Freedom Road Read online

  Make way for the mower. I scythe, I seethe, I destroy. Make way for desolation. Make way for bitterness and tears. Make way for Yama, son of Surya and Saranyu, for I have mixed his poison and become like him a walking death.

  On the Monday before Memorial Day, a bright, shining day with all the promise of the summer season to come, the police appear on Avery Road.

  3

  CRYSTAL BLUE PERSUASION

  Oliver Cross sits in his unlit living room a mile west of the Philadelphia city line, drinking Lone Star from the bottle and staring at his old television set, the volume off because the inanity that pours out of the speaker is too much to bear. In the silence he tries to hear the voices of the past, the calls to arms, the chants and songs, the steely, righteous riff from a Fender, but all he hears is silence. All is silence, all is waste and regret. Who are those fools with no regrets? The only thing that keeps him warm through this winter of his life are his regrets. He should have fought in the war, he should have stayed on the farm, he should have screwed that girl with the mole on her cheek freshman year, he should have just said no. No. What could have been simpler?

  But he could never say no to her.

  Oliver Cross sits in his faded, cloth-covered recliner in the fading afternoon, drinking and stewing, the only two pleasures left to him in this bitter world. He drinks and he stews and lets the silence wash through him like truth, until above the silence he hears the authoritarian sound of car doors shutting—slam, slam-slam—and he knows, as sure as he knows the fist of pain twisting in his spine, that the police have come for him.

  The knock on his door is delivered with the same fascist rhythm as the slammed car doors. Oliver lifts a huge gnarled hand and scratches at the dent in his bald head. Maybe they’ll go away, he thinks, or maybe they’ll knock down the door and have to clean off the dried raw egg before replacing it; either option seems preferable to him getting up and answering their damnable knock. He imagines the door bursting open with a great clash and clatter as an army of police charges in amidst a cloud of splintering wood, only to find him in his chair, grinning like a hyena. Guns trained on his face, he’d calmly tell them to piss off.

  “Oliver,” comes a familiar voice from his porch. “Could you open the door, please? We need to talk to you.”

  “Do I have a choice?” Oliver shouts back. His voice is the ratchety croak of a ticked-off bullfrog, a seventy-two-year-old bullfrog with an indolent lymphoma that is suddenly becoming industrious and a wrenching arthritis in his back.

  “Not really, no. Please, Oliver. We won’t be long.”

  Oliver sits for a moment more, scratching again at his head—itchiness being one of the symptoms of his condition—and nodding at the sad facts of the moment, before he straightens the chair and pushes himself to standing. She’s right, he doesn’t have a choice; he wonders when he ever did. Everything in the stream of his past seems like it happened without his choosing, because if ever he had chosen anything, how did he end up here? It takes half a minute for his back to go through the pains of straightening as far as it can straighten. He is at what now constitutes his full height when he opens the door.

  Jennifer Post stands in the doorway, flanked by two uniformed police officers, men with jaws jutting like they’re expecting trouble. A non-uniformed woman with a briefcase stands behind them, and behind her is the cop car, its blue and red lights spinning. Jennifer is smiling; the two cops and the woman aren’t. Jennifer’s familiar eyes are brown and kind; the cops’ eyes are covered with gray sunglasses that match the color of the guns on their hips.

  “Are you going to invite us in?” says Jennifer, African American and young, or what passes for young to Oliver these days, plump and forty or so. Her frizzy hair is bound into a ponytail, and a scarf, as always, is at her throat. Oliver stands in front of the four uninvited guests and scratches at his head like he is figuring the odds at a craps table. But what is there to figure? When do the odds ever not favor the moneymen? He steps to the side.

  “Gosh, it’s so much cheerier than the last time I was here,” says Jennifer once inside. “Is that a new stain on the carpet? I think it is. I must say, Oliver, it adds just the right touch of hominess. And everything smells like . . . like . . .”

  “Old socks,” says Oliver.

