Spooner (51 page)

Old Dodge was a reserved sort of fellow, polite but not by any means as lovable as his dog. Spooner ran into him down at the
foot of the driveway now and then, by the mailbox, or alongside the road, usually with Lester, walking up or down the long
hill to Bailey’s Corner. He was an unusually clean-smelling old fellow, always fresh-shaven, shirts ironed and starched and
worn buttoned to the neck and wrists, who knew the name of every weed growing in the yard and spent hours in the morning sketching
the egrets nesting in the marsh at the lowest, wettest part of the grounds. His wife and daughter were gone, a car accident,
and the same accident had left him with a scar that dropped like a bead of sweat out of his hairline and all the way to his
collar.

The old man had declined Spooner’s occasional invitations to dinner or cookouts, although his dog hadn’t missed one since
Spooner moved in, and these days the animal was putting in as much time at Spooner’s as he was at home, especially when Marlin
and the weight lifter were visiting. Often he spent the night.

The old man got up early. The southern, more rural end of the island was a good place for birds—there were hawks and owls
everywhere, and an eagles’ nest at the edge of Spooner’s property, and two more nests in the trees farther south, and most
days you could see them out sitting on the channel markers in the Sound, fishing the shallows or, when the wind came up, hanging
like kites over the marsh, hunting rabbits and quail and the occasional toy poodle that wandered a little too far from the
house. Spooner had once seen an eagle take a pigeon right out of the air—at least had heard the impact and looked in time
to see the explosion of feathers where the bird had only just been, and another time, walking with Lester along the southern
edge of his property, a pretty fair-sized, live rabbit dropped out of a tree and landed with a certain
oof
right at his feet. Spooner looked up and spotted the eagle staring down, and they stared at each other a little while and
then, hearing something at his feet, Spooner looked back at the ground and saw that Lester had eaten the rabbit.

For all that, old Dodge was not much interested in eagles or hawks, and had thrown in instead with the egrets, which struck
him as more elegant killers. He studied the birds before he committed them to paper, sitting in a lawn chair with a cup of
steaming coffee in his lap. Beside him on the picnic table he laid out pencils, a sketch pad, binoculars, and a coffeepot.

There were currently fourteen egrets nesting in the lower, swampy end of the old man’s property and he knew them all pretty
well, one from the other, ages, physical idiosyncrasies, dispositions, rankings, and it seemed to Spooner that knowing them
so well had led to a certain disappointment with whatever he drew, which is to say that even when the work was very good,
it wasn’t good enough. A very tough grader was old Dodge.

What he was trying for was not just beaks and bones and feathers—he was a good sketcher and could do that in his sleep—but
the moods and personalities that delineated the birds one from another. They were strange animals, the egrets, dependent on
one another socially but showing no interest at all when one of their own was reduced to a pile of feathers by the coyotes
and was left on the ground near the marsh at daybreak.

Sometimes Spooner walked over in the morning when he saw the old man setting up, and the old man always seemed happy enough
to see him, and happy to show him his work from the day before, which he treated with a kind of friendly contempt. Spooner
thought of his own art teacher back at Peabody Laboratory, Daphne Stone, who would pass slowly behind her students, hands
hooked together index finger to index finger behind her back,
very good, very good, excellent, Helen
, and would pause as she arrived behind Spooner, who always drew the same thing, the house in Vincent Heights, the sun, his
family in the windows, the dog somewhere in the air, as big as the house itself, and put her hand gently on his shoulder.
“No, honey, that’s not quite it.”

He thought sometimes it wouldn’t make a bad gravestone:
No, honey, that’s not quite it
.

If he was in the mood, the old man might point out the particular egret he was working on that day, or that week—Spooner did
not know how long it took him to study an egret—or just bring him up to date on the general state of affairs down in the marsh.
Who was courting, who was nesting, who was injured or missing. Sometimes there would be a bird perched in a nearby tree, away
from the others, cast out or shunned for some unknown offense. Pissing in the nest, for all Spooner knew.

So you either get up to take a piss in the night and the coyotes eat you, or you don’t and the missus throws you out of the
house. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t again.

For their part, the coyotes were everywhere that year, taking rabbits, house cats, sheep, deer, even dogs the size of Lester—one
of the younger coyotes would come out of cover and lure the dog into an ambush—and once in a while even an egret, and the
scattered feathers would be lying there in the morning, and the old man would scrutinize the other birds for signs of remorse
or anxiety, but they showed nothing of the kind, and he would sit all morning watching them, perhaps thinking of his own losses,
and in the end would head down the long slope to the marsh with a rake and a plastic bag, Lester moseying along a few steps
ahead or behind, to remove the remains. In the end, it was old Dodge himself who couldn’t get on with the day until the carcass
was out of sight.

L
ester was enormous. He slept in the old man’s house one night and between Spooner and Mrs. Spooner, nestled in at some awkward
angle, the next. It was impossible to realign him in the night, and as for scooching him over, you might as well try to scooch
the federal government.

Shortly after Spooner had moved into his house, he had seen the animal eat the same three-pound London broil twice in five
minutes. Hot off the barbecue the first time, swallowing it more or less whole, then pumping it all back out onto the patio,
wet and still steaming and more or less intact—you could almost think it was a baby Lester—and waiting for it to cool off,
testing it now and then with his nose. And five minutes later, ignoring the shrieks and gagging noises that passed through
those in attendance like the wave at Yankee Stadium, he ate it again. Spooner found himself in awe, not just of the animal’s
appetite, but of his lack of inhibition. Of being so comfortable with who he was.

Spooner grew powerfully attached to Lester, and in his mind the beast somehow became the centerpiece of this place and time,
the best place and time of Spooner’s life. He had a beautiful house and a beautiful drain field and a beautiful daughter and
ten acres overlooking the sound, and worked when he wanted to work, and wrote what he wanted to write, and still never looked
at Mrs. Spooner without some damp thought of her medically diagnosed, slightly misaligned vagina, this never failing to stir
him to smile, even though they had been together a pretty long time for it to have stayed so fresh and new.

And occasionally even felt fresh and new himself, even though his hands and wrists were so shot that most mornings he could
barely manage his own shoelaces, and his elbow joint didn’t function until noon, and his legs were brittle and undependable
one day to the next, and his back wasn’t worth a damn where it had been broken either. Strangely all that was of no more consequence
most days than a little spit dancing in the frying pan.

As for the Devil’s Pocket, he thought once in a while of the young citizens in the street with their bats and tire irons,
but he also imagined them now, wallowing all these years in what they were, with their bad teeth (though admittedly their
own teeth) and dead-end work and wives daydreaming of collecting insurance payments after they were killed on the job, and
wished them nothing more or less than the lives they had made for themselves to live.

He thought of himself as through with that place and that night, and signaled as much to Mrs. Spooner as often as was practical,
but you are never completely through with a night like that, and there was still a list of their names somewhere in his storage
closet that he’d never tossed out, and he stumbled across it now and then, looking for something else, a reminder of what
happens when you go in halfhearted.

The old man’s grandson had arrived that first time in a sparkling white Ford pickup with oversize tires and decorative pin
stripes that ran the length of the truck, and as many times as Spooner had seen the vehicle since, he’d never seen it dirty,
never even a spot of bird shit on the hood, a condition that to Spooner’s certain knowledge was impossible to maintain in
this part of the country, but there it was.

For years Spooner and old Dodge had shared a well, splitting the small costs of electricity and maintenance, but these days
the pump ran constantly whenever the grandson was home, from eleven or so in the morning until dusk, washing his truck, watering
his flowers, emptying and refilling the fish pond he’d built, and Spooner knew enough about electric motors by now and about
living on the island not to wait for the water pump to burn itself up and leave himself at the mercy of the only well-pump
man on the island, who, hearing the sound of desperation in a caller’s voice, would be two weeks minimum getting around to
taking a look. Instead, Spooner called the island’s well digger, who needed work at the time and came directly over and put
in another well. Seven days, four hundred and ninety-four feet. Nine thousand, seven hundred and ninety dollars, tax included.

Only the beginning of Spooner’s affection for Marlin Dodge.