Spooner (6 page)

The chaplain, for his part, looked like a mink in a trap, willing to chew off a foot to get loose. But then he was timid for
a chaplain, at least by comparison with the other chaplains Calmer had known, and Calmer thought it was a good thing that
he’d chosen a career in the navy, as he would have a hard time of it out in the civilian world, where a man in his line had
to be able not only to sell but close the deal.

Calmer moved a little closer to the rail then and saw the casket, riding in the water like a cork. Behind him, she was speaking
again but addressing the chaplain now. “Pardon me,” she said, “but is something out of the ordinary?” The chaplain appeared
terrified of being pulled further into this mess than he was.

And the casket rolled in the ocean, as seaworthy and tight as the
Buck Whittemore
herself. “Will somebody
please
tell me what’s going on?” she said, sounding more ragged now, as if the whole sorry episode, starting back at the Army-Navy
game, was all catching up with her at once.

Calmer smiled in a reassuring way, stalling for time to think.

She raised her voice. “Will somebody here please tell me what’s going on?”

He said, “Mrs. Toebox, it might be best if you went below deck…”

She stared at him flatly and then turned to the chaplain and said, “Do you have a cigarette at least?” She was used to getting
what she wanted, Calmer saw that now, but it only made him want to protect her more.

Second Lieutenant Jensen appeared with a pack of Chesterfields and a lighter. Calmer waited until he’d lit her up, and then
took Jensen by the arm and steered him a few yards away. Until this moment, Calmer had never in his career put his hands on
a man under his command, not in anger. He’d broken up fights, he’d shaken a sailor or two awake on watch. He’d caught thieves
and loan sharks and extortionists and sent the worst of them to the brig. He’d had men go crazy and grabbed them before they
could jump, and once a petty officer named Oliver Irwin had tried to throw him overboard during a Saturday-morning inspection.
Calmer had wrestled him down ten feet from the side of the ship and held him there until he’d stopped kicking. The kid was
the smallest sailor on board, and three times as strong as he looked. A farm boy too. Calmer still smiled at that, remembering
how close Oliver Irwin had come to throwing him over the side.

He squeezed Jensen’s arm, which was so soft as to feel boneless. “Mr. Jensen,” he said, “did you prepare that casket for burial?”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I checked it over.”

A look passed over his face, though, and Calmer saw that he couldn’t remember if he’d drilled the holes or not.

“Do you have an opinion as to why it’s floating?” he said.

“Sir?”

“I said, why is it floating?” He heard his own voice now, which meant he was getting his hearing back. Jensen looked confused.
“Why hasn’t the casket sunk?”

Jensen said, “Sir?” and an instant later, without really meaning to, Calmer reached up and pinched the man’s cheeks, squeezing
them together, or as close to together as he could. This pinching formed Jensen’s lower lip into a spout and a heavy line
of saliva dripped out of it over Calmer’s hand. He cranked Jensen’s head in the direction of the coffin. He hadn’t intended
to take it so far, but once in a blue moon things happened on their own. His hand skidded across Jensen’s cheeks, and then
Calmer had his lip, and then let go suddenly, sorry now that he’d grabbed his face at all.

“Do you see it, Lieutenant?” he said. “Is it coming back to you now, what we’re talking about?” The widow took a long pull
on the Chesterfield, then flipped it over the side.

Jensen’s eyes were tearing, and Calmer saw that he’d somehow bloodied his lip.

“Yes, sir,” Jensen said, but he spoke indistinctly, something wrong with the shape of his mouth.

“Is it sinking?”

“No, sir.”

“Why doesn’t an object sink, Jensen? You went to the University of Minnesota…”

Calmer heard her behind him. “Has someone got another smoke?”

“It’s made of wood, sir,” Jensen said.

“Did you drill holes in it?”

Calmer saw it now. Jensen’s lip was somehow stuck behind his front teeth, and Jensen took it in his fingers and pulled it
out before he answered. “My suggestion, sir, would be to put a boat in the water…”

There were specks of blood on Jensen’s gloves and down the front of his uniform. There was also blood on Calmer’s hand, already
tacky. He felt her watching him, waiting for him to put a boat in the water and rescue the casket. He couldn’t, of course.
You didn’t put a boat in the water unless there was no choice. Especially in choppy water. You didn’t risk lives to save a
dead man, even a dead member of Congress.

Jensen began to say something else but changed his mind. He dabbed at his lip instead. The casket had crossed into the ship’s
wake to the starboard side and was getting smaller all the time, the polished wood catching the sun as it bobbed. The photographers
were shooting away, the whine of their motor drives audible even in the wind.

Her eyes moved from Calmer to the casket and back to Calmer. But there was nothing he could do.

“Chaplain,” he said to the chaplain, “would you escort Mrs. Toebox belowdecks?” But she was shaking her head even before it
was all out of his mouth.

“No,” she said, “I am the wife of a U.S. congressman, and I’m not going anywhere while you just let him float away…” She looked
out into the wake, and the conversation was over. The reporters were writing in their notebooks; he couldn’t say if she’d
noticed them or not, and the casket bobbed in the sun like the kindling of some ferocious headache in the distance.

“He couldn’t even swim,” she said, as if that should have made it easier to sink him.

