Denny made a face at the boxy sedan. Not only was the battery probably dead, but the entire car could be dead, along with almost all of its factory contemporaries—it was an old Rambler that dated, he guessed, from the 1960s. Its color was beige that had bleached in places to the tone of sallow flesh.
The key was in it—encouraging, that. Why have a key in a dead car? Denny slipped in behind the wheel and tried it. The engine fired to life instantly. He let out a laugh. He imagined neighbor Rose dutifully coming over to run the car and charge the battery. Good old Rose. He gunned the engine a few times, then turned the ignition off. His stomach pressed hard against the steering wheel. Was Homer smaller than he was? No—Rose must have slid the seat forward. Good old Rose. He reached down to the side of the seat to adjust it, found a lever, and pulled on it. Wrong lever: he was thrown back into a full recline. He squirmed, but the seat would not go back up with his body in it, and he had to pour himself out the door first.
The foyer floor was concrete, painted and etched with musical symbols. If he moved the partition aside, he would be able to drive the car right out the large double doors of the barn. He slid the bolts aside, but snow blocked the doors. Again snow, always snow. He sighed and headed back to the house. In his reverse trek, he took advantage of his deep footprints. He made it up the treacherous rear steps and grabbed the snow shovel and went on into the house, since he would have to approach the blocked barn doors from the front.
As he passed through the entryway, he saw the light blinking on Homer’s answering machine from Betsy’s message. He detoured to erase it but then saw the number “2” flashing in the message window. A second call had come in. He pressed “Play.” The new message opened with a long pause, followed only by these quick words:
“I’m coming over.”
A woman. No identification. An intimate. Sarah? Confidence drained from his body like blood from a corpse on the mortician’s table. He wasn’t ready for her. He wasn’t ready at all. The pause at the beginning of the message seemed especially ominous. It wasn’t a delay for the gathering of thoughts. It was part of the message, calculated to express strong feeling. But what strong feeling? What history did they have? What would he say to her? He was a fool to think they would jump right into the sack.
He looked out the window. Far below, where the driveway met the road, a silver car was beginning a slow climb to the house.
Denny yelped and ran to the back door. He more or less skied down the stairs, clawed his way along the fence to Homer’s workshop, dashed through the workshop out its side door, and lurched from there to the barn’s side door. He rushed across the floor along the front of the stage, leaving a trail of snow in his wake, but there was no time to bother with it. A door on the far side of the barn opened to a steep but navigable slope. At the bottom of it were dense woods.
SEVEN
HIS LAST NAME WAS DUMPLING. HE KNEW IT FROM THE FAMILY cemetery at the edge of the woods, which he could see from his refuge behind a pine tree. Two of the tombstones rose above the snow, marking the place where Oramel and Ellen Dumpling would shiver for eternity. He couldn’t read their dates, but he guessed from the height of the two monuments that they had pioneered the homestead. The other markers, humble bumps, looked like snow pillows. From his spot in the woods, Denny could see that his downhill scramble had taken him right through the middle of the plot. He was lucky not to have barked a shin on a marker. The dozen or so graves sloped with the land, giving the impression that the corpses had to dig in their heels to keep from sliding.
Homer Dumpling. He tried the name a few times.
He had been hiding for about fifteen minutes. By ear, while snow melt from the pine boughs dripped on his head, he had tracked Sarah’s search for him—first her distant singing out of “Homer!” from the back of the house, where she would have seen his footprints leading from the stairs to the repair shop; then he heard another call, less cheerful, probably from the passageway between the shop and the barn; then a clearly annoyed shout from within the barn. The calls made him feel like a stubborn farmer tuning out his wife. I got chores, Maw.
Now, through the boughs, he kept a sharp eye up the hill on the side door by which he had exited the barn. Sure enough, it flew open, and here came her face and hair and voice: “Homer!” She hung over the threshold, squinted in the sunshine at the path made by his lurching body, glared into the woods, and finally pulled back inside and slammed the door.
Denny hugged the pine tree. His breath came in short, delighted puffs. “You’re in trouble now, Dumpling!” he said, as if Homer were the one who would face her wrath.
