The man suddenly turned somber. “Got to go. A grim scene up there, I expect.”
Denny nodded and watched him trudge into the woods. He had no interest in joining the group and what they were dealing with. He decided to go in the opposite direction entirely—to drive back home. But a glance down the driveway showed him that his car was pinned in by Nick’s.
Sparky strolled out of the house with a plastic spray bottle of blue liquid and a rag. As Denny walked to his car, he watched Sparky go to the helicopter bubble and climb in. He sprayed the inside of the bubble and cleaned it lovingly, working in sections. Then he got out, scraped a bit of snow off the outside with his glove and coat sleeve, and rubbed it clean with the rag. On his way back to the house, he sidetracked to where Denny leaned against the Rambler, and together they looked at his achievement.
“Me ’n June, when we have a toke, we like to lay down outside and look up at the snow fallin’ in our faces. It gets wet and cold though. This mornin’, when her snorin’ woke me up, I had an idea. Me and her can crawl into the helicopter bubble, maybe cuddle up in a sleeping bag there, and watch the snowflakes come down on the Plexi.” He grinned. Denny braced himself for a fresh round of self-congratulation, and here it came: they threw away the mold when they made ol’ Sparky, etc. “Better check it again. June likes things perfect.” He hurried back to it.
Denny got in the car and started the engine to warm it up. He watched Sparky in his idiotic enterprise. It brought to mind a moment at a staff party the year before, when Roscoe put his arm around Denny, the way someone does when they’re about to say something nice, and said, “When I think of you, Denny, I think of one word: appetite. You’re all appetite.” Roscoe then wandered off, leaving Denny to reflect on things. Now he wanted to say the same thing to Sparky, but the appetite Denny was thinking of had nothing to do with food. It had to do with the world, which Sparky seemed to see as existing for his personal consumption. He wondered if that was what Roscoe had meant.
Denny spied Lance—his vigil concluded—striding down the driveway like a parade marshal. Both of his knees were caked with snow. Nick had said Lance prayed on one knee. Did he switch knees when one got cold? Lance stopped and called something out to Sparky. Denny rolled down his window and heard Sparky yell from the bubble, “In the kitchen.” Lance then shouted something about a newspaper. Sparky hollered, “Don’t believe in ’em.” Lance continued striding to the house, caught sight of Denny in the Rambler, frowned, and veered over to him. Denny reached for the banana cream pie he had brought from home and went to work, digging into the pie plate with his fork.
When Lance reached Denny’s window, he leaned in close, his chin pointing accusingly. “Why did it take you so long to figure out that Marge fell into the truck in town?”
“Beg pardon?” Denny shoveled a mouthful of pie into his mouth and let out a little moan of pleasure.
“You parked right in front of the hotel. You knew she fell from the hotel that same night.”
Through a mouthful of creamy filling, Denny said, “You’ve been talking to my friend Nick, haven’t you?”
“How could you not put those two things together?”
“I did. And I told Nick as soon as I did.”
“How could you not put them together immediately?”
Denny chomped on the pie and pretended to study the question. “I guess I’m slow,” he said. “Is it a crime to be slow?” He was prepared to go on in this vein, but Lance spun away and stormed off. Denny found him infinitely amazing. What, exactly, did he suspect Denny of? Not of impersonating Homer, certainly not that. But of something. In skinny Lance’s world view, were all chubby people criminals?
A few minutes later, Sparky, having returned to the house, reemerged on a fresh mission. In one hand was a leash with the dog at the end of it, its nose scouring the snow. In his other hand was a gun—a black revolver so large that it looked unwieldy, though Sparky handled it nimbly. Denny guessed that he was going to track down the bear with his dog and shoot him in the bib to show Nick and Lance how it was done. But his agenda seemed less pressing. He and the dog wandered over to Denny. The animal—small, thin, dirty-white—had a strangely U-shaped body. The line from his tail to his head bulged outward as if someone had bent him over a knee and permanently reshaped him. It didn’t look agile enough to jump through Denny’s window to attack him, so he didn’t roll it up.
