Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  As for the report, Calmer had promised Larsson confidentiality and was good to his word, and so he typed it himself, all day and half of the next. He called Larsson then and heard the flat dread in the man’s voice when Calmer told him it was finished.

  “I’ll have them cut your final check first thing in the morning,” Larsson said.

  It came back to Calmer that he was being paid. A hundred, was that it? The number sounded right, and Christ knew he could use an extra hundred, but when he thought about that, he couldn’t remember what he needed it for. Maybe something for Lily, he thought. Maybe something for Lily.

  A moment passed, Calmer and Larsson each thinking his own thoughts, and finally Larsson broke the silence.

  “No one sees it but you and me,” he said.

  “That was the agreement.”

  Another long pause, and then, “How bad is it, Calmer?”

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  Out of long habit, Calmer woke up early, an hour at least before dawn, and went into the kitchen to make breakfast. Two fried egg sandwiches, pickles, some peas he’d set on a shelf in the refrigerator. There was an open glass of orange juice in there too, and he paused, thinking of having a little vodka with it, but there was a long, busy day in front of him and he didn’t want to start it with a logjam in his thinker.

  He sat down to organize the day’s work, but nothing came.

  He noticed the folder lying on the counter and remembered typing something yesterday. Something long. He stared at it a moment, blank, and a moment passed and it all came back to him at once. The Cheever story, the one about the man swimming home in the suburbs. Calmer felt a small wash of relief; the memory lapses were beginning to worry him.

  He stared for a moment at the folder, thinking of the beautiful piece of work inside—fantastic and ordinary at the same time, seamless, unpredictable sentences. And it occurred to him that something as ordinary and fantastic as the story itself had happened as he’d copied the words, in those moments they were in his own hands, taking them off one page and transcribing them onto another, which is to say that for a little while they had been his in the same way that they must have been Cheever’s when he first wrote them. The thought crossed his mind to have the class try the same thing. Not the whole story but a page or two. Old-fashioned, but what could it hurt?

  He picked up the folder, thinking that he’d better get going if he meant to Xerox twenty-three copies before class.

  Three hours came and went and found Calmer sitting casually at his old spot on the corner of a desk situated at the front of room 110 at Toebox Junior High School.

  At ten minutes after eight, the classroom door opened and the school’s principal, whose name Calmer didn’t remember, walked in, a young woman a step or two behind. Ten minutes previous he’d escorted this same woman out, thinking she was a substitute teacher who’d stumbled into the wrong classroom.

  As the interruption came, Calmer was discussing the style differences between short stories and novels, and was pleased with the way things were going so far, the class unusually attentive for the first period of the day.

  Then the door opened and he saw the principal and the young woman and remembered the startled expression on her face a few minutes earlier. He’d said, “Thanks, I’ll take it from here,” and escorted her out the door and pointed the way to the principal’s office, and assured her that someone there would know where she was supposed to go. Afterwards, he’d thought he heard her running up the hall.

  The principal moved in closer and asked quietly if he might have a word with Calmer outside, and Calmer followed him back through the door and into the hall to sort out the misunderstanding.

  He gave the principal no trouble at all, leaving peacefully, apologizing for the mistake, inside out with embarrassment. Still, he rode an old, sweet, familiar feeling all the way home, the feeling of having a class of kids in the palm of his hand, and was as surprised as anybody when he stepped into Larsson’s office later that afternoon to deliver the report and found him apoplectic. He threw Calmer’s check at him across the desk.

  “I hope you realize what you’ve done,” he said.

  “Actually…” Calmer said, and it was a day or two before it came back to him, that he had in fact distributed to each student in room 110 of Toebox Junior High the same thirty-one-page report he’d given Larsson, detailing the district’s long-term and ongoing cheating scandal on standardized tests, and the theft of $177,500 from the district’s discretionary account, traceable to the office of the superintendent, Dr. Merle Cowhurl, D.Ed.

  PART EIGHT

  Whidbey Island

  SEVENTY-SIX

  The grandson’s honey came back home to him in the light of the moon, in the spring, in a looming 450-horsepower automobile known as the Viper, which loomed a pale white color that evening, the color of skim milk maybe, or an albino. The car had California plates and crept up the driveway like a growling stomach, and at the top of the driveway near the garage, it maneuvered in backwards next to the grandson’s pickup, which was also white, of course, but more the color of whole milk. The pickup, however—witness the grandson’s broken heart—had been allowed more or less to return to nature, at least sat as muddy as any pig-shit pickup on Whidbey Island, Spooner’s included, with underinflated tires, a cracked windshield, and good Christ, was that a crease in the tailgate? Still, the Viper backed in and stopped a yard or so from the truck, facing the opposite direction, like a filly offering the old stallion a sniff of her cookies.

  And perhaps not coincidentally arranged for a quick getaway.

  The grandson’s honey emerged from the automobile slow and glistening like some reptile climbing out of the New York City sewer system. The Viper was a very low-slung car. He was still shirtless, with a tanning-salon tan and cutoffs cut to the pubis, and even in the moonlight you could tell that he’d been taking his supplements and lifting faithfully in the gym. You could also see how somebody in New York City might have flushed him down a toilet. He reached back into his racer to toot the horn.

