Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  This was also the feeling back home, more or less, when word reached his constituents. It was like Montgomery Ward had gone out of business.

  Not that Toebox was particularly worse than the other great public servants of his time, and in fact was in some ways probably better, at least kept in closer contact with the people. He probably knew a thousand of them by name—he had a trick of memory that helped him match names with faces—and this trick had naturally fostered in him the conceit that he was irreplaceable, which is a common enough conceit in the business, although in the hard light of day, Rudolph Toebox, like so many of his colleagues, was exactly as irreplaceable as the laces in your shoes.

  He was drinking peppermint schnapps out of a leather-covered flask when the end came, sweating even in the cold, and had been trying to distract himself from an oncoming bout of food poisoning ever since he ate the hot dogs at the beginning of the second quarter. Three of them, heavy on the sauerkraut and onions. And now the same gimped-up little nigger harnessed into the aluminum box had reappeared at the end of the row of seats and was standing there, trying to get his attention, trying to sell him three more.

  “Three mo’, big man. Three mo’…”

  The congressman ignored the vendor and concentrated on the problem. As it happened, he was known in Washington as a problem solver, and had his secrets for that too. One secret, actually, as at heart, like so many other distinguished public servants, he was a surprisingly simple fellow. A one-solution man, in fact.

  No sudden moves.

  That was the ticket. Long years of public servitude on behalf of one of the vast and barren regions of America—a thousand speeches at one-room schoolhouse graduations, at co-ops and churches and VFW halls—had taught him firsthand the nature of life on the prairie, and he had come to understand that nothing out there, not beast nor fowl, liked things to move suddenly; that sudden movement was always an invitation to stampede. Cattle, geese, bison, chickens, the common man: They were all the same, and now, in a moment of insight just before the end, he saw his theory also applied to diarrhea. Who knew, it might have been the key to the universe.

  Too late for that, though. The seats he’d been given, wonderful as they were, were fifty yards from the closest bathrooms, and there was not a chance of making it. He didn’t have the time; he didn’t have the strength. He was weak in a way now that went beyond all the ways he had been weak before. In Toebox’s final moments, he could not have lifted his own bosom.

  Which was why, even suffocating in his coat, he hadn’t been up to moving around enough to take it off. Instead, he sat inside it and sweated. The coat was made of vicuña and had been given to him for Christmas the previous year by the nation of Bolivia, along with a matching hat. Iris didn’t care for the hat and worried that it made him look like a Communist, but Toebox wore it anyway. He loved hats, and here, if you’d like to see it, is a list of the ones she cleaned out of the Washington apartment later that week after she got back from the funeral: an Elk’s cap, an honorary deputy sheriff’s hat, a mortarboard he got from the state university where he received his honorary Ph.D., several Stetson cowboy hats that were presented to him as mementos for serving as grand marshal of various parades and rodeos in the western regions of his district, a Brooks Brothers fedora he was given—along with a pin-striped, double-breasted blue suit—when he toured the plant, a Beefeater’s hat like the ones the guards wear at Buckingham Palace (a gift from the British ambassador to the U.N.), a Japanese helmet with a bullet hole through the side—the only one he paid for himself—and a yarmulke he got at some Jewish deal that he never did find out what it was supposed to be about.

  Back in the home district Toebox was known variously as A Man of Many Hats and Your Voice in Washington and The Working Congressman—there were highway signs that said those things everywhere you went—but while he was in fact many-hatted, and undeniably had a certain voice in Washington (forty-yard-line seats to the Army-Navy game spoke for themselves), the only work he’d ever done that you could call work was a stint in the U.S. Navy, where his specialty was waxing floors. Toebox’s floor waxing occurred in 1942, early in the war, and led to a Purple Heart when he stepped into a puddle of water as he operated the waxing machine, briefly dancing out into the land of cardiac arrest, then was brought back more or less along the same route, when a medic hooked up his toes to the same outlet, more or less inventing the defibrillator. After that, he would not even plug in a toaster, and was eventually designated Section 8 and sent home to Iris.

