by Pete Dexter
Nothing came.
It was the start of something new, sipping gin in the garage and reading the morning paper, letting all the small problems and complications inside the house take care of themselves, Calmer seemingly no longer weighed down with responsibility and dread, with his wife’s asthma, with his wife.
Spooner was hit with an impulse to acknowledge his father’s new life. He said, “Maybe you should get a dog.”
And realized even as he said it that he’d mistaken capitulation for recovery.
PART SIX
Whidbey Island
SIXTY
A long time after Philadelphia, after his teeth had been capped and the caps had fallen off and been replaced with other caps, which also fell off and were finally replaced with implants, and he could smile over his implanted teeth without feeling the lumps of scar tissue in his lips, after he could sit and work again without the eerie, scalding pain crawling over his back, and could lie down at night without the pillow floating beneath his head, and without drifting back to the operating table and what had happened there, one day on an island three thousand miles away, in a place as far removed from the city of Philadelphia as you could find, Spooner looked up from a very bad sentence and saw his daughter flying up the driveway like fire.
It was three in the afternoon; the driveway was a sheer quarter-mile climb from the road to the house. The child weighed eighty-five pounds and was strapped into a backpack full of school books.
For the previous half hour, Spooner had been nosing back and forth over this same bad sentence, poking here and poking there, like some sweet old bitch trying to rouse the still puppy in her litter, and now he stopped, grateful for the interruption, and watched her make the last hundred yards, admiring the way she finished it all the way to the top, remembering that feeling of breaking into a sudden all-out run for home, for no reason except you could do it, and exactly pictured his own long, unhinged charge down the paved hill from the highway in Vincent Heights, past a dozen houses whose closets he had attended as the Fiend, and felt the wild pull of the hill itself, the feeling of running for your life, and then hitting the red-dirt circle at the bottom, too fast and out of control, past two more houses he had broken into, and here the road evened out a bit and he slowed, the wind cool in his hairline sweat, and he turned right at Granny Otts’s driveway and headed straight up it, almost as steep as the roof of her house—yes, he had been on her roof—and across the yard to his own front steps, willing himself to run even those last eleven brick steps up to the porch and the front door, and then at the door turning back to admire the distance he’d come, hands on his knees and feeling the trembling in the muscles of his thighs, and feeling his lungs—too small to feed the engine pounding in his chest—looking back at the far hill, at the amazing distance, and seeing clearly that he had done something that could be seen and measured, something real, and in that same moment seeing that it was all as pointless as mud.
Thus reengaged with his childhood, Spooner did not notice his own child was sobbing until she had stopped at the walkway, a few steps from the front door, and taken off her backpack and sat down on top of it and dropped her face into her arms.
He watched a moment longer, giving her a moment to collect herself because she didn’t like to cry in front of him, and then he couldn’t wait any more and stood up, thinking maybe something had happened at school. He knew how little it sometimes took. The child was twelve years old and didn’t cry much and never had, especially in front of him. Spooner was forty-seven now and loved her crazily, and went crazy at the sight of her weeping and always had, and she understood him and protected him as much as she could from the facts of her twelve-year-old life.
He walked out the side door, coming to her from around the house, giving her a little more time, and then from her blind side sat down in her lap. She screamed, laughing and crying at the same time, and he slid off her lap and put his arm around her and felt her smoothing out, and then waited another few minutes, until she could talk.
“What’s up, doc?”
He’d been saying that when she was sad or hurt or scared since the day they brought her home from the hospital.
There were two of them over there now besides the old man, commuters, landscapers, and truck polishers by day, citizens of the wild side by night. Marlin Dodge—the old man’s grandson—and Alexi Sug, Marlin’s Ukrainian weight lifter who seemed unable to move without first considering the positioning of his body to best show off the cut of his muscles. The old man’s aversion to the pair could not have been plainer, but he seemed obligated in some way to let them stay. On the few occasions he and Spooner had spoken about them, the old man referred to them as the grandson and Atlas Shrugged.
The grandson and Atlas Shrugged had been at the bottom of the hill digging postholes with a rented tractor when Spooner’s daughter got off the bus, and the one driving the tractor—the grandson—had choked off the engine and called her over to tell her that he was going to kill her cat. The cat was named Whitlowe, and had been with them awhile, a small, limping, twitching ball of muscle whose X-rays had revealed a piece of buckshot still lodged in his shoulder. He was half wild and covered with scars, his ears ragged-edged, like they’d been chewed by moths. The animal was a stray who’d come into the yard two or three years ago and still would not allow himself to be touched except by Spooner’s daughter, and followed her room to room in the house and slept with her at night, his chin resting against the top of her head on the pillow, his drool in her hair when she woke up. Last winter she’d tried making him mittens.
The evidence against the cat was apparently all circumstantial. Marlin had seen him loitering in the area of his koi pond lately, and lately his koi were being murdered in the night.
