Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  And then he saw it, what was going to happen. Saw Calmer’s remains blowing back into their faces, the ashes sticking to everything wet and floating around in what was by now half a foot of water in the bottom of the boat, saw them tasting the ashes in their mouths and all of them spitting over the side, and saw that this whole idea of throwing Calmer away was too much like emptying a half-full can of Coke out a car window at eighty miles an hour anyway and, reconsidering the whole scene, began to think of the ceremony as littering. He saw that it would be better and more dignified to simply set the box into the water and let it sink—it was two or three hundred feet deep here at least—and allow the currents to do the dispersing out of sight.

  He closed the top and then leaned over the side, the boat rocking dangerously at the motion, and set the box in the water.

  It was a heavy little box, but then, so was a Chris-Craft.

  Which is to say it didn’t sink.

  There was not a word from his cousin or his brothers or sister—on reflection, Spooner sometimes pictured this scene as another family’s: he as the full-grown, still-lovable Mongoloid child, doing his best but mucking up the works for the thousandth time even as the siblings retreated into an old silent agreement, sheltering him from knowing that he has mucked up the works again, from knowing the one thing he does know, absolutely, that he is special.

  It was Cousin Bill who finally commented. “Oh boy,” he said.

  The little box bobbed in the chop that had come up with the breeze, and drifted away from the rowboat, southeast, toward Seattle. And there was a thought, Calmer’s ashes washing up intact in West Seattle. Spooner turned and looked at Darrow, who was smarter and would have an idea—and at the risk of undermining not only that statement but the countless other references to Darrow’s superior intelligence, it is perhaps not unfair to remind you whose idea the rowboat was in the first place—waiting to hear how they were going to re-collect Calmer’s ashes.

  “What did you just do?” Darrow said. Nothing accusatory in the question, that wasn’t the tone, although you couldn’t call it strictly informational either.

  Spooner said, “My thought was that it would sink.”

  Cousin Bill, meanwhile, climbed to the bow and began making the same sort of motions with his hands that you make for someone parking in a tight space. He was a water-going man and knew a few things about currents and tides, and seemed now to have taken charge of the ship. Darrow took no offense at being replaced, and for a few minutes he followed instructions, pulling hard on one oar and then the other, his strokes smooth and rhythmical, and for a little while you could actually see what the expression having an oar in the water was all about.

  For their part, the civilians—Spooner, Margaret, and Phillip—sat where they had been sitting, trying not to look one another in the eye, wary of unspoken messages passed at such an emotional moment, knowing that something might be said with a single glance that could never be taken back. The word stupid floated in the air like colored balloons after the flashbulb goes off, but nobody uttered a word.

  And Dr. Ploof’s eight-thousand-dollar rowboat continued to fill with the Puget Sound, and just prior to drawing even with the box of ashes, Cousin Bill looked back to make sure the crew was ready to make the retrieval, and noticed the water. “Bailer,” he said, “we need a bailer.” He leaned far to the right—Spooner’s side of the boat—his fingers just brushing the box, and then he was past it, empty handed.

  Spooner, who had the better angle, leaned out and also touched the box, but it was slippery and too big to be plucked up with the tips of his fingers, and he was angry suddenly, as if he—or Calmer—were being teased, and he reached for it again, this time with both hands, wanting this thing settled straightaway. Darrow flattened one of the paddles against the current and pulled with the other, bringing the side of the boat around in the direction of the box of ashes, and it is likely that if Spooner had just waited a second or two longer the ashes would have come to him, right to the side of the boat, and it is also likely that his reaching would not have caused the rowboat to flip over—although not completely upside-down over, just out from under the passengers—as it did, as rowboats sometimes do.

  But it’s a second-guesser’s world and always has been, and on that subject it is also the kind of world where the only human with enough sense to wear a life jacket is the human who doesn’t go overboard, which is to say that when Spooner came back to the surface and cleared his vision, what he saw first was Phillip, alone in the rowboat, leaning carefully over the side to collect one of the paddles. Margaret and Darrow were behind the boat and slightly to the other side, swimming in. He did not see Cousin Bill but heard a certain familiar hooting from behind the craft, indicating wild amusement, which, taking into account the personalities involved and the amount of amusement available—thirty-eight-degree water and a half hour’s ride back to the island, in the unlikely event that the boat didn’t sink—narrowed it down pretty well to Bill.

  Not that any of this registered particularly as what it was, since even though there were sights and sounds to burn in these first moments in ice water, there was not much in the way of meaning. A whole new world, but too much to take in all at once. Or perhaps you could say it was like the world at your moment of entry, the On/Off switch is switched on and there you are, brand-new and bawling and out of focus and not knowing shit from Shinola—although if you want to get technical about it, Spooner hadn’t known what Shinola was before he went into the water either.

  Later, after his brothers had pulled him out and he’d had a chance to warm up and dry out and think it over, he was struck with the idea that the first half minute or so in ice water probably wasn’t much different from the first half minute after you homogenized your elbow, or maybe went headfirst into a boiling vat of collard greens, or were sucked out of an airliner. That apparently the human signal operated inside a pretty narrow frequency, now that he thought about it, and beyond that frequency nothing came through but static, one noise as meaningless as another.

