Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  Relatives had begun to filter into town, and the neighbors brought over hams and macaroni salads, and Calmer sat at the kitchen table, not so much bereaved as distracted. By now he’d quit trying to keep track of the growing loads of food and relatives being dropped off at the door. He didn’t seem pestered in the least by all the movement and attention, although to Spooner the place felt like it was being ransacked.

  The doorbell rang again, and Calmer came back into the kitchen carrying a ham the size of a pygmy.

  They went to the funeral home in the morning to see her, in two cars: Darrow and Phillip and Calmer in the Buick, Margaret and her husband and Spooner in the rental Spooner had picked up at the airport.

  Spooner had taken a pain pill when he woke up in his old bedroom that morning, then had another one when he heard they were going to the funeral home. But even drugged and sweet, he did not want to see his mother. The rest of them did, though, as Spooner had known they would.

  Spooner could not predict what note the sight of their mother’s body might sound in his sister or brothers, except that Darrow, who was born wise and calm in that same familiar way Calmer was, could be counted on to keep his head and conduct business. To take that weight at least off Calmer’s shoulders. He was younger than Spooner, but in a world that made any sense would have been the older brother.

  The leadership of the expedition having been conceded to Darrow, Spooner envisioned his own function as the muscle, like one of those fellows standing behind the president in sunglasses with that doohickey in his ear, there just in case. If something happened, he would be the one to throw himself on the grenade, which, everything considered, was not such a bad way to go, a painless death plus you got to miss the funeral.

  Margaret rode with Spooner in the front seat of the rented car. Her husband was in back, reading the obituary that had run that morning in the newspaper, the stem of his unlit pipe clamped into his mouth all the way back to the molars. Calmer and Phillip and Darrow had left ten minutes ahead of them in the old Buick.

  Spooner looked over at Margaret now, gazing through the passenger window at the town. She’d left home for college before Calmer took the job in South Dakota, and although she came home most summers to visit, the place was never the place you come back to for her, the way Prairie Glen might have been if they’d stayed there. And even though Spooner was no more tied to Falling Rapids than she was, he found himself sorry that Margaret had no connection to the place. She was hungry for these things, and for as long as he could remember she had tried to hold on to whatever small pieces of the past she could. He supposed it was the difference in their ages. It was only eighteen months but in some way she’d known their father and lost him, while for Spooner he was missing from the start. And out of this difference came her hard claims on the things she had left, while Spooner lived more or less on the other side of the mirror, never believing anything was his for good until it was so generally worthless that nobody else would want it.

  The dog, for instance. The dog was definitely his.

  Harry was deaf and blind and brittle now, horrible to smell, always gnawing away at some part of his body, a leg or his tail or his pecker, apparently trying to whittle himself out of this world. He still occasionally wandered the small dirt road along the south shore of the little lake where they lived, yearning perhaps for one last feel of some fluffy white poodle’s throat in his jaws, but mostly these days he just stayed home, gnawing.

  Doing all this chewing on his person, he would, by evening each day, have accumulated long, crescent-shaped glops of hair behind his lower front teeth, soaked in the saliva of his poor infected gums, and every night while Mrs. Spooner warmed his—Spooner’s—dinner, Spooner would sit on the floor with the dog, pry open his mouth and pick out the day’s accumulation of hair. Usually it came out all at once, like a dentist’s impression of your teeth, and lately on occasion one of his teeth came out with it.

  Yes, Harry was all his.

  No one would take his dog.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Spooner walked behind his sister and her husband toward the funeral home. Calmer, Darrow, and Phillip were up ahead, waiting near the door. Another family was emptying out of the place, happy to be loose again and free, nobody exactly skipping, but no dawdlers either, about like the unloading of an airliner.

  Some of the mourners in this group nodded to Spooner as they passed, a few even stepping off the sidewalk into the grass to let him by, perhaps an acknowledgment that they’d made it out and Spooner was just going in. Or that they were all in the same boat. For whatever reasons, half a dozen small connections were struck and extinguished, all in the same moment.