“See my sidearm? It’s for little Paul Schoomer.” Sparky looked down at his dog. “He can’t pee in public. Bashful kidney. Takes him an hour to work one up. I can’t let him run loose or he’d tear up Considine’s chicken coop, so I got to walk him, and it’s boring. But if Paulie smells another dog’s pee, he goes right away. Problem is I only got but the one dog ever since Prince Albert got caught in the splitter. I know your next question.”
“You do?” Denny wasn’t sure of it himself. He had so many.
“Does human pee work? The answer is some does. Not mine, sad to say. I’d demonstrate but I don’t want to discourage you by flashin’ my Jeremiah.” He chuckled, an action that sent his head bobbing back and forth quickly. “Now, strange to say, June’s pee does the trick. You lay some of it down and Paulie’ll pee every last drop till he’s drained dry, almost like it hurts. Long story short, from time to time June pees in a jug, and I fill the gun from the jug. Observe.” Denny suddenly realized Sparky was brandishing nothing more than a squirt gun. He aimed it at the ground and squeezed the trigger, but nothing came out. After several tries, he said, “With this gun you got to build up the pressure.” He placed a finger over the squirt hole and squeezed several times, and when he pulled his finger away, a sparkling yellow stream shot out. The dog dashed over to it and immediately conquered it, looking up at Denny the entire time.
“Sometimes I squirt it up a tree trunk,” Sparky said, “out of his reach, to see how high he can cock his back leg. He tries so hard he falls over. Damn, I shoulda done it this time. Stick around, Homer. He’ll have another wad in an hour or two.”
Tempting as the proposition was, Denny had had enough of life at Sparky’s. “Can you see if Nick left his keys in the ignition?”
Sparky dragged the dog over to the police car and looked in the driver’s window. “Bingo,” he said. “You ain’t gonna try to move it, are you?”
Denny swung his car door open. “Why not?”
Sparky grinned. “No reason.” He lit a cigarette and waited for Denny to get out and come to Nick’s car. Denny, in turn, waited for Sparky to walk away with the dog. Sparky finally wandered up the driveway, but he looked back with interest as Denny got out, opened Nick’s door, and turned the key. The wail of the car siren filled the forest. Denny searched in vain for the siren switch. He turned off the ignition and removed the key, but still it wailed. He looked up. Sparky was hunched over, hands on knees, so dramatic in his laughter that he looked like a silent film actor guffawing.
Lance stormed out of the house. He opened the passenger door, leaned in, and threw a switch under the dashboard.
“Don’t act mad,” Denny said in the sudden silence. “Don’t act mad when you’re really happy.”
“Happy?” Lance said. “Happy?”
“You’re happy you have a reason to yell at me.”
Lance scowled at Denny’s hypothesis. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Denny explained that he was trying to move the car so that he could leave. Lance began to walk around the front of it but suddenly spotted Sparky with his gun and came to a dead stop. Sparky grinned and twirled the revolver. “I got the drop on ya’, Detective. I got the drop on ya’.” He raised it, put his finger over the end to build up the pressure, and fired a yellow stream toward Lance, though it fell well short. Lance muttered something—Denny wasn’t sure, but it might have been “fucking circus”—as he came around to the driver’s door. Denny had begun to get out, and Lance yanked the door while Denny’s hand was still around the handle. This created the impression of resistance,
and Lance glared at him, wide-eyed with disbelief. Denny hurried to the Rambler. Lance pulled Nick’s car up the driveway a short distance and got out.
Denny could now drive forward, but Lance held a hand up for him to stop. He leaned down to Denny’s window. “When you were waiting for your so-called friend at the airport, how did you get by security?”
“Come again?” Denny immediately saw that he was doomed.
“You gave us the impression at the airport that you had just landed, so we didn’t question your presence. But now you say you arrived a few days before that and returned to the airport. But you were in the gate area.”
“That’s right,” Denny said. He had no explanation whatsoever. He looked at the seat to his right. The pie plate was empty.
“How did you get by airport security without a ticket?”
