by Pete Dexter
“Why do I need to know how to load a rifle?” she said. He told her again it was a shotgun and not a rifle, but when Mrs. Spooner wasn’t interested in something, she didn’t pay attention to the details.
“Because of the coyotes,” he said. “They’ve been coming right into backyards all over the island for house cats.”
The next afternoon they went into the meadow and he showed her how to shoot. He wanted Marlin to hear it for himself, wanted him to hear that they had a gun.
“It’s the coyotes,” he said to her again. “We could lose the cat.”
PART SEVEN
Falling Rapids
SIXTY-EIGHT
By the end of that year, citizens all over the state of South Dakota were saying they might as well live in New York City, which in the state of South Dakota was not a compliment. Murder-wise, the world had gone upside down. First the number—four homicides statewide, against the annual average of .8—and even more alarming, none of the killings occurred on any of the state’s various reservations but were all east-of-the-river, white-on-white affairs, not an Indian in the bunch. Three males, one female, the last to go being Dr. Merle Cowhurl, D.Ed., superintendent of the largest school district in the state. Cowhurl was pronounced a goner at 5:25 p.m., Christmas Eve.
Dr. Cowhurl was described the following morning in the Morning-Ledger as an exacting sort of fellow, a stickler for respect and discipline and the district’s dress code, as well as a stickler for being addressed as doctor, and not just by members of the various student bodies but by the faculties as well. Such warm remembrances were pieced together in the half hour before deadline by a skeleton crew working the city desk of the newspaper and, in the way these things happen, came to serve as Cowhurl’s legacy, and many people who’d never thought much of him while he was on the job thought better of him, reading that, thought he was exactly what the school district needed all along.
There were arguments of course regarding the crime itself. Some elements of the population, undeluged as yet by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, refused to count Cowhurl’s death as murder, would not accept a car accident as a homicide no matter how drunk the driver was, a legitimate enough point for another time, perhaps, but in this particular instance obscured the larger, more pressing question of how much of an accident the accident had been.
This much was inarguable: Dr. Cowhurl was run over in his own driveway by his own wife, Arlene, who at the time was behind the wheel of a cheerful, cherry-red, twelve-cylinder Jaguar convertible he’d bought her as an anniversary present only seven weeks before, in early November. The car had just 750 miles on the odometer and was still technically in the break-in period, when sudden starts and stops were not recommended by the manufacturer. The dealership was 60 miles away in Omaha, Nebraska, and the car had already been towed there twice, first when the fuel pump quit and then again after Mrs. Cowhurl pulled a little too suddenly into a parking spot at the Alibi Lounge and liquor store and bent the front end of the frame. Cowhurl had been furious at her carelessness and, as a lesson in personal responsibility, deducted the towing charge from her monthly allowance.
According to the medical examiner’s report, Mrs. Cowhurl was operating the Jaguar at approximately eighty-five miles an hour, heading south on South Ninth Avenue, when she abruptly changed heading and barreled eastward across a neighbor’s lawn, blowing through the tall hedge that served as a boundary between the neighbor’s yard and the Cowhurls’, and plucked him off the controls of a new self-propelled Craftsman snowblower, which he’d given himself that same morning as an early Christmas present.
As per the warning instructions in the snowblower’s manual, Dr. Cowhurl was wearing goggles and earplugs when the end came, in addition to his usual outdoor gear: insulated hunting boots, earmuffs, mittens, and a parka. Thus the educator was all in all pretty well sealed off from the outside world, which in the following weeks his detractors would whisper had been his modus operandi since the day he took over as superintendent, and in any case probably never recognized what was coming even if he’d sensed it in time to look up, as Mrs. Cowhurl attacked out of the setting sun, which as it happened was also the direction the snowblower was throwing snow at the time, into a fierce, cutting wind rolling down out of Canada, which in turn was throwing the snow back into Dr. Cowhurl’s face.
