freedom house

(photo courtesy yistergirl)

To celebrate Halloween, I’d like to share this story again. There’s nothing like a haunted house. Have you ever seen a real ghost?

It wasn’t so scary after you’d lived there for awhile. It was a mammoth Victorian, dingy white, with exes of tape on the windows, three stories plus a basement and an attic no one ever visited. It sat in a line of newer, smaller houses that repeated a pattern of dereliction with cement gardens, security doors, and plastic potted plants. The street was bald save the four old-growth walnut trees flanking the Victorian, remnants of forgotten ancestors; one and a half in front and two behind.

Jo and her little brother Max didn’t live there, they just visited, usually for the weekend but sometimes longer. Their mother Joyce had a thing with Philip, a longstanding resident whose seniority and hard work at the program earned him conjugal visits. They stayed with Philip in the first bedroom on the second floor, at the top of the curving staircase. Joyce and Philip shared the narrow bed and the kids rolled out sleeping bags on the closet floor.

When they visited, Joyce was usually assigned to work in the hollow industrial kitchen where she’d help unload sacks and giant cans of food from the donation truck. Joyce was a whiz at inventing new ways to mix the ingredients—succotash and Velveeta on toasted wonder bread or baked potatoes piled with bacon bits and peas from a can. The kids were free to amuse themselves as long as they didn’t bother the residents or distract them from their work.

During breaks, chatty residents like Troy played cards in the front parlor or watched the mammoth television built into an ornate wooden cabinet. Troy always wore a tight yellow t shirt with the words “Pigs Is Beautiful” printed under a cartoon of a pig in a policeman’s uniform. Troy kept a purple pick stuck in his afro for easy access. He would sometimes challenge Jo and Max to a game of Go Fish; he taught them dance moves and showed them how to shake hands.

One day that was so hot that the sidewalk outside burned their bare feet, the kids lay on a ratty sofa on the front porch, watching a cloud of flies hover and swoop like waltzing kamikazes. Max was playing with a transistor radio one of the counselors gave him, confiscated from one of the residents; it had no batteries but Max was pretending, beating the air with imaginary drumsticks and moaning a tune, whenTroy strutted up the stairs. He nodded at Max and held out his pale palm to Jo for the complicated handshake before he plopped down on the sofa but there was nothing relaxed about Troy with his big smile, his hard muscles and that sly look in his eyes.

“What’s up?” Max wanted to know.

“You want to see something crazy?”

The kids said they did and so he led them out into the scalding sun where the walnut trees huddled in their own shadows, around the side toward the kitchen where he instructed Max to flip back the lid of one of the big metal dumpsters. There, on top of the pile was the carcass of some largish creature, a shape aroused with the manic twisting of a thousand fat, white worms.

Jo ran halfway back down the walk but Max moved forward to get a better look. Troy just stood there, smiling hard.

“What was it?” Jo wailed. “What happened?”

“Doesn’t matter what it used to be, little sister. Now it’s alive, alive again for our entertainment.”

Troy was always nice to Jo and Max but Dawn called them “ugly little bastards,” even though it wasn’t true; the kids insisted that they who their dad was but they just weren’t very close. Dawn’s face and chest were covered with pimples and her hair was so long that when she walked, it swung back and forth like a curtain revealing the pockets of her tight jeans. Their mother Joyce said Dawn had the dirtiest mouth she had ever heard; Dawn said Joyce was a phony-cheese-eating-scabby-skank-slut and if she had any brains at all, she would keep an eye on her man. Dawn was always moving between the game room to the tv room, working the crowd. It was a game she played: if she could get a guy to stop what he was doing and look at her, she’d won. But it wasn’t easy. She had to yell outrageous things to get them to look away from the tv screen and when they turned up the volume, she’d have to talk even louder. If someone refused to glance up from his hand of cards, she’d curse or insult him or sit on his lap. She was always taking a guy by the hand and trying to lead him off somewhere.