But because she was angry, Denny actually found her less threatening. He had his own history with her now—he had made her mad by not being available when she arrived, and they would talk about that, at least for starters. But what would he offer to explain his absence just now? That he had wanted to visit his ancestors’ graves? You bet. That he had then gone into the woods to savor his native boreal forest after three years in the tropics? Who could challenge that?
He began the climb back to the barn. However, the terrain did not cooperate. In fact, there was no terra—only snow and more snow. The stuff looked solid on the surface, but with every step it sucked him right up to his groin. He must have been on a northern slope. That was one of the first things he looked for in a winter layout—variable depths according to sun exposure. Drifts, too. Good modelers instinctively incorporated that kind of detail. Bad ones couldn’t even tell you where north was. Denny always wanted to know the layout’s compass orientation within a degree, the historical date and time down to the second.
He stuck to the path he had made before, and as he passed through the family plot, he cleared the snow away from a few markers. Dumplings all. About halfway up the hill, one particularly violent extrication flopped him on his back. In this position he became aware of his heart rate. Each pulse bulged his skull and briefly blinded him. He thought it best to lie still for a while.
“Sexual intercourse,” he said to the blue sky, and he began to thrust his hips up and down. Earlier, when Sarah had stuck her head out the door, after she had yelled his name he had heard a little growl of anger from her, and he gave her that sound now as he imagined her on top of him. He hadn’t gotten a close look at her, but because of the way her black hair had swung out the door, he gave her a witch’s face. Not an ugly face, just a sharp-featured one. She would ride him like a broomstick. It could be just ten minutes away. Ten minutes! Sooner if they didn’t have to go back to the house. Was there a bed somewhere in the barn? What about the Rambler? He could tilt the front seat back. They’d fog up the windows.
He scrambled to his feet and struggled up the rest of the slope to the door. She wasn’t in the barn, which surprised him. He walked up the aisle to the foyer just in case she had anticipated his idea and already crawled into the Rambler, but it was not his lucky day. He heard an engine roar in the distance and looked out a front window. Sarah’s car hove into view from the far side of the house and began its descent down the driveway. He didn’t know until now that a car could look angry.
“You’ve got yourself a bottle rocket, Homer!”
Denny turned to go, then caught sight of something. On the exposed wood wall between the window and the big double doors hung laminated newspaper reviews of performances that had been held in the building. Denny browsed them. Photos of the artists accompanied some of them. In one of these, a group of thirty or so brass musicians standing in front of the barn hoisted their horns while a small goat looked at them quizzically. Denny sensed Homer’s presence in the photo before he actually saw him, and when his eyes locked on him, he laughed with relief. No wonder Nick had taken him for Homer. Denny knew for a fact that he had never held a trombone. Were it not for that, he might have been persuaded that he had posed for this picture and simply forgotten about it.
Denny leaned in close to Homer, looking for a difference, a “tell,” but he saw none. He approache
d until his vision blurred, and he pulled back just a bit. Homer stood a little forward of the group—was he their leader? They were all caught in a shout, and Homer’s mouth was the most open of all, as if he were roaring. His T-shirt had ridden up his body from raising his trombone, and a crescent moon of belly flesh smiled at the viewer. He didn’t seem to be a very dapper fellow.
Denny moved on along the wall, scanning other articles. The one nearest the door told of the creation of Sarah’s concert series—six years ago, judging from the date of the story. Sarah was excited, she said, about the venue, the historic barn at Little Dumpling Farm, which she was renovating with some help from her “dear, dear friend,” Homer Dumpling. Denny wished she had said “main squeeze.” But maybe she did, and the reporter said, “This is a family newspaper—may I write ‘friend’?” And Sarah said, “In that case, please write ‘dear, dear friend.’”
Denny remembered he had business to take care of. The cell phone was still in his pocket, a time bomb ready to blast his designs to Kingdom Come. He retraced his steps to the house and found the snow shovel where he had left it against the wall next to the answering machine, when Sarah’s arrival had sent him scampering. The blinking number told him that two more fans had called. He pressed “Play.”
