Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  SEVENTY-ONE

  As Calmer crossed the street for home, though, a car turned onto it, coming left off Twenty-sixth at the end of the block, and he stopped for a moment and watched the snow dancing in its high, double beams. He looked away then, suddenly dizzy, his eyes losing the shape of the street itself, the sense of near and far. He leaned against the handle of the shovel, afraid of falling, and tried to remember if he’d eaten anything today. The thought crossed his mind that his heart might have momentarily stopped—not a heart attack but something in the way of a musician who finds himself out of step with the orchestra and takes a few beats off to come back in on time.

  The car began to slow, and Calmer gathered himself and moved slowly out of the way. He was almost to his front door when he heard the tires sliding across the ice and then gently bouncing into the curb—a heavy, wet noise, maybe the same sound Mrs. Cowhurl’s Jaguar had made running over Cowhurl’s head, although he was pretty sure it hadn’t sounded like that to Cowhurl—and there were two cheerful toots on the horn and then the hum of the automatic window. Calmer turned, his feet stinging like the dickens, and tried to make out who was behind the wheel. He had a powerful urge to pee.

  The car was low to the ground, and probably some shade of yellow under all the dirt. Ice was frozen a foot thick in the wheel wells, and the brake lights lit up the fog coming out of the exhaust.

  “Calmer?”

  He recognized the voice even before he bent to the open window and saw the face. Larsson lit a cigarette and laid his arm out the window, nineteen years old again, chatting up some girl on the sidewalk, hugging his door as he tried to talk her into taking a ride.

  He was wearing an old letter jacket from the university, and a leather cap with fur earflaps. The car was a Cadillac, and the turn signal on the dashboard blinked on and off, throwing two distinct reflections off the lenses of his bifocal glasses.

  Calmer looked into the car, and the warm air blowing out the window carried a waft of liquor. He thought again that he might like an eggnog.

  “Some business,” Larsson said, glancing over in the direction of Cowhurl’s place. The Peace sign was still blinking from the roof, and Larsson pulled at his cigarette, burning a perfect circle in the dark. “Some business,” he said again, and Calmer turned without a word to go back into his house and pee.

  “Calmer?”

  Calmer kept going; Larsson was as dead to him as Cowhurl. “You spare me a few minutes, you think? It doesn’t have to be right now. Maybe tomorrow?”

  He’d waited months to hear from Larsson after he’d been demoted and put back in the classroom, his salary cut in half, believing that Larsson would come to him with something else. He’d promised him as much when it happened. Don’t let’s us make a big fuss, Calmer, you got my word all this will get worked out. And Calmer was a long time—he was embarrassed at how long—seeing what Larsson’s word was worth.

  “I don’t see the point, Larsson,” he said now. Surprisingly matter-of-fact, but these days, what wasn’t surprising? Who could have guessed that he would enjoy cooking and cleaning for himself, enjoy leaving a drink on the coffee table without a coaster while he tickled up a fire, playing the hi-fi too loud, going whole weekends without answering the phone or the doorbell? Or that Christmas alone would be so peaceful?

  “We need to talk, Admiral,” Larsson was saying. “We got a disaster on our hands.”

  “We?” he said.

  “Everybody. The whole school district.”

  “You’ve got the wrong house,” he said, and started inside again.

  “Criminy sake, Calmer, I need a few minutes of your time.”

  Calmer said, “I have to pee.”

  “You and me were friends once,” Larsson said, “still are, as far as I’m concerned. What do you say, I come by early tomorrow and pick you up? They got a champagne brunch at the club, I promise to have you home before the games start.” The games, as if Calmer cared about the games.

  And promise, as if Calmer had no memory at all. Or maybe it was Larsson who didn’t remember; maybe that was the secret of success. Calmer felt unfaithful to Lily even giving him the time of day. Worse than that, in some way he still liked him.

