Free Spirit

by Joshua Safran

  During a break in the interview preparations, I found Leopoldo up front, flirting with one of the legal secretaries who was also married to a Salvadoran. “I followed Archbishop Romero,” he told her with a straight face. “I been always part of the peace movement. No matter how bad it get, there’s no excuse for the violence.”

  It was all lies. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. The truth made me and my mother the biggest suckers of all time. We had been bilked out of years of our lives. The whole thing, all that time, it was just a big con game—a stunning scam. I couldn’t even bring myself to be angry. I just felt totally ripped off.

  We exited I-5 toward Stanwood, and the streetlights flickered across the side of Leopoldo’s face. He didn’t look scary in this light. He looked like a clown. Seated next to him was my mother. She looked like one too. A couple of clowns in a tragic circus.

  But as bad as Leopoldo was, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was I any better?

  “Where the fuck you go to!?” Leopoldo had called after me a few months back. “I no say you can go!”

  I closed the door gently behind me and ran down the alley. When I saw that he wasn’t chasing me, I rounded the corner slowly and swaggered down the block. A new family was moving into the house where the pack of Dobermans used to be, and I wanted them to see me strut. But they didn’t notice me. They were too busy unloading the stuffed parrots and the crate of Creedence Clearwater Revival albums from the back of a black van.

  “Hey, what’s up,” I said to the fat kid with the camouflage headband. “I’m Josh.”

  “Hey, I’m Andy. Some people call me Mandy, not like a girl’s name, but like Manly Andy—Mandy.”

  “Mandy?”

  “Or Andy. Whatever you want.” Mandy was fiddling with a pair of plastic nunchucks. He was dressed like a commando but built like a marshmallow.

  “You moving in?” I asked.

  “Yeah, we were living in the trailer park but my dad married their mom,” he said, pointing at the three blond kids shuttling rag rugs and lava lamps into the house. “We’re kinda like the Brady Bunch.”

  I didn’t know who the Brady Bunch were but figured they were some notorious family of outlaws from TV. “Cool,” I said. “I live around the corner with my mom and stepdad. He murdered a lot of people in El Salvador.”

  “Cool,” said Mandy. “Very cool.”

  Despite his warlike attire, Mandy turned out to be kind of a dud. He preferred action movies to actual action and was too afraid of imagined snakes to take the shortcut through the field behind the church. I left Mandy to veg out on the couch and became fast friends with his stepbrother Jim. Jim was a year older than me, and at night we dressed in black and prowled around the neighborhood like ninjas.

  I’d found my newest adoptive family and spent every waking hour with the Brady Bunch. Jim’s mother drank heavily and cut hair for money on their front porch. Mandy’s father smoked weed alone in the black van after dinner and had a bumper sticker that said THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO SAY I LOVE YOU & F*ING IS ONE OF THEM. Jim’s youngest sister was eight, but she still sucked her thumb and dragged a security blanket around with her. I didn’t pay her any attention, focusing instead on the older sister, Rachel.

  Rachel was a year younger than me. She had a sweet face but it was interrupted by oversized teeth whenever she dared to smile. She had a crush on me. I could tell by the way she blushed when I told her she looked pretty. When she followed me from room to room, I pretended not to notice, and I ignored her when she spun around to show me her rudimentary knowledge of ballet. Rachel had so many questions for me, but I was too cool to answer them. “Tell me about New York, Josh! What was it like?” She’d keep at it, begging for details, and finally I would notice her, gazing down at her like a rock star deigning to acknowledge the shrieking groupie in the first row. Then I’d begin concocting stories for her, and she’d inhale them like opium, her head nodding, her eyebrows rising. Sometimes all she could say in response was “Wow.” Who could blame her? I was very impressive, or at least I pretended I was.