The silent types stayed upstairs in their rooms, smoking cigarettes. Jo and Max would sometimes play jacks in the dim upstairs hallways that smelled of sweat and burnt toast and when the ball got away from them, the kids would stand in a doorway stealing eyefuls of the tidy, scantly furnished rooms while their ball was retrieved. All personal possessions were confiscated, so the kids had to look hard to discover the personal touch: a windowsill with an ivy plant potted in a coffee can, a crocheted blanket, a burlap beanbag.

One day, their ball rolled into a room and when Jo went to the door, she found Ronnie lying on his bed wearing nothing but a pair of thin shorts. He exhaled a cloud of smoke toward the doorway. “Nope. It’s not in here,” he said, fixing her in his amber eyes, blinking slowly. He stretched his legs like a cat and pointed his nylon groin in her direction. He licked his lips and asked, “What would you give me if it was?”

Most days, the children preferred to play on the sidewalk in the shade of the walnut trees. In the spring, the wheels of the skateboard caught on the catkins and blighted nuts. None of the neighborhood kids ever stopped to talk as they pedaled by. “Rubberneckers!” Jo would yell after them, and huck up the biggest loogie she could and spit in their direction.

Months went by with only cursory impressions. Life at the Freedom House was hazy and slow. They “worked their steps” like sleepwalking zombies. To Jo, it felt as though they were always on the outside of the moment looking in, on the brink of understanding. At bedtime before going down to play the game the adults played as a group every evening, Joyce would tuck them in to their sleeping bags. Jo and Max would share the events of their day and she’d say, “That’s just the way it is at a halfway house. That’s the way it has to be.” Jo would lay there waiting for sleep, listening to the voices vibrating up from the game room below, thinking that a halfway house was a place where people live halfway—not fully, not in Kodachrome but in an unfocused, unfinished way, a fumbling-in-the-dark. Jo thought you had to live at a halfway house until you knew what you were missing and when you did, then you could become a real person.

Nothing memorable happened until the haunted house. It was Troy’s idea. In order to take up the slack in private donations, he said, they should put on a haunted house, and he walked from room to room spreading the word and painting vivid pictures in the air with his hands. Everyone thought it was a good idea and the counselors and Director agreed so they began preparations, practicing parts, designing costumes, and scrounging in nearby dumpsters for props. Jo and Max were ecstatic to receive an assignment: it took all day to hand-paint each poster with Jo drawing the letters and the black outline of the house and Max adding blood red embellishments. The next day when they walked the neighborhood, stapling posters to telephone poles and on bus stop benches, a kid with a crew cut and a transistor radio paused to read over their shoulder.

“On Main Street?” he asked. “Isn’t that the burn-out house?”

Jo turned to look him up and down. “Yeah. Why, you chicken?”

“Are you going?”

“Of course.” Jo pushed the sleeves of her t shirt up. “I’m like the ringleader of the whole show.”

The kid smirked and turned to Max. “What about you?”

Max stuck out his chin and squinted up at the sky. “I live there, man.”

The kid was impressed.

On opening night, a huge searchlight arrived behind a truck. When they fired up the generator, the windows of every house on the street vibrated with the noise. Three beams began a slow dance across the sky, searching for hidden bodies in the low-hanging clouds. Troy strutted back and forth on the sidewalk in his tight black pants, with bones painted across his face and chest. He held a bullhorn to his mouth: Brothas and sistahs, we are gathered here today to separate the man from the roach. Tell me, do you think you good enough to escape a living hell? He shook his snaky mane of braids tied with real chicken bones and pointed to the house. This is the biggest, baddest show in town. Users, criminals, murderers, monsters and ghosts. Enter if you dare but let me tell you, my friends, you never tried nothing till you tasted real fear.

Jo had a nametag stuck to her chest that designated her as one of the “spirit tour guides.” It was her job to wait near the ticket table where Joyce was taking money and, as soon as she had a group of eight paying customers, Jo would introduce herself and tell them to hold onto a piece of rope. They had rehearsed this several times but now, in the muggy darkness with the lights flashing and the bullhorn blaring and the house glowing and creaking like a live thing, Jo had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from crying.

