From Away

by David Carkeet

  Denny shut up and listened.

  “I should have done what I threatened to do three years ago. If I don’t hear from you, you’ll hear from me. And it won’t be pretty.” The man hung up.

  Three years ago. What “damage” had Homer done to him? And what had the man threatened to do? He opened the phone book and found “Boren Electric.” The office was in East Montpelier. He looked up “Boren, Warren,” found his address, and took out the county map he had used to track down Sparky’s house. He was stunned to see that Borin’ Warren lived on a street that intersected Horn of the Moon less than half a mile away.

  Denny mulled over his options, pretending that he had several. He could take the initiative and have it out with Warren Boren—but have what out with him? Talking with Orange Cap had been hard enough, and that conversation had been amicable. How could he conduct an argument without knowing what the issue was?

  A thump in the kitchen sent Denny hurrying in there. Next to the dishwasher, a plywood dog door connected with the dog pen. It was bolted now, but the dogs, as if aware of the imminent “dip,” heaved their bodies against it. Denny watched it bulge with every blow. He felt like the next scheduled victim in a horror movie. He shrieked and fled.

  Upstairs, he paced in the bedroom. He went to the front window in the computer room and looked out. All was quiet, but he saw something midway between the house and the road that he hadn’t noticed before—a pond. It was still covered with ice, but he could see the banks, and all around its edge was a ring of water where the ice had begun to melt. Earlier, under the uniform snow cover, the pond had disappeared into the landscape. The brown field that gradually sloped to the pond was covered with stalks lying flat on the ground, smashed from the weight of the snow. The field was ugly and dead looking. Across the road and up the hill, some hairy, horned animals that he hadn’t seen before seemed to be staring at him. They were yaks, he was sure of it. In Vermont? “Yakety yak,” he said.

  He wandered back into the bedroom. A double casement window next to the bed looked onto the pen. The dogs had given up on the door and were sniffing around. Chester. Calvin. He went back to Homer’s computer and tried their names in the password box. Neither worked.

  He heard the crunch of tires on snow again and went to the front window. A green Subaru pulled in front of the house—not Sarah’s car. Nor was it a Boren Electric van. Of course, it could be Boren’s personal car. The driver was taking some time to disembark. And it won’t be pretty. But a woman stepped out—a woman with some heft to her. Denny brightened. Perhaps Homer had a girlfriend after all—a real girlfriend. She opened the back door of the car and leaned into it for something. Her ass was exactly midway in size between Sarah’s and Denny’s. She pulled out a cloth carrying bag—wine and cheese? Denny hurried down the stairs.

  Whoever she was, they had a history. Denny could tell from her posture when he opened the door. She pursed her lips tightly and gave him a suspenseful full-body smirk, holding it for as long as possible before she burst out of it with a laugh and gave him a hug with a whispered “Homer.” He was about to escalate, but she pulled back and studied his face, frowning at his injured lip.

  “That is bad,” she said. “I’ve brought a poultice. Two, actually.” She bent down and took what looked like two cheesecloth pancakes from her bag, one slightly larger than the other. She held the larger one up. “This is a mix of comfrey and Balm of Gilead. Pull back one layer of the cloth and apply the paste right to the wound. It’s moist and ready. One hour, once a day. The other one you put on once a day but just for ten minutes.”

  Of the three people who knew of his injury—Sarah, Lance, and Nick—only one, Nick, would have cared enough to tell someone else about it. This would be Millie. Denny felt an emotional rush in the power of pure logic. He could build an entire life out of deduction.

  She hefted the smaller poultice in her left hand. “This one’s agrimony. It’s what I gave you when you cut your leg.” She stepped close to him and gently touched his lip. “I just want to make sure it’s not too deep. Comfrey can heal the outside too quickly before the interior bruise heals.” She smiled. “I’m glad you’re back.”

  “So am I,” he said.

  The smile left her face as suddenly as if Denny had cursed her. She looked hard at him, then shook her head slightly and stepped down from the porch. “I’ve got something else, too.” She opened the car hatch and took out two snowshoes. Denny had seen a metal pair in Homer’s mud room. These were different—long and wooden. “Remember these old guys?” she said.

