Home Free

by Dan Wakefield

  “Can it be a color of sox?” asked Sissy. “I mean like the Red Sox or White Sox?”

  “How about the Bangor Blue Sox?” Lou said. “It’ll be so cold, even if they don’t have sox their legs will be blue.”

  She poked Gene under the table before he could do it to her.

  “We haven’t yet finalized the standard uniform,” Flash said, “so I don’t know if sox will be a prominent part of the gear.”

  “Blazers,” said Plumley.

  “I doubt the teams will wear blazers, Stan,” Flash said, “except perhaps for road trips. I like to see a club in matching slacks and blazers, carrying their equipment bags, as they debark from plane or bus.”

  “Not wear em!” Plumley shouted. “Call em that!”

  Flash looked momentarily puzzled but Sue clapped her hands and said, “Of course! The Bangor Blazers!”

  “Oh, yeh, terrific,” Flash said.

  Sissy and Sue each gave Stan a little kiss on the cheek. He grinned, high on rum and attention.

  “To the Bangor Blazers!” Flash shouted, raising his glass.

  They all drank.

  Drunk, back home, Gene was giggling and shaking his head.

  “Fuckin Flash,” he said. “Fuckin curling. Crazy. Lose all his bread again. Always gotta try some impossible goddam business.”

  “Not so bad,” Lou said. “Better’n not ever tryin. Least he tries. Some people don’ even try.”

  “You talkin about me?”

  “Nobody. Talkin bout nothin.”

  Through his drunken haze Gene knew it was best to shut up and go to bed.

  Barnes’s big news brought everyone together.

  An actual Hollywood movie producer with credits and credentials was going to make Barnes’s mystery a movie. Not the new one, The Crimson Corpse (they had changed the title), but good old Death of a Deb.

  Fuckin Barnes. Wearing a pair of those gold prism glasses that you get in head shops. His eyes looked jumpy and small behind them, perverted pinballs. But below, his jaw was set in a solid grin, a jagged curved jack-o’-lantern.

  “Rich!” said Nell, popping her pink bubble. “Tell em, man.”

  Barnes said the deal was a hundred grand. Ten grand for a year’s option, ninety more if the movie got made.

  Squeals, whistles, shouts.

  Somehow everyone, Barnes included, thought of “his movie money” as the hundred grand he might get instead of the ten he was sure to get.

  They all had their own idea about how he should spend it.

  “A nightclub,” Gene said. “How about starting a nightclub? Barnes’s Blue Heaven, man. You could sit in a corner chain-smoking, doin a Bogart number.”

  Thomas suggested a scientific approach to the dog tracks.

  Nell was for a bank. Putting the money there.

  Flash groaned.

  “No vision,” he said. “None of you. Don’t you know your Prophets? ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’”

  “Yeh,” said Barnes, “but look what happens when there’s too much.”

  “If you are making snide reference to the North American Curling League,” Flash said, “it is still a viable entity with enormous growth potential.”

  There were groans and hisses.

  Nell started more brandy around, Thomas was a regular joint-rolling assembly line. It seemed like money, even the thought of it, got everyone high and then wanting to get higher. Maybe that’s how it was when you had your bull markets.

  Lou said if she had the bread she’d buy land.

  “Land,” said Barnes. “Yeh, I like it. I mean I like the idea of buying it, owning it. Something real. You can use it, walk around on it. Land. Sure. But what the hell would I do with it then? After I walked around on it?”

  “Besides,” Nell said, “Barnes hates to walk. If it’s more than a block he takes a cab.”

  “He could buy his own cab to have on the land,” said Thomas, “so he wouldn’t have to walk.”

  “Really,” Barnes said. “What would I do with land?”

  “Build a house on it,” Lou said. “Or buy some land with one on it already.”

  “But I’d end up not really living in it,” Barnes said. “I’d say I would, and I’d mean to, but after a week or so I’d get bored and want to go back to the city. Some city or other. See. I really don’t think I could live anywhere.”

  “None of us live anywhere,” Gene said. “Not really. Not like people used to do.”

