Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  The breeze came through the trees whistling, and branches dead all winter cracked and fell through other branches and landed with surprising force—as he watched, one of them as tall as a man fell out of an alder and stuck a foot deep into the earth, quivering like an arrow.

  The wind rose and fell, and tree limbs cracked and broke, and small single clouds rolled at remarkable speed across the sky, and yet for all the movement there was also an absence of movement, a blossoming unease.

  The kids.

  And for a long moment he couldn’t catch his breath.

  Where were the kids?

  He looked at the alder branch, still upright in the ground, and in that instant he might as well have been speared himself, bug-style and pinned to the felt in some museum. How long had it been since he’d seen them? He tried to remember where they’d been, if they’d been together. Then a moment resembling relief. Margaret was across the road with the Ennis girls. He remembered now. She’d told them where she was going, which left the other one, the one you always had to worry about anyway. Calmer quieted himself, was still until he could think. It wasn’t necessarily so bad. The kid could be in a tree or on the roof or setting fires somewhere. Or have broken in to somebody’s closet and at this moment was pissing away into their shoes. The “Fiend,” they’d called him.

  He thought of the car. The car. Oh Christ, the car.

  He checked the driveway, already knowing it wasn’t there, and then looked north, out toward the two great, dead maples that stood near the property line, and then beyond them, to the bottom of the hill. It was more or less what he’d expected now that he thought about it, the car coming to rest at a strange, tilted angle, and he dropped his chin onto his chest and started out across the yard running.

  He thought of himself and his father in the front seat of the old flatbed, idling at a train crossing on the dirt road to Aberdeen, his mother in the backseat in a dress and sun hat. The dust blew in, the train blew past, so close that he could feel the rattling in his legs.

  And he pounded through the trees and brush, all the fear set aside, one thing at a time. Christ, was he still inside there? Underneath?

  There was wind to consider—if a gust caught her sideways as he moved in close to the dock—no, wait, not that.

  He thought of Ennis flying out the back door and then next to him at the running board, putting his back into it too, to set the car upright. Calmer had never said it to anyone—who would he say it to but Ennis himself, and Ennis was a man who suffered to be told good morning—but a second before Ennis grabbed hold, Calmer had put together the shaking in his body and the shaking he’d felt hundreds of times when an airplane began to stall, and realized that like an airplane, he had loaded some mechanical part of himself beyond its limits and set off a series of failures in the various systems that kept him up. Which is to say he’d known he was right at the edge.

  It was what the boy was after every day of his life.

  Calmer cleared the small stand of trees twenty yards from the car. He began to call out the boy’s name—not that he expected an answer—and then stopped. The name had slipped his mind.

  Wait, calm down. There was an inch or two of clearance beneath the running board, and he got down on his hands and knees and peered into the darkness, hardened against what he might see. His eyes corrected for the darkness, and he glimpsed the shoes. And followed them to the legs and the legs to the body, everything bigger from this angle than it should be, an illusion. Still, what was there was there, the twisted, strange angles aside, it was what it was, and he knew he could never let her see the boy like this, ruined. That would be as heartless as the news itself.

  Something moved.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s all right now. Everything’s all right.” He hurried to the front of the car, to the thing that had to be done, and, facing away from the wreck, bent his knees until his hands found the hard, narrow edge of the low side of the bumper and lifted with all his strength.

  The car seemed to stir, almost as if it had come awake, and then a violent force tore the bumper out of Calmer’s hands, skinning the pads of his fingers down to the tips, and there was a scalding pain and a wild, ringing clamor, and for a little while the throbbing in his head seemed worse than the throbbing in his fingers. Strangely, he thought he’d heard a voice. At the moment the car was torn from his hands, he thought he’d heard a single spoken word, and realized he must have spoken it himself.

