Spooner (61 page)

Over old Dodge’s quiet objections, Calmer washed the windows when the slugs scummed them up, and in spite of an openness that
was unusual among the intelligent men of Dodge’s acquaintance, particularly those in academia, it was a little while before
they were comfortable together, before they could comfortably discuss the particulars of their lives or the business of getting
old, or could just sit comfortably together and not talk at all. Unlike Calmer, old Dodge didn’t keep abreast of politics
or current novels, hadn’t looked at a book or magazine or even a newspaper in months. It wasn’t just his eyes; the truth was
he could only hold a thought for a few seconds these days without somehow drifting back to Marlin and the bodybuilder. He
daydreamed of setting fire to the house and burning up his grandson with it.

S
pