Freedom Road

by William Lashner

  “I can’t,” he called back. “My leg.”

  “Oh come on. A little water aerobics will do it good. And the water’s beautiful.”

  “Really, no. I can’t.”

  “Coward,” she said.

  “Coward?”

  The taunt was enough to force him to his feet, to strip off his shoes and pants, boxers, and shirt, to send him limping and flopping like a three-legged dog until he fell into the water with a grunt and a shout. Because if he ever had a hope of keeping her as part of his future, it would take more than the old man’s money. He’d have to show some spit and initiative, too, and if this wasn’t it, at least it was something.

  But the water was cold, unbelievably cold—Erica had kindly left that out of her exhortations—and the shock of it squeezed his body and shrank his testicles even as it numbed his brain. But this last thing wasn’t entirely unwelcome.

  While the girls swam and dived to the bottom, laughing and chatting, he turned onto his back and floated, letting the sun paint his face and chest with warmth as the water buoyed him with its frigid fingers. Breezes danced across the surface, tugging him here and there. He maybe should have been up at that falling-down stable, continuing to wile his way into the old man’s graces, or still clothed at least, but this, just now, the warmth and the cold together, the swirl of the breezes, this was something new and peaceful. For a moment he lost the buzz of anxiety and felt something else, a kind of peace rising from the depths of the reservoir to pierce his heart with calm.

  “Uh-oh,” said Erica softly.

  “What’s wrong?” said Ayana.

  “My grandfather’s coming down and we’re not wearing anything.”

  Frank’s peaceful heart seized in him, and he rolled off his back to go vertical in the water, moving his arms to keep his shoulders above the surface and his junk below. Erica’s grandfather was trundling down the path as the dog trailed behind. With his back bent like it was, the old man looked like a walking pretzel.

  “Don’t worry about him,” said Ayana. “Most old men are pervs, they can’t help themselves, but Oliver’s not like that. Definitely not.”

  “Why do you say that?” said Frank. “What happened on your little road trip? Anything we should know about?”

  “Nothing. That’s it. Not a thing. Just gentleman stuff is all. Except that he stole the whipped cream from my pancakes, if you can imagine that.”

  “The little thief,” said Erica. “I thought he was vegan.”

  “He took me to a barbecue joint. All he had was the potato salad and beans, but there was definitely pork in the beans. He paid for it, too.”

  “You almost sound like you like him, Ayana,” said Frank.

  “Well, he goes on and on about the stupidest things, and he curses too much for an old guy, and his taste in music is the worst.”

  “I know, right?”

  “But he bought me a guitar.”

  “Why did he do that?” said Frank, perking.

  “I don’t know. He heard me sing.”

  “He didn’t seem to like my voice much last night.”

  “The man knows quality,” said Ayana. “And you know, he actually listens when you talk, which is strange for someone who watches Fox News.”

  “He watches Fox News?” said Frank.

  “Yeah, in the motels, with the sound off. He stares and grinds his teeth. He says it keeps him seething, which is the way he likes it.”

  “Hey, Grandpop,” called out Erica. “You coming swimming?”

  “In that sewer?” the old man called back as he tromped down the path. “Not on a bet.”

  “Is anything wrong with the water?” said Frank.

  “It’s open season on rivers and streams again. Who knows what the strip mines in the mountains are dumping into the creek. You’re likely to come out with three eyes.”

  “Is that what happened to you, Oliver?” said Ayana.

  “It was clean as soap back in the day. Your father learned to swim in that reservoir.”

  “It must have been sweet,” said Erica, “you teaching little Fletcher the backstroke in the old swimming hole.”

  “No one taught your father anything,” said the old man. “He just jumped in and did it.”

  “I didn’t know he was such a wild kid.”

  “There’s a lot about him you don’t know,” said the old man, collapsing in slow motion until his butt hit the ground. “Lot I don’t know either.”

  The dog ran to the lip of the water and barked at Frank. Frank swam slowly to the shore, limping forward once he could stand on the soft muddy reservoir bed. On dry ground he leaned down to ruffle the dog’s neck before, without drying off, he turned away from the old man and put on his shirt and boxers. He dropped to the weedy dirt to slide his pants over the lame leg. Then he lay in the sun on a patch of grass not too far away from the old man. The dog paced around for a bit before dropping onto his stomach between them.

  “What are we doing next?” Frank said, like a good little suck-up.

  “I’m going to try to raise the portico roof,” said the old man. “I don’t know what you’re going to do.”

  “I can help,” said Frank. “We have some time before we have to get back on the road.”

  “On the road to where?”

  “Away. We’ll be safe overseas.”

  “Maybe, if you get there. But that’s the trick with an open warrant.”

  “We’ll be flying out from California.”

  “Yeah, that might work. I hear they don’t have computers out there in California.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do?”

  “Face what you did.”

  “Like you, old man?”

  “Exactly.”

  “How was prison?”

  “Lonely. Anxious. Shitty food. A boredom so brutal it squeezes your eyes. Sort of like running.”

  “I’d rather run.”

  “But you might not have to. I made sure the Russian knew you had given up his stuff, and I told him where it was.”

  “You put him on Delaney?”

