Freedom Road

by William Lashner

  He could see it in her eyes when she looked at him now, the three Ds: disappointment, disillusionment, doubt. He had first seen hints that night in Chicago, when she glanced at him before heading up the stairs at the house in Humboldt Park, leaving him alone with Marisol—not totally alone, Sheila was there, but Erica knew, she knew—and just then, with the intoxication of Marisol in his blood, he hadn’t really cared. But the triple Ds were full borne two nights later after that smooth-talking lawyer bought him out of Delaney’s clutches, giving over not just all the merch he had stolen from the Russian, but a load of cash Erica had somehow picked up to go with it.

  Afterward, when the lawyer brought him back to Erica and that weird old man Finnegan, he tried to thank her, he tried to smooth it over with his smooth-sounding words, but she could barely glance his way. All she could manage was a “Shut up, Frank.”

  Truth was he had failed her, repeatedly, like he had failed Marisol and his brother and his parents and everyone else in his life, including, ironically, the Russian himself. So at the hospital, where they had x-rayed his knee and then given him the crutch, when Erica came up with the lamebrain idea of coming here, to this wasteland, he hadn’t stood in her way. And with his knee filled with pain after Delaney stomped on it like he was stomping on a cockroach, there wasn’t much standing he could do anyway. She had talked the place up as she drove them west from Chicago: her father had been raised there; the lawyer said some of the old commune members were still living on the land; and Erica was certain they would take care of her as one of their own. It would be a place to recover, to gather themselves, a quiet refuge where they could figure out their next move. And all the time he knew what her next move would be.

  Bye-bye, Frank, you penniless fuck-up.

  The farm, though more ragged than expected, had been pretty much just what she had promised. They had been warmly welcomed after Erica told their story. They were fed and put up in one of the rotting old cabins. They had even been given a bit of work to do to keep them busy. “It is a commune after all,” said the old lady. It was all as friendly as preschool.

  And then they waited. For what? For his leg to heal? For the scant amount of pills he still had to run out? For Erica to find a way to abandon him without losing her fake rebel edge? For him to be left here without a penny or a purpose and the whole fucking world breathing down his neck?

  It was certainly heading that way, Frank could feel it, when, like a bolt of no-damn-good out of the blue, that ragged rattling truck appeared, coming at them as if there was hot vengeance roiling through the engine’s crankshaft. It jammed to a stop beside his Camaro, vibrating on its axels with a back-and-forth rhythm that matched the rabid, fearful beating of Frank’s heart.

  When Ayana stepped out of the truck, Frank blanched with terror, certain that he was already dead. Ayana was a figure in the Russian’s orbit, a homeless waif hanging with Ken and his hipster ponytail. Frank didn’t recognize the man in the front seat, but he assumed he was a killer who had come to cut out Frank’s febrile little liver; the geezer sure had the face for it. Frank would have run right then, but with his leg still a wreck and only the crutch to aid his flight, any attempt at an escape would have been more humiliating than successful.

  So he stayed stock-still, waiting for the inevitable, when a beast leaped out of the truck, an animal that turned out not to be a hound from hell but instead a dog, his dog, Hunter, who should have been idling like a spoiled prince at Javier’s place in Philly.

  What was Hunter doing here?

  The dog tore at him and leaped in the air. Frank instinctively bent as low as his leg would allow and rubbed his dog’s head as Hunter’s tongue swiped across his wrist. It was a touching reunion, until the bald piece of jerky stepped out of the driver’s side of the truck.

  Sour, that’s what his face was, sour as a sour drop, sour as a Chinese soup without the sweet, sour as a corpse.

  Frank glanced around to see if the others saw it too, Erica and the old lady, but instead of fear there was something other on their faces. Erica was almost smiling, and the old lady was looking on with a puzzled expression, as if the world had gone awry. And then the old lady put down her tools and stepped across her vegetable patch.

  “How’d he find us?” he asked Erica, later, when they were alone in the cabin. Erica was fiddling around, straightening up for some reason.