  “I didn’t know Glade made that scent. Maybe you should open a window. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Let’s air this place out.”

  Her cheeriness grates as always, but with Jennifer he senses that it is a true reflection of her inner self and not some act, and that stops him from vomiting his disdain onto her scarf. One doesn’t shout at a lame girl for her limp, or upbraid a blind man for his lack of sight. She is entitled to her disability.

  “The officers need to search your house and your truck,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “We’ll talk after. In fact you can count this as an appointment, so I won’t need to see you on Thursday. But for now it would be better if you just sat down and let them do their work.”

  “Maybe I should call the lawyer.”

  “That’s your choice.” She takes out her phone. “If you want, I could call Donald for you. But they’re still going to search.”

  Oliver feels anger and frustration rise within him. That they should be allowed to treat him like this is intolerable. He knows the Constitution, he knows his rights, he went to law school after all. True, it was for only a year, but you learn everything first year anyway. As his anger rises, he closes his eyes and lets the emotions build until they fill him with an exploding hate before overflowing and splashing like raw sewage onto the carpet. And she wonders about the stains. When he opens his eyes again, he is outwardly as calm as toast. This is a trick he learned in San Francisco and used much at Rockview, the craphole they sent him to after the farce of a trial.

  “Put the phone away,” he says. “I hate the lawyer almost as much as I hate your meddling.”

  “This shouldn’t take long.”

  “Whatever you say.” He walks slowly to his chair, falls backward into it, puts his hands on the armrests, and stares at the television. “You’re the boss.”

  “I like to think that you’re the boss, Oliver, and I’m just here to facilitate good decision-making.”

  “Then get the hell out.”

  “Well, when you put it that way,” she says with a light laugh.

  One of the cops says, “We’ll need the keys to your vehicle, sir.”

  “They’re in the kitchen. On the table.”

  “I’ll stay here with Mr. Cross,” says Jennifer.

  As the officers and the woman with the briefcase begin rummaging through his house, Oliver stays silent and seated. Jennifer walks about inspecting the living room as if she were thinking of getting into real estate. Oliver isn’t worried about what they will find, because there is nothing to find. There is no illegal drug, no porn, not even any hard alcohol, just a case of beer in the fridge, which doesn’t count because it is only beer. Let them waste their time searching; wasting it is all their time is good for anyway. Everyone’s time, when you get down to it.

  “I realize now I’ve been a little lax in visiting the homes of my clients,” says Jennifer.

  “I’m not a client. Clients can walk away.”

  “I’m finding your house very revealing. You haven’t done a thing to it in two years. It’s as depressing as the day you came home.”

  “It fits my eye.”

  “It could use some work. Do you happen to know a carpenter, Oliver, hmm? And why didn’t you put anything on the walls after the renters left? I know your wife was a fine artist. Wouldn’t her paintings look lovely in this room?”

  “I don’t need paintings to remember her,” he says. “She still talks to me. Every damn day.”

  “What does she say?”

  “Take out the garbage.”

  “And is that Fox News on the television? Why are you watching Fox News?”

  “I like to kee
p my eye on the enemy.”

  “Are the police going to find anything?”

  “No.”

  “I told them they wouldn’t.”

  “Then why are they here?”

  “There’s a child missing. The father voiced a concern.”

  “Damn crank.”

  “The police chief promised the father he’d check it out. It was considered advisable to bring me in when they did.”

  “It’s a neighborhood of cranks and they all hate me.”

  “How does that make you feel, Oliver?”

  “Like I’ve finally done something worthwhile.”

  “How long have the egg yolks been on your door?”

  “Since Halloween.”

  “And you didn’t think to clean the mess off?”

  “I thought about it. Then I rolled over and went back to sleep.”

  “Keeping the notice to shovel your walk taped to the door is a nice touch, too.”

  “That way they won’t have to put another one up next time it snows. Which brat is missing?”

  “Let’s wait until they finish the search.”

  “Fine,” says Oliver. “I’ll be here.”

