by Pete Dexter
Still, he wanted to hear from Calmer. It didn’t concern him much that what Calmer said wasn’t so dependable these days, only that time was running out for him to say it at all.
As far as Spooner could tell, this need to know where he stood with Calmer had materialized in the hospital in Philadelphia, on the operating table, where somehow he’d lost the ordinary capacity to see himself from a reliable, consistent perch. Such capacity, when he thought about it, described one half of the two working parts of conscience, and even if conscience wasn’t exactly what was missing, he knew that he had his finger on the right page in the catalog, and over the years had fixed on Calmer, the most ethical man he’d ever known, to tell him how he was doing.
The preoccupation with time running out was a new development, probably traceable to the night in the driveway when he presided over the disgorgement from Lester’s stomach of a huge, wet, perfectly intact chunk of Marlin Dodge’s calf, still bearing three and a half letters of the four-letter tattoo, USMC. Spooner had been confused and worried at the time, floating around loose in that world of blind spots that lies in the throw of a car’s headlamps, and as he stared at the heap Lester had disgorged, he—Spooner, not Lester—briefly mistook the lettering, taking it for a USDA stamp of approval.
Realizing his mistake, Spooner had taken off his jacket and carefully wiped the animal’s chin clean of Marlin’s goop and then taken his face into his hands, gently, but bringing into play a certain man/dog authority that was unusual between them, and looked into Lester’s dark eyes, holding his attention a long moment and then directing it to the evidence at their feet—the smoking gun of all time—and quietly, firmly, enunciated the word no.
EIGHTY-EIGHT
The bandages on Calmer’s hands had to be kept dry and changed every forty-eight hours, and the trips to the doctor’s office left him tired and edgy. “You don’t take a thirty-year-old horse to the vet,” he said. “They keep telling you it’s all for your own good, but in the end, it doesn’t make any difference what they do. You live for a while and then you die.” More and more, Spooner saw him receding into the old make-do days where he’d spent so much of his life.
They were on the way home from Coupeville. “You have to treat an infection. That can make a difference,” Spooner said.
Calmer turned in the seat and stared at him. “Listen,” he said, “you should know this by now. There are people you can’t trust—doctors, lawyers, even your own family.”
Spooner thought he saw where things were headed. He remembered the conversation outside the house in Falling Rapids after Calmer had been demoted, he and Phillip and Darrow sitting in lawn chairs, Phillip saying that they hadn’t heard the other side of the story—the whole scene as clear to him now as Calmer’s shadow had been behind the screened kitchen window. A small bad moment, yes, but a throwaway, he would have thought, in the sadness and disorder of that awful year. He saw though that he’d misjudged it.
“He didn’t know what he was saying,” Spooner said. He felt Calmer’s eyes resting on him, waiting, attentive. “He was what, sixteen, seventeen years old? With a brain like… It’s like you opened up a box of Cracker Jacks and found a million dollars. No, wait—a tit. Everybody else gets a whistle or a little plastic gun, and he gets a tit. It doesn’t even fit in his pocket, you following me here? He’d not sure what he’s supposed to do with it, he’s not even sure he’s supposed to have it.”
Calmer continued to wait him out.
“So the way these things can go, he said something just to be part of things, that’s all, something as a matter of fact that he’d heard from you. Listen to both sides…”
It was quiet a minute and Spooner took two or three false starts at what came next, gradually seeing that a tit in a Cracker Jacks box wasn’t the metaphor it had been cracked up to be when it first skipped into his head.
“Let’s forget the tit in the Cracker Jacks,” he said finally.
Calmer smiled and held up one of his bandaged hands. That fast, his good mood was back. “Ah, but ‘the moving finger writes,’ ” he said, “ ‘and having writ moves on; nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line.’ ”
Spooner would have loved to say something in that vein back, to remind Calmer that he was also a literary man these days, but all that would come to mind was the part of Humpty Dumpty where the egg couldn’t be put back together.
EIGHTY-NINE
It took longer to reach the end of the island than it usually did, Calmer walking more slowly, stopping every forty or fifty yards to look around, as if marking his place. It seemed to Spooner he might be favoring his left leg, but it was pointless to ask. Calmer would as soon admit that his leg hurt as admit that he didn’t like what Mrs. Spooner had made for supper.
They sat on the bait shop’s steps, drinking seventy-five-cent beer, and presently Calmer patted himself down and found a pencil in his shirt pocket, and in spite of his bandaged fingers wrote a series of numbers across a napkin.
Four, six, nine, thirteen, nineteen, and after that a blank space for what came next. It was the old game from the years in Milledgeville, Calmer and Margaret and Spooner sitting at the kitchen table after supper, Calmer making up the numbers.
At first it had gone like this:
2, 4, 6, 8, ___ or 3, 6, 9, 12, ___
They hadn’t gone too far with that before a disagreement came up that you might say spelled out the future. Calmer wrote down, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, ___, and Margaret had the answer—thirty-six, six times six—before Calmer even put the five on twenty-five.
Part of the game was the right number; the other part was the reason.