  “How could I forget?”

  Again she stiffened. It must have been his voice. But why did she react so strongly to it? “Your telegram meant the world to me, Homer, at a very rough time. Mom would want you to have them.”

  “That’s very nice, Millie. Are you sure you don’t want to keep them?”

  “She was always crazy about you.” Millie stared at him. “Nick mentioned that your voice sounded different. It’ll take some getting used to.”

  “Is it a good voice?”

  “It’s not yours, that’s all I know. You talk faster, too.” With one hand she made a big circle in the air that framed him. “Florida changed you, Homer.”

  “For the better, I hope.”

  “I’ll have to see.” He expected a laugh to follow, but she just pointed to the snowshoes, which she had leaned against the bottom post of the stair railing. “These old guys are great for the big dumps. They blaze the trail, and others can follow on smaller shoes. Mom blazed, we followed.” She stepped forward and touched the wood. “She called them ‘rackets.’” She took a deep breath. “I have another stop, and then I have to pick up the kids. I’ll see you later, Homer.”

  “You bet.” Denny watched her get in her car and drive off. He waved with an excess of cheer. She made him nervous.

  He took the two poultices back inside. They felt a little creepy, like prosthetic breasts. He held them over his own breasts, then tossed them onto a chair and went back upstairs to Homer’s computer.

  Two hours later, he was closer to finding Homer’s password only in the sense that he had eliminated a few dozen of the infinite number of candidates. The light was starting to fade. He went to the front window. The wind whipped the trees in the distance. The snowshoes had fallen over—he could see their tips just beyond the front edge of the porch roof. It looked cold out there.

  The dogs resumed their banging on the little door. They must have heard his footsteps. He sighed and went down the stairs and into the kitchen. He had seen no dog food in the house—he would have noticed it immediately—but his eye fell on two sticks of smoked salami on the counter that he had bought in Burlington. He got down on his knees and examined the door. It was large for a dog door, so large that Denny wondered if it originally had had a different use. It was hinged at the top, and two sliding bolts low on each side held the bottom closed. If he set the salami down just inside the door and unbolted it and ran like the devil, would the dogs chase him or would they stop to eat? Maybe both—he imagined them eating on the fly as they chased him, working the salami like a freight-car hobo chomping on a stogie.

  He had another thought. Instead of unbolting the door and feeding the dogs inside, he could feed them outside, as far from the door as possible, and then unbolt the door and flee to safety. After they ate, the dogs would try the door again, come inside, and spend the night where it was warm.

  As he peeled the wrapper off the salamis, he realized he would need four servings—two for now and two for breakfast—and he cut them in half. What else did dogs need? Water. He filled a ceramic bowl and set it on the floor. He found a tray in Homer’s pantry and set the four salami portions on it. Then he took a packaged submarine sandwich from the fridge, along with a liter of root beer and a bag of potato chips. After just a little hesitation, as a reward for his efforts, he added half of a coconut cream pie. He carried the tray upstairs and set it on the bed. With the computer room connecting on o
ne side and the bathroom on the other, all of his evening needs would be met. He shut the two doors that led from these side rooms into the hall, sealing himself safely in the bedroom.

  He went to the double casement window next to the bed and worked one of the cranks. The window was stuck from disuse, but it opened after a few bangs. He poked his head out. He was directly over the dog pen door. The two dogs, their heads cocked back, stared up at him. They were at his mercy. What a wretched condition, he thought—to depend utterly on someone for food.

  “Poor doggies,” he said.

  They stared.

  The configuration of the square pen was simple. The house formed one boundary, and the wall of Homer’s workshop formed the one across the way. A wire fence ran along the front of the pen, anchored at the front corner of Homer’s shop and at the house on the side. The fence at the rear ran from shop corner to house corner.

  Denny took two salami halves from the tray. He tested his windup in the awkward conditions and settled on a backhand, as if he were throwing a Frisbee. He called to the dogs—unnecessarily, since they watched with unflagging interest. He leaned out the window and flung one of the halves at the far front corner of the pen. It banged off the shop wall into the pen close to the corner. Both dogs were already on their way to it before it had settled into the snow.

