Home Free

by Dan Wakefield

  “I’m basically lethargic,” she explained, “but I like speed. I mean as in amphetamines, as well as going fast on the highway. Truck drivers take it to stay awake on long hauls, and that would give me a justification. I wouldn’t just be taking it for pleasure, but to help me in my career. Also, since I’m basically lethargic anyway, speed doesn’t really get me all nervous, it just sort of brings me up to normal. So I’d drive well with it. In fact I do. But I mean on the job, on long-distance driving.”

  Gene, having finished a comparatively modest breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon, ordered another coffee. He wanted to prolong it, being there with Lizzie, listening to her plans for a future career in long-distance trucking. No one had said anything about what would happen when breakfast was over. Maybe she would drive him back to town in her pickup, drop him off, and wave good-bye.

  “Where are you going?” she asked. “I mean from here?”

  He wanted to say his plans had changed he wasn’t going anywhere he wanted to move right in to her old-fashioned room. But he didn’t want to scare her off.

  “California,” he said. “L.A.”

  “When do you have to be there?”

  He thought a minute and laughed.

  “I don’t,” he said. “In fact I don’t have to be anywhere.”

  It was true, and the thought gave him kind of a floating feeling, a little scary, like he might just go up in the air like a balloon without a string, drift higher, and disappear.

  With the same sort of blind impulse that last night had made him put his head in her lap he blurted out, “Lizzie, I like it here. A lot. I’d like to stay longer.”

  She nodded, slowly. There was a kind of gravity about her that showed through her youth.

  “I know a place,” she said, “you could stay awhile.”

  He hoped she meant her room, that would be fine.

  No. She was thinking of a farmhouse out in West Branch some graduate student friends of hers had rented for the year. But the woman had run off to Canada and the husband had left to search for her.

  “All over Canada?” Gene asked.

  “Mainly the Northwest,” she said. “She talked about Vancouver a lot.”

  “Well, that narrows it down.”

  Still, there was no way to know when or if both of them would be back. The guy had put Lizzie in charge of the house, which just meant checking it out and feeding the cat. There wasn’t any reason why Gene couldn’t stay there as long as they were gone. Maybe even after. Maybe the husband would need a roommate if he came back alone.

  “What’s it like?” he asked. “The farmhouse?”

  She thought.

  “It’s the kind of place Bonnie and Clyde would have liked to hole up in after a job.”

  Exactly.

  It was on a small road off Interstate 80 about fifteen miles from town. Battered gray frame with a peaked roof, a front porch with a swing suspended from rusty chains. The whole house looked tilting, but in opposing directions, so its angles seemed to be in lazy contradiction. It perched on a small hill, so from the road in front it had a kind of stark pride about it, set alone against the sky. Gene was in love with it even before he saw the inside, the iron wood stove in the kitchen or the pedal organ in the living room with a bench that opened up to a treasure trove of hymnals and songbooks and old-time sheet music.

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  She smiled, nodding, and said, “It’s special somehow.”

  Then the grave look came over her and she sat down. She got out a pouch and some papers and slowly, exactingly, rolled a joint. She lit it, had her hit, and passed it to Gene. For some time they sat not saying anything, smoking and passing the joint back and forth.

  “You can live here,” she finally said, “but I can’t move in with you.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  He hadn’t really thought of what was happening specifically, he was just going with it, staying with Lizzie.

  “I have to have my room in town,” she said.

  “Because of the university?”

  “Because of a guy.”

  “In town?”

  “No. He’s not in town.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I can’t tell you. See, the thing is, he has to hide out right now. There are people looking for him.”

  “People?”

  “The FBI.”

  “Did he really do something?”

  “Lots. About the war. You know. To stop it.”

  “Sure.”

  Gene was glad the guy wasn’t some kind of thug.

  “There’ll be a time when I can go to him, and when he tells me I’ll go but in the meantime he’s alive and I’m alive and we do what we feel like, with who we feel like, and there’s other guys in town I like, but that’s different than moving in with somebody, really living with them. That would sort of—”

  “Change things. Yes. I see.”

