Freedom Road Read online

  Right after that he went home and burrowed in his basement for the boom box. Now, with his truck parked in front of the house, and the Eagles playing as loudly as the stereo allows, he leans against the side of the truck, stares at the door with his arms crossed, and waits. When the tape snaps to a stop, with no response other than a curtain twitch from the house, he opens the bay, turns the tape around, and presses “Play” again. There is a cassette of Hendrix in the cardboard box, of Creedence, of Janis Joplin, but why give them the satisfaction of something worth listening to when he can subject the bastards to “Witchy Woman?”

  A kid walks by on the sidewalk, short hair, glasses, tattoos on his arm. He lifts a fist in solidarity. “Eagles. Going old school. Rock on.”

  “Eagles suck,” says Oliver.

  The kid stops and looks at him. “Then why are you playing them?”

  “I’m in the mood for suck,” says Oliver.

  “I get you, man.”

  “No, you don’t. And you never will.”

  The kid laughs. Oliver hadn’t been trying to be funny.

  It isn’t long before the police cruiser, lights flashing, pulls up behind his truck. Two uniforms step out. The woman comes up to him, smiling. The man stays back, a hand resting on his wide belt, talking softly into the microphone hanging over his shoulder. Both are wearing armored vests. He supposes they’re worried things could get out of hand, he’d start in to playing Jackson Browne, and then all hell would break loose.

  “Is there a problem here, Mr. Cross?” says the woman cop over the music.

  “No problem,” says Oliver back.

  “It looks like a problem to me,” she says. “What are you doing, sir?”

  “I’m standing here in a public street, listening to music. The street is public, am I right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And it’s not a crime to listen to the Eagles, is it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Though you might want to rethink that.”

  “We’re going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “I think I’ll stay. You know, First Amendment and all. Power to the people.”

  “We’re not asking, Mr. Cross.”

  “You just said you were asking.”

  “You’re disturbing the peace and harassing the homeowners of this property,” says the male officer still standing by the police car. “Get in your damn truck and go home.”

  “Does he always handle your situations by barging in like that?” says Oliver to the woman cop.

  “He likes to assert himself.”

  “Tell him to assert his ass back to the precinct.” The woman laughs as Oliver pulls a business card from his shirt pocket.

  “Before you do anything, you should give her a call.”

  By the time Jennifer Post joins the party, the police are sitting in their car, lights still flashing, and there is a small crowd of kids and a few oldsters watching from the other side of the street. Oliver notices Carly Brackin keeping an eye on things from an upstairs bedroom while Mrs. Brackin watches from behind the curtains downstairs. A few in the crowd sing along with Don Henley, though they don’t seem to know many of the words other than “Desperado.” About right.

  Jennifer parks behind the police car, talks a moment to the female cop, and then makes her way to Oliver. She leans against the truck and listens for a bit.

  “I love the Eagles,” she says.

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “What are you doing, Oliver?”

  “I’m taking your advice.”

  “When did I advise you to make a spectacle of yourself and harass law-abiding, taxpaying homeowners with classic rock?”

  “It’s only classic if you mean old, and it’s only rock if you mean not rock.”

  “Oliver.”

  “You told me to get a life.”

  “And this is your new life?”

  “The girl in there knows something about my granddaughter.”

  “You’re looking for your granddaughter?”

  “Somebody has to.”

  “Does your son know?”

  “His wife knows.”

  “That’s a start. Look, I’m glad you’re reconnecting with your family, Oliver, it warms my heart. But the girl already spoke to the police.”

  “She didn’t tell them the name of the boy Erica ran away with.”

  “And she knows?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “She knows. I could see it on her squinty little face. And she lied to the cops about not knowing there was someone new.”

  “Interesting.”

  “That’s a crime, isn’t it?”

  “It could be.”

  “But the police are here to bust me for playing the Eagles. I love the criminal justice system.”

  Just then the tape player shuts off. Oliver opens the bay, flips the tape, and presses the “Play” button. Dulcet tones and then Glenn Frey running down that road. Again. And again. For all of eternity. Talk about the damned.

  “You think this little exhibition of yours is going to work?” says Jennifer after the song mercifully ends.

  “There’s only so much Eagles anyone can take.”

  “You’re going to get me fired,” she says. “Another half hour, that’s it.”

  “Fine.”

  “Welcome back to the world, Oliver,” she says before she pushes herself away from the side of the truck and walks to the police car.

  A few moments later the police car drives off, the male cop in the passenger seat giving Oliver one of those hard-cop looks that Oliver always finds so amusing. He checks his watch. The boom box blasts out “Already Gone.” Oliver spits.

  Before the tape spools to the end again, the door of the Brackin house opens and out steps little Carly, with her squinty, pretty face. She glances behind her as she descends the front steps and then walks slowly toward Oliver, her eyes cast down, a folded piece of paper in her hand.

  “Please turn that off,” she says. “I’m begging you.”

  He shuts off the tape player.

  “Erica told me she hates you,” says Carly.

  “Dog bites man.”

  “And that she’ll never forgive you.”

  “I’ll never forgive myself.”

  She looks up at him then. She isn’t squinting now, and her eyes are wet, which frightens Oliver.

  “Do you think she’s in trouble?” she says.

  “I don’t know. That’s the point.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” She hands over the paper. “This is his name and his address. I went there once. He’s an idiot with tattooed arms and a scar on his face, but she talked about him like he was the second coming. I had never seen her like that before. It was like she was lost in him.” Pause. “And there were drugs.”

  He nods as he opens the paper and gives it a scan. Frank Cormack. The very sound of it has a shifty quality. “Did this Frank person go to school with you?”

  “No. She met him at a coffeehouse when we were performing one of my songs. He was working the deck. He’s some sort of folk singer.”

  “Did you know she was leaving?”

  “She didn’t tell me. Something must have happened all of a sudden.”

  “When it happens, it tends to happen just like that.”

  “Good luck finding her, and, please, don’t come back.”

  She starts walking to the house and then she stops and turns around. “Erica said she’ll never forgive you, but that she still misses you.”

  Oliver Cross doesn’t say anything back. He just watches as the girl retreats into the safety of her house and then he almost smiles. So Erica misses him. Who would have imagined that? Talk about your peaceful, easy feeling.

  9

  BLACK DOG

  The address Carly Brackin gave him leads Oliver to a second-floor unit in a duplex next to the railroad tracks. When Oliver bangs on the apartment door, he hears the barks and growl of a
dog, which gives him hope. Maybe she is in there. Maybe this will be easier than he thought.

  “Cormack,” he calls out. “You there, Cormack?”

  He hears no answer to his bang and call but for the wild howling of the dog. He thinks of knocking on the downstairs apartment to see what the neighbors might know, but figures that would make too much cautious sense. Instead he pulls a crowbar from his brown Carhartt jacket.

  It is too warm for the jacket but he wears it anyway because with the slit he cut into the lining, he can easily slide a crowbar into the inside pocket. There was a time he was part of a crew refreshing apartments for new tenants and he was often required to bust into the units. It never hurt to have a crowbar at the ready: it could lever open a locked door; it could pick up a discarded piece of crap-stained clothing too filthy to touch; it could crack the head of a mad and half-starving dog when it leaped at your throat.

  Before working on the doorjamb, he looks behind him, sees only a girl lolling by the train tracks, and then wedges the bent claw of the crowbar into the gap beneath the dead bolt. It takes only one swift yank, and a single painful bark from his back, to splinter the wood and free the bolt.

  He raises the crowbar high as he pushes open the door, expecting a snarling rush of dog meat, but instead of a crazed pit bull, what comes at him is a medium-size mutt with matted hair and soft eyes. It wouldn’t have taken much of a blow to crack its little skull, but despite his reputation on Avery Road, Oliver Cross is not a violent man. He dislikes even stepping on a cockroach—the frantic, futile retreat, the crack of shell, the white guts spurting. So when the dog attacks, he doesn’t smash its crown with a swift blow. Instead, he lifts his boot and, none too gently, shoves the thing’s jaw.

