From Away

by David Carkeet

  The printer finished its job, and Denny remembered that Sarah wanted the data electronically, too. He looked for evidence of an Internet connection and, finding none, clicked on a dial-up icon, triggering a modem squawk, a sound he hadn’t heard in several years. Once connected, he opened Homer’s email program. Luckily its password was saved. The screen read, “You have 421 new messages.” Denny clicked on the most recent email. It had come in a few hours earlier—a welcome back from someone named Henry. Likewise for the two preceding, one from a Nguyen, the other from a Fran, both posted the previous day. But surely Homer’s email account hadn’t received 421 messages in the short time he had supposedly been back.

  Denny jumped to the beginning of the 421 unread messages, landing at a spot almost exactly three years prior, when Homer had moved away—and had clearly abandoned this email address. The first several emails were ordinary messages from friends and customers. As Denny moved forward in time, they began to change. Some emails were re-sendings, with subject lines like “In case you didn’t get this.” A few asked where he was. Some said they missed him. One customer with a cryptic email name asked about a horn that he’d dropped off for a repair. A college development office reminded him about making an annual contribution to something called The Amelia Fund. None shed any light on why Homer left town because they all came after his departure. Denny scrolled back to the beginning of the unread messages. He needed to look at the last emails Homer had read just before he left.

  There weren’t any. The “In” box was empty of any read emails. Denny jumped to the archived mail and found that screen empty as well. Frowning, he clicked on “Sent Mail.” Nothing. It was unlikely that Homer’s email program failed to save all these messages. Did he actively delete them? Why? Did he do it regularly in the course of computer housekeeping, or did he do it this one time for a special reason?

  “Forty-five thousand,” Sarah said. She was standing in the doorway, the cell phone to her ear. Denny kept the email program open. It was a reasonable thing for Homer to be reading his email. “Forty-five thousand,” Sarah said. “That’s what we need. They’ll match. But we need a Vermont donor for the forty-five thousand. From anywhere in Vermont.” She was talking unusually loudly, Denny thought, and facing him in order to display her phone prowess. “Forty-five,” she said again. “Bye.” She snapped the phone shut and stood in the doorway. She seemed to want him to ask what the call was about, so he didn’t.

  “The data’s in the printer tray,” he said, his eyes on the screen. “I’ll email it to you next.”

  She stepped to the printer. “Then get off-line so I can get on.” She carried a laptop under her arm.

  He turned in his chair and faced her. “‘Please’?”

  She stared at him. “What?”

  “Can you give me a ‘please’?”

  She stood very still. Then she took her laptop from under her arm and wedged it between her thighs so that it stuck out just below her crotch. “Sure,” she said with strange eagerness. “I’ll give you a ‘please.’” She lifted her hands to her sweater until they cupped her small breasts. She lunged forward and snarled, “Can you please suck on these?” She moved so violently that she had to grab the laptop before it slipped from between her legs. She snatched the sheets from the printer and left the room.

  Denny pondered this turn of events. He found it hard to view her behavior in a positive light, considering that he had nearly wet himself when she had lunged at him. He had felt trapped, as if he were tied to a tree in the woods and she was savagely taunting him before the kill. What she had done was not the act of a civilized person.

  On the other hand, given the sexual component in the gesture, could she have been making overtures? It was an angry display, yes, but maybe she was angry because he had been slow off the mark. Maybe his pretend-mate theory was all wrong. Wasn’t it possible that “suck on these” was a reminder of past shared pleasures that he, Homer, had been inexplicably slow to resume? Viewed in this light, the head-banging at the ATM in town could have been an accident after all. He imagined her fretting in the study right now, asking herself what was wrong, wondering what on earth was keeping Homer away from her.

  He scooted his chair back. She had closed his door as she had left, and he quietly opened it. His expectations were clearly mixed, because he had a sudden flash of her poised outside his door, an assassin ready to spring. But she was down the hall with her office door closed. He tiptoed. As he reached for the doorknob, he stopped his hand at the sound of her voice.

  “Because,” she said. The tone of this single word was quite different from what he had just heard from her. Surely no normal human being could switch moods like that.

  “Just because,” she said.

  There was a pause.

  “Just because.” She giggled. The girlish delight seemed genuine. But so did the Amazonian lunge. “I knew you would call because of the way you looked at me.”

  Denny’s ears strained.

  “I did not.”

  Pause.

  “No I didn’t.”

  Pause.

  “No I never.”

  Very long pause. Denny heard the sound of a chair rolling and a soft bang. He readied himself to run from the door, sensing she was on her way out.

  “I’m just setting up my laptop.”

  Pause.

  “So what if I am multitasking? I should give you all of my attention? Are you going to arrest me, Mr. Policeman?”

  Pause.

  “And just when might I expect this brutal interrogation?” Pause.

  “Lord, no. He’s just a friend.”

  Pause.

  “Oh, you know everything, don’t you? Then tell me how you know.”

  Pause.

  “More than one would wish.” Big laugh. Then, loudly, “Goddammit, Homer, you’re still online.”

