Spooner (54 page)

They moved from tree to tree and deeper into Spooner’s front yard, and Spooner wished the cat were here to see this. Whitlowe
might be a serial fish killer, but he had self-respect.

“Love hurts,” Spooner said to the septic tank man.

The bodybuilder overheard this and turned on him furiously, wiping his eyes and his nose. He yelled, “You mind your own business,
you fucking bigot! All of you people make me sick!”

Spooner had a strange feeling that he was being used to bring the couple back together. At the word
sick
though, he was reminded of where he and the septic tank man had been in their previous conversation. “That’s what’s gunking
up the system,” he said. “I throw up all the time. Everything makes me sick.”

The septic tank man thought that over and then checked the grandson, who was catching his breath, still stalking Atlas Shrugged
but the Ukrainian saw what he was up to and maintained the distance of separation, coming farther all the time into Spooner’s
yard.

Spooner said, “You two want privacy, maybe you ought to take it back over to your place.” Before that was out of his mouth,
the front door opened and Spooner’s wife came out holding a hammer, 109 pounds, including the hammer, all sighted in on one
murderous 109-pound thought. She stepped over the yard-high wall that bordered the sidewalk, through the plants on the other
side, and then past Spooner in the direction of their neighbors. Seeing this, the bodybuilder decided that he’d take his chances
back where he came from, and turned tail, as they say, crashing back through the nettles and brush and the trees.

She centered on the grandson.

He pointed at the hammer. “That’s already assault,” he said.

Even on the island, everybody was a lawyer.

This announcement was shortly followed by a snorting noise from the septic tank man. He had been following the action from
a certain remove and now seemed to sense where he fit in. “Why don’t you bring your fat sissy self over here, and I’ll show
you what assault is, junior,” he said.

Mrs. Spooner, meanwhile, was still holding the hammer. Spooner noticed the veins in her right arm, pumped up thick and blue
like the arms of the missing bodybuilder.

Marlin looked at the septic tank man, a huge man, maybe Marlin times two. “You don’t have anything to do with this,” he said.

It wasn’t clear if he was talking to Mrs. Spooner or the septic tank man, but neither one of them was listening. “I’m calling
the sheriff,” he said.

The septic tank man began to laugh. “Swishy, swishy, something’s fishy,” he said. Sixth grade? Seventh? Not for the first
time, Spooner marveled at the sides he ended up taking.

“That’s assault,” the grandson said again, pointing at the hammer, and then he turned his back and began to walk in a slow,
deliberate way toward his house.

Spooner gently took the hammer out of Mrs. Spooner’s hand, wondering how it would feel to swing a hammer at somebody’s head.
She was still looking at the spot in the trees where Marlin had disappeared, and Spooner realized that this moment had been
in the works since the day their daughter had come up the hill crying because Marlin had said he was going to kill her cat.

“He’ll call the sheriff,” the septic tank man said. “That kind always does.”

Spooner thought he was probably right. The island was the only place he’d ever lived where the police actually arrest a woman
for brandishing a hammer at trespassers.

“Self-defense,” Spooner said. Getting everybody on the same page.

But the septic tank man shook his head. “I didn’t see the missus do a damn thing,” he said. “As far as I observed, them two
sweeties just came onto your property to have a sweetie-pie slap fight, and she was inside the whole time.”

Spooner looked the situation over and saw the septic tank man’s point. He took the hammer into the backyard and threw it over
the bluff, and when he got back to the septic tank he said, “It never happened.”

“I would say that’s just the correct legal note,” the septic tank man said.

T
ime passed, and by and by a deputy sheriff appeared through the trees in the same spot Spooner had first seen the bodybuilder.
She was a big girl, bigger than Spooner but smaller than the septic tank man, and her holster and belt squeaked as she walked
over. Pockmarked skin, no makeup, her hair, which was her best feature, combed back into a ducktail.

“Here comes another fancy one,” the septic tank man said. Surely, Spooner might have argued in different circumstances, there
was more to a human being than that. Some of the deputy’s friends probably copulated in ways the septic tank man’s friends
copulated themselves.

The deputy was moving closer all the time, picking her way through the brush and nettles, stinging herself now and then, not
looking like a person accustomed to the great outdoors, and finally stopped a few yards in front of them, separated from them
by only an open septic tank and the stench of just-removed human waste.

“Which one of you is Mr. Spooner?” she said.

Spooner lifted his hand. “Here,” he said.

“I have a complaint that you threatened your neighbor Marlin Dodge with a claw hammer.”

Spooner nodded, as if this was exactly what he expected.

“He said you threatened him with a claw hammer. Do you have the hammer on the premises, sir?”

“Here?” Spooner held out his arms and turned around, showing her that he had no concealed tools whatsoever. Perhaps offering
himself up to be searched. “No tickling,” he said.

He put his arm casually around Mrs. Spooner’s neck and felt the muscles in her shoulder jumping under his hand. Given the
chance, would she bury the business end of a claw hammer in the deputy sheriff’s skull?

“Nobody threatened the queer,” the septic tank man said. “I was here the whole time, and so was my associate.”

The apprentice nodded, and the deputy sheriff looked them over, and it was clear she didn’t believe a word they said. “Is
that your story too?” she said to Spooner’s wife. It felt to Spooner like his wife’s muscles were playing dodgeball in there.
There was, however, no outward sign of the percolation going on under his hand.

“I ought to charge you all,” the deputy said, not even trying to keep the disgust out of her voice. Looking them over one
by one.

“I wisht you would, dearie,” the septic tank man said. “I’ll sue this goddamn county till it pisses blood.”

“Sir,” she said, “I will remind you that I am an officer of the law. You can’t talk to a deputy sheriff in that manner.”

“My ass,” he said, taking the other side of the argument.

“What did you say? Would you care to repeat that?”

Yes, he would. “I said, ‘my ass.’ ”

“You all heard that,” she said.

“I’m going inside,” Spooner’s wife said.

“Stay where you are, please,” the deputy said. “I need statements from everybody. We can do it here, or we can go to Coupeville
and do it.” Coupeville was the county seat, and Spooner’s wife did not care what the deputy said or wanted her to do, she
was going back into her house. “Ma’am?” the deputy said. “I’m speaking to you.”

But Spooner’s wife was already walking through the plants, then over the shallow stone wall bordering the sidewalk, and then
inside.

The deputy turned back to the apprentice, identifying him as the weak link. “I’d like to speak to you over here, alone,” she
said.

“Stanley don’t talk,” the septic tank man said. And now that he mentioned it, Spooner hadn’t heard the apprentice say anything.
He’d just sat there most of the time looking up into the cloudless sky.

“Sir?”

“He don’t talk.”

“What is he, retarded?” she said.

“You heard that,” the septic tank man said to Spooner, “she called him a retard.”

And that fast, the man in bib overalls was holding all the cards. “He’s mute,” he said, and there was triumph in his voice.

The deputy saw that she’d made a monumental mistake. “I meant dumb, like deaf and dumb.”

“The hell you did,” the septic tank man said. “What’s your name? I’m going to file a complaint with the county.”

“Look…”

The septic tank man only smiled, having her by the short hairs as he did, and she stood there without a bullet left in her
gun. A moment passed, the septic tank man grinning, the deputy staring at the ground, pretending to be analyzing the case.
She looked up and said, “All right, I’m going to interview Mr. Dodge, and I’ll be back later for all of your statements,”
but she wasn’t coming back, anybody could see that, because she’d crossed the one line—insensitivity—that no deputy sheriff
from this place could cross and keep her job.

She turned around and picked her way back through the trees and nettles to the yard next door, her bottom as wide as a U-Haul,
and Spooner did not see or hear from her again for a long time.

The septic tank man looked in the direction of Spooner’s house and said, “You’ve got to cut down on the grease.”

Spooner looked into her face when they’d finished, seeing her in some new, more complete way, and later on, as she napped,
her head cradled in his arm in a place that was putting it to sleep, he stared at the top of her head, and for the first time
in his life he could not come up with the words to tell her how tender she was to his heart.

T
he bodybuilder moved out that same day, packing his things while the deputy made Marlin wait in the truck. She even gave Alexi
a ride to the ferry. Marlin made no effort to interfere, and sat in his truck for a long time after they’d left.

After that, Marlin threw a party once in a while, but nothing as long or as loud as before. He continued to work on the fence,
and slowly the line of naked posts climbed up from the road, and Spooner sometimes noticed the big white Ford pickup parked
in the driveway splashed with mud or covered with pollen from the alders, as if Marlin didn’t even care enough to wipe it
down with a damp cloth. Self-deprivation, the universal language of heartbreak and remorse. Other victims went on weeklong
drunks, or quit eating; Marlin Dodge quit washing his truck.

From what Spooner could see, he blamed it all on his grandfather, the quarrel, the unfinished fence, the dirty truck. One
night Spooner heard him yelling, “Why don’t you just fucking die?” And useless, he was always calling old Dodge useless. A
thirty-eight-year-old man who had lived all his adult life off a trust fund that was left for him by his mother.

T
here was a deer in the driveway, most of a deer, at least.

Spooner hit the brakes before he hit the carcass, got out of the truck and saw it had been a doe, spindly and small, but an
adult all the same. Covered with yellow jackets. It looked like she’d been hit out on the highway, something going fast enough
to tear her inside out.

The animal was laid sideways across the driveway in a narrow spot with trees on both sides, hidden by the bend in the roadbed.
Spooner couldn’t drive around it, even with the truck. It was early Saturday morning, and Spooner was on the way to Bailey’s
Corner for the newspaper and some milk for the dog. Lester liked milk with his cereal.

He left the truck running and walked back up to the house and found a coat and a pair of gloves and a fifty-gallon trash bag,
and managed to fit the doe into the bag without getting himself stung. He stuck the gloves inside the bag with the deer, and
then threw the whole thing into the back of the truck and drove it to the recycling center, where he watched it slide down
a wide shoot into a trash compactor. He pressed the compactor’s starter, still preoccupied with the vandalism, not even hanging
around to listen. He was usually interested in the noises of things being crunched and sometimes if an unusual item came in—a
used-up watercooler, say, or a BarcaLounger, even the occasional television set—the girls who ran the place would call him
at home and set it aside until he came by and could listen to it with them.

He did not mention the doe to Mrs. Spooner, but that same afternoon he drove fifty miles to the north end of the island and
bought a light single-barrel .410 shotgun at the hardware store, something she could point and shoot. He showed it to her
in the yard, how to load it, how to work the safety.