph is no longer red but gray, her nose no longer as sharp as it was, her chin pointy with age. You can see the resemblance between grandmother and granddaughter still, but unless you saw Helen then, young with that mouth ready to devour the world, the haunting resemblance won’t punch you in the gut like it punches him.

  He doesn’t see his own picture anywhere, though there are places where photographs have been obviously yanked from the wall, montages of times before Helen died, when he was still part of the family. That’s where he lives for Erica, in the gaps. That she hasn’t put other photos over the empty patches on the walls is a victory of sorts.

  “What are you doing, Oliver?” says Petra.

  Petra, standing now in the doorway, has put herself back together, regaining her sheen of plastic perfection, but Oliver can see the cracks beneath the surface. Sometimes the best things about a piece of porcelain are the flaws. He imagines the scene that morning before he knocked: Fletcher dressed to steal in his suit and tie, coming down the stairs and seeing his wife collapsed on the couch, the wineglass upended on the carpet. Fletcher must have left without waking her, without making sure she was all right or giving her a kiss goodbye. For some reason, the dark resonance of the moment makes him a little happy, which pisses him off. And he feels a bit sad that he never truly got to know his daughter-in-law before it all went to hell.

  “Our little girl grew up,” he says as he peers at her over his glasses before turning back to the photographs.

  “They tend to do that.”

  “Who’s this?” He points at an African American boy in one of the photographs on the wall, the boy standing with his arm around Erica.

  “That was her boyfriend, Adam. They broke up a couple months ago.”

  “Is he still around or is he missing, too?”

  “He’s still around. He plays baseball for the school.”

  “Adam who?”

  “What do you want, Oliver?”

  “Why did you tell Fletcher to have the police search my home?”

  “I already explained.”

  “Yeah, you explained. But your explanation sounded fishy. Instead, it felt like you just wanted me to know. Fletcher was leaving Erica’s absence to the police and nothing was happening and you wanted me to know.”

  Her lips twitch into a wry smile. “You look good, Oliver.”

  “I look like crap. And you could have just called.”

  “Would you have answered the phone?”

  “No.”

  “His last name’s Morgan. Adam Morgan.”

  Oliver yanks the photograph off the wall. “Now which of these little pixies would she most likely have confided in?”

  Petra walks past Oliver and pulls off a picture of Erica and three other girls. “These are her closest friends. The girl on the left is Carly. They’ve been together since the first grade.”

  Oliver stuffs the pictures in his pocket. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Oliver?” she says. “I followed Fletcher’s lead regarding your relationship with our family because it was his mother and you’re his father and I just thought it should be up to him, but I was wrong in that. I should have fought to keep you in our lives, at least in our daughters’ lives. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry doesn’t win the peach,” says Oliver.

  “I’m not saying what you did was right, but at least you did something. Fletcher’s just sitting around and drinking Scotch and waiting for someone else to save his daughter. But I can’t bear the sitting and waiting. Something needs to be done. My baby needs to be found.”

  “And you think I’ll find her?”

  “At least you’ll do something.”

  “Yeah,” says Oliver. “That’s always been my problem.”

  Just then he sees her, on the other side of Petra, walking down the hall in blue pajamas, rubbing her eyes. The other granddaughter, what is her name? Elisa, that’s it. What is it with all the Es? He remembered her as a roly-poly three-year-old with fat cheeks. Now she’s a seven-year-old beauty, with Petra’s blonde hair. When the girl looks up and sees Oliver in her sister’s room, she instinctively leans into her mother’s hip.

  “Who’s that?” says the girl.

  “That’s your grandfather, dear,” says Petra. “Daddy’s daddy. Grandfather Oliver.”

  “The one who killed Grandmom?”

  “That’s right,” says Petra.

  The girl shies away from him, slinking back, using her mother as a shield, so that only one eye peers out at Oliver from behind her mother’s hip. She is too cute for words, blood of his blood. This is what Helen has been after, this moment, why she set him on this chase. It won’t be long before Helen is all over him for details of her youngest granddaughter. He leans forward and puts his hands on his knees and stares at her over his glasses for a long moment, soaking her in, before he says,

  “Boo.”

