Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  Sometimes when the grandson and Alexi were gone, Spooner saw the old man come out of the house and untangle him, looking around as he worked as if he were afraid of being caught.

  At night, in bed with Mrs. Spooner, Spooner awoke to an eerie howling next door, a sad, unnatural noise that woke Mrs. Spooner too, and they lay together listening in the cool, clean sheets, no trace of dog breath or dog flatulence in the room, no press of dog elbows pinning their own legs to the mattress, or violent shaking as some small itch tingled into the beast’s consciousness and was obliterated by the wild thumpings of whichever hind leg could be used to get at it, or yips and twitching as he dreamed his retriever dreams; and they lay together in the quiet, settled room, Spooner and his wife, in clean, smooth sheets, and could not get back to sleep for missing him, for thinking of him over there chained to a tree.

  She was up first in the morning, just at dawn, brushed her teeth and combed her hair and put on a pair of jeans. She walked out into the backyard in her slippers, rolling the bedroom’s sliding door open as quietly as she could. He heard the noise though—these days even when he slept, he was never all the way asleep—and got up too, stepped barefoot outside onto the cold patio tiles and watched Mrs. Spooner bending over the dog, trying for a little while to untangle the chain’s metal knots but in the end simply unhitching the collar and leaving it there, still attached to the chain.

  He was a skeleton of his former self by now—which is to say that you could tell he had bones—and lapped at a pail of water Spooner got him from the utility room, and ate a couple of sandwiches that Spooner made out of some of the leftovers that had taken over the top two shelves of the refrigerator in the animal’s absence, and then the dog and Spooner went back to bed, each to his regular spot, and after Mrs. Spooner had made breakfast for their daughter and walked her down to the road to catch the school bus, she came back to bed too, and they all slept together until noon.

  Saturday afternoon, with Mrs. Spooner and Spooner’s daughter gone for the weekend to Seattle and Spooner unable to get anything done, tar-babied to one sentence after another, he heard the distinctive pop of Calmer’s .22 from the meadow.

  Grateful for the interruption, he went to the door and then sat down on the steps and watched Calmer and old Dodge taking turns down there, trading the rifle and the helmet and fresh beers back and forth, the shots echoing from the hills across the road as if someone were shooting back.

  Spooner sat down and watched, and listened to them laughing, and he ached to be down there with them, for a little while to be one of the coots himself, drinking beer in the meadow, laughing. It just made you want to retire.

  Presently the grandson emerged from the house next door and stepped out onto the patio. He was next to naked—nothing on but his Jockey briefs—and his stomach was huge and smooth and perfectly round, and on it rested a pair of awful-looking saggers that from this distance called to mind the faces of housebound, indolent children.

  The grandson took a step or two forward, gingerly, as he was barefoot, and called out to the old man, scolding him the way you would scold the dog—Get back over here, goddamn it—but the old man seemed not to hear, and when the grandson called him again and danced out a few threatening steps farther, Dodge calmly handed his beer to Calmer, took the rifle, and fired off a shot in the grandson’s general direction—a shot in the dark, you could say, the old man being at least half blind without his glasses—that was exactly as likely to kill young Marlin as lightning.

  The deputy arrived half an hour later with the coots still in the meadow. The deputy had been here before, a year or so ago on the day Mrs. Spooner had chased Marlin and the bodybuilder off with a claw hammer, and now she stepped out of the squad car, saw the rifle and instantly dropped behind the fender on her haunches, covering her head. It made Spooner’s knees ache, just the sight of somebody that size on her haunches.

  She called out to them from behind the car to put down their weapons.

  The grandson had apparently seen the sheriff’s cruiser first and was already out there beside her, telling his side of the story. He had dressed—shirt and shorts and loafers without socks—and pointed across the meadow as he spoke, striking some classic tattletale’s pose that Spooner recognized from a lifetime of trouble with teachers and city editors.