  “But Barnes wouldn’t have to be there all the time,” Lou said, “like living there permanent. When he got tired of living in the house he could loan it out to friends. There’s always people looking for a place to be for a while. Then later on Barnes could come back to it, maybe he’d want to stay there awhile with some other people there, too.”

  “Ugh,” Thomas snorted, “it’s getting to sound like another one of those hippie communes. Everyone on downers and baking bread and babies crawling around in the cow dung. I’ve been to em. And then the people all end up getting pissed at each other anyway.”

  “No, not a commune,” Lou said. “That’s where the people go planning to stay there and so pretty soon they all feel stuck. Like being trapped. This kind of thing I’m talking about would be a place where anyone could go when they want and leave when they want. Including Barnes. He wouldn’t be stuck there, but it would give him a base.”

  “Give him a place,” said Gene.

  “Like home,” Lou said.

  Barnes leaned forward, intent.

  “Yeh,” he said. “I’d call it that.”

  “Call what that?” Thomas asked.

  “The house and land he’s going to buy,” said Lou, warming to the idea, feeling it begin to catch and move around the room with the smoke and brandy, people imperceptibly lifting with it.

  Barnes sprang out of his chair and then began to move, slowly, like he was stalking something.

  “I’d call the place ‘Home,’” he said, “because nobody has one anymore. At least none of us, people like us. I mean, we all have our little apartments—or big ones, it doesn’t matter what size they are, it’s all the same. Compartments they are actually, like on a train. They might as well be on a train. They’re just places where we put our books and clothes and records and our grown-up toys and our bodies for a while. A place to lie down. We’re all in these little cubicles alone or maybe with someone else—a roommate or lover—but even with two or even three or four it’s still the same principle—we move on and find other compartments in other cities, like switching trains, but still moving all the time, going back and forth and never anyplace where we can fall back to and say, ‘Now I’m Home.’ And feel it’s true.”

  Barnes took off his prism glasses and didn’t look demented anymore, just intent. The room was quiet, caught up in it.

  “Home,” Gene said softly. “I hadn’t thought about it for a while.”

  “Nobody has,” said Flash.

  “Hey!” Nell said. “It wouldn’t just have to be for us, either. People we meet who need to be Home for a while. And don’t have one.”

  “You can’t get all of Appalachia up there,” Thomas said, “or all the orphans in Massachusetts.”

  “No, man,” Nell said, “just a few people, that we’d meet anyway, in our lives, and like them.”

  “Mmmmm,” Barnes purred, nodding, rocking gently back and forth, moving into it, the dream, saying, “You go there when you want to go there, that’s why it’s Home. But no one cries when you leave, no one gets pissed and calls you a black-sheep bastard.”

  “Sheep,” Lou said. “Let’s have a flock. At Home.”

  It seemed like it existed now.

  “Possibly,” Barnes said, “but first we got to have a St. Bernard. With a flask of brandy around its neck. And the flask will say ‘Home’ on it.”

  “How about nobody’s name on the mailbox,” Flash said. “It could just say ‘Home.’ If a person happened to be in a position of wishing to avoid
collection agencies, he could hide out at ‘Home’ and no one could find him. Some dude comes sniffin around, you point to the mailbox and tell him that’s you. Mr. Home. Hell, there’s something to this thing.”

  “You got it,” Barnes said, granting the wish. “The mailbox will just say ‘Home.’”

  “And anytime we’re there,” said Gene, “any of us, we’ll all be ‘Home.’ Our name. The Home family.”

  “At the family Home,” said Lou.

  “Beautiful,” Barnes said.

  Shouts, whistles, people putting on records, making a fire, rolling more joints, celebrating the founding of Home.

  Gene took a hit of the joint he forgot he was holding and passed it to Lou.