  7

  I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE

  The way Elisa looked at Oliver was the most brutal of mirrors. His youn
gest granddaughter’s eyes were wide with fright and her lips trembled before she buried her face in her mother’s hip. The laughter that he had intended from his harmless little joke choked in his throat.

  So this is what he has become, a ghoul to frighten the innocent young. Maybe Helen sent him on this quest to change that, to change him in his last rancid years, but could any effort be more futile? Whatever he might once have been, whatever he might have been able to become, he has aged into this bitter piece of human jerky with no purpose other than to send little girls shrieking into the night. Despite all his good intentions, all his spiritual yearnings, all his right thinking, left-leaning politics, he has fulfilled his destiny by becoming a monster.

  But maybe, just maybe, that’s exactly what Erica needs.

  The area between the preppy private school where they stashed Erica and the sports fields is thick with boys and girls in their uniforms and practice jerseys, lugging around equipment bags and walking with that youthful, athletic lope to join their compatriots running around the track or smacking the ball back and forth with their field-hockey sticks.

  They are all so beautiful, so full of promise that Oliver Cross can’t help but feel sorry for them. Ahead of them they have the dreamworld of college and then, they all hope, a good forty years of selling their souls day by day for bits of paper with pictures of pallid-green politicians. They think money will buy them safety, but he knows the truth. Their lives will fail, their loves will die, their children will turn, their grandchildren will disappear. And they will look back, one and all, at these shining days and wonder what the hell happened.

  “I can’t now,” says Adam Morgan, brushing past the old man on his way to the baseball diamond. Oliver had been standing with a photograph in his hand, the one with this boy standing with his arm around Oliver’s granddaughter, and eyeing the athletes passing by until he spied Erica’s old boyfriend making his way to the fields. He is tall and thin, in full uniform, with hair spilling out of his blue cap. A bat bag hangs from his shoulder. “I have a game.”

  Oliver grabs a fistful of bag and yanks.

  The boy jerks backward, his arms flailing, before successfully stopping himself from falling. He instinctively lifts a fist, but when he looks into Oliver’s eyes the fist stills its progress, hovering in the air for a moment, suddenly a useless thing, before the fingers open and it disappears.

  “You know who I am,” says Oliver.

  “Yes, I know who you are.”

  “Then you know you have time to talk to me.”

  The boy looks at him, glances away, and then back again. “Okay,” he says, gesturing Oliver off the path between the school building and the fields to a spot with a bit of privacy.

  “I don’t know where she is,” says the kid.

  “But you know something.”

  “Yo, Adam,” calls a teammate. “We’ve got to get going.”

  Adam waves him on and turns back to Oliver. “We have a game. Look, I don’t know anything, I really don’t.”

  “Why did you break up?”

  “One of those things, I don’t know.”

  Oliver shoves the photograph in front of the boy’s face. “Look at her.”

  “I know what she looks like.”

  “Look at her.”

  The boy takes the picture and stares and his face grows darker.

  “So?” says Oliver.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You say that a lot.”

  “What do I say a lot?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because I don’t. I have to go.”

  “Tell me what you do know.”

  “That picture was taken in the fall last year, before her injury. She busted up her knee playing field hockey and started in with the Oxy after the surgery. She wasn’t ready to quit when the prescription ran out, so she didn’t.”

  “Where’d she get her supply?”

  “It’s high school, man. Everything’s available. The stuff that passes around in our hallways would blow your mind. But where she got it isn’t the point. The point is she changed. She stopped caring about things, school, friends, herself even, the way she looked. She wasn’t fun anymore.”

  “She needed help.”

  “What was I going to do?”

  “Help her.”

  “Yeah, well maybe I tried. What did you do?”

  Oliver looks away, spits. “So you broke up with her because of the drugs.”

  “She broke up with me.”

  “With you? Why?”

  “I don’t know. There was someone else, what do you want me to say? She was screwing someone else. How’s that, Grandpa?”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Oliver stares.

  “She didn’t tell me,” says the boy. “She didn’t even admit it, but I knew. I could tell. It was the way her kisses felt different, you know. Like she was just trying to get through it. The way everything felt different. And then she told me it was over.”

  “And you don’t know who it was?”

  “No.”

  “Who would?”