  “He says he followed our trail. We sure left one.”

  “You called him, didn’t you?” he said, lumbering behind her with his crutch.

  “No.”

  “Then how?”

  “I don’t know, Frank. When I went to the lawyer to get you out of that trouble in Chicago, I figured someone might follow.”

  “But how did he know about here? And he said something about my brother. How did he talk to my brother?”

  “Ayana, maybe? He said she helped him.”

  “So you’re saying he chased us all the way out here from Philadelphia? In that old beater of a truck? Just on Ayana’s word? I wouldn’t buy that crap in a thrift store. What is he after?”

  “He just wanted to find out if I was okay. He said my mother asked him. And my grandmother too.”

  “Your grandmother? The one he killed?”

  “He says they still talk.”

  “Well isn’t that something. Isn’t that just some damn thing.”

  “Don’t you think it’s romantic, Frank? A love that transcends the grave.”

  “No, it’s creepy. Ghosts and ghouls and shit. What did you tell him when he asked if you were okay?”

  “I told him I didn’t know anymore.”

  “Jesus, Erica. Throw me under the bus, why don’t you.”

  “I was just trying to be honest. I’m still trying to process Chicago. It’s been hard so far.”

  “I know, baby. Look at me, I know. It will get easier. I’ll make sure of it. I got plans for us, still. But we need to leave and fast.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if an old man who talks to dead people can find us, anyone can. And because of Ayana. I don’t trust her. She’s probably given us up to the Russian already.”

  “Oh, Ayana’s okay. She helped Grandpop, and we talked already. She’s so happy to be away from the rest of them.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We have to get going.”

  “Then go, Frank. No one’s stopping you.”

  “You’re not coming?”

  “Not right now. And not just because you say so. I want to stay for a bit.”

  “Why? What’s here?”

  “My grandfather. We’re on the road to freedom, right? That means freedom to go, yes, but also freedom to stay if there are things to stay for. I haven’t seen my grandfather in a couple years. We’ve been kept apart. I sort of want to get to know him all over again.”

  “You’re going to get us killed, sweet pea.”

  “No one’s after me, Frank.”

  And there it was, Erica stepping away from him as clearly as a slap in the face. Separate threats, separate futures, suck on that. He should have seen it coming; he did see it coming. It was what the heist from the Russian was all about in the first place. The only way to keep someone like Erica has always been the only way. He needed to get some bank and quick. He needed to get off the farm and find enough cash to get them out of the country and off to Paris. He needed to find some money, real money, or their life together was dead.

  In a fit of frustration he threw the crutch across the room. It slammed loudly against the wooden wall and Erica jumped.

  “Fuck this,” he said, keeping his leg stiff as he banged, crutchless, out the door.

  It was always the same, always the same, there was never enough and it was always the same. His leg burned and his breath was fast and when the dog came up to him he pushed him away with his lame leg and sent him scurrying. What was he going to do? What the hell could he do? He buzzed with a bitter deprivation. This day was like every other day of his fucking life—he w
as always short of the one thing that could solve everything.

  He looked up and saw the old man in his battered work boots lumbering toward the ruined stable with the dog, Frank’s dog, trailing behind, and something started clicking in his head.

  Erica hadn’t had a spot of trouble getting the extra cash from the lawyer friend of her grandfather to pay off Delaney. Why was that? Apparently she had met the lawyer at some fancy club in the city, a place where her great-grandfather used to belong. That meant there had been some money there, at least once. With the one brother dying in Vietnam, old man Cross would be the only heir. He wasn’t living high like some rich suck-up daddy’s boy, that was for sure, but that didn’t mean much; these old hippies were batshit crazy. And the lawyer who came with Erica to buy him out was as slick as they come. Lawyers like that don’t work for old men with nothing to their name but a ratty old truck. Lawyers like that work for high-balling squillionaires.

  Maybe Erica was right. Maybe they should spend some time getting to know the old goat.

