Free Spirit

by Joshua Safran

  I began crying as I made my way back through the forest to the clearing where we were squatting. The tarp covering our “bed” was littered with branches and evergreen needles. Tools and empty water jugs were scattered around the pile of boxes that contained our worldly possessions. My mother was gone. She had probably hitchhiked into town to pick up supplies. Leopoldo was on the other side of the clearing, out of sight, sawing at the base of some tree with his bow saw. I was still sobbing as I set my haggard blue book bag down on the ground and began rummaging through a black milk crate for something to eat. I found a jar of pickles and wandered a few hundred feet deeper into the forest.

  Eventually I sat down on one of Leopoldo’s fallen logs, where I stopped crying but still convulsed a little involuntarily. School was no longer an option. I wasn’t going to get up and go through all of that again. For what? For aches and bruises and humiliation? I’d departed in the morning with nothing but my intelligence. And now my stupid remedial self didn’t have anything left.

  A sharp crack rang out of the forest in front of me. High above me the canopy rustled and snapped. The soft light silhouetting the feathery sprays of the massive cedar across the clearing began to shimmer down the length of the tree. The tree was moving. It was falling. At me! The tree was rumbling now as it came. I didn’t feel anything, not even fear. I just didn’t care. Why get up and move? Who would miss me? My mother? Leopoldo? He wanted me dead. The kids at school would be cheering for the tree.

  The cedar tree’s long branches were cracking and exploding as they collided with other trees on the way down toward me. From somewhere a raven cawed in panic. But I sat still. The cedar tree now hurtled down at me, blocking out the light above and casting a shadow over me. In its wake, brilliant light fingers of God came pouring through the canopy. And, in that moment, I saw very clearly a young man laughing. He was tanned, with a close-cropped beard. Head thrown back, black eyes shining. His black curly hair dancing in the wind. He was cloaked in a white prayer shawl under a blue desert sky. This visionary man was the future, the son I might have some day if I could find the strength to struggle through these troubles.

  The ends of branches were beginning to strike the ground ahead of me like spears. Everything was popping and exploding. Forest debris swirled around me, surging in the wind that heralded the tree fall. I slid off the log and began running, bobbing and weaving, ducking under branches and leaping over logs. I was screaming in fright, but also with exhilaration.

  I would make it through this and have a child. My childhood might be hopeless but I could make someone else’s wonderful. I would give my kid running water—showers and baths and toilets, electricity, a safe warm home, toys, new clothes, and a good school. I would model his childhood on the opposite of mine. I would never beat him or abandon him. I would never have sex in front of him or give him drugs. He would never know alcohol or violence. I would train my son to be upright and strong, to stand in defense of the weak against bullies.

  I was flying through the forest, dodging falling shadows and braving a gauntlet of branches and sprays that whipped down around me. As the massive cedar tree made landfall at my heels, I hurled myself into the lee of a large stump. The ground shook with a tremendous rumble. Branches, bark, and dirt rained down around me. The air filled with secondary crashes and cracks as the tree finished falling in the forest. In front of me was the edge of the clearing. I could see the blue glint of my book bag skewered by a jagged branch.

  The landscape had shifted but I was all right. The undaunted, uplifting words of Robert Nesta Marley, came to me then like prophecy:

  The stone that the builder refuse

  Will always be the head cornerstone.

  I stood up and dusted myself off for the millionth time that day. Just then, Crazy John came bursting out of the foliage, shirtless, his wiry red hair standing out at strange angles. “Are you OK?” he bellowed at me, his eyes wild with concern.

  “Yeah. I’m OK,” I said. He calmed himself down with deep breaths and stared at me. I smiled back and said: “Well, this will make a great story some day!”

  “This’ll make a great story right now,” Crazy John said, his outstretched arm displaying for me the beauty of the lush green forest around me. He farted with a swish of his hips and turned back into the foliage from whence he’d come, cawing like a raven.

  I knelt and began freeing my book bag from the branch that was pinning it down. I needed that bag. I had to go to school the next day.