  “Hey!” Denny yelled. “You!” Oddly, his words succeeded in stopping one of them—the one who trailed in the race and was therefore open to other offers. Denny backhanded the second salami toward the rear corner of the shop, and the dog dashed for it. Denny ran out of the bedroom and down the stairs. He glanced out the kitchen window—the dogs were chowing down in their respective corners—and he dropped to the floor and unbolted the door. He sprang back to his feet and ran upstairs and closed the bedroom door behind him.

  Through the casement window he watched the dogs, having made quick business of the salamis, sniff around their corners. Then, almost simultaneously, they began to trot toward each other along the shop wall. He wondered why. They passed each other, and each went to the spot where the other had dined to sniff around for leftovers. This struck Denny as funny. Then the dogs headed for the door. As soon as they disappeared from view, he heard them banging their way into the kitchen directly below. Then he heard their claws on the hardwood floor of the entryway. Would they come up and lunge against the bedroom door? If so, it would be a long night. He waited, but they remained downstairs. Perhaps they had found a warm spot, a favorite rug.

  He sat on the bed and ate in silence, fearful of attracting the dogs if he made any noise. He watched the wind stir the trees through the window. He had the feeling Sarah wouldn’t come by tonight; his doom would be postponed until tomorrow. What would he say to her when he couldn’t get into his own computer? He was too tired to think about it. It had been a challenging day, starting with Sparky’s phone call. He was anxious to get between Homer’s sheets. There was something about those sheets.

  He fell asleep almost instantly. At one point deep into the night, the squeak of the dog door woke him—the dogs stepping out for a pee, he guessed. A few minutes later, he heard the squeak of their return. He had seen a can of WD-40 in a utility closet. He would spray it on the hinges tomorrow. He saw himself doing it, and the image became a dream that looped over and over, so when he woke from the same noise some time later, he was surprised to hear the squeak, given all his work.

  He was also surprised—and disappointed—that the dogs decided the hour was perfect for rough-housing. They scampered and banged against the kitchen cabinets. Denny imagined them practicing their attacks on him, taking turns with the roles.

  You be the salami man.

  No, you.

  I called it first.

  FOURTEEN

  “DOGGIES!”

  Denny, his bare belly hanging over the casement windowsill, hollered down at the dog door.

  “Come on, you doggies!”

  He pulled back inside and listened. He thought he heard a stirring from below, perhaps from the front hall. If they came up the stairs, all was lost—he would never get them out the dog door. The stirring stopped. He got down on his knees and leaned out the window again. He cupped his hands over his mouth and tried to shoot his words straight down the side of the house.

  “Doggies!”

  It wasn’t working. Even if they heard him, they weren’t fooled into thinking he was outside in the dog pen. He closed the window and crossed the room. Gingerly, he opened the door. No dogs. He tiptoed to the top of the stairs. At the bottom, they sat on their haunches and looked up at him—not with menace, but with soft-eyed hope. He was The Provider.

  “Poor doggies,” he said. One of them shifted, and Denny almost bolted for the bedroom. But they remained seated. He stared back at them. What was scary was their sheer capacity to do harm—their dental arsenal. But that didn’t mean they would use it against him. He needed to remember that.

  “Outside!” he said suddenly, hoping they knew this verbal cue, but they didn’t move. How could he make a noise outside the dog door to attract them? What object could there be on the second floor that was long enough to reach the first?

  He hurried to Homer’s bedroom closet and pulled out the strange box he had seen there amidst the boots and shoes. It contained an emergency chain ladder of 1950s vintage, judging from the box-top photo of the shirtwaisted housewife happily descending it. He untangled the light chains as he dragged the ladder to the window. He hooked the curved tops over the sill and shook the chains and rungs to achieve full extension. The ladder ended just short of the top of the dog door. He tried to swing it. He had hoped to send it away from the house so that it would come crashing back, but it wasn’t rigid enough for that. Then he had a different idea. By grabbing the tops of both chains and snapping them, he was able to send a wave downward that culminated in a sharp slap on the clapboard just above the door. He was getting ready to slap the house again when the dogs shot out as if some evil force had ejected them from inside. They roamed in brief confusion before they spotted him and gazed up in wonder.