  Spooner jogged down the hill toward the deputy on legs that had been rebuilt seven times in various operating rooms across America, legs like an old dog’s, and set about to defuse the situation. It was a mark of his new maturity that he thought to defuse the situation rather than exacerbate it, although even as the word defuse passed through his mind he found himself thinking of fuses and that little white string dangling out of Mrs. Spooner’s nest the day previous, after she’d emerged from the shower to dress for the trip into the city, and he considered and rejected working this image into his conversation with the deputy.

  He nodded politely at the deputy and then glanced out into the field, as if he’d just noticed the geezers with the rifle. “There’s been a misunderstanding, I think,” he said, dripping maturity. “They’re just plunking at some cans and bottles.”

  The deputy jumped at the sound of his voice and then screamed at him to get down. “Get your ass down! Now,” pointing at the ground to indicate the correct direction. Pointing, in fact, with her black, semi-automatic pistol, and screaming “Down, goddamn it! Are you deaf?” A passerby might think he was witnessing the world’s harshest puppy training.

  And then she turned and screamed in the other direction, bawling at the old men to drop their weapons.

  “They can’t hear you,” Spooner said. “They put toilet paper in their ears.”

  “I’m telling you for the last time,” she said. “Get down.”

  The grandson shifted his weight, dropping off his haunches to a knee. “It’s partly my fault, officer,” he said to the deputy. “I should have seen this coming.”

  She glanced over at him quickly, then rose a little and peeked through the windows to check on the old men. She moved to the side, trying to duck-walk up toward the front of the car, but took only one step and then lost her balance and rolled a little ways downhill. How do ducks do it, anyway?

  She sat up, got to her knees, specks of grass and dirt on the back of her shirt, and used the door handle—holding it with both hands—to maneuver herself back up to her haunches. Overweight as she was, the deputy was as comfortable haunched as Spooner was sitting down. Spooner had read somewhere that this was how women of certain tribes delivered their babies.

  The deputy took half a dozen deliberate breaths—huge flap-happy lungs pressing into the name tag on one side of her shirt and the badge on the other—and wiped at her forehead, her whole face glistening like a fresh turd in the desert, and it was hard to say if she was catching her breath from the effort to pull herself back up, or if she was trying to collect herself and calm down. It was also hard to say what she had in mind regarding Calmer and old Dodge; for all Spooner knew she was readying herself to charge the bunker.

  Instead, she cracked open the cruiser’s door and crawled back inside, low to the seat until she was wedged in beneath the dashboard, and called on the radio for backup.

  It was what they needed, all right. More deputies.

  “My grandfather suffers from dementia,” Marlin said, even as the deputy was signing off. Perhaps believing that if he kept the lie alive a little while it would sprout and have a life of its own.

  The deputy crawled backwards out of the car, still keeping low. Her hat had fallen off when she lost her balance, and rolled a pretty good distance out into the open. The sheriff’s insignia on the crown caught the sun and twinkled.

  The grandson was saying, “This time we’re going to have to do something, get him in some kind of supervised living facility where he’ll be safe.” The deputy gave no sign that she’d heard. “That other one,” the grandson said, indicating Calmer, “I don’t know what his story’s supposed to be.”


  Spooner looked down at the grandson and said, “You’re something, aren’t you?”

  She said, “Sir, I’m telling you for the last time,” good news to Spooner, who didn’t like being nagged even under the best of circumstances—that is, by the unarmed—and without giving it another moment’s consideration he walked out into the meadow where Calmer and the old man were still drinking beer and enjoying the afternoon.

  Spooner took the toilet paper out of one of Calmer’s ears. “Let me have it for a second, will you?” he said.

  Calmer checked to make sure the safety was on—you can’t be too careful with firearms, he’d been saying that for as long as Spooner could remember—and handed him the rifle, and old Dodge, who hadn’t realized yet that he was in the middle of a police emergency, handed Spooner a beer, which he polished off without pausing once for oxygen. He’d never been much of a beer drinker but could have been except for the taste.