  The business office was small and warm and smelled of the press of flesh, not as neatly kept as Spooner would have predicted—an ashtray had been left on a chair, and there were others here and there around the room, half full of ashes and gum wrappers and ground-out cigarette butts, some blotted with exotic shades of lipstick, and the trash can beside the old man’s desk was stuffed full with papers—but remarkable in its size and seating capacity. There was a sofa, a love seat, nine leather chairs; fifteen people could be right at home. Sixteen, if you moved the ashtray.

  “Please,” the old man said, “make yourself comfortable. Call me Junior.”

  Now that Spooner looked, the old man was a very old man, and small; the desk was enormous. An old man in an old suit, a freshly cut flower in one of his lapels. Junior’s suit appeared to be four sizes larger than Junior, but he was old, and Spooner supposed he might have shrunk.

  “May I begin,” Junior said, “by offering my deepest condolences.” He distributed business cards, looking from one member of the family to the next expectantly, as if he’d offered to fight anyone in the bar.

  The card identified Al Hershey, Jr., co-owner of Hershey’s Funeral Home with Ralph Hershey, Jr., serving the needs of Falling Rapids since 1939. Dignity at Reasonable Prices. Two Hersheys and each of them a junior. Cousins?

  It was hard to say how long ago Al Hershey, Jr., might have been born—eighty-five, ninety-five years—his head was strangely shaped, disproportionately large on top, like a muffin. And lying sideways across this muffinlike head was a patch of hair as black as the Bible but apparently constructed for someone with a narrower pate than the old man’s. It lay up there like a house cat, and gradually an unthinkable thought slinked into Spooner’s consciousness, and once that thought rolled in, Spooner speculated that Junior might have gotten the suit the same way. And the shoes! Nobody of Junior’s stature had feet big enough to fill the shiny new wing tips he was wearing.

  Junior was talking business; bereavement, respect, sacred memory, comfort, dignity, waterproofing for the ages. Spooner wondered if words like these had the same meaning for the old man as they did for everybody else, or if they lost their meaning over the years, or had come to mean something else. And if that were true, he wondered how the two undertakers, Junior and Junior, would comfort each other when the time came.

  Junior said, “A viewing in the chapel is always nice. It’s a little extra but it gives everyone a chance to say good-bye to…”—and now he ran a shaking finger down a sheet of paper, finding her name—“a chance for all of Lily’s friends to say good-bye in a religious setting, which was so important to her during her stay here on earth.”

  He stopped abruptly, as if he sensed he’d said the wrong thing, and then rechecked his paperwork. For the few seconds the name checking required no one spoke or moved, and then, satisfied, Junior simply stood up and headed for the door, motioning them with a wobbly roll of his head to follow along. Another eight ounces of weight up there, and his neck would have snapped like a pencil.

  The display room seemed to be a place full of good memories for the old man. Around the perimeter were ten demonstrator caskets in an assortment of models and colors, and at the center of the room was the crown jewel, a box that seemed in the half-lit room to glow.

  The old man entered first
, finding the light switch. The lights were dim and fluorescent, and the boxes lay tall, dark, and handsome all over the room. The room had four windows, hidden from view by heavy off-red curtains, and Junior went to the curtains now, taking his time, and drew them open one after another, and a layer of foreboding and mystery dropped away from the caskets as each new wide shaft of light fell across the wooden floor.

  When the last curtain was opened, he paused a moment to look over the room in its new, brighter mood, and smiled with the morning sunshine at his back, and his teeth were huge and as white as wet paint, seeming almost to spill out of his mouth—whose teeth could they have been?—and the cuffs of his trousers lay on the carpet around his feet, as if he were sitting on the commode. It gave Spooner pause, imagining the old fellow looting Lily.

  Now Junior moved from one casket to the next, opening the lids. Most of them caught some glint of the light coming in through the room’s southern windows. A small satin pillow had been placed inside each box, and across each pillow was a small white tag, where the price was written in elegant script.

