Dan Wakefield - Home Free

It did seem kind of funny when you thought about it, though, not that Barnes couldn’t find his land but that a guy like him had even looked for it. Suddenly it seemed like that’s what everyone wanted, land, especially younger people like Jerry and Monica. It seemed like everyone suddenly discovered we were running out of it and wanted to get their own little piece before none was left, get their own parcel and put their name on a stick and plant it in the ground and then dig a hole you could hide in or put up a house you could live in or just stand there on it, knowing it was yours, your land, you were making your stand.

Monica offered to scramble Gene some eggs for breakfast but he thanked her no and had a glass of milk and said he sure did appreciate the hospitality and now that he’d had his breakfast if nobody minded he’d just get a can of beer and go back to the hammock.

Nobody bothered him till late in the day when Nell brought him a mug of some kind of soup and said he had to eat it.

He winced.

“C’mon, buddy, I can’t.”

“You gotta ,” Nell said in a fake-urgent whisper, her eyes mischievous. “Monica made it for ya. It’s got all kinds of herbs and all. You know, like some kind of hippie soup. It’s real special.”

Gene even grinned, and drank the stuff down. It tasted like moldy figs. Maybe it was.

Everyone was gone awhile and then they all came back and said Gene had to join them for a feast. They had a tub of steamers and a couple dozen ears of corn and a couple gallon jugs of Cribari rosé. Gene ate an ear of corn and five or six steamers in order to satisfy Nell and then settled down with a nice big kitchen glass full of rosé.

Other people came. A couple cute chicks who ran a natural food store. Two jock-looking guys wearing those sweat shirts that say “Property of—” some-fucking-thing-or-other, and a small, pretty girl with bangs they called Pal. The two guys called each other Coach. Maybe they were. Coaches.

The coaches brought some really dynamite grass that even got Barnes high and started Gene giggling in spite of his condition.

Nell put an arm around his shoulder, smiling at seeing him smile, and said, “Hi, man.”

“You’re not kiddin, kid.”

“About what?”

“Being high. Int that what you said? High?”

“Like ‘hello,’ I meant.”

“Oh, that kind,” Gene said and giggled again.

Barnes tilted toward them, grinning.

“What’s goin on?” he said.

“Hello,” said Gene. “Get it?”

“He means ‘High,’” said Nell.

“Who isn’t?” said Barnes, slumping to a seat on the floor.

One of the coaches had rolled another fat joint of the dynamite stuff—it looked like a sloppy white cigar—and it was going around.

“Here come de sun,” said Gene.

They got stoned so good that Barnes said what a crime it was everyone couldn’t get any damn drug they wanted right from the drugstore that’s what a drugstore should be a store for drugs, like it used to be. He said in the good old days a hunnerd years ago that’s the way it was, they had the coke in Coca-Cola and the cough syrups were loaded with all kinds of goodies, you could just go down to your friendly neighborhood drugstore and get you something to get you high.

Gene said maybe there still was dope in stuff you bought at the drugstore, stuff you never thought about because it just looked ordinary.

They raided the bathroom medicine cabinet and soon were spraying gums with some kind of throat spray they swore made you numb like coke and trying to snort Ben Gay, passing it around to all the others recommending it highly, by now they were all so high anyway it was hard to tell if anything else got em up even more but it was easy to think so and everyone was up for the scenic moonlight sail that Jerry suggested but when they all piled in his rowboat it tipped and spilled them out but luckily though all the people were high the tide was low so there were no fatalities. Just wet clothes, sore backs, bruised elbows and knees, heads beginning to swell and stomachs turned with all that had been inhaled and eaten and drunk and snorted, and somebody’s lungs hooting at the moon in the time he was convinced of being a coyote. Back in the house the bodies draped out to dry themselves and after a few gulps and random giggles the mood turned quiet, contemplative, solemn, and the bigger of the two coaches, the one who rolled the joints, said “Sleep,” and one by one without more talk, they laid down their heads and did.

