Dan Wakefield - Home Free

“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. Com partments 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.