  He really was getting into this thing, in his head. Home. In a way they really were a family, that’s how families happened now, friends who got together not because they were born under the same roof out of the same people but because they wanted to be under the same roof with the people they liked to be with. Not all the time, Lou was right, everyone would end up hating it then and each other, but knowing you had it, a place, go to on weekends, holidays, whole summers. Maybe if it really happened he could work it so that was his job, running the place, sort of like the manager. Hell, people got degrees in hotel management, it must be an all right thing to do, this would be something like that really. If Lou had a Tuesday-Thursday schedule maybe they could commute, you wouldn’t have to be on the spot all the time but just on a regular basis to keep an eye on things, keep things going. People, animals, being outdoors, fixing things. He was made for it. What was wrong with doing that for your life? Look at Thoreau. When he made his pitch to Lou he’d throw in Thoreau and the Cornell School of Hotel Management. How respectable could you get for Chrissake? He leaned back on the floor, closing his eyes, smiling.

  Later Lou bent over him and asked, “Where are you?”

  “Home,” he said.

  Barnes sent in for catalogs of land for sale and everyone feasted on them free. Houses with acres with running brooks, ocean-front footage, forests of pine, mountains with views, valleys with shady dells, trout-lined lakes, ultimate privacy, perfect seclusion. Peace for sale. Pick your own kingdom.

  The day they went looking for Home was wind-whipped and rainy, the sky sulky gray. That didn’t help. Neither did northern Maine, site of the best bargains. The land was scratchy poor, brambled, and brown. Weathered old houses leaned and pitched, dilapidated. Mongrels curled in boarded doors of deserted gas stations, paint-peeled and pump-falling. Roadsides were weighted with the molding iron architecture of automobile graveyards. Towns looked random and bleak, fields dead and barren.

  “So this is Home,” Thomas said, rasping out his laugh.

  Barnes sucked on a silver flask of brandy.

  “Hey,” said Gene, “we haven’t seen any places yet. Wait till we see the places.”

  The first place was a small house buried back in the hills on dirt roads, left by a widow who went to live with a sister in Philadelphia. The realtor couldn’t find the key but showed them the view through the windows. Dusty curtains. Fang-baring dogs let up a bloodcurdling yelp and the group automatically huddled together.

  “Bowker boys,” the realtor explained. “Live down the road. They’re no good and their dogs’re just like em. Mean as sin.”

  The next place was gutted by fire, a window-broken shell on a dismal hump of weedy ground. With ten plus acres, a bargain at forty-two-five, the man Said.

  There was also an immobile home on concrete blocks with a splendid view of a billboard advertising Mail Pouch Tobaçco.

  There was a modern, split-level, suburban-mold home with two-car garage, stuck abstractly in a hillside.

  As Thomas observed, it was not for them, it was more of a house for “regular people.”

  There was a falling-down barn with five acres a farmer was tired of trying to till anymore, complete with outhouse and chicken coop.

  There wasn’t any Home.

  “Oh, well, easy come easy go,” Thomas said as they headed back south toward Boston.

  “Shitman, we just begun,” said Gene.

  “Sure,” said Lou.

  “Wait and see, man,” Nell said to Barnes, and gave him a reassuring squeeze on the arm.

  Barnes was glum, silent.

  Rain pummeled the windshield.

  Gene and Lou were sitting around in bathrobes, drinking coffee, sharing a joint, reading the Sunday papers. It seemed like they didn’t talk as much anymore. They were doing what they intended to do, they had a much nicer place to live, and yet something always seemed a little bit off lately. Sometimes Gene wished they had stayed in the funky pad behind the Trailways station. He thought of it fondly, the spirit of the place. Or maybe it wouldn’t make a difference.

  Maybe it would help if they talked more.

  Maybe that’s why he went and told her his dream.

  “Had the damndest dream,” he said. “You know how some are so real you wake up believing them?”

  “Mmmm,” she said, idly looking at department store ads. “What was it?”

  “I dreamed we had a baby,” Gene said. “A girl. We were trying to think up a name and—”

  Lou let the page she was holding fall.

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said.

  “My dream?”

  “I don’t want to hear about having babies. We discussed that a long time ago. We agreed about that way back in Urbana.”

  “We did?”

  “You’re goddam right we did.”

  “I thought we agreed about marriage. Not doing it. That doesn’t have anything to do with having kids. People have kids all the time now without getting married.”

