Freedom in Florida

Freedom stood before him in her flannel shirt, no bra, a single rivulet of sweat pouring down the bony channel between her sagging, freckled breasts. It was at this point, when she made it clear that she was willing to help him escape, that he stopped thinking about those breasts, and started thinking about everything else. They stood in front of the liquor store by the university, at 8 in the morning, the only place within walking distance of the house with a call-box, where he had told her to find him. She smoked her menthol cigarette and looked away as he tried to make up his mind.

What were the alternatives here? He could go home. Yes, home. That was the really wrong thing about this, he had gotten to where he was thinking about it as home. Because there was no place else to call home. So he would go home, and cook them breakfast. Here, with freedom standing, waiting, her name was Misty, by the way, he could not even bear to think about them. The kids, the brother, his girlfriend. He would go home and cook breakfast, and go read for half an hour while they ate and showered and fought over the bathroom, and, eventually, left to go to school and work. Then he would clean up, roll up their sleeping bags (the twins slept in the living room, on the floor), make the beds, then take the already-overflowing garbage out, then do the dishes, then clean the floors, then while the floors dried he would water the garden, weed, then walk down to the grocery-store, then come back get started on dinner. So his day would pass as the live in housekeeper. Nothing truly, obviously bad would happen unless he broke something, or neglected to do something, or spoke back. Of course, the kids would spill stuff on purpose, spit food on the floor, that kind of thing, the two adults would pretend not to see.

You get a place to be. That was the upside of the situation. You have a place. It was not a home, you sleep on the fucking kitchen floor, but you are not an intruder, nobody questions you being there. What happened to me that I am happy with just that, though? It did not start out with him being the servant. There was a time that he was an equal, when he would have looked down on those nasty hillbillies and been right to. Even then he had cleaned up after them, though. They were his guests, he thought. He had had no problem with it. Now, they were paying the rent and he was still cleaning up after them. It had not happened overnight. That's how the best traps work, slow and certain like cancer. You don't go from being a free man to a broken, loyal servant quickly. But when you get to the servant place, when it grows on you over time, without anybody telling you that you are owned, stating obviously, it is complete, you are owned. You see no other way to live but as an accessory to your owner. This is your place, as a satellite. The world was a scary, hard place, with no place for a thirty-eight year-old man with no formal education, and whose body was used only to the house-work he had been doing for the last year, and whose mind was used only to fiction. Freedom's life until fairly recently told him how bad it could be. The hillbillies told him that. What would you do? The niggers around here would cut open your soft, pudgy old ass your first night on the street. That was what Amanda's brother had said to him shortly after she had left. Not in anger either. He had said it simply, as an honest opinion. His assessment. It was probably true. He had been lucky to have gotten that hotel job and kept it for as long as he had. There were people out there, thousands in this town alone, with college degrees who had to settle for the fast-food drive-through. He would die on the street, out behind a dumpster.

He had met the redhead, Freedom, in the library. Misty. She had broken one of her false teeth on the water-cooler and was sitting at the back, at one of the desks where nobody could see you, crying. He had stood staring at the rows of Walter Mosley paperbacks (the mystery section was at the very back of the building) and peeking around the corner at her. Only that morning he had sat on the toilet and wept. Truly wept for the first time in twenty years. Now he was in the library, the only comforting place in his world, he felt a raw, incautious empathy here, for her. He was not used to approaching strangers. Especially strange women. He had never been that kind of guy. But here he was, feeling empathy, feeling at home, and there she was, not the prettiest woman in the world, vulnerable, and with a problem that he could fix. He went over and spoke. I know a guy who can fix that. It was the first offer of anything he had made to anybody in a long while. That was how it started.

She was a stripper, a profession Amanda looked down on. Her first husband had run off with, and later married, a stripper. She was over forty, only got a few gigs a month in one or two places, to fill in till they could find another, younger girl. She lived in her car, having been evicted the week before. Amanda had left behind a free fix certificate with a discount denture guy downtown (he could only think that maybe he had enough money that she would always be able to replace her false teeth instead of fixing them). She drove him to the house to get it, then they went to the denture place, then they sat in the parking-lot and waited while the dentures were made. They talked. Thinking that he would never see her again, he told her everything. Thinking that he had nothing to lose he revealed all of himself to her, things he never shared with anyone, not even Amanda. She did the same. Then at the end of it. When the dentures were ready, when it was almost time to go get her son, they found that they understood each other. There was a familiarity there, that it was too soon to call friendship, but that bordered on intimacy anyway. They felt that something could happen.

She had a job up in Jacksonville, she told him. She was heading there now. A good job. He could see the boy in the backseat, sleeping. I don't have much room, but you can get some clothes and come with me. So here it was. The old Cadillac. This is my hope, he thought. I have nothing at that house, but I have everything at that house. I met her twenty-four hours ago. She was looking away, smoking a second cigarette, waiting for him to decide. Fuck the clothes, he said. Let's just go. It was a decision he would both regret and delight in for the rest of his life.