  She might know a little ballet, but I’d studied at a Russian ballet school in New York City. She loved to go square dancing with her mom, but I’d taken first place in the junior square-dance competition at the Kansas State Fair. She loved Madonna, but my dad had played bass in Madonna’s backup band. I’d even hung out with her a couple of times at parties in New York. She was pretty short in real life, I told Rachel, and had a surprisingly husky voice. Madonna smoked nothing but clove cigarettes. And lest Rachel begin to doubt my manliness, I told her I’d once killed a man. I was dating a girl three years older than me back in California. Her stepdad used to come to her room and beat her with a belt. I didn’t think that was right, and one day I confronted her stepdad with a pistol. He lunged at me, and I shot him between the eyes. After a night in juvenile hall they let me go, calling it self-defense. The stepdad’s family had vowed revenge against me, and now I was in the witness relocation program here in Stanwood. I’d done all of these things before I was twelve.

  They were lies, but they were easy. I kept dishing them out, and Rachel kept eating them up. She asked a lot of follow-up questions, but they were no problem. I’d spent a summer living with my father on the Lower East Side so I was well equipped with all the little observations I needed to build a fantasy world amidst bohemian celebrities in the Big Apple. I’d read Madonna’s interview in Penthouse, so I knew intimate details about her life. And I’d read more books than Rachel’s family put together, so I had no end of inspirational source material to draw from.

  Rachel also required some proof, of course. I couldn’t just say I was a ballet dancer or a square-dance champion without getting up from my chair. But I’d learned the art of false identity from a sensei of fraud. Leopoldo could claim to be a black belt in kung fu or a chess master because he made it clear that these things didn’t matter to him. They were mere playthings he’d put down already. If you made a big deal about his alleged mastery of a specialized martial art or an ancient game of skill, he told you that you were acting like an excitable child. Leopoldo would show off a few moves and nothing more. If that wasn’t enough to convince you, then forget you. Leave him alone and stop wasting his time. This routine was somehow very convincing, and I practiced it on Rachel. I rose from my chair wearily, stretched dramatically, gave her a few spectacular arcs of my hand through the air, and pointed at the window with my toe. That was master ballet, take it or leave it. Square dancing was a little harder because I had no idea what it even looked like. It was some sort of yee-haw cowboy dance. So I shuffled around muscularly in a circle and that was championship-level square dancing. And it worked. Rachel shook her head in wonder at my humble displays of greatness.

  Successfully sliding my deceit down her gullible throat gave me a charge of power and control, but it also left me with a nagging nausea in my belly. But I didn’t let my guilt stop me. I kept on feeding her lies.

  We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend exactly, but we took long walks together, and she told me boring secrets she’d never told anyone else. One Sunday she made a picnic for us, and we ate her sandwiches together in the middle school playground. For dessert we sipped from juice boxes, and I told funny stories to make her laugh. Rachel grinned impishly and suddenly sprayed me in the face with her juice box. My eyes stung. That little bitch! I grabbed Rachel by the hair and yanked her toward me. I slapped her in the face and then slipped behind her and put her in a headlock.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she cried.

  “You better be sorry,” I spit at her. I held her tightly.

  “I’m sorry,” she cried again.

  I was calm now. “You do not disrespect me like that.” She nodded, and I let her go. When she stopped crying, we walked back toward home, holding hands for the first time.

  The weekend after Leopoldo was exposed as a fraud, Rachel’s mother invited me to go with them to the mudflats on Camano Island. We slid on
our bellies all day across miles of briny mud. We laughed at the sinfulness of being so dirty. At the end of the day, our grime-streaked bodies ached all over. But it was a good ache, the way a soldier must feel after walking through a battle unscathed. While the rest of the Brady Bunch made a fire on the beach, Jim and I toweled off up at the car.

  “Check it out,” he said. “I got my M-16 out of storage.” He was holding a black military assault rifle out in front of him. It bore the unmistakable ribbed hand guard and square handle that defined the American infantryman in the Vietnam War.

  “Whoa,” I said. The gun invoked a dissonant blend of lust and fear. “Is it real?” I asked.

  “Nah,” said Jim. “It’s just a BB gun.”

  “Can I hold it?”

  “Sure,” said Jim. “This is how you cock it.” He pulled back a lever along the chamber with an exhilaratingly ominous mechanical snap.

