Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  The grandson’s truck could be picked out of any parking lot on the south end of the island, not just for its cleanliness but also for its oversize tires and built-up suspension, which left the operator’s seat at about the height of a tennis umpire’s chair. It had California license plates, highway-patrol-like antennae, custom air intakes, glass-pack mufflers, a sound system that could blow you right out of bed. Still, it wasn’t technically the noise that woke Spooner when Marlin came in late at night. That is, he did not wake up hearing the truck as much as feeling it, a faint shaking in the dark, the nurse trying to wake him up after surgery, a metaphor that would bring him wide awake and buzzing with dread even as the truck’s mufflers and state-of-the-art sound system rattled the windows of the bedroom.

  Not that it had been dead quiet at night before the grandson arrived, there was always some sound outside, owls, the wind, the coyotes. The coyotes in particular couldn’t kill a mouse without commencing a celebration.

  The noise and shaking grew as the truck climbed the driveway, and then died suddenly. The door would slam shut and Spooner would lie awake, waiting, listening to the ticking of the huge engine as it cooled, and then sometimes he would hear Marlin yelling at the old man, bullying him one moment, nagging him the next, like some Fishtown princess born to dispense misery wherever she went. You would never guess, listening to it, whose house it was. But even if old Dodge was physically afraid of the grandson, Spooner could tell that in some way he was still holding his own. Not shouting or arguing, just quietly refusing to give in.

  In the beginning Marlin would appear one week and be gone the next. Sometimes he returned in the company of Atlas Shrugged, whose hair changed color every time Spooner saw him—platinum blond now—and who appeared never to leave the house without taking off his shirt and oiling his body.

  Spooner had to admit they worked hard, the grandson in his sleeveless shirts and the boyfriend in his oily muscles, hauling in topsoil and gravel and bags of cement; shovels, wheelbarrows, rakes, and rented machinery lying all over the yard; they were out there all day sometimes doing what they did. He could appreciate that—how many times over the years had he made admiring remarks regarding some stranger’s character on this very evidence?—but realized that in this case he would never get around his personal disgust. He could have overlooked the muscle boy’s grotesqueries, both of body and mind, could have overlooked the grandson’s upper arms, arms like the fat lady’s thighs, dimpled and so white on the underside as to appear faintly blue, and could have overlooked the various gold chains they wore and the stud earrings and the tattoos (one ran vertically up Marlin’s calf, displaying the initials USMC, and Spooner still hadn’t made up his mind about that; it was hard to imagine, but these days you just never knew), and might even have been able to overlook Marlin’s obvious desire to steal everything the old man had. At least, if he hadn’t known the old man, he could. If he hadn’t known the old man he might have assumed, looking at the way the grandson turned out, that somewhere along the line the old man had probably stolen most of it himself. Spooner had lived long enough now to understand that even if aging slowed you down and straightened you out, it didn’t erase what you’d done, or who you were.

  Still, all that he could have overlooked. What he could not overlook was the other thing, Marlin’s navel. His sleeveless shirts were all snug around the belly; buttons popped off the shirts that had buttons, delineating this navel, which stuck out of the round swell of his stomach like a boil. It was possible of course that Marlin had been born like that and couldn’t be blamed, and possible it was some herniated piece of viscera. Spooner had read somewhere that 3 or 4 percent of the population was similarly affected, but as open minded as he considered himself to be, he could not rationalize away his disgust. There are some things you can abide, and some things you can’t.

  Old Dodge was also disgusted by his grandson, and more so once the bodybuilder began showing up with him. He was also disgusted by the spectacle of the oversize truck rolling up the driveway at three in the morning, the bass thumping in the night air like some malicious heart, but for reasons of his own he was unwilling to throw him out. Spooner thought it was probably an obligation to the women in his life who were gone now, one of whom had brought Marlin into the world. Leaving him helpless to change a thing.

  And for a long time the old man made himself scarce.