  He did see. It was a boundary she had to observe, a pact she had to keep with the guy hiding out. The guy she loves. No. Gene decided he would think of him as “the guy hiding out” instead of “the guy she loves.”

  “If you stay here,” she said, “I could come out and spend the night, but not all the time. I’d come when I could, but I couldn’t make a schedule. I guess you’d mainly have to trust me.”

  He felt dizzy with the grass and the revelations, him and the house and the guy hiding out. This time yesterday he was on his way to Los Angeles. Now he was making up his mind about staying in a house where the people who lived might return anytime and he’d have to leave, in order to be near a girl he just met who was waiting to hear from a guy hiding out from the FBI and would go to him when he said to come.

  Suddenly Gene laughed.

  “What?” Lizzie asked.

  “It’s time I put down roots,” he said. “I’ll stay.”

  Her grave look left and she smiled, big.

  “Besides,” he said, serious, “I trust you.”

  She nodded.

  “It’s hard to explain,” Gene said.

  Barnes said he understood.

  They were having a beer in a booth at Donnelly’s.

  “All I know is, right now it feels good,” Gene said. “It might be over tomorrow or next week or a couple of months, but in the meantime, if it’s good, why not?”

  “Sure. Sounds like good medicine.”

  “It kind of takes a lot of the bad taste out of me, from everything back to breaking with Lou.”

  Barnes said he didn’t mind driving on the rest of the way to L. A. by himself, he’d look for Gene sooner or later. He gave him the phone and address of the producer who’d know where he was, and a check so Gene would have some bread to tide him over, he could pay him back when he got there and landed a job. He insisted. Gene said a couple hundred would be swell. Barnes made it three.

  He ordered another round.

  “This is the one for the road,” he said.

  Gene raised his glass.

  “Go west, old man,” he said. “Be well.”

  The house, worn by time and weather, well used, useful, personal, rumpled, safe seeming, surrounded by brown fields and guarding trees, going gold now, red, orange, falling, fall. Fall. October. Fires and fog.

  Lizzie, bumping up in the beat blue pickup, work boots and corduroy, chestnut hair swinging thick, gravity and grace, then everything shed, warm and milk white and holding, held, instinctive, right, in bed.

  The house and Lizzie.

  His life.

  He’d walked into it like walking up the aisle of a movie and melting into the screen and becoming a part of the picture, the story, finding out what happened as you went along, knowing from the beginning how it would end but not when. Then he’d be standing on the stage feeling silly and strange with the screen dark and the houselights on. Bright. He’d be blinking, trying to find his way out. In the meantime this was his life.

  House.

  Her.

  Somet
imes they just stayed in, spending long times in bed. Sometimes they got high and played Chinese checkers with an old set Gene had found stuck behind the organ. Sometimes they sat on the organ bench while Lizzie picked out hymns with one finger and they bellowed out “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” “Rock of Ages,” “Abide With Me.” Sometimes Gene cooked, most always stews. Nothing fancy would do. Not the time or place or person. This was stew country, stew weather, and Lizzie a stew lover, hearty, fresh, full.

  She took him to parties, nothing like the one he had seen the remains of at Gordo’s place. Gentler.

  A turkey dinner one Sunday afternoon in town, a dozen some people sitting on the bare board floor, white angles of sun slanted in. Richie and Marian lived there, he used to be in The Writers Workshop but started his own custom furniture business, she designed and he carpentered and they had two kids, twin towheads, playing through the party. Marian did the turkey; other people brought things to go with it: Brussels sprouts, glazed carrots, mashed potatoes and gravy, mince and apple pies. “This is great,” Gene said to Marian. “What’s the occasion?” “None,” she smiled. “I think they’re the best, don’t you?” He agreed, shifting along the floor till he got himself right in a shaft of sun. Warm. They all were drinking a sweetish wine called Wild Irish Rose. Fine. Just fine.

