The Neighbor by Dean Koontz

1
    My name is Malcolm Pomerantz, and I’m an axe man, though not like those guys on that reality-TV show about loggers. Had I ever been
that
kind of axe man, I would long ago have cut off both feet or been crushed by a toppling tree. I’ve been clumsy all my life. I have managed not to stumble into an accidental death only because my profession—I’m a musician—doesn’t require me to deal with power tools or treacherous terrain.
Axe
is musicians’ slang for
instrument
, and my axe is a saxophone. I have been playing it since I was seven, when the sax and I were nearly the same size.
    I’m fifty-nine now, two years older than Jonah, my best friend of half a century. I’m tall, and Jonah’s not. I’m white; he’s black. When I first met him in the summer of 1967, Jonah was ten and quick and graceful, a piano prodigy, and I was twelve and lumbered around like Lurch, the butler in
The Addams Family
, which had been big on TV the previous year. When I first heard him playing, he rocked the keyboard with Fats Domino’s “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday.” In both our lives, 1967 proved to be … unforgettable.
    At my insistence, Jonah recently talked his life—or at least a strange and tumultuous portion of it—into a tape recorder, and his story became a book titled
The City
. There isn’t any point in talking my life, because most of the interesting parts are what happened when I was hanging out with Jonah; he’s already covered that territory. I do have one little experience to recount, however, a curious series of events that occurred a few weeks before I met him. Like his more engaging story, mine suggests that the world is a more mysterious place than it seems to be most of the time, when we’re plodding along from breakfast to bedtime in a reassuringly familiar routine.
    In those days, my sister, Amalia, was seventeen, five years older than I was, but we were as close as twins. Not that we looked alike. Blond hair in a ponytail, she was lithe and graceful, full of such enthusiasm for life that both in sunshine and in shadow, she had a glow that I swear was not entirely a figment of her adoring little brother’s imagination. On the other hand, I was a loose-limbed twelve-year-old with an Adam’s apple that made me look as if I had swallowed a Granny Smith whole and had gotten it stuck in my throat. Although she didn’t have much of awardrobe, Amalia always wore the right thing for the occasion and looked as if she’d stepped out of a Sears catalog. With my round shoulders and arms as disproportionately long as those of an orangutan, I tried to disguise my awkward form by dressing as if I were an adult, though, being blind to fashion, I only called greater attention to my gangly nature: black wing tips but with white socks, dress pants hiked a couple of inches north of my navel, my short-sleeved spread-collar white shirt buttoned all the way to the throat.
    At twelve, I didn’t yet think much about girls. Considering my long, pale face and hound-dog eyes behind black-rimmed glasses with thick lenses, maybe I already knew that even through adulthood I’d never be a guy who had flocks of pretty girls in flight around him. I had the love of my sister and my saxophone, and that was enough.
    It had better be enough, because Amalia and I didn’t have a home life that would be suitable for a TV show like
Ozzie and Harriet
or
Leave It to Beaver
. Our old man was a machinist, a foreman for an entire shop of lathe operators, most of the time as silent as a rock, a cold man who by his stare alone could convey his disapproval and his ardent wish that he could hold you to his lathe and shape you into someone more appealing. Chesterfield cigarettes were to him what the Eucharist is to devout Catholics. Amalia insisted he wasn’t cold, but only wounded by life and emotionally isolated. Our mother liked TV around the clock, interludes of neighborhood gossip with Mrs. Janowski, who lived next door, and Lucky Strike