From Away

by David Carkeet

  Homer stared at him. “You must be confusing every single person I know. I have a lifetime of history here. How could you possibly fake that?”

  “It’s working out fine.”

  Homer stared some more. Denny wished he would stop doing that. Couldn’t he say something right after Denny said it? Denny felt like a fleet track runner lapping a lumbering farmer.

  “You don’t know anything that I know,” Homer said. “As soon as you open your mouth, it should be obvious you’re not me.”

  “It’s going smashingly.”

  Homer frowned—again the pause before speech. Denny reached out a hand and made a spinning wheel motion that only deepened Homer’s frown. He said, “I take it you stay in the house all the time.”

  “Oh, no. I just got back from John and Rodrigo’s mud season party. I fooled ’em. Rodrigo, anyway. I didn’t talk with John.”

  Homer seemed thrown by the way Denny tossed out these names. “What about other people there? Larry? Anne? Tully? Fran?” His words came out too slowly to constitute a rapid-fire challenge. The man was clueless about confrontation.

  “Can’t say. I don’t remember those names.”

  “Nick?”

  “Oh, Nick for sure. He was the first one I fooled. We’re great friends.”

  “You fooled Nick.” Homer seemed crestfallen, but it was hard to tell for sure. Denny couldn’t read the emotions on his face. He didn’t show a lot of range.

  “Millie’s got me worried, though,” Denny added.

  Homer blinked. “Millie.”

  “She’s a tough nut to crack. But she gave us her dead mom’s snowshoes. They used to call them rackets. Isn’t that odd? Your condolence telegram was a big hit, by the way.”

  Homer couldn’t keep up. He shifted in his chair. “You talk like this is an ongoing operation. You talk like I’m not here.”

  “I know you’re here. I’m not crazy or anything. I meant it as a warning. Millie seemed suspicious from the moment I met her. She’s really going to be suspicious when she hears your voice. So is everyone else. I told them we had an operation, a hemilaryngectomy. You’ll just have to tell them your voice spontaneously changed back. There’s a certain dermatologist you should avoid, though. Hey—she’s someone I know that you don’t. You’ll have to catch up with my history.” Denny grinned.

  Homer brought both hands to his face in a slow wipe from top to bottom, then looked at Denny. “Who are you? Did you spring up from the ground? Where did you come from?”

  Denny could appreciate Homer’s confusion on this point. He delivered a brief chronicle of the events that landed him on Horn of the Moon Road—his I-89 accident, his stay at the Ethan Allen, Marge, the detectives at the airport. “Nick thought I was you,” he said. “One thing led to another.”

  Homer was leaning forward. He seemed to struggle to understand something. Then his face cleared and he sat back. “I’ve been following the Marge case online.” He pointed at Denny. “You’re the guy who was in the hotel room with her.”

  “Dennis Braintree.” It felt funny to say the name. Like a surrender.

  “You’re a suspect in her death.” Homer adjusted the rifle in his lap.

  “Among others.” Denny decided not to tell Homer that he, too, numbered among the suspects.

  “You’re hiding behind my name.” Homer fell silent. Denny sensed he was plugging him into the Marge story. “You must have met Sparky.”

  “Yep. Fooled him, too.”

  “Big surprise.”

  Denny laughed and was surprised when Homer didn’t. Then something occurred to him. “Do you read the Times-Argus regularly?”

  “I lived here for thirty-five years,” Homer said. “It’s hard not to.”

  “So you saw the story about you being back home. That’s what brought you here from Florida.”

  “Why this talk about Florida? It was in the newspaper.”

  “Because you’ve been living there.”

  Homer shook his head. “I’ve been in Texas the whole time. Austin.”

  Denny was so used to the idea that he—Denny—had spent the past three years in Florida that he found it hard to make the adjustment. “Why did everyone think you’d gone to Florida?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You know, almost no one at the party asked me anything about those years.”

  Homer’s face was more difficult than ever to read. “It’s Vermont.”

  “I know it’s Vermont.”

  “People respect privacy.”

  “It felt more like indifference. Three years!”

  Homer shrugged.