“Homer?” a man’s voice said. “It’s Warren Boren.” The rhyme made Denny laugh. “Three years, Homer. Three years. It’s disgraceful. Call me at once.” This was no fan. “Up yours!” Denny yelled at the machine. Next was a woman whose insincere sing-song invited Homer to serve on some town committee. It was a long message, and it became clear that her reason for inviting him was to secure his vote for her in the election for chairperson. “We’re so glad you’re back!” she said in conclusion, packing extra fervor into the words because she realized she should have opened with them.
“Everyone wants a piece of Homer Dumpling,” Denny called to the sky as he marched to the front of the barn with the shovel over his shoulder. “And Homer Dumpling wants a piece of Sarah.” He laughed hard at that. Then he looked around quickly in case someone was within earshot. Not likely on this hilltop. But from here he could see a house on a neighboring hill on the other side of the road—Rose and Edgar’s place? They couldn’t have heard him, but they might have seen him. Did Denny walk like Homer? How would he ever know?
He threw the shovel down and hurried back to the house and up the stairs. He had seen the TV in the second bedroom, but the thought hadn’t occurred to him then. Now he pawed through Homer’s collection—all the tapes and DVDs lying loose as well as those in the TV cabinet and on the bookshelves in the room. Amid the dreadful musicals and romantic comedies that Homer seemed to favor, Denny found four promising videotapes. He fussed with the machine and settled on a sagging couch to watch.
The first tape—an outdoor band concert—was shot by a fixed camera at the rear of the crowd. Homer, puffing on his trombone in the back row, was visible only when the instrumentalist in front of him bent down to pick up a water bottle. A closer view came during some hand-held candid shots of the musicians relaxing during the intermission. Homer stood with two other men, chatting. They all wore white dress shirts and khaki shorts. Homer’s legs were about the size of Denny’s, but they looked more solid. He wore his hair slightly longer than Denny did, and occasionally he stroked the top of his forehead with a thumb to take it out of his eyes—a gesture that Denny tried and found unnatural, but he would work on it. The tape did not pick up the conversation—closer offscreen talk and a blackbird’s squawk dominated the soundtrack. As he watched the trio, Denny became momentarily disoriented and tried to remember what they had talked about.
That tape bore a professionally printed label, “Catamount Brass Band, Sand Bar State Park,” as did the next tape, which brought to citizens who had missed it the complete public winter joint hearing of the Central Vermont Land Protection and Conservation Commission and the Green Mountain Renewability, Durability, and Sustainability Task Force—an orgy that Denny could get through only with the help of copious snacks of Homer’s kitchen stash of Fritos, which he shoveled into his mouth like a fireman stoking the firebox. The committee discourse was unintelligible, consisting of mysteriously shared language that Denny had never heard before. Homer must have been confused as well, because he sat mute at the table through the entire proceedings.
Denny popped the tape out. Next up: “Softball at Dog River Field,” a home movie, given the scrawl on the front label. Denny instantly recognized Homer squatting behind the plate, and he finally produced some language, though his rhetoric was far from Churchillian: he said, “Branght.” He said it over and over, before every pitch. Denny began saying it to the screen along with him. One articulation by Homer was unusually clear: he was saying, “Bring it,” apparently crucial words of encouragement to the pitcher.
When Homer’s team was at bat, the ballplayers could be seen wandering down the first-base line to use a large sandpile near right field as a pissoir, urinating with their backs to the crowd. The camera zoomed in on one group that included Homer, and Denny had the privilege of watching him shake when he finished, though what he shook remained out of view. The woman wielding the camera giggled. Sarah? Around the dugout, Homer got little face time. Nick dominated, with pep talk and comic imitations of other players. Homer appeared from time to time, smiling mutely, occasionally clapping at a play, but his lips never parted for speech.
Denny popped the tape out and reinserted the brass band tape. He rewound it to the intermission, where he remembered Homer chatting. But his memory was wrong. Homer simply stood in inscrutable silence. When the two men he was with laughed at something, he smiled, but it was an automatic response, like the wag of a dog’s tail in response to a human’s happy tone. Three tapes and several hours, and all he had heard was “Branght!” Denny frowned at the dullard on-screen, angry at what he felt was a degrading of their reputation. “Speak!” Denny yelled.