At a safe distance, a group of kids had gathered on the sidewalk. Little kids, ones her age, ones who could still go trick-or-treating if they wanted to, staring with big eyes. She thought she recognized the kid with the transistor radio.

She adjusted her witch’s hat and tried to smile for her nervous group of four adults and four teenagers: “You gotta hold onto the rope. Believe me, folks, you don’t want to get lost in there. If you let go, I won’t be able to help you.” She led them up the steps and through the door.

In the front vestibule, everyone had to use their hands to push through the nooses dangling from the ceiling. There was just enough light to see the curved banister writhing with crepe paper flames. One woman in her group screamed and then giggled when she discovered one of the baby dolls hanging in a noose. “Don’t mind the children,” Jo joked, “They wouldn’t hurt a fly!”

She paused at the next doorway to make sure they were all holding the rope and knocked twice before leading them into where the crowd of red devils holding forks encircled a bed where Dawn, wearing nothing but a skin-colored leotard, lay tied with clothesline. They hadn’t been able to find real pitchforks so regular cutlery had to do; the men jabbed Dawn with their forks and she seemed to be having entirely too much fun screaming and writhing about. One devil (Jo thought it was probably Ronnie) poked Dawn so hard in the thigh that it left a red mark, but Dawn just squealed for more, more, more.

Jo led the group quickly to the kitchen where the stainless steel tables were covered with a giant, viscous piles of soup bones and rotten meat in a pool of real pigs’ blood. Jo froze when she smelled the thick tang of blood in the air. Philip stirred a pot full of steaming goop and laughed a crazy laugh. “Come and get it! If you clean your plate, I might let you go out and play!”

“Whatever you do, don’t let go of the rope!” she repeated as she took that first group quickly through the house, past the grabbing hands in the dark hallways, down the back staircase to the basement where the dirty women wrestled each other and screamed insults at the people holding the rope, through the laundry room where fat men wearing rubber Nixon masks sang rounds of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” on and on, until they arrived at the garage in the back where the cage was kept.

They’d used every bit of scrap wood or metal they could find to make it. Troy taught Max how to use a hammer and a drill and they had spent the largest part of each day in October weaving the pieces together. It looked like a giant domed spider web, five feet high and ten feet wide and there at the center was Max, just a regular little boy, not bloody or dirty, just naked except for a pair of tattered cut-offs, his skinny chest corrugated with jutting ribs and skin glowing white under the overhanging fluorescent bulb, his pale blonde hair alive with electricity like a crazy halo.

Someone whispered, “It that a real boy in there?”

Someone else said, “What’s a little kid doing in here?”

Max called to them: “Help me, help me!” When they neared the edge of the cage he began to scream, pulling at his hair and rattling the bars. When he saw the looks on their faces, he pointed and laughed.

And that was that. Back outside, there was a long line waiting to get in. The hum of the generator and the sound of Troy’s voice droned on: Take a trippy trip you’ll never forget, brothas and sistahs. Anyone can visit, but few will survive to tell the tall tale. The only way you gonna escape this hell is with a rope or a gun.

It wasn’t scary after awhile. As the night progressed, Jo began to relax and even enjoy herself, telling jokes and working the props, taking her time.

At midnight they shut down. The Director went to his office to count the money and when he came out, he made a speech about how they should all feel really proud of themselves, really proud. He said this was a big step toward their recovery and gave everyone a pack of cigarettes. They all hugged and hi-fived and went to bed.

It wasn’t until the next morning that anyone noticed Troy’s room was empty. They crowded in to see the loafers lined up under the bed, the sheets with military corners, the little bottles of shampoo, aftershave, and tubes of ointment carefully laid out on an outspread towel. Outside the window, the empty branches of the walnut tree shivered in the wind.

Max had tears in his eyes. “No note? Nothing?” He picked up the Brut deodorant, pulled off the cap and sniffed. “Is he gone? Or is he dead?”

“Maybe this is a good thing,” Jo told him. “Maybe he was just finished.”

And they both turned to Joyce. They stood there waiting, patiently, watching her face for a sign.

*

*

A couple links that informed/inspired: