Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  But this was the way of the world. Somebody does the work, somebody else gets the glory. They knocked off for lunch at one o’clock and sat down beside the open tank to eat, and Spooner ambled out to see if the family was getting enough roughage, bringing along a couple of bottles of beer.

  The boss was sitting against a tree in his socks, his work gloves lying across his rubber boots. The apprentice was looking skyward, perhaps calculating a philosophy of his own.

  Spooner said, “What about a beer?”

  The boss looked at him as if he didn’t understand the question.

  “Or a Coke, or something to wash that down?”

  The boss, judging from the pile of bones next to him, was eating a whole family of quail. He shook his head, and Spooner noticed his mouth was stuffed full. “State law,” he said. “We’re on the job.”

  Spooner nodded that he understood; the world had not finished yet filling up with rules. The boss ripped off some part of the quail and swallowed it without chewing, and then wiped his mouth and nose backhanded with his sleeve. “I need to talk to the missus,” he said. “This could be a disaster.”

  Spooner trembled.

  “This septic system is a disaster waiting to happen,” he said.

  Spooner took a step closer and stared down into the tank. It looked clean as a whistle. “Maybe I could tell her something for you,” he said. “She isn’t feeling too well right now.”

  Marriage, he had learned, in addition to the recently described division of work, was also a learning process, a process that never ended, and Spooner was still learning a mile a minute, knowing her a little better every day, the moods and cycles and flows, what made her laugh and what made her happy, and he knew to a certainty that talking to the septic tank pumper wasn’t what made her happy. Plus, she loved quail as much as the old man next door loved egrets, and it felt to Spooner like his life pretty much depended on keeping the septic tank pumper and his wife apart.

  The boss shook his head. “There’s more grease in that tank than I’ve seen in a long time.”

  “Grease?”

  The apprentice was still looking at the sky—maybe he’d seen all the earth tones he could handle for the day.

  “Grease, it must of been a foot thick in there. Is she using the garbage disposal instead of taking out the trash?”

  “No, we take out the trash.” Actually, this was Spooner’s job, in addition to jar lids and emptying the dishwasher.

  “The only thing that should ever go in your tank is shit,” the boss said, “if you follow me here. I can tell just looking at a person’s tank if it’s a healthy situation, and this is not healthy.”

  “We’re sick?”

  Along with dizziness and the scaling feeling across his back and the teeth that kept falling out and all the rest of the side effects, Spooner had emerged from the operating room in Philadelphia as a closet hypochondriac. He knew symptoms of dozens of diseases that his doctors had never heard of. Particularly muscle diseases, which had become his specialty. Some time ago he’d had to quit reading medical stories in the newspaper—he would develop symptoms the same day—up to and including obituaries, and now this.

  The septic tank man shrugged. “You get to know these things after a while,” he said, and the apprentice looked over and nodded, apparently having seen the same signs the boss had. “But the main thing is, the missus is got to quit dumping all this grease into the system. It gets into the drain field and you’ve got a disaster.”

  Spooner loved his drain field in a way you cannot understand unless you have lived on a lake where the spring water table is only a foot and a half beneath the ground. He felt threatened, and his stomach made preparations to toss lunch, and in that very moment, perhaps the truest epiphany of his life, he realized what the problem was.

  Before he could say a word, though, there came from next door a scream, and then the sound of trash cans spilled across a driveway. Spooner looked in that direction, but the maples were thick with leaves at this time of year and cut off the view between houses. It was not so unusual, though, to hear screams from next door.

  The septic tank man seemed even more startled than he’d been by the grease in Spooner’s tank, and also looked in that direction but he couldn’t see anything either because of the trees, and by and by there was another scream, this one a little longer than the first one and not as human, and then there was the noise of someone running through bushes and small trees, and presently the bodybuilder crashed through, bleeding from the nose, huge and shirtless and scary, crying like a baby.

  The grandson appeared a moment later, twenty yards behind, rolling through the same opening in the brush like some bear chasing campers. Out of breath and sweaty. The bodybuilder circled a little bit, his hands on either side of one of the elm trees, and called the grandson a big fat bully. Those exact words, a big fat bully. The grandson charged but pulled up short, more of a bluff than a serious attack. No way was Marlin Dodge going to catch Atlas Shrugged.

  “What in the world is that?” the septic tank man said. He’d been sheltered, of course, coming as he did from a large, well-known island family and spending his whole life here, on the southern, less sophisticated end of the island, with few associations beyond his family and his customers, and had gazed into septic tanks all his adult life and had never seen anything remotely as awful as what appeared before him now.

  The grandson was edging toward the bodybuilder, trying to walk him down. The bodybuilder hung just out of range, keeping a tree between them, still crying his heart out.

  They moved from tree to tree and deeper into Spooner’s front yard, and Spooner wished the cat were here to see this. Whitlowe might be a serial fish killer, but he had self-respect.

  “Love hurts,” Spooner said to the septic tank man.

  The bodybuilder overheard this and turned on him furiously, wiping his eyes and his nose. He yelled, “You mind your own business, you fucking bigot! All of you people make me sick!”

