Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  Calmer followed this motion from the ground, sensing that the windlass operator was unsure of himself in the fog, wishing he were operating it himself, and almost at the same moment this thought arrived, he saw two of the supporting lines go slack. Then, in a kind of slow motion, the platform dropped open about sixty degrees and stopped, and Calmer, who decided later that he must have been under the influence of the undertaker’s question about piano moving, in fact thought of a grand piano, somehow turned upside down, the lid falling open. And then saw the piano player tumbling out of his own instrument.

  And as Calmer imagined falling piano players, the casket dropped silently through the fog, and then began landing, three distinct landings—two crashes and a tremendous thud, like God himself had fallen out of the nest, a noise that hung distinctly in Calmer’s memory all day.

  The casket and its lid and its various hardware were strewn across the deck, reminding Calmer of a pecan nut stomped open. The congressman himself was lying belly up across a stairwell in the attitude of a man offering his face to the shower, or the Lord, looking for all the world like somebody with nothing to hide.

  On the bright side of things, beyond having come apart the casket did not appear damaged, so the problem was only a matter of reassembly. And what could be assembled once could be assembled again.

  Calmer issued orders quietly, and there was an equally quiet, insectlike scramble of sailors over the body and the various parts of the casket, and a moment later the body and the various pieces of the casket were below deck and Calmer was surprised to find himself washed in relief at having it all out of sight.

  Calmer went into the room and locked the door.

  The congressman’s body and the pieces of his casket were lying across two tables used for butchering. The room was airtight and refrigerated, ventilated from the ceiling. Enormous sides of beef hung from hooks, pale blue and shiny, and there were boxes of poultry, cheese, eggs, thousands of pounds of perishable food. The congressman looked vaguely uncomfortable, his hair unmussed and perfect, decked out in a pinstriped Brooks Brothers suit which, truth be told, did him no favors, figure-wise, an effect enhanced perhaps by the fact that he was barefoot, his feet a color of blue similar to the hanging meat, and swollen well beyond the recognizable shape of human feet, as if they had been squeezed out of the pants’ legs like toothpaste.

  Calmer used a thin nylon rope to hold the box together while the glue set, looping it top to bottom like some country girl’s suitcase.

  He closed the door behind him, hoping to borrow another hour against the moment the coffin had to be untied and brought back up on deck. He found his body singing with optimism. The box would hold—it should hold—although the pallbearers would have to carry it on their shoulders now because one of the railings had broken off the side and would never support the weight of the full casket. It could be done, though. He’d lifted the body and gotten it back into the box alone; six men could get it up onto their shoulders. The hard part would be navigating the stairway back to the deck. He pictured how that might go and experienced a brief sagging in the singing optimism department, and behind that came a knee-buckling weight which is the burden of optimism, at least when optimism flies in the face of common sense and perhaps the laws of physical science.

  And now he remembered that three of the pallbearers would be politicians—a member of the House from a district adjacent to Toebox’s and two of Toebox’s aides—and Calmer tried but could no longer remember what there had been to be optimistic about in the first place. Politicians for pallbearers? The effect of cold temperature on quick-drying glue? A ship full of reporters and photographers?

  Thinking these thoughts, he turned a corner and very nearly flattened Iris Toebox.

  EIGHT

  The moment he laid eyes on this woman, a shot of desire fired somewhere so close to Calmer Ottosson that he could feel the concussion, and a whole tree of blackbirds rose at once into the sky. Which is the romantic way of saying that he just wanted to row her across Lake Michigan.

  Iris was wearing a black coat over a black dress and a hat with a veil that was not yet dropped over her face. He had seen her picture the day before in the Philadelphia Bulletin, but it had not prepared him for this. She was not beautiful so much as flawless. Everything perfectly in place, perfectly in balance. Perfect calves, perfect ankles, perfect feet—although he couldn’t actually see the feet, which were inside the shoes setting off her ankles and calves.

  And the wings beat in his throat. All the panicked birds.

  On her arm was a second lieutenant named Jerome Jensen, to Calmer’s knowledge the worst officer on his ship. A man of breathtaking incompetence, no attention span, in love with detail and procedure and the uniform itself, and who habitually wrote up enlisted men for the smallest infractions and informed confidentially on his fellow officers.

  It spoke of them both perhaps that Jensen had no whiff that he and Calmer were not eye to eye.

  On reflection, Calmer would see that in regard to what happened that morning vis-à-vis the widow Toebox, it was his own imagination at fault; he had never imagined that even Jensen could make a botched job of greeting the congressman’s widow. Calmer had intended to meet her himself but after the loading accident wanted as much time to put the congressman and his box right as he could get, and so had turned it over to the first officer he saw, which was Jensen. It seemed like a good idea, in fact, as Jensen looked like an officer and always wore his uniform spotless and freshly pressed. Calmer was very clear with the orders: Greet Mrs. Toebox when she arrived at the ship, apologize for Calmer’s absence, escort her to Calmer’s quarters to await the burial. Make her comfortable. Offer her coffee or a drink, something to eat if she wanted it, the morning papers, and then leave her alone.

