Four Years from Home Read online

  “Okay, look, we only have time for one more play and we need a basket. So I want Petey to inbound it to Harry and you, Harry, you alley-oop it to me under the hoop. I’ll nail the reverse lay-up and we all go home winners.” Whenever we played basketball in our driveway I was the team captain. How could it have been any other way?

  “What if I can’t get it to Harry?” Petey was a low wattage bulb for sure.

  “Harry will get open, right, kid?” I punched him in the meat of his shoulder for emphasis and to make sure I had his complete attention.

  “Sure, Tom, whatever you say. I’ll get open.”

  There was something about the way he said things that told you what he really meant, even when Harry didn’t put what he meant in the actual words themselves. It always made me uneasy and usually took me a minute to figure out. It was one of those things I wished I had been quicker at. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the luxury of a minute. Leo, the other team’s captain in our three-on-three game, was already yelling “forfeit.”

  Petey slapped the ball, starting the imaginary five-second clock and Harry faked right and stepped back and left. Leo stumbled, leaving Harry open. Petey tossed him the ball and, as Harry turned, I realized what he had meant. He had confirmed part of my orders, but had omitted the last of them — the one where he was to pass to me. That bastard! “I’m open!” I yelled as he turned toward me, smiled, and swished a fifteen footer to win the game. The streetlight at the corner of Oregon and Casswell came on, signaling the end of the game. It was dark and dinner time, and time for Harry to pay. Only I had trouble justifying killing him in front of the others when it was Harry who had won the game for us and Harry who was the hero, even though he had not followed his captain’s orders. He was lucky… But he was a dead duck and I would see to it that his luck changed….

  Mrs. Hoople prepared a nice chicken potpie for dinner and we talked about nothing in particular for a few hours. My interrogation of her would be but a footnote in the overall report. The more important witness was yet to come. I excused myself and headed upstairs, making sure I let the cat know who was boss before I left the kitchen. Then I spent the rest of the evening in Harry’s room, relaxing. It had been a long, tiring day. Sometimes days are like that, especially when they are full of the unexpected. Surprise has a way of taxing the brain. Battle plans have to be revised, new contingencies formulated in the face of idiotic orders from above; it wasn’t easy leading a squad in a war with a godless enemy on one side and inept leadership on the other. I had to do all the thinking and planning for myself. There was no other sergeant like me, and they should be damn happy I was out here fighting their war for them. I thought about calling the family and reporting in, but I was still angry with Sam for ratting me out to the Kenyon people, and I knew it would make him suffer more if I didn’t.

  I was really beat. At one point in my life, I had the theory that tiring the brain tires the whole body, a theory supported by the evidence that Frankie Marx was never tired, therefore he had no brain. But then I later learned that this was a logical fallacy called affirming the consequent. It was like saying that all idiots take baths, you take a bath therefore you are an idiot, ignoring the fact that people other than idiots take baths. Like me, for example, I was about to take a bath in scummy, dirty water polluted by my own filth and, even though I felt like an idiot, I knew I was the farthest thing from one. As expected, the bath was fairly disgusting and it wasn’t until I was totally dry and sitting at Beth’s desk that I felt almost normal again.

  Beth’s collection of books included a yearbook, which I naturally went through hoping to find something that would help me. Lots of black and white photos of the campus and the students, and the teachers, all living black and white lives. Boring. I didn’t see Harry or Beth in any of them. When I came to the senior class photo section I paid more attention. Several of the senior portraits had little idiocies scrawled under them. “Remember me always — Carrie.” Unlikely anyone would forget hair like that. It was long, brown, and stood straight up. It looked like someone had dropped her from the roof of Old Kenyon and had snapped the photo on her way down. I found it amazing that anyone could get her hair to stand up that like. I had experimented with the use of fear and glue to get Harry’s hair to do that, but I’d never considered something as simple and effective as dropping him off a building. I liked the hair and the concept. She made her point. I wouldn’t forget her.

  “Friends forever — Josh.” Not likely, unless he planned on maintaining that friendship from his jail cell. He definitely had that “most likely to be convicted and sentenced to life” look written all over his mug. I flipped to the “R’s” and stopped. There it was again — where Harry’s photo should have been — a picture of someone who was nearly a dead ringer for me. My search had gone beyond the bizarre, passed the signpost up ahead, and entered the Twilight Zone. Harry had, in four years from home, grown up to look like me. And the writing under the photo? “Roses are red, violets are blue. When I grow up, I want to be just like you.” Harry was looking right at me. He was talking to me. He had in four years hatched a bizarre plan to become me. He had finally become a worthy adversary. Too bad he was dead.

  Chapter 8

  I tossed around in the unfamiliar bed throughout the night, my sleep a broken mix of odd dreams of the adventures of Harry the Kenyon student, followed by periods of awakened restlessness, and then, finally, endless staring at the wall. Harry had changed, so much so that physically it was almost impossible to tell us apart. All those years of torture and my countless attempts on his life and well-being had turned Harry into my doppelganger. But that wasn’t quite right. He might have looked like me but he could never be me. The stuffed shirts had said that Harry had done some good things at Kenyon, many good things. Not things I would do. And he was apparently nice to old ladies, something that would never have occurred to me in a million years, though having met Mrs. Hoople I could see why he had taken a liking to her. She was a nice old bat. No, he was not my evil twin, but he was nearly my twin, from the handsome looks down to the smart-ass remark in the yearbook. That must have been why he never came home, rarely wrote, and never, ever sent pictures of himself. He was becoming me and he knew that I would have had a field day with that. He knew his turning into the thing that he and everyone else had feared and hated for a lifetime would have been years and years of material for me. I could have built several major battle campaigns on it and filled many seasons of Combat! with Emmy-winning episodes. In a way, it was a pity he had been cut short in his metamorphosis. I would have been my own greatest challenge.

  Bells ringing in the distance awoke me from the first dream I’d remembered in years. A gray light, filtered by the thick glass windows, washed across the bed. I looked at the clock – 7:00 a.m. It was a tune they were playing, but one I didn’t recognize, and it was coming from the church on campus. Obviously either there was a seven o’clock service for which I was late or it was the Gambier wake-up call. The pirate businessmen had hoisted the main sail on the good ship Kenyon and called all hands to battle stations. Classes would start in one hour. They had no idea who they were dealing with. The notebook was out and the entry was already made: “Attach device to bell ringer. If rung before 8:00 a.m. discharge ten thousand volts through the hull.” I had seen that on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. It always worked on that giant squid attacking the Seaview.

  After a quick washcloth cleaning of the night’s sweat from my upper body, I got dressed and went downstairs. Mrs. Hoople and the cat were already working on breakfast. She was putting together eggs and bacon and the cat was making toast, swatting the steam coming out of the toaster, waiting for it to pop. I tried to remember back to high school physics... The transference of electricity to heat in a toaster was accomplished by providing huge resistance and thus friction that built up heat, but couldn’t you still get electrocuted by it? Mom never let us poke knives into the toaster to remove stuck toast, and always made us unplug the dev
ice before getting the burnt items out. There was still hope then that we would be having fricasseed cat for supper.

  “You’re up early. What time’s your first class?” That was a problem. I was missing both the “when” and the “what” on that one. “Oh, you’re not awake yet. Here, let me check.” The old lady put down the spatula and stepped over to the fridge, poking one of the many papers magneted to the door with a greasy finger. “Looks like studio art — landscapes at eight. Since you’ll be going that way, can you check my mail, please?”

  With her pinky, she gingerly picked her keys off the magnetized hook on the door and handed them to me. A skeleton key and a key that looked like it probably would fit a trunk… or a post office box. “301” was stamped on it. “Sure, I’ll stop there before class.” I wandered into the hall, fingering Harry’s keys in my pocket. When I was out of sight of Mrs. Hoople, I took them out and compared the keys. The odd key on his key ring was not the same kind. It was about the same size, but definitely not the same. Dropping both sets into my pocket I returned to the kitchen with the newspaper, a substantial hunk of wood pulp called the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The Kenyon pirates apparently had no printing press of their own and so were forced to import their news to keep the breakfast table crowd amused, which probably kept the swashbuckling to a minimum before lunchtime. Mrs. Hoople delivered my favorite breakfast and I dug in, giving her the “Mm, mm, good” with such enthusiasm that her face lit up like that Mom handing out the Campbell’s soup in the commercials. If nothing else, the trip had been filled with plenty of bacon, and you can’t go wrong with bacon.