Spooner sat looking at the answer a little while, just staring at it until Calmer began in his patient way to show him where it came from. But Spooner knew where it came from; he was thinking of something else. “It can be any number,” he said.
It was still only a month or so after the wedding, probably before it had begun to sink in with Calmer what he had on his hands.
He said, “How now, brown cow?” which set Margaret off giggling, as it could be counted on to do.
Spooner said, “You could have a different rule.”
“But not in the middle of the game. One rule for all the numbers in the line. You can have any rule you want for the next line.”
Still Spooner stared at the numbers.
“What other number could it be?” Calmer said.
Spooner shrugged, picked his birthday. “One,” he said.
Calmer crossed out thirty-six and wrote a one on the end of the sequence, looked at Spooner, and raised his eyebrows in an exaggerated way. “And what, pray tell, is the rule?” he said. Talking Shakespeare now, the way he sometimes did.
“Whatever the number is, that’s the rule.”
“But how would one say it? How can it be expressed?” Calmer had not talked to them yet about equations, didn’t see any reason to muddy the water with the word before they understood what it was for.
Spooner said, “The rule is the last number is one.”
Calmer studied him a moment and then smiled, and when Margaret looked up at him to see if that was fair, he shrugged, as if Spooner was right. “The anarchist,” he said.
And here they were, forty-odd years later, Spooner and Calmer sitting on the bait house steps, playing the old game. He picked the pencil carefully out of Calmer’s fingers and wrote, 25.
Calmer said, “Magnifico!”
The truth was that Calmer had a partiality for prime numbers, and once you knew that, the rest of it was simple addition.
“You remember what we were talking about yesterday?” Spooner said. “I wanted to be sure we understood each other about that.”
He waited, but there was no sign that Calmer remembered anything at all.
“Your kids turned out fine, Dad, especially Phillip.”
Calmer shook his head and smiled at the misunderstanding. “No, we weren’t talking about him. The other one, in
the city.”
“Phillip’s the one in the city,” Spooner said. “He lives in Manhattan, in an apartment on Lexington Avenue.”
Calmer cocked his head, rethinking it. He killed the last warm swallow of foam in the bottle and made to get up and leave.
Spooner sat where he was. “Right?” he said.
Calmer assumed a familiar, patient expression, then lowered his voice in a way that it was understood what he said wasn’t for any of the others to hear. “The other one,” he said. “The one in Philadelphia.”
Calmer got up and went to the trash can to deposit his empty bottle. Spooner followed along after him, like a catfish just whacked with the fish whacker, and in this condition they commenced the second half of the morning’s walk, the more difficult half, mostly uphill, following the natural rise of the cliff. Calmer was out in front, unusually deliberate about where he put his feet, as if his shoes were too small and it hurt him to step.
And Spooner followed along behind, wondering if Calmer was doing the arithmetic now, figuring out who he was.
Calmer took his regular nap when they got home and later Spooner saw him out in the meadow with old Dodge. They were down there together almost every afternoon these days, sometimes even in the rain.
NINETY
It was time to change the bandages again, but Calmer had gone into his bedroom after the morning walk and hadn’t come out, even for lunch. He’d been slower out along the cliffs again, and reluctant to talk when they sat down at the bait shop.
Most likely, his hands were hurting. Spooner hoped that it was his hands, not what he’d said yesterday about whom you could trust. He was still running a fever—it was half a degree higher, actually—but there was no pus in the dressings when the nurse cut them off up in Coupeville, no streaks of infection running up his arms.
He’d had two beers and a Coke at the bait shop, and then turned on the hose when he got home and drunk from the nozzle a long time. Spooner gave him another hour, and then another, and sometime close to two-thirty he tapped on the door and looked in.
Calmer was lying on his back, reading. There was a shine to his skin, and the light from the reading lamp collected in a damp line of sweat across his forehead. Calmer had propped up one of his legs on a pillow. Lester was next to him, resting his massive head across Calmer’s chest, and as Spooner moved closer the animal swept his tail slowly across the sheets, wrinkling them one way, smoothing them out the other.
“Let’s run up to Coupeville and get the bandages changed,” Spooner said.
Calmer looked at his hands, at the bandages, and then rested one quietly on top of the animal’s head. Lester’s tail moved across the sheets again.
“Let’s let it go this once,” he said.
Spooner took in the width of the dog’s skull—Christ, what a head—and then Calmer’s T-shirt, dark with sweat. “You feeling all right?”
“Sleepy,” Calmer said. “Just sleepy,” and closed the book and laid it down over on the other side of Lester.
There was a chair under the window and Spooner sat down, then got back up and went to the icebox for a couple of bottles of beer. Calmer gave his a taste and set it down on the reading table.
“No good?” Spooner said.
“Just some water, if you don’t mind.”
Spooner went into the other room again and filled a glass with ice and water, and this time when he got back Calmer had closed his eyes.
Spooner set the water glass on the bed table and sat back down. He stared at the ceiling, remembering the mangled body under the truck axle, wondering if Calmer had tried to lift it off his chest. But if that was it, why hadn’t he just used the jack? From what Spooner had seen of it, the nature of Calmer’s disease didn’t affect reasoning or intelligence; his memory was what it was after. He would have seen what needed to be done.