  30

  OUR HOUSE

  Oliver Cross is lying on his back, his ankles and chest stippled with spider bites, his nose clogged and his mouth dry, when the dog licks his face.

  He pushes the mongrel away, squints at the sun shafting through the gaps in the stable’s ceiling, and rolls heavily onto his side. He hopes to drift back to his dream of youth and vigor but it is too late. He rises slowly, he walks stiffly, his bladder is heavy, his neck is stiff, and his back is screaming. He has done this three times already through the night. The dog bounds around him like an idiot.

  He steps through the open front door and surveys the sun-blessed earth shimmering before him, wild and weedy and green. Yesterday it looked like a junked-up scrap of abandoned land, but now there is something of Elysium in the view. He presses the swollen nodule on his neck, twice the size that it was when he left Pennsylvania, which explains the stiffness. The dog sprints past him, stops, turns, bows, barks; his posture says, “Let’s play.”

  Let’s not.

  Oliver steps from beneath the sagging portico roof, blocks one nostril and blows half his nose crust onto the packed dirt, blocks the second nostril and finishes it off. Then he strides toward a bush and starts to peeing, right there. Watching his own pathetic spatter, he feels like a lion being served an avocado.

  “Jesus, Oliver, put on some clothes.” Ayana is leaning against one of the portico’s pillars, facing away to avoid the sight of him. “That’s disgusting,” she says.

  “Welcome to Seven Suns.”

  “What the hell got into you last night?”

  “Other than Crazy Bob’s reefer?”

  “I’ll admit it, Oliver, that bud should be wrapped with a bow and sold on TV. But when you sort of went loco, everyone looked around, wondering what the hell you were going on about.”

  “I saw a piece of truth.”

  “So did I, just now, when you stepped naked out of the door. Truth is overrated.”

  “No one told you to stalk me.”

  “I’m not stalking you. I’m just trying to figure things out. Like, okay, we found Erica, and everything’s fine. And maybe you knocked the Russian off Frank’s trail. Yay. But what happens now?”

  “Who the hell knows?”

  “I need to get back.”

  “I thought you were going west.”

  “Plans changed, I told you. How do I get home?”

  “Maybe ask someone who cares.” All he wants to do is relieve himself in peace, and here he is, facing the world in the raw, getting neither peace nor relief.

  “You brought me here,” she says.

  “You hitched a ride. I let you come. The rest is up to you.”

  “What are you doing, Oliver?”

  “Turning over a new leaf. And it feels sweet. Here on in, I’m out of the helping business. You want advice, check an almanac.”

  “What’s an almanac?”

  “Yeah,” he says as he turns around and heads back inside.

  He steps again out of the barn, this time clothed in his boots, jeans, and flannel shirt. Ayana is gone and Helen has been quiet since his outburst at the fire last night and so he is blessedly alone.

  He scratches at the bug bites on his chest and looks at the ruined orchard. The sight of it hurts his heart; he can almost hear the dead trees weeping. He turns away and surveys the wreckage of the stable. The old place is in better shape than the orchard, but not by much. Staring at what’s left of the building he pulls out a memory of this place, a memory he has kept close all these years, holding it in his pocket like a coin, a hedge for when the failures of his life ricochet dangerously about him.

  He rubs his fingers over the coin’s delicate contours.

  A winter’s day, the snow blanketing the earth is bright and endless. The stable’s wood-fired stove is doing its best, but inside the walls there is still a bite in the air. Sunlight streams through the windows, along with a draft. Fletcher is swaddled and gurgling in a wooden bassinet Oliver built. Helen has set her easel by one of the windows. She is wearing three sweaters, a woolen hat, woolen gloves with the fingers cut off. Her hair is pulled back, a smear of white paint rises like a flare on her cheek.

