Chapter Four

Sunday, October 15, 8:30 a.m.

From The Oregonian

14 Killed in Oregon’s Deadliest Pile-Up; Dust Storm Blamed

(Clark City) -- The day after a blinding dust storm triggered a 52-vehicle deadly pileup on Interstate 84, Oregon State Police are still reconstructing the blizzard of events.

At 5:20 p.m. Saturday, a cloud of dust whipped up from dry, newly tilled wheat fields in Eastern Oregon crossed I-84 and swallowed up dozens of cars. The damage caused by the chain reaction accident was compounded when a rig carrying diesel fuel exploded.

Six people were pronounced dead on the scene, included an injured man found in his car at 5:52 p.m., who died before frustrated state troopers were able to free him. Virtually every ambulance in the region was called into service to deliver 38 patients to hospitals in Clark City, Walla Walla and Pendleton, including two people who were pronounced dead on arrival. Six more later died of their injuries. Life-Flight took three badly burned victims to Legacy Emanuel Medical Center’s Burn Unit.

Police identified the dead as and Dorothy Campbell, 69, of Pendleton; Fred G. Carpenter, 76, of Redland, Wash.; DeWayne George, 52, of Tri-Cities, Wash.; Karen C. Marlowe, age unknown, of La Crosse, Wash.; Free Meeker, age 19, of Medford, Ore.; Gene Pavel, 37, of Clark City; John Phillips, 54, of Portland, Ore;. At least one victim's body was too badly burned to identify late Saturday, police said. Police withheld the identities of others pending notification of family members.

 

 

 

 

Her hands shaking, Free put down the newspaper. That was it, then. She was officially dead.

She didn't feel like a dead person - but she didn't feel real, either. Wearing only a borrowed muumuu, she was sitting cross-legged on a sagging double bed in a room at the Stay-A-While Motor Inn, three blocks from the hospital.

The owner had been all clucks and sympathy when she saw the blood on Free’s face and clothes. The basic outline of the story she already knew from listening to her CB radio. “Do you got any Band-Aids, honey? Or clean clothes? ‘Cause Darlene can get you some,” she had asked, her brown eyes sympathetic. Free had barely had the strength to shake her head. The woman, who turned out to be the Darlene in question, had loaned Free her own first-aid kit, polyester muumuu and white cardigan sweater.

During the night, Free had gotten only snatches of sleep. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw dead people, cars cartwheeling through the air, the orange bloom of fire. Over and over again, she had flinched awake, hearing the squeal of tearing metal and the terrible boom of impacts in her dreams.

Now it was 7:43 in the morning. The curtains in her room were closed, but they were so thin that the room was filled with a gauzy light. Spread out on the bed in front of Free were the contents of Lydia’s purse and Jamie’s bag.

Lydia’s belongings took up only a small corner of the bed. Jamie’s money covered the rest of the faded polyester coverlet - neat stacks of worn gray-green with a $100 printed on every corner. Each stack of one hundred bills was rubber-banded. Next to the stacks of money she had put other things from Jamie’s bag. There was a compact gold-colored scale calibrated to weigh grams, a notebook, two small plastic bags filled with white powder, a large plastic bag filled with pot, and another small bag filled with brownish twisted shapes that Free identified as ‘shrooms.

Leaning forward, Free counted the money again, tapping her finger on each rubber band. There were seventy-four stacks in all - for a total of $740,000. Free had never seen so much money in her life.

It was so much money the sweet, papery smell of it filled the room. So much money that she could hardly take it all in.

So much money that it could change her life. So much money that she would never have to worry again.

So much money that she could offer this baby in her belly a real life. A settled life. She could give this kid a house and a dog and a mother who never had to work. All the stuff Free had never had. Stability. Store-bought clothes. A car that ran reliably - and that had heat, a complete floor and no ‘creative’ paint job.

There was only one problem. It wasn’t her money.

But whose money was it?

When she had first glimpsed the money, Free had wondered why someone would stuff a gym bag full of used bills. Real people, or squares, as her mother Diane still called them, would have put the money in the bank or the stock market. When she emptied out the bag on the bed and saw what was under the money, that had cleared up any confusion.

So Jamie had been a dealer. Diane and Bob had consumed more than their share of drugs, but the only one they had ever sold was home-grown pot, and mostly they just gave that away.

She picked up the notebook and began to leaf through it. It was filled with some kind of code, although she was sure that even if she knew how to read it, it would all be dates and dollars and grams. Where had this Jamie been going? Before he got caught up in the accident, his car had been headed west. Had he been driving to Portland or someplace further away, like Seattle or San Francisco? His car, Free remembered, had had Oregon plates, so he probably lived in the state. Who was he bringing the money to? Suddenly, Free remembered what Jamie had said about the bag while he struggled to get up. Don will kill me if I don’t give it to him. At the time, she had thought Jamie was exaggerating. Now she guessed he might have been telling the truth. After all, someone was bound to get pretty territorial about $740,000.

How long would it be before this Don person came looking for the bag?

But if it weren’t for Free’s intervention, there probably wouldn’t even be a bag to look for. She picked up the paper again, looked at the front page photo of tangled trucks and cars burned down to charred skeletons. Wasn’t it more than likely that this Don would assume that the money had literally gone up in a puff of smoke? If it hadn’t been for Free, it would have. In a way, wasn’t this like finding free money?

Free dropped her head into her hands and rubbed her fingers over the smooth contours. Too much had happened to her in the last few days. Her head didn’t have enough room to hold it all. Figuring out she was pregnant - and then trying to figure out what to do about the baby. In the middle had come figuring out that her boyfriend was a two-timing asshole who had hooked up with the first hootchie that crooked a finger. And now this. An accident so bad that it made the front page of the paper. An accident that left a dozen people dead and her alive, sitting cross-legged on a bed surrounded by someone else’s money. An accident that specifically left someone named Lydia Watkins dead, and another woman named Free Meeker alive. Only everyone thought that Free was dead and Lydia was still alive.

Everyone but Lydia, and she wasn’t in a position to say any different.

Free looked down at the money again. She ran her fingers lightly over the stacks of bills, soft and slightly fuzzy. Too worn to be anything but real money. So much money. Enough money to solve everything.

Free turned her attention to the corner of the bed where she had spread out Lydia’s things. Lydia hadn’t had much, but what she had had was what Free thought of as “classy” and her parents would have classified as “uptight.” A flowered cloth bag full of makeup in matching marbled green containers that all read “Clinique” on the bottom. A pair of silver earrings shaped like crosses. An eel-skin wallet, more notable for what it didn’t have than what it did. There was no checkbook, no Blockbuster card, no Whitchers card, no Visa or MasterCard or Discover card. Just a library card, a driver’s license, a Social Security card, three crisp twenties and thirty-two crumpled ones. The last thing in the purse had been a little fabric-covered photograph album, fastened with a snap.

Free unfastened it and flipped through the photos. It began with a black and white picture of a dark-haired little girl in a dress and black patent Mary Janes. She was flanked by a woman wearing cat’s eye glasses and a man with a white shirt and a dark tie. Lydia with her parents, Free guessed. Next a photo of an older Lydia, recognizable now as the woman Free had picked up. In a brown fast-food uniform, she raised a knife with a grin, parodying a killer. Then Lydia, smiling with a group of women friends, their arms laced around each others shoulders, all of them dressed in pastel dresses. Free felt a flash of envy at the sight of the tasseled graduation caps on their heads.

The last picture was of Lydia on her wedding day, her face almost lost in a veil made of layers of white lace. Free studied Lydia's husband - not tall but powerfully built, with dark eyes, slanted eyebrows and a heart-shaped face. He was beautiful in a totally masculine way. What had Lydia said about him? He loved me so much that it was like we were still on our honeymoon. Free’s heart felt squeezed when she realized that everyone in these photos was now dead. Who was left to mourn Lydia?

Normally, Free wasn’t the type to pick up hitchhikers. Even Diane, Free’s mother, said it wasn’t safe anymore for a woman by herself to pick up a hitchhiker, even another woman. But Lydia had looked so out of place, so young and harmless, as she stood beside the freeway on the outskirts of Pendleton that Free had made an exception. For one thing, Lydia had been wearing a dress. A dress that looked as if cleaning it required a trip to the drycleaner. Free herself didn’t own a dress or an iron and had never been to a drycleaner. She found herself pulling over for the other woman. How could Free leave her to the wolves who would surely scent her?

