Freedom
By: Jason Bruner
Tags: Creative Non Fiction, Homelessness, Arizona

The Palo Verdes grow thick and tangled along the southern edge of Papago Park. They sit in a sandy wash on the north side of a chain link fence that protects their wildness from the clean corporate lines of Tempe Town Lake. As that 2-mile stretch of desert reservoir finally brought its promised development, the park’s trees twisted into a haven for folks with different aspirations. But even fenced off and in the dappled shade they were too close to the new condos. This is the pinch of progress: where to go?

I told Chris I hadn’t seen him in a while. “I been goin’ all over the place — Mesa, other cities…” his accented Nigerian English trailed off. The last few months had him feeling unsteady. “I just need to find a place to stay.”

Chris wore three shirts: colorful, button-down plaid near his skin, cyan — similar style — on top of that, an extra-large faded blue polo for the outer layer. He leaned toward me, speaking with his elbows on his knees, which were forward of his sneakers. Fingers kneaded, picking at his cuticles — less out of habit, more for a place to look.

I’ve known him a couple of years, and he’d always seemed to make do on Tempe’s streets. His life had a certain rhythm, but the renovations in Daly Park across the street had thrown it off. “It’s not a safe place,” he reasoned.

Pinched out of Papago, they mostly took the bridge across the lake, heading to the south side of the university campus. The problem: pruned Palo Verdes can’t hide anyone.

“The police, they want me, so I gotta move so they don’t get me.”

“Why would they want to get you?” I asked, because I don’t know the exhaustion of an endless calculus: “Oh! About moving around, about sitting in the wrong place, about people coming at night, about police saying oh you can’t be here it’s after 10 pm.”

Thinking. Always thinking.

In what is now Papago Park there once stood a prison camp that housed German P.O.W.’s. Early on the morning of December 23, 1944, twenty-five of them stole some rafts and maps and walked out into the desert, intent on floating their way to freedom in Mexico. Their error: assuming rivers in Arizona would have water.

Had he seen the guys he got along with? “I don’t have time to keep up with nobody else. I see him — that’s okay. I don’t see him — that’s okay too. Me, I keep moving.” Always squeezed forward.

“I try to sleep but can’t find no bench and then it’s trespassing or this and that and the police want me and so I don’t sleep and keep moving and then I am always in a new place, new place and I don’t know about this and so I always have to keep thinking and then I wake up and some days I wake and I am already off in my mind and I know it’s not going to be a good day. If I could have some place to stay though.”

Most of the escaped German prisoners were picked up by Arizona ranchers within a few days. One of them lasted a few weeks by tucking himself into the caves that pock the red sandstone outcroppings in Papago. He would sneak back into the camp at night to steal supplies. He learned that you have to make your own maps to survive here.

“What would a good day look like?”

“Ohh!” he chuckled. “Sometimes in the morning I know it’s already off and then it’s not until the afternoon that it might be okay. Because so much to think about. But if I get a place to stay, then other things can work out.” That was his refrain: the relief of a certain kind of future. “That way I don’t think about so many things.”

“What are some things you have to do to get a place?”

“I got to have deposit — cash for deposit, then rent, and then you pay your bills and utilities. But I got no money and can’t get a job. These homes sometimes have lots of people in them, they just big and people cause trouble and they have rules, rules but people mess with you and you got to be there at this time and this time and that and that and there are living rooms and guys, they just want trouble, trouble.” Stuck in the open.

Prodded along by countless constraints, Chris arrived at the Easter breakfast just after we started, which is to say that liturgical time and Chris’s time can align on occasion. “I used to come to a church. Wednesdays, they pray. Sundays, they do worship. I come to those things,” he said without my asking. His explanation: “I get a place to stay, I don’t have to think too much.” His life just didn’t have space for that stuff now.

He filled a paper plate with casseroles, and he covered it with another. “Maybe I eat this tonight or save it for tomorrow. I eat it tonight because I eat before bedtime and I sleep good.”

We sat in silence, then he shook his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t got nothing else to talk about right now.” He hunched forward as he threw the garbage bag full of his things on his back. Nowhere else to be, but somewhere else to go. “I don’t have nothing else to say.” Tired of my questions. “But pray for me because I think about too much.”

The last German officer turned himself in on January 28, 1945. What was the best he could hope for, really?

“I’ll pray you are able to get peace.”

“Yes. That’s it. That’s it. Peace.”

He moved along, hoping for the freedom of stillness.