  And there, as the district’s first war hero returned live from combat, he ran for and was elected to public office, and spoke mysteriously of the hidden scars of war, and while he was not reluctant to wear his medals and ribbons at parades and VFW speeches and appearances at high school gymnasiums, the specific incident behind his own hidden scars Toebox would not discuss. More than once some smart little crapper in the audience asked if he’d smothered an enemy grenade—there was always one at every school assembly bringing his size into it—and he would eye the kid for a long minute before he answered, pointing him out for the principal to deal with later, and say the same thing: “The real heroes didn’t come back, son.” Which would shut the kid up, all right, and as a rule dropped the rest of them into a respectful silence too.

  The farmers and ranchers in Toebox’s part of the country were appreciative of his visits to their children’s schools and his stand against higher taxes to raise the salaries of teachers and other public workers, and liked his billboards and his short, snappy-looking wife, and he was elected again and again.

  His district was the entire state, a flat, dry rectangle of prairie and plains out in that part of the country that is all rectangles and plains, and occupied by farmers and ranchers and the salesmen in ties half a foot wide who followed them, selling them Oldsmobiles and John Deere tractors. Yet, in spite of the congressman’s prairie roots, and hers, Iris decided to have the body buried at sea. Perhaps because of his service in the navy—he’d won the Purple Heart, after all—or perhaps it was the expense. It was not the cheapest thing in the world to ship 360-odd pounds across the country, especially refrigerated, which in itself seemed like a ridiculous waste of money at this time of year. Iris had spent her twenties in the Great Depression and had seen hard times and was tight with a dollar.

  But whatever the reason she decided that her husband should be returned to the sea instead of the prairie, the point here is the way things happen—in this case, the end of the congressman and the beginning of Spooner—the long way around telling you that after a sparsely attended funeral, Toebox’s casket was driven to the naval station in South Philadelphia, and the next morning loaded on board the U.S.S. Buck Whittemore, a 2,800-ton Forrest Sherman–class destroyer under the command of Commander Calmer Ottosson, a polite, soft-spoken farm boy from South Dakota turned wunderkind at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, turned youngest commander in the United States Navy, and now, still polite and soft-spoken, plainly an officer on the fast track to the top.

  Except things morbid and unexpected happened one after another that day on the Buck Whittemore, and after that day, the only place Calmer Ottosson was going as far as the navy was concerned was back to wherever he came from, the sooner the better.

  And which accounts, indirectly, for how he became Spooner’s father.

  FIVE

  Calmer Ottosson had not received the coffin containing Rudolph Toebox gladly. The congressman came with reporters and photographers, for one thing, and a widow and a congressional aide and other congressmen and their congressional aides, and Calmer, who didn’t like on-board ceremonies in the first place, or, now that he thought it over, on-board politicians, resented the waste of money and time just to drop one over the side. In this way he was unlike most of his classmates back at Annapolis, who were drawn into the service by ceremony and/or the uniform itself.

  But then, Calmer was bare-bones itself. Except for physical-education classes, he’d had no so
cial life at all at the academy, no girls, no card games, no sports, no fistfights, very little self-abuse. He was reclusive and self-reliant, never comfortable asking for anything, even the salt and pepper. His only authorized activity beyond the ordinary academic life of a midshipman was caring for the school’s mascot, Bill, a sweet, low-key angora goat whom he fed and groomed throughout his junior and senior years, and for whom he kept a secret, oddly romantic diary entitled The Quiet Yearnings of Bill, a Castrated Goat.

  He held himself to a short regimen of nightly calisthenics and taught himself to write with his feet. This foot writing was accomplished by holding a pencil between his second and third toes (counting from the inside out), and before he gave it up he could write in script or block letters and even turn the pencil around and erase his mistakes.