Waking, it looked like a battlefield. This side must have lost. Bodies pretzel-bent haphazardly overlapping here and there not in lust just left there. A groan or sigh or snore or some odd move of stretching arm, leg shifting, showed they all weren’t dead. Maybe just wounded. Or gassed. Some bodies gather and rise, squinting and blinking, sigh, disappear.

Somehow Jerry and Monica got it together to make it up the beach and get the concession going, and likewise the natural food store chicks in their own enterprise. Coach Billy, the big, sandy-haired coach with the bull neck and the pale blue eyes who seemed to be the head coach of the coach bunch got to his feet and then to the kitchen, popped a can of Bud, let out a cavernous belch, rubbed his iron potbelly, stared down at the fallen troops, and said, in so many words, to follow me, and stirring, straggling, stumbling, stunned, they did.

Stopped in town to pick up a couple of cases of Carlings, a couple of loaves of Wonder bread and two family-size jars of Skippy Peanut Butter in case anyone was up for lunch. Coach Billy insisted it was all on him, everything they ate or drank or smoked or snorted or chewed at The Broken Arms was on the house.

The house they called The Broken Arms was where Coach Billy, Coach Burt, and Pal all lived.

It was a bumpy ride back into scratchy scrubland mostly on an unpaved unmarked muddied and pitted and potholed poor excuse for a road. Visitors guaranteed to be shaken well on the journey. And again at first sight of the house.

Out of thick brush a clearing comes suddenly, blank, dusty, nothing growing, an emptiness like a hole in a picture and then set into it onto it a stark, stiff, naked frame box of a two-story house once white but colorless now, washed out, corroded, bleached, blanched, roof in places scalped of shingles and sagged in the center like an overridden mule, two of six square windows blinded by boards, the others open blank, a front porch with top tilted to one side favoring a lame pillar bolstered by unpainted two-by-fours, old-fashioned glider on it with rusty coils sticking down through stuffing, and littered around the blunt building a dead car on wheel-less rims, a rusted jack, deflated beach ball, playground swing, big red Harley-Davidson in running order and plumed with appropriate squirrel’s tail, a bicycle not in running order stripped of all but a crippled frame, a metal beer keg, badminton net, two croquet clubs, old-fashioned round-topped refrigerator without a door. And out of some or all of this, skittering in and around it raising dust and yips comes a scraggy wirehaired terrier who also belongs here. They called him Coach.

“Hey,” said Barnes, sensing he should say some salutary statement in behalf of his group, new visitors wanting to be appreciative, polite, “Hey,” he said again before coming up with: “This is really something.”

“We looked and looked,” Pal said, pleased, “and finally found a place that had the two things Coach Billy really wanted.”

“What?” asked Barnes, his mind boggling in the effort to imagine.

“Privacy and a front porch.”

The Broken Arms had one kind of privacy but not another. It was sealed off from the world outside, but inside its sagging walls you could hear any word or sound made in any given room in it from any other given room. There were five tiny rooms and a bathroom upstairs, and down, one big one and the kitchen. Layers of different wallpaper peeling and molting gave the interior a scrambled effect, dim stripes and soiled flowers, patterns of stars and sailing ships, repeated, running into one another. Pillows were living room furniture, all shapes and colors and sizes so you could stack them or strew them, sit or lie on them, or, if the mood hit, throw and fight with them. After an afternoon of playing touch they came in and flopped on the pillows and then Coach Burt teased Pal about missing a sure touchdown pass cause of trying to catch like a girl and she hit the target of his head from across the room with a small green beanbag of a pillow and knocked off his long-billed baseball cap and the whole room exploded with pillows, everyone hurling and ducking and pouncing and then they rained back down, subsided, sighs and huffings, and Pal said she’d make a run into town for some clams and there’d be spaghetti with clam sauce if anyone wanted and everyone did, Barnes going with her and bringing back wine, a case of Cribari rosé that by now he’d got used to, and after the feast they smoked and everyone stayed: sapped, zapped, crapped out on the pillows.