And Lydia, it turned out, needed all the help she could get. The words had poured out of her as soon as she got in the car. First a car accident had taken her parents, and then two weeks ago a machine at the disposable diaper factory where her husband had worked had literally eaten him up. The factory offered Lydia a tiny settlement. Instead of signing, Lydia had called this big-time Portland lawyer who advertised on TV all over Oregon about his ability to wring settlements from large companies. Lydia had been all set to drive into Portland, but that morning her car had blown a head gasket. Free, who was driving a 1972 Impala so old that mushrooms sometimes sprouted on the floor of the backseat, nodded sympathetically while Lydia rattled off her story.

Free hadn’t planned on going to Portland, but after hearing Lydia’s story she decided to take her there. She knew all about what it felt like to be abandoned, with no one to turn to. So what if she added a couple of hours to her trip? She figured the good karma was worth it. Besides, she was in no hurry to get back to Medford. The drive down from Portland would give her more time to figure out how to break the news about the baby. But they never made it as far as Portland. Thirty minutes after pulling over to pick up Lydia, Free had driven blindly into the dust storm.

Now that Free had looked inside Lydia’s nearly empty wallet, it was clear that the other woman had badly needed whatever money the lawyer could get her. She wondered if Lydia had been forced to sell her engagement and wedding rings. The whole time the other woman had talked, the fingers of her right hand had absentmindedly circled the white mark on the ring finger of her left hand. It was strange to think that they were only a few years apart in age. The two of them had been as different as if they had been raised in separate countries. Some part of Free couldn’t help envying Lydia her square parents, her graduation cap, even the poor dead husband who had looked at Lydia with such adoration on their wedding day.

Thinking about Lydia just made Free think about the accident, and she didn’t want to go experience those memories again, so fresh she could still almost smell the smoke and blood. She decided to take another shower, as if she could wash the thoughts away. A shower without shampoo or soap, since the Stay-A-While Motel cut down on overhead by not providing any toiletries and offering thin towels as rough as a cat's tongue.

From the mirror, still spotted with the white flecks of someone else's toothpaste, a stranger looked back at Free. Who was she, anyway? With her bald head, shadowed eyes and the cut on her forehead, she looked like a victim or a refugee. Learning forward, she carefully peeled back the Band-Aid. The edges of the cut were holding together, set now in a bruise as black as midnight. Reaching down to grab the hem, she stripped off the muumuu. Naked, she looked like a battered wife, her body splotched with dozens of dark purple bruises. Her feet stung, and when she lifted one she saw the bottoms were dotted with dozens of small cuts from her barefoot escape up the hill. The shower head was shorter than she was, but she stayed in for a long time anyway, as if the warm water could wash away the images of death and destruction. Free opened her mouth to the spray, swishing and spitting and rubbing her index finger over her teeth in lieu of her missing toothbrush.

Free took stock of herself. She was nineteen. She had a shaved head, a nose ring and a tattoo of Chinese characters around her biceps. They were supposed to mean something about happiness, but Free sometimes wondered if they really meant anything at all. In the last week, she had lost first her boyfriend and then her car. She had a career, if you could call it that, as a pet groomer at Petorium. And she was, as she finally had been forced to admit last week, pregnant.

After climbing out of the shower, she attempted to dry herself off. Not only was the towel rough, but it seemed to be made of some special fabric that actually repelled water rather than absorbed it. She still hadn’t decided what to do, but she did know one thing. She didn’t want to spend one more minute in this motel.

With no alternatives, Free pulled back on the voluminous muumuu, abstractly patterned in turquoise and blue. From the floor, she picked up her jeans and T-shirt. They were stiff with dirt and blood and other stains she couldn’t identify. She couldn’t imagine ever getting them clean. Balling them up, she pushed them in the wastebasket, then washed her hands. The ring in her nose suddenly looked silly. She twisted it out and tossed it in the wastebasket, on top of her old clothes. Now she just looked sick, her brown eyes red-rimmed.

Free felt the baby move inside her again, a feeling like a trail of bubbles. The bottom had fallen out of her world. Somehow this baby seemed the only true thing she had. Free walked out and sat back down on the bed and stroked the money again, as soft as corduroy. Enough money to change everything. Maybe to even change who she was.

For nineteen years, she had been Free Meeker. Free’s name had presented itself to her mother during a particular stellar acid trip on the Fourth of July, 1980, the same night Free was conceived. And true to her name, Free had grown up free. Free of advertising, free of hang-ups, free to eat tofu and mung bean sprouts. Free of secrets and locked doors, free to run around naked as much as she pleased. Free of authoritarian hierarchies, bad trips, bad vibes, bad attitudes, and aggressive dogs. Free to wear tie-dye dresses and toe-ring sandals year-round, even in the rain. Free of rules, polyester, shampoo, the establishment, the government, shag carpeting, and anything else that could be labeled square, mainstream or conservative.