  The dog is so shocked at the calm rebuke that it retreats from the room, yelping and spinning as it goes.

  Oliver looks around, smelling the stink of the place, and feels the dawning of a fierce worry that makes his scalp itch. With the crowbar raised and his eyes focused on the doors off the front room, he takes a step forward. Something squishes beneath his boot.

  “Little fucking mutt,” he growls.

  At the sound, the dog dashes back into the room and barks as if to say it serves Oliver right for shoving a boot in its face. Oliver cleans his boot sole on the cushion of the couch and keeps moving forward.

  The worry comes because Oliver recognizes this scene. Not this exact scene, but the mise-en-scène. This is an abandoned apartment, one left in great haste and one step ahead of physical eviction. The clothes scattered, the drawers dumped, the furniture tipped. Useless objects are strewn across the floor as in the aftermath of a hurricane, along with a pet left behind to crap all over the floor before it withers and dies.

  But this time he isn’t interested in the details of the desolation: the holes in the walls, or the cracked sink, or the carpets ruined by the dog. With his crowbar he picks up a lank bowling shirt from the floor. He recognizes it from the photograph of Erica and that Adam Morgan kid. It is hers; she was here. Did she race away with this Frank Cormack asshole? Or, more frighteningly, did he race away from something he had left behind?

  Oliver calls out his granddaughter’s name as he wades through the apartment, the dog nipping at his heels. He feels like a monster on the loose, searching for something large and inert, a girl in trouble, a girl attacked, mutilated, left for dead. The images that flit through his brain are enough to choke him, but when he scours the place, every room, every closet, every space beneath bed and bureau, he finds nothing. Sweet nothing.

  For a moment the terror eases, but then it floods back in. He has been going through the motions in his search for Erica, trying to satisfy his dead wife’s whim without too much struggle. It was all about the show. He figured his granddaughter had run off to see the world and find herself, just like he and Helen had run off after the radical events in Chicago made their staid paths seem obsolete. That’s what kids are supposed to do when they’re suffocating in conformity. Life is too important not to take the wild leap.

  But now the terror has risen again, even in the face of finding nothing in the apartment, and it will stay with him, sitting like a rider on his back, jabbing its spurs into his sides at every turn, every pause. Because once he has imagined the worst, he won’t stop looking until he can put Helen’s fragile mind at ease. And his own.

  In the bathroom, in the filthy toilet, he finds two cell phones leaning up against each other, unable to fit down the hole. He rolls up his sleeve and reaches in. As he washes his hands and the phones in the sink with water hot enough to scald, the dog rams Oliver’s leg with its head. Oliver pushes it away again with his boot. Oliver doubts there will be anything of use in these waterlogged bricks, but you never know.

  Finished with his search, he heads to the door and, as he does, the dog’s yapping suddenly stops. The quiet startles Oliver, who turns and looks at the pup’s eyes, wet and pleading. There were hounds at Seven Suns, prideful things that sprinted across the landscape after hedgehogs or lay like kings of the earth in the afternoon shade. Free and feral, as dogs were meant to be. It’s why they never had a dog on Avery Road; it seemed wrong to keep such an animal locked up in a house.

  “You hungry?” says Oliver to the dog. “You thirsty? You want to get the hell out of here and go crap in the woods?”

  For a moment Oliver thinks of just letting the thing out, opening the door and watching it flee into the wild. Go, little hero, and be free.

  But dogs like this mutt aren’t meant to be free. Perhaps someone will find it, take it in, brush its matted fur and feed it and give it a loving home. But most likely not. Most likely it will starve in the woods, or be run over by a train, or be eaten by a fox, or, even worse, get picked up by the animal cops and be gassed. It’s a pity about the dog, but what the hell is Oliver going to do about it? What the hell indeed?