  FIFTEEN

  Rainfall

  Leopoldo was in a race against the rain, and I knew he was going to lose. He knew it too. We’d both lived in Washington long enough to know that he had a month, at most, before the rains started and never stopped. A month to build a solid foundation, erect sturdy walls, and lay down a waterproof roof. A month to protect us from the elements. But Leopoldo was still chopping down trees.

  Claudia was oblivious to the obvious outcome. Even as the skies began to darken, she was still talking about the pyramid and her imaginary art studio and her pretend pottery shed. Leopoldo knew she would catch on eventually, so he did his best to blame me for his impending failure. I was worthless, he said. But this worked to my advantage because it meant I could keep going to school. If I were as bad as he said, then I was doing him a favor by getting out of his way.

  Leopoldo resented me for going to the “fancy school” and complained to Claudia: “Josh think he too good for hard work now.” In the evenings, he tried to punish me for my elitist ambitions. He put me to work hacking branches from fallen logs or hand-planing boards out of wet timber. Only nightfall saved me from a forest full of chores.

  Sitting around the fire at night, Claudia debriefed me on my day, curious to see what I was learning in school, what lies they were trying to feed me. Leopoldo snapped at us for talking too loudly or for talking in a tone of voice he found to be disrespectful. Watching me write an essay about what I did over the summer, he detected my vulnerability: homework. School wasn’t just on school time. Some of it was on his time. Leopoldo called me away from the fire. He had his hands full fixing a saw blade and he needed his flashlight. I rifled through the milk crate of tools and patted down the bed, but the flashlight was nowhere to be found. I suspected he’d hidden it. It took me half an hour, but I finally located it wedged between a bag of clay and a rotting melon. When I brought him the flashlight, he threw it into the mud and told me I was too late. I took my place on my log by the fire and returned to my essay. But he wasn’t done. Leopoldo pushed me onto the ground and rolled my seat into the flames. He said we needed it to keep the fire going overnight. I joined Claudia by the wheelbarrow of bricks Crazy John had hauled back into the clearing and together we constructed a brick bench by the fire. Leopoldo descended on us in a frenzy of frustration. “No, no! Those bricks for the fire!” He dismantled our seat from under us and cast the bricks into the ash around the fire pit. I sat cross-legged in the dirt and finished my essay, the light from the fire flickering across the page.

  But my essay would never get handed in. The next night, he mistook my draft essay for scrap paper and threw it into the fire. “What are you thinking!?” I yelled at him, but he put a finger in my face and told me, “You better show to me some respect. I working and you sloppy, throwing around the papers. What you are thinking!?” And so it went.

  With time running out and the skies starting to darken, Leopoldo swerved into an arrangement to end work on the pyramid and achieve failure with honor. He borrowed Erica’s AMC Gremlin and, on his way home from the bar, he crashed it into a telephone pole. When his hangover had subsided and the damages had been tallied, Leopoldo declared his back unfit for further service. Not that he didn’t try. He heroically scraped the bow saw against the last remaining spruce tree in the clearing, but the pain was too great. He lamented, and we agreed, that he would’ve finished the pyramid but for his debilitating injury. When the heavy rains came there was no one to blame but Fate.

 
; The outdoor kitchen was washed away. The ground turned to soup, and the moss dripped like a thousand oversaturated sponges. We scrambled around in the mud without a plan, wringing out our blankets and wrapping our disintegrating cardboard boxes in slimy plastic garbage bags. A dozen rotting trees lay dead at our feet, but we still had no shelter. I stepped onto the school bus the next day soaked to the bone and slick with grime. The bullies couldn’t get enough of me. When I climbed back through the jungle at the end of the day, Claudia had finally lost her uncanny optimism. She and Leopoldo had hitched a ride to the scrap yard in Burlington and returned with a roll of salvaged plastic sheeting and a pile of dirty lumber and crumbling particleboard. They hammered this collection together, and the result was a patchwork lean-to nailed onto a large tree stump.

  The lean-to on the stump where Claudia, Leopoldo, and I spent the fall and part of the winter of 1986. Its leaking ceiling was five feet high at its tallest.

  Somehow this was home.

  The incessant rain shrank our world into that damp bedraggled square—seven feet by seven feet, at most—floating above the slime like an ark of despondency. This left room for nothing more than a family bed of soggy foam mattresses and a thin strip of bare particleboard that became our makeshift kitchen. It took half an hour to bring water to boil on our battered green camping stove, and the rice was half-cooked and chewy when it was served. Our bread was nothing but a collection of little scraps once all the mold had been cut away.

  After dinner, the adults filled up our small space with venom, spitting at each other in front of me without inhibition, as if I were just another stream of water dripping from the ceiling. I sat at the foot of the bed, hunched over my math packet. Math was the hardest since I had never really learned it before. Without knowing my multiplication tables, each problem took half an hour. The kerosene lamp wedged between my feet began sputtering, and a new leak opened up over my head. We were out of buckets and bowls, so I threw an old blanket down to soak up the water and slid down the bed to a drier spot. I hummed loudly to myself to drown out their screaming.

  Leopoldo suddenly decided the argument was over, yelling: “He is showing off! Why he doing school here? You no tell me what I know! You no tell me what I can do! You shut up or I give you what else!” I didn’t need to turn around to know his hand was raised in the air. I braced myself for impact like I was a passenger in his car. But only silence ensued. A thick punitive silence, from both sides, as they rigidly lay their bodies at opposite sides of the bed. And then: “Josh, turn off the light!”

  I looked up at the collage of wall, glistening with rivulets of water in the glow of the lamp. He had me now. The sun was setting early. It was too dark for homework without the lamp and there was nowhere else to go. “Josh!” I blew out the lamp, and carefully positioned myself on the bed between the plastic buckets and metal bowls. They steadily splashed and pinged as I tried to fall asleep.

  The next day Mrs. King gave me a minus on my math homework. She wrote: Incomplete. Try harder, Josh!

  The only way around Leopoldo’s light embargo was to get up earlier. But even then, not enough morning sunlight filtered into the lean-to, so I took to sitting on a wet stump with a cruddy blue tarp pulled over my head. At just the right angle, the light filtered in, but the raindrops did not. Soaked and groggy, I scratched at the damp pages on my lap with a mechanical pencil, trying not to tear the fragile paper. I still didn’t finish my homework most days, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t about completion anymore. Homework was an act of defiance, a way of showing myself I still had a measure of control over my life.

  One morning I awoke shivering and choking. The air was thinner than usual and carried a new chill. Winter was on its way. New leaks had sprung from above in the night. I was soaked to my core and coughing. I couldn’t breathe right. The cold, the wetness, the mildew and mold—it all conspired to obstruct my airways with impenetrable congestion. I sat up and blew against the barricades in my sinuses to no effect. Claudia and Leopoldo were curled up together under an old fur-lined parka. Leopoldo’s hand was still closed over the neck of a wine bottle.

  Outside I stamped around in the mud and rain, trying to rally myself for the thousand-yard trek through the rainforest to the bus stop. Even with my impenetrably clogged nostrils I could tell that I stank. My hair was unspeakably greasy, but I didn’t have the fortitude to stand naked in the freezing rain with a bottle of shampoo. I barely had the fortitude to stand up.

  This was rock bottom. I knew that now, and it was somehow inspiring. I couldn’t imagine it getting any worse. It just couldn’t. In a month or less the snows would come. Sure, it would be colder, but the roof would stop leaking. That would be an improvement. Or maybe this gnarly congestion would progress into a serious illness, and then they’d have to hospitalize me. That would be an improvement, too. From here, from this place and this point in time, there was nowhere to go but up.

  Unexpectedly, it was Crazy John who would start us on our way. On Camano Island, Leopoldo and my mother both acknowledged the strange irony of being taken in by a crazy man, but Leopoldo wasn’t about to question free rent, and my mother had always believed that crazy was only one step away from enlightened. Crazy John looked on silently as Leopoldo chopped down tree after tree and alternated between loving and beating my mother.

  All the while, Crazy John was diligently working on his octagonal structure by the road. By the time the rains came, he’d built a cozy little cabin for himself and Erica to share. They were all set for the winter with a tight roof and a propane stove and lamps. He’d even built a little covered shoe rack where you could store your muddy boots before going inside. “That John. He make to embarrass me,” Leopoldo complained to my mother.

  When Crazy John came knocking at the decomposing door of our lean-to to ask us for help paying the property taxes, Leopoldo shoved a finger in his face: “This you trick!? You tell us free rent, then we work so hard on the land, and now it your land? And now we have to pay to you the rent!?”

  “No,” Crazy John said calmly. “It’s still my family’s land and you’re still welcome to live here as long as you want. But they sent me the property tax bill because it doesn’t seem fair for them to pay it since they’re not living here. And it seems fair for you to pay half of it because you are living here.”

  “You fuck us!”

  Crazy John walked away into the rain. Leopoldo muttered about him all evening. “He crazy if he think we paying this!” Leopoldo was hot now, fueling himself with green bottles of malt liquor until he couldn’t stand it anymore. “I go talk with him.”

  He rattled around in our kitchen crates outside, and I fell into a deep, disturbing dream. At some point in the night Leopoldo stumbled through the mud, following Crazy John’s footprints back toward his octagonal cabin. Shouting and shrieking broke my sleep. I could hear Erica screeching in terror. Claudia scrambled down the bed. “You stay here, Joshey!” She stomped her boots on, and one foot busted through the soggy particleboard floor. I dismissed it all as another bad dream and went back to sleep.

  In the morning, I found Leopoldo sitting at the end of the bed vomiting into the green rainwater bucket. When he turned around to wince at me, his face was slate gray. He looked like a corpse. “What I do to them?” he moaned. Leopoldo remembered crashing through Crazy John’s door the night before, but then the details slipped into a haze. Did he have a knife? Did he put the knife to Erica’s throat? She was pregnant. “Claudia,” he choked out, “you tell them I sorry.”

  Claudia trudged through the mud with Leopoldo’s message, but sorry wasn’t enough. She came back in defeat, her head down, the neglected hood of her jacket full of rainwater. Crazy John and Erica were scared for their lives and the life of their unborn child. Leopoldo had threatened to kill them, boasting that he had murdered white people before and wasn’t afraid to do it again. “Look at me!” he had demanded. “To kill is for me a sport. When I aiming to kill, I always make the goal.” By som
e miracle, Leopoldo hadn’t pulled a knife on them, but they weren’t taking any more chances. We had until noon to get out or Crazy John was going to call the cops.

  We struggled through the mud and rain, gathering our most prized possessions. Then we slogged toward the trail, stopping to let Leopoldo vomit every few feet. We filed past Crazy John’s octagon in a desperate little procession. He stood on the front porch of his cabin, stone-faced, his arms crossed against his chest. As I passed, lugging a crate of my poetry journals, I looked up at Crazy John’s face, trying to catch his eyes. He wouldn’t look at me. It was too awkward. I recognized the averting of the eyes. It was what normal people did. And then I realized that he wasn’t crazy anymore. Now it was our turn.

  SIXTEEN

  A Kind of Normal

  The Stanwood library opened its doors to me without question. Mercifully warm and clean, it was a shelter from the rain and the echoes of Erica screaming in the night. I washed my face in the white sink and took refuge in a book about the Golem of Prague. There I stayed for hours until Claudia’s insistent whisper pulled me back. She was brimming with excitement. “Joshey, I found the perfect place! Right here in Stanwood!”

  A home in town! I pictured a two-story house with a yard and a climbing tree. Maybe a driveway with a basketball hoop. But my image of perfection evaporated as we pulled out of the library parking lot. We weren’t climbing the hill to where the nice houses looked happily down onto the world. We were looping around into the little barrio at the edge of west Stanwood, where the migrant workers subsisted, their laundry hanging outside in the rain like advertisements for poverty. We pulled off of the paved street and inched down a muddy alley until we came to a stop in the gravel parking lot of the old Masonic Lodge.