by Pete Dexter
Spooner and Mrs. Spooner, meanwhile, walked together in the direction she had pointed—was still pointing—and although she was walking beside him, it was not a regular side-by-side thing, the way they had once gone into the First National Bank of Collingswood, New Jersey, to be married, but more the way you and the beast napping in the office might walk if you were holding still another pound of Morrell’s bacon in your hand, and in this fashion they—Spooner and Spooner’s woman—progressed yonderly through the guesthouse to the double doors leading outside. And reaching the doors, looked out.
There, she pointed, there. And the two chattiest deaf people in the world had never spoken more clearly with their hands.
It could be useful to mention here that Mrs. Spooner, in spite of her lovely bottom and a wide-ranging and fascinating internal life, had not come into this world with a penchant to nurture. Her ancestors were obviously hunters and trackers, bred to eat the stragglers, not nurse them back to health.
In spite of this, she held Calmer in deep affection, and not only for his small kindnesses and acts of chivalry and his level head when things went upside down and her husband’s—Spooner’s—obvious and deep attachments to the man who had raised him. More than any of that, Calmer was established in some way in the middle of her daughter’s heart, and she cared as much for the child’s heart as her own.
Still, there sat an eighty-year-old man with undeniable signs of dementia cross-legged on an army blanket down in the meadow with his rifle, dressed, bottom to top, in the following manner: black shoes, dark socks, boxer shorts, white T-shirt, German military helmet, circa World War I.
Calmer aimed the rifle up into the air and squeezed off a shot and then lowered it and waited, scanning the meadow (was a duck supposed to fall out of the sky?) and then reloaded and fired again.
Spooner had never seen Calmer shooting into the sky before, but he understood straightaway what was going on. The image of a towheaded Calmer sitting alone in an unplowed field in South Dakota firing this very same gun into the air, trying to bring one back in right on top of himself had been with Spooner since the night Calmer had told him the story. Spooner had been in bed shivering with fever after he’d sat in the anthill, Calmer trying to find some way to recast what Spooner had done into something different from what it was. Perhaps trying to recast Spooner himself into something different.
“It’s nothing,” Spooner said to his wife. Rifle shots were no more out of the ordinary on the south end of the island than cookouts.
“He’s in his underwear,” she said, “shooting a gun.”
Mrs. Spooner had an underwear phobia, part of a larger phobia connected to invasions of her privacy, and kept the bedroom shades drawn at night, and the bathroom shades drawn day and night, even though there was nobody out there to look in but the raccoons.
Spooner started down toward the meadow, maybe two hundred yards from the guesthouse, and Calmer fired off another one. “You have to say something to him,” she said.
“I will, I will.”
He meandered downhill in a head-of-household style, like there wasn’t much more to this than unscrewing the pickle-jar lid. He fought an urge to run—not away but right at Calmer, to get it over with—but if he’d learned anything living the accident-prone life, it was that you never run downhill at someone with a rifle who doesn’t know you are coming, and who one of these days isn’t going to remember who you are.
Calmer was working the bolt action again, reloading. Spooner hurried the last few steps and began to speak but saw that Calmer had plugged his ears with Kleenex, so instead of speaking, Spooner moved around to the side where he would be visible out on the periphery of his vision, and waved.
Calmer brought the gun up and fired it again and then watched the meadow a few seconds, then looked over at Spooner, opening the breech to reload, as if he’d known he was there all along. He handed him the German helmet, which Spooner accepted and put on Mrs. Spooner’s head as she arrived.
“The school bus is coming along soon, Dad,” Spooner said, and where that came from he didn’t know but it seemed to him that he’d hit one out of the park.
Calmer checked his watch and then nodded and stood up from his cross-legged position all in a single motion, not using the gun or even his hand to push off the ground, and Spooner watched in open admiration, forgetting for the moment that Mrs. Spooner was there expecting him to lay down the law and that in certain moods she was pretty limber-bodied herself, in fact in the right mood would climb all over you like a porch monkey looking for a hidden banana.