  He slips the crowbar back into his jacket and finds a mostly empty bag of kibble in the kitchen. The dog follows him and sits down by his two metal bowls, both empty. Oliver fills one bowl with water and the other with food and then stands back to watch the dog eat.

  It doesn’t just go at it, wolfing its meal. Instead, the dog takes a mouthful of food and scurries away, drops the kibble onto the hallway floor, and eats it there. Finished, it comes back to the bowls, works a bit at the water, and then takes another mouthful into the hallway. Oliver finds the whole act somehow touching. When it is finished with the food, licking the bowl for any final microscopic bits, the dog walks over to Oliver and stands in front of him, waiting.

  Waiting for more? What a greedy bastard. Oliver admires that.

  He stoops down as best he can and checks the dog’s collar. Its name is Hunter. It has had some shots. There is a number to call, probably the number of one of the cell phones that were in the toilet. Oliver rubs the dog beneath his chin and Hunter stretches his neck.

  “You’re going to help me find him, aren’t you, Hunter, you little beast? That’s right, you’re going to run him down like a hound from hell.”

  The dog licks Oliver’s wrist.

  A few moments later, Oliver is climbing down the steps of the building with Hunter on a leash and the near-empty bag of dog food under his arm, two metal bowls tucked inside.

  “Hey, mister,” says a girl leaning against an electric pole across from the building. It is the same girl he saw before out by the tracks. Up close she is older than he thought, but still almost young enough to be in school with Erica. Beautiful black skin, a ring in her nose, long tight curls of dark hair, and a smile that looks like a permanent feature, as if she were born to smirk. “Is that your dog?”

  “Would I be taking him if he wasn’t?” he says.

  “Can I pet him?”

  “Sure,” he says.

  The dog pulls him toward the girl. She stoops down and scratches his head. “Hey, little doggie,” she says as the dog leans in to her. “He’s filthy, mister, and he smells like crap.”

  “He
gets into things,” says Oliver. “Do you know my nephew who lives in that apartment up there? Frank? He was watching him for me.”

  “Frank?”

  “Frank Cormack.”

  “Yeah, I know Frank. I live over there.” She nods toward a clutch of rickety houses on the other side of the tracks. “I watched you break into his apartment.”

  “I had to get my dog and he didn’t give me a key. Have you seen him lately?”

  “No.”

  “There was a girl with him, red hair. You know her?”

  “Erica?”

  “Yeah, that’s her.”

  “Sure, Erica. Who’s she to you?”

  “Any idea where they went?”

  “No, man, no idea. You got a cigarette?”

  “You shouldn’t smoke.”

  “There’s a lot of things we shouldn’t be doing, like breaking into someone else’s apartment and stealing his dog.”

  “If you see Frank around, could you give me a call?”

  “If you want. Yeah, maybe. If I’m not too busy. You know, I got things.”

  “How about if I give you twenty bucks now and fifty more if you see him and call me.”

  “That might work.”

  He puts down the bag, pulls out his wallet.

  “You got a number, mister?” she says after she takes the twenty. As he gives it, she taps it into her phone. “What’s your name?”

  “Oliver.”

  “And your last name?”

  “Oliver.”

  “Oliver Oliver? That’s a funny name. Where do you live, Oliver Oliver?”

  “Around.”

  “I get you. I’m Ayana.”

  “Good, Ayana. I hope to hear from you.”

  “Oh, for fifty dollars I expect you will. And take good care of the dog.”

  10

  WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN

  The dream world of Avery Road is a fitful, fantastical landscape. Boys and girls in armor ride dragons into battle, adults make love on beaches with high school flames, trains roar across the plain as passengers glimpse from their windows cowboys spinning atop wild broncos, arms flapping. The land is lush, the sky is blue, the clouds so bright they hurt your eyes as they float by like great white turtles. Yet even in this verdant paradise of hope and reverie there are school tests with questions that are impossible to answer, bosses with red eyes and three rows of teeth, ovens left on, clothes that disappear, guns that won’t go off. And, of course, there are the money worries, the money worries, the great American fixation on who has what and who has more and what will happen when next month’s bills come due.