Freedom Road Read online

  “My English teacher in high school was pretty hot. She liked me, said I had a poetic soul. I should have done something about that.”

  “Look her up. We’ll stop by on the way.”

  “But I’m with you now; you’re my one and only.”

  “Isn’t that, like, old-fashioned? Aren’t we up for anything?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “A three-way with your English teacher. Reciting Shakespeare as we go doggie style. I wonder what Shakespeare recited when he gave it from behind. I guess Shakespeare. Oh yeah, baby, baby, let me do it to you. Might not be poetic, but coming from him it’s still Shakespeare.”

  “I want to pull over right now and swallow you whole.”

  “And what’s the goal of all this teacher-parent pleasing they wanted me to do? Fill my résumé, battle my way into a top-ten college, find a job that pays more than my friends are pulling down. And all the time looking a certain way and behaving a certain way and laughing at all those who go about it any differently. And what was the pot at the end of the rainbow? A gig at Goldman or Bain?”

  “Bane? Isn’t that the Batman villain? I am Bane, you will die.”

  “Bain and Company. A consulting firm. Romney. But see what I mean. Sacks of gold, Goldfinger, Bane. And my father’s law firm, Blank, Rome. Really? That’s where I want to spend my life, at Blank, Rome? They’re like monsters with helmets and sandals and those pleated skirts, and their eyes are all white as they wander zombielike searching for poor people to crucify. We are from Blank, Rome. It’s like they name themselves just to weed out anyone with a conscience. And what do you end up with? Money, sure, and marriage, and kids, and alcoholism, and adultery, and divorce. And then, in the despair of middle age, you find yourself hiking the Pacific Crest Trail to find yourself, or maybe just stuffing your gut with food and prayer and cheap sex in European hostels.”

  “So you decided to skip all the other stuff and get right to the cheap sex in European hostels.”

  “It’s a plan.”

  “I like it,” said Frank, and he did.

  “So what was her name?”

  “Who?”

  “Your hot English teacher.”

  “Mrs. Applethorp.”

  “Sounds spicy.”

  “She had this cute overbite.”

  It was good to hear Erica laugh. The rant he’d heard before, or something much like it. It was like she was trying so hard to convince herself and never quite succeeding, but the laugh, the laugh, hard and guttural and true, that was as real as a drenching rain. That was something he could hang his life on.

  “You want to get high?” she said.

  He checked his watch.

  They lolled on a blanket atop the grass by the side of the road. The ground was soft, the air smelled of loam, the tongue of the setting sun licked their faces like a puppy.

  It was amazing what you could do with a strip of tinfoil and a straw, as long as you had a lighter and a pill to go with it.

  For a moment Frank wasn’t being chased, he wasn’t afraid, death didn’t lie entwined with freedom inside the spare tire of his car. For a moment he and Erica were the only two people in the world and the sun belonged to them as if it could be stuffed into a pocket when they were ready to move on. He believed just then that his love for Erica was so strong, so perfect, it would burst out of his heart like a bottle rocket and flood the world with harmony and peace. In this dark age of madness and hate, his love for Erica might be humanity’s last hope.

  He turned on his side and nuzzled her sweet, sweaty neck. He wanted to write a song about all this, he needed to, was desperate to. The words began to form like magic puffs of cloud in the sky. “Love.” “Above.” “Need.” “Bleed.” “Kill.” “Thrill.” “Heart.” “Apart.” It was all there, just waiting to be snatched out of the ether and turned into art.

  He always felt so productive when he was stoned, but lately he hadn’t done anything about it. Inspiration without follow-through—the story of his life. But tomorrow would be different. There would be follow-through tomorrow, and the next day, and beyond. He wouldn’t be pulling out the computer and writing the song just now, there was no time for that, not with the Russian on his trail, but there would be time enough in all the tomorrows on their journey through space and time into the future: Chillicothe, Santa Monica, Sydney, Bali, Prague, Paris. It was all in front of them.

  The sun was reaching for the horizon, which meant it would be late when they reached his brother’s house, all to the good. The later the better, the darker the better. They would slip in unseen, get the money from his brother, slip out again with nothing to connect him and Erica with his brother’s family as they roared ever west.

  “Let’s go, sweet pea,” he said.

  “Not yet,” she said, her voice a drowsy chime. “Let me sleep a little more.”

  “Sleep in the car. I want you to be up and chirpy when you meet my brother. I want him to fall in love with you like I did before we say goodbye.”

  Frank had been in the alley behind the coffeehouse, leaning beneath the single yellow bulb, taking a quick few drags from a reefer after his set, preparing to work the board for the upcoming amateur hour, which just showed how grandly his “career” had been going, when the girl sidled up beside him.

  “I thought you were pretty good,” she said.

  “That’s what I aspire to,” he said without looking at her, “pretty good.”

  It had been a crappy set, he knew, a bunch of songs written long ago, delivered with the affect of a terminally bored teen, which was about the best he could muster anymore, considering he hadn’t written anything fresh since he left Chicago and was pretty much done with the whole music thing. Working for the Russian was taking all his productive time, but it paid the rent and kept him stocked. He took another drag and then offered it to the girl.