  Denny grabbed the two remaining salami halves from the plate on the nightstand—he had smelled them from bed through the night—and leaned out the window and gave them the Frisbee heave. The dogs ran to their two corners as if they had been doing it for years. As he hustled to the staircase, he visualized closing the bolts on the dog door and clapped his hands at his success. As a result, he was a little slow to see that at the bottom of the stairs, exactly where the dogs had been sitting, Sarah now stood.

  She must have let herself in, and she was looking up at his body—his naked body, fresh from slumber—jiggling down the stairs. He shrieked and covered himself with his hands. He threw himself into reverse, but his momentum carried him a few steps closer to her before he could backtrack. Denny faced her as he stumbled back upstairs, not wanting to turn and expose his ass, but the look on her face was excruciating, so he spun around and scurried on up the rest of the way, covering his front with one hand and some of his ass with the other.

  But the dogs! If he took the time to get dressed, they would come back inside, and how could he be Homer in front of Sarah if he was afraid of his own dogs? He slowed, thinking he could lock the dog door nakedly—but no, he couldn’t go through with it, he just couldn’t. He hurried into the bedroom, yanked on his pants, and rushed back to the stairs.

  Sarah hadn’t budged. He scampered down and ran past her into the kitchen. Just as he dropped and reached for the dog door, it flew open and a herd of buffalo overran him—or so it felt. He rolled himself into a ball on the linoleum and lay on his side, whimpering. After a moment, it became clear that the dogs weren’t consuming him. Rather, they were licking him all over his bare upper body. He lifted an elbow to take a peek, and one of the tongues rasped his nipple, giving him a tingle. He sat up, his back to a cabinet door, and the dogs romped all over his lap. The one who had licked the nipple kept coming back to it.

  “Good do
ggies,” he said.

  “Jesus.” Sarah stood at the end of the kitchen. At the sound of her voice, the dogs jumped away from Denny and shot out the dog door.

  Denny took a moment to catch his breath. “I’ve missed them,” he said.

  “Did you print that stuff up for me?”

  He rose and collected himself. “I’d like to get some breakfast first.”

  “It’s ten o’clock.” She was the chef declaring the kitchen closed. “I’ve been up since five. I need the first three years from the Excel files—budget, program, attendance. Print them up. Email them to me, too.” Her cell phone rang and she fished it out of her vest pocket. She turned away from him and sat down in the booth with her back to him. Her end of the conversation was “No.” Then “No.” And “No.” Then “Wait, I’ve got another call.” After a pause, she said, “Well, hi there! What a surprise! But not really.” She immediately laughed at her own joke, whatever it was. “I’ll call you right back. Don’t go away.”

  Denny eased out of the kitchen and ran up the stairs. There was nothing to do but attack Homer’s computer—as in attack. He would pull some strategic wires, pour water into it—anything to make it act up and get him off the hook. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Sure, she’d be mad, but what did it matter since she was always mad anyway?

  He pulled a T-shirt over his head and sat down at the keyboard. His jostling of the desk cleared the screen saver, and he was surprised to see an entirely new screen before him. It read, “Welcome, Homer.”

  Was he in? How had he gotten in? He launched Excel and saw the files Sarah presumably wanted, neatly arranged by year. He clicked on a few to make sure, and then he began to print the first three years’ entries. As the printer whirred into action, he sat back in his chair and thought. Could he have stumbled on the password the night before and not known it? He remembered reading about some security software that delayed access by several seconds whenever a correct entry followed several incorrect ones, as a check against hackers making rapid guesses in sequence. Homer could have had such a program. If so, then the very last password Denny had tried must have been correct. He wouldn’t have known it at the time because the screen would have changed only after he had given up and left the desk. He had no idea what his last guess had been, but it didn’t matter as long as the computer stayed on. This interpretation seemed improbable even as he arrived at it, but what other explanation was there?