The last tape: “John and Rodrigo’s Mud Season Party, 2005.” Three years before the present. Three years—would Homer even be in this tape? Yes, there he was in a group shot in a kitchen, listening and not talking. Later, one of the hosts had Homer down on his knees on the wooden deck in order to honor the unusual fasteners that he, the homeowner, had used in the construction of this, his perfect deck. The host: “Some people say, ‘Hey, it’s just a deck so why bother?’ But Rodrigo and I don’t feel that way. We see the deck as an extension of the house.” Homer feigned interest in the home show, but poorly. He seemed uncomfortable and squirmed on his knees, and his nods looked like signals to conclude the conversation, which actually happened without his help when someone jovially grabbed the homeowner and hauled him out of the frame. That left Homer on his knees, beached on the cedar. The camera, rather than chronicle his return to vertical, moved on, but not without first capturing an inch of his butt crack.
The tape next found Homer seated on a swinging outdoor couch with a plastic or vinyl cover of a garish floral pattern. Some man was talking fast and hard, and Homer was the sole hapless listener. The man wore a bow tie, and he spoke so animatedly that it seemed to be spin like a propeller. “So the bartender says to the E-flat, ‘You’re looking sharp tonight. This could be a major development .’” The camera stayed with the man through several more puns, all the way to the end: “The bartender has had only tenor so patrons, and everything has become alto much treble, he needs a rest, so he closes the bar.” Judging from the speaker’s hopeful grin, the joke was over. The camera went to Homer for his reaction. Puffy-cheeked, droopily smiling, eyes at half-mast, he might as well have been orbiting Neptune.
A pan farther over showed a woman seated next to Homer, and the cameraman gave Denny a jolt when he said, in a playful, nasal tone, “Hi, Sarah.” She replied with equally playful nasality: “Hi, Rodrigo.” Denny scooted forward on the couch. She had witchy hair, yes, and sharp features, too, but they were intriguingly sharp. She was actually pretty. This was far more than he had hoped for. In a
straight tone, the host said to her, “You’re looking thoughtful. What’s on your mind?” Sarah pressed her lips together and frowned. To Denny she looked like someone inventing a thought instead of recalling one. “These are my friends,” she said, casting her eyes around and nodding repeatedly. “I’m thinking how good it feels to be among my friends.” “I’m sorry, Sarah,” Rodrigo said, “but could we do another take, and could you possibly be even more banal this time?” Sarah’s smile, rather fixed to begin with, suddenly hardened, and a fragment of a loud laugh from Rodrigo could be heard before the tape cut to a black dog leaping for a Frisbee at the edge of a road.
Now that he knew for certain what Sarah looked like and what she was wearing at this party, Denny rewound the tape and reviewed it from the beginning. But he would not see her or Homer again until dusk, when everyone gathered in a meadow for dancing. The event was shot from a distance, showing the whole group of fifty or so dancers, and Homer and Sarah were in the picture the entire time. They started every dance as partners, even when the previous dance had distributed them away from each other. The dance caller had a microphone, and she explained the moves of each dance in advance. She described the learning curve as a sequence of “confusion, mastery, and boredom.” She promised to end a dance when she sensed boredom had been achieved.
Homer, unfortunately, rarely progressed beyond confusion. He turned the wrong way, grabbed someone else’s partner, advanced too far or too little. Once, at the end of whirl, he put his hand squarely on a tit, evoking an open-mouthed response from the victim—not Sarah, which was just as well, given her manifest displeasure with Homer generally. She shook her head at his stumbles, shoved him when he strayed too close, laughed outright, and looked away as if to dissociate herself from him. She made no attempt to rejoin him for what was announced as the last dance of the evening. She hid her rebuff, or tried to, by talking with demonstrative engagement to the willowy, long-haired man she had ended up with. Just before the dance began, she flirtatiously knocked her new partner’s cap from his head.
From Away Page 7