Freedom Road Read online

  Later, Oliver Cross would say that this was the moment that changed everything, where he stepped out of one kind of life and into another, but that would not be the entire truth. Because when the next blow came, shattering his collarbone and deadening his left arm, he wasn’t changed at all, just knocked right back into the world exactly as he always had been.

  Except the world was now in flames.

  Oliver Cross, kneeling helplessly on the street, looked up into the uneven darkness of the city sky and saw above him, amidst the fury and chaos, a dark-brown baton rising to slam again into his skull. It would kill him this time, the baton, he was certain, yet still, in his daze, he waited for the blow as if it were some sort of benediction.

  Until a bright light fell on the cop gripping the baton, who immediately spun around and swung his cudgel at a television camera, shattering the lens into shivers, and then went on to smash the light and the cameraman, too.

  Amidst this slashing and banging, someone grabbed at Oliver from behind, pulled at him and dragged him back, all the while shouting at him to get up, to get going. The next thing Oliver knew he was staggering past the paddy wagons being loaded with body after body, past the cop cars with their sirens blaring, staggering through the crowd, but not on his own. He kept his deadened left arm tight to his body while he was pulled away from the battle by a woman in a dark coat with a blue bandanna over her face—the same woman, in fact, whose hand he had been holding just a few moments before.

  She pulled him through the chaos and onto a side street, past a pack of kids straining to roll a car onto its side. One of the kids caught him staring.

  “Barricades, man,” the kid said. “Power to the people or some such shit.”

  “Keep going,” said the woman, and that’s what he did, lurching with her into the guts of Old Town.

  Half a block later she tugged him into an alley and around a dumpster with Daley’s name printed on it in white block letters. They ducked into an entryway lit by a single yellow bulb over the door.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  Oliver dropped onto the entryway stoop.

  “You’re bleeding like a pig in a slaughterhouse.” She leaned forward and moved her hands through his hair and across his skull. “Chicago, hog butcher for the world.”

  “What?”

  “Carl Sandburg.”

  “Who?”

  “Read poetry much?”

  “Why?”

  “You have a two-inch-long gash in your head. Here.”

  She pulled the blue bandanna down off her face and reached back to untie the knot. After wiping the blood off her hands she wadded the bandanna into a ball and pressed it onto the wound. Then she gently took hold of his right hand and placed it on top of the bandanna to keep it in place.

  As she did all this, Oliver found himself staring at the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He had noticed her striking green eyes before, in the line of protesters, evident even with her mask, but now that he could see her entire face, long jawed and sharp, with the slight sardonic twist of her lips, he was stunned.

  “Hey, you,” she said, snapping her fingers as if to wake him from a hypnotic trance. “Are you with me?”

  “Yes . . . fine . . . yes . . . I am . . . okay.”

  “That cut needs to be looked at,” she said. “You’ll be getting stitches. And what’s with your arm?”

  “I think . . . my collarbone . . . they broke—”

  “What were you thinking, rushing at them like a fool?”

  “Rushing at who like a what?”

  “You don’t remember? They must have beat the memory right out of you. Three of them had some kid up against a car and were taking their whacks when you charged like a maniac. As they were banging at you, the kid got away. It was pretty stupid, but it was also, in a way, almost heroic.”

  “Right now, considering I’m a bloody mess sitting on a stoop, I’d go with stupid.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “I can’t get arrested.”

  “Do you have a record?”

  “No. I . . . I just can’t.”

  She took a step back and looked down the alley toward the street. “Those kids will keep the cops busy for a while. If we get rid of the light, you can hide out here until it’s safe for you to find a hospital.”

  She unslung the bag from over her shoulder and swung it high. The yellow bulb shattered with a pop, plunging the alleyway into darkness.

  “If any cops come down the street, they’ll just pass us by,” she said, before sitting next to him. “I’m Helen.”

  “Oliver.”

  “And why are you so afraid of getting arrested, Oliver? It could be a badge of honor. ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’ ‘I fought my war in Chicago.’”

  “I’m in law school,” he said.

  “Ah, I see, and the bar association might not be so impressed. What’s a law student afraid of being arrested doing on the streets of Chicago, today of all days?”

  “I don’t know.” He thought about lying, coming up with some noble gibberish to impress this Helen, maybe by talking about his brother, and the war, and his determination to make the politicians in Washington listen to the voices of his generation. But there was something about this woman’s manner, and the way her beauty so startled, that squeezed out the truth. “I came with a friend, Finnegan. The thing was just something to see, I guess. All the freaks and the music. Allen Ginsberg. And maybe we thought we’d find some girls.”

  She laughed. “I admire the shallowness. This whole day I’ve been rubbing up against such saccharine earnestness that my teeth ache.”

  “And my brother’s in the war,” Oliver added because he couldn’t help himself.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But he’s not why I came. He volunteered. He wants to go into politics himself and looks at the war as an opportunity.”

  “But still.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And how did the girl thing work out for you?”

  “Not great.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t help alleviate the situation, but I’m engaged.”