  Spooner had not been in the room a minute before fixating on the most luxurious model—the Eternity—and was now peering down into its green velvet bed. The sides of the casket were heavily cushioned and had the billowy look of clouds, and pockets had been sewn here and there so that small objects could be stowed for later on.

  “You’re looking at the very finest casket ever made,” Junior said. He reached up and took Spooner’s bad elbow, and the grip was sharp and unbalanced, like a parrot had landed on his arm. “In my opinion, there is no finer tribute to the person who brought you into the world.”

  Spooner continued to stare, and now Calmer walked to the foot of the casket and stared in too.

  Behind them Darrow said, “We were looking for something modest. It would be more in line with her wishes.”

  The old man pretended not to hear him and continued on with Spooner. “Totally watertight,” he said. “Comfort for the ages, and you can see the craftsmanship for yourself. Classic lines.”

  Calmer leaned into the box and sniffed, and then he patted the floor and the sides. The casket was narrow and steep, much deeper than it looked from the door, and Calmer leaned so far in as to nearly disappear.

  “Don’t worry,” the old man said to Calmer, “it doesn’t look so lonesome once the body’s inside.” A moment passed and brought Margaret to the edge of the coffin too.

  “A thousand years will go by,” the mortician said, “and this casket won’t leak a drop. Guaranteed. No water, no rodents, no roots. Roots grow around this casket, not through it. All money-back guaranteed. A redwood will not grow through this casket. Think of it, these trees have been out in the forest since the time of Christ, and the Eternity will outlast them all.”

  There was another long moment of silence, which the undertaker, thinking the deal was now as good as closed, completely misunderstood. “Of course, it’s your loved one—”

  Which was when Calmer climbed in and lay down. He turned sideways, away from them, and fluffed the pillow and lay his cheek against it and closed his eyes. And for a long time he simply lay still.

  Looks passed, one of them to another, some uneasy current in the room, nobody knowing what Calmer intended. Or if he’d broken down for good. He issued a noise that could have been a sigh of contentment, or could have been the last straw.

  “Sir?” Junior said. “Your shoes, sir?”

  FIFTY-NINE

  Margaret was quiet most of the way home. After Calmer had climbed out of the casket (“It’s a little hard on the back,” he’d said), she and Darrow and Phillip had gone into the back to see the body while Spooner sat in the waiting area with Calmer, reading a six-month-old copy of Sports Afield magazine. It wasn’t clear what was going on with Calmer, but something had changed and as far as Spooner could tell, it was all for the good.

  “If that was supposed to be funny,” Spooner had said to Calmer, speaking of his climb into the Eternity, “it was.”

  And Calmer had smiled and leaned back until his head touched the wall and hadn’t said a word.

  Now Spooner slowed the car and pulled to the curb, leaned out, and vomited. “You know,” he said to his sister, when he was back inside, “it’s strange, but I never threw up that night when Calmer called to say Mother was dead.” She looked at him a little oddly, and he wiped at his mouth and said, “Usually I would. That or go outside and cut the grass in the middle of the night. I don’t handle stress well anymore.”

  Margaret studied him a little longer and said, “Have you ever thought about therapy?”

  And like that Spooner was braying like Stanley Faint. Therapy! Had he thought about therapy? It was the idea of bringing a psychologist into it now, at this stage in the game, that had set him off. It would be like picking up a hitchhiker out on the interstate without slowing down.

  He looked at his sister, who had been seeing psychiatrists since college, hoping he hadn’t insulted her. “It’s just that every time I bust up a knee or an elbow or something, I have to see a therapist.” Which sounded lame even to him. “You know, just a different use of the term.”

  Worse and worse.

  That night, back at the house, some of the cousins were sitting in the living room, talking about Aunt Lily. Getting their stories together, things to tell their children when they returned home. The children, of course, wouldn’t care if their Aunt Lily could tinkle and play the harmonica at the same time; it was nothing to them.

