From Away

by David Carkeet

  Denny obliged. Nick’s request had not included Lance, who was in equal danger if any existed. Lance’s cell phone rang. Denny wondered where he kept it, given his skin-tight garb. Lance quick-drew it from a little Velcro holder on the outside of his left biceps and stepped away to take the call. The farther away he went, the more absorbed he became in the call.

  Millie was about to speak to Denny, but Sarah arrived and interrupted her with a “Greetings, all!” The return greetings lacked her brightness.

  Millie leaned toward Denny. “How’s your lip, Homer?”

  “The swelling’s gone down. The poultices really helped.”

  “But your skin looks irritated. I wonder if you’re having an allergic reaction.” She reached up. Denny hoped she would touch his lip, and she did. “I gave you the same herbs when you cut your leg that time. You didn’t react to them then. I don’t get it.”

  Nick beamed and said, “I have an idea.” He left the group. Millie turned and watched him cross the deck to a group of three women, and when she turned back to Denny, her eyes were suddenly hard. Without a word, she spun away and walked to a metal circular staircase that led to a patio below the deck.

  Nick returned with a woman whose gray hair was braided in two coarse ropes hanging to her waist. She scared Denny, so he welcomed her with extra cheer. “Hello there!” he said.

  She stiffened. “Have we met?”

  Nick said to her, “I don’t think you have. Angela, this is my friend Homer. And this is Sarah.” He looked around for Millie. Denny said that she had gone downstairs. Nick looked puzzled, and then he winced and reached up and tousled his hair. But he forged ahead. “What do you think?” he said to Angela. “Is that an allergic reaction?”

  The woman peered at Denny’s face and seemed not to like what she saw there. “Yep.”

  “Angela’s a dermatologist,” Nick explained.

  “Very resourceful, Nick,” Sarah said with a laugh.

  “Nick told me you’ve been using a poultice,” Angela said to Denny. “Obviously you should stop using it.” She looked at the cut on his Adam’s apple. “There’s no irritation on your neck. I take it you haven’t applied it there.”

  “No.” Denny didn’t want to risk elaboration.

  “That’s from Homer’s surgery,” Nick said. “To remove a tumor.”

  Angela snorted. “I don’t think so.” When they looked at her, she said, “That’s not a surgery incision. The scar is too short, and it’s ugly.”

  “I had it done in Florida,” Denny said, as if this would explain everything. “By a Floridian.” He was conscious of Sarah at his side.

  The doctor squared herself, bracing for battle. “Let me get this straight. You had a laryngeal tumor?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Glottic or supraglottic?”

  The second sounded more complicated than the first. “Glottic.”

  “What stage?”

  “Pardon?”

  “What stage cancer?”

  Denny wished he could use her braids to lower himself down the cliff for a getaway. “I’m not sure.” He worked up a smile, but it felt feeble. “My attitude was just fix it.”

  “Right on,” said Nick.

  Angela turned to Sarah, astutely identifying her as one who would enjoy the mockery scheduled for delivery. “Obviously not a champion of ‘informed consent.’” To Denny she said, “A hemilaryngectomy scar doesn’t look like that at all. It would wrap around your neck like a necklace. Besides, your voice is perfectly normal.”

  “But it’s not,” said Nick. “It’s really different. Right, Sarah?”

  If Sarah meant to respond, the doctor beat her to it. “Obviously by ‘normal’ I don’t mean the same as it was before. How could I know that? I just met him.” She threw her hand out at Denny on the him, effectively changing its meaning to the asshole . “With a hemilaryngectomy, you always get hoarseness.” She pointed at Denny. “His voice is clear as a bell.”

  “His voice?” said a newcomer coming up from the patio. Denny was so used to pretending to know strangers that he was surprised to see a familiar face. It was the visitor to the radio station, Blue Balls, who said in passing, “If you want clear as a bell, you should hear him on the trombone!”

  Angela let out a bored sigh. “I believe my work here is finished.” She walked off.

