Spooner (39 page)

Again he opened his eyes, for just a moment, and one of them was as cloudy as the shards of glass that had spilled out over
the cloth upholstery.

And Spooner was running.

He ran east, uphill, running for home. He passed over the crest of the bridge and in the overhead lights his shadow doubled
and grew more distinct, and presently there were other lights and other shadows and the long arm of the law drew up close
behind and put on the red and blue. The lights worked on Spooner like a cattle prod—at this point in his life, of course,
he knew what that was—and he sprinted another quarter mile, downhill now, making a small note that all the work at the gym
had left him in remarkable shape. Presently, another Port Authority police car appeared, this one from the other direction,
the New Jersey side of the river, and pulled sideways and directly into Spooner’s path and also began blinking its lights.
The door swung open and a policeman got out holding a nightstick. He was younger than Spooner and anxious to whack him and
threw his hat back into the seat as he got out, not wanting it in his way when the whacking began.

“Halt,” the policeman said.

But Spooner already had.

“Put your hands where I can see them,” the policeman said.

Spooner looked at his hands, wondering why the officer couldn’t see them where they were. He was coming back to his senses
now, realizing where he was. The cop moved a step closer, a certain look of anticipation rising in his eyes. The Port Authority
police did not get to whack as many citizens as the city police did, and some of them never got over the unfairness of it.
But now the other cop stepped out of his cruiser too, and he was older and not so anxious to hit Spooner over the head.

“What’s the trouble?” the second policeman said. He was looking at Spooner carefully, trying to place him. “Hey, you’re that
newspaper reporter, right?” he said.

Spooner’s picture by this time was hanging fifty feet wide in the subway stations and riding the side of city buses. It was
a feeling he never got used to, seeing himself rolling past on the street.

Spooner did not answer right away, not wanting to embarrass himself further than he was already embarrassed.

“What’s going on?” the first cop asked. He could have been talking to Spooner, or he could have been talking to the other
cop.

“Spooner,” the second cop said. “That’s who you are, right? Spooner?” He made some motion to the other cop, who stepped away.

“What are you doing out here, pal?” the second policeman said, and glanced out over the bridge. “You’re not despondent or
nothing…”

Spooner had no idea. “There’s something in the car,” he said.

The second, older cop patted him on the shoulder. “Let’s see what we got,” he said, and this unexpected kindness touched Spooner,
very nearly brought him to tears.

The second policeman held the door of his own car for Spooner, and Spooner got in, went quietly, as they say. They drove the
seven or eight hundred yards back to the company car, which was still angled against the bridge walkway, the front door still
open, the headlights shining off into the darkness over the Delaware River. Spooner’s shirt was soaked through with sweat.

“You been tootin’ the horn a little this evening, Warren?” the cop said. But Spooner was safe. What was after him tonight
was not the criminal justice system.

They stopped and got out and approached Spooner’s car from behind, the younger cop holding his flashlight in one hand and
resting the other hand on the butt of his pistol. He pointed the flashlight into the back and then, without saying a word,
set it on the roof of the car, opened the door and yanked the man out by the feet. The man’s head bounced once on the running
board and then hit the cement. More lightbulbs broke. One of the man’s shoes came off, and the policeman who’d pulled it off
dropped it and stepped back, repulsed, as if the foot were still inside it. Spooner edged closer and looked. There was frost
in the man’s beard, and little bubbles in the corner of his mouth. The bubbles popped and were replaced by other bubbles;
the rest of the package was calm water. Spooner could not see him breathing, but bubbles didn’t just bubble up out of the
dead. Or maybe they did. The man was wearing an argyle sock on the foot without the shoe, oily black with dirt at the bottom,
and all his toes stuck through. The toes were swollen and some color of dark red approaching black, and all in all Spooner
had seen better-looking toenails on chickens.

“Jesus,” the older cop said, “how long’s this guy been in the backseat? He’s practically froze.”

Spooner tried to remember the last time he’d looked in the backseat. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think they vacuum the cars
once a week, when they wash them.” He supposed the man could have been back there a long time.

The other cop headed back to his cruiser, lights still blinking on and off, and Spooner heard him on the radio, calling for
an ambulance.

“Ten minutes,” he said when he came back.

It was quiet a moment, Spooner studying the man’s foot. “You think we should put him back in the car?” he said to the older
cop.

The older cop looked at him a moment, then scratched the back of his head. “No, you don’t want to do that. My advice is, you
find somebody lying out on the bridge like this, you don’t touch nothing. You never know what happened, what kind of internal
injuries he might have.” He looked at the body again. “He might of got hit by a truck before you found him and called for
help.” He looked at Spooner and winked.

Spooner stood still, and the cop looked back over the bridge toward the city. “Why don’t you go home, leave this one to us?”
he said. “You look like you could use some sleep.”

S
pooner headed home to the little house in the Pine Barrens. Back to his wife and daughter, safe and warm. He pictured them
curled in bed, each into her own familiar curl, and then, against his will, thought again of the sound the man’s head had
made when the cop pulled him out by the feet. The shoe that had come off; the hole in the end of the man’s sock. The toes.
He could not stop picturing the toes.