  It doesn’t take long. Two of the bedrooms are completely bare, and the closets are mostly empty. Only the basement is crowded with crap. When Oliver rented the house during his term at Rockview, he moved all his stuff into the basement and covered the pile with a tarp. When he returned, most everything stayed right there. He brought up only a table, a couple kitchen chairs, the recliner, a bed, the television; what else would he need?

  “It’s clean, Ms. Post,” says the tech when the search is completed.

  “Thank you,” says Jennifer. “I’ll stay with Mr. Cross for a bit after you leave.”

  “Are you sure that’s advisable, ma’am?”

  “Oh, Oliver’s a sweetheart. Aren’t you a sweetheart, Oliver?”

  “Sweet as dirt.”

  They wait as the cops and the tech shuffle out of the house. Through the closed front door they can hear the car doors slam and the cop car drive away. With the cops coming up empty, the sound is not quite so authoritarian. Oliver, thinking of the show they are putting on for the neighbors, almost smiles and then catches himself.

  “If this is in place of our next appointment,” says Jennifer, “I suppose I should ask how things are going.”

  “Peachy.”

  “Did you join any of the community groups we talked about last time? Have you been in touch with friends? With family?”

  “No.”

  “How about your son? Has he tried to get in touch with you?”

  “No.”

  “Have you tried to get in touch with him?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think you should?”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe because you’re his father?”

  “We all make mistakes.”

  “You can’t give up on your child.”

  “He gave up on me.”

  “You’re breaking my heart, Oliver.”

  “Yeah, well, life breaks your heart, and then it just keeps slamming away. Come back to me when you’re seventy-two and tell me about the party. Anything else? I’ve got my day to finish.”

  “Any specific plans?”

  “Sitting here, stewing. There are beers in the fridge.”

  “You need to get a life, Oliver.”

  “I had one. It died.”

  “The child who’s gone missing?” says Jennifer. “She’s your granddaughter Erica.”

  Oliver sits as still as a rock, trying not to let anything show. Jennifer is looking for a reaction, and on principle he never gives the system what it wants. So he sits in his chair, as immobile as Lincoln within his monument, thinking through the implications of what Jennifer has just said.

  Erica is his eldest granddaughter. He has not seen her since before the trial. She was thirteen or fourteen then, with Helen’s shocking green eyes. What is she now, seventeen, eighteen? And missing? It’s all falling apart. Every step was wrong; every decision was disastrous. He starts into rubbing his head and keeps rubbing until his big old hand falls over his face. The realization is dawning. His mind doesn’t work as fast as it used to, but eventually he catches on.

  If Erica is the missing child, that means the father who has accused him to the police chief, the crank who has sent the cops scuttling through his house, is . . .

  “So, Oliver,” says Jennifer. “Any plans now?”

  4

  MR. BIG STUFF

  After Jennifer leaves, Oliver sits and waits as his emotions rise within to choke him. Just once he’d like to taste something other than his own bile when the world intervenes in his misery. He used to wonder whether the problem with his life was the hard heart of the world or the damaged heart inside himself, but he stopped wondering when he realized it didn’t much matter. It isn’t one or the other, just the two rubbing together like flint and steel. There is no place left for him in this world, and that’s a problem with a single solution.

  When he figures Jennifer has finally given up idling at the end of Avery Road to spy on him, he waits another ten minutes before pushing himself out of the chair. He manipulates his back as he walks into the kitchen and grabs the car keys. A few moments later, a brown-and-tan 1990 Ford F-250 diesel, racked with rust and wheezing all the while, bounces out of the driveway and onto Avery Road.

  Thirty-six years ago, when Helen and Oliver Cross escaped back to the world with their seven-year-old son, Fletcher, in tow, they chose this house because it was close to Helen’s ailing mother. It was also barely habitable and cheap as dirt, a convenient factor since dirt was about all they had to their names. But by that point Oliver had done enough carpentry at the farm not to be daunted by the rehab. That the house was smack in the middle of a multiracial, working-class neighborhood was not just a positive feature; it was a prerequisite.