  The grandson appeared at the door and one moment stood pole-axed, and the next broke into tears and a wild scamper over the pineconed sidewalk—the grandson was barefoot but in this moment oblivious to pain—bound for his honey. The scene made Spooner think of Splendor in the Grass, although he couldn’t have told you what Splendor in the Grass was if his eyesight depended on it—a movie? A line of women’s dainties? Soap? It didn’t matter; there was an undeniable splendor lying over the landscape, and perhaps something grassy too, although this was not a fresh-cut grassiness, as the old man stayed indoors and the grandson had not touched the yard all spring. But lawn maintenance aside, it was still pretty clear that this was one of those situations you hear about, often from sports commentators, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

  Spooner witnessed the episode in its entirety, having driven home from the grocery store with the Viper’s blue headlamps in his rear window, and when the reunion commenced, splendor in the grass or not, he had mixed feelings. On one hand, he was a sucker for happy endings and for love stories, especially the kind where love overcomes great odds of distance and time, but at the same time, part of him had been hoping the bodybuilder was, well, dead—mixed feelings in this case being more or less analogous to the book-world term mixed reviews. When a writer tells you his novel has received mixed reviews, it means that after the book was trashed and his heart was broken in every newspaper and magazine in America, the weekend critic at the Pekin Daily Times said it was a heart-pounding race to the finish.

  Calmer had been in the guesthouse a few months now, still settling in, and in spite of his age seemed to have lost interest in nothing. He and Spooner took walks every morning, always at his instigation, timed to the rising sun, which this time of year was a few minutes earlier every day.

  The walks themselves followed the cliff that ran from Spooner’s place to the southern tip of the island, two, two and a half miles eac
h way, and included three or four fences to climb and half a dozen detours over deer trails, some of which dropped below the edge of the cliff, and there were places where a trail would emerge from the brush and Spooner would be staring straight down five hundred feet to a stretch of dark, massive, cold-looking stones.

  The sight of the drop always stopped Spooner in his socks, but Calmer would already be moving ahead, oblivious to the height, confident and sure-footed and strong. Spooner’s worry was not that Calmer would stumble off the cliff, rather that he would walk off into oblivion and not even notice. Calmer had arrived from South Dakota in some stage of dementia, distracted and restless in a way Spooner had never seen him before, his interest pulled one way and another by his line of sight, as if the whole world was a new place. This was the category of things that worried Spooner, and even when he—Spooner—worked or slept, occasionally even when he was in delicto with Mrs. Spooner, in the back of his mind Calmer was always falling. The upshot was that at the end of the day Spooner would climb into bed exhausted from keeping track of his stepfather and would wake up the same way for the same reason. And in this condition, of course, was much more likely than Calmer to end up as spillage on the rocks.

  Calmer, on the other hand, slept very well. He realized something was going on upstairs, but his intelligence was intact. He could see why Spooner was tagging along every morning, and even if he was too polite to say it, would have preferred to take his walks alone.

  But back to splendor in the grass:

  The grandson and his bodybuilder cuddled awhile in the driveway and then took it inside. As for what went on in there, well, as the scientists say, we just don’t know. Spooner imagined them dressing up like Royal Canadian Mounties, and then afterwards, perhaps that monkey thing, preening each other for mites. But that was only speculation and ignorance, and perhaps even homophobia raising its ugly head. The fact of the matter, as Spooner had already gleaned from the Sunday Styles section in the New York Times, was that same-tool love wasn’t very much different or more preposterous than love by the prong-and-socket style nature designed, and after the boys next door finished with the part of it that was different—and Spooner counted on the Times to leave this last bit of uncharted territory uncharted—the grandson and the bodybuilder most likely cuddled and promised each other never to fight again, just like any other couple making up.

  And during the cuddling perhaps also pledged to have the old man put away somewhere, where he would no longer be an encumbrance to their relationship, and while admittedly this was a pretty foul plan, it was not unheard of in the prong-and-socket world either. For his part, old Dodge stayed holed up in his room with his dog, except when the dog couldn’t stand the domestic tension anymore and went next door to visit the Spooners.

  Mostly Dodge holed up alone. He saw the mail that came into the house though and listened to the grandson’s end of phone conversations, and was aware that Marlin was in it now with a local attorney to have him declared incompetent to handle his own affairs.

  The old man’s eyes were going bad, along with his hearing and the circulation in his feet, and he’d given up forever getting the egrets down exactly right on paper, although this was not just the problem with his eyes but a feeling lately, coincident with the arrival of Marlin and the bodybuilder, that he had somehow participated in the contamination of nature.

  The old man had perked up though when he noticed that a fellow about his own fit in the world was staying in the guesthouse next door, this maybe three months ago, and guessed it was the stepfather Spooner had mentioned from time to time, back when he’d dropped by for a word in the mornings. Dodge thought about those visits quite a bit, about the days when he’d had the house to himself. The visits, the morning coffee, a few hours trying to get the birds down just right, a walk with the dog to the grocery store, maybe a romp in the yard. The days had seemed to pour naturally, one into another, with some peaceful accomplishment always in the works, night and day.