  Later on, seven relatives from Calmer’s side of the family arrived from Conde in two Ford pickups, each truck with extra wheels on the back axle to accommodate heavy loads. The men carried the suitcases and clothes for the funeral and Arlo’s wife brought in a keg of beer that must have weighed a hundred pounds. The other woman was holding six dead pheasants by the feet. Gutted and partially plucked.

  Spooner picked out Arlo right away, just the way he’d pictured him; gone were the index finger, the middle finger, and the pinky, right down to the knuckles. Unaccountably, the bear had left the ring finger intact.

  Arlo had picked off the pheasants on the way to Falling Rapids, and the woman who brought them in had gone right to the kitchen sink to finish cleaning them. Arlo’s dog Dick was in the bed of the truck outside. The pickup belonged to Arlo’s wife, Arlene, who hugged Calmer, lifted him off the floor, pumped herself a beer and sat down. She pointed at Arlo. “I’ll tell you this much, none of you characters are driving home. Not my rig. You want to hunt pheasants, use your own truck from now on.”

  Arlo moved behind her and stuck the remaining finger of his left hand into his mouth all the way to the ring, wetting it so that a little line of spit hung between the tip of his finger and his lips as he took it out, and then moved up on her from behind and screwed it into her ear.

  “Goddamn it, Arlo,” she said, and pulled loose from him and grabbed the Minnesota Twins baseball cap off his head and used it to scour out her ear, using that same twisting motion that he’d used to befoul her. Then she spit into the cap and set it back on his head.

  He said to Calmer, “She just loves that.”

  It wasn’t pheasant season, as one of the Whitlowes—an environmentalist, it developed—pointed out, and Arlo patiently explained that he wasn’t shooting pheasants, he was killing them with the truck.

  The pheasants came up to the road at dusk to eat gravel, and Arlo bore down on them at seventy, eighty miles an hour, sometimes catching two at a time as they scattered and ran or tried to fly. Hearing the thump or thumps, Arlo would slam on the brakes, putting the truck into a slide, and then his dog Dick—who went with him everywhere—would be out of the truck bed even before they’d stopped, and back thirty seconds later with the bird.

  Hearing this so repulsed the environmentalists of the Whitlowe side of the family that half a dozen of them or so went into the living room and discussed turning him in.

  Arlo looked at Calmer, shaking his head. He said, �
��What you got yourself into now, Calmer?”

  Spooner saw the play in Calmer’s eyes, and thought for a moment that they might have lost him back to the other side.

  The day after the funeral, Spooner found Calmer sitting alone in the garage. The Ottossons had gotten up at dawn to go home to their farms, but there were still Whitlowes all over the house, and Calmer was out there reading the Minneapolis Tribune by the light of the single bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. Sitting in a lawn chair, a glass and a bottle of the Beefeater on the cement floor next to him, a lit cigarette tipped into the ashtray in his lap. The line of smoke came up like he’d been shot in the balls with a Roman candle.

  Spooner took a chair from a stack of chairs against the wall and wiped off the spiderwebs. He sat down a few feet from Calmer. It was cool in here and smelled of gasoline and cut grass. Spooner wondered if Calmer had come to the garage out of habit—he couldn’t smoke in the house because of her asthma—or if he’d just wanted to get away from all the random noise and movement inside.

  They sat together a little while, neither of them talking, and Calmer handed him the sports section of the paper and nodded in the direction of the gin bottle on the floor. Spooner spotted a paper cup on a cross beam, emptied the nails inside into a coffee can, then cleaned out the cup with his T-shirt and poured himself a little straight gin. He took a seat and presently lay the newspaper in his lap and looked up into the rafters, feeling like there was something he should say, but nothing came.

  His eyes adjusted to the bare bulb, and he made out a coil of rope up there, and a wagon, and beyond that, in the front corner where the lines of the roof all came together, a wasps’ nest as big as a grapefruit. He tried to image how he might go about taking care of it without getting stung, but nothing came.