As Marlin spoke, Alexi had moved closer, finally standing over her, huge and sweating, so close she could feel the heat off his body. He enjoyed a certain pretense of danger, this Ukrainian, presenting the world a moody, reckless, unpredictable sort of gunslinger with something slightly off upstairs, and when Marlin had finished speaking he said, “Do you know how much koi fish cost, little girl? More than your allowance, I bet.”
Spooner had noticed that many of the landscaping set were same-toolers these days, but this was the first of the breed Spooner had run into who aspired to be menacing to society.
The grandson, on the other hand, was not a bodybuilder but what used to be called stout, back in the days when girth and a good appetite were in fashion, and most likely a bully all the way back to first grade, and had apparently come to a certain menace of his own without the aid of human growth hormone or steroids or hours in the gym with free weights.
SIXTY-ONE
The trouble next door had begun in the spring, seven months previous, when Marlin first arrived. Before that, it was just the old man and his dog—a sweet, 160-pound beast called Lester.
Hiram Dodge was a quiet, courteous gentleman who had once taught literature at Peed College in Oregon but had fallen out with his department and then the college itself during those years when English departments everywhere were being turned over to the politically entitled. Not that he’d quit on principle. In the end, it wasn’t about the vandalism of literature, as he called it, more that he was sick of looking at their faces. Faculty and student body alike. In the beginning there had been exchanges of unkind words with the politically entitled, which led in about two minutes to charges of racism and sexism, homophobia, etc., which old Dodge had dismissed with the back of his hand, which led to campus demonstrations and demands for his removal, and outraged alumni, and story after story in the sympathetic Portland-area media—sympathetic to the politically entitled, not to old Dodge—and thus, outcast and friendless and surrounded by snipers, old Dodge bought a puppy and named it Lester Maddox and took it with him everywhere he went, referring to the animal by name every chance he got, which prompted a decision by Peed College to offer Dodge an enormous buyout, and perhaps because he was sick of looki
ng at them, and sick of the students and all their entitlements, and because he could see that the administration had made the offer knowing that he would refuse it on principle, he took the money and left.
Old Dodge was a reserved sort of fellow, polite but not by any means as lovable as his dog. Spooner ran into him down at the foot of the driveway now and then, by the mailbox, or alongside the road, usually with Lester, walking up or down the long hill to Bailey’s Corner. He was an unusually clean-smelling old fellow, always fresh-shaven, shirts ironed and starched and worn buttoned to the neck and wrists, who knew the name of every weed growing in the yard and spent hours in the morning sketching the egrets nesting in the marsh at the lowest, wettest part of the grounds. His wife and daughter were gone, a car accident, and the same accident had left him with a scar that dropped like a bead of sweat out of his hairline and all the way to his collar.
The old man had declined Spooner’s occasional invitations to dinner or cookouts, although his dog hadn’t missed one since Spooner moved in, and these days the animal was putting in as much time at Spooner’s as he was at home, especially when Marlin and the weight lifter were visiting. Often he spent the night.
The old man got up early. The southern, more rural end of the island was a good place for birds—there were hawks and owls everywhere, and an eagles’ nest at the edge of Spooner’s property, and two more nests in the trees farther south, and most days you could see them out sitting on the channel markers in the Sound, fishing the shallows or, when the wind came up, hanging like kites over the marsh, hunting rabbits and quail and the occasional toy poodle that wandered a little too far from the house. Spooner had once seen an eagle take a pigeon right out of the air—at least had heard the impact and looked in time to see the explosion of feathers where the bird had only just been, and another time, walking with Lester along the southern edge of his property, a pretty fair-sized, live rabbit dropped out of a tree and landed with a certain oof right at his feet. Spooner looked up and spotted the eagle staring down, and they stared at each other a little while and then, hearing something at his feet, Spooner looked back at the ground and saw that Lester had eaten the rabbit.
For all that, old Dodge was not much interested in eagles or hawks, and had thrown in instead with the egrets, which struck him as more elegant killers. He studied the birds before he committed them to paper, sitting in a lawn chair with a cup of steaming coffee in his lap. Beside him on the picnic table he laid out pencils, a sketch pad, binoculars, and a coffeepot.
There were currently fourteen egrets nesting in the lower, swampy end of the old man’s property and he knew them all pretty well, one from the other, ages, physical idiosyncrasies, dispositions, rankings, and it seemed to Spooner that knowing them so well had led to a certain disappointment with whatever he drew, which is to say that even when the work was very good, it wasn’t good enough. A very tough grader was old Dodge.
What he was trying for was not just beaks and bones and feathers—he was a good sketcher and could do that in his sleep—but the moods and personalities that delineated the birds one from another. They were strange animals, the egrets, dependent on one another socially but showing no interest at all when one of their own was reduced to a pile of feathers by the coyotes and was left on the ground near the marsh at daybreak.