  “Really?”

  “Getting married in the spring.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “You don’t sound convinced. Is he here?”

  “He’s in med school, on rotation in New York. But I’m at Bryn Mawr and I thought it was time to make history instead of just reading about it in books.”

  “Bryn Mawr, huh? Preppie little Philly school. I suppose that means you’re here for McCarthy.”

  “I’m not here for anyone.”

  “So what are you? Yippie? Hippie? SDS?”

  “I’m Helen,” said Helen.

  “I was for Kennedy.”

  “It’s amazing how popular he became after they killed him. But they’re all just politicians. I’m not for any of them. I’m for anarchy, mayhem, liberty, and art. I’m for singing naked on the rooftop. I’m for a freedom that sinks into your bones until the itch drives you crazy.”

  “Sounds like being married to a doctor to me.”

  “I’m going to be an artist and I’ve read my Virginia Woolf. But marriage is what you make of it, Oliver, just like life.”

  “And what are you going to make of it?”

  “Something that’s mine. I read somewhere that the key to making a great painting is to free our minds of the jargon and limitations imposed on us from the past. Proper perspective, proper use of color, proper theme, propriety itself, the so-called natural order of things. What does the world look like when you strip that all away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I, but I intend to find out.”

  “I like Picasso.”

  “Picasso is everybody’s favorite artist, and he works so hard to be exactly that. But he just hops from one set of rules to the next. Cubism, neoclassicism, surrealism. What about no rules? What about looking at the world as if you’re t
he first person to ever see it and putting that on a canvas? That’s how I want to paint. That’s how I want to live.”

  “Sounds exhausting.”

  “But think of the freedom. No rules, no laws, nothing but the beat of our own hearts. We toss off whatever they try to foist on us and build our own structures. That’s part of what we’re doing here. Did you see Ginsberg?”

  “I joined his chanting circle.”

  “How experimental for a good Episcopalian.”

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s like we’re following in the footsteps of the Beats, sure, but not chained to their male-centric, macho Buddhist crap. We’ll make our own rules.”

  “Our own crap.”

  “At least it will be ours. What do you want out of life, Oliver?”

  “Respect, money, I don’t know. A job worth doing. A house on the beach or by the golf club.”

  “Do you like to golf?”

  “Hate it.”

  “Do you like the beach?”

  “Not really. The sand, you know. It chafes.”

  She laughed.

  “Love,” he said.

  “Well, that’s original. But what kind, Oliver? The kind they tell you to want in the movies and in poems?”

  “Sure.”

  “The kind that follows their rules, uses their ceremonies, the kind that enslaves you, and makes you spend a life of drudgery supporting the house and kids and backyard pool even as the love sours from all that dire responsibility?”

  “Does that sound so bad?”

  “It sounds like my mother’s life, without the pool. We could never afford the pool.”

  “You can use ours.”

  In the darkness he could feel her move closer and then, suddenly, on that step, she was kissing him.

  He pulled back. “Why are you doing that?”

  “You like Picasso.”

  “You said everyone likes Picasso.”

  “But not everyone is here now, bloodied and broken in heroic battle.”

  “Is that what it was?”

  “And not everyone has a pool.”

  She put her hand on his cheek and kissed him again. Her mouth felt soft, electric. He could have happily fallen into the moist warmth of it. He wanted to reach out and grab hold of her, but with his broken collarbone screaming in pain and his right hand still pressing the bandanna over his wound, he was unable to execute his normal movie clinch. So instead he just sat there, passively letting her kiss him and kissing her gently back. And as he kissed her he felt something rise up from his heart. That might have truly been the moment, the moment that changed everything.

  Or maybe it was the moment he felt her hand undoing his belt buckle, and then the button of his pants, and then the zipper. When she had pulled him out of his underwear and had him in her hand, gently stroking him as her mouth explored his and their tongues danced one with the other, he pulled back again.

  “What about the med student?”

  “He likes this, too,” she said.

  Or maybe the moment that really mattered was a few moments after that, when his lips shivered on hers and his breath caught and she laughed in surprise before wiping her hand on his shirt.

  She gave him a quick peck on the lips before standing and heading into the darkness. By the time he figured out what he wanted to say to her, she was gone.

  Hours later, in the dim morning light, Oliver stumbled back onto Clark Street, where the survivors of the night’s battles wandered dazed among overturned cars, strewn trash, and pieces of discarded clothing stained red with blood. He was immediately led by a white-jacketed Yippie marshal to a theater on Wells Street, where protesters stood behind iron gates within an ornate stone arch, holding the latch shut until they determined that he wasn’t a plainclothes cop faking his injuries to slip through their defenses.

  In the mob scene inside the theater, his head was bandaged and he was given a sling for his useless arm, along with a snort of something that didn’t quite deaden the pain but made it something distant. He fell asleep for a few hours on the theater’s roof, before waking in excruciating pain and setting out for the hospital to get his collarbone and head taken care of.