  He wondered if Larsson had seen him crossing the street and stopped on some impulse to make peace. Larsson would believe he could do that, throw his arm around your shoulder and make you forget he’d ruined you. From what Calmer knew, he’d been doing it all his life. Big-shot jock at college in Vermillion, big-shot banker—he owned the bank where Calmer’s house was mortgaged—president of the school board, member of the state board of regents, the board of the Flatt Valley Hospital district, president of the United Way. A big shot with the Methodist Church and the alumni association, a big fund-raiser for the university. He’d cut ribbons and shoveled first shovels of dirt all over the state, and his picture was in every issue of the alumni news, and in the Morning-Ledger three, four times a month, always the same message: It all comes down to teamwork, pulling together for the common good.

  And in spite of all that, in spite of what he was and what he’d done, Calmer liked him, couldn’t help liking him even if there was nothing about him he liked. And it wasn’t only Calmer—everybody in town had a tender spot for Dean Larsson, just as everybody who’d ever come in touching range of Merle Cowhurl despised him.

  Larsson had been the first person to interview Calmer about the job in Falling Rapids, the meeting commencing at Larsson’s office at the downtown branch of his bank and ending up a dinner and several drinks later at a place called Minerva’s, and on the way out of that eating establishment he’d hung his arm around Calmer’s shoulder and told him that as far as he was concerned, he was exactly the ticket. Brains and common sense both, the rarest possible combination to find in the field of public education.

  He’d said, “Anything you need to make this happen, Admiral, you let me know.” From the beginning he’d called him Admiral, impressed with Calmer’s career in the navy.

  Calmer peed, holding his pecker like a cigarette because his fingers were still too stiff to hold it the usual way. They were also too stiff to rezip his zipper and so he went into the living room and stirred the fire and stood in front of it awhile, opening and closing his hands. He’d never made fires when Lily was alive—asthma again—but now, October to March, he had one going all the time. From the fireplace he watched Larsson maneuver his car backwards into Cowhurl’s driveway, close up behind the car that had come in while Calmer was shoveling the walk. Larsson got out, ducked under the crime-scene tape and went to the front door, weaving in the wind like a drunk. He knocked and whoever answered noticed the wreath still hanging on the door and took it down, and while Larsson waited to be asked in, a rectangle of light was cast from the house out across the yard like the doorway to the underground shelter back on the farm in Conde, where Calmer’s family had once waited out tornadoes.

  Calmer walked into his kitchen and stopped dead. A carton of eggnog had been left out on the kitchen table, and next to it was a bottle of dark Bacardi rum.

  He stepped back out of the kitchen and looked upstairs, listening, wondering if one of the kids had come home to spend Christmas after all.

  Calmer made the eggnog and took it to the front porch and sat down in the rocking chair. The crime-scene tape enclosed the entire front of Cowhurl’s property and extended to the spot in the neighbor’s yard where the Jaguar had first left the street. A lone cop had been left sitting in his cruiser outside to protect the scene, but he was asleep now, the engine running.

  For a long time it was quiet.

  Christmas night.

  Calmer realized that he was sad, wishing that Lily had lived this long at least. The best Christmas of her life, wasted.

  The porch was screened in. He’d spent the weekend before she died building plastic windows to insulate the space for winter. She’d wanted real windows, custom-made, but the truth was she didn’t like being out there anyway, where the cold
stirred up her asthma and due to the bushes the only view to be had was directly across the street.

  The wind had all but quit, and stars were visible in the sky—from the looks of things, the temperature would drop another twenty degrees tonight—and the Peace sign still blinked on and off, casting its blue light across the snow.

  Calmer sat on the porch and drank eggnog and thought of Lily. He’d seen her happy without reservations exactly twice in his life—the night JFK was elected president and the day Richard Nixon quit the White House—and both times they’d drunk highballs in the kitchen and she’d ended up singing old Theta sorority songs. He thought of the pure, pitch-perfect sound of her voice, and for the first time in a long time he missed having her there with him in the house.

