Free Raucous by Ben Paul Dunn Page B

before he recognized the place.  He passed young women on horseback, three cars driving slow and sounding their horns on blind turns.  The hedge row arced over, not quite a tunnel, but one hell of a maze for the uninitiated.  Drizzle hit his windscreen making it harder for him to associate places with his memory bank.  It had been a lifetime since he had been here, and then only once.  He passed the dirt track, regarding it as just another entrance to a field.  He drove on for five minutes but something, he couldn’t explain what, a tree, the gate, he didn’t know, but he turned back and pulled up into the small space off the road. 
    The rain was coming down harder, puddles were forming and the earth was quickly developing into a soft sludge.  He hadn’t brought boots, he was wearing Addidas trainers that had been fashionable when he was a kid and seemed to have retained some type of retro cool.  Gazelles that would be ruined by the walk he was about to take.
    He climbed over the gate before he realized the chain was loose.  The gate swayed open with his weight on top and Raucous smiled.  Always check, he told himself. 
    Maybe he was wrong, he thought.  Maybe the place would be gone.  But he wasn’t coming for what lay within, that would have been stripped of anything worthwhile and the junk they stole left to corrode.  He followed the path, looking down seeing neither tyre tracks nor footprints.  Maybe the abandoned farm has stayed abandoned. But the fields looked kept, long green grass, or some type of crop was growing in uniform height with strips of turned earth visible between the rows.  The seeds had been laid by machine.  He followed the edge of the field on a path that was wide enough for a small tractor.  Brown earth shaded from the rain by a long line of trees.  He walked on up the shallow incline, heading toward the small wood he could see at the far corner of the next field.
    The rain let up slightly, but Raucous was already wet through.  His hooded sweatshirt was warm but not impermeable.  He saw the small building when he was fifty meters from the wood.  The old brick building and roof still standing.  He walked twenty more and stopped short.  He stood staring and thinking about when he had come here with Christian.  Two of them alone, Raucous not supposed to be there.  Raucous wondered what would have happened if he had just said no.  What life would that have been?  A shit one, he knew.  He was going nowhere fast back then.  He wasn’t going anywhere quickly now.  But at least now he had a reason.  Someone had told him living without hope would kill you, but he learnt living without reason was worse.  A lot of days when, what is the point, was a constant thought.  Now he could answer, he knew where he was trying to go.  And the barn held nothing.  An idea, a dream, and the reason many died.
    Raucous squinted.  He could make out the large steel lock on the red door.  He remembered Christian locking it up.  He remembered them getting in the van that waited outside and heading back. 
    Raucous had his instructions.  He wanted to know now if they had been true, or if they had played him then like he believed they had. 
    He counted the trees back from the barn.  He was stood under the seventh.  The seventh tree.  Make your excuses and take a piss.  The seventh tree.  By the roots. 
    Raucous stepped toward the trunk, looking down.  The earth was uniform, no divots or troughs.  You really believe it’s there?  He thought.  Raucous sank to his knees, and sank his fingers into the mud.  He clawed at the earth, which was soft and easily moved.  He scooped and dragged, shaking his head, asking himself why he was doing this.  This was bullshit, it had all been bullshit.  Whatever plan they had, went wrong from the start.  The whole thing failed.  No one got rich, everyone died, and Raucous stayed alive because he killed and kept his mouth shut. 
    Raucous