For now though he found himself trying to remember if there was ever a time in his life when he could have gotten up like that, or even a time he could have sat with his legs folded up in front of him in the first place.
Calmer smiled at Mrs. Spooner and patted her in a friendly way on top of her German helmet. He gathered up the blanket, folding it miraculously into a perfectly even rectangle, and then headed up the hill.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
The following week there arrived via certified mail a letter from Hillary Levin & Associates, a two-woman Langley firm representing Marlin Dodge. Ms. Levin was the most famous and successful attorney on the south end of Whidbey Island, specializing in divorces and anti-discrimination suits brought on behalf of aggrieved minorities, and while the divorce end of the business stayed pretty flat—she did not represent men in divorce cases, except in the cases of same-tool domestic partnership split-ups—the aggrieved minority suits side of things was expanding nicely, outpacing even the discovery of new aggrieved minorities.
She had city-girl mannerisms—was probably the fastest walker in Island County—and city-girl manners, and would pass the citizens of Langley on the street without a word in response to the occasional Good morning, counselor, and on the one and only occasion she and Spooner had been invited to the same party, he’d caught her staring at him all night, lethal as a castration machine, with an expression that said, Everything in good time, sport.
So it was no surprise to Spooner that Ms. Levin’s letter did not strike a warm or conciliatory tone but simply laid out the complaints of Marlin Dodge, her client, and threatened immediate action if such complaints were not satisfactorily addressed.
One: intimidation. An elderly occupant of Spooner’s home had on at least two occasions fired off a rifle in the front yard, for no apparent purpose except the intimidation of Marlin Dodge, and/or to cause Mr. Dodge and his household unnecessary clamor and discomfort, possibly as reprisal for his nontraditional lifestyle. And here Ms. Levin also noted that Spooner had in the past threatened Mr. Dodge with bodily injury, at one point brandishing a hammer, causing Mr. Dodge to seek protection from the county sheriff’s department.
Two: trespassing. The previously mentioned elderly occupant of Mr. Spooner’s household had several times trespassed onto Mr. Dodge’s property, climbing over the fence Mr. Dodge had erected to afford himself and his domestic partner, Alexi Sug, some measure of privacy and protection, and in so doing had upset Mr. Dodge’s aged grandfather, Hiram Dodge, who suffered not only panic attacks but manic depression and some degree of dementia and disorientation.
Three: stolen livestock. The Spooner household had all but stolen Mr. Dodge’s grandfather’s beloved black Labrador retriever, Lester Maddox, holding him in the Spooner residence and/or on their premises for days at a time, with the animal’s absence adding daily to Mr. Dodge’s grandfather’s growing state of confusion and agitation.
And that was it.
Sincerely, Hillary Levin, Esq.
It was lunchtime and Spooner put the letter in his pocket and opened the refrigerator and looked around for something for Lester. The dog had gotten up when the shooting stopped, hungry after his nap. Spooner spotted a ham in the back, wrapped in aluminum foil, maybe a pound of meat encasing a bone about the size of an exhaust pipe. As always when he saw a healthy-looking bone, Spooner felt a pang of regret that he couldn’t somehow use it himself.
Ms. Levin was wearing pleated trousers with enough slack up front where she was beginning to bulge for a makeshift pouch, about what you might need for feeding the chickens. She was reclined in her office chair with her feet crossed and resting on top of a beautiful cherry desk.
She looked up, offering him not even the courtesy of appearing surprised.
“Do you have an appointment?” she said, and set a cigar in an ashtray. And it was a real cigar, not some white-tipped, unisex cheroot.
Spooner had never been a cigar smoker himself and stared at the gooey end, thinking of the female apparatus. “I just dropped by,” he said, “to say that your letter arrived, and your client, Mr. Dodge”—and now he consulted the clock—“has until, let’s say, three o’clock this afternoon to take down his fence.”