  He was a natural student with a tireless curiosity and could stay awake forty-eight hours and still think clearly over an exam. He played the piano and did square roots in his head, and could read sheet music and in some way hear it almost as if he were remembering it.

  He kept these things to himself and kept himself apart, yet never seemed to stir the kind of resentment and misunderstandings that you might expect, this sort of person in this sort of place. And nothing about this ever changed. Sixth in his class at Annapolis, first at flight school in Memphis, and right to the end had no enemies below or above.

  If the question occurs to you as to how or why a human being teaches himself to write with his feet, it began, at least in this case, with a letter from home. Calmer’s mother wrote all the letters and cards that came out of the house, and he received one every week, Wednesday or Thursday, usually six pages long, as it was her habit to compose a page a day, usually after the supper dishes were done, and rest on the Sabbath. The letters were full of weather forecasts, crop reports, news of broken drive belts, what the coyotes had killed while she and Dad were at church (My, but the varmint has got Father’s dander up this time! He’s still setting up there in the upstairs bathroom window with his 30-30 and a flashlight, wouldn’t even come down for supper…), stories of broken fences and heartburn, car wrecks, tractor accidents. And newspaper clippings. Sometimes it seemed like she’d clipped the whole Conde Record. Winners and losers of the turkey shoot down at the Rod and Gun Club, football scores, honor rolls, high school graduations, marriages, births, obituaries. The letters were always signed Love, Father and Mom.

  It was toward the end of one of her letters, after a detailed, strangely nonpartisan account of a monthlong battle of wits between Father and a weasel that was raising cain in the henhouse that she dropped in the news about Arlo:

  I suppose you heard by now that Cousin Arlo finally run out of Luck with that polar bear in Minneapolis and had Three Fingers de-gloved on his left hand, which I am given to understand means the bear got it all but the Bones, which the docs proceeded to Lop off at the hospital anyways. He made all the papers and the UPI news wire, and said he didn’t blame nobody at the Zoo, lest of all the bear, who was just doing the job she was hired to do. Just his luck to be left handed! I am certain he’ll be looking at those missing fingers for the rest of his Life, and think about what a darn Fool he was to be getting drunk with that crowd in the first place. But that’s Arlo for you, the one that’s always got to find out everything for himself.

  And off this news, Calmer taught himself to write with his feet. More out of curiosity than sympathy, wondering what he would do if he lost his own fingers. As the fitness reports always said—right up until the day he was ruined—Calmer Ottosson was an officer prepared for contingencies.

  But more to the point, teaching himself to write with his feet was the sort of thing he had been up to all his life. Making his own fun, as the great writer called it.

  But then, like the great writer, he’d grown up alone.

  An adopted only child on a break-even two-hundred-acre farm fourteen miles southeast of Conde, South Dakota, a tiny spot up in the northeast corner of the map near Aberdeen, who at seven years old enjoyed sitting barefoot in a plowed field, balancing his father’s helmet from the war on his head and firing his single-shot Remington .22 into the air, correcting for the breeze as the little puffs of dust appeared in the spots where the bullets landed, trying to bring one right in on top of his head. He was a child who listened to what he was told and never bragged about his good marks at school or his shooting, just as years later, at the academy, he never mentioned that he could write with his feet. Not to anyone there, not in any of his letters home. Not even the ones to Cousin Arlo, although Arlo would have been tickled to hear of it—Arlo was everybody’s favorite, and not just because he led a colorful life and visited the twin cities and Chicago and came home with stories on himself, but also because, unlike the rest of them, he knew how to accept a compliment without feeling indebted, which led to family resentments. Most of them wouldn’t smile if you gave them the Nobel Prize. On the other hand, Arlo was a damn-the-torpedoes drinker, especially at family celebrations, and Calmer didn’t want the relatives hearing about his foot writing at a baptism or a funeral and coming away thinking that he’d got so fancy in college that he was having fun these days off the misfortunes of his own cousin, which would just kill his mother.