  Then into this peacefulness strode Marlin, uninvited—as he supposed the boy went everywhere in life—and then his foul-breathed friend with all his muscles and bluff, and that fast, the place he’d made for himself was ruined, and lately he thought more and more of giving in, letting them have it and finding someplace else for himself.

  The old fellow had been sitting in the yard when Dodge first saw him, wearing a baseball cap, reading a book. He was there about an hour and returned the next afternoon to the same spot, and the afternoon after that, and every afternoon unless it rained. Old Dodge considered putting on his shoes and pants and walking over to introduce himself, but even the thought left him tired, always too tired, and he didn’t know what he might say anyway, and then one day the fellow simply appeared outside with a pail and a squeegee, and commenced cleaning the slug slime off Dodge’s bedroom window, and a few minutes later they were sitting across from each other at the picnic table, drinking beer, pleasantly shooting the breeze.

  The fellow’s name was Calmer Ottosson, and before long he was coming around once or twice a week, always when Marlin and Atlas Shrugged were gone for the day, and he was not only a reader, it turned out, but pretty well read.

  Over old Dodge’s quiet objections, Calmer washed the windows when the slugs scummed them up, and in spite of an openness that was unusual among the intelligent men of Dodge’s acquaintance, particularly those in academia, it was a little while before they were comfortable together, before they could comfortably discuss the particulars of their lives or the business of getting old, or could just sit comfortably together and not talk at all. Unlike Calmer, old Dodge didn’t keep abreast of politics or current novels, hadn’t looked at a book or magazine or even a newspaper in months. It wasn’t just his eyes; the truth was he could only hold a thought for a few seconds these days without somehow drifting back to Marlin and the bodybuilder. He daydreamed of setting fire to the house and burning up his grandson with it.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  Spooner’s guesthouse was divided into three parts. The north side was the guest quarters—a bedroom, a bathroom, and a sitting room—and the south side was the office where Spooner worked, which also had a bathroom although Spooner preferred to walk outdoors and use the bushes. Although Mrs. Spooner preferred that he didn’t.

  Between the office and the guest quarters was a long, narrow room with a small kitchen on one end and a pool table and some exercise equipment on the other, and a couple of comfortable leather chairs with good lamps for reading. Calmer spent most of his time in this room, reading, napping, teaching himself to play pool, fascinated as the laws of physics materialized in front of his eyes. He was eighty years old, and this was the first pool stick he’d ever had in his hands.

  After their morning walk, Calmer and Spooner—and Dodge’s dog, if he was visiting—ordinarily repaired to the guesthouse, where Calmer would drink a glass of milk and shoot pool for an hour or two and then nap in one of the leather chairs, and Spooner and Lester would close themselves into the office to work. The place was well insulated, and Spooner would only notice the sound of the pool balls clicking when it stopped, meaning Calmer had put away his cue and gone into his bedroom to rest, and in the sudden quiet Spooner would hear even fainter noises—the sound of the Union Pacific over on the mainland, two miles straight across the water, rolling north to Canada, or a swarm of birds passing through the trees, also on their way north, and every forty minutes or so the muffled sound of the icemaker dropping ice into the collection plate in the freezer, and the faint concussions of pistol shots from a mile farther up the hill, where one of Spooner’s neighbors ran a gun shop out of his garage.

  All these small sounds were familiar and Spooner was at home and comfortable and working pretty well one afternoon when the door to his office flew abruptly open and she was standing there, Mrs. Spooner, the old nostrils flaring—never a good sign—and, strangely for someone so clearly in the mood to talk, unable to enunciate even a single word.

  He w
aited and by and by found himself wondering about the expression cat got your tongue. Was it just Spooner, or does that strike you as a little gory for what it is meant to put across? Spooner had begun noticing expressions like these not too long ago, and they were everywhere in the language, lying right out in the open, like little headless bodies on the patio after the cat—speaking of the cat—has been out all night hunting. Where did they come from? Explode onto the scene. Stop dead in your tracks. Pants on fire. Was it the Old Testament?

  Was it the Irish?

  For her part, Mrs. Spooner simply pointed, stabbed her finger yonder, toward the front of the house, and with this physical action found her voice, issuing those two basic words as fundamental to the mysterious male/female equation as the monthlies itself. She said, “Do something.”

  Spooner got up and went with her, noticing that in spite of the obvious excitement in the air, the dog, who enjoyed an occasional woof in the yard as much as the next Lab, remained lying on his back, his rear legs both suspended in the air, following the Spooners only with his eyes. He was tired. But then, already today he’d eaten a loaf of bread and a pound package of Morrell’s bacon that Mrs. Spooner had laid out on the counter for breakfast, then accompanied Spooner and Calmer on their regular walk to the foot of the island, and now seemed to have scheduled a little me time to sleep it off.