Two weather fronts were closing in on the northern part of the state at the same time that afternoon, and the twenty-two-year-old television weatherman had predicted a once-in-a-lifetime storm, and the old-timers had been predicting more or less the same thing for three months—saying all along that a mild autumn promised a hard winter—and with this convergence of predictions plus the timing of the storm itself, the event was named even before it was delivered: the Great Christmas Eve Blizzard, not that it was anything compared to the Great Easter Blizzard, which occurred back in ’49 and froze to death half a dozen drunks downtown yet didn’t cause the cancellation of a single church service in town, or even postpone the traditional Easter-egg hunt in Keisler Park. But then, people in those days were made of harder stuff—ask anybody out at Sunset Convalescent—even the children, and the Easter eggs were real eggs, not some chocolate/marshmallow thing wrapped in tinfoil.
But Christmas Eve:
The cherry-red British convertible meanders peacefully up Ninth Avenue, twelve English cylinders humming sweetly together beneath the hood, Mrs. Cowhurl behind the wheel in sunglasses and a scarf. A sound then, something like clearing your throat, and the machine seems to slightly buck, and an instant later it is moving at eighty-three miles an hour, a speed it is still going a few seconds later when it slams into the six-inch curb at the edge of her neighbor’s property, bending the Jaguar’s frame (five thousand minimum for that, as Mrs. Cowhurl’s previous jounce into the curbing down in front of the Alibi was much gentler and cost $1675) and then goes airborne, crossing the first twenty feet of the neighbor’s yard in sudden and complete silence, the mighty twelve-cylinder Jaguar engine having seized shut with vapor lock just previous to leaving the ground—the sad truth is, reliability has never been British Motors’ long suit. At any rate, the automobile, with its huge twelve-cylinder engine, is more than a little nose heavy, and it lands as you might expect on the front tires and front bumper and skids in that posture across most of what is left of the neighbor’s lawn, taking out a section of the hedge and then a section of Dr. Cowhurl himself, catching him just at the knickers, breaking both his legs, and, according to investigating officers on the scene, catapulting him twenty-nine yards into the branches of the fir tree in the middle of his front yard. Thus, twenty-nine yards becomes the official distance Cowhurl was flung, although a blind man can see that the whole lot itself is barely thirty yards wide and that the investigating officer has confused yards with feet. Still, the report is the report and twenty-nine yards is and will remain the official distance, just as the verb catapulting is and will always be the incident’s official verb, at least the one that will be used by the Morning-Ledger and every radio and television station in the state whenever the incident is rehashed. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of stories, and Dr. Cowhurl catapults through them, every one.
Although no one claims to have seen the actual impact, it is surmised that Dr. Cowhurl rebounded slightly off the ground after he dropped out of the fir tree because a banana-shaped piece of his scalp is found wedged into the car’s front bumper, accordioned by the force of impact—accordioned being another verb that will appear whenever the event is reworked in the press.
But a little scalping is the least of the damage, as a moment after the banana-shaped section is removed from his hairline, the automobile’s left front tire rolls over his head, leaving a detailed if slightly elongated likeness of the doctor’s profile in the snow—right down to the front teeth and earplug—and even if the skull itself looks remarkably intact to the eye, it is not so to the touch, and the medical examiner is surprised and not a little queasy when he lifts it later and finds that it is
soft and hard in random places, like a thawing chicken.
The medical examiner is late to the scene, due to family obligations and the weather—it is Christmas Eve, after all—but once arrived wastes no time pronouncing that the automobile hit Dr. Cowhurl at a high rate of speed, as it takes violent impact to retroflex a human’s patellae, not to mention catapulting him twenty-nine yards into a fir tree, not to mention squashing his skull and dragging him beneath the rear undercarriage all the way to the house, where the vehicle finally comes to rest. And that fast, retroflex joins catapulting and accordioned as part of the incident’s official language.