  “Maybe they’ll fry each other’s asses. My guess is he’s off the chase. And a lawyer might be able to talk to the DA in Ohio. Maybe work out a deal.”

  “I’d rather run.”

  “If you tell the whole story, it won’t be as much time as you think. And you’ll know the deal before you give yourself up.”

  “You have all the answers, don’t you?”

  “What do you have, Frank, other than a bum leg and price on your ass?”

  “Love?”

  The old man laughed. “If you’re going to stake your life on love, it better not be a question.”

  “She’s a complicated girl.”

  “She’s her grandmother’s granddaughter.”

  A howl came from the distance, like the call of a wolf, and Hunter’s head lifted. A moment later the dog was up and sprinting away from them both.

  “So,” said Frank. “The portico roof.”

  “The posts on the end look solid enough, it’s just the bases that rotted out. I found a metal beam the right size. We could use the jack from my truck to raise the roof and then slip the posts onto new bases and bang in some supports.”

  “I’m game if you’re game.”

  “But now that I’m down I won’t be able to get up for a while. And then after all that getting up I might need a nap. Maybe this afternoon.”

  “I’ll be there,” said Frank. “Anything you need you can count on me.”

  “In the end,” said Crazy Bob, “they pinned it on the coyote.”

  “It’s always the coyote,” said Erica’s grandfather.

  “He must have knocked over one of the candles when he was snacking on Lucius’s guts,” said Gracie. “The fire destroyed most of the evidence.”

  “Wily bastard,” said the old man.

  Frank was sitting in the circle around the fire, just beyond the stone ruins of the ranch house. He wasn’t really paying
attention—he didn’t have much interest in anything that happened yesterday, not to mention forty years ago—but the oldsters were talking as if it sure had meant something to them. And he noticed that Erica was listening as if it mattered to her, too.

  There hadn’t been a party like the night before. Instead it had been a normal evening of exquisite boredom on the farm. There was a plain mash of beans and squash to go with the salad, and now it was seven of them wiling the night away with loose talk about old times, a bucket of Blue Moons, and Crazy Bob’s crazy shit. Wendy, Angie, and Toby had gone with some of the others to a country and western bar across the hills in Fountain. Frank had been thirsting to get away from the farm and maybe guzzle a bellyful of whiskey, but he decided he was better off staying close to Grandpa Moneybags. The dog pack, with Hunter included, was sitting just outside the firelight.

  “It doesn’t matter what the fuzz said, we knew the truth of it,” said Flit. “It was a crime, and not just against Lucius. The farm’s never been the same for any of us.”

  “How not?” said Erica.

  “The spirit went out of it,” said Gracie. “We were here to raise a living from out of the ground, yes, but also to explore our way of being, to create something new in this world. We thought changing one piece of the landscape could change every other piece. It was a political act, being here.”

  “Everything’s political,” said Crazy Bob. “Buying into the capitalist fantasy is political, just as turning away from it is political. And preparing for the inevitable backlash from the capitalist overlords and their money slaves was political, too. And we were prepared, weren’t we, Oliver? All across the valley, and even up as far as Manitoba Springs, we were a militia of our own, ready to beat back the invasion.”

  “You were always the feisty one,” said Erica’s grandfather.

  “We’re still ready, all of us who are left. No one gives up power and money without a battle. Revolutions are all about the might.”

  “And the spiritual, too,” said Gracie. “Let’s not forget that. That’s where Lucius came in.”

  “He was as spiritual as a cobra,” said old man Cross.

  “That’s sweet of you to say,” said Gracie with an indulgent smile, “since cobras are worshipped as gods in India. Lucius believed he had the answers while the rest of us were still trying to figure out the questions, but there was something there, Oliver, you can’t deny it. And when he went like that, in blood and fire, the spiritual part of the farm seemed to get burned away along with the ranch house. Of course, Erica, then your grandmother and grandfather left. And not too long after that Fire left with her boys.”

  “And then the peacock died,” said Crazy Bob.

  “The peacock?”

  “Sam we called him. Majestic bird. Another coyote took him down. That was like the gods telling us the golden age was over. We should have given it up right then, but it’s tough, sometimes, to admit defeat.”

  Yeah, tell Frank about it. It had been a hard afternoon, shoring up the portico roof of that crumbling stable. The old man had made Frank do most of the work, even with his bum leg. Jamming the rusting metal beam between the roof and a plank set up on the jack, pumping the jack handle as the roof rose the barest of intervals with each pump, then slipping the weathered wooden post between a loose cinder block and the roof. As he lowered the jack enough so that the post took the weight, he kept waiting for the whole thing to blow apart. And he certainly noticed that the old man stood behind him, so that Frank would take the shards if the wooden post exploded into failure.

  Except the post didn’t explode, it held, and the roof started to look almost level.

  “All right,” said the old man. No smile, no word of thanks. “Let’s do the next one.”

  Now, even after a hot shower, Frank’s muscles radiated ache as he sat by the fire with his sore leg extended. Manual labor was a thing for the first-name-onlys, and they could have it.