  Margaret was the first of the victims back in the rowboat, pulling herself up as easily as one of those prepubescent Russian gymnasts mounting the parallel bars, and then leaned forward until gravity tipped her onto the floor, where she splashed into maybe eight inches of water. She got to her feet and took charge, took the oar from Phillip and paddled one side and then the other, like a canoe, and Phillip made his way cautiously to the front, and then stopped for a moment, collecting himself, preparing for the rescue.

  Darrow came on from behind him, however, tipping that side of the boat almost to the water line, and yet Phillip, who was standing up and hadn’t heard him coming, again managed to stay dry. Cousin Bill arrived third, handing up the six-pack to Phillip before allowing himself to be dragged on board.

  Then for a little while Spooner was alone in the water, treading water, he supposed, although he couldn’t say what his arms or legs were doing, or particularly feel where they were, and when he looked up into the boat, the faces were indistinguishable, one from the other, like strangers leaning in over the crib.

  He glimpsed the box then—the sun’s reflection off it, at least—and moved to retrieve it, and was shortly surprised to find himself actually heading in its direction, yet even as the gap narrowed he felt time slowing, distinctly slowing, until it almost stopped, like one of Calmer’s old puzzles, the closer you get, the slower you go, and presently the water lost its hard bite and turned warm on his face and pulled Spooner its own way, but before he gave in and allowed himself to be dragged back into the rowboat and saved, he persisted a little longer, one last chance, making corrections off the dancing light up ahead, and for a little while you might say they were right back where they started, he and Calmer, and where they had always been, which is to say, just out of reach.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It seems I have been remiss. As far as I know, this is novel number seven and up until the present moment I have never undertak
en to compose one of the love notes that often accompany a work of long fiction, thanking all the people who made it possible. There was such a note that accompanied Paper Trails, a collection of short nonfiction that came out a couple of years ago, but then it was pretty much a matter of being shamed into it, as my friend Fleder had not only come up with the idea for the book and the title for the book, but had also been the one who waded through the thousand-odd columns and chose which ones to use and where to use them, and so in the end I thanked him for helping—I still love that, helping—and thought, well, that’s that.

  But it wasn’t, which brings me around to the reason I don’t—didn’t—write acknowledgments, which is that you can’t just say thanks, Fleder, and move on. Pretty soon, you are not just thanking Fleder, you are also thanking publishers for publishing and editors for editing and typesetters for typesetting and loved ones for putting up with your temperamental, artistic moods during the long, difficult years it took you to wait for Fleder to finish the work back in New York. You are thanking your dog and the postmistress and your agent. Think about that, your agent.

  It was Fleder himself who brought the matter to my attention. He is modest to a fault, and looked at the bare-bones acknowledgment for his work in Paper Trails and said, “Wait, you can’t just thank me.”

  “Who else?” I said.

  He said, “Well, what about Esther?”

  And I said, “ICM already got fifteen percent of the book, and it is not entirely impossible that they did even less of the work than I did.” Notice I said this to Fleder, not to Esther herself.

  And Rob said, “You’re not going to thank Esther? Have you made some decision never to come back to New York?”

  And in my world that is what you call a point well taken. You damn right I thanked Esther, in fact, I suddenly feel like thanking her again—I wonder if she’d like her feet washed—but before we get puckered up for where all this will inevitably lead, it may be useful to first discuss the rules.

  One rule, actually, and it is simply that there is a difference between people who are paid to be helpful and nice and those who are nice for free, and generally speaking the coming acknowledgments will be more heartfelt regarding the volunteers as opposed to the professionals, especially those volunteers who made it through when the novel was 250 pages longer than it is now.

  Among those in the eight-hundred-page category is Padgett Powell, as far as I’m concerned the most underappreciated novelist/short story writer of our time, who spent hours hunting through the text for titles and in fact came up with three or four that were better than anything I came up with, but were all in some way of the material as opposed to being about it. One of his suggestions, for instance, was The Accidental Quality of Things That Are True, or something a little better than that, and even though the phrase was taken directly from the book itself, it nevertheless failed to settle with my breakfast. Why? Who knows? It may be my preference for a good American name like, oh, Esther Newberg, over the Native American version, She Who Rips Throats for Pleasure.

  By the way, Esther, I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately, how much I appreciate everything you’ve done.

  But what I was saying before I was interrupted with that spontaneous appreciation of Esther was that when someone of the talent of Padgett Powell takes the time it takes to ladle through eight hundred pages of a first draft of your soup, you have been complimented in a way you should not forget.

  Also on the subject of underappreciated talents, I should mention that my friend Dr. Ploof also accepted the manuscript in the long form, commented a few days later that he liked the beginning very much and then did not raise the matter again, which I took as confirmation of my suspicion that the story was too long, and immediately set about removing 250 pages from the manuscript, and considered adding pictures. The most useful criticism, by the way, does not come neatly thought out and typed for you to read in the Sunday Books section of the New York Times. The very best criticism isn’t written at all, or even spoken. It is simply there in the awkward silence as you and the doctor sit safely buckled into his pickup in the moment before he turns the ignition key, each of you diverting the conversation by nursing some old shoulder or knee injury that has come alive during the ascent into the cab, and the silence goes on and on and now you are sitting there watching helplessly as the natural moment for some complimentary remark on the manuscript passes into the ether. Criticism of this sort causes you to think, to cast a fresh eye over a whole project, to understand what you have done in larger terms, and perhaps understand it so well that you throw a third of it away.