  He looked at his hands, which he held down and away, the fingers spread, like a girl drying her nail polish, and the blood followed the line from his palms to the tips of his fingers, and then beyond the fingers, dripping off the lowest points, the half inch or so of empty, loose skin dangling below each of the nails. They had the look of gloves pulled inside out. His head and hands throbbed, and all of it floated in a wild clamor, and it was a long time settling down.

  And again he remembered the voice. Not the boy’s—it was a man’s voice. His own, he thought, it must have been his own voice. A single word: “Hey…”

  EIGHTY-FOUR

  Suppertime, Spooner knocked at the bedroom door. Calmer had been in there all afternoon, hadn’t come out even to meet Spooner’s daughter as she got off the school bus. He never missed that, walking her up the driveway carrying her books, talking about her teachers or what one of her friends had worn to school. What was cool. Lester had also been missing all afternoon, and it was close to time to eat. The dog had a hard rule about missing meals.

  Spooner looked quickly out the back door, checking that the animal hadn’t been chained again to the tree, and then out the front. No dog, but Marlin was still in the driveway under his truck, working.

  Spooner knocked again and then tried the door, which was unlocked—Calmer never locked the doors here on the island and took some small pleasure in not having to, returning to a time and place where no one broke in to houses.

  Spooner poked his head in and saw Calmer asleep in bed. It was strange to see him in bed while it was still daylight—in the old days he was always up, in Georgia and Prairie Glen and South Dakota, always going, daybreak until nine or ten at night, and even when he stopped for a few minutes to have a drink or a smoke, he was looking around for something to do while he rested.

  These days he went to bed early and napped an hour or two on the couch, and it seemed possible that an enormous exhaustion had built up over the years, over the decades, and was finally coming due.

  Well, Calmer had earned his naps.

  He’d covered himself with a light blanket, looking small underneath it, but he had always seemed smaller to Spooner when he slept, as if some of the air had been let out, and was always turned on his side and curled down into his knees, covering whichever ear wasn’t buried in the pillow with the meat of his forearm, like a soldier waiting for the next incoming shell. Looking at him, Spooner thought of the scene at the funeral home, how he’d curled up about like this in the box, and for a while no one had known what to do until Darrow had leaned in for a closer look and Calmer had gotten out and stretched, complaining about the hardness of the casket’s floor on his back.

  Spooner thought passingly of the missing dog and then noticed that Calmer’s hand was wrapped in a towel, and then that blood had soaked through underneath, where it covered his palm.

  The towel was loose and slightly overhung the tips of Calmer’s fingers. It looked like a lot of blood, but then it didn’t take a lot of blood to look like a lot of blood. There was more of it on the floor leading to the bathroom and Spooner went in there, and it was splashed over the sink and the edge of the bathtub, and soaked into the shirt Calmer had been wearing earlier and was now stuffed into the hamper. The wastebasket held a pile of bandages and tape, stiff and almost black with dried blood.

  He went back to the bed and gently rolled Calmer’s shoulder. His eyes opened, clear and alert, and he sat straight up. He checked his wristwatch, and at the movement the towel dropped off his hand—his le
ft hand—into his lap. He looked at the hand, one side and then the other, skin dangling off the end of his fingers and the fingers themselves, raw and caked black at the edges, like they’d been burned. He took the other hand out from under the blanket, and some of the towel came up with it, stuck to his palm.

  “Well, for the love of Pete,” he said. He took the blanket off his feet, maybe to check that his toes were intact. The hand attached to the towel began to seep blood, not so much from one place or another, just all over.

  Spooner said, “Good Christ. You burned up your hands.”

  Calmer held up one of the hands between them—the one not stuck to the towel—as if to suspend judgment until all the facts were in. Then he moved it up to his nose and sniffed. “I don’t think so,” he said. “There’s no odor.” Interested in the puzzle, if not the injury itself, but then, even back when he was razor sharp, Calmer might reach for a pepper shaker or a pencil and notice a fingernail had been smashed or was half torn from the bed underneath it, and would need a minute or two to remember that he’d closed it that morning in the car door.