  They were playing Carole King music, warm, friendly things like “Song of Long Ago” and “You’ve Got a Friend,” and then someone put on a new Carly Simon album, and its title song seemed like a personal message to Gene. It was all about how we can’t know what’s coming, we ought to enjoy things now, while we’re together, because—and she belted the line, making him shiver, thrilling to it:

  These are the good old days.

  Yeh. Now. This moment. He looked at Lizzie, her head back, her mouth slightly open, smiling, her hair lit in the late sun. He wished he could have that moment, keep it, save it, hold it. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying.

  Sometimes they watched TV on the big color set in the farmhouse, and always found funny stuff, no matter what was showing. Maybe because they were high. Who knew? Or cared? They watched the old black-and-white movie of The Roaring Twenties with James Cagney, guys machine-gunning one another all over the place, and there was one part where Jimmy and some of his Prohibition henchmen are pouring big jugs of alcohol into a bathtub. Lizzie tapped Gene’s arm for attention.

  “Hence the term ‘bathtub gin,’” she said.

  “Hence,” said Gene.

  It got them giggling, and they kind of adopted the word as their own, working it into the conversation whenever they could.

  “Hence.”

  Sometimes when Lizzie stayed overnight Gene would ride into town with her the next morning. He’d perk some coffee for them to warm up with and then they’d have one of those knockout truck-stop breakfasts Lizzie loved so much and then she would drop him off on Main Street. He’d stand at the corner across from the Iowa National Bank till he caught the time and temperature, blinked in dull gold bulbs that formed the numbers, and then he set off on his ramble, feeling he had somehow oriented himself, that knowing the time and temperature showed he had his shit together, though it was rare that on these occasions he had any notion of what day of the week or date of the month it was, but what the fuck, you couldn’t be on top of everything. Besides, as the temperature started getting down in the twenties he figured it must be about November.

  The University of Iowa was there, of course, but Gene had seen enough of campuses to last him a lifetime, what he dug was the town itself. Of course, it was called Iowa City but to Gene it was a town, that was what he liked about it, the feeling it was small, slow, easygoing. It reminded him of those towns “the boys” came home to in World War II movies. There were old-fashioned hardware and dime stores with wooden floors, bars with billiard tables, diners that served homemade chili, the Epstein Brothers’ homey bookstores where you could browse all day without being hassled. Most of the downtown buildings were small, two and three stories, and after a couple of blocks were the white frame houses with big front porches, an occasional vacant lot, the streets wide, the trees old. Sometimes you’d come upon something that would jerk you back to the sense of the pressurized present, like the anger-dripping red-lettered sign painted on a big board fence that said “Smash Agri-Business Power!” But at least it had the “Agri” in it that kind of gave it an Iowa flavor. He doubted if they’d heard about “Agri-Business Power” in Boston. Maybe Lou had. Oh, well.

  Anytime he got depressed he headed straight for Donnelly’s. There were lots of good bars in town but Donnelly’s was the oldest and to Gene’s mind the best. It was dark, with wooden booths, a billiard table at the back, a long mirror that went the whole length behind the bar, like the ones in movie Western saloons, and, to top everything off, a big jar of liquid with some mysterious greenish-yellow objects floating in it that Gene discovered were turkey gizzards. For a quarter you could get a turkey gizzard to munch with your beer! No fancy-pants cocktail dainties in this place. Turkey gizzards. There weren’t many fancy cocktails ordered either, people came to Donnelly’s for serious drinking, mostly beer or shots.

  One day in Donnelly’s Gene was telling the bartender how much he dug the place, the bar and the town both, and he learned to his amazement and outrage that it wouldn’t be that way long. Urban renewal was coming. They would even tear down Donnelly’s. Tear it down! Shit, Gene thought it should be a national monument, a fuckin historic site. But it wouldn’t. It would just be a memory. Instead of old wood there’d be plastic here, like anywhere. Gene figured if they could do it way out here in the middle of the country then finally there wouldn’t be any towns left at all, just one big national strip of fast-food, quick-stop, Plexiglas and plastic, an Orange Julius on one end, a Taco Belle on the other, so you would know which coast it was. Along the way there’d be signs to tell you where the towns used to be.