There it was. Without a ticket. Lance was a fool for building an escape clause into the language of his inquisition. “I spent two nights at the Econolodge,” Denny said, polishing his answer with delay—polishing, polishing. “I wasn’t sure if I was up to returning home. There were a lot of personal issues—I don’t need to get into them right now, but I’d be happy to sometime. I finally decided I couldn’t do it. I bought a ticket to go back to Florida, and that’s why I was in the gate area. I was waiting for my flight. But then Nick saw me, and we talked, and I was overcome by his warm welcome. I saw I was among friends. Long story short, I decided to stay after all.”
Lance was scowling long before Denny finished. “What about your bags?”
“What about them?”
“You said they were lost.”
“They were. Not that day but when I landed two days before, and they were still lost, and so when Nick asked me about them, I naturally said—” Denny stopped talking because Lance was no longer listening. He had spun away and was storming up the driveway, fists clenched at his sides as he headed back into the woods.
As Denny pulled away, he waved goodbye to Sparky, who jabbed a finger at Lance and yelled, “I got the drop on him.” The repetition bordered on the compulsive. If the phrase had special meaning for Sparky, Denny couldn’t fathom it.
ELEVEN
THE LADY TALKING ON THE CLASSICAL MUSIC STATION FASCINATED Denny. He never listened to this kind of music but did so now, on his way back home from Sparky’s. He figured it was good practice to be Homer even when no one was watching. The station had just played “The Lone Ranger,” and Denny, excited, had honked along with it.
But the lady doing the announcing—Jeez! She talked with a mouthful of smiles, as if her program were a funhouse of hilarity. What was hilarious here? “I can’t think of a better way than that overture to jump-start our day.” She said it as if she wanted to scream with laughter right there in the studio.
“Faker!” Denny yelled at her.
“There was quite a bit of horn tooting in that piece,” the lady went on, “which gives me the opportunity to toot my own horn, as it were.”
“Oh, haw haw haw!” hollered Denny.
“Let me tell you about a very special concert series coming up in a few months.” She named some musical groups that Denny had never heard of, and he mouthed along in imitation of her, rocking his head from side to side because he was so bored. She wrapped up by saying, “I want to thank each and every one of my dear friends who have helped me in very small ways with this series. It will happen, as always, at the Little Dumpling Farm on Horn of the Moon Road. I hope to see each and every one of you there.”
“Yikes!” Denny yelled. He looked at the radio, afraid that Sarah’s face would shoot out of it and yell “Homer!” at him. She began to announce the next number, then interrupted herself in the middle of it to identify the station, adding, “We’re in the heart of downtown Montpelier. Come by and check us out.”
“I will!” Denny laughed crazily and admired his grin in the rearview mirror. He executed a U-turn and headed for town. He would do to Sarah what she had done to him when she had shown up at the house. He would shock her. And if things got tricky, Nick had given him some ammo that he could use to throw her off balance. He snapped his fingers to the next piece—violins and a cuckoo bird—and by the time he got to town he knew when the cuckoo was coming and chimed in.
He parked near the main intersection, figuring the station was nearby. Homer would certainly know its location, so asking for directions from the wrong person could get him in trouble. But there on the corner, in front of a bead store, was Two-Tone, the skinny, pink-and-blond-bearded mime who had directed Denny to the cell phone store two days earlier. He had not greeted Denny then or shown any surprise to see him, so it was safe to assume he did not know Homer. He could be his regular informant for directions.
Two-Tone, wearing a combination of Navy pea coat and shiny green athletic shorts, was ardently tattooing a paddleball, moving his lips as he counted the blows. He flubbed a stroke and raised his arms in a wordless rant of frustration. When he saw Denny approaching, he did a surprising thing. He gasped and ran away, streaking pell-mell down the sidewalk, his pale legs flying up behind him. Pedestrians jumped out of the way and looked after him in wonder. One of these, a brawny, square-faced man balancing a massive bag on one shoulder, was still shaking his head as he approached Denny. He grinned and jerked a thumb behind him. “He’s my hero,” he said. “I want to be like him in all ways.” He stuck out his hand, which Denny took. “I heard you were back. What’s up?”
Denny went for the truth. “I’m here to see Sarah at the station.”