Calmer said, “Chaplain…” and the chaplain reached tentatively for her arm, but she pulled away the moment he touched her sleeve.
The reporters were moving closer, trying to see what was going on.

“Can’t we just pick it back up and try again?” she said. She’d been angry a moment before, but now she was only exhausted.

Calmer shook his head. “There’s nothing to pick it up with, ma’am. I can’t put a boat in the water, not in this situation.
I promise, though, I won’t let the remains float off into the ocean. But now for your own peace of mind . . .”

She closed her eyes. “No,” she said.

Someone had given her another cigarette and she looked around for a light. Calmer had no lighter but the chaplain pulled one
out of his pants pocket and cupped his hands against the wind and tried to get it to work. The wind was back up, though and
his hands were shaking, and the lighter blew out again and again.

She waited, leaning forward into his hands each time he tried to light her up, and then took the lighter away from him and
lit the cigarette herself. She drew the smoke into her lungs—Calmer was mortified to find himself staring right at her lungs,
and then to realize he was still staring at her lungs—and then she closed her eyes around the feel of the smoke, perhaps trying
to shut off everything else. She handed the lighter back to the chaplain.

“Please, ma’am, you keep it,” he said.

She would not be talked off the deck. She either had to be carried off or left where she was. Calmer imagined the pictures
in the newspapers, the widow kicking, teeth bared, her dress slid up until her panties showed. She held the cigarette at the
very tips of her fingers and leaned a few degrees over the railing to look back on the casket, and the wind, which had shifted
again, pressed the material of the dress into her bottom, which had conjugated itself into a perfect valentine.

He saw it then, that he’d misread her. She was frantic, but not over her husband; she was like some claustrophobic child who
does not want to get on the elevator, and then, thinking of claustrophobia, he reflected on the clammy, loose press of Rudolph
Toebox himself, mounting up. Yes, that was it. She was here to see him sink.

A moment passed, and then a look of loathing crossed her face and she breathed the words: “
It’s coming back
.”

He willed himself to look another direction, spotted his gunnery officer and turned away from Mrs. Toebox to speak to him
privately.

He was staring again. It was like catching a fingernail in a tear in the lining of your pocket—you forget it’s there, and
then you’re snagged on it again. He sensed that she was about to break into tears, and sensed how much she did not want to
cry here in public, and he reached out to steady her. And in what was already the strangest day of his life, the strangest
thing yet occurred. She had seen him coming and moved slightly away, not wanting to be touched—he saw that too late—and his
hand, which he’d stopped in plenty of time, circled back like some malfunctioned missile and went straight for her bosom.
Her left bosom, his right hand. It seemed to him that the ship pitched, or some spasm had taken over his nervous system.

Another, different sort of loathing passed over her face, replacing all the conflicting expressions already there, and he
realized that even if he knew what just had happened—he didn’t, and never would—something as bad or worse would happen while
he was explaining it. Calmer was not in any way a superstitious man, was the opposite, in fact, a mathematician who understood
and believed in the laws of probability and chance, but on this day he and the universe had not started out even.

“Ready here, sir,” the gunnery man said.

Calmer looked up at him, knowing there was no way out, and nodded. Only that, a single nod. It was quiet a moment, and then
the clear metallic sound of the gun being cocked, and then a long burst of fire so loud that Jensen, still preoccupied with
his bleeding lip, bolted and ran for cover.

The first rounds broke the water perhaps twenty yards in front of the casket, and led from there directly to the box, reminding
Calmer of the trails left by geese as they tiptoed out of the water to take flight.

And then the box itself. The first round that hit blew the top, and it splintered and spun high into the air, and was still
in the air as other pieces of the thing exploded out beneath it.

Time passed, and the splashing began as the pieces fell back into the ocean, and then that was over and the sea was covered
with pieces of the package, and Calmer didn’t see how it could do anybody any good to check what was floating and what had
sunk.

T
he court-martial was a formality. He was convicted of dereliction and acquitted of conduct unbecoming an officer—several members
of the crew having testified to the strangeness of the sea that day, to swells six feet high, and swore that, knowing their
commander and knowing the ship, any groping that may have occurred could only have been accidental.

Calmer’s appointed lawyer was a recent graduate of Rutgers law school who did not look old enough to vote and found reasons
for optimism right up to the announcement of the verdict.

The trial itself took only two hours in the morning; the deliberations went on all afternoon. The lawyer was buoyed at each
new half hour that went by in deliberations, and he seemed like a pretty nice kid to Calmer, just starting his career in the
law, and Calmer wasn’t up to telling him that the deliberations were only a courtesy, that he would be guilty on one count,
not guilty on the other. It didn’t matter which one they chose. He was out of the navy; he wasn’t going to jail. He would
probably be fined what the navy owed him in pay.

The court came back finally at five-thirty with dereliction of duty, and on reflection, Calmer saw it was the right verdict,
and his only disappointment with the whole proceeding was that the widow hadn’t been called to testify. They’d taken her statement
by deposition. He still carried the sight of her standing on the deck of the
Buck Whittemore
, the wind in her skirt. He had not been able to forget the tenderness he’d felt, and would never completely shake the feeling
that they’d come through a bad time together and were in that way linked. Later on, he read that she’d gone home to the prairie
and was appointed by the governor to serve out her husband’s term.