“You still don’t remember how it happened,” Spooner said, indicating Calmer’s hands, but Calmer only smiled, as if he were waiting for him to get the joke.
Presently, the smile faded. “I wish I could help you,” he said.
NINETY-ONE
Spooner found him, still in bed with the dog; it was a little after seven o’clock. He’d brought over a glass of crackers and milk at bedtime and left it on the reading table, and it was still there, untouched.
He opened the door and let Lester out, and the dog went to Mrs. Spooner’s garden and commenced a four-minute urination.
The coroner told Spooner it was impossible to estimate how long ago Calmer had been shot, but then made an estimate after all, for the newspaper. He said it could have been a month. The bullet was in next to the femur, about halfway between Calmer’s knee and his hip, the entrance wound from the front. The infection had gone into the bone.
“He would have lost the leg anyway,” the coroner said, and then offered up another opinion that would also make its way into the paper. “A gunshot wound,” he said, “can be extremely dangerous.”
NINETY-TWO
Margaret had been in Boston and took the first flight west. Darrow drove from Montana with his wife and kids in the old VW van, all his eggs in one basket. Phillip was in London, doing some kind of accounting that nobody in England knew how to do, and he caught a nonstop flight to San Francisco and then a flight north, arriving in Seattle half an hour before Cousin Bill, who had bought a trombone and was starting his first lesson when Spooner ran him down at his music teacher’s house out on Beaver Island.
The marine forecast had called for a warm, calm day and they were all pretty good swimmers, but Phillip, who had not gotten to the top of the New York City accounting world by taking chances, strapped himself nevertheless into a life jacket before setting foot in the boat.
The boat itself was a rowboat—Darrow’s suggestion instead of the fishing boat Spooner had arranged to borrow. And it was a better idea, the sound of the gulls, the quiet of the water, the oars breaking the surface, in and out, like breathing, and only a week before, as it happened, Spooner’s friend Dr. Ploof had received a forty-year-old rowboat via UPS, bequeathed to him by a patient who’d skipped town years before owing him a little over eight thousand dollars.
As to the matter of casting Calmer’s ashes into the sound, Spooner’s understanding of the way it worked was that the ashes would be washed from the sound into the ocean, and from there into other oceans, and from them into other sounds and rivers and inlets and outlets, and in the end Calmer would merge with all the various waters of the world and trickle here and there all over kingdom come, and in this way gradually disappear into the currents of water and time.
And one of these days, it might rain a little Calmer too.
NINETY-THREE
The ashes were in a box in Spooner’s lap. He was stationed toward the back of Dr. Ploof’s eight-thousand-dollar rowboat, on the same seat with Margaret. Darrow sat in the next seat, rowing, and beyond him was Phillip in his life jacket, watching over his shoulder as America disappeared, and Cousin Bill, who, although more of a sailor than a paddler, was quite a water-going man himself and was anxiously waiting for his turn at the oars.
They’d put the boat in near the bait shop at the south end of the island, stopping inside to buy beer for a last toast, and paddled a mile or so out, beyond the bay to open, deeper water where the wind picked up and the current began to take the rowboat south. According to the marine forecast, the surface temperature of the sound was thirty-eight degrees—so cold that the inch or so that had already leaked into the bottom of Dr. Ploof’s rowboat was numbing Spooner’s feet—and the wind off the water dried the sweat off Spooner’s face and scalp, and then began, a little at a time, to chill him, and he wondered if he should have brought a sweater.
They went out into it, farther, a little farther, and a little more, and when it finally seemed like far enough, Darrow, his lips edged blue by now, like everybody else’s, turned the little boat into the wind and waited.
And everywhere in Dr. Ploof’s rowboat were freezin
g Whitlowes, waiting for Spooner to make his move.
Spooner reconsidered the dark, square box in his hands. It was heavier than he’d imagined it would be, and there was more of it. He opened the top and fixed his eyes on the contents, not really contemplating his stepfather, as the other passengers may have thought, but quietly imagining the box they’d need to haul his own ashes out to sea. At this point in his life, Spooner had accumulated titanium rods running down the inside of both femurs, ceramic hips, a small metal plate under his scalp, fourteen implanted teeth, three screws in his bad ankle, one screw in his good ankle, and Jesus only knew how many screws holding his elbow in place. He imagined the sounds of the scattering of his ashes, the plopping as the screws hit the water, the splashing pieces of titanium.
He glanced again into the box and Calmer was smooth as brownie mix. Never any trouble for anyone.
And the family was waiting.
The wind seemed to pick up again, blowing Spooner’s shirt flat against his chest, and there were clouds on the horizon now, and the temperature dropped a few degrees in not many minutes and pretty soon, marine forecast or not, it could have been October. He ran his hand over his chest and his nipples were like BBs. Still, no one spoke, no one hurried him at all. And he sat looking at the ashes, trying to feel what he was feeling more clearly, looking for some better connection prior to chucking the remains of the greatest man he’d ever known, or at least the greatest man who had ever known him, into the Puget Sound.