Three hours later—it was now five o’clock in the morning—Spooner got quietly out of bed, walked outside and pried the lid
off the septic tank.

Due to the unusually wet winter, not to mention the lake, the water table on Spooner’s lot was only about thirty inches beneath
the ground, and things had been backing up septic-wise pretty much ever since October. You flushed and shapes blossomed up
to you from the toilet bowl like nightmares.

He lifted the septic tank cover, dropping it an inch or two onto his fingernail, crushing it, spilling blood into the septic
system and possibly vice versa, and then picked up the whole lid—the heaviest thing he’d picked up since Mrs. Spooner quit
insisting on live Christmas trees—and threw it violently and as far as he could throw it, which was just barely far enough
to clear his feet, and then stood slightly out of breath, beholding the proof that he was and had been for some time alive
and functioning here on Earth.

He continued to behold the proof a moment longer, swaying over the open tank, trying to divine some solution for a moody septic
system. Spooner squinted the way he had seen Calmer squint, trying to force into himself some mechanical intuitiveness, but
just as well could have been trying to invent internal combustion. In the end his best idea was to run the garden hose from
the tank across the road into the woods on the other side, and siphon it over there, the way you siphoned gas out of the car
tank when you didn’t have enough to get the lawn mower started.

He stood thinking about that plan a moment longer, his thoughts coming to rest finally on the lawn mower.

The lawn mower
.

Mrs. Spooner climbed half asleep out of her marital bed that morning to administer the five-thirty feeding to baby Spooner,
so sleep-deprived as to not even notice Spooner’s absence at first, but did gradually notice a noise out front, then saw that
the front door itself was open and, holding baby Spooner close to her chest against the cold, walked out the door and stood
transfixed in the light of the moon as her husband mowed the front yard.

Spooner looked up from the mowing and saw his wife crossing the lawn, wrapped in a blanket and holding the baby. She appeared
to be hurrying and appeared to be thinking the same thing she’d been thinking that afternoon last summer when he’d set the
porch on fire, and he was momentarily paralyzed with dread, knowing there was something going on that he was supposed to have
seen for himself.

She had to yell because the lawn mower had no muffler. “What in the world are you doing?” she said. The words fogged in the
morning air, and now baby Spooner turned in her arms and was looking at him, smiling. The baby, only a couple of months old,
already got him completely, understood everything that mattered. He looked from one of them to the other, and the expressions
on their faces could have been bookends for the entire encyclopedia of human experience.

Wrapped in her blanket, Mrs. Spooner appeared faintly biblical this morning, and he was struck by her purity. In answer to
her question, he indicated the part of the lawn that he had finished mowing, as if it spoke for itself. Which, in fact, it
did. Her gaze moved to the open septic tank and the garden hose leading across the street into the trees. She reached down
and disconnected the cable from the lawn mower’s spark plug, and the morning turned eerily quiet.

“You’re going to wake up Lou and Penny,” she said. Lou and Penny Harker were the people next door, and as she said that, the
lights in fact went on over there, and a moment later the front door opened and there they were, both of them wearing what
looked like sleeping bonnets. They were good, frugal people, Lou and Penny, and kept the house cold at night.

“Everything okay?” Lou called over.

Except for no neighbors at all, Lou and Penny Harker were the best neighbors Spooner could imagine. They were quiet and loved
their dog, and in the summer they liked to sit in the lawn chairs out by the lake and drink martinis, and kept their yard
so clean that Spooner wiped his feet before he stepped over the short fence that served as the property line. Twice a week
Mrs. Harker hung her astonishing lingerie out on the clothesline, where it lifted and fell in the wind along with Lou’s checkered
shirts and blue jeans.

Spooner waved at Lou, thinking how lucky he was to have good neighbors. “I’m mowing the lawn, Lou,” he called.

Lou nodded, as if that was pretty much in line with how things looked to him too. Then he looked out over his own lawn, white
with frost, and called out, “It’s pretty early in the year; don’t cut too close or you’ll damage the roots.” He waved and
closed the door.

Mrs. Spooner considered him closely. “What is it?” she said.

He shrugged. “The water table, I guess,” he said. She was still staring, perhaps looking for some sign that he was pulling
her chain, which he did quite a bit when they were courting and was one of those qualities about him that she liked better
later on, after he didn’t do it so much. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want my daughter growing up thinking she has to watch what’s
in the toilet to make sure it flushes.”

“You’re mowing the grass,” she said.

“I was waiting to see if I’d fixed the septic system, and thought, Why waste the whole morning?”

She eyed the open septic tank and turned the baby’s face away, as if she were too young to know these kinds of things went
on. “Come inside,” she said. “It’s cold out here.”

“And then the lawn looks like hell,” he said.

“Nobody can see the lawn,” she said, “it’s still night, and it’s probably going to snow again anyway.”

Not wanting to start an argument, Spooner put the lawn mower back in the shed and came inside. Mrs. Spooner was feeding the
baby, and Spooner lay on the floor at her feet a little while, looking up, trying to see her from the baby’s perspective.
Then he got up and began washing the dishes.