  Once in a while, though, alone on a Saturday night, he might take off his shoes and socks and stand on his desk, ducking his head to accommodate the ceiling, and write a letter:

  Dear Arlo,

  Greetings and salutations! Mother wrote with the happy news that you have finally quit biting your nails.

  Or something of that nature, which was the nature of Calmer and Arlo around each other, and had always been. Calmer was no mischief maker himself, but he had an appreciation for those who were, and even when his luck ran out and he lost all the things he’d worked for and was drained empty, he never quit trying to see himself in the world as Arlo did, as part of the story.

  SIX

  If it is fair to say that Calmer Ottosson got where he was in spite of an inclination to avoid human entanglements, it is also fair to say that he got where he was because of it, loners and leaders so often turning out to be the same people. This solitary bent was his nature, but it was also a practical thing. Humans, he’d noticed early on, even before the academy, followed best when they couldn’t see who was leading.

  There was another reason for keeping apart, demonstrated in his awkwardness at finding himself off duty and in the proximity of the same men who took his orders. He accepted this awkwardness, knowing better than to try to change it, knowing his shyness was as set in him as the shape of his head. On duty, though, there was no shyness; he was fair with people and respectful, played no favorites, kept no enemies. Kept to himself. Privately, he did not trust even the best of them to do their jobs, particularly at sea, and constantly took the ship’s signs himself, often knowing instinctively where trouble was coming—the engine room, communications, the kitchen, the mood of the crew—even before it arrived.

  He did these things quietly and in order of importance, leaving time enough during the day to do his own work too.

  How he kept this schedule was anybody’s guess, except that for a human being Calmer could do with very little sleep. Beyond that, what was most in his favor was an innate sense of how things were put together and the way one part affected another—an engine, a horse, a septic tank, an outbreak of flu on ship—if a thing had moving parts, he could find a logic behind the movement, and when it broke, he would see how to fix it.

  He was slower to see himself in the same way, though, and it was only later on that he came to understand that he’d done too much of the work himself, kept to himself too long. It had affected his judgment, this being alone, and led to what happened, and made him see things that were not there.

  SEVEN

  The sky was still dark when the congressman was delivered to the pier, not a glimpse of light in the east. The congressman arrived in a gray Cadillac hearse, the driver an old man in a black suit and a jet-bla
ck toupee who owned a funeral home on South Broad Street and did quite a bit of business with the navy. Calmer came off the ship to personally supervise the unloading and introduced himself to the undertaker.

  “Calmer?” the undertaker said. “I never heard that one before.” Then he squeezed Calmer’s bicep and said, “You ever done any piano moving, sonny?”

  It was a few minutes before six in the morning, and there were already eight or nine reporters on board, along with half again as many photographers. It was cold, and the newspapermen were all down in the galley, some of them eating, some of them drinking laced coffee against the chill of the morning, talking about the stories they’d covered that were better stories than this one.

  The casket was made of mahogany and weighed, fully loaded, something over five hundred pounds. It emerged from the Cadillac dark and gleaming (rollers had been installed at the business end of the vehicle, and they rang faintly as they spun) and was gathered up into the hands of as many sailors as could squeeze in to grab hold. Wherever Calmer went in the navy, it was always the enlisted men—not the officers—who went out of their way not to disappoint him.

  He signed for the congressman and shook the funeral man’s hand—it felt as small and fragile as a child’s—and the casket was placed carefully in the center of a platform attached by four lines to a windlass operated from the deck of the Buck Whittemore.

  Calmer checked the lines himself, then motioned to the operator, and the platform lifted slowly into the air, Calmer leaning farther and farther back to follow its progress. There was a whining noise from the electric motor and the platform climbed slowly into the fog and then stopped. The noise changed pitch and the platform jerked sideways, commencing a swinging motion that continued even as the casket dropped slowly toward the deck.