  The rifle nestled perfectly against my shoulder. It was born to be held in my arms. I crouched down in the bushes and swept the barrel back and forth along my field of fire. The muddy delta, the jumbled rocks, the jungly weeds—I could have been in Vietnam. But when I tried to imagine clusters of Vietcong to shoot at, I kept seeing Leopoldo’s crouching form in front of me. His sneering face, his scraggly-ass goatee, his red headband. I imagined drilling him right through the head. And then, through my sights, there was Rachel laughing down by the bonfire with her big horsey teeth. Could a BB even travel that far? I lowered the sights to her shoulder and pressed the trigger. Through the little iron circle I saw her face collapse in tears. She was clutching at her arm. Then her crying was carried on the wind.

  “Oh, shit, Jim. I think I just shot Rachel!”

  “Where?”

  “On the arm.”

  “You fucker! Now my mom’s going to take the M-16 away from me again.”

  I handed the rifle back to Jim and walked down to the bonfire like a condemned man. I was the worst person in the world. I would’ve preferred to die by the side of the trail but knew I had no choice but to face my victim. By the time I reached her, Rachel had stopped crying but was still sniffling. I apologized over and over, and Jim hissed at her until she agreed not to tell their mother.

  We rode back to Stanwood from the mudflats in silence. My hand was limp in Rachel’s clutch, and I bowed my head in shame. As I thought it over, it was suddenly clear to me what was happening. I was becoming a little con-man, molded in Leopoldo’s image. And I knew this meant he was winning somehow.

  When we got out of the car, I pulled Rachel aside and confessed it all to her. Everything I’d told her was a lie. Everything. I couldn’t dance. I’d never met Madonna. I’d never had a girlfriend. And the only person I’d ever shot was her. Rachel’s face pulled itself apart, and she cried, worse than when I’d shot her.

  “Why, Josh? Why did you lie to me?” she asked in tearful gasps.

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged.

  “I hate you! I never want to see you again.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said numbly and turned away from her.

  When I came through the door of the apartment, Leopoldo was waiting for me. “Where the fuck you been!?”

  “I shot a girl,” I said, and closed the shattered door to my room behind me. He didn’t come after me. Maybe he was too confused by my answer. Or maybe he was proud of me.

  NINETEEN

  The Revolution

  Leopoldo was shouting, but no one was listening anymore. The ground was shifting under his feet. It wasn’t an earthquake, not yet, but the mud was pulling at his boots, and he was steadily slipping down the slope.

  Claudia had lost her ever-talkative tendencies and would lapse into silence for hours at a time. She moved around the apartment like a ghost. She wasn’t defying him, but she was depriving him of her company. I wasn’t defying him either, but I was coming close. I was flexing, testing the strength of my opponent in little ways. I dragged my feet when Leopoldo demanded urgency and asked sarcastic questions when he ordered me around. It was clear to me now that a showdown was coming. Leopoldo was not going to leave voluntarily. I would have to force him out.

  The problem was when. Things were too intolerable to wait much longer, but I knew I couldn’t trigger the inevitable confrontation until the time was right. And, from where I stood, no time seemed ideal to go up against an ex-military commando who enjoyed fighting. He was a liar, but he was still lethal. So I kept my head down and probed for weaknesses and opportunities, like an unarmed scout scurrying through the silent landscape in search of the perfect battlefield. When the day of battle came, I would be ready.

  As Leopoldo felt his hold over us slipping, he resorted to drink more than ever. His alcoholic binges became ever more destructive and raged on well into the morning. When I came home in the afternoon I would find him stumbling about in a pit of wreckage, incoherently apologetic. These were the moments when he was at his weakest, but I couldn’t fight him then. This was Leopoldo the pitiful alcoholic fool. And that wasn’t the man I wanted to stand up to. I wanted to take on Leopoldo the abusive bully, when he was at his strongest. Yet that was when I was most afraid of him.

  Spring unexpectedly delivered a week of rainless skies, and I spent every afternoon shooting baskets down at the hoop behind the church. The open air lifted a measure of heaviness from my chest, and I stood at the free-throw line carefully lining up my shot. My ball clanged off the rim and rolled out of sight into the church parking lot.