A neighbor appears and reports that a moment after the Jaguar crossed his yard and took Dr. Cowhurl off his machine, Mrs. Cowhurl exited her vehicle, walked calmly into the house and opened the bathroom window, where she could be heard to enjoy a long tinkle, then, by her own admission, she combed her hair and put on fresh makeup and returned to the car, checking one way and then the other, before backing it out of the yard, over Dr. Cowhurl, and then parking it in the garage. Innocently hoping, as her attorneys would posit at her trial, that Dr. Cowhurl would not notice the damage to the car.
SIXTY-NINE
News of Dr. Cowhurl’s sudden end spread through the city like the previous spring’s epidemic of Dutch elm disease, which had claimed all the trees that once canopied South Ninth Avenue, and left the neighborhood looking frail and bald, something like the aftermath of chemotherapy. Yet the two blocks of South Ninth Avenue where Calmer lived had for fifty years been the city’s unofficial center for Nativity scenes, and the tradition held fast, unaffected by the naked look of the neighborhood. As always, there were angry letters to the newspaper charging idea-stealing and copycatting, and hard feelings, and grudges, and a fistfight/wrestling match that had gone on for half an hour before the police arrived to break it up. Lawsuits were filed and half a dozen lawyers were already at work on the case.
But like every other year for the past fifty years, endless lines of cars had driven past the various Ninth Avenue depictions of the birth of Baby Jesus, some featuring live livestock, and now, as news of the death passed through the little city, the populace bundled up and headed back out into the teeth of the two-front storm again, even though it was Christmas Eve, when traditionally the Christmas-display looking was over and there were family dinners and stocking hangings and present-opening traditions to attend, not to mention church services to remind the children of the true meaning of Christmas.
Calmer watched the procession outside from the living room, sitting on the sofa with his feet crossed on the coffee table. Cars crawled past the house, children pressed wet-mouthed against the back windows. The Peace sign blinked pale blue from the roof across the street, the color growing brighter as the afternoon turned dark.
It was Calmer’s first Christmas Eve alone, and his was the only house on the block without at least a token Nativity display, not even a wise man in the bushes in front of the porch. He had turned off the kitchen and living room lights before he sat down, and the only illumination in the place came from a tiny red glowing button on the hi-fi. It was enough to see by though, and he looked around the room thinking this was it, where they’d ended up, as close as he ever came to making her happy.
He had been carrying around a dose of the flu for ten days, a strain bad enough that he’d called off his regular holiday trip to Montana to be with Darrow and his family. He hated to miss the little girls—four of them, all rock climbers and long-distance runners; miracles—but more than that he hated missing Darrow with the little girls. In that version of his son, he saw himself.
Calmer had been at this same post yesterday when the meter ran out on Cowhurl, listening to Handel’s Messiah on the hi-fi with the volume so high it shook the cups and saucers. Loud music had given Lily headaches. The wind had been whistling out of the north, gusting to fifty miles an hour, and between that racket and the Messiah, neither the sound of Cowhurl’s new snowblower nor the sound of the crashing Jaguar had made it across the street, although the snowblower itself did. It was a top-of-the-line self-propelled model that continued on even after Cowhurl was picked off the controls, clearing a path twenty-seven inches wide out to the street and then across it, bouncing first into the curb in front of Calmer’s house and then heading north up South Ninth Avenue, wandering from one side of the road to the other, finally reaching a small cul-de-sac called Whiting Court where it vanished. No trace. And you had to wonder how many citizens had been stabbed with the thought this morning as they celebrated the birth of the Savior that if they had only been a little quicker last night getting out of the house that fucking snowblower could be sitting in their own garage right now.
But back to Christmas Eve:
Calmer had sensed a stir outside and tried to ignore it, afraid to go to the window on the chance it was carolers, but the movement continued and eventually not knowing what was going on began to intrude on the music, and he left the sofa and went to the front door and peeked out just as the first police car pulled into Cowhurl’s driveway. Even at this distance the flashing lights were half hidden in the storm. A house or two farther up the block, he thought, all you would see would be the reflection of the lights in the snow whirling above the car.