  He had given these orders slowly, patiently, and Jensen had nodded along just as patiently, yet here he stood, slightly behind her in the passageway, looking confident and not a little self-satisfied.

  “Commander Ottosson,” he said, “may I present Mrs. Toebox. She has asked to be with her husband.”

  She smiled and offered Calmer her hand. Pale, tapered fingers lay cool and light against his palm. Her wedding ring had been moved to her right hand, which he remembered was the custom of widows back in his part of South Dakota, too.

  He tried not to look at Jensen, afraid he might strangle him. “Allow me to offer you my quarters, Mrs. Toebox,” he said, and now he did glance quickly at Jensen. “It’s warmer, and there’s something to drink. I’m sure you’ll be more comfortable.”

  “Thank you,” she said, “but I prefer to be with my husband.”

  She spoke directly and evenly, and her voice did not begin to break as he thought it might. She waited a moment longer, then smiled politely and looked back at Jensen. “This way, you said?”

  “Yes ma’am,” and he nodded at Calmer as if he had everything under control. She started around him in the direction of the storage room. She was smooth and perfectly balanced, giving nothing away. Bereaved as a house cat, from her outward appearance.

  He stood a moment watching her from behind, aching to protect her—always his first impulse with women who attracted him. He realized this was not an ordinary impulse, not even faintly tangent to sexual intercourse, but there it was and had always been. Except this time there were birds and the ache to protect her mingled with the woman’s scent.

  He got to the door first. “I’m afraid there was a small accident bringing the casket on board,” he said. She didn’t seem to hear that, just waited for him to open the door.

  It was colder inside than he remembered. The casket also seemed different now: lying over the tables against the far wall, tied up like a hostage. Moisture had condensed on the lid.

  He sent Jensen to get Mrs. Toebox a chair, and for a few minutes he was alone with her in cold storage, and the panicked birds pounded in his throat.

  She seemed to think he had other things on his mind. “I’m quite comfort
able here, Captain,” she said. “I’m sure you have more important matters to address.”

  “Commander,” he said, “I’m only a commander.” He saw that she didn’t understand the difference, but he was satisfied just to have set the record straight. He noticed that she hadn’t remarked on the condition of the casket or asked what sort of accident he’d meant.

  He heard himself say, “I understand your husband was a navy man.” Polite conversation for Calmer was like dancing, trying to remember the steps.

  She gazed at the casket, and he couldn’t read her at all.

  “He was in the war,” she said. “He got the Purple Heart.”

  And then Jensen came back with a chair, and as time passed it occurred to Calmer that everything he had ever been and done was aimed at this single morning, that she was what he had come this far to find.

  The Buck Whittemore cleared port at Philadelphia at 0800 hours and headed for deep water. Calmer reluctantly left Iris in cold storage and went to the bridge, checking the course and the radar. A light fog lay over the water, but a breeze was coming up from the south, beginning to clear it off, and he could see into it almost to the curve of the earth. His eyesight was still exceptional; the doctors at flight school had never seen anything like it.

  He thought of the widow Toebox down in the storage room alone with the corpse, sitting next to it in the chair Jensen had brought, her legs crossed, feeling the roll and the size of the sea. And thought of the way she presented herself, even in mourning, as if nothing from life had laid a finger on her yet. In his experience the widow’s appearance was an oddity for a woman who had grown up on a ranch. As a rule, ranch work—like farmwork, there wasn’t much difference for the women—left its mark on them early, even if they married and moved into town. The womanly side dried up ahead of time, and year by year what was left was distinguishable from the men, who also were drying up, but more slowly and in a different way. Which is to say the men dried up mostly from the work, the women from the worry.

  The wives of Calmer’s cousins, for instance, were all wrung out by now, most of them still only in their thirties. Arlo’s wife was sunshine itself, but already whiskery and the best arm wrestler in the family.

  But nothing about the widow Toebox reminded Calmer of any of his cousins’ wives. He pictured her now inspecting the casket—which he hadn’t quite gotten shut all the way, leaving the width of a dime between the box and the lid, a crack he expected would be hidden by the flag—and then had another picture, which he had been picturing on and off ever since he’d seen the photograph of Toebox and his wife that ran with the obituary in the Evening Bulletin. How had it looked, the act itself between the congressman and his small, tidy wife? From the photograph in the Bulletin, it must have looked like a fat man fucking a mattress.

  And as that image came and passed, Lieutenant Jensen meandered up onto the bridge, blowing over the surface of a cup of coffee, and sat down casually on the corner of the map table.

  Calmer was still picturing the widow alone in the meat locker, and seeing Jensen he was suddenly unsure if holes had been drilled in the floor of the casket. The holes should have been drilled at the funeral home, but the old undertaker was plainly in some prolonged state of distraction, in the way old men sometimes were when the great distraction of their lives was no longer much of a distraction and they saw what was left. Or, to put it another way, they’d let go of pussy matters only to find themselves confronted with the big picture.

  Calmer wondered if the big picture looked different if you’d been putting bodies in the ground all your life.

  He looked around the wheelhouse, and everyone save Jensen was at work.