  Denny looked at him. “What do you weigh?”

  “Three forty. You?”

  “Three thirty. You do look a little heavier than me.” Before Homer could respond, Denny said, “I know why you went away.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “You left because of Warren Boren.”

  Homer’s rich, booming laugh surprised Denny.

  “He keeps calling and threatening us,” Denny said. “He says he’s going to do what he should have done three years ago. I expect him to step up to the porch and blast me with a blunderbuss. Did he chase you out of town?”

  Homer’s face became lined with confusion. Then it suddenly cleared and his shoulders slumped. He stirred with unhappiness. “This is awful. He’s calling about his French horn. It’s completely my fault. I feel terrible.”

  “French horn? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I sent it to a shop in St. Johnsbury before I left. It was a complicated repair. I gave instructions to return it directly to Warren. That must not have happened. The poor guy. He’s been without his favorite horn all this time.”

  “He’s stalking us!”

  “It’s important to him. But I certainly didn’t leave because of him.”

  “So why did you?”

  Homer slowly shook his head. Then he threw a hand out toward Denny. “Look at the way you’re sitting. I never cross my legs like that.” He set the butt of the gun on the floor so that the barrel pointed to the ceiling. He lifted a foot and crossed his legs in the open male fashion, with an ankle resting atop a knee.

  Denny held his closed position and, to irritate Homer, bounced his airborne foot in a delicate manner. “I can’t sit like that. It hurts my knee.”

  “Not a very supple fellow, are you?”

  “I’ve got you beat on the dance floor, anyway. You’re going to have to take lessons before John and Rodrigo’s next party.”

  Homer stared at the fire. “I don’t think that’ll happen.”

  “Why the rifle?” Denny said.

  Homer laughed lightly. “You’re quite the Vermonter, aren’t you? It’s a shotgun. I brought it from the workshop—and loaded it—because I didn’t know what kind of person you are. I still don’t.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  Homer stood up, leaned the gun in a rear corner of the living room, and knelt before the stove. He took the poker from its rack and opened the glass door. “I’ve replaced the logs you brought in with a different stack. You’ve been burning pine. You wouldn’t do that if you’d ever seen a chimney fire. The pine outside is for bonfires. Use the hardwoods for fires in the stove. They’re to the left of the back door.” The big man labored with the poker and logs. It required little effort, but his breathing was noisy. “Your snow clearance is a disgrace. I almost broke my neck coming up the front stairs.”

  “It’s boring, all this shoveling. How can you stand to live here?”

  Homer laughed lightly again. He closed the stove door, hung the poker back on its rack, and eased into his chair with a grunt.

  “I left Vermont,” he said, “for a song.”

  TWENTY

  “A SONG?” DENNY SAID.

  Homer stared into the fire.

  “A song?” Denny made the spinning wheel motion again with one hand.

  “Stop that,” Homer said calmly. “It begins sixteen yea
rs ago.”

  Denny suppressed a groan.

  “In college. My senior year at Michigan. I was in the marching band, and it was football season—a crazy time of constant rehearsal and travel. We were on the bus going to Columbus when the word went out.” He paused.

  Denny almost said, “The word?” But Homer was picking up speed.

  “I was sitting next to Woody Schneithorst, a percussionist. He opened his backpack to get something, and he said, ‘What’s this? A flyer?’ Woody was a talker, always verbalizing everything. But he was quiet as he read the flyer. That got my attention. He handed it to me with his eyebrows dancing all over the place.

  “The flyer announced a contest in musical composition. Nothing unusual there. We learned about contests all the time. The prize would go to whoever wrote ‘the most beautiful piece of music’—kind of a bald statement. There were some guidelines, but nothing about form or instrumentation. Just ‘the most beautiful piece of music.’ All entries were due by the end of the semester—about three weeks away. Kind of short notice. And there was no identification of a sponsor or a foundation behind it. That was one of the first things you looked for. The field, too—you always wanted to know who you were up against. This one was open only to members of the University of Michigan Marching Band. An odd bunch for a composing contest.

