The Free (P.S.) (16 page)

They continued on until they could see, in the distance, a series of pole barns and shacks: the settlement. They parked and got out. Farther along on the road they came to a dead woman in a green parka, her legs bent toward her head. She’d been shot in the stomach, and they could still see steam rising from her.

They passed more bodies, kids and old people, men and women. Some naked, others with no heads, some with no limbs.
THE FREE
was spray-painted on every building, and vultures flew overhead by the dozen. Coyotes trotted in and out of the buildings, and in the distance gunshots rang out.

“Leroy, let’s get out of here,” Jeanette cried.

But Leroy couldn’t move. He could hardly breathe; he fell to the ground wheezing. Jeanette struggled to get him up and back to the car. She drove them away from the destroyed settlement while Leroy fought for his breath, his eyes closed, his body huddled against the passenger-side door. When they came to Kitimat they abandoned the red car near the dinghy and Jeanette helped Leroy into it and she rowed them back to their boat.

In the middle of the night she woke to Leroy’s arm over her, pulling her into him.

“How are you feeling?” she whispered.

“I’m better,” he said. “But seeing all that was so horrible.”

“It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” Jeanette said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m sure.”

Jeanette said, “You know I was just having a dream I’d graduated from college. You and I were living in a one-bedroom house we’d bought together. You should have seen this place. The plumbing didn’t work, the wood floors were spattered with paint, and everything was covered in grease. I don’t know why there was so much grease on everything but there was. Anyway, we fixed it up until it was a really nice house. And the yard that had been all weeds and trash became a real yard. You poured concrete and built an awning so we could sit in the shade during the summer and barbecue. We planted trees . . . In my dream you had just come home from work and you were bleeding. You’d cut yourself on a job site. The cut was on your forearm. I tried to wash it out in the sink but it wouldn’t stop bleeding. We decided to go to emergency. In the dream we didn’t drive. It was like all of a sudden I was in the waiting room and you were gone. But you weren’t in the doctor’s office. You’d vanished. You were in the National Guard. You were deployed in Iraq. In the dream I panicked and when I panicked everything changed. All the walls turned gray and suddenly I was in an empty building that I couldn’t get out of. I was alone and I couldn’t find you, and I knew I’d be stuck in there forever.”

“But that’s not real,” he said gently and kissed her neck and brought her closer to him.

“Maybe it is.”

“I don’t think so.”

“In our house there were pictures of us all over. One photo had your uncle in it. He has long black hair and is wearing a corduroy coat. Your mother has short, brown hair and freckles. She’s hugging your uncle and they look very happy. They’re surrounded by snow and there’s someone behind them that I can’t quite make out. The image is blurry.”

“I have that picture framed,” Leroy said. “When I was thirteen my mom rented a cabin in the mountains and we spent the weekend there for my birthday. I’m the person behind her that you can’t really see. My uncle took the picture on a timer, but I moved at the last moment. That’s why it’s blurry.”

“How would I know that picture?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re going to join the army and get killed,” she whispered. “That’s what the dream means.”

“It doesn’t.”

She moved her hands up and down his arms and stopped over a long scar. She turned on the bedside light and looked at it.

“See,” she exclaimed. “You have a scar and before you didn’t have a scar.”

“No, I’ve had this scar for years.”

“You haven’t. I know. I feel your arms every night.”

“I swear.”

“How did you get it?”

“I cut it on a job,” he said. “Like your dream said.”

“I don’t understand anything anymore,” she said. “I don’t understand what’s real and what isn’t real.”

He kissed her neck again.

“In my dream I could see the couch we bought at the Salvation Army and the table and chairs we bought from a garage sale. I can remember us painting the walls and you wiring the basement so we could put in a washer and dryer. I remember buying towels and sheets and inviting your mom over for dinner. We had movie posters on our bedroom walls and a framed picture of Amália Rodrigues on our dresser. We had a bathtub and a fireplace and we used to make love in every room ’cause you convinced me it was good luck. We had everything you could ever want . . . Why would I know all these things that aren’t real? Why would I be dreaming about things like this if they weren’t true?”

It was early morning and the woman who sat holding Leroy’s arm couldn’t stop weeping. Her name was Jeanette, and her thin fingers moved over a long scar on his arm while she spoke.