SEVENTY-NINE
Spooner did not enforce the three o’clock deadline, but not over some sudden impulse to be reasonable. More, it was that old problem of not having the right tools for the job, meaning the task ahead was too big for a hammer, and so three o’clock came and he was not only waiting for the tool situation to improve—his friend Thorson was due home anytime and would lend Spooner what he needed—he was also waiting for the grandson and Alexi Sug to show up because, after all, this was for them too.
He sat peacefully on the front steps of the guesthouse with Calmer, talking about an afternoon back in Milledgeville when they’d all gone downtown, Margaret and Spooner and Darrow and Calmer, Calmer carrying Darrow upside down, as always, when an enormous red-haired woman blew out the front door of Trout’s Sundry Goods and Liquor and bawled him out in the street for carrying a baby like that. Calmer remembered the woman right down to her print dress and white gloves. And they talked and time passed and pretty soon, maybe four-thirty, Thorson rolled up the driveway towing his bulldozer, which they had agreed over the phone was the logical step up from a hammer, and they all had a beer or two together, and finally the grandson and the bodybuilder appeared in their driveway, shoulder to shoulder in the looming albino-white Viper, and Spooner stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants and said, “Well, off to work.”
He started at the top and drove the bulldozer downhill, splintering and unearthing fence posts whole, still attached to the cement they’d been buried in, two, maybe three hundred pounds each, just chewing the scenery, he thought, and hoped he might get to use that phrase when Ms. Levin took the matter to court.
The noise as the posts and rails snapped and crackled, loud as it was, was pretty much smothered beneath the noise of the bulldozer. Spooner saw Marlin and the bodybuilder when they came out the door, saw their expressions as they gradually understood what they were seeing. Marlin said something to the bodybuilder, who disappeared into the house and was back in no time at all with a video camera. It was the sort of thing Spooner never thought to do, to his considerable regret. Here, for instance, were years of pleasurable viewing lost forever through lack of foresight, but then even if he’d thought of it, how long would it have taken to find the camera? A month? Did he and Mrs. Spooner have a video camera? The bodybuilder turned the camera over to Marlin and stood by, flexing, while Marlin recorded the destruction of his handmade, homemade fence, rail by rail, post by post.
Spooner reached the bottom of the fence line and turned the machine around, lifted the blade a few inches and slanted it forward to collect the debris. It took longer cleaning the mess up than it had making it, but that of course was the oldest story in the world.
Nevertheless, time flew, as they say, and much too soon the job was finished, and the fence wire had been rolled into the shape of a wasp’s nest and stood five feet taller than the bulldozer itself and twice as wide. The nest-looking sculpture was engulfed in a haze of dust and smoke, and suspended within it, like ornaments in a Christmas tree, were pieces of freshly splintered post rails, unearthed beer bottles, the jawbone of a deer, half a doormat, and an entire sign that had once been affixed to the giant maple at the entrance to Spooner’s side of the driveway.
Seacliff.
Yes, Spooner’s house had once had a name.
The previous occupants had come from a community just outside Seattle called Mercer Island, a land of deep pockets indeed. They were dot-commers of some sort, just retired, all decked out to live in the woods and give the country life a stab; not terrible people, but the kind you would not be surprised to find out named their houses. And they had come not just for a stab at the country life but at rekindling the old spark, which had been extinguished over the years of counting money on Mercer Island. (This information, by the way, did not come to Spooner through the usual island channels, that is the real estate gossip you have to listen to in this neck of the woods to buy a house; but directly from the woman herself. As for the husband, he excused himself when she started in on it and went outside, and a moment later Spooner saw him behind the wheel of the new Land Rover in the driveway, reading the Wall Street Journal.)