Minutes passed and there were other lights, an ambulance, then a fire truck, more police, members of the press, and finally the county medical examiner. Calmer was still at the door watching when Cowhurl’s wife was taken from the house and escorted to a police cruiser. She was wearing a fur coat and overshoes, smiling for the photographers when she saw they were taking her picture. There was an officer stationed on each of Mrs. Cowhurl’s arms, holding on, but this was years before women’s lib found its way to the Dakotas, and handcuffs were not deemed necessary.
SEVENTY
Christmas Day, Calmer pulled the curtains away from the front window and sat down on the sofa and sipped at an eggnog he’d made, laced with rum and nutmeg. The Robert Shaw Chorale was singing Christmas carols on the hi-fi, and he gazed trancelike across at Cowhurl’s yard. Thirty inches of snow had fallen overnight, and except for the yellow crime-scene barriers and the footprints and tire tracks of various officials and official vehicles that had come back early Christmas morning to gather evidence, and the lone police car stationed in the driveway, you would never guess that anything out of the ordinary had happened over there at all.
Peace…
Peace…
About one-thirty, two of Cowhurl’s three grown sons arrived together, one in an overcoat, the other in a parka. The one in the overcoat was a doctor of education, just like Cowhurl; the other was working toward his D.Ed. degree up in Fargo. There was a third son, Calmer remembered, who had seemed like a nice kid but was no student. Neighborhood reports had him up in Canada, living in Toronto with a colored girl. Later that week, when the boy failed to show for the funeral, a neighbor remarked to Calmer that it was no wonder the poor woman went crazy on Christmas Eve, with a son like that.
Although he was interested in the events across the street, Calmer took no pleasure in Cowhurl’s slaughter, and instead, by nature and habit, put himself in the position of the sons. Seeing them arrive, he’d considered walking over and knocking on the door—something he had not done once in the years since he’d been demoted, had not spoken once to the man in all those years—but in the end couldn’t think of what he might say if they invited him in. The sons knew who he was and must have been given some version of what had happened.
Half an hour later, Calmer finished off his third or fourth or fifth eggnog of Christmas Day and, feeling like some exercise for the first time since he’d gotten sick, put on his parka and mittens and went outside to shovel snow. The temperature had turned warm when the first front blew through, up into the high thirties, and then dropped again overnight, leaving a crust of ice three inches thick beneath the snow, which could not be shoveled but had to be chipped away piece by piece. An afternoon’s work, at least.
&
nbsp; Contrary to habit, he did not estimate the job or plan the work, just began where he began and went on from there, sweating even as the wind continued to blow a steady thirty miles an hour from the north, and when he’d finished his own sidewalk and driveway, he crossed the street and began on Cowhurl’s. First the walk that ran parallel to the street, then the one that led to the house.
The wind rose and the temperature fell, and gradually the alcohol wore off and he stopped sweating, and his undershirt was soaking wet and cold as the snow itself.
His toes had gone numb even before he’d crossed the street, and now his fingers hurt like ten little ice cream headaches. Again and again, he took off his mittens and stuck his fingertips in his mouth, and before he’d finished there was no feeling even in that, and his eyelashes were thick with frost.
He was chipping away the last few yards of Cowhurl’s walk when a car pulled into the driveway, a man and woman inside, and for a long moment they sat where they were, staring at the house, not a word between them, and seemed as far away from one another as it was possible to be and still be in the same car, and in time they got out and walked past Calmer to the house, single-file, their faces vaguely familiar but buried in their collars and scarves. They were together but in that way married people are together when it’s all over and every man for himself. Calmer stepped politely into the snow to let them pass, and they went past without a nod.
He finished the job just as the last bits of daylight dappled the late-afternoon sky, and started home, wondering if there was any eggnog in the house, thinking he should have one because it was Christmas.