  “So all those things were strange. But it was the prize that really set the competition apart. ‘The winner will be rewarded with the favors of a member of the April Quartet.’ That’s what it said. It’s the kind of sentence you read twice, and even then you don’t think you read it right. ‘Favors’? Sexual favors? No, it must mean everyday favors, like doing your laundry or something, but that’s ridiculous, so you go back to sexual favors. And your mind runs wild.”

  “Was it four women?” Denny said.

  Homer didn’t take his eyes from the fire. “The April Quartet was a graduate student group. They were pretty good, but they weren’t destined for greatness or anything. They were actually most famous for their looks—two knockout women, two striking men.” He glanced at Denny: all would be revealed in the fullness of time. “When they played, their looks made their music better than it was. They were more than good-looking. They radiated sex. Everyone felt that way about them. It was a perfect group for fantasy because it had something for everyone. One of the women was straight, the other was a lesbian. The same for the two men—one straight, one gay. Four human desires were embodied right there on the stage. When you watched them perform, if it was dull—Brahms, whatever—you would picture each of them with a suitable partner. You just couldn’t help doing that. This variety meant the contest would appeal to everyone. In the flyer, ‘the favors of a member’ presumably meant the member of your choice. It had to mean that. It wouldn’t be much of a prize if the fit wasn’t right.”

  Denny squirmed with agitation. He wanted to be in a contest like that. Not writing music—it would take him too long to learn enough about music to win—but a railroad modeling competition, with sex as the prize. Why didn’t he have that kind of luck?

  “The talk on the bus was pretty lively. Flyers had been stuck in everyone’s backpack or instrument case—I checked later and found one rolled up in the bell of my trombone. At first the buzz was kind of restrained because a sentence at the bottom of the flyer said the contest would be cancelled if word of it reached anyone outside the marching band. Sometimes we sneaked other people onto the bus, but after a check we saw that there weren’t any on this trip, and speculation ran wild. At least for a while. Then people began to stare out the windows. Some had staff paper with them, and they took it out, looking kind of sheepish. By the end of the trip, music was being created, no doubt about it.

  “Lots of people thought the contest was a hoax, of course. Most of the time I thought that myself. But in the weeks that followed, people kept plugging away, just in case. Or just for the sake of the music. The whole band was thinking about musical construction. My theory prof complained that students were suddenly changing their term paper topics. They wanted to write about beauty, of all things.

  “Naturally it would have been nice to know what the players in the quartet had to say about it. All it would have taken to kill the contest was for one of them to say, ‘Never heard of it!’ But they weren’t available. All four of them were in a chamber group in residence in Malaysia for a month. The mastermind behind the contest had timed it for a period when they would be gone. The timing supported the idea that it was bogus, but it could have been a coincidence. Everyone wanted it to be a coincidence. If someone had really tried, they could have tracked them down. This was before cell phones and even before most people had email, but there were contact numbers, and they could have been reached. Instead, everyone preferred to believe this bizarre thing was real, that the quartet was willing to use their bodies to commission a piece of music. They were certainly vain enough for it to be plausible. They liked to be looked at—you could tell. In their publicity photos, they were always draped all over each other.

  “The winner of the contest was to be announced at the end of the fall semester, on the day after the last final exam. It would happen in the music auditorium. The marching band gathered there—almost everyone put off going home for the holidays to get the results. We waited for someone to come onto the stage and make the announcement. Instead, the room got dark, the number ‘1’ appeared on a screen, and a piece began to play over the loudspeaker. It wasn’t a particularly good piece, and people muttered to each other that their composition was much more beautiful than that one. But that wasn’t the winner. After sixty seconds—that was the limit, the submission couldn’t be any longer than sixty seconds —another piece began, with the number ‘2’ on the screen. Then a ‘3’ and another one. We finally figured out this wasn’t a ranking from top to bottom. All of the entries were going to be played, and this was just the play order.