  Truth was, he should have been high as a cloud right now, but the old man had passed the joint and stuck with a beer, as if still recovering from his crazy outburst the night before, and so Frank had decided it was best to do so himself. He didn’t even know if the old man had noticed, but Erica had given him a strange look when he passed the blunt. He just shrugged, grabbed a bottle from the bucket, and twisted off the cap. She didn’t have to know the game he was playing, though she could probably figure it out.

  “Why did you leave the farm, Oliver?” said Ayana.

  “Helen’s mother took sick. We went on a run to visit.” The old man, staring into the fire, gave a shrug and took a slug of his beer. “And then we just sort of stayed.”

  “That was the story, at least,” said Flit. “The sick mother. The short visit. Just a few weeks you said. But you left the day after the fire and we all knew you weren’t coming back.”

  The old man didn’t say anything, just kept staring, like it was as true as the night, all of it. In the darkness, the eyes of the dogs glowed.

  “Why wouldn’t they come back?” said Erica.

  The quiet stoked Frank’s curiosity. He noticed Gracie looking at Crazy Bob, as if there were a secret buried somewhere in the past.

  “The boy,” said Gracie, finally, after a long and uncomfortable silence. “Your grandmother was worried about your father.”

  “My father?” said Erica, curled with interest in her chair. “What about him?”

  “She wanted to get him to a real school,” said Gracie. “Fletcher had stopped participating in Angie’s lessons. And for a long time he refused to talk.”

  “Daddy wouldn’t talk? I can’t imagine that. Why not?”

  “Maybe because he felt more like an animal than a kid,” said the old man.

  “My father?”

  “He used to run wild across this land, as wild as the coyotes. And then there were his teeth. Helen wanted to get them fixed.”

  “Oh those teeth,” said Gracie with a laugh.

  “They were a spilled box of Chiclets, they were,” said Crazy Bob. “And Fire’s boys had such grills, like picket fences, white and straight enough to make a movie star green.”

  “But it wasn’t just the teeth, was it, Oliver?” said Flit.

  “Stop it, Flit,” said Gracie, with a warning snap in her voice. “It wasn’t Oliver.”

  “It wasn’t the coyote, that’s for sure. There was enough of the skull left after the fire to know that.”

  “I’m telling you the facts,” said Gracie. “And I know.”

  “How do you know so sudden like?”

  “Because he was with me when it happened.”

  “Middle of the night like that?” spit out Flit, and then he quieted when he realized what he said and everyone, Frank included, turned to the old man, who kept staring at the fire. One of the dogs yawned loudly.

  “Convenient,” said Flit, finally and abashedly, “coming up now after we been mashing it between our teeth like cud all these years.”

  “Maybe she’s been protecting someone else, you old fool,” said Crazy Bob.

  “Aah, I don’t buy it,” said Flit. “I know what I know, and I know Oliver ran like a scared dog after the killing and the fire.”

  “That’s just Oliver,” said Gracie. “He always runs when things get hard.”

  Frank would have thought old man Cross would have spoken up after that, spit out some sharp barb defending himself, but all he did was hold his beer in both hands and continue gazing into the fire, as if some answer were there in the flames. Frank turned from the old man to Erica, and realized she was staring at her grandfather with a look of shock. Then she turned her face to Frank and he cringed.

  “How’d it finally all work out for you in the world there, Oliver?” said Crazy Bob. “You fix them teeth?”

  “They’re so bright and flat now,” said the old man, “you can shave by them.”

  “I bet it burns your britches,” said Crazy Bob with a yelp.

  “And Helen?” said Gracie. “Ho
w did Helen do?”

  “Better than me. She taught art, got a rep for her work, doted on the boy, and then the grandkids.”

  “Grandmom was really something,” said Erica. “She painted a zebra on a carousel in my room. She did it when I was a baby and I still won’t let my mom paint over it. She’s such a part of my heart.”

  “Helen was fine in the world,” said the old man. “I was the trouble. Being out there was like living in someone else’s delusion.”

  “Most of us left the farm at one point or another,” said Crazy Bob. “But unlike you, we came back.”

  “Yeah, well, it was a marriage, not a dictatorship. Helen couldn’t be shoved one way or the other. Ever. Even at the end.”

  Frank knew what the old man was talking about. Everyone did. When Erica showed up at the farm it was one of the first things she blurted. “How’s your grandfather?” “I don’t really know. I haven’t seen him since he killed my grandmother.” That put a halt on the old conversation. But there were secrets here, and lies too, maybe, material to mine and use. Frank wanted to keep the old man talking.

  “That must have been hard, what you did,” said Frank, putting an edge of sympathy in his voice. “I can’t imagine that.”

  “Good for you,” said old man Cross, “because I can’t forget it. I keep living it over and over.”

  “Daddy never forgave you,” said Erica.

  “I knew he wouldn’t. But it wasn’t up to him.” The old man stared into the fire. “If you ask the court, it wasn’t up to me or her, either.”

  “Well, it’s not like you didn’t have practice,” said Flit.

  “Shut up, Flit,” said Gracie.

  “It would have been legal in Oregon,” said Crazy Bob. “You should have gone to Oregon. They know how to run things up there. And a slice of marionberry pie might have changed her mind.”