  Cleveland Plain Dealer — that seemed like a stupid name for a newspaper. Cleveland was a hundred miles north of Kenyon and there were no plains there and nothing plain about a place that was so loaded with crap that by rights it should have tipped over and fallen into Lake Erie. Nobody from Pittsburgh likes Cleveland. Nobody. From birth we are taught to hate the place. From the video highlights of the Steelers revenge battles against the Browns, year after year, game after endless game, to the football pacifiers for babies and the Steel Curtain towels for everyone else, it was all about whipping up a frenzy of hatred over some stupid football rivalry. Nobody knew what started it and nobody really cared because it was the hatred that united a city and gave it purpose and identity, the same kind of hatred that had united a country under Hitler. I had devoted an entire section to it in The Book of Tom.

  I’d only been to Cleveland once back in high school with some gang friends looking for trouble after a Steelers-Browns game, but the place was just plain dead. In fact, it was just plain deader than dead. The masthead must have been a misprint — they really meant Cleveland Plain Deader. And the paper was just as bad as the city. How can you have a comics section without “Peanuts?” I found plenty of lingerie ads but nothing about Kenyon, Gambier, or Harry’s accident. I wasn’t surprised. A gang of pirates wouldn’t air their dirty laundry in public. A pirate would rather die before telling you where his secret hideout is and what sinister things are going on there. They have a code they follow, you know.

  I asked Mrs. Hoople why there was no local paper. “Silly boy, nothing ever happens in Gambier. You know that.” Her sugary sweetness reminded me of a play the Christian Brothers had made me read in high school — Arsenic and Old Lace. In it, two, sweet old ladies poisoned lonely old men and buried them in the cemetery next door. Somehow they made money off that, but I couldn’t remember how. Did they have a tool shed like Mrs. Hoople? She certainly had the shovels for it, and there was that cemetery just down the street. Had I unknowingly done away with the evidence of Harry’s death when she had me clean out that shed? My palms were sweating. I couldn’t remember the symptoms of poisoning. Did arsenic smell like garlic? And cyanide? Was that almonds? I could only smell my own panic. I felt sick. How could I have been so stupid? The eggs had seemed pretty much just like eggs, but the cat wasn’t eating his; neither was Mrs. Hoople. They were just staring at me, the Old Lace killer of Gambier and her accomplice cat, Arsenic, staring at their next victim.

  “What’s wrong, dear? You don’t look well.”

  No, it couldn’t be. Her concern was genuine. It had to be; otherwise I was a dead man and my trip to Ohio would end in the Gambier cemetery beside Harry. Mrs. Hoople simply could not be the Mata Hari of old ladies. I had no logic to explain it, no fancy arguments to prove it. All I had was my hunger. I was starving. A new hypothesis formed and I ate the rest of my scrambled eggs to prove it, staring the cat down in case he was thinking of making a move on my breakfast.

  The Kenyon pirates were far more clever and dangerous than I had first given them credit. In fact their setup was pure genius, and I actually came to admire them for it. They had erected a shield of innocents surrounding their position, people in the line of fire who were totally unaware of the true goings on at the institution behind them — the perfect cover. The king’s soldiers could question them, torture them, even kill them, but they’d never get from them the location of the hideout because they didn’t know there was a hideout. It was so perfect I found myself frantically taking notes before I forgot all the details of their scheme.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hoople. I guess I’m not myself today.”

  I felt better for having eaten and, with no specific plan in mind for the day, I decided to just go with the flow and see what happened. I was sure that, at some point, I would reconnect with the authorities. Maybe then I would tell them who I really was, maybe not. I hadn’t decided. My motto is: “If you aren’t smart enough to figure it out, I’m not dumb enough to tell you.”