  “You want?”

  She took the joint and sucked at it so greedily he thought she would smoke it all. About to grab it back, he got a good look at her and his alarm turned to something else. She was so shockingly beautiful that for a moment he forgot to breathe. He had noticed her before, in a pack of high school kids gathered in the back of the room, no doubt to cheer on one of their own playing in the next set. She was pretty in that high-school-girl way—smooth skin, thick mascara, woven bands around her thin wrists—but in the alley, lit by the bulb above them and the glow of the joint, she was otherworldly. Her eyes seemed to glow as the tip of the joint sparked from her inhale.

  “You here to watch a friend?” he said.

  “I’m singing.”

  “Really? Your own stuff?”

  “Carly writes and plays guitar but she’s got the voice of a frog, so I sing for her.”

  “I’ll look forward to that.”

  “Don’t,” she said, “I’m not much good either, just better than Carly.”

  And she was right about not being much good, but it didn’t much matter. There was just something about the way she sat on the stool while her friend played. She was self-contained and self-conscious at the same time; it was there in her posture, the spread of her hands, the way her eyes closed as she missed the high notes. Erica sitting on that stool was the very image of the way he had wanted his music to sound when he started out, young and beautiful and fearless and fuck all what anyone else thought. After their set, he stared with regret as she and her friend Carly walked out the door.

  It was only a few moments later when he felt a hand on his shoulder while he was still behind the board. “Can you get me anything a little more potent than the grass?”

  He turned and saw her and his heart skipped a beat.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Roxies?”

  Yes, he had told her, yes he could.

  That their relationship had started with and was still largely premised on his supply of the drug was a disappointment to Frank. Erica had become hooked on her pain medicine after her knee operation, and Frank
had become hooked on escape as his life teetered, and so it was through the drug that they bonded. This was a failure, he knew; a love such as theirs deserved purity of body and soul.

  One goal of their run west was to get them both clean and ready for their glorious futures. The beaches on Bali would be good for that, surely, sweating out the toxins beneath the Eastern sun. And yes, he had felt the tiniest disappointment in Erica when, still barreling west, she asked about getting high (not so much a suggestion as a demand, really, considering the state of things), but damn it had felt good. It had felt real. And truth was, it somehow gave him a renewed confidence. Sometimes a smidgen of smoke, or more than a smidgen, was just what the doctor ordered.

  “You don’t talk much about him,” said Erica as they roared through the darkness toward his brother’s house. “What’s he like?”

  “Todd? I called him Toddle. He was the perfect son, the perfect big brother. He taught me how to throw a baseball and how to tackle with my head up, and we wrestled like banshees across the living room floor, fighting over this and that. He was bigger and a better athlete, but he was too sweet to hurt me and I was ferocious enough to do damage, so it was almost even. And I was always getting into trouble, which let him play the perfect son all the years we were growing up. Heroic of me, wasn’t it?”

  “I know the feeling. My little sister will be able to do no wrong.”

  “Until she follows your path.”

  “God, I hope she doesn’t.”

  “Why not? You’re always going on about how much better it is to strike out on your own than follow lockstep with the masses.”

  “Not for her. She’s too sweet.”

  “You’re sweet.”

  “No I’m not,” she said, looking out the window at the darkness whizzing by. “I’m as sour as a crab apple.”

  “My brother’s sweet. A middle school social studies teacher, what could be sweeter? And he coaches the football team. Not the brightest maybe, but he was always overly protective of me, no matter how much crap I deserved.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess because he’s my big brother. And, you know, whatever I got into, and I got into shit, I kept him out of it. I never blamed him for anything, and when he did something bad, I covered up for him when I could. Like the time he spilled ink on the new carpet and I took the blame.”

  “That was noble.”

  “I was always in trouble anyway. What difference did it make? It’s easier to play along with the roles you’ve been assigned than to break out and become something new.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said. “It’s like I haven’t done my daily duty if I don’t see the disappointment and worry on my parents’ faces. It’s like this whole trip is just playing out my role to the end.”

  “But that’s not what we’re doing, sweet pea,” he said, putting a cheer in his voice as she grew darker. “We’re breaking out of those roles, breaking out of the vise of our lives. We’re smashing the chains binding us to what we once were and becoming something new, something better and truer.”

  “It’s pretty to think so.”

  “We’re not just thinking it, we’re doing it. And that’s why I need to see my big brother, the only family I give a damn about. I don’t expect I’ll ever be this way again, and I need to say goodbye.”

  15

  DNA

  It was past midnight and they were driving on fumes when Frank and Erica arrived at Todd’s street just above the cemetery. The houses were dark, the roads were quiet, but Frank was buzzing with energy. Maybe it was the upper he had popped when the road started slithering like a snake on him, but most likely it was just the excitement of seeing his brother for the first time in years. His brother was always a tonic for him, and Toddle’s very presence made Frank feel protected again, like everything wild was still possible.

  The house, a small two-story box with a picket fence and vinyl siding, was dark like the rest; a battered blue sedan, perfectly sedate for his sedated brother, was parked in the drive. He woke up Erica after he popped the Camaro into “Park.”