  Oh, there would have been singing tonight.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  Dean Larsson came for Calmer a little after nine o’clock in the morning, looking like he’d slept on his face, his blue eyes shot with blood and his skin creased and scraped raw by the cold. He had on fresh clothes, though—pressed blue jeans and cowboy boots with silver toes and a homemade Christmas sweater that hung on him like lawn sod. Knitted into the sweater was a snowman with the feet of a chicken. The snowman’s arms were twigs and stretched straight out, spanning Larsson nipple to nipple. The name Frosty was stitched into the fabric with an exclamation point, and underlined, but at a slightly downhill angle from Frosty himself, suggesting another plane, as if the famous snowman happened to be passing by as the word FROSTY! was sliding down an adjacent hill.

  Calmer met him at the front door and left him there while he put on his overshoes and coat, thinking again of Lily. It wasn’t hard to imagine what she would say, that he was letting them push him around. She would have called it obscene, just having Larsson on the property.

  In the car on the way to the country club he smelled alcohol in Larsson’s skin, percolating up under the Old Spice. He was bigger by a hundred pounds than when Calmer met him, and made fun of himself over it in public. He drove one-handed and vaguely out of breath, smoking a cigarette and sipping with the same hand at a cup of coffee that he held between his thighs. If the coffee was laced, Calmer could not tell. Larsson’s stomach rubbed against the steering wheel when he turned corners. He caught Calmer staring at his stomach and nodded along, patting it fondly. “Been living off the fat of the land so long, I turned into it,” he said, and in spite of himself, Calmer felt an odd affection. The trouble, he thought, was that with Lily gone there was nobody around to hold him to his grudges.

  A live ash dropped off the end of Larsson’s cigarette and onto his stomach but he seemed unconcerned about setting fire to the sweater. The tires chomped snow and ice, and Calmer looked out the window and a little later he heard Larsson sigh.

  “That was some business,” Larsson said.

  Calmer wondered if Larsson remembered it was the same thing he’d said last night, twice. Most likely he was just feeling around for something to break the ice, and some business was all that came to mind. Ordinarily he would have talked sports. Larsson could tell you his shooting percentage, batting average, yards per completion, and rebounds from every year he ever played anything, seventh grade to his last season at the university, remembered the won-lost record of every team he ever played on, and seemed even to remember the games themselves, all of them, inning by inning, play by play. Seventy-four years old and still coasting on what he’d done when he was fifteen.

  Larsson blew smoke and sighed. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “Christmas Eve you’re out shoveling your own damn driveway and the missus gets a bee in her bonnet to run over you, and in a goddamn Jaguar automobile you just gave her for your anniversary? And then goes inside and has a squat and then comes back out and runs over you again? And then parks the damn car? And as far as I know, there wasn’t even any reason. At least Merle wasn’t diddling anybody I know of.”

  He looked over, maybe asking if Cowhurl had been diddling anybody he knew of, or maybe even if Calmer had some idea of what the state of relations between Cowhurl and the missus was. People were always saying she used to be quite a package until she let herself go, but that was before Calmer had met her. Lately, she’d been putting on weight, and looking at her you might not have seen how she could get in and out of a Jaguar in the first place.

  They both knew Cowhurl had had an affair with a secretary up in the administration building—she had some strange name, it seemed to Calmer—and had taken her along to conventions in Denver and Minneapolis and Des Moines. Blushing, that was it. Darcy Blushing. A tidy girl, always straightening things up, wrapping everything in rubber bands, the kind of girl who made the best of what she had, always tuning and pruning herself into the little pat on the bottom she was. She was also the type of girl other girls didn’t like, and as far as Calmer knew, she had no friends in the office of either sex, and had no use for friends—unless you counted her special friend, Dr. Cowhurl, whom she used like all-purpose cleaner. She was smart and careful and had a memory like a bank vault, and knew a thousand things she wasn’t supposed to know, and when the time came, she knew enough to toss Dr. Cowhurl, D.Ed., and the whole school board over the railing like a sack of kittens. And when the time came, the financial settlement came out to a little over nine hundred dollars for every day the woman had been employed. Enough to buy a school district of her own.

  Calmer had never told Lily about the settlement, not knowing what she might do with the information. She might call a talk show.