“Right. I just heard her.” He pointed across the street. “I’m headed that way. Got to mulch the crabs at the library, and they’re holding the new Lakoff for me. Let’s cross.” The “Walk” signal had lapsed, but the man strutted without hurry across the intersection as if confident that any cars that struck him would bounce off. Denny stuck close to him. When they reached the corner, the man said, “Enjoy,” and went on down the sidewalk.
Presumably Denny was at, or near, his destination. He faintly heard someone singing and crying at the same time, and his feet took him that way, into a square courtyard serving three businesses —a flower shop to the left, an antiques store to the right, and a radio station directly ahead at the end of the courtyard. He stopped. He could already see Sarah, thanks to a large window that gave passers-by an insider’s look at the studio’s operation. She sat in profile and faced a big fat microphone. The crying singer shut up, and she began to announce the next piece.
Denny had a brainstorm and ducked into the antiques store to the right. Ten minutes later, he emerged with a little present—three antique sherbet glasses, frosted in lovely pastel colors. He had never bought anything for a woman before. He felt like his father, who used to grin shyly as he watched Denny’s mom open a birthday present. Denny walked toward the large window but stopped short of it by about ten feet.
Sarah looked as she did in the home video: angular and sharp-boned but nonetheless attractive. She looked younger than him, somewhere in her thirties. She was reading a list of programs scheduled for the rest of the day. “Ooh, that’ll be good,” she said of one. She grinned mightily as she read, which seemed a little odd to Denny. He didn’t think the grin was for him. In her peripheral vision she might have seen that she was being watched, but he sensed she hadn’t seen more than that. After the announcements, she thanked “each and every one” of her listeners and bid them a wonderful rest of the day. She rolled her chair back. Denny braced himself, but she turned away from the large window to a smaller interior window, behind which another woman sat—the producer, Denny guessed. Sarah mopped her brow dramatically, but the other woman, though she must have seen the gesture, looked away without expression and busied herself with some equipment in a cardboard box. Sarah then spun around as if to greet her many fans watching from the courtyard, but the only one was Denny. He looked at her intently. What would she do, how would she react?
She flinched, but before she could do anything else, the door f
rom the production room opened, and she spun away from Denny. The man standing in the doorway sported a full beard, and he held his chin pressed hard against his chest as if he were hiding a small apple under his facial hair. Sarah performed her dramatic brow mop for him, but he just signaled with an index finger that she should follow him. Whoever he was, he outranked Homer. Sarah abandoned Denny without another glance.
Denny went to the door with the station’s call letters on it and entered an empty reception room. From there he looked down a hall and saw Sarah stepping into an office. She left the door ajar, and Denny could easily hear the conversation. It proved to be one-sided. The man—the station manager, apparently—reprimanded Sarah for pushing her concert series on her show. “I’ve never heard the word ‘I’ so much from an announcer,” he said in a resounding baritone. “I don’t want to hear ‘I’ from you again unless it’s an emergency. ‘I am having a heart attack,’ for example, would be permitted.” Denny heard a weak laugh from Sarah. The manager, more calm now, went on to say that perhaps he should have cautioned her in advance about pursuing a personal agenda. Then he revved up again. “But I shouldn’t have had to caution you. It goes without saying.” He calmed down again and said that she needed to be careful about commenting on other station programs. After all, to say one program will be good implies that the one mentioned before or after it might not be good. He said he knew it was her first day and all—Sarah interrupted and said “second day,” which seemed strange to Denny; why challenge the offered extenuation?—and either because of the interruption or for reasons of his own, the man’s voice got loud again. “When you say ‘Mannheim school of composers,’ it should be a broad ‘ah.’ And for God’s sake the opera is Ah-ee-da, with three syllables, not Ai-duh. If you’re not sure of a pronunciation, run it by Gene. Actually, run everything by him.”
Denny heard a loud slap of hands on a desktop that evidently concluded the meeting, but when he saw Sarah emerge from the office, the flame in her cheeks suggested that the blow had been dealt to her face. As she approached, Denny, standing in the middle of the reception room, opened his arms slightly in case a hug was in order.
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