  “We’re here.”

  “Oh, okay,” she said. “Where?”

  “Chillicothe. At my brother’s house.”

  “Okay, good.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, pulled at her shirt. “How do I look?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Hardly. Will he have a bed for us?”

  “There’s a pullout couch in his living room.”

  “I hate those things. There’s always a bar just at the wrong spot.”

  “It beats sleeping in the car,” he said. “Now put on your smile, sweet pea, it’s time to charm.”

  At the front door he knocked lightly and then a little louder when nobody answered. He stepped back, looked up at a second-floor window. “Yo, Toddle,” he called out heartily, then stepped forward and knocked again. A moment later, as he felt more than heard the soft footsteps coming closer, he couldn’t help himself from knocking some more.

  The door opened and Todd’s pale face appeared, his blond hair mussed. Frank stepped forward and embraced him tightly. “Toddle, man, look at you,” he said, squeezing the breath out of himself.

  “Frank. Christ. I’ve been calling you.”

  Frank pulled back, ignored the squinty concern on his brother’s face. “My phone’s dead. You gonna let us in?”

  “Sure, yeah, sure,” said Todd, looking first at Erica then at Frank, before stepping out and surveying the street. “You parked in front.”

  “Your piece-of-crap car was in the driveway,” said Frank. “What else could I do?”

  “Get inside,” said Todd, taking one more surveil of the landscape before closing the door behind them all.

  It was comforting for the moment being swaddled in his big brother’s lower-middle-class nest of mediocrity. The faded living room couch, the coffee table with an actual coffee-table book, the toys in heaps, the very lived-in scent of it all reminded Frank of the choking domesticity of his own childhood. This was what he was running from, had been running from all his life, and yet, for some reason, he was so glad to be right here right now, his mood went into overdrive.

  “Toddle, man, I’m so happy to see you. So where’s the kid, where’s Petey? I need to give my nephew the biggest hug. You’ll just love him, E, he’s the cutest thing. The way he runs, like a little penguin with his neck sticking forward. Eeeh, eeeh, eeeh.”

  “Pete’s sleeping,” said Todd.

  “Well wake him up, man. His uncle’s here. Let’s have a party. This is Erica. We’re on our way west. I don’t know when I’ll be back and I want to see Petey. I need to see Petey.”

  “He needs to sleep.”

  “And what about Kerrie, where is she?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “At least let me say hello to my sister-in-law. Oh man, Todd, man, you look stressed. Lighten up.”

  “It’s after midnight,” said Todd.

  “That’s when all the good stuff happens. Oh all right, I understand. You all got your schedules. Work and stuff. So I’ll see them tomorrow. I’ll make those pancakes Petey likes, the ones that look like Mickey Mouse, and sing that song. Erica and I can just sack out on the couch. We’ve been driving all day, man.”

  “It’s Erica, right?” said Todd.

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Erica.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Erica. You mind if I take a minute with my brother?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You want a glass of water or something?”

  “No, I’m good. I’ll just sit.” She threw herself down on the green sofa, put her feet on the coffee table, and let her pretty head loll along the back of the couch.

  Todd gave Erica a long look, and then nodded for Frank to follow him. Todd led him right through the kitchen and out into the backyard, closing the door behind them. The little lawn was dimly lit by a single light, and the thick trees around it gave them a bit of privacy. When Todd turned to face Frank
, his features were firm, almost fierce, the face he undoubtedly gave to those middle-school troublemakers who interrupted his lesson. Frank couldn’t help but laugh at his big brother trying to be stern.

  “How old is she?” he said.

  “Eighteen, man.”

  “You better hope so.”

  “Maybe seventeen. But she’s amazing, so smart you wouldn’t believe. When you get to know her you’ll understand. Hang out with us tomorrow and you’ll see what I’m talking about.”

  “You can’t stay.”

  “Wait, what? Just for the night.”

  “You have to go.”

  “Is it Kerrie? Man, stand up for yourself, stand up for your family.”

  “You have to go, Frank. You have to go, now. You can’t stay with me. And I can’t give you any money, that was made very clear. No money or someone dies. And as soon as you go I have to make a call.”

  “Wait a second, what?”

  “You parked in front of the house. I don’t have a choice. They threatened my family. They threatened my son.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t lie. We’ve had enough lies, all of us. Stop lying, Frank. What the fuck did you do?”

  Don’t try telling Frank Cormack that you can’t change your life, because it’s as easy as pie, as easy as one two three, as easy as getting in the car and slapping it into gear and pressing down like a madman on the gas.

  And don’t try telling Frank Cormack you can’t remake your world because he had done just that, blown up everything before racing to a new and light-drenched future with the love of his life, a woman who would exalt him and save him at the same time.

  And don’t try telling Frank Cormack that you’re not in control of your destiny because that’s the worst kind of cop-out for those too timid to do what must be done. Sure, you’re going to ruffle some feathers and dent some skulls, and sure, parts of your old life are going to end up strewn like garbage along the side of the road, but that’s just the price of freedom. Freedom! And don’t doubt there’s always a price, because the bastards make sure of it.