Dan Wakefield - Home Free

In her room, she closed the door, drew a small bolt, lit a candle.

The room was old-fashioned. It had a big high brass bed with blankets and a quilt on it; old, tinted photographs in gilded frames, a faded print of a country landscape. Gene was glad it was that way. He was glad there weren’t any posters of Jefferson Airplane or Jimi Hendrix, no signs with peace slogans or Viet Cong flags. This was another, quieter time and place, with candlelight. With Lizzie. She took off her robe with no drama nor shame. Simply. She was milky white all over as she went to him, her face calm and thoughtful.

What she and Gene did in the high bed was something he realized he hadn’t done for a long time. He had fucked and sucked and humped and screwed, been blown and frenched and nibbled and bit, in old and new and unknown positions. But that night he and Lizzie did something different together than all those things.

What they did was, they made love.

Lizzie thought truck stops were the best places to eat, and she took Gene to one of her favorites for breakfast. Over her meal of waffles, sausage, milk, a piece of apple pie with ice cream, and a cup of coffee, Lizzie swore her passion for trucks was not just because of the wonderful food you got at the truck stops. She drove a beat-up old blue Ford pickup that was her proudest possession, and she said quite seriously after she got her B.A. she planned to go to truck-driving school.

“Do they have them?” Gene asked.

“Of course. It’s something you have to learn, like a science. Well maybe it’s not exactly a science, but a skill anyway.”

Her major was American Lit and she loved to read it but she didn’t want to write it or teach it so she couldn’t make a living with it and therefore needed a trade. So why not something you love? Which in her case was trucks. She had always loved trucks, ever since as a kid she preferred toy trucks to dolls. Also, she felt she had the right personality for a long-distance truck driver.

“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 any where.”

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.”