Spooner (60 page)

Whidbey Island

T
he grandson’s honey came back home to him in the light of the moon, in the spring, in a looming 450-horsepower automobile
known as the Viper, which loomed a pale white color that evening, the color of skim milk maybe, or an albino. The car had
California plates and crept up the driveway like a growling stomach, and at the top of the driveway near the garage, it maneuvered
in backwards next to the grandson’s pickup, which was also white, of course, but more the color of whole milk. The pickup,
however—witness the grandson’s broken heart—had been allowed more or less to return to nature, at least sat as muddy as any
pig-shit pickup on Whidbey Island, Spooner’s included, with underinflated tires, a cracked windshield, and good Christ, was
that a crease in the tailgate? Still, the Viper backed in and stopped a yard or so from the truck, facing the opposite direction,
like a filly offering the old stallion a sniff of her cookies.

And perhaps not coincidentally arranged for a quick getaway.

The grandson’s honey emerged from the automobile slow and glistening like some reptile climbing out of the New York City sewer
system. The Viper was a very low-slung car. He was still shirtless, with a tanning-salon tan and cutoffs cut to the pubis,
and even in the moonlight you could tell that he’d been taking his supplements and lifting faithfully in the gym. You could
also see how somebody in New York City might have flushed him down a toilet. He reached back into his racer to toot the horn.

The grandson appeared at the door and one moment stood pole-axed, and the next broke into tears and a wild scamper over the
pineconed sidewalk—the grandson was barefoot but in this moment oblivious to pain—bound for his honey. The scene made Spooner
think of
Splendor in the Grass
, although he couldn’t have told you what
Splendor in the Grass
was if his eyesight depended on it—a movie? A line of women’s dainties? Soap? It didn’t matter; there was an undeniable splendor
lying over the landscape, and perhaps something grassy too, although this was not a fresh-cut grassiness, as the old man stayed
indoors and the grandson had not touched the yard all spring. But lawn maintenance aside, it was still pretty clear that this
was one of those situations you hear about, often from sports commentators, where the whole is greater than the sum of the
parts.

Spooner witnessed the episode in its entirety, having driven home from the grocery store with the Viper’s blue headlamps in
his rear window, and when the reunion commenced, splendor in the grass or not, he had mixed feelings. On one hand, he was
a sucker for happy endings and for love stories, especially the kind where love overcomes great odds of distance and time,
but at the same time, part of him had been hoping the bodybuilder was, well, dead—mixed feelings in this case being more or
less analogous to the book-world term
mixed reviews.
When a writer tells you his novel has received
mixed reviews
, it means that after the book was trashed and his heart was broken in every newspaper and magazine in America, the weekend
critic at the
Pekin Daily Times
said it was a heart-pounding race to the finish.

Calmer had been in the guesthouse a few months now, still settling in, and in spite of his age seemed to have lost interest
in nothing. He and Spooner took walks every morning, always at his instigation, timed to the rising sun, which this time of
year was a few minutes earlier every day.

The walks themselves followed the cliff that ran from Spooner’s place to the southern tip of the island, two, two and a half
miles each way, and included three or four fences to climb and half a dozen detours over deer trails, some of which dropped
below the edge of the cliff, and there were places where a trail would emerge from the brush and Spooner would be staring
straight down five hundred feet to a stretch of dark, massive, cold-looking stones.

The sight of the drop always stopped Spooner in his socks, but Calmer would already be moving ahead, oblivious to the height,
confident and sure-footed and strong. Spooner’s worry was not that Calmer would stumble off the cliff, rather that he would
walk off into oblivion and not even notice. Calmer had arrived from South Dakota in some stage of dementia, distracted and
restless in a way Spooner had never seen him before, his interest pulled one way and another by his line of sight, as if the
whole world was a new place. This was the category of things that worried Spooner, and even when he—Spooner—worked or slept,
occasionally even when he was
in delicto
with Mrs. Spooner, in the back of his mind Calmer was always falling. The upshot was that at the end of the day Spooner would
climb into bed exhausted from keeping track of his stepfather and would wake up the same way for the same reason. And in this
condition, of course, was much more likely than Calmer to end up as spillage on the rocks.

Calmer, on the other hand, slept very well. He realized something was going on upstairs, but his intelligence was intact.
He could see why Spooner was tagging along every morning, and even if he was too polite to say it, would have preferred to
take his walks alone.

But back to splendor in the grass:

The grandson and his bodybuilder cuddled awhile in the driveway and then took it inside. As for what went on in there, well,
as the scientists say, we just don’t know. Spooner imagined them dressing up like Royal Canadian Mounties, and then afterwards,
perhaps that monkey thing, preening each other for mites. But that was only speculation and ignorance, and perhaps even homophobia
raising its ugly head. The fact of the matter, as Spooner had already gleaned from the Sunday Styles section in the
New York Times
, was that same-tool love wasn’t very much different or more preposterous than love by the prong-and-socket style nature designed,
and after the boys next door finished with the part of it that was different—and Spooner counted on the
Times
to leave this last bit of uncharted territory uncharted—the grandson and the bodybuilder most likely cuddled and promised
each other never to fight again, just like any other couple making up.

And during the cuddling perhaps also pledged to have the old man put away somewhere, where he would no longer be an encumbrance
to their relationship, and while admittedly this was a pretty foul plan, it was not unheard of in the prong-and-socket world
either. For his part, old Dodge stayed holed up in his room with his dog, except when the dog couldn’t stand the domestic
tension anymore and went next door to visit the Spooners.

Mostly Dodge holed up alone. He saw the mail that came into the house though and listened to the grandson’s end of phone conversations,
and was aware that Marlin was in it now with a local attorney to have him declared incompetent to handle his own affairs.

The old man’s eyes were going bad, along with his hearing and the circulation in his feet, and he’d given up forever getting
the egrets down exactly right on paper, although this was not just the problem with his eyes but a feeling lately, coincident
with the arrival of Marlin and the bodybuilder, that he had somehow participated in the contamination of nature.

The old man had perked up though when he noticed that a fellow about his own fit in the world was staying in the guesthouse
next door, this maybe three months ago, and guessed it was the stepfather Spooner had mentioned from time to time, back when
he’d dropped by for a word in the mornings. Dodge thought about those visits quite a bit, about the days when he’d had the
house to himself. The visits, the morning coffee, a few hours trying to get the birds down just right, a walk with the dog
to the grocery store, maybe a romp in the yard. The days had seemed to pour naturally, one into another, with some peaceful
accomplishment always in the works, night and day.

Then into this peacefulness strode Marlin, uninvited—as he supposed the boy went everywhere in life—and then his foul-breathed
friend with all his muscles and bluff, and that fast, the place he’d made for himself was ruined, and lately he thought more
and more of giving in, letting them have it and finding someplace else for himself.

The old fellow had been sitting in the yard when Dodge first saw him, wearing a baseball cap, reading a book. He was there
about an hour and returned the next afternoon to the same spot, and the afternoon after that, and every afternoon unless it
rained. Old Dodge considered putting on his shoes and pants and walking over to introduce himself, but even the thought left
him tired, always too tired, and he didn’t know what he might say anyway, and then one day the fellow simply appeared outside
with a pail and a squeegee, and commenced cleaning the slug slime off Dodge’s bedroom window, and a few minutes later they
were sitting across from each other at the picnic table, drinking beer, pleasantly shooting the breeze.

The fellow’s name was Calmer Ottosson, and before long he was coming around once or twice a week, always when Marlin and Atlas
Shrugged were gone for the day, and he was not only a reader, it turned out, but pretty well read.