  Nick looked after her. “That was pleasant.” He took a deep breath. “I have to see what’s up with Millie.” He headed for the circular staircase. Without a word, Sarah left as well.

  Denny was suddenly alone again. Thanks to Dr. Obviously, he felt in real danger of exposure for the first time since becoming Homer. His best hope was that Sarah hadn’t gone right to the idea that Denny was an imposter but instead had settled on a less drastic theory—perhaps Homer had pretended to have had cancer, possibly as an excuse for his three-year absence. Maybe she was dancing between this interpretation and the imposter interpretation. But even if she was dancing, Denny was doomed, because it would take little reflection on her part to see that his recent behavior had been riddled with anomalies. How could he bring her back fully to the belief that he was Homer, albeit a changed Homer with a funny voice?

  He faced the crowd. A few minutes passed. No one approached, which struck him as a little odd. Wasn’t the party practically given in his honor? Finally, he walked across the deck to the hors d’oeuvres table. On his way, he heard a white-bearded man say to a gray-bearded man, “Twice? That’s nothing. I was tear-gassed three times, once in ’69 and twice in ’70.”

  On the other side of the hors d’oeuvres table, a woman was going on about some bird she had seen, and a man’s voice made listening noises. Denny loaded up his plate with chips and a spread made of refried beans, guacamole, sour cream, and tomato. He turned to watch the crowd and began to scoop big portions of the dip into his mouth with one chip after another, holding the plate close to his mouth for speed. Behind him, the topic shifted from birds. The woman said, “How long were you off the air the other day?”

  The man said, “Two hours and forty minutes. A real John Cage moment.”

  “Wow. Goodbye, listeners.”

  “Not to mention ad dollars. Plus there’s an FCC fine. Prescott was fuming.”

  Denny knew that name. Prescott was the man who hid apples in his beard—Sarah’s boss. He turned around and recognized the speaker as one of the two tall men he had seen when he had first arrived—the one who had said “Ai-duh” after Sarah had passed by. Denny circled the table, joined the duo, and asked them point-blank what they were talking about. The woman took his arrival as an excuse to go somewhere else. Did Homer have a bad history with her? Maybe it was just time for her to move on.

  The man said, “I was telling Mary about a problem at a relay station. We had almost three hours of dead air.”

  “What happened?” Denny said.

  “An odd bit of sabotage. Some switches were thrown, nothing that couldn’t be easily fixed. But whoever did it added some time-consuming obstacles. The saboteur—that’s what we’ve come to call him—broke all the light bulbs and chained and padlocked the access door. Unsophisticated but effective. Sort of a guerilla action.”

  “Any suspects?”

  The man laughed. “He did leave a trace of himself behind.” He leaned forward to share the confidence: “He pissed on the wall.”

  “DNA,” said Denny.

  “Exactly. If only there were a national registry.” The man quickly raised a palm and looked around nervously. “Not that I’m proposing such a thing. It was pretty high up on the wall, from what I understand. A tall saboteur, it would follow.” He chuckled, then stopped. “It’s not funny, actually. This morning Prescott discovered a wavy line cut all along the studio window facing the courtyard. Someone took a glass cutter and etched it from one end to the other. We’re wondering what’s next—a brick through the window?”

  “Could that happen?” Denny said. “While someone’s announcing?”
/>   “Who knows?”

  Denny realized he should express more particular concern: “I’m worried about Sarah.”

  The man raised his eyebrows.

  “It could happen when she’s in the studio,” Denny said.

  “But . . . she’s not with us anymore. Didn’t she tell you?”

  “She’s not announcing? Since when?”

  “Friday was her last day.”

  Two days ago, Denny thought. He wanted to ask precisely when the sabotage had occurred, but he didn’t dare put the topics side-by-side. Good God, he thought. If she was this bad, she was even worse than he had thought. She was bad to the bone.

  “So she announced three or four times? That’s it?”

  “Something like that. Cutbacks. And maybe the fit wasn’t quite right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The man looked uncomfortable.

  “Speak freely,” Denny said, and the man laughed.

