(This series of articles is about “Home,” however you define it. . . It’s where the heart is. . . It’s where our stories begin. It’s where we belong.)
Wanda, her real name is Shelby, and her man, Dog, he claims he can’t remember the name his Mamma gave him, pushed their neatly packed shopping carts down a dark, industrial alley, a place where big consumer goods are counted and examined and loaded on to semitrucks bound for places, some of which the two would recognize and may have visited in their youth or on vacation with a former spouse or child. As they proceeded, with a bit of apprehension and a bit more of the giddiness of possibility that cheap brandy mixed with a heavily caffeinated energy drink can bring. The alley opened abruptly into a well-lit concrete bowl or turn basin, the trucks all gone, the loading dock doors locked and gently rattling in the wind.
Wanda saw them first, letting loose with her unique celebratory expression of surprise or glee, which was a kind of surreal combination of a cackle, a giggle and a moan, then repeating louder each time, “Yah Dog, yah Dog, yah Dog, look Dog!”
Sitting architectonically perfect under a brilliant mercury vapor light, like a Bauhaus Invention at center ring, was a stack of cardboard boxes that had held large refrigerators.
“My god Dog, look at the rooms, look at all the rooms!” she said. Dog rolled his cart down close to the boxes. He kicked a couple and punched a couple more. He opened one up and crawled inside, “By God Wanda, we’ve got us the makin’s of a damn bungalow! Sure do!” he said.
It took them all night to get five of the boxes back to the wooded area next to the freeway. Dog rested for an hour or so then walked to the twentyfour- hour drugstore and bought a pint of brandy and two rolls of duct tape. He sat up against the eastern wall of the building, the morning sun warming his cramping muscles, sipping the brandy and counting the last of their cash. He was sure that there was enough to get some cheap house paint and a couple of meals until they could get some more. He checked his pocket to make sure his folding knife was there. He would need it later.
Wanda sat in one of the boxes, heating water for coffee in a cracked, four cup Mr. Coffee carafe over a can of Sterno, imagining how they would lay the place out. She remembered that either she or Dog had some clear plastic sheeting in their cart, enough to make some windows. She imagined how she would draw in curtains and pictures on the walls with the crayons Dog had found for her last Christmas time. She wanted blue house paint. Her Grandmother’s house was a Dutch Blue. She remembers her grandmother proudly telling her that it was “Dutch Blue, not sky blue, no Shel, it is Dutch Blue” … from “A Blue House” By Franklin Cincinnatus (Kevin Tully is an artist, gallerist, woodworker, and writer. He has been a golf columnist and an allaround agitator. Kevin has a figment of his imagination, Franklin Cincinnatus, who dictates short stories ostensibly representing larger bodies of work. Kevin writes them down. kevin@asmithgallery. com )