  He was glad there was still a Donnelly’s to go to the day he hitched into town and happened to look at the pile of newspapers in the drugstore. He hadn’t been buying or reading papers since he went to Maine, he figured it eliminated a lot of junk from the general accumulation in his head, but he sometimes glanced at a headline to see if anything big was up like the war or the world ending, something that made any difference. On this particular day when he looked down at a paper from Des Moines what caught his eye was not a headline but a picture of Janis Joplin. He figured maybe she was coming to give a concert somewhere around there so he picked up the paper to find the details. Maybe Lizzie would like to go. But the picture was not because of a concert. It was because Janis Joplin was dead. In a motel room in Los Angeles. Of an overdose.

  He went to Donnelly’s and drank straight whiskey at the bar. He felt like someone he knew had died. She’d been scary, yeh, but real, and special. You always heard about this or that writer or politician “speaking for” some group of people or other. That’s what Gene thought Janis had done, besides make real good music. She spoke for a lot of people—not just young people or hip people or hippie people. She spoke for the people who hurt bad.

  Even in a town like Iowa City you could find bad news. After finding out about Janis Joplin dying, Gene stayed out at the farm for a while. He went for long walks, sometimes to a creek where he’d “dry-fish,” just sit there and concentrate the way he’d do if he had a pole and line and bait. Sometimes he watched the weather. The fog was like a whole other element, the way it came so quick, rolling up over the hills and around the house, spreading across the roads so thick that cars would have to pull over to the side, waiting for it to pass. Gene chopped wood for the iron stove in the kitchen, played records, read books—not the grad students’ books, but the ones that must belong to the farmers who owned the place—Mutiny on the Bounty, Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, The Prisoner of Zenda. It wasn’t lonely because he knew Lizzie would be back. He didn’t mind waiting. He trusted her. She came.

  One night she took him to a chili dinner at Mull
igan’s house. Mulligan was this big red-bearded poet who lived in a farmhouse a few miles from Gene’s. He reminded Gene more of a ballplayer than a poet, one who’d make a good high-school coach. His teams wouldn’t win a lot but the kids would all dig him. As well as being a poet he was a chili freak, and he had asked a bunch of people over for a batch of his favorite, which he said was a recipe he’d created from the best of Iowa and Mexican chili methods and ingredients.

  He must have leaned heavy on the Mexican. The chili was so hot that only Mulligan could eat it. The rest of the room looked like a Red Cross station for people who’d just escaped a burning building and were suffering from smoke inhalation. They were coughing and wheezing, calling for water, tears rolling down their cheeks. Gene had taken one big bite and it nearly did him in. Mulligan was enjoying the chili so much he didn’t notice for a moment, but then he looked around the room and said, “Oh, shit. I guess I did it again.”

  Mulligan’s wife got up and went to the kitchen. She was tall, slim, with black hair and dark, lively eyes that seemed as if they could penetrate walls. Gene thought her incredibly beautiful, like some kind of Navajo princess or something, and he found it hard to get used to matching her up with the name Mulligan called her by. Her real name was Melanie but he called her Mama. She was, of course, they had two kids.

  When she came out of the kitchen she was carrying a big tray with cold chicken and potato salad. She was very quiet and solemn-looking but every once in a while the corners of her straight thin mouth would start wriggling in betrayal of some inner hilarity as they did now when she put down the food and said, “I made it just in case.”

  Mulligan loved to make chili but he couldn’t help making it so hot that no one but him could eat it.

  No one minded. Mama’s dinner was swell, and Mulligan consumed most of the other chili, then leaned back and played from the fifties jazz records he collected, guys like Getz and Desmond and Monk and everyone listened and smoked some gentle grass.