  He saw old Dodge one afternoon paused on the hill leading to Bailey’s Corner, paused and adrift in some thought while Lester worried over a patch of grass like he’d lost his keys.

  The old man’s face was often bruised these days, but it wasn’t clear that anyone was hitting him. Old Dodge had looked fruit stained or punched up most of the time even before Marlin’s arrival. He appeared unsure of his footing today, and held on to a road sign as he waited for Lester to finish looking over the patch of grass. Blind Entrance 400 Feet.

  Spooner pulled his truck off the road a few yards ahead of the sign and opened the passenger-side door.

  It was early summer, and the old man was wearing his shirt buttoned as always to the neck. A bruise ran down his forehead that seemed to have bled from the hairline into his eye, and he was carrying a twenty-pound bag of dog food on his shoulder, which Spooner had no trouble imagining the animal eating in a single sitting. Old Dodge had begun to decline Spooner’s offer of a lift to the top of the hill, but Lester loved to ride and got in as soon as Spooner opened the door, and sat up close against him, making room for the old man, waiting patiently for him to get in too.

  Old Dodge set the bag of food on the floor and climbed slowly into the cab. The bag fell sideways as Spooner started back onto the road, and the old man reached down to set it upright, and for a moment seemed disinclined to straighten back up, as if he’d decided this moment and this place were as far as he wanted to go.

  The dog, meanwhile, was delighted at the way the afternoon was turning out—a truck ride, a new bag of dog food on the floor; how good could things get?—and gradually leaned more deeply into Spooner’s side and then licked his neck and jaw, then stepped squarely into his lap and into his line of vision, and now his damp pecker was resting on Spooner’s bare arm. Lester stuck his enormous, sweet head out Spooner’s window, and the wind blew open the flaps that covered his teeth, and for a little while you could almost think he was whistling.

  Spooner leaned back to see past the dog, but old Dodge had turned his face away, and looked out his window a long time, as if there were something spellbinding in the ditch, and Spooner saw clearly the meaning of the old man’s hiding the bruise.

  Another afternoon, not long afterwards, he saw them, Atlas Shrugged and Marlin, in the driveway, in flip-flops, washing the truck.

  Marlin had the garden hose. He was sporting a pair of Bermuda shorts, each calf a collage of swollen, blue veins, but otherwise milk-white, muscular, and hairless. Soviet legs, which perhaps explained the attraction. Spooner noticed another, smaller Marine Corps tattoo encircling Marlin’s ankle: Semper Fi Forever. It seemed like everywhere he went these days, Spooner was witness to America’s crying need for more copy editors.

  Not to mention dermatologists. A constellation of acne sprayed across Alexi’s powerful back and neck, and across his powerful shoulders, and his powerful forehead, which was lumped up like the worst headache in history. His own shorts were cut off at the lap, like a Times Square whore, and his tattoos, beyond the mandatory ring of barbed wire around each bicep, were dark blue panthers in repose across each of his shoulders, oblivious to their own beds of angry red pimples.

  As Spooner watched, the bodybuilder suddenly bucked and barked and darted a few feet away from the truck, which had already had its daily bath and was sparkling in the sun, and half a second behind him came an arc of water from the hose, and he dodged away happily and arched his back and shrieked as a drop or two found him, and Spooner watched them play, the grandson with the hose, the bodybuilder with his body: the playful squirtings of love.


  And until the day that Spooner’s daughter came up the driveway crying, that was as much as Spooner had to do with Marlin and Atlas Shrugged.

  SIXTY-THREE

  The landscapers were still at the bottom of the driveway, the scene precisely as his daughter had described it. Two piles of posts and one pile of cement bags were near them on the ground, neatly stacked. The grandson was on a rented tractor with a posthole digger, digging postholes. He had dug half a dozen of them so far, perfectly spaced, and Spooner could see at a glance that they were at least twenty feet inside his (Spooner’s) side of the property line.

  The bodybuilder noticed him first and paused, glistening sweat, striking one of his possibly involuntary poses.