“A couple weeks ago I was going to the store and in the parking lot I saw an old red Fiesta like the one I had. Like the one you always had to work on. I just stood there and looked at it and I couldn’t stop crying. I kept thinking about all the places we went in that car, of all the times you tried to fix it, of when we went camping in it or went to the beach or to the movies. I just stood there staring at that car, and I couldn’t leave.”

20

Freddie McCall woke up on the couch to the alarm on his phone ringing. The fire had died out and the room was now cold. He rose and folded the sleeping bag, changed his clothes and washed his face, and drove to the group home and clocked in. He helped put everyone to bed, and then cleaned the kitchen and bathroom, did four loads of laundry, and fixed a cabinet door that was broken. It was past midnight when he finally gave out. He sat at the kitchen table and read the newspaper and fell asleep.

He woke up an hour later to his phone ringing and fumbled for it in his coat pocket and put it to his ear to hear his ex-wife’s voice.

“Is that you, Freddie?” she asked.

“It’s me,” he said, trying to wake up. “Are the kids alright?”

“They’re okay,” she said quietly.

“What’s going on? It’s late.”

“I’m not sure what’s going on,” she said.

“Where are you?”

“At home, in the basement. The girls are upstairs asleep.”

“What’s wrong? What’s going on?”

She didn’t speak for a moment and then she cleared her throat. “I have to tell you that I’m sorry I made such a mess of things.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about you and me.”

“I made a mess of things, too,” he said and sat up. “But we didn’t get a lot of breaks.”

“No, we didn’t.”

“So what’s going on?”

“It was a mistake to move in with Rob. I knew that before I even did it. I guess I was just tired of living like we were living. I’m a fool, Freddie.”

“You’re not a fool. You were having a hard time.”

“I always blamed you, and I’m sorry for that.”

“Maybe you should blame me,” he said.

“I can’t blame you for Ginnie.” She paused. “Do you ever think what it would have been like if she wasn’t born?”

“No,” he said.

“I do,” she whispered. “I do all the time.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“It’s an awful thing to say but it’s true. It would have been so much easier.”

“Why are you calling?”

“I don’t think Rob understood what having kids around would be like. I think it’s too much for him. Tonight we started arguing during dinner. He’s got a bad temper, and I can pick on him. I do pick on him. I can make things worse. I know that’s true. Both the girls started crying so I yelled at him to stop scaring them. I said some nasty things to him and he got so mad he stood up and went to the fridge and pushed it over. It crashed to the ground and broke. It was really loud, and it scared everyone. I know he was shocked he did it. And then he stormed out and he hasn’t come home.”

“But the girls are okay?”

“They were upset but they’re asleep now . . . Freddie, I have to ask you a favor.”

“What is it?”

“I want you to take the girls for a while.”

“Of course I’ll take them.”

“I’m having a hard time right now, Freddie. In a lot of ways I am.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

They didn’t speak for nearly a minute after that. In the silence Freddie could hear Donald talking to himself in the back room. He knew that soon Donald would be coming from the darkness of the hall naked and screaming. “Why don’t you just come home with them,” he told her. “No pressure or anything like that, just temporarily. See how it goes. I can be better than I was. I will be better.”

“I like that you say that, Freddie. I do. But I can’t. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I understand,” he said.

“Can you buy plane tickets for the girls?”

Freddie sighed. “You know I’m broke and that I don’t have a credit card anymore.”

“I’m broke, too,” she said.

He thought of all the money he sent her each month, month after month after month. He knew Rob made three times the money he made and owned his house outright, but he didn’t mention any of that. All he said was, “I don’t get paid for two weeks.”

“I think they should come up sooner.”

“Maybe once things calm down you can get Rob to buy the tickets and I’ll pay him back.”

“I’ll see what I can do, but I have to go now, Freddie,” she said and then hung up the phone.

The rest of the night he was sleepless. He started drinking coffee at 4:30. He sat at the kitchen table and tried to think, but he was too tired to think. Dale arrived at 6:35. Freddie, again late, rushed home, changed, and drove to Heaven’s Door Donuts. He parked and flashed his lights twice and Mora met him in the parking lot with the donut boxes.

