Free Spirit

by Joshua Safran

  I crawled over to the opening in the floor again, huffing air fast, preparing myself to do something heroic. I slung my head through the divide and yelled: “Hey!” She had crammed herself into a corner, her back to him. He stood over her, prodding her with his foot. “Get up, pinche puta!” Dirty whore!

  “Hey!” I called again, fingering the piggy bank next to me. “Hey!” He couldn’t hear me. I felt frustration, at first, that I wasn’t pulling his attention off of my mother. But I felt something else too, more powerfully. Relief. He couldn’t hear me. He didn’t know I was there. I crawled back into my bed, crying and convulsing with fear. I was agonizing over my mother, but was also scared for my life. I knew that made me a terrible, cowardly, selfish little wimp. I knew that, and I was still too frightened to do anything.

  Below me the destruction went on and on. How could he still be at it? Wasn’t she dead yet? How could I be nodding off in the middle of the storm? But I was, my head jerking up suddenly with the louder screams and crashes. And then blackness.

  The sun rose on the day of the wedding. Could it have been? Could last night have been true? All was so still and calm. Light trickled in through the mist. Then, the moaning began. “Oh, my honey… honey. I so sorry. Drink this, baby, please.” Leopoldo was in a squat, shifting back and forth on his toes next to my mother, who was laid back in the armchair. He looked up at me with pleading eyes, his face carved with deep lines of anxiety. My mother looked like a car crash victim. She gazed up at me and didn’t even attempt a wincing smile. Was she judging me for not coming to her defense? One eye was nearly swollen shut, purple and monstrous. Her face was a succession of lumps and swellings. Her lips were cut and raw. Even her fingers were swollen, as she clumsily spun the dial on the rotary phone.

  “Hola, Trina, tenemos que reprogramar la boda.” And: “Hi, John, we have to postpone the wedding, I’m sick.” Lisping through fat lips, her voice was flat and dead. Reverend Taylor’s phone rang and rang. Oh no, had she left Anacortes already? She picked up on the seventh ring. “Hi, Reverend, we have to reschedule.” There was no question of canceling. It was just a matter of postponement.

  Leopoldo came home with flowers, and a card, and the chicken soup she wanted, and plenty of makeup to cover up all the carnage. They calculated that between the natural healing process and the generous application of pancake makeup, her face would be presentable again in a week, and the wedding was reset for eight days later.

  Leopoldo groveled and explained himself for two days. “I was all loco from the stress of the wedding. The night before, was very much pressure. We should not have the wine around the house.” He sang to her and coaxed her up onto her feet to dance with him. They swayed together, and finally she smiled, and eventually she laughed, and all was forgiven. Their love was strong, and they would work through this together.

  When the rescheduled wedding day arrived, it unfolded around us in a daze. We went through matrimonial motions: I said my line, we took three photos, Reverend Taylor signed the papers, and everyone went home.

  Another week went by, maybe two, and then he was at it again. Bellowing about something or other and beating her. I played my role, hiding upstairs, hating myself for it. When there was a break in the storm, I popped my head down. He was standing with his face in my line of sight, bristling. My mother was rising to her feet on wobbly legs. “What, Claudia, you mad at me? You hate me? What you wanna do? To hit me!? Hit me? Go ahead, hit me.” And then he was yelling: “Hit me, hit me, hit me!” My mother slapped him with an open palm clean across the face. The slap rang out into silence. He stood there stunned for a moment and then punched her square in the face. She flew backward out of sight, crashing onto the altar of incense and little gods and goddesses we had by the fire.

  Claudia, Leopoldo, and me at their ancient Egyptian occult wedding in 1986.

  The destruction was so loud that Michael McNeary, the drunk violinist who lived down the trail, must have been able to hear it. And now he was banging at the front of the cabin. Leopoldo threw open the door and charged out at him. “What you want!?”

  Michael stumbled back gracefully in his green frock coat and knickers. “You need to stop,” he said in a lilting slur.

  “She my woman!”

  “Then all the more reason to stop. It’s too much.” He gave a little bow as he pronounced the words, challenging and deferring all at once.

  “I love her!” Leopoldo shot back.