  The deputy arrived from behind then, armed and dangerous. “Facedown! On the ground now!” she said. “Do it!”

  Calmer got to his feet and pulled old Dodge up after him.

  “I said on the ground!” Still screaming. Calmer smiled politely, with no intention whatsoever of lying on the ground.

  The deputy looked quickly at the grandson, who had followed along behind and arrived on the crime scene last. “Which one of them fired at you, sir?” she said.

  For a moment the grandson couldn’t seem to make up his mind who he wanted to finger. “Him,” he said finally, and indicated Calmer. “It was him.” But now she stared at him a moment, perhaps beginning to smell a rat.

  “It was he,” Calmer said to the grandson and then addressed the deputy. “Madam,” he said, “no such thing occurred.”

  And there was some kindliness for her in his voice that had nothing to do with the words themselves, some consideration of her situation perhaps, of the embarrassment at being stuffed into this absurd outfit that did nothing but exaggerate her obesity and awkward, mannish appearance, and she seemed to just give up, sagged and let the gun drop to her side, and in that surrender, you could see the powerful sway of Calmer Ottosson’s kindness.

  As for Spooner, he was picturing the scene that could erupt if she got more careless than she already had and maybe shot off her own toe. They could have their own Ruby Ridge, Spooner and Calmer and old Dodge, and for a long second this not only seemed possible but logical, where he and Calmer had been headed from the start.

  She holstered her firearm, though, turning her back on the grandson, who continued to press the issue as if he had not noticed her change of heart, and then, unaccountably, she was on the verge of tears.

  Calmer laid a hand on her shoulder and walked her a little ways back to the cruiser. He picked her hat up and dusted it off, and she wiped at her eyes and then got in the car and backed carefully down the driveway.

  And then she was gone, and Spooner sent Marlin home and went back to work, and Calmer and old Dodge sat back down and picked up shooting and drinking where they’d left off.

  EIGHTY-ONE

  Spooner found Calmer early in the morning, half an hour or so after sunrise, sitting out in front of the guesthouse reading Friday’s New York Times. He’d folded the paper into quarters, the edges lining up exactly, and was staring at a story about an opera singer—at least there was a picture, upside down to Spooner, of someone in pigtails and a set of horns alongside the article.

  Weather-wise, it was already a perfect spring day in the Great Northwest, gray skies and a mist in the air, although Calmer hadn’t seemed to notice, and he sat in a windbreaker with his legs crossed and mud on his shoes and the bottom of his trousers, looking at the page as if something about the opera singer worried him. Beverly Sills? Was that Beverly Sills? There was some age, Spooner thought, when women couldn’t bring off the horns-and-pigtails look anymore.

  “Beverly Sills?” Spooner said.

  There was a peculiar, unsettled cast to Calmer’s expression this morning that Spooner hadn’t seen since Lily was at large.

  “They came and…” Calmer hesitated, trying to come up with the name. “The fellow next door, they came by earlier and got him. The police and a lawyer and someone from the county.” He paused again, remembering it. “They said they’d be back for his clothes.”

  They looked at each other, the suddenness of what had happened still in Calmer’s face.

  Spooner sat down on one of the big rocks that lined the walkway between the two houses, feeling obligated to explain and soften some fact of life, except there was no such fact, just this small morning impasse that constituted the present moment.

  Calmer said, “He was pretty quick, but they had him outnumbered,” and picturing that, Spooner remembered a panicked grosbeak that had gotten into the garage last weekend, careening wildly into one window after another, leaving little dustings of feathers in the air every place it hit while Mrs. Spooner closed in from below with her butterfly net to save it.

  The moment passed and Calmer looked back at the newspaper. Next door, a truck turned in to the driveway, most likely Marlin was returning from wherever it was that they’d deposited old Dodge for storage, but Calmer did not look up at the sound, already absorbed in the article on Beverly Sills.