  Denny hurried back to the computer and disconnected the modem. It was a good thing he did because she wasn’t far behind him. He innocently looked up from his desk as she stepped into the room.

  “I’m off,” he said.

  “Here.” She handed him a sheet of paper. On it were printed fourteen numbered tasks. “Do them in order. There’s a backlog—for obvious reasons. These are the most pressing problems. The sander’s in the car.”

  “Sander?”

  She had started to leave the room and now stopped, clearly irritated by this delay. “For the stage? It’s due back at six tonight, but you can do it. Chop chop.”

  She returned to her study—and to more telephonic spooning with “Mr. Policeman”? Lance, no doubt. As for who was “just a friend,” Denny had thought of Nick at first, figuring Lance had asked about Nick because he knew they had dated. But then came “More than one would wish.” More what? More weight/size/ pounds/bulk/fat. Homer was the one who was just a friend. That closed the book. There would be no instant sex in his new life.

  Instead, there would be this:1. Patch roof over stage.

  2. Rewire stage subpanel and replace fuses with circuit breakers.

  3. Sand stage floor.

  4. Stain stage floor.

  5. Apply poly to stage floor (3x).

  It went on and on. Carpentry, sheetrocking, plumbing, upholstering, window glazing. Why wasn’t “Build atomic bomb” on the list?

  In the course of the next hour, considering that he lacked any of the required manual skills, Denny accomplished quite a lot.

  First, he determined that the barn roof was way too high and steep for him even to contemplate a repair. This allowed him to check item number one from the list.

  His next achievement was to find the subpanel—this after first finding an old Reader’s Digest Home Repair book from the 1970s in the living room bookcase and looking up “subpanel.” The one for the stage was in a rear corner behind a folding screen. He opened the little door and studied the six fuses in the metal box. He was supposed to “rewire” this subpanel, whatever that meant, and replace the fuses with circui
t breakers. He estimated five, maybe ten minutes—not the time necessary to complete the job, but rather his life expectancy if he probed the innards of the subpanel. He closed the door and checked item number two from the list.

  He knew what a “sander” was. Likewise a “car,” and Sarah had said the sander was in her car. She had parked it right outside the barn doors. As he made his way to the front of the barn, he wondered if she had done this because she was thoughtful. No, fool—for speed. Chop chop.

  The sander’s long handle stuck out of the trunk of her car through a gap under the tied-down lid. He untied the rope and beheld the machine. It reminded him of the carpet sweepers he had seen porters use on the circus trains of his childhood, but he soon discovered that it had a few more pounds on it—more than one would wish—thanks to the motor at its base. He lugged it through the snow to the barn and wheeled it down the aisle to the bottom of the stairs at one end of the stage. He counted the stairs. He filled the music hall with the noise of six heaving groans as he hoisted the machine, one step at a time, up to the stage. He spied a dark stain on the floor and looked up above it—so far that he staggered backward a bit. The leak up there had caused the damage down here. But elsewhere the stage was also worn and scarred. He remembered reading in one of the laminated articles posted in the foyer that Sarah had found the wood from an old dance hall in New Hampshire that was about to be torn down.

  The sander was a rental, and it came with copious instructions tucked into a plastic sleeve dangling from the handle. Denny studied them like a zealot with a sacred text. He plugged the ridiculously long cord into an outlet at the rear of the stage. A sanding belt was already attached to the drum, so he was “good to go,” as they said in the building trade—or so he guessed, and he said it several times as he positioned himself behind the sander. He rockered the switch to “On.” The sander came to life and bolted forward in a way that surprised him, so he groped for the switch and turned it off. He grasped the handle firmly this time, resolved to use the advantage of his mass to restrain it, and turned it on again. The sander started and immediately shut down—as did a bank of lights directly overhead.

  Denny knew he had blown a fuse. That was why Sarah had wanted the subpanel rewired before he sanded. He had violated her task order, but he could work around it. He returned to the subpanel and opened the door. The corner where it was housed was darker now, but he was able to see that one of the six fuses showed the fog of failure. He looked around on the nearby shelves for a replacement, and, finding none, had a different idea. He unscrewed one of the remaining good fuses. This caused a bank of lights at the rear of the auditorium to go out, but he didn’t need them right now.

  “Clever Hans,” he said as he began to screw the fuse into the slot for the circuit controlling the sander.

  “Homer!” It was Sarah. She must have come in the side door near the stage. He couldn’t quite see her. “You couldn’t have done the roof already. Where in the hell are you?”

  He took his time screwing in the fuse, wondering what he would say to her. Strangely, just as he finished screwing it in, the sander fired up. Had Sarah jumped onto the stage and started it? Had she decided she should pitch in? Was this the beginning of a reconciliation?

  These questions were decided in the negative when, hurrying forward from the rear corner of the stage, he saw that the sander, its switch left in the “On” position (oops!), had started up when he had replaced the fuse and restored the flow of power to it. Driven by the whirring belt at its base, the sander now charged across the stage on its own. Its path was erratic, owing to the absence of a controlling intelligence, and a swerve took it toward the front of the stage. It held this course to the edge of the stage and then off the stage, its engine now screaming in a higher pitch as if celebrating its airborne freedom.

