Home Land: A Novel Read Free

An update is an update. The things that happen are the things that happen.”
    Forgive me, Principal Fontana, but Gary has a point. Updates are updates, and it is in this spirit, assuming you survived your evening of massive blood loss on the trash slopes of the boat basin, that I know you’ll publish mine.

The Awful Percussion of Shoes
    CATAMOUNTS, here I come.
    Perhaps a patient man would wait until his first update found its way into the Notes before submitting another, but patience has never been a virtue I could call “Pal,” or “Royko,” or “Homes.” Hey, I’m an impulsive guy, a gun-jumper, a faith-leaper. I cannot, will not, hold my horses. My horses are gorgeous things, sweat-carved, sun-snorting beasts. Look at them go! See them gallop at some equine destiny I am ill equipped to comprehend.
    It’s been ever so.
    It’s been ever so since the candy bar incident.
    Pardon? Candy bar?
    Witness me briefly through the bent lens of history. See boy me: homely, surly, nipples afire with hormonal surge. This boy’s mother buys him a candy bar. Big doings, a candy bar, in a household loyal to fruit, to kale, to sprouts and curd, to something called, apparently, bulgur. The boy guards the candy bar the whole ride home
from the mall. He hides it in his sleeve from the sun. There beside his mother in their boatish beige sedan, he awestares up at her, her beautiful nose. It’s a big, slanting, sacred thing, this nose of the woman who has given him life, sheltered him from Nor’ Easters, asteroids, the death rays and Stuka dives of his mind, the nose of the woman who has now bestowed, against all nutritional creed, the only thing he truly craves.
    “Don’t eat it right away,” she says. “Save it. I know a little trick to make it even better.”
    A trick to make a candy bar better? She’s a sorceress, his mother, a good witch. She takes perfection and perfects it.
    “We’ll put it in the freezer. Wait L., wait, and it will be worth it.”
    He loves it when she calls him L.
    Home, he bolts from the car with his candy bar under his shirt. He must shield it from the elements. It’s a fine spring day but he knows full well there are elements about, eager to drench, to blight, to melt. He runs to the kitchen and eases the candy bar into the freezer, slides it between some cellophaned soy burgers and a foil-wrapped package he knows from past reconnaissance to be a half-loaf of zucchini bread. His mother trails in after him with the grocery sacks, sees him standing sentry at the freezer door.
    “It’s going to take a while, L. Go play.”
    Go play? A mighty and delicious molecular transformation is taking place!
    “I mean it, L. Go play in the basement.”
    Go play in the basement? How far from the locus of his happiness must he trek? Okay, the basement. He treks down to the basement. Play commences with some British commando, his usual wade-in-the-river-scale-the-pylon-stab-the-Kraut commando, but when he gets the rubber knife in his mouth and starts up his father’s stepladder, the blade, he swears, tastes of nougat.
    He does Gettysburg instead, dons his Union cap, wipes out the Army of Northern Virginia with his plastic musket from the hobby shop. Those dead racist bastards pile up in some dry valley of his
mind. The slaves make songs for him, a vaporish version of his father beams. Still, he notes, his musket is much the color of milk chocolate. Is Witch-Mommy’s alchemy working? Go play, Goddamnit. He wills himself back to slaughter, Omaha Beach, Khe Sanh, spits clips at Victor Charlie until his musket, now by dint of an alternate grip an M-16, jams. Just fucking typical. The Cong burst out of the broom closet, AKs blazing. He hurls himself at the wood-paneled wall. Drool for blood slides down his chin.
    “I’m hit, I’m hit,” he says. “Medic!”
    It’s a bitch, but it’s not Charlie’s fault. He had no right to be in Charlie’s basement.
    The last thing he sees before he dies—and for a while