  “I should explain the format for submission. Entries were anonymous, and there was no paperwork. Just a tape. You could tape it alone on the keyboard, but not everyone played keyboard well enough to do their piece justice. A few used guitars. If you could assemble a group, all the better, for color, but then you had to depend on people playing as well as they could, and since their piece was up against yours, you couldn’t count on that. I played trombone for a few recordings, so I knew the temptation. Some people went outside the band. We heard all sorts of ensembles. But most people did it alone on their own instruments, and if they had a recognizable tone, you’d hear their name being muttered all over. About halfway through one piece—a tenor sax disaster—someone yelled, ‘No nookie for you, Wamser!’

  “We listened to the entries, we wisecracked. At the beginning of every piece, there was complete silence, because you were wondering if yours was up but also to see if you would be moved by the beauty. That didn’t happen—being moved—until number eighteen. On the keyboard. Not a peep from the audience until it was over, and then someone shouted, ‘Play it again,’ and others joined in. By then number nineteen had begun, but the crowd booed it down, and number nineteen came to a stop and number eighteen began all over. The crowd called for it again and again. They would buzz after each playing and then shut up when it started again. Finally after five or six run-throughs they stopped clamoring—they knew the whole program had to be gotten through—and nineteen cranked up again. There were sixty-five entries, and none of the others had a chance. One nice piece caught my ear, a catchy flute ditty. But, really, it was number eighteen all the way.”

  Homer fell silent. Denny heard raindrops drumming on the porch roof in front. The rain seemed to have come from nowhere, so the storm was a quick mover. Homer glanced at the front window, then turned his gaze back to the fire.

  “When it was over, there was a lull. What now? We kept looking to the back of the auditorium, way up high, to the control room. It was dark, and we couldn’t see a thing. We could have stormed it and found out who was behind it all, but people seemed mo
re curious about who the winner was, so everyone sat tight.

  “Then a female voice came over the loudspeaker: ‘Would the composer of number eighteen please step up to the stage?’ That’s when we realized what was going on. We were not just the contestants—we were the judges, too. The mastermind had trusted us, even in our cutthroat little world, to respond uncontrollably to beauty. There was kind of a stunned moment as we all realized that. But no one went up to the stage. People started chanting, ‘Eighteen, eighteen, eighteen.’ It didn’t happen. The winner didn’t want to identify himself.”

  “It was you.” Denny’s words rushed out ahead of the thought.

  Homer sat. His big face was unreadable. “It was the right decision. It would have been awful.”

  “Why?”

  “You know perfectly well why. You know what they would have thought. Homer? With Juliet? She was the second violinist in the quartet, and she would have been my prize. I didn’t claim her, but I did get to sit there knowing that my sixty seconds of music had conquered this rowdy group. Things kind of wound down from there. Someone jumped up and said, ‘It’s mine! I wrote it!’ and then everyone else did, too. I joined in, and it felt good to shout and claim it. We finally all shuffled out of the auditorium. Some people ran upstairs to the control booth, but it was empty when they got there. In a way, it was a fitting conclusion. It was as if the composer picked the music out of the air and then cast it back. I almost felt that way about it myself, as if I was barely responsible. It was something that came to me, a little flowing line in three-four time. A waltz. I love three-four.” Homer closed his eyes. “‘Ashokan Farewell.’ ‘Scarlet Ribbons.’ ‘Cavatina’ by Stanley Myers. ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble—’”

  A gust of wind threw a bucket of rain at the porch window, making Homer flinch and open his eyes wide. Almost immediately, another gust pelted the window. When he resumed speaking, he picked up the pace.

  “The waltz had a little second life after that. Someone had recorded the whole judging event—a guy who always carried a tape recorder with him, looking for ‘found music,’ and he found a lot that day. People made different mixes from his cassettes. A clarinet player took the waltz and wrote out parts for the entire band and distributed them. She was a whiz at instrumentation, and I liked what she did with it. I would have done a few things differently, but it came out well, overall. Michigan went to the Rose Bowl that year—we lost—and at the end of the game, the band played it for the first and only time. We hadn’t even rehearsed it. It was a farewell to the season. The crowd probably wondered why we were playing a waltz. They were filing out, but lots of them stopped and listened. The director was baffled. He just stared at us, and when we finished, he said, ‘What was that?’