Freedom's Child (7 page)

My name is Freedom and there’s barely room at the Whammy Bar to stick out my chest. Long, gray beards spotted with beer foam protrude from black leather biker jackets. Jailhouse tattoos with the Indian ink that fades to green. Pints of ale spill from the brims. Teeth rotted by crystal meth decorate the bar as they shout over the All-man Brothers Band and Pantera. A cloud of Pall Mall smoke inflates within the walls. And to my left, at the end of the bar, is Passion, though rare is the prostitute who uses her Christian name.

Passion gets stares from the bikers, and not because she’s a pro, but because she’s black; too many of the bikers don’t like black people. But Passion frequented the place long before it was a biker bar. She came with the
HOT PIE
, where she sets up shop in room number 12. And it’s that time of year when the air gets too cold and the hookers stroll in for a few minutes of warmth. They hide in the corners of the bar, though not for long after the men have a few rounds. They shiver in their fishnets and hover over pots of French onion soup and cups of coffee.

Passion is good people. She’s ripe at fifty, the mother hen to the other runaways and coke-addicted pros. A gold tooth at the front of her smile always catches my attention from the corner of my eye.
Her short curly hair and long blue nails emerge from a long and old white faux-fur coat. And even above the loud music, and I mean decibels hardly within the human threshold of volume, I swear I can hear her lick and smack that gold tooth with her tongue. She always smiles. She always looks like she has a secret you’re dying to know. She’s great company, smart and up-to-date on all the politics and science and literature and such, and so I love having her around, someone in Painter I can have an intelligent conversation with. Yes, the only sensible person in the state of Oregon is a whore. Life’s funny like that.

I have a minute to rest. I lean near Passion from my side of the bar. She stares into a newspaper and uses a plastic spoon to stir her bowl. She smells like spearmint gum, latex, and onion soup. There’s a chewed-up wad of gum on the tip of her nail as she eats.

“Obama this, Obama that.” She folds the newspaper away. She must be the only black person in America who hates Obama. For some reason this makes me like her more, because she’s not a conformist. I wipe down the same patch of bar over and over again as we discuss politics.

“Sure, put all the gun crimes in the headlines to back a gun ban. But what good will it do? The guns aren’t the problem.” She blows on her soup from silver lipstick and raises her voice to get a rise. “It’s these crazy-ass cracker white boys who are allowed to have them.” Anyone else might take offense to such a statement. I know she means nothing prejudicial about it.

“I tell you what,” she says as a fat biker named Gunsmoke with a blond receding hairline slams his glass on the bar.

“That nigger Obama ain’t taking my rights from me.”

“Relax, shugga, I didn’t vote for him neither.” She raises her glass to Gunsmoke, but he looks away. Passion and I share a smile. I go to the blond and take his mug to the draft taps. Foam falls from the Pabst Blue Ribbon faucet.

“Passion, would you watch the register?” Passion’s practically management here. “Gotta go switch cans in the basement.”

“You got it, honey.”

I slip my way through the crowd with a few iron elbows to the door beside the restrooms where it says “Employees Only.” The hallway smells like urine after a few courses of antibiotics and crack, the smell of sweet hay. Not that I’ve ever tried crack, but let’s not be naive.

I hold my breath. Beyond the door, a hallway in darkness. Overhead are caged lamps that flicker, dim graves to fruit flies that failed to follow the sweet fumes of liquor into the bar. The sound of the music from inside is muffled behind the walls. I walk slowly. I hate hallways, I’ve always hated hallways, especially dark ones. I focus on these lamps, and I’m reminded of an interrogation room back in New York. The hall expands. The space grows darker. The music becomes distant. And suddenly I’m back in that interrogation room twenty years ago. Before I was Freedom Oliver. Before I met the whippersnappers. Before I went crazy. Back when my name was Nessa Delaney.

“Nessa, be smart,” said one officer. He and his partner circled around me like buzzards. Their eyebrows formed
V
’s, faces a shade of ruby with frustration. With each hour that passed, their shirt cuffs moved an inch higher on their arms. “Now, I know you don’t want to end up having this baby in prison, do you?”

“Go to hell,” I grunted, cuffed in a steel chair with the short leg, the one that makes the suspects uncomfortable and antsy. I’d seen enough
NYPD Blue
on TV to know the trick. The officer slapped me across the face. It stung more and more with each backhand, until it actually burned my ears
.

But worse was the smile from the second cop in the corner of the room, his arms crossed. “Hell will be a lot better than where you’ll end up.”

“Freedom.” I jump
when Carrie shakes me from the flashback. “You all right?” I focus on a nude woman tattooed on her forearm. I focus on anything that can rip me from my memories.