The Mercer Islanders were in the early stages of divorce, and the woman wept a bit when she said she would have bittersweet memories of the place and would take comfort in knowing it would be in good hands, a family with all its connections intact. Everybody smiled—the Spooners, the woman, the real estate agent—and Mrs. Spooner, this completely out of character, even held the woman a moment as she cried, and on reflection, it was perhaps not the most sensitive thing Spooner ever did when, on an impulse fifteen minutes later, he stopped on the way out at the driveway entrance and levered the Seacliff off the old maple and tossed it into the bushes.
Spooner maneuvered Thorson’s bulldozer back and forth, tidying up, moving the entire mess up the hill to a spot just this side of the grandson’s driveway, where lay the property line, and left it there, the dust settling over the ground, the garage, and the looming albino-white Viper. And for a moment perhaps experienced that feeling Hemingway wrote about all the time—that he’d worked well.
This feeling of self-congratulation lasted all day and into the evening, even after he and Mrs. Spooner went out to buy groceries and saw that in all the excitement he had bulldozed his own mailbox.
Later, after dinner, he walked over to the guesthouse to say goodnight to Calmer. “There’ll be trouble now,” he said.
Calmer said, “I wasn’t thinking this was a good time to borrow a cup of sugar.” Smiling, way ahead of him, and yet in the morning, an hour after their walk, Spooner stepped outside the guesthouse to relieve himself in the bushes and saw Calmer next door with a pail and the squeegee, on a ladder, washing the old man’s bedroom window.
And saw that sweet old Lester had been chained to a tree.
Spooner checked the driveway; the Viper was gone. He wondered if Calmer had considered that before he went over. More likely, the slugs had slimed up his windows and he’d gone over to clean off old Dodge’s after he’d cleaned off his own.
He watched Calmer work, moving at a speed as familiar to him as the stroke of his voice, the same speed he ate and shaved, patient but slightly hurried, as if there were always more to do than time to do it. Spooner made no move to retrieve him. How was that supposed to go, anyway? I thought we agreed you’d stay in your own yard?
He’d heard of something like this before, of course, parents turning into the children and children turning into the parents, but he didn’t see how such a change was possible without starting over from the beginning, as if everything that had passed between them didn’t count.
Calmer finished the window and carried the ladder into Dodge’s garage—in a house fire, he’d put away his tools—and presently Dodge came out of the back door in his underwear, carrying a couple of beers, and Spooner went back to the typewriter.
The dog was another matter, something that couldn’t be set aside so that he could work.
How would Lester sle
ep? It was his practice by now to squeeze between them, facing Mrs. Spooner, and usually upside down with his nose nestled into the backs of her knees, and from this position any sound in the night would set off his tail—an enormously thick and heavy appendage—into big, loopy circles, whacking Spooner glancing blows across the ears. Spooner assumed there was some similar arrangement with the old man, although he doubted that the old man occasionally rolled over in the night, as he did, half asleep and hoping for a little late-night affection and poked the dog in the hip blade instead of Mrs. Spooner.
No, he did not expect that the animal would sleep much chained to a tree in the yard.
Spooner could not stand to see a dog on a chain.
EIGHTY
The next morning out along the cliff Calmer suddenly stopped, staring at a clearing ahead tucked beneath the top of the cliff. There was a single tree here, sprouting out almost sideways, its roots tangled and exposed, a jerry-built-looking sort of tree that appeared so faintly attached that a canary might bring the whole thing down.
A moment passed and Calmer scratched his ear. “Those kids scare me to death,” he said. “Oh, I suppose they’re strong enough. They’re like monkeys, really, every one of them, but still, it frightens me. They should stay on the path.” And he surveyed the steep, loose patch of dirt beneath the tree now, looking for the girls.
“Darrow’s kids?”
Calmer nodded. “That stuff looks all right, but it breaks off under your feet.” Spooner looked at him, realizing that he’d been out there himself, testing the footing for the girls.
Days passed, a week, then two, with Lester chained to the tree. Night and day. A pail of water was set out for him in the morning, but once the animal had lapped the trunk a few times the radius of his circle was so short that he couldn’t reach it.