  Oliver, raised in affluence, had turned his back on the values of his upbringing. He and Helen were committed to joining the ranks of the Lumpenproletariat that would rebuild the nation, one child taught and one nail hammered at a time. At least that was the plan, which showed just how little Oliver knew then of the Lumpenproletariat. While he viewed the neighborhood as the model for a new age of American egalitarianism, his neighbors viewed it as suburban.

  Now as he drives through these streets, he sees only a sty of dead-eyed swine, force-fed fast food and fancies, trusting their fate to plutocrats who have nothing for them but disdain and a designated slot in the line to the slaughterhouse. He should have left decades ago, found a place more amenable to his yearnings and worldview, maybe someplace high in the mountains, or in Costa Rica. But there was the boy and his school friends, there was Helen’s teaching job, there was his failing furniture shop and Helen’s chemotherapy and his own treatments. There was life. And then there was death.

  But even with all the bitterness he holds toward his neighbors on Avery Road, they are still his people, struggling each day to scratch a living out of the barren fields of capitalism. As he drives out of the neighborhood, away from the city and into leafier environs where houses compete ever more feverishly in their ostentation, he feels he is driving through a foreign land peopled by cannibals. If his truck stalls, which it has been known to do, and he steps out of the cab to see what is what, he will no doubt be set upon by the worst kind of brutes, the unrepentant wealthy. That his son, for whom he and Helen reentered the world so long ago, has ended up living here, among the savages, is either an inevitability or a betrayal, and Oliver chooses to believe it is the latter because that pisses him off more and these days being pissed off is when he is his most authentic self.

  Oliver parks his truck across the street from a stone monstrosity with turrets and buttressed walls and a worshipful arched entranceway. Two stained-glass windows flank the great oaken door, behind which Fletcher lives with his wine collection and his big white teeth. It didn’t much concern Oliver wh
en his son fulfilled Oliver’s own youthful expectations and headed off to law school. The world needed lawyers on the correct side of things: Darrow and Marshall, Kuntsler and Ginsberg and Weinglass. Even Paul Robeson had been a lawyer.

  But instead of fighting the system, Fletcher embraced it. What kind of labor lawyer doesn’t represent labor? That was a question Oliver asked, loudly and gibingly, over numerous Thanksgiving turkeys when Helen was still alive and the family still celebrated holidays together. Fletcher would stammer out a response, but the answer was evident: the kind of lawyer who aspires to nothing nobler than to live in a Gothic cathedral and nibble partridge bones.

  Before the truck has even stopped rocking, Oliver scoots out and begins his mad hobble up the wide lawn. His back is bent, his work boots land splayed on the grass, his unbuttoned flannel shirt trails behind him like the plaid cape of a lunatic in a Scottish asylum. He bangs at the door with the bottom of his fist, twice, thrice.

  “Fletcher, you bastard,” he calls out before banging again.

  Oliver knows what has happened. His son’s precious little daughter has taken a hike out of the morass of sick consumerism that Fletcher has bathed her in for eighteen years, and Fletcher’s response is to sic the police on his father. How dare he?

  “Come out here and face the music for once, you little coward.” Bang, bang.

  When the door finally opens, it is Petra, Fletcher’s wife, standing in the doorway. There is something in her face that stills the anger inside him for a moment, a moist redness on cheeks that are always proudly pale. She is holding a glass of wine. And she is smoking.

  The sight of a cigarette, held vertically in her long fingers, causes Oliver to take a step back. Petra doesn’t smoke, Petra doesn’t drink, except for a fine wine at dinner, and Petra doesn’t laugh or mess her makeup with tears; Petra is cold as cash. But here is his daughter-in-law with her cheeks red, her eyes moist, and a cigarette in her hand. The scene is so out of beat with his expectations that it quiets his rage for a moment. But he doesn’t want his rage quieted and so he bulls through as if Petra’s evident distress doesn’t exist.