  Spooner had a strange feeling that he was being used to bring the couple back together. At the word sick though, he was reminded of where he and the septic tank man had been in their previous conversation. “That’s what’s gunking up the system,” he said. “I throw up all the time. Everything makes me sick.”

  The septic tank man thought that over and then checked the grandson, who was catching his breath, still stalking Atlas Shrugged but the Ukrainian saw what he was up to and maintained the distance of separation, coming farther all the time into Spooner’s yard.

  Spooner said, “You two want privacy, maybe you ought to take it back over to your place.” Before that was out of his mouth, the front door opened and Spooner’s wife came out holding a hammer, 109 pounds, including the hammer, all sighted in on one murderous 109-pound thought. She stepped over the yard-high wall that bordered the sidewalk, through the plants on the other side, and then past Spooner in the direction of their neighbors. Seeing this, the bodybuilder decided that he’d take his chances back where he came from, and turned tail, as they say, crashing back through the nettles and brush and the trees.

  She centered on the grandson.

  He pointed at the hammer. “That’s already assault,” he said.

  Even on the island, everybody was a lawyer.

  This announcement was shortly followed by a snorting noise from the septic tank man. He had been following the action from a certain remove and now seemed to sense where he fit in. “Why don’t you bring your fat sissy self over here, and I’ll show you what assault is, junior,” he said.

  Mrs. Spooner, meanwhile, was still holding the hammer. Spooner noticed the veins in her right arm, pumped up thick and blue like the arms of the missing bodybuilder.

  Marlin looked at the septic tank man, a huge man, maybe Marlin times two. “You don’t have anything to do with this,” he said.

  It wasn’t clear if he was talking to Mrs. Spooner or the septic tank man, but neither one of them was listening. “I’m ca
lling the sheriff,” he said.

  The septic tank man began to laugh. “Swishy, swishy, something’s fishy,” he said. Sixth grade? Seventh? Not for the first time, Spooner marveled at the sides he ended up taking.

  “That’s assault,” the grandson said again, pointing at the hammer, and then he turned his back and began to walk in a slow, deliberate way toward his house.

  Spooner gently took the hammer out of Mrs. Spooner’s hand, wondering how it would feel to swing a hammer at somebody’s head. She was still looking at the spot in the trees where Marlin had disappeared, and Spooner realized that this moment had been in the works since the day their daughter had come up the hill crying because Marlin had said he was going to kill her cat.

  “He’ll call the sheriff,” the septic tank man said. “That kind always does.”

  Spooner thought he was probably right. The island was the only place he’d ever lived where the police actually arrest a woman for brandishing a hammer at trespassers.

  “Self-defense,” Spooner said. Getting everybody on the same page.

  But the septic tank man shook his head. “I didn’t see the missus do a damn thing,” he said. “As far as I observed, them two sweeties just came onto your property to have a sweetie-pie slap fight, and she was inside the whole time.”

  Spooner looked the situation over and saw the septic tank man’s point. He took the hammer into the backyard and threw it over the bluff, and when he got back to the septic tank he said, “It never happened.”

  “I would say that’s just the correct legal note,” the septic tank man said.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Time passed, and by and by a deputy sheriff appeared through the trees in the same spot Spooner had first seen the bodybuilder. She was a big girl, bigger than Spooner but smaller than the septic tank man, and her holster and belt squeaked as she walked over. Pockmarked skin, no makeup, her hair, which was her best feature, combed back into a ducktail.

  “Here comes another fancy one,” the septic tank man said. Surely, Spooner might have argued in different circumstances, there was more to a human being than that. Some of the deputy’s friends probably copulated in ways the septic tank man’s friends copulated themselves.

  The deputy was moving closer all the time, picking her way through the brush and nettles, stinging herself now and then, not looking like a person accustomed to the great outdoors, and finally stopped a few yards in front of them, separated from them by only an open septic tank and the stench of just-removed human waste.

  “Which one of you is Mr. Spooner?” she said.

  Spooner lifted his hand. “Here,” he said.

  “I have a complaint that you threatened your neighbor Marlin Dodge with a claw hammer.”

  Spooner nodded, as if this was exactly what he expected.

  “He said you threatened him with a claw hammer. Do you have the hammer on the premises, sir?”

  “Here?” Spooner held out his arms and turned around, showing her that he had no concealed tools whatsoever. Perhaps offering himself up to be searched. “No tickling,” he said.

  He put his arm casually around Mrs. Spooner’s neck and felt the muscles in her shoulder jumping under his hand. Given the chance, would she bury the business end of a claw hammer in the deputy sheriff’s skull?

  “Nobody threatened the queer,” the septic tank man said. “I was here the whole time, and so was my associate.”

  The apprentice nodded, and the deputy sheriff looked them over, and it was clear she didn’t believe a word they said. “Is that your story too?” she said to Spooner’s wife. It felt to Spooner like his wife’s muscles were playing dodgeball in there. There was, however, no outward sign of the percolation going on under his hand.

  “I ought to charge you all,” the deputy said, not even trying to keep the disgust out of her voice. Looking them over one by one.

  “I wisht you would, dearie,” the septic tank man said. “I’ll sue this goddamn county till it pisses blood.”