“You’re even later than you were last week,” she said. She wore her white apron and gray sweats and a red ski cap with a white cotton ball on top. She handed him the boxes and leaned down, resting her arms on the car.

“I have good news for a change, Mora. I’m going to get my girls back. Marie wants me to take them. She called a few hours ago. You were right. She can’t handle it.”

A large delivery truck pulled up next to them and four men got out and headed for the donut shop. She stood back up. “Geez, I’m happy for you, Freddie. You know I was praying you’d get a break and now you have one.”

“I can’t believe it either. But you better go,” he said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said and drove off.

He parked his car at Logan’s to see three paint vans already in front, waiting. He apologized and opened eight minutes late. He handled the morning rush and drank cup after cup of coffee to stay awake. At 11:00 a semi-truck backed to the dock and delivered two pallets of paint. He checked them in and began restocking the retail floor. At twenty minutes to noon Pat parked his black Ford F-250 pickup in the lot and came in the front doors carrying a liter of Dr Pepper and a frozen turkey and mashed-potato TV dinner.

“How was it this morning?” he asked.

“Jenson bought five hundred worth of Super Spec and I finally got the Oldham brothers out of Sherwin-Williams. They came in a half-hour ago.”

“What did they buy?”

“Eight hundred dollar’s worth of primer.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Darn, that’s really good.”

“The margin wasn’t the best, but I got them here. If I can get them to stay, I can start easing the margin back again.”

Pat set his lunch in the refrigerator and took off his leather aviator coat and hung it on a hook by his office door. He cleared his throat. “If anyone calls for me tell, them I’m in a meeting and I’ll call them back.”

“Alright, Pat, but before you go I was hoping to ask you something.”

“What is it?” he said and went to the remaining box of donuts. He took out a maple bar and a twist and filled a cup with coffee.

“I was hoping I could get an advance on my paycheck. To tell you the truth, Pat, I’m in a serious jam. I might even need a loan for a couple months. Not much, maybe a thousand dollars? I’m getting my kids back but I don’t have enough money to fly them up from Las Vegas. It’s an emergency or I wouldn’t ask.”

Pat coughed but he didn’t answer. He just took a bite of the maple bar and washed it down with coffee.

Freddie waited for him to speak, but when he didn’t he continued. “You know I hate asking anything from you, and I haven’t since your dad died, since you took over here. But now I’m afraid I need help.”

Pat leaned against the counter and set the donuts and coffee down. “Darn it, I don’t think I can do that right now, Freddie. Things are tight with me as well. I’d like to help, but it’s hard all over. This economy is hitting everybody. That’s for sure.”

Freddie moved to the other side of the counter from him. His face haggard and pale under the bright store lights. He’d slept three hours the night before, and had already had four cups of coffee. He looked at Pat but Pat wouldn’t look at him. “I know the store’s slow,” he said. “But winters are always slow and this year is better than the last two. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t a dire situation, but I’m afraid it’s pretty bad for me right now.”

Pat glanced past Freddie to the parking lot where a white painting van was pulling up. “I wish I could help, Freddie, but that’s not the policy that this company has.”

“The company is you and me, Pat. Everybody else is gone now. I’ve worked here for a lot of years. Your dad hired me out of high school. Your dad would always help a guy out. Always.”

Two painters came into the store and walked toward the counter. Pat finally looked at Freddie and nodded his head to them, picked up his donuts and coffee, and went into his office. Twenty minutes later he came out and heated his lunch in the microwave. He then went back inside office to call his wife, and Dr. James Dobson’s voice began leaking through the walls.

Four days later, on Saturday, Freddie closed Logan’s Paint Store at 5:30. He sat in his car in the parking lot looking over a road map. He found a paper bag on the floor and wrote down the miles it would take to get to Coyote Ridge Corrections Center and divided them by the miles per gallon the Comet got. He counted the cash in his wallet and thought he had enough for gas and maybe dinner. He checked the oil and water, and got on the road heading east.

The Comet stayed in the right lane for three hours while tractor trailers grumbled past and passenger cars sped by. He saw miles of plains and barbed-wire fences and open hayfields and farms and ranches along the way. His car shook and rattled, the steering linkage worn and loose, making the old car sway in between the white lines of the interstate.