  And one night a year or two from now when over a bottle of wine the doctor confesses, as he surely will, that he lost the manuscript the day you gave it to him, you will thank him anyway because the doctor, as always, has left you a more thoughtful person and in his own way may have improved the book.

  The book by the way is a novel, not in any sense a memoir, but is nevertheless based loosely on events and characters from my own life, which prompted me to send early copies to all the relatives who show up in the pages—both my brothers, Tom and Arthur, my sister Kitty, and my cousin Bill Vann. Actuarially speaking I am probably slated to go first (Bill is a little older but comes from better stock) and it occurred to me that opening the novel up to familial objections/comments before its publication might cut down on unsightly graveside celebrations later on.

  Tom in particular understands the structure and sound of good sentences, and not only can pick out the ones that aren’t good, but can also see how to fix them. This talent—editing—has pretty much gone the way of pinsetters these days, especially in the book business, and I would be very surprised to find another writer anywhere who gets to run his stuff past two sets of eyes as good as Tom’s and Dr. Deborah Futter’s, who is in charge of me over at Grand Central Publishing, and while technically this violates the rule of acknowledgments—that is, she is paid to save me from myself whereas Tom, Kitty, Arthur, Cousin Bill, Dr. Ploof, et al. are not—she is bent enough off true to pass for a member of the family, and sometimes I cannot help thinking of her as a volunteer. And even though she doesn’t seem bent enough to be one of mine, Dianne Choie, also of Grand Central, should be acknowledged because without adult supervision where would any of us be?

  My sister also read the long version, and she is not only the most literary member of my family but maybe our best writer, and her approval of vast tracts of Spooner have loaded my six-shooters for the long process of copyediting that still lies ahead, a process I have always found to be a nasty, two-week walk down memory lane with Miss Kilmer, an obese grammarian back at the University of South Dakota who once returned a term paper I submitted without even the courtesy of a failing grade, just the notation This Is Entirely Inappropriate, and ever since I have daydreamed that if only they’d let me take my sister with me to college, Miss Kilmer would never have gotten away with that.

  My youngest brother, Arthur, recently gave up a partnership at Price Waterhouse to teach high school mathematics, and in spite of that has a very accomplished sense of order and time, and pointed out for me all the places the novel violated the normal rules thereof—i.e., Spooner ages three years while the rest of the world ages twelve—and made helpful suggestions in regard to how one might go about fixing the problem. His main suggestion, in fact—to have all the characters age at the same rate without regard to issues of maturity—not only seems to have straightened out much of the confusion but has also given me a brief glimpse into the workings of an orderly mind—Arthur’s—and I think we all know that a writer can never get enough of seeing the world from a different perspective.

  Also in the category of nice-for-free readers of the eight-hundred-page version is my friend Fleder—you remember Fleder, the author of Paper Trails?—and even though I was a little disappointed with his contribution this time—the man didn’t offer to write even the first draft—and none of his suggestions for a title seemed exactly right t
o me either, one of them became the title nevertheless. So as I publicly thank Fleder again, I will also take this occasion to acknowledge that this far in my career as a literary man, Fleder has named or, in this case co-named, at least three and maybe four of the books I have produced. (Can anybody here remember who named Paper Trails?) I might also mention that a warm, unsolicited note regarding the manuscript from his wife set me humming for weeks. She is Marilyn Johnson, an intoxicating and faultless woman as far as I am concerned, except for one night a couple of years ago in the town of Deadwood, South Dakota, when she suddenly refused to allow her husband to play with me anymore unless I stopped proposing small bets on the color of undergarments worn by the cowgirls who stumbled into old Saloon No. 10, leaving us nothing to do but drink, gamble, and watch the streets for sightings of Kevin Costner and David Milch. Mr. Costner is a movie star and owns the town’s most expensive restaurant, and David Milch is the Hollywood genius who produced and wrote much of the HBO series Deadwood. Mr. Milch’s story was an interesting one to me, at least as it emerged from maybe half a dozen profiles written about him back when Deadwood was in its heyday, and it goes like this: Mr. Milch had pined to do a western ever since he was an important writer on an Emmy-winning network cop series and could just as easily have been a novelist, if I remember the story correctly, and after years of research and reading everything available on the old west decided to focus his talents on the town of Deadwood in the 1870s. But hold your horses, Tex. As Mr. Milch has explained it, he didn’t read everything after all, he read everything except the novel Deadwood, and was not only able on his own to come up with the same setting and feel and characters that populated the novel, but somehow intuited a footnote-in-history sort of character named Charlie Utter into pretty much the same human being who is the central character of the novel. Except Mr. Milch gave him an English accent, and if that’s not Hollywood genius I don’t know what is.