  “Kids! Now there’s more than one? How many do you have in mind? Cheaper by the dozen? The little old woman who lived in a shoe?”

  “I just said ‘kids’ in general. I only meant one.”

  “Then you meant one too many!”

  “Babe, it was just a dream. I was telling you a dream I had.”

  “Some dream. I can see it now. Snot and cereal.”

  “It wasn’t that way.”

  “But that’s the way it is. In real life. Not in dreams.”

  “OK, OK, sorry I mentioned it.”

  “So am I,” she said.

  She got dressed and went out for a walk.

  A few weeks after the trip to find Home the first snow fell.

  Back when summer was over and everyone had got together again they all had agreed to gather at Barnes’s place to celebrate the first snow, whenever it was. That was the time they had the great bash last year, with the magic stew and all, the first big snow, so it seemed like a good idea to do it again.

  The snow came early, and didn’t seem the same.

  Instead of just being beautiful it seemed to be causing a hassle for everyone.

  Barnes and Nell had dinner at Felicia’s in the North End, and as if it wasn’t bad enough having to stand on the stairs forty minutes to wait for a table, when they got out they couldn’t find any cabs because of the snow and had to walk back home. Barnes was grumpy, blowing his nose a lot and drinking straight bourbon to try to kill the cold he was getting. Nell was mute, not even doing her bubble gum.

  Lou had been late getting home and Gene hadn’t cooked, not knowing whether she’d want anything, so they just started drinking as soon as she showed and Gene got out a can of sardines and a discolored hunk of cheddar and some Triscuits. That was dinner. By the time they got to Barnes’s they were already sort of smashed.

  Flash came late, cursing the snow because Logan was closed and his scheduled Braniff baby would probably land in Detroit tonight instead of his bed.

  Thomas’s milk truck had skidded on the ice while he was trailing a beautiful girl and he not only busted a fender against a fireplug, he lost track of the girl. Probably never find her again, lost, gone forever, probably she was the one he’d always been looking for.

  “Where’
s the music?” Gene asked.

  “Not on,” said Barnes. “Nell?”

  She sighed, stood up, and stacked on a random bunch of records, not bothering to see what they were.

  Thomas rolled a couple of joints and started them around the room.

  “Why don’t we do something?” Barnes said.

  “About what?” asked Lou.

  “Not about anything. To have something to do.”

  “If we made a fire,” said Thomas, “we could be sitting by the fire. That’d be doing something.”

  “Only one log left,” Barnes said. “And the Sunday Times.”

  “Magi-logs,” Thomas said. “Someone could go out and buy a couple magi-logs.”

  “Who?” asked Barnes.

  “Anyone,” Thomas said.

  No one did.

  Flash took a big toke off a joint and said, “They’ll ruin everything.”

  “Who?” asked Lou.

  “Fuckin new basketball league. ABA.”

  “What’s wrong with em?” Gene asked.

  “Playin the game with a goddam beach ball.”

  “They do?”

  “Might as well. It looks like it. Goddam basketball painted red white and blue. Jazzy new uniforms, all kinda colors. Pretty soon it won’t be a sport it’ll be a fuckin circus.”

  “It’s progress,” Barnes said.

  “Progress, my ass. Won’t have athletes anymore. Have clowns. That’s what the public wants. Let em have it. To hell with tradition. Look at the hard time curling is having. You know why?”

  “People lack vision,” said Barnes.

  “Besides that. It’s a traditional sport. Centuries old. People don’t dig that now, they wanna go see some clowns throwing a beach ball around.”

  “If this was Home,” Thomas said, “the St. Bernard could come around and give us a hit from the brandy keg.”

  “There’s some in the kitchen,” Nell said.

  “That’s not the same,” Thomas said, “as having the St. Bernard bring the keg around.”

  “Well, I’m no St. Bernard,” Nell said.

  “Jesus, Nell,” Barnes said, “just cause you’re pissed at me you don’t have to take it out on everybody.”

  “OK, Mr. Good Humor Man.”

  “Hey, Barnes,” Gene said, hoping to head off him and Nell, “you looked anymore?”