  The grandson got out of the truck and went in the front door, and then a little time went by and the garage door opened, and he emerged with a car jack and his toolbox.

  And now Lester also appeared from around the side of the guesthouse, pine needles sticking to his coat and his nose, and he had a seat beside Spooner, his tongue narrow and raised along the side edges, like the brim of a Texas Ranger’s hat, and there were specks of dirt and pine needles stuck to it too, and to the ragged black ribbons covering the lower teeth in back, and Spooner began picking the pine needles off, cleaning him up.

  “She said there’d be a hearing,” Calmer said. Spooner looked up and found him staring at the house next door. “The woman from the county. She said there’d be a hearing into his competence.”

  EIGHTY-TWO

  The grandson went back into the garage and came out this time rolling two tires along in front of him, one with each hand. He stopped and let the tires roll a little ways of their own accord until they slowed and wobbled and fell into each other, coming to rest not far from the truck. He went into the garage again and came out with two more. Half of the people on the island had pickups, and this was the first Spooner had ever seen or heard of any of them changing out winter tires for summer. People with cars did that sometimes, but not trucks. He recalled asking Dodge what Marlin did for a living, back when the grandson first showed up, and the old man had chewed it over a moment and said, “Marlin keeps a very shiny truck.” In point of fact, he lived off some monthly stipend left to him by his mother, and the truck was the closest thing to a job he’d ever had.

  Marlin came out of the garage again, carrying what looked like brake liners. He blocked the back tires with pieces of firewood and got down on his hands and knees to look for the right spot to set the jack, then pulled himself back to his feet, like some arthritic old knight just knighted by the queen, and set the jack, and then gradually, an inch at a time, lifted the far front quarter of the truck off the ground. The fender came up first, the axle hanging beneath it, and it rose half a foot or more before the tire left the ground. He continued his jacking until there was a foot of clearance, tire to driveway, stopping now and then to check how much room he’d made for himself to work.

  Calmer made a small, humming sound, as if something had surprised him, and he brought the paper closer and began the story about Beverly Sills, which to Spooner’s knowledge he had already read twice in the last twenty minutes.

  EIGHTY-THREE

  He woke with the sun on his face, in a chair, still half in some dream regarding women with cow-horn helmets. The cloud cover had burned off and he was sweating in spite of a pretty stiff breeze that had come up off the water. He stood and took off his jacket, then notic
ed that a newspaper had been blown apart and lay in sheets around the yard.

  Calmer went about the yard picking up the sheets of paper, hurrying against Lily coming out of the house and seeing the mess and worrying herself into another asthma attack. She had it in her head these days that Cowhurl was vandalizing the place, and there was no talking her out of it. Ever since he’d been fired—demoted—she felt them watching every minute of the day; keeping secret records. Just waiting for us to make a mistake, she said.

  The fact was that a pack of stray dogs was running loose, tipping over Calmer and Lily’s garbage cans Thursday nights—Friday was trash collection day—scattering their stuff up and down the street. He remembered the panicked way she got him up the first time it happened, like the garage was on fire. There was no calming her down, no telling her it was only garbage and that everyone else’s garbage cans, including Cowhurl’s, had been tipped over and strewn over the neighborhood too.

  And so these days he took the garbage out Friday mornings, at first light.

  The newspaper had been blown to kingdom come and he spotted another sheet of it, out past the garage, pressed against some bushes along the driveway. The paper seemed to breathe as the wind blew and died. He picked it up, checking around to make sure he’d gotten it all, and began to ball it up with the rest but then stopped when he noticed her picture, a little heavy these days but still a package of songbird he found very appealing, and he folded it carefully and stuck it into his pants pocket, thinking it might be something good to read in front of a fire later, and only then remembered that they couldn’t have fires. Remembered Lily’s asthma.