  “I don’t know. By then she had become something of a loner. Sometimes she told me she had been at Carly’s, but then Carly didn’t know anything about it. So she might have fessed up to her.”

  Oliver takes out the photograph of Erica with the three girls. “Which one?”

  “That one, there.” He points to the same girl Petra pointed to. “Carly Brackin. Are we done?”

  “One more thing,” says Oliver. He pauses a moment, stirring up his courage. “What was Erica like before? What was my granddaughter like when you two were still in love?”

  For a moment the boy’s face is an abacus, tabulating all the things horrific and strange that Erica told him about her grandfather. They must have added up to something because he looks again at the picture in his hand.

  “She just saw everything differently, you know. Everything was new to her, nothing was a cliché. She saw colors no one else could see. Yeah, I know, it was a high school thing, so what. Everything was richer with her. And you know, I still miss it. I miss her. I look around and all I see is drab.”

  Oliver nods, remembers. “You know what you need to do?” he says.

  “What’s that?”

  “Snap out of it.”

  The boy smiles and nods before walking away, toward the ball field, and then a moment later starts to run.

  “So how’s that, Helen?” says Oliver Cross out loud. “I’ve been chasing you since ’68 and now I’m as good as chasing you again.”

  8

  LYIN’ EYES

  Oliver Cross puts his old boom box on the hood of the truck and slips in a cassette. The tape player is the size of a bread box, which, along with Oliver and boom boxes, is another thing no one has much use for anymore. He found the player in the mess of old crap piled in his basement. The cassettes were beside it in a water-stained cardboard box that hadn’t been opened in years. That box is now on the floor of the truck’s cab, along with empty plastic clamshells that held the new batteries.

  He presses “Play;” the dulcet tones of “Take It Easy” slip through the speakers, soon followed by Glenn Frey’s rasp of a voice. He turns the volume up as loud as it can go. Too bad there isn’t an eleven.

  Oliver once met Glenn Frey and wasn’t much impressed with him or the Eagles, a bunch of sellouts playing pabulum for elevators and dentist offices, complaining about how hard it was selling out, and warning the huddled masses about the great tripartite plagues of money, drugs, and pussy, even as they grabbed as much of each as possible.

  Every time he hears the Eagles, what is left of his teeth start to grinding, which perfectly fits his mood as he leans against his truck on the wide suburban street outside of Carly Brackin’s house, a flashy, overwrought piece of crap, sitting amidst a slew of other such pieces of crap in a new development on the outskirts of the township. Welcome to Capitalist Acres, the sign shou
ld read, where nothing matters other than the size of your wallet and your supreme lack of taste. These are the kind of houses he hated working on when he was still taking outside jobs to keep his furniture shop up and running despite an alarming lack of demand. If he is going to be pissed off, he figures he might as well go whole hog and piss off everyone else in this stinking development. The Eagles are the perfect weapon.

  He tried to play it polite with the girl, knocking lightly on the door, faking a smile like a doting grandfather just looking out for his missing granddaughter’s welfare. Maybe the smile was more fearsome than kind, but it didn’t matter, this Carly knew too much about him to be fooled. She had a squinty face, young and pretty and squinty. Maybe she needed glasses, or a glass of Scotch.

  “I can’t talk to you,” she said.

  “All I want to know is his name,” said Oliver.

  “Go away, please,” she said. That “please” was a nice bit of politeness before slamming the door in his face. Maybe they taught the well-mannered door slam in finishing school now.

  He kept knocking until it was the mother who answered. Tall and gaunt with fluttering hands, she looked like she was flinching the whole length of their short conversation. As far as Oliver was concerned, the only good thing about his having a reputation was that it was a bad one.

  “My daughter doesn’t want to speak to you, Mr. Cross.”

  “I’m just looking for Erica.”

  “She’s not here, I promise you.”

  “She was with a new boy. Tell your daughter all I want is a name.”

  “She’s already talked to the detectives. I was with her when she did.”

  “Did she tell them who the new boy was?”

  “She told them she didn’t know if Erica was seeing anyone new, and I believe her, so there is no use continuing with your badgering. This is our property. You are trespassing. Are you still on parole, Mr. Cross?”

  “What the hell does that matter?”

  “I wouldn’t want to have to call the police.”

  “I bet you wouldn’t,” said Oliver Cross.