  “There was a kind of . . .”

  “Agenda?” Denny said. “Pushing her concert series?”

  “Oh, there was that, certainly. But something more. A certain indefinable . . .”

  “Egomania?”

  “No, but now that you mention it—”

  “Philistinism?”

  “No, but there, too—”

  “Testiness? Peevishness? Truculence?”

  “I was going to say ‘insincerity.’”

  “Interesting,” Denny said.

  The man smiled and frowned at the same time. “Are you two still together?”

  “We are as we have always been.”

  The man chose Denny’s word. “Interesting.” His eyes roamed the crowd. Lance was approaching, raking his fingertips over his tight abdomen as he walked. “Who’s this curious fellow?”

  As Denny considered an answer, Lance pulled up to the other side of the hors d’oeuvres table, whipped his cell phone from his biceps holster, and took a picture of Denny. He studied the result, took another one, and went on his way.

  “You have an admirer,” said Denny’s companion.

  Denny’s eyes followed Lance into the house and through the kitchen.

  “So. How was Florida?”

  Denny gasped and grabbed the man by the upper arm. “Thank you for asking. You’re the only one who’s asked. The only one! But I’ve got to find Nick.” As he eased away from his puzzled companion, he added, “I hope you don’t have any more problems at the station. When did this vandalism happen, by the way?”

  “The studio window was damaged late last night. The relay station was messed with earlier in the day, in the morning. Exactly when Sarah would have been on if she were still . . . you know.”

  “Right.” Denny went on his way. The man’s face had given away nothing. Earlier he had even referred to the saboteur with a “he.” And Denny knew why: pee on the wall. How had she done that? Had she hung from something overhead, like a spider monkey urinating from a treetop? She could have pissed into a jar and splashed it against the wall. The notion reminded him of Sparky and his water pistol full of his wife’s urine. Had Sarah borrowed Sparky’s idea? Maybe the pistol itself?

  Just as Denny reached the circular staircase, Nick emerged from it, looking more careworn than usual. He took a long drink from his beer bottle. “Millie wants to go home. Here’s a rule to live by, Homer. Don’t second-guess an herbalist by calling in a dermatologist for a second opinion. What kind of idiot wouldn’t see that coming?” He made a fist and knocked himself on the head and then belched softly. “I gotta find Lance. He’s all hopped up about something.” He raised a hand to shake in soul-brother style, and Denny stumbled through it. Nick wandered off, sucking down the rest of his bottle and setting the empty on a table.

  Denny scanned the crowd, his mind on the many fires he felt in need of putting out. The Lance fire seemed beyond his control at the moment. What about the Sarah fire? Rodrigo wheeled a gong out of the house and positioned it behind Dr. Obviously, who, having found fresh meat for contradiction, was lecturing to a group. Rodrigo took a mallet from a hook on the gong frame, wound up, and banged the gong hard. The dermatologist jumped and glared at him.

  “Time for contra-dancing, everyone,” Rodrigo yelled. “A storm’s on the way, so we’re going to start early. If you want to join us, head for the park. If you don’t want to join us, the hell with you.” He laughed fiendishly and, for the fun of it, banged the gong again.

  People began milling toward a short staircase leading to the driveway. But many of the guests made no effort to move. Among the latter was Blue Balls, whom Denny spied swinging on the couch and holding forth. Was he telling a joke? Sarah stepped up from the patio below, and Denny, inspired, grabbed her by the arm.

  “I want to say goodbye to someone,” he said to her. “He may be gone by the time we come back from the meadow.” He steered Sarah toward the swinging couch. At first she resisted and huffed, but she was no match for him. Rather than make a scene by ripping her arm from his grasp, she succumbed.

  Blue Balls interrupted himself to welcome Denny to his group. Denny said, “Down in Florida I tried to tell someone a joke of yours, but I couldn’t remember the line about the tenor and the alto—”

  “Oh, Lord,” Blue Balls said excitedly. “The climax! ‘The bartender—’”

  “You told it the last time I was here, three years ago, right here on this couch.”