“Yeah, sorry.” I put my hands down in my cleavage and scoop out the sweat. I gulp at air polluted with crack and try to shake it off. I try to tell myself that it was years ago, that it’s over now. “Gotta go to the basement and switch the PBR kegs.”

“I’ll take care of it.” She squeezes my shoulder to put me at ease. If only it worked. “Take the night off. I’ll watch the bar.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” She waves me off. “I got it. Go home.”

Dear Mason and Rebekah, though once upon a time, you were Ethan and Layla,

To pick up where I left off last: I was giving my mother a pedicure on her deathbed. It was the August after I’d graduated high school, top of the class, I might add. It was the day a pregnancy test came back positive in the restroom of a Roy Rogers. It was the day my mother died.

“Vanessa, I’m scared.” Before that, I wasn’t sure if she knew I was there. There were a lot of things that weren’t there. Her voluminous hair wasn’t there. The meat on her bones wasn’t there. Her will to live wasn’t there. But I was there. I was there until the very end.

“Don’t be scared, Ma.” I tried not to drown in my own words, tried to be strong. “I won’t forget the cuticle cutter this time.”

And that was it. Poof, she was gone. She never got to learn I was pregnant. Perhaps that was a good thing. She never did approve of those Delaney boys.

That was around the time your father decided to join the NYPD. I was suspicious at the sudden transition from lifting cars and sipping 40s to being a cop.

“Imagine the dope you could score in arrests,” Lynn would push. Oh, yes, your grandmother was a fucking gem. Lynn, this stocky woman
with bad teeth and a huge fucking mouth…never mind. I shouldn’t talk bad about your grandmother. That’s for you guys to assess without my editorializing. Maybe one day you guys will see for yourself if she’s still around.

The apple didn’t fall too far from the tree. I think that was Mark’s plan all along: become a copper to score dope, to demand respect. He was always one who felt he deserved respect, even if he didn’t earn it.

After Mom died, we spent a few months with the Delaneys until we’d gotten our own place, a house we bought on Huntington Drive with the money I’d inherited from my mother, an inheritance that turned all of the Delaneys into my best friends overnight. But on one particular night at the Delaney house, I was about four months pregnant, Mark didn’t come home.

See, your father and I were kids at the time, excited at the thought of playing mom and dad at such a young age without knowing what parenthood really meant. Lynn Delaney was the only parent Mark was familiar with, so the recipe was already toxic. I was just too young to see it at the time.

It was the night before his graduation from the NYPD academy, and the neighborhood was already preparing the party. Not a bad idea to know a cop on the inside, the delinquents around the block would say. The rest of the Delaneys were fast asleep, but for your uncle Peter, the only one of your father’s brothers that I ever cared for. Peter was this brilliant and kind man confined to a wheelchair, and probably the best friend I ever had in all my life. I miss him from time to time, think about calling him once in a while. But that would breach my contract with the whippersnappers. Peter and I talked about anything and everything, from our disagreements with the Delaneys to the unpleasant changes of pregnancy, from politics and science to movies and comics.

But anyway, it was close to 4:00 a.m., and in walked a stumbling Mark, a nightclub stamp on the back of his hand, the smell of peppermint schnapps and cologne seeping from his skin. I should note that while at the academy the past few months, the eyeliner and leather was traded in
for CK One body spray and button-downs. He toppled a side table on the way in, ash and cigarette butts scattering on the floor.

“Mark, where the hell have you been?” I shushed. “Your graduation is in a few hours.”

“Why don’t you mind your own fucking business, you slut,” he said, his mouth wet from drink and eyes glassed over. “Whose baby is that, anyways?”

“You sh-sh-shouldn’t talk to her like that,” said Peter.

“Oh, yeah?” And there, for the first time, I saw your father with this particular look, one that turned his eyes to black, one that sent a chill through my bones. He leaned over and reached under Peter’s wheelchair. He wanted to humiliate Peter, and he succeeded when he pulled a black pouch from under his chair, a pouch full of Texas catheters. He took his car keys and began to stab the bag that held Peter’s urine. The bag burst on Peter’s lap. Your father burst out in laughter.

“What the hell are you doing?” I slapped his shoulder.

“Get away from me.” He pushed me hard enough that I fell backward.

I should have left right then. Rebekah, take this advice. The second a man touches you like that, run as far as you can. But I was a stupid kid, a stupid kid who stayed. With my mother dead, I had nowhere to go. And in my head at that time, I’d thought that staying with an asshole was a better alternative than raising my child without a father.

After he stumbled back to his bedroom, I helped Peter in the dark, but I could feel his face burn red in the night. “How could you be with a monster like that?” He tried not to cry. “How could you let a man like that father your own flesh and blood?”