  “I love her too,” Michael volleyed back without a trace of irony.

  “I love her. She my woman!”

  “She’s your woman, and we both love her,” concluded Michael.

  “Go home!” Leopoldo ordered him.

  “If you stop, I’ll go home.”

  I couldn’t believe that he wasn’t tearing apart the tiny man with the Renaissance haircut and tights. But he wasn’t. Michael was just too slight and silly for Leopoldo to know what to do with. Instead, he slammed the door in Michael’s face. Silence followed, and then he laughed. “¡Maricón!” Faggot!

  I cried silently, more ashamed than ever. The little leprechaun was braver than I was. After a while the beating resumed.

  The aftermath was more or less the same. This time he had punched her with her glasses on, so both eyes and the bridge of her nose were swollen and black and blue. This time the excuse was that Leopoldo had been stressed out about money problems. Once they had jobs, he said, the whole problem would go away. Claudia froze him out for a day or two, and then the song and dance thawed her love again.

  Always the song and dance. The sweet, melancholy crooning of José Luis Perales spilled out of the tape player. The orchestra swelled behind his voice as he sang of the thief who had robbed him of his woman, and Leopoldo and Claudia swayed together as one. My mother wrote in her dream journal:

  The heat of this relationship is almost unbearable… this is no dreamdance but more like a walk in a minefield… yet I would not avoid this connection any more than I would avoid the heat of enlightenment… this relationship is not haunted by a longing for anyone else except for my fullest self when I feel her slip away.

  And to me, in the privacy of a walk out into the tall dark forest, my mother told me: “Don’t give up on Leo, Joshey. He’s seen so much hurt. I have to heal him. You have to help me heal him. Joshey, you have to understand how important he is. What he saw happen in front of him, what he did in the Revolution. Even though he had no formal education, in El Salvador they were inviting him to speak to the university students, to share his story, to bear witness.”

  “But he gets so angry,” I protested.

  “You let me worry about that,” she said, “he’s getting better.”

  A few days later, he got worse. In the middle of his opening tirade, I could hear my mother interrupt him: “Let’s go outside. I don’t want Josh to have to hear this.” They screamed and shrieked their way down the hill. At the bottom of the trail Leopoldo smashed his way through the locked door of a vacant cabin, and he beat her up in there for a change. In the middle of the night, they came crashing back into the cabin, screaming for help. My mother’s arm was drenched in blood. Leopoldo was bare-chested, fumbling to wrap his T-shirt around the wound.

  I stumbled around at my mother’s side, one foot still in the dream world. “What happened? What happened?” But no one would notice me.

  Leopoldo was now on the floor, sparking his lighter, setting fire to a newspaper. “Here, honey, here, wait!” The newspaper flared at my feet, and Leopoldo picked up the fire, juggling it in his hands, and then rubbing the flames out on the wooden floor. He swept the hot ashes up with his hands and turned back to my mother. With the gentleness of a pediatric surgeon he unwrapped my mother’s arm, exposing the long grisly gash in her arm to the smoky air, and then began packing her open wound with newspaper ash.

  “Ah!” my mother winced, but she kept her arm still.

  “Hold to be still, be still,” he counseled her. The ash-packing was one of his
shamanic healing treatments. My mother would later tell people, with a tone of wonder, about the time he miraculously healed a deep cut of hers with ash from a newspaper. She just neglected to share the part about how he caused the wound in the first place. Down in the vacant cabin, Leopoldo had pulled the “Hit me, hit me!” routine again. And she had. And he’d hit her back again—in the face. Then he’d raised the stakes, pulling a long serrated bread knife out of a drawer. “You hate me? You want to cut to me!?” He’d exposed his neck to her and handed her the knife. “Cut me! Cut me!” She knew where this was going, and she didn’t see any way out, save one. She slashed at her own arm, hoping that the sight of so much blood would calm him down. It worked. For a week or two, and then he was drunk and violent again.

  This was my mother, and this was my stepfather. This was our new pattern of life.

  TWELVE

  The Descent of Man

  Darkness was finally gone, but echoes of screaming and smashing still reverberated in my head. Normally, I would have just peed in the apple juice jar and gone back to sleep. But not today. It was Saturday, and on Saturdays I had to walk down the mountain.