  He pulled the towel the rest of the way off his right hand, and there was a peeling sound as the cloth separated from the wound, and in the moment before blood began to pool, Spooner saw what looked like a series of shallow excavations. The pads of Calmer’s palm were missing, as well as the three billowed areas of each finger. While Calmer watched himself bleed, Spooner walked back into the bathroom, shut the door, and did the thing he could be counted on to do in moments like this. He was still bent over the toilet when Calmer came in behind him, ignoring the regurgitation, and went to the sink. He put his hands under the faucet, the water as cold as it would come out, and hummed to himself as it ran.

  Afterwards, together, they wrapped his hands in clean towels and headed for the hospital, which was in Coupeville, thirty miles north on the highway, but first Calmer insisted on apologizing to Mrs. Spooner for ruining supper, and Mrs. Spooner in turn insisted on seeing his hands, then said nothing at all for a moment when she saw them, and in this silence was everything that could be said.

  Over Calmer’s protests that it was nothing, they all went together to the hospital, she and Spooner’s daughter in the backseat, Spooner and his dad up in front, the Spooners out for a family outing, and Calmer remarked that it was good to have everyone together like this and that they should do it more often.

  The doctor advised keeping Calmer overnight, but Calmer only smiled and, using one of the same hands the nurse had just bandaged, shook the medical man’s hand with a grip that had drained a million cows of their juice—you could see the surprise in the doctor’s face—and patted him audibly on the shoulder blade, saying thanks, but he wouldn’t want to take a hospital bed from somebody who might need it. His blood pressure and heartbeat and respiration were all steady and strong, good for a man half his age, although he was running a low-grade fever—100.7. He still hadn’t mentioned pain or acted as if he were in pain, even when the nurse moved his fingers around to bandage them one by one.

  While that had been going on, Spooner’s daughter had turned white and fainted, and Calmer sat with her in back on the way home, holding her a little while and then pretending to faint at the sight of cows along the road.

  EIGHTY-FIVE

  It is not entirely accurate to say Spooner found the body. At least not in the sense of finders keepers. In the sense of finders keepers, the body was found by Lester, who, in the weeks he’d spent chained to the elm tree in the grandson’s backyard, had lost perhaps thirty pounds. Thus, he could now urinate from the classic three-point stance and was beginning to look like he had a rib cage, and seeing this new, sleek version of the beast, Mrs. Spooner had gone to a veterinarian and bought a fifty-pound sack of diet dog food and instructed Spooner not to give it to him all at once, and in other ways laid down the law that Lester, for his own good, was through as a recreational eater.

  Meaning that ever since his rescue, Lester had been served only the daily recommended diet for animals his size (the new, sleek size, not his previous 160–180 pounds) twice daily, feedings he finished in seven or eight seconds, and even though he would look up at Spooner afterwards with that you’re shitting me expression, he was in all other ways his old happy self, from the moment he woke up every morning wedged into his old happy slot between Spooner and Mrs. Spooner, knowing in his own way that he was integral to the whole sweet, happy mess.

  The sun set on the trip back from the hospital and cast the driveway in a dark gloom, steeped as it was on either side with maples and firs and alders, bringing horse blinders to mind, or the Lincoln Tunnel, and then two eerie lights appeared straight ahead, and Spooner stood up on the brakes.

  Lester was standing neon-eyed along the tree line, just outside of the beams of the headlights, and the instant Spooner recognized him—even before he saw that something was wrong with the shape of his body—he realized that in all the excitement a near-calamity had occurred: Nobody had fed the dog.

  Spooner got out and walked to the animal, crossing through one headlight and then the other, throwing shadows two directions at once. The dog looked steadily into the lights, not having picked up yet on Spooner’s aroma. His tail wagged cautiously, not in its usual big happy loops, waiting to see what this was coming out of the dark.

  Then Spooner spoke his name, and in the instant the word Lester was released into the air the dog closed the distance like Spooner was chicken pot pie.