  The attachment to dig postholes worked off the back of the tractor and looked something like a five-hundred-pound corkscrew, and Spooner had a moment of apprehension when he got close enough to sense its weight, and perhaps for that reason did not step up onto the tractor and pull the grandson off his seat, as he had expected to do, but took a position directly in the way instead, shutting down the site, as they might say down at the union office.

  The grandson stared at him a little while, waiting for him to move out of the way, and finally shook his head and turned off the engine.

  Spooner noticed the bodybuilder was barefoot.

  “The tractor is rented by the day?” the grandson said. “So if you don’t mind…”

  The bodybuilder turned at the hips and stuck the shovel into a pile of loose dirt, in one movement giving better display to his obliques, his barbed-wire biceps, and his black-panthered shoulders. Spooner was exactly a lifetime past waiting around to be hurt and made a note of where the shovel was. When it got past this stage, the first casualties would be the toes of Atlas Shrugged. After that, it might go in a hundred ways, but this much of it had been decided a long time ago, before he’d ever heard of Whidbey Island: He would never start from as far behind as he had in Devil’s Pocket.

  He spoke to Marlin, not the weight lifter. “What’s this about the cat?”

  It was the bodybuilder who answered. “It’s dead,” he said. “End of story. If I get him, I’ll drown him; I like to get them by the neck where you can feel them die. I get off on that sick shit, you know? It’s just the way I am.”

  He smiled, enjoying this part, showing off for Marlin. Spooner imagined how he must look to them, skinny and old, not much more to worry about than the old man. He would get to the shovel, though, and for a literal fact would separate the bodybuilder from some of his toes. The main requisite for something like that wasn’t muscles, or even quickness, but simply a willingness in the moment, and Spooner would not have come down if he hadn’t been willing.

  Spooner stood still and waited, feeling an old, icy calmness settling in. Yes, the first step in negotiations would be cutting some toes off the bodybuilder. What happened after that happened after that.

  “Just keep the fucking cat away from our koi fish, we got no problem,” the grandson said, flat-voiced, as if Spooner were boring him to death.

  The bodybuilder said, “Those things are seventy-five bucks apiece, Dad, and he’s killed seven or eight of them now. Every time we look outside, one of them’s floating around on top of the water.”

  Dad.

  The bodybuilder changed poses, possibly in some state of sexual anticipation. “Next time, though, he’s dead. That’s a promise. Keep your fucking kitty cat inside.” Getting pretty carried away with it now, all this posing.

  Spooner spoke again to the grandson, who had finally stepped down off the tractor. He glanced at the grandson’s boots, which looked new and had ornamental gold buckles, wishing he were barefoot too.

  It wasn’t that the cat was particularly innocent of murder—a cat is a cat—or was above slaughtering a koi or two for fun; still, if history meant anything, the killers were egrets. Every year hundreds of people of all sexual persuasions moved to the island, often after some sobering experience—retirement or divorce or running out of closet space in the city—reminded them that the clock was running. They came to the island to find themselves, or maybe get in touch with nature and wildlife, or just to smoke a little dope in the woods and take a class or two in creative writing. Glassblowing was also big. Everywhere you looked these days, somebody was advertising to teach you how to express your creativity.

  Before any of that could happen, though, you needed a fish pond.

  For reasons still unknown, this sudden longing for creativity and/or meaning in life predisposed the island’s transplants to koi, and well-heeled newcomers often built elaborate indoor/outdoor facilities with electric filters and heating controls and underwater lights so the koi, a colorful member of the carp family, could be observed at night, and also for reasons still unknown, this predisposition was especially prevalent among the same-tool set, but regardless of your sexuality, the egrets would kill as many of those beauties as you could buy. Why? Well, the food chain came into it somewhere. The smaller fish, at least, the ones you could get at Island Pets for $9.99 and that were a few inches long, these were snacks. But koi also came in larger sizes and grew in proportion to the size of their pond, and for a couple of hundred dollars, say, plus a sixteen-dollar round-trip ferry ride, you could get something on the mainland that no egret in the world could get down its throat. The egrets would kill it anyway. For fun or target practice or just on principle—who besides maybe old Dodge knew what was in an egret’s mind? What was known was that occasionally one of them would dive-bomb a koi pond without checking the depth and end up clogging the pond’s water filter, often with a colorful, two-hundred-dollar member of the carp family still impaled on its beak.