  “Yes, yes. Here it is. ‘The bartender has had only tenor so patrons, and the soprano out in the bathroom, and everything has become alto much treble, he needs a rest, and so he closes the bar.’”

  Denny threw his head back. “Oh, that’s prime.” He turned to Sarah. “Isn’t it prime?” She ripped her arm from Denny’s grasp and stormed off after the others going to the park.

  Denny, hoping he had done his cause some good, followed her and the group she had joined, but he made no effort to catch them. After a few turns in the road, they reached an open field where dancers were organizing themselves. While the musicians tuned up, the caller directed the crowd to form two circles. Denny joined Sarah in the inner circle.

  He had a decision to make. When it came to footwork, Homer was a manatee on land. Denny had watched him stumble and grope in the videotape. He had seen Sarah’s scornful stares. He knew what he had to do to be Homer on the field of dance. But instead, inspired by his little victory with Blue Balls’ joke, when the music began, he chose to be Denny. He had never performed these dances before, but the caller gave good instructions, and they came naturally to him. For all his supposed faults, Denny was a graceful man. He knew how to work with what he had. There would be no handstands or cartwheels. But there could still be delicacy, fleet-ness afoot, a balloon-like floating on pixie legs. He imagined everyone saying, “Look at Homer go!”

  Later, as he drove home, he saw the possibilities. He had already tried to modify Denny toward Homer, tempering him with Homer’s bovine passivity. Now it was time to modify Homer in a Denny direction, judiciously injecting him with life. The golden mean between the two would produce a perfect social being.

  He was still charting his destiny when he stepped into the dark house, so it took him a moment to notice how toasty the downstairs was. A glow from the living room told him that the fire had been stoked. Sarah had left the party before him, he assumed to drive to her apartment. Had she come here instead? But he hadn’t seen her car, and it certainly wasn’t like her to tend the fire. He heard the jangle of a dog collar from the darkness of the living room.

  And then he knew. He knew an instant before he heard the voice from the easy chair in the far corner of the room.

  And what everyone said was true: his voice wasn’t anything like Denny’s.

  NINETEEN

  HE SAT ENTHRONED IN THE CORNER ARMCHAIR, HIS SUBJECTS AT his feet—one lying on the floor, the other resting a chin on his knee. The light from the entry hall reached him just enough to show a walking stick or cane resting like a scepter across his lap. Was he an
invalid? Did he have a bad foot from his diabetes? Denny noted the possible attributes for future exploitation even as he recognized that the game was up.

  Denny felt scrutinized when he took off his jacket and tossed it on the desk. Was he taking liberties tossing it like that? It was Homer’s living room, after all. For that matter, it was Homer’s jacket. He didn’t like having these thoughts. He wanted him to go away.

  “No,” Homer said when Denny stepped to the other armchair that faced the stove. “Move it back first. Sit away from me.” He raised the cane from his lap, which turned out to be not a cane at all but a long-barreled gun. Denny grew excited. He didn’t want to get shot—he certainly didn’t want that. But the gun was definitely exciting. He pulled the chair away and sat down.

  Homer turned on the nearby floor lamp, and Denny got his first full look at him. He looked like a worried version of himself. He opened a hand with his palm facing upward—an invitation to Denny to speak. He said, “What were you thinking?”

  Denny shrugged and opened one of his own hands. He intended a different message from Homer’s, but the gesture must have looked like an imitation. “I saw an opportunity.”

  “An opportunity?” Homer’s voice was deep, but it cracked on the question. “You haven’t taken any of my money, so that’s not it.”

  “Oh, no. That doesn’t interest me.”

  Homer shifted in his chair and disturbed the dog resting its head on his knee. It resettled on the floor. “Were you unhappy with your own life, so you took mine? I could have come back at any moment. I have come back. What was your plan then?”

  “I didn’t think about it.”

  Homer made a deep-throated noise. “You’re not serious.”

  “I’ve just been taking it a day at a time.”