  He is working on a piece of a Ponderosa pine that had come down in a windstorm on the slope of Mount Blue. A lumberman friend had milled a burled slab and Oliver is in the process of using a hand plane to smooth its surface. The curls of wood that roll out beneath the blade are almost thin enough to see through. And with each pass of the plane it is as if the soul of the wood is becoming clearer.

  He looks up and sees Helen by the window. The sunlight highlights her cheekbone and the lines around her eye. She is no longer the Bryn Mawr junior he first fell in love with eight years before; it is as if their time together, all their experiences and experiments and love, is etched now into her face. The sight of her takes away his breath. She doesn’t look back; instead she is absorbed in her work, her art. She is the cause, she is the result. With each push of the plane and stroke of the brush they are growing closer to the source of all things. It feels just then so very near. He lowers his gaze, lays his tool carefully on the wood, grips the bulb and presses forward.

  He is still fingering the memory, lost in his losses, when he spies Gracie making her hitching way up to the stable from her cabin. At the sight of her, he puts the memory back into his pocket to protect it. She almost stole it once.

  “Good morning there, Oliver,” says Gracie as she approaches. “I wondered when you were getting up.”

  “I’ve been getting up all night,” he says.

  “Quite a performance out there by the fire. Reminded me of old times. You were always one for raging at the ghosts. There’s coffee if you want it. And some breakfast. Oatmeal with molasses and fruit.”

  “The old stable has gone to crap.”

  “It has, yes. Some people tried living in it for a bit after you and Helen left, but it’s tough to heat in the winter. And then the upkeep got away from us.”

  “It appears the upkeep of the entire farm got away from you. What happened to the orchard is a crime.”

  “You were the one who took care of the trees, Oliver. Some of us ran and some of us stayed; those who stayed did the best we could. For a time it was a struggle just to keep feeding the chickens and finding enough to eat.”

  “You look like you did okay.”

  Gracie smiles tightly. “You used to admire my appetites,” she says, and then, as if she can’t help herself, she lets her mouth twitch.

  “I was young and stupid,” he says, turning away from her to look out over the fallow fields.

  “So you were the one. What’s your plan, Oliver?”

  “I don’t have a plan.”

  “If you’re thinking of staying awhile and fixing up the old place, you should maybe think again. We’re trying to sell.”

  “You’re selling the stable?”

  “The farm. We’ve been making do with what we
can, Social Security, some trusts we’ve inherited, the vegetables we grow, the chickens and goats. But you can see it’s not working. And the area’s changing. Development has come and we got an offer that’s hard to refuse.”

  He turns to face her. “But you don’t own the place, Gracie.”

  “That’s not so clear. It turns out Oates sold the land a while ago. And we haven’t been paying rent in all the years after, and the new owner never came around to tell us to start paying. There’s a lawyer the developer brought in who says we might actually have a right to the land because of that. It’s called adverse possession. You went to law school, didn’t you, Oliver?”

  “For a time.”

  “Then you might have heard of it.”

  “And you might want to look up the word ‘hostile.’”

  “The lawyer says it could work, and he actually got his degree. Those of us who stayed would get a piece. Wendy, too, since she’d have to relocate the goats. But only those of us who stayed.”

  “Not me, you mean.”

  “Not you, yes. We hate to do it, but it’s time. Toby and Crazy Bob say they’re ready to move to Florida. Flit too. Remember how hard the winters are? And those old men, they like to eat early. Angie has grandkids in Oakland. As for me, Sunrise is out in San Bernardino, now. Three kids. I’d like to get to know them better.”

  “What does she do out there, Sunrise?”

  “She’s a venture capitalist. Calls herself Susan. And Fletcher, I hear from Erica, has become a corporate lawyer.”

  “We did a hell of a job with them, didn’t we?”

  They stand together quietly, not laughing.

  “Sunrise went to live with Juba’s mother right after you left,” says Gracie.

  “And you stayed without her?”

  “It made sense at the time. Juba’s mother had some money but she never had much use for me, so I thought it was better for Sunrise to be there without me. I had my own issues then, remember?”