  “You’re on my property,” the grandson said.

  And here Spooner said nothing at all, leaving the matter of property lines for later, after the fence was up. The grandson turned away from him then and climbed back up onto the tractor, and the engine fired and the posthole digger jumped a little forward, and Spooner jumped a little backward, and the would-be cat strangler picked up his shovel, and a moment later they were back at work.

  Spooner stayed a minute longer, watching, and then walked back up the driveway, still humming with adrenaline, realizing how badly the afternoon could have gone if it had gone his way. Realizing that he could now be looking at a ride to the county jail in handcuffs, charges of assault with a deadly weapon, months of front-page stories in the local paper, which came out twice a week and would milk the incident like the last teat on the last cow in the world, not to mention huge lawyer fees, also milking the incident like the last teat on the last cow in the world, even the possibility of jail.

  He knew he was lucky that it had stopped when it stopped, but the feel of it was still all over him, and in his heart he wanted to go back and hack off some toes. Not so much to hurt somebody, although that was part of it. What he really craved was that look of surprise.

  For weeks Spooner watched the fence project progress, the grandson and his bodybuilder digging postholes and setting posts, mixing cement, hammering away at supporting rails. At least he supposed that was what they were called, supporting rails. It was solid, handsome work, and personalities aside, you had to admit the fuckers knew how to build a fence.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  On the day of the next incident, Mrs. Spooner had scheduled the island’s septic tank pumper to pump out their tank. Routine maintenance. She oversaw these things as her part of the unwritten pact that kept the marriage so alive and strong. She kept the septic tank pumped and supervised all matters relating to the physical upkeep of the house. She also wrote the checks, and cooked, and kept files and warranties and troubleshooting manuals where she could find them, and did much of the troubleshooting and tooling around herself.

  But marriage is a two-way street, of course, and Spooner had his end of things too. He was in charge of emptying the dishwasher, for instance, and unscrewing jar lids, and routinely offered to help in other ways except they both knew bett
er than to let him near the tool box. They had come a long ways, Spooner and Mrs. Spooner, without his physical involvement in the places they’d lived, and in his heart of hearts, he still could not get his mind around the idea of something that didn’t move, like a house, having so many moving parts.

  The septic tank pumper was gray-haired and huge and over the years had developed a philosophy of life. Spooner had met enough of them now—septic tank pumpers—to expect as much; those chosen to pump sewage were always philosophers, or in the process of becoming philosophers, and not just She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes types, but the real thing, studying the meaning of life over the days and months and years they spent gazing down into the abyss. Who was more entitled to an opinion? They occupied a dark, forlorn corner of the field of philosophy, these septic tank pumpers, not a cockeyed optimist in the bunch, but Spooner had long suspected that it wasn’t the work turning them bleak, that it might in fact be the other way around. That they might well have been bleak fellows from the beginning, and therefore drawn to the work, and predisposed to—and perhaps in extreme cases even dependent upon—finding what they found when they lifted the old lid off the tank.

  After all, such people had to eat too. They couldn’t all be teaching college.

  The Spooner family’s septic tank man arrived an hour before lunch in bib overalls and within twenty minutes had pumped out enough of what was in the tank so that his apprentice could get inside it with the big suction hose and collect the bits and pieces of stubborn residue, which the boss squirted off the sides of the tank with Mrs. Spooner’s garden hose. Spooner watched them work, remembering the words of various coaches on the subject of teamwork, recalling as he watched that teamwork’s greatest campaigners were never the ones who had to get in the tank.