  I remembered a couple of buildings — former houses I’d guessed — between the Alumni House and the post office that were marked with an “Art Department” sign, so after breakfast I headed that way. The street population had grown dramatically. An army of students with the occasional Lieutenant Professor type in the column was headed through town toward campus from the north; which I had discovered from a map was where the freshmen dorms were. These fresh recruits looked rested and energetic and were therefore a force to be reckoned with — fresh troops, large numbers, every general’s dream before the big battle. And freshmen are young and have pliable minds. They are easily brainwashed and will follow even the most foolish order without question. That makes them dangerous. I had been right all along — north of town was not the kind of place to venture into without a full squad.

  I was tired. I made a note to remove all numbers under nine from every clock in my kingdom. I also considered making the sun not come up until nine, but that seemed a bit complicated for the technology at my disposal. Maybe just add sleeping pills to the penny candy shelf in the drugstore — get kids started on the habit of sleeping late at a young age. My first year at college was the only year I had been stupid enough to sign up for an eight o’clock class. But to my credit it only took ten minutes before I realized that only losers or freshmen took the early classes, so with some creative rescheduling, it was nothing before ten for me for the next four years. Yet here I was, up before eight, looking for Harry’s stupid eight o’clock class. But it was Harry’s eight o’clock class, not mine. And, given that Harry was a senior and not a freshman, Harry was the loser, not me. Q.E.D., which, for those not lucky enough to either have had Brother Patrick for Latin twice, or ten minutes of their own eight o’clock symbolic logic course in college, stands for quod erat demonstrandum. If you need more than that; look it up in your Funk and Wagnalls.

  I walked by the Art Department, reconnoitering the two old houses thoroughly; deciding that the one with paint splattered out a second floor window and down the wall was the one I would be headed to after my little errand. The paint was a mess of earthen tones with a trail of odious green through it. I got the impression that it was no accident the way the colors were arranged, that this was some knucklehead’s idea of art. Oh boy, I couldn’t wait. A student waved to me from the second floor window. I waved back and moved on, cataloging for future consider
ation the idea of adding a green turd swimming in a sea of brown crap to the wall of Soup Edwards’ office. Not such a bad piece of art after all.

  The Gambier post office. My first question was: Why? But the answer was obvious to the bureaucratic mind, which I had long studied. It was all about money. It always was. There was far too much mail for the U.S. Postal Service to handle without incurring the undue expense of hiring more people who actually had to work. Therefore a percentage of the letters had to get lost every day to keep expenses down. And lost mail had to go somewhere, so why not build a post office in the middle of nowhere, ship it there in bulk, and give it to the poor college students in Gambier? It was perfect. Delivery was easy and cheap, no sorting, no thinking; just drop any piece in any box and you’re good. It didn’t matter who got what. So isolated from their families, these homesick kids were starving for communication, any communication. So Billy got the Acme flyer and was happy with the sales. Kevin got the birthday card that strangely had someone else’s last name on it and didn’t care that it wasn’t his birthday. Sara became Our Neighbor at… and got the book of local store coupons for Sewickley, Pennsylvania, and started planning her hardware purchases. And Harry received the dunning letter from the Sears outlet in Wisconsin for that refrigerator he never paid for, and dreamed of the food he could store in it. It was an ingenious, efficient alternative to raising postal rates. At least, I thought so.

  The post office was a reasonably modern brick building, in clear violation of the Gambier code of quaintness and collegiate gothicnicity, which must have been frustrating to the stuffy, old Kenyon people. I liked that. It meant I wasn’t alone behind the lines. There was a resistance movement somewhere. The lobby’s inner walls were covered in bronze systematically numbered mailboxes flanking an empty business window — all very Maginot line-like. Posted hours – 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. That also appealed to me: no freshman or losers here. At the bottom of every bank of boxes were a few, larger ones that were marked with a letter followed by a number. Harry’s key didn’t fit in A-2, not even close. I checked Mrs. Hoople’s box. There was an electric bill for her from Mount Vernon Power and Light and a piece of mail for Harry from the Kenyon registrar. I opened it. Harry had gotten all As for the semester.