  “Lieutenant,” he said, and Jensen stood up and saluted. He hadn’t noticed Calmer when he walked in.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Calmer motioned him closer and spoke so that the other officers and men couldn’t hear what he was saying. He did not chastise officers in front of each other; ordinarily he didn’t have to chastise them at all. They knew he was paying attention, and for most of them that was enough. “I have something for you to do,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Calmer saw him begin to smile and had a corresponding impulse to pick him up by the neck. Instead, he moved a few inches even closer and was pleased to see a look of alarm cross the second lieutenant’s face. “I want the coffin prepared for burial,” he said.

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  “Wait, just wait. I want you to go back down to the storage locker and station yourself outside the door. Am I clear so far? You are outside the locker, she is inside, the door is shut.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A few minutes ahead of the ceremony, I will arrive to escort Mrs. Toebox to the deck. After we are no longer in the locker, you will enter the room and check the coffin to make sure holes have been drilled into the bottom. There should be ten or twelve holes, one inch in diameter. If there are not, you will drill them yourself. Are we clear?”

  “Aye-aye, sir. Ten to twelve holes, one inch in diameter.”

  “The casket is lying between two tables, so you won’t have to move it to gain access to the bottom.”

  “Yes, sir. No problem, sir.”

  Calmer studied him a few seconds longer. He thought of calling him off the job and doing it himself. Just drilling the holes with her there in the room, but then he imagined the drill bit breaking through and slipping in too deep, pulling spiraled flesh out of the bottom of the box.

  No, he thought, not with her in the room.

  Still, he tried to cover his bases. “This is not a matter in which you are to exercise personal discretion, Lieutenant,” he said.

  “No, sir.”

  Calmer studied him a moment and then nodded, dismissing him, and went back to the helm, lost in the image of the congressman having at his poor smothering wife.

  He cut the speed to three knots, the ship rolling now in five-foot swells. Approaching the spot. He went to collect the widow.

  Jensen was outside her door, as ordered. He knocked once, waited a moment, and looked in. To his enormous relief, she was still there. He felt ridiculous. What had he expected?

  The crew was assembled in parade dress all along the port side of the deck. The reporters and photographers had come up from the ship’s galley and were clustered together, apart from the sailors. Calmer stood with the widow and as he watched, one of the photographers, an old-timer in a duck hunter’s hat and a black cigar took the cigar out of his teeth, leaned over the side and vomited, some of it blowing back onto his pants and the cameras hanging from his neck. He put the cigar back in his teeth, pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and dabbed here and there around the cigar to clean up his mouth and chin, and then knelt and began working on his shoes.

  Calmer hoped the rest of the media wouldn’t begin chucking breakfast too, which was the way it sometimes went. Somebody yodels and a minute later you’ve got an avalanche. He couldn’t protect her from that.

  There was motion behind him, the honor guard emerged from below, and behind it the coffin bearers and the coffin. Three sailors, three civilians. The coffin was draped in a flag of the United States. Calmer had not seen who’d brought the coffin up from the meat locker to its present spot, but two of his healthiest-looking enlisted men now lifted it from the deck and set it carefully on the coffin bearers’ shoulders. Among the bearers were the congressman from the neighboring district and the two Toebox aides. The color guard was all from Toebox’s home district and had been brought on board with the widow and politicians for the ceremony. There was no official beginning, but the procession to the side of the ship began and the crew came to attention, and a moment later even the members of the press fell silent, and in the quiet you could hear the flags overhead snapping in the wind. The coffin bearers, meanwhile, sailors and civilians alike, took short, stumbling steps under the weight, and the ship pitched and rolled. The wind had moved to the north, and the ship’s bow was no l
onger directly into it.

  The civilians had all taken one side of the box, and the sailors from Toebox’s home district had taken the other. The sailors were taller than the civilians, and stronger, and that side of the box was riding half a foot higher than the other. Calmer now saw disaster everywhere he looked.

  The congressman from the neighboring district had turned red, as if he were holding his breath, and then he stumbled, and the whole civilian side of the casket seemed to stumble with him. The scene earlier on the deck came back to Calmer, the casket lying in parts and the congressman face up, a quizzical cast to his expression, as if there were something about all this that he still didn’t understand.

  Calmer stood beside the widow Toebox, and she moved slightly in to him, her shoulder touching his arm, but he could not be sure if she had wanted him closer or if it was only the rolling of the ship. She did not pull away, though, and the spot where they connected issued some sweet, unknown buzzing.

  The casket bearers reached the spot and set the casket down. Relieved of his load the congressman from the neighboring district pitched violently and pulled the flag off the flag-draped coffin in an effort to save himself from the fall. And Calmer felt her still there against him, slightly pressed in to him, all of her attention straight ahead. Did she even know they were touching? He did not move even an inch, afraid to lose the connection.

  He tried to think of something to say but nothing came. Small talk again. The honor guard stood at attention behind them, rifles at their sides, and then he did think of something—he saw he could tell her to cover her ears before they fired off the salute. It felt like a blessing, this small thing he’d been given to say. He saw her gaze shift to the mechanism that would release the casket into the sea. Beyond it the sea looked as hard and gray as the side of the ship itself.