Jax Miller - Freedom’s Child

“After you passed out,” he speaks into the pathetically empty fridge. “You were having a nightmare and kept on yelling Mason .” I play dumb, an act I play well. What can I say? I live in a world surrounded by incompetent retards, including Cal. But his skills in the sack compensate for a head full of rocks.

“I never met no Mason.” It’s a double negative, therefore I still tell the truth. A simple manipulation of words to sneak past Cal. “I probably just heard it on TV or something.” The phone rings and I rummage through the kitchen cabinets for it. I put it there when the headaches come. Cal looks at me like most people do: confused. I follow the cord to where the phone sits on a few cans of peas in the back. “Yeah?” I answer. “Yellow? Hello?” I hold the receiver tight against my jaw. I pretend to end the call, covering the hang-up with my hand. “It was the wrong number. Those good-for-nothing salesmen or something.” I’m not telling the truth.

“Your face says otherwise, Free-free.”

I hate when he calls me Free-free. It reminds me of a kid’s pet hamster. The carton of orange juice is back to his lips for seconds. Must be the gin I added to it the other day. And with that stupid grin and those washboard abs, I pretend to watch a commercial ad for Tropicana. I think of their slogan: Tropicana’s got the taste that shows on your face . Sure, if dumb is a flavor.

“I gotta shower.” I untangle the phone cord and walk for the bathroom. “Please be gone by the time I’m out.”

Matthew Delaney sits on the lidless metal commode in a solitary cell. Ossining, New York, home to Sing Sing prison. He holds a small stack of papers on his bare thighs as he wipes himself.

“Let’s do this, Delaney,” says Jimmy Doyle, the correctional officer. Matthew smiles politely and requests just another minute to finish. The officer looks away. The officers always look away. One by one, he tears each page into tiny pieces and flushes them with his piss and shit.

He kisses one last inch-long square, cut perfect with nail clippers he had snuck in more than a year ago. The scrap reads “Nessa Delaney.”

“Nessa, Nessa, Nessa,” he whispers to the wall of his six-foot-by-eight-foot cell, an old photograph with her eyes scratched out taped above his cot. “I don’t know which I might enjoy more. When I made love to you all those years ago …”

“Time to go, Delaney.” Doyle opens the steel door.

But Matthew takes one more moment to speak to Nessa. “Or when I find you and cut your arms off before drinking the blood?” He feels his guts lift with excitement, the idea of her death akin to the feeling of falling in love. The hatred and yearning for her have blended into one single emotion over the years, one he could neither resist nor fully grasp.

A smirk crawls across his face as he walks down the C-block. Toward the north end is med-sec, medium security, where, as opposed to the solitary confinement that Matthew was so accustomed to, these were shared cells with bars.

Matthew swings his bag filled with his personal belongings over his shoulder as he follows the officer, one he was well acquainted with. The inmates of the north end holler and cheer at his departure, rattling their tin cups against the bars and turning their soap wrappers into confetti, as such celebrations are afforded after a man’s time is served. At the last cell, before entering another passage of security, an inmate sporting ink of the Aryan race throws his shoe at the side of Matthew’s head.

And the smirk becomes teeth grinding.

In a swift movement that resembles something choreographed, Matthew lets his bag fall, reaching into the cell with both arms and pulling the prisoner backward against the bars. He uses his left hand to pull on his right wrist, arm wrapped around his neck and pulling tighter. “Do we have a fucking problem?” He seethes at the man, whose lips start to lose their pigment. He cannot answer, his voice constricted by Matthew’s elbow.

“Cut it out, Delaney.” The guard grabs his biceps. “You’re two steps away from freedom. You gonna throw it away because of this asshole?”

“Freedom …” He releases the man.

“Now, c’mon.” Doyle keys in a code. “Your family’s waiting.”

When they pass security and have a minute alone, Matthew sighs, the blood returning from his face and back to the rest of his body. He shakes the guard’s shoulder. “I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done while I’ve been stuck in here, Jimmy.”

“I’ve known you since we were kids, Matty.” But Matthew knows the help came only because his mother was the guard’s go-to dealer for good cocaine and the occasional supper. Matthew couldn’t care less, as long as he could get the information his little heart so desired, information pertaining to Nessa Delaney, now known, if his information is correct, as Freedom Oliver. “I’ll come by the house and see you guys soon, gotta visit my mom down there, anyway,” he tells Matthew.

When met by other officers, the guard nudges Matthew in the back. “Let’s move it, Delaney.”

* * *

Mastic Beach, New York: once a hidden gem on the south shores of Long Island, adorned with summer homes and bungalows for Manhattanites getting away for beach holidays during the warmer months. In recent enough memory, it was a safe haven where everybody knew everybody and the streets were lined with crisp, white fencing. Mastic Beach had color and clear skies and everyone loved to listen to the elders speak about the place when the roads were still made of dirt and of pastoral lands before the invention of the automobile. Small businesses were family-owned and -operated, with scents of baked bread that permeated in and through Neighborhood Road. Marinas flooded with beautiful sails that poked from Moriches Bay and rose to the heavens.

But then heroin trickled its way through the sewers of Brooklyn and emptied into the streets of Mastic Beach, and before long, crime rose to astronomical levels. Where people used to smile in passing, now they keep their heads down in fear of being jumped and beaten. Stabbings are as common as visits to the Handy Pantry. The elderly are robbed and the children of Mastic grow up way too fast. Thirteen and pregnant? Congrat-u-fucking-lations . And chances are, if you actually have a grassy patch big enough to be considered a yard, then more than once you’ve seen the lights of a police helicopter looking for a suspect on foot. And in those instances, your brain runs through every troublemaker that you know from your block until you have an idea of who it is they’re looking for.

Today, Mastic Beach is the dumping ground for Section 8 government housing and every perv, creep, and sicko on the Sex Offender Registry list. The town glows red on maps because of them. Every week, the residents get letters in the mail, mandated by Megan’s Law, telling them of rapists and child molesters living only a few houses down. Small businesses have become enclaves of illegal Arabs. And the gangs have colonized the area: the Bloods, the Crips, MS-13. The whites are the minority these days. Except for the Delaneys. They’re their own gang, a whole other species.

* * *

Peter doesn’t have to count how many boxes of wine it takes to get Lynn Delaney drunk. The answer is two, the equivalent of six bottles. But it’s no wonder, when the mother of the Delaney brothers weighed in at six hundred-plus pounds.

Lynn becomes out of breath with every lift and swig of the wineglass. The cabernet stains the crevices of her smile, a smile hard to see past the quarter-ton of lard melting over the king-size bed that has to be supported by cinder blocks instead of the standard brass legs. It’s the first time Peter can remember his mother making an effort to improve her appearance, the purple lipstick stuck to her gray and hollow teeth, a result of too many root canals from years ago when she actually gave a shit about her grin.