  But no matter how powerful all those moments truly were for Oliver Cross, the moment that actually might have changed everything happened two weeks after that night, half a world away, when elements of the Eleventh Light Infantry Brigade of the United States Army, participating in Operation Champaign Grove, engaged an enemy force while sweeping an area four miles west of Quang Ngai City. The eighty-minute battle, which resulted in sixty-one enemy deaths, also resulted in two infantry soldiers killed in action, one of whom was Second Lieutenant Fletcher Cross of Highland Park, Illinois.

  After receiving word of his brother’s death, Oliver Cross left school suddenly and took a bus from Ann Arbor, with transfers in Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore, on his way to Philadelphia and a very different future.

  2

  THE BEAST IN ME

  Fifty Years Later

  The small brick house at 128 Avery Road is dark as death on Halloween. Up and down the street jack-o’-lanterns twinkle on walkways and spotlights illuminate front-yard gravestones decked with cobwebs pulled from plastic bags. Children dance along the sidewalks with their masks and blood-drenched fangs, hitting house after house in their devilish protection racket, but the gloomy door of 128 receives not a knock.

  In truth, the trick-or-treaters would have passed it by even if it had been lit like a firecracker. The younger children are steered away by the firm hands of their parents, and the older children scare one another with stories and dares, but none has the courage to tempt the fate that resides behind that door. Later, when lights are dimmed and most of the children are inside, dazed by sugar as they count their haul, eggs will be thrown at the dark house at 128 Avery Road and yolks will drip down the front door like sallow tears.

  The little monsters, they’ll get theirs, sooner than they can imagine. Carrying home candy hiding the razor blades of truth. Spoonfuls of sugar to help the capitalist poison slide down their sad, deluded throats.

  Yellow stains still mark the door of 128 Avery Road on Christmas morn, the yolks having hardened like unruly dribbles of atomic sludge. On the plots surrounding the house, colored lights are blinking and plastic reindeer stand guard. A blow-up Santa waves to passersby from inside a great plastic ball. Through picture windows you can see trees, some of them even real, decked gaily with lights and tinsel and bright, shiny ornaments. Stacks of presents lie undisturbed until the rooms come alive with shouts and laughter as the wrappings are torn off with joyful abandon.

  But there are no shouts or music within the darkness of 128 Avery Road. The only sign of life is a slight whoosh of the curtains in the front window, as if some brooding ghost were floating back and forth, forth and back.

  Celebrate what? Pull away the colored paper and all is bitterness and death. The only gift worth having is nothing. Let them laugh now, the little families in their little bubbles, it won’t be long until the tears fall.

  The first blizzard of the season descends on Avery Road a week after the New Year’s parties and fireworks. Children fall backward into the snow, making angels with their arms, and build forts to withstand fierce tactical assaults. Parents shovel their own walks and the walks of their neighbors, working together to clear driveways of heavy drifts caused by the plows. But the snow on the sidewalk in front of 128 remains pristine, untrammeled by shovel or boot. Neighbors visiting one another for hot chocolate and gossip glance nervously at the dark house as they veer into the street. The yellow stains still on the wood seem shameful somehow, a reminder of something best forgotten. A young boy starts in on shoveling the walk and the curtain twitches over the front window of 128 Avery, but the boy’s mother calls him home and that is that.

  A few days later a pink notice from the township about the unshoveled walk is taped to the door at 128 Avery Road, giving the occupant thirty-si
x hours to clean the way or be cited. But the next day is warm, and the snow is already melting, and soon a narrow meandering path of wet cement appears within the banks of the dissolving snow. Yet the notice remains taped to the door week after week, month after month.

  Shovel what? I’ve been shoveling their crap my whole life, and what did it get me? The more you shovel, the more they dump until you’re neck-deep in their crap. The only thing I’m shoveling now is the mealy dirt of the graveyard.

  Spring sweeps onto Avery Road like a hawk chasing a barn mouse: the days lengthen, daffodils pop, children in Little League uniforms play catch with their parents on the street. Lawns fertilized to within an inch of their lives spurt before being mowed and edged with ruthless savagery. Even the lawn of 128, more weed than grass, grows wildly in that early spring. The neighbors talk among themselves about the unruly patch, but none dare march to the door, with its yellow stains and pink notice, to make the general displeasure known.

  Late on a Thursday, with the approach of dusk, a sight brings all activity on Avery Road to a halt. Gardeners stop mid-dig, ball players stop midthrow, dogs freeze midpee as an angular old man, broad of shoulder, bent of back, and bald as a grapefruit, pushes a rusted reel mower back and forth across his ragged patch of yard, his long jaw working all the while. No one shouts a hello or raises a hand in greeting. As the rusted blades spin, chewing more than slicing the sprouting leaves of weed and grass, the residents of Avery Road retreat, slowly but inexorably, into their own cozy houses, parents to check on their children, children to huddle in front of the televisions. And all the while, all anyone on Avery Road can hear is the spinning of the rusted blades as Oliver Cross curses aloud and pushes the infernal machine back and forth, forth and back.