Secretly, all Free had ever wanted to do was fit in. In grade school, the rest of the kids had lined up at lunch to get hot dogs on squishy buns, squirted packets of bright yellow mustard at each other. Between bites, Free hid the nubby brown bread of her alfalfa sprout sandwich underneath the cafeteria table. From their first day of school, Free and her younger sister, Moon, had been allowed to decide whether they felt like attending on any given day. Free had had perfect attendance. Moon had usually opted out.

Deep inside herself, Free had longed to be something, more, well, normal. When she was a kid she used to shoplift Good Housekeeping magazine and clip out the pictures of mothers she could have had. Mothers who wore aprons over housedresses, instead of no bras under tie-dye. Mothers who whipped up meat loaf and mashed potatoes, instead of millet stew so thick you could stand a hand-whittled wooden spoon straight up in it.

And since Free’s family moved around a lot, it was hard to make friends, leaving her feeling even more alone. The four of them had lived in a teepee, in a tree house, in a converted chicken coop, in an old VW bus plastered with Grateful Dead stickers, in a commune that fell apart in bitter jealousy after a few months. Over the years, Diane and Bob had made their living through one non-job after another - making goat cheese, adjusting auras, crafting lumpy pots, selling beads with mystical powers.

Growing up, Free lied to the few friends she had about curfews and regulations and strictly enforced dinner hours. As if she had some. At her house there were no rules, so there was nothing to rebel against. Free hated it. It gave her an awful floating feeling, like going on a space walk, only her cord had come loose from the ship. In high school, her friends rebelled against conformity by stealing their parent’s cigarettes, skipping class and getting stoned. Free had smoked her first joint seven weeks before her eleventh birthday. With her mother. Secretly, Free craved conformity and rules. She wanted to wear a uniform, attend organized events and be the kind of person who had goals.

Diane and Bob, her parents, had rejected all that. Free and Moon never called them Mom and Dad. When Free was a kid, her parents had always been trying on different names - Summer, Rain, Apple, Sky, Diamond, Silver. For a while, they had given themselves Indian names, despite their pale skins. Diane had been She Who Runs, and Bob had finally settled on Thunder Cloud. Over time, they had gradually turned back into Diane and Bob again, given in to the establishment in some small fashion. Still, they often accused Free of being “too uptight.” They called her their “normie,” with a hint of exasperation. They were appalled when they discovered that she was secretly shaving her legs, horrified when they caught her eating M&Ms. They believed that cops were pigs, the president was a crook, America was spelled with a K, and white sugar was poison.

The years hadn’t changed them much. They still grew pot in the basement and organic vegetables in the garden, still danced around the kitchen listening to reggae while boiling lentils. They still sprawled in beanbag chairs, and divided the living room from the dining room with a rainbow-colored bead curtain. Bob still had a patchy beard, bad posture and a belief in conspiracies. Barefoot, Diane still marched right past the “No shoes, no shirts, no service” sign at the grocery store. And she certainly didn’t wear a bra. Even now, in the summer she wore a crocheted halter that looked like two doilies. Bob and Diane continued in their counter cultural ways, fond as ever of lava lamps, and, nearing fifty, often the oldest attendees at rock concerts.

How would they feel if she weren’t around any more? Free amended the thought. The two of them already thought she was dead. The paper wouldn’t have listed her name if her family hadn’t been notified. As far as Bob and Diane were concerned, she had died yesterday. She pictured them at home, wrapped in each other’s arms, weeping into each other’s hair. Nothing she could do, including coming forward, could spare them from the grieving they had already done. In a few days, she bet that would try to contact her spirit, see if she were doing okay, if she needed them to perform some kind of purification ceremony to free her in the afterlife. But the two of them had never really needed Free, or understood what she needed. In a way, it would probably be a relief to them that Free was dead, rather than having a live Free show up at home with the unexpected and probably unwelcome news that they were going to be grandparents.

Free looked back down at the money again, ran her fingers over its softness.

What if she took this money and ran?

What if Free Meeker became someone else - the woman she had always secretly wanted to be?

What if Free could really live up to the name her parents had given her?