  A moment later my ball reemerged in the hands of Byron Smith, a weasel-faced eighth-grader I’d seen hanging around with the heavy metal kids. He was accompanied by a long-haired teenager I’d never seen before. They were both grinning.

  “You wanna fight?” the teenager offered me hopefully. My dog, Benji, barked in warning, but I stood my ground.

  “No, give me my ball back.”

  “How about we fight for the ball?” They were on the court now and kept coming closer.

  “No, I just want my ball back and then I’ll go home.” This was not what he wanted to hear. His pasty face was in mine now, and he poked me in the chest. He had rings on his fingers.

  “How ’bout you fight my friend Byron here, or I do this to your little faggoty dog!? You ever seen one of these?” He pulled out a black Chinese throwing star from his denim jacket and stabbed it into my ball. Byron flinched, and the ball gasped and wilted.

  “Fucking jerks!” I protested. “That was my ball.”

  “What’d you call me!? Huh!?” He was back in my face.

  I could’ve run, but once they’d popped my ball and threatened to kill Benji that was no longer an option. And although Byron was older, he was about my size. I glared at Byron’s bucktoothed grin and wet spiky hair and felt confident I could hold my own. I nodded, as if to say OK, I’ll fight you. Byron came at me in a flurry of fists, punching me in the face three or four times before I could even raise my hands. I was on the ground, blood in my mouth, blood pouring out of my nose.

  “Get up, faggot! Get up!” the teenager was hollering down at me. “Get up!”

  I pulled myself onto my feet and drove into Byron’s midsection. We rolled around on the blacktop, and I crushed him in my arms with all my strength. He struggled to free himself, but I could feel that I was stronger. And then I was on top of him, punching and smashing at his face.

  “And Byron’s down,” the teenager announced. “Oh no!… The Ref gets involved!”

  A sudden boot to the back of the head sent me into blackness for a moment. When I came to, I was on my side, feet kicking me in the ribs, back, shins, butt. Then a heel to the temple, and my skull creaked.

  Somewhere a voice announced: “And the faggot goes down by TKO in the second round!” And then laughter trailed off around the corner.

  I limped home, spitting blood, crying, and swearing oaths of revenge. My face was swollen and numb, my lips were cracked, and my nose refused to stop bleeding. When I came in the door, Leopoldo greeted me with: “Why
you gone so long!?”

  “Two boys beat me up,” I howled at him.

  “Why you cry like a pussy?”

  I tried to pull myself together, but couldn’t stop shaking. Claudia came home from Inga’s just then. “Oh my God, Joshey, what happened!?” she shrieked, grabbing at my face as though I were dying.

  “Two boys beat me up.” I was crying again.

  She turned to Leopoldo: “Do something! What are you going to do!?”

  “What can I do?” he shrugged.

  “We could go find them,” I growled. “They’re probably on their way to Video Farm. You could have a little ‘talk’ with them.”

  But I knew it was no use. He never stood up for me. When I told my mother I was getting bullied by the big girl back on Camano Island, I actually felt sorry for the girl as I watched Claudia dispatch Leopoldo ahead of me down the trail. What was he going to do to her? Thrash her? Or just scare her so bad she would piss her acid-washed jeans? But he did nothing. He just shrugged his shoulders and reported back: “She say Josh use very bad words.” The girl gave me an extra special pummeling that day for telling on her.

  And now it was the same thing. “What can I do? If two boys fight you, you fight back to them. Here.” Leopoldo reached under the sink and gave me a wet, broken mop handle. “You carry this in you pants. If they come to you, hit them.” The scrap of wood was a joke.

  This man had killed people, sought out fights with the police, and beaten his wife with impunity. All he was good at was violence, but he couldn’t raise a finger to protect me? What use was he? He was nothing, totally worthless. I shook my head in disgust and went to the bathroom to clean the blood off my face. Looking at my battered image in the mirror, I didn’t see a victim looking back at me. Under the blood, I was nearly a man, with a shadow of a moustache and a solid jawline. Battle-bruised but tough. Flashes of the fight flickered through my head, and I realized that I’d fought back for the first time. I’d thrown punches. I’d tackled Byron Smith and taken him down. And I would have beaten him too if his friend hadn’t kicked me in the head.