  “Sir,” she said, “I will remind you that I am an officer of the law. You can’t talk to a deputy sheriff in that manner.”

  “My ass,” he said, taking the other side of the argument.

  “What did you say? Would you care to repeat that?”

  Yes, he would. “I said, ‘my ass.’ ”

  “You all heard that,” she said.

  “I’m going inside,” Spooner’s wife said.

  “Stay where you are, please,” the deputy said. “I need statements from everybody. We can do it here, or we can go to Coupeville and do it.” Coupeville was the county seat, and Spooner’s wife did not care what the deputy said or wanted her to do, she was going back into her house. “Ma’am?” the deputy said. “I’m speaking to you.”

  But Spooner’s wife was already walking through the plants, then over the shallow stone wall bordering the sidewalk, and then inside.

  The deputy turned back to the apprentice, identifying him as the weak link. “I’d like to speak to you over here, alone,” she said.

  “Stanley don’t talk,” the septic tank man said. And now that he mentioned it, Spooner hadn’t heard the apprentice say anything. He’d just sat there most of the time looking up into the cloudless sky.

  “Sir?”

  “He don’t talk.”

  “What is he, retarded?” she said.

  “You heard that,” the septic tank man said to Spooner, “she called him a retard.”

  And that fast, the man in bib overalls was holding all the cards. “He’s mute,” he said, and there was triumph in his voice.

  The deputy saw that she’d made a monumental mistake. “I meant dumb, like deaf and dumb.”

  “The hell you did,” the septic tank man said. “What’s your name? I’m going to file a complaint with the county.”

  “Look…”

  The septic tank man only smiled, having her by the short hairs as he did, and she stood there without a bullet left in her gun. A moment passed, the septic tank man grinning, the deputy staring at the ground, pretending to be analyzing the case. She looked up and said, “All right, I’m going to interview Mr. Dodge, and I’ll be back later for all of your statements,” but she wasn’t coming back, anybody could see that, because she’d crossed the one line—insensitivity—that no deputy sheriff from this place could cross and keep her job.

  She turned around and picked her way back through the trees and nettles to the yard next door, her bottom as wide as a U-Haul, and Spooner did not see or hear from her again for a long time.

  The septic tank man looked in the direction of Spooner’s house and said, “You’ve got to cut down on the grease.”

  Spooner looked into her face when they’d finished, seeing her in some new, more complete way, and later on, as she napped, her head cradled in his arm in a place that was putting it to sleep, he stared at the top of her head, and for the first time in his life he could not come up with the words to tell her how tender she was to his heart.

  SIXTY-SIX

  The bodybuilder moved out that same day, packing his things while the deputy made Marlin wait in the truck. She even gave Alexi a ride to the ferry. Marlin made no effort to interfere, and sat in his truck for a long time after they’d left.

  After that, Marlin threw a party once in a while, but nothing as long or as loud as before. He continued to work on the fence, and slowly the line of naked posts climbed up from the road, and Spooner sometimes noticed the big white Ford pickup parked in the driveway splashed with mud or covered with pollen from the alders, as if Marlin didn’t even care enough to wipe it down with a damp cloth. Self-deprivation, the universal language of heartbreak and remorse. Other victims went on weeklong drunks, or quit eating; Marlin Dodge quit washing his truck.

  From what Spooner could see, he blamed it all on his grandfather, the quarrel, the unfinished fence, the dirty truck. One night Spooner heard him yelling, “Why don’t you just fucking die?” And useless, he was always calling old Dodge useless. A thirt
y-eight-year-old man who had lived all his adult life off a trust fund that was left for him by his mother.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  There was a deer in the driveway, most of a deer, at least.

  Spooner hit the brakes before he hit the carcass, got out of the truck and saw it had been a doe, spindly and small, but an adult all the same. Covered with yellow jackets. It looked like she’d been hit out on the highway, something going fast enough to tear her inside out.

  The animal was laid sideways across the driveway in a narrow spot with trees on both sides, hidden by the bend in the roadbed. Spooner couldn’t drive around it, even with the truck. It was early Saturday morning, and Spooner was on the way to Bailey’s Corner for the newspaper and some milk for the dog. Lester liked milk with his cereal.

  He left the truck running and walked back up to the house and found a coat and a pair of gloves and a fifty-gallon trash bag, and managed to fit the doe into the bag without getting himself stung. He stuck the gloves inside the bag with the deer, and then threw the whole thing into the back of the truck and drove it to the recycling center, where he watched it slide down a wide shoot into a trash compactor. He pressed the compactor’s starter, still preoccupied with the vandalism, not even hanging around to listen. He was usually interested in the noises of things being crunched and sometimes if an unusual item came in—a used-up watercooler, say, or a BarcaLounger, even the occasional television set—the girls who ran the place would call him at home and set it aside until he came by and could listen to it with them.

  He did not mention the doe to Mrs. Spooner, but that same afternoon he drove fifty miles to the north end of the island and bought a light single-barrel .410 shotgun at the hardware store, something she could point and shoot. He showed it to her in the yard, how to load it, how to work the safety.