He stopped at a truck-stop twenty miles from the prison, exhausted. He could barely keep his eyes open as he ate dinner in the truck-stop restaurant. In the parking lot, in the backseat of his car, he spent the night in a sleeping bag. The next morning he washed up in the restaurant bathroom, got a coffee to go, and left.

The corrections center was a series of stark, colorless concrete buildings surrounded by tall cyclone fences, flood lights, and empty fields. He parked and went through the visitors’ gate. He showed his ID, filled out the visitor form, and waited with dozens of other visitors until a guard brought them all to the cafeteria where they took seats and waited until the prisoners were brought in. He looked around at the other people waiting: Mexican, white, and black. There were babies crying and people whispering, and bored kids forced to sit still. The room smelled of Pine-Sol and seemed like any cafeteria in any school Freddie had ever been in.

It was twenty minutes later when he saw Lowell come into the room in prison-issued clothes: khaki pants, a white sweatshirt, and tennis shoes.

“Hey Freddie,” he said. He sat across from him. “It must not be good news if you’re here.”

“It’s not,” Freddie replied. He looked at Lowell. His hair was back in a single braid. He’d lost weight and looked worried and tired. “Marie wants me to take the kids back. The thing is I can’t work two jobs and keep them so I have to sell the house. Anyway, I can’t have them around the basement even if I could scrape by moneywise.”

Lowell sighed and looked down at the table, but he didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry about this. You know I am. I just don’t know what else to do.”

“When is this happening?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. I don’t have the money for airfare. Marie says she’s broke, too. I even asked Pat for a loan.”

“I bet that went great.”

“I asked for a thousand but he wouldn’t do it.”

“You should quit on him,” Lowell said and looked around the room. “You should just walk out. He’d be screwed; he doesn’t know shit about the paint business.”

“I know,” Freddie said.

“But you won’t?”

He shook his head. “I can keep Logan’s going. I can get my kids through high school with that job.”

“You want to work for Pat that long? You want to support him while he buys new cars and sits in his dad’s office a couple hours a day?”

Freddie didn’t answer.

“I’m sorry I’m in a bad mood, Freddie. I just didn’t need to hear what you’re telling me. My sister says she’s going to stay in my house when I get out. So I either have to live with her or find a new place. And then another cousin of mine forgot to put oil in my motorcycle and burned the engine out. Shit ain’t going my way. And now this . . . You’ve always been straight with me, Freddie, and we’ve been friends. But you’re one of those guys who works his whole life and tries not to do the wrong thing, and all it gets you is guys like Pat. You make rich guys richer and all they do is ask for more, and you always give it to them. Let me just say this, if you work for Pat for ten more years, I don’t want to know you, Freddie. ’Cause it’ll say something about you that I don’t want to see . . . Look, your basement is the only thing I got going for me when I get out. I don’t have my truck. I won’t have my house. I won’t have shit.”

“I’m sorry,” Freddie said.

“You’re sure?”

Freddie nodded.

“I’ll make sure Ernie comes in a couple days to get rid of them,” Lowell said and then stood up and walked back to the guards.

Outside in the parking lot Freddie sat in the Comet trying to get it to start. He’d flooded it, but even so he kept trying until the battery finally died. He got out of the car, took his jumper cables from the trunk, and opened the hood and waited for someone to come out.

A young Mexican woman with a baby and a toddler came through the last chain-link gate of the prison ten minutes later. She was a short, stout woman barely five feet tall. Her son, who was just able to walk, held her hand and she held a shopping bag and a baby in her other. They came to a white pick-up truck and she put the baby in a car seat and buckled the young boy in and shut the passenger-seat door.

Freddie walked over to her as she opened the driver’s side. “Excuse me,” he said. The woman seemed frightened at first, but then she smiled and said hello to him. She had two silver teeth that Freddie thought made her seem beautiful and exotic somehow.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said. “But my car won’t start.”

“No gas?” she said.

“I have gas. Bad battery. I need a new battery,” Freddie said. “Or maybe a new alternator. Maybe a new car.” He grinned.

“A jump?” she said and smiled back.

“If you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” she said and got up onto the bench seat. She shut the door and rolled down the window. “This truck is too big. I need a ladder.” She smiled again. “Where is your car?”