Sometimes Spooner walked over in the morning when he saw the old man setting up, and the old man always seemed happy enough to see him, and happy to show him his work from the day before, which he treated with a kind of friendly contempt. Spooner thought of his own art teacher back at Peabody Laboratory, Daphne Stone, who would pass slowly behind her students, hands hooked together index finger to index finger behind her back, very good, very good, excellent, Helen, and would pause as she arrived behind Spooner, who always drew the same thing, the house in Vincent Heights, the sun, his family in the windows, the dog somewhere in the air, as big as the house itself, and put her hand gently on his shoulder. “No, honey, that’s not quite it.”
He thought sometimes it wouldn’t make a bad gravestone: No, honey, that’s not quite it.
If he was in the mood, the old man might point out the particular egret he was working on that day, or that week—Spooner did not know how long it took him to study an egret—or just bring him up to date on the general state of affairs down in the marsh. Who was courting, who was nesting, who was injured or missing. Sometimes there would be a bird perched in a nearby tree, away from the others, cast out or shunned for some unknown offense. Pissing in the nest, for all Spooner knew.
So you either get up to take a piss in the night and the coyotes eat you, or you don’t and the missus throws you out of the house. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t again.
For their part, the coyotes were everywhere that year, taking rabbits, house cats, sheep, deer, even dogs the size of Lester—one of the younger coyotes would come out of cover and lure the dog into an ambush—and once in a while even an egret, and the scattered feathers would be lying there in the morning, and the old man would scrutinize the other birds for signs of remorse or anxiety, but they showed nothing of the kind, and he would sit all morning watching them, perhaps thinking of his own losses, and in the end would head down the long slope to the marsh with a rake and a plastic bag, Lester moseying along a few steps ahead or behind, to remove the remains. In the end, it was old Dodge himself who couldn’t get on with the day until the carcass was out of sight.
SIXTY-TWO
Lester was enormous. He slept in the old man’s house one night and between Spooner and Mrs. Spooner, nestled in at some awkward angle, the next. It was impossible to realign him in the night, and as for scooching him over, you might as well try to scooch the federal government.
Shortly after Spooner had moved into his house, he had seen the animal eat the same three-pound London broil twice in five minutes. Hot off the barbecue the first time, swallowing it more or less whole, then pumping it all back out onto the patio, wet and still steaming and more or less intact—you could almost think it was a baby Lester—and waiting for it to cool off, testing it now and then with his nose. And five minutes later, ignoring the shrieks and gagging noises that passed through those in attendance like the wave at Yankee Stadium, he ate it again. Spooner found himself in awe, not just of the animal’s appetite, but of his lack of inhibition. Of being so comfortable with who he was.
Spooner grew powerfully attached to Lester, and in his mind the beast somehow became the centerpiece of this place and time, the best place and time of Spooner’s life. He had a beautiful house and a beautiful drain field and a beautiful daughter and ten acres overlooking the sound, and worked when he wanted to work, and wrote what he wanted to write, and still never looked at Mrs. Spooner without some damp thought of her medically diagnosed, slightly misaligned vagina, this never failing to stir him to smile, even though they had been together a pretty long time for it to have stayed so fresh and new.
And occasionally even felt fresh and new himself, even though his hands and wrists were so shot that most mornings he could barely manage his own shoelaces, and his elbow joint didn’t function until noon, and his legs were brittle and undependable one day to the next, and his back wasn’t worth a damn where it had been broken either. Strangely all that was of no more consequence most days than a little spit dancing in the frying pan.
As for the Devil’s Pocket, he thought once in a while of the young citizens in the street with their bats and tire irons, but he also imagined them now, wallowing all these years in what they were, with their bad teeth (though admittedly their own teeth) and dead-end work and wives daydreaming of collecting insurance payments after they were killed on the job, and wished them nothing more or less than the lives they had made for themselves to live.
He thought of himself as through with that place and that night, and signaled as much to Mrs. Spooner as often as was practical, but you are never completely through with a night like that, and there was still a list of their names somewhere i
n his storage closet that he’d never tossed out, and he stumbled across it now and then, looking for something else, a reminder of what happens when you go in halfhearted.
The old man’s grandson had arrived that first time in a sparkling white Ford pickup with oversize tires and decorative pin stripes that ran the length of the truck, and as many times as Spooner had seen the vehicle since, he’d never seen it dirty, never even a spot of bird shit on the hood, a condition that to Spooner’s certain knowledge was impossible to maintain in this part of the country, but there it was.
For years Spooner and old Dodge had shared a well, splitting the small costs of electricity and maintenance, but these days the pump ran constantly whenever the grandson was home, from eleven or so in the morning until dusk, washing his truck, watering his flowers, emptying and refilling the fish pond he’d built, and Spooner knew enough about electric motors by now and about living on the island not to wait for the water pump to burn itself up and leave himself at the mercy of the only well-pump man on the island, who, hearing the sound of desperation in a caller’s voice, would be two weeks minimum getting around to taking a look. Instead, Spooner called the island’s well digger, who needed work at the time and came directly over and put in another well. Seven days, four hundred and ninety-four feet. Nine thousand, seven hundred and ninety dollars, tax included.
Only the beginning of Spooner’s affection for Marlin Dodge.