  The leap put Denny in mind of a boy’s summertime jump from a cliff. In this case, however, what lay below was not the old swimming hole, but rather an open-mouthed Sarah, standing in the path of the juggernaut.

  FIFTEEN

  DENNY WASN’T KEEN ON MODELING TRAIN WRECKS, BUT HE suddenly found himself assembling one. The 1891 four-train collision at East Thompson, Connecticut, seemed right for the occasion. He forced it all into a small basement with an I-beam encroaching on one corner. As an extra complication, he added a hobby-hostile wife. The modeler had to fight off the sarcasms she hurled down the stairs as he worked.

  This last part was easy to imagine because Sarah was giving him some of the content and all of the volume he needed. She was like a train herself, running over him and then reversing and running over him again. He didn’t understand why she was so angry. She had managed to jump out of the way, and when he had hurried down from the stage, he saw that the only damage was to a few seats in the front row and maybe to the sander.

  He managed to look at her without seeing her. He used the same distant gaze he summoned whenever Roscoe and the gang went after him, though it had never been so severely tested. Sarah was pure noise, going on about all the things that were wrong with him, all the ways he had let her down. His three years’ absence was mentioned—finally, he thought—but she focused on his indignities of the past two days: his “gross physical advances,” his “sass,” his “impertinence,” his “spaciness.” She had seen some of that spaciness just before he had gone away, she said, cycling back to that offense. She should have known something was up, that he was getting ready to let her down. She claimed everyone was disappointed in him. “But you’ve let people down before, haven’t you? Haven’t you?” Did he know how hard he had made things for her? Did he? She had to learn to do everything—everything! She had to learn how to use power tools. She had to take a class in how to use a block and tackle. Did he think that was fun for her? Did he?

  Denny blinked and stared off to the side. One problem with modeling train wrecks was that they were static. He had an idea, though. What if the model represented three-fourths of the wreck—the moment after three of the trains had collided but not the fourth? The little Norwich Steamboat Express could be chugging along, heading for the disaster in ignorance. Of course, he wouldn’t want it to crash, and he didn’t want to just bring it to a boring stop. He’d have a remote-control switch, something that would surprise everyone by sending the train off onto a sidetrack, thwarting fate. A second chance.

  “You’ve really let yourself go. What did you do for three years—lay on the beach all day? You’ve gotten saggy. You used to be strong. At least you had that going for you.”

  Setup would be complicated. He would need a hidden hatch for ongoing access to all parts of the board. Sometimes his favorite place was under a layout, just at the moment before he pushed a panel up and popped his head through. It made him feel like an underworld god. Pluto, if memory served.

  “You might have heard me talking on the phone about the grant.” This sentence seized Denny’s full attention because its delivery was different. She was no longer driving her train over him. “There’s a real opportunity here to move the series up to the next level. But I need support.”

  “Forty-five thousand.”

  Her body went rigid. “May I finish what I was saying? May I?” She stared fiercely at the sander as if it were a third party in the conversation. “I need seed money from a Vermont donor.”

  “No.”

  She flinched and glared at him. “What—”

  “I’m not giving it to you. And don’t say, ‘What makes you think I was going to ask you for it?’ Of course you were.”

  She threw her arms out from her sides. “Who are you? Who in the hell are you?”

  “I’m your human tool. I’m the physical plant. The maintenance department. And the financing. Or at least I have been. Not anymore though.”

  “What?”

  He slapped his belly. “There’s a new sheriff in town.”

  She hurled her body forward and opened her mouth and broadcast a scream into his face so loud that initially he mistook it for a
noise coming from outside the barn, like an airplane’s howl just before the crash. He thought that she intended to bite his face, so the scream actually came as a relief. He held his ground, calmly sweeping his eyes over the top of her head. At this close range, her hair didn’t smell very clean. When she pulled back from him, she had to reach for a breath. There was an air of unpredictability as to what would happen next. The thought occurred to Denny that it was in such uncertain moments that ordinary people suddenly committed violent crimes.

  From the darkened rear of the barn came a soft voice. “Homer?” Nick stood just inside the foyer, near the last row of seats, looking like a schoolboy reporting to the principal. “Is this a bad time?”

  “You can have him,” Sarah said with contempt. She wasn’t going to put on a show for Nick. She spun away from Denny and raged out the side door.

  Nick made his way down the aisle. When he reached Denny, he glanced to the door where Sarah had exited. “Trouble?”

  Denny wanted to approximate the truth. “It’s not how I thought it would be.”

  “Nothing ever is, man. I don’t know a lot, but I know that much. You’ve been away. Give her time.” Nick hesitated. “Maybe I should come back.”

  Denny shook his head and pointed to the front row. He sat in a seat with a missing arm that had been clipped off by the sander. Nick sat two seats over, leaving a space between them. He studied Denny’s face. “Are you using those poultices Millie brought you?”