  The school board paid up, of course, and that, as far as Calmer knew, had been the end of Cowhurl’s wandering eye. On the other hand, that spring Calmer was fired or demoted—whichever way you wanted to put it—with no settlement, and he was a long time out of the loop by now, and to this day people who worked in the administration office were afraid to be seen with him, afraid it would look like they weren’t part of the team.

  The car was blowing hot air off the windshield and into his face, and Calmer unbuttoned his coat.

  “What I think this might be about?” Larsson said, “he spoiled her. It’s always a fine line between happy and spoiled. I’ve been married to the same female forty-four years, and I’ll deny this in federal court if you ever repeat it, but you got to make them earn what they get. You just give them any damn thing comes into their head, they forget who’s boss. Next thing you know you’ve got talking in the huddle.”

  He looked at Calmer again and winked.

  “I grant you the woman’s crazier than a loon, but that’s a given. You know she shoplifts? Anything that isn’t nailed down. Been sticking a rib roast up under her skirt at Compton’s every week for years, holding it in there between her thighs while she checks out, I guess. Old Marty, he just sent Merle the bill every month, no harm no foul. But what I’m getting at, you’ve got to keep hold of the reins. Some way or the other, you got to have hold of the reins.

  “Or you get talking in the huddle,” Calmer said. Please let Lily be listening.

  “You’re fucking with me, Calmer, I know that. But mark my words, the next thing you’ll hear, she’ll be laying on the couch while some fifty-dollar-an-hour psychologist is working up a case of temporary insanity. And she’ll get away with it, all because Cowhurl didn’t have hold of the reins.”

  The year previous to the Darcy Blushing settlement, the school district had expelled a C-minus student at the new high school for getting herself in a family way. Calmer had fought Cowhurl over the expulsion, bitterly and personally, and when Cowhurl expelled her anyway, saying students had to be taught to take responsibility for their actions, Calmer had gone over his head to Larsson.

  Responsibility.

  In the end, Calmer tutored the girl himself, got her through an equivalency test for a high school degree, and she was living in Denver these days, married to a tire salesman, and sent Calmer a card every Christmas with pictures of her children and the pets. This year’s card was sitting open right now on the dining room table, along with f
ive or six others from students he didn’t remember, even when he pulled out the yearbooks and looked at the pictures that went with the names.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  Larsson drove the Cadillac into the country club parking lot, parked, and reached into the backseat for the black Stetson hat he’d lately taken to wearing, and then got out of the car. He left his keys in the ignition. The lot had been plowed that morning, which had only made the layer of ice beneath the snow slicker and trickier to navigate than if they’d just left it alone.

  Larsson moved over it carefully, a step at a time, his arms held out seagull-style for balance, grinning at himself as he slipped, stopping three times to shake hands with other members of the club who were also on the way in for the day-after-Christmas brunch. Some of them read his sweater out loud.

  “Frosty!” they said.

  Calmer was a few feet behind, invisible to Larsson’s rich friends.

  The dining room at the country club had picture windows overlooking the first tee box and the ninth green, and even with all the snow you could make out the general shape of the fairways by following the tree lines. Ice had caught on the underside of the branches and pulled them down, like earrings, and the branches hung motionless in the sun as if gravity itself had frozen in the night. Calmer squinted into the glare coming off the ice and noticed half a dozen children in the distance, riding sleds and some sort of metal saucers down a hill, carefully avoiding the flat area at the bottom, where the green was. Country club children, already programmed to the inviolability of putting surfaces.

  They went to an unoccupied table, Larsson marking it for himself with his hat, which he hadn’t put on his head since he got out of the car, and then he led Calmer to the middle of the room where the buffet had been laid out, about twenty-five yards of it—fruit, biscuits, waffles, pancakes, a dozen steaming trays of eggs and bacon and sausage and breakfast steaks, gravy with sausage, gravy with bacon, gravy with chicken gizzards, six or seven different kinds of potatoes. There was a separate table of fish—perch, fried catfish, clams, trout, an enormous salmon, head intact and smiling in spite of a body eaten down to semi-skeletal, giving it the look of an airplane fuselage under construction.