  There was something lopsided about the animal’s shape, and Spooner lay him down in the driveway in the headlights and knelt down with him, afraid that he’d strayed out onto the road and been hit. He pressed his fingers into him lightly at first and then more deeply, watching the dog’s expression for some sign of pain, but the animal only groaned sweetly and thumped the driveway with his tail. You got the same thing when you asked Calmer about his hands.

  Mrs. Spooner was out of the car now too, and behind her their daughter. “Is he all right?” Mrs. Spooner said.

  “He seems all right,” he said. “I was afraid something hit him.” And ran his hand over Lester’s coat again, top to bottom. “He’s swollen through here, but he seemed to be moving okay.”

  Having heard Mrs. Spooner’s voice, Lester could not contain himself another minute and scrambled to his feet and buried his nose in Mrs. Spooner’s cookies, as he always liked to do by way of greeting.

  “Good God,” she said, “look at his stomach.”

  And that was it, all right, his stomach. Distended, as they said. Not the way it had been distended before, when he was 180 pounds, but stretched and taut, like he was pregnant.

  “Good God,” she said again.

  Then, as if to ease her worried mind, Lester backed up a step and tossed it all up, and even in the glare of the headlights and the darkness of the night, there was no mistake about what he’d had to eat while he was waiting for supper.

  EIGHTY-SIX

  The local paper made Marlin Dodge a front-page story and did what it could to come up with a hero. The paper had been sold recently to a small chain and it was a business now, and heroes and pictures of heroes sold newspapers, and as a rule the paper did not like to run tragic stories without one, a little good news with the bad. In this particular case—“South Whidbey Man Dies Under Truck”—the editors had settled on Lester. “Dog Summons Neighbor to Scene of Accidental Death.” Which Spooner, still a newspaper man at heart, did not think quite caught the gist of what had happened. Not that he was going to contradict it.

  The paper ran a large, flattering picture of Lester across the top, side by side with a less flattering picture of Marlin Dodge.

  “Dead at 42” it said below Marlin.

  Beneath Lester it said, “Too Late to Save Master.”

  “Well, you saved a little,” Spooner said to the dog. “You didn’t eat his head.”

  The tragedy was replayed the following week, but with a new slant. Coyotes.

  Aberrant behavi
or, the coroner called it, possibly due to a growing competition for food. “This could get a lot worse before it gets better,” he said.

  EIGHTY-SEVEN

  Old Dodge came home. The county dropped the hearing into his competency—not a word of apology—and Spooner hired a dump truck to take away the nest of ruined fence, and Calmer and the old man resumed their afternoon visits, sometimes down in the meadow drinking beer and shooting Calmer’s single-shot .22, and even though Mrs. Spooner still worried about the rifle, and Calmer occasionally got up from supper to see if Lily needed anything in the bedroom, the grandson’s death had somehow returned the place to its natural ambience, only sweeter now for the reminder that time was running out.

  But if time running out made things sweeter, it also worked another direction, and Spooner, a man by now of some reputation for going his own way, who had over the years taken pretty dramatic steps to be seen in that way, craved the good opinion of his stepfather more than he could ever admit, and felt the chance to find out where he stood with him slipping away.

  He had thought when Calmer first arrived that the answer would be obvious, or at least he would find a way to ask the question. But there was a forty-year precedent at work against that and Spooner remembered like yesterday the awful silence that would fall over the kitchen after any utterance, no matter how innocent, of this general subject was floated out over dinner.

  And in the way things happen, forty-odd years had come and gone and with the exception of the one awful letter from his mother, nothing was said. On the other hand, remembering the letter, Spooner sometimes conjured up a life where everyone poured out his heart at dinner, and the mother cried over her dead husband and brought out pictures of her wedding to show what she’d looked like back before she’d been cheated out of life, and glimpsing this scene Spooner rethought everything and had no objection to this code of omerta after all.