  My boots were all I needed to get dressed. I’d slept with all my clothes on. I always did. If he came up after me, I could just leap out the window of my little loft onto the roof of the outhouse, and from there run into the forest. I backed down the wooden ladder slowly, breathing through pursed lips like a diver descending into a shipwreck, breathing out of my mouth because I didn’t want to smell the aftermath.

  The cabin was a crime scene. Broken dishes littered the floor; books were strewn in an impact radius around the smashed shelf; muddy footprints led to a pool of vomit. My mother was asleep in the easy chair and, even in the dim light, I could see the bright red of her swollen brow. Leopoldo was passed out facedown on the bed. One muddy shoe was still on, and the naked sole of the other foot sparkled with hints of broken glass.

  Normally, I would have stayed to help pick up the pieces. But not today. It was Saturday. I checked to see that my mother was still breathing. She was—deep, almost peaceful breaths. Her lips were cracked and puffy, and I looked away before I saw more. I didn’t want to know the extent of the damage. I pulled on my boots and stepped down with a crunch. Underfoot was a smashed picture frame. Me, as a baby, smiling up at me. Most of the glass was in shards, obscuring my little face. The rest of it was undoubtedly embedded in Leopoldo’s foot.

  The cabin air was full of puke and malt liquor, and I gladly traded it for the mud and moss carried on the breath of the forest. The dark gray mist accepted me without question, and I plunged into the wet gauntlet that led down the hill. The salmonberry bushes and ferns struck at me with wet, harmless blows. I plowed through them, remembering that the trail hadn’t always been this overgrown. I used to clear it regularly, enthusiastically, charging into the thicket, hacking at all sides with my machete, pretending to be Richard the Lionheart. But that was before the coming of Leopoldo. The day of the wedding I’d thrown the machete into the nauseating muck of the outhouse, where I knew he wouldn’t go after it.

  At the bottom of the trail, I followed the path to the muddy circle, where the top of the driveway collapsed into the trees. Two useless wrecks greeted me. Michael McNeary’s rusting blue pickup was still pinned onto the stump where he’d crashed it. Next to it was our gray Chevy Citation, its face bashed in where Leopoldo had rear-ended the police car. The mangled vehicles were sinking into the forest, and they looked like a still life from the End of the World.

  As the driveway spiraled its way down the hill, mud gave way to smatterings of gravel and finally the road. I followed Janicki Road as it dipped down the mountain to the right. The logging trucks rumbled down the road from the clear-cut. It was Saturday morning, and Eli was waiting for me to watch cartoons.

  Karma opened the door, and I saw myself in her eyes. The greasy-haired, big-eyed, big-nosed kid in rumpled clothes. The kid from the forest whose mom had taken up with one of the illegal immigrants from River Kerry’s crew. Whose mom had started showing up at the food co-op with black eyes and fat lips.

  No one said anything, but Karma always invited me in, now without question. And Richard would let me stay all day, until every last cartoon was over, and I had no further excuse to ignore reality.

  A few days later, my mother and stepfather were dancing again, enjoying the honeymoon period between Leopoldo’s storms. My mother thought the lyrics from the tape player were revolutionary and romantic all at once, just like Leopoldo: And you and I will be a pair of crazies again, turning the wrong into right, letting our love live in freedom. They swayed together, letting the music erase all their memories of darkness.

  When we were down to our last ten dollars, Claudia and Leopoldo finally got a job together at the RoozenGaarde bulb factory outside of Mount Vernon. There they stood side by side, hunched over a conveyor belt, separating tulip bulbs from clods of dirt. Sometimes on their lunch break at the bulb factory, they would drive to a little hill and gaze down at the long fields of tulips, laid out in gigantic stripes of red, orange, and yellow. Leopoldo would roll himself a fat joint and capture the energy of the landscape on a little canvas with watercolors. “Las flores are in love, honey.” This, she thought, was Leopoldo’s real soul, loving, and moved by the beauty of the natural world.

  Claudia posing in front of a sacred pole she and Leopoldo erected, adorned with her sun and moon masks, on Cultus Mountain. Claudia was the “moon” to Leopoldo’s “sun.”

  Although I was home alone all day, I suffered the hours of loneliness and boredom happily, knowing that they were working side by side. Now that he could monitor her all day long, he wouldn’t have any excuse to be jealous. But Leopoldo still found ways she could be cheating on him. If she took too long at the store, he was convinced she was screwing the box boy out back on a bed of lettuce. Every trip to the post office was a chance for her to have sex with a mail carrier on a pile of packages. Even visits to Fabricio’s became uncomfortable. When he introduced Claudia to other Salvadoran guys, he’d say: “You see how beautiful is my woman?” They knew him well enough to nod yes or risk offending him, but they couldn’t agree with any enthusiasm or he would start yelling, “You looking at my woman!?” when he hit the malt liquor tipping point.

  One afternoon in June, Eli and I climbed up to the new clear-cut above River Kerry’s place. We sat on one of the raw, wet stumps and mourned the death of the trees together. Then I spent an hour complaining to him about my unraveling life.

  “Look, dude,” he tried to comfort me. “At least it can’t get any worse.”

  But he was wrong, things got worse, for both of us.

  Leopoldo and Claudia lost their job at the bulb factory. It had taken Leopoldo less than a week to begin complaining that his back hurt from leaning over the conveyor belt all day. Then he started limiting his workweek to Saturdays and Sundays, based on the theory that the clueless boss would think he was a go-getter and overlook his fraudulent time cards for the other five days of the week. When this didn’t work out, Leopoldo began griping about how he was being exploited. My mother supported his charges of exploitation because she noticed the nefarious timing of the raids by La Migra. Immigration officials came like clockwork to haul off half the workforce the day before payday. Finally Leopoldo denounced the boss in front of the whole processing plant: “You exploit the workers! You are motherfucker!” And they were both fired on the spot.

  A few days later we were evicted. The landowner came up from Seattle to tell us he was selling his timber rights to a logging company. The whole forest would be clear-cut. The cabins would be razed, and nothing would remain but a wasteland of stumps. We needed to get out ASAP.

  Maybe some good could come out of this, I thought. Maybe we could rent a house in Mount Vernon, complete with lights and a television and, dare I dream, a toilet. But Claudia’s face was taut with worst-case scenarios. “Now that I’m married I can’t qualify for Welfare. We’ve go
t no jobs, no money, no car. What are we doing to do?” All these problems made Leopoldo thirsty, and he went outside for a warm beer and a joint.

  Our savior came in the unexpected form of Crazy John, who stopped by with his girlfriend Erica to tell us they were moving out to Camano Island, off the coast of Snohomish County. His family had some raw land out there, he told us, and he and Erica were going to build a home together. Leopoldo’s eyes swiveled up from his smoldering blunt with opportunistic curiosity. My mother’s face softened, and she raised her eyes in thanksgiving. When Crazy John heard that we were being displaced by Capitalistic Earth-rapers coming to murder the trees that he once called friends, he naturally invited us to come along with him. “It’s the least I can do, Claudia, after all those months you let me sleep naked in your car.”

  We piled into Erica’s powder-blue AMC Gremlin like preschoolers on their way to the zoo. Crazy John, nominally sitting in the front passenger seat, filled up my entire field of vision. Erica had him lift his leg every time she wanted to shift gears. Her brown hair was worn in a perfectly even bowl cut, which gave her the appearance of a medieval monk. She was never without pink bubble gum and a Pepsi, and cracked anal sex jokes for most of the hour-long ride to Camano Island. My mother gesticulated excitedly the whole way, talking at Crazy John and Erica about the Spirits and intentional community and about how we were going to start a new civilization together on the land.

  “Look, Joshey, look!” Claudia was pointing animatedly at a wall of temperate rainforest. “Look at those trees!” I was looking at those trees and it was not good news. Forget electricity and television, there wasn’t even a structure out here, not even a mailbox. Upon closer inspection, there wasn’t even a clearing in which to build a structure. But Leopoldo and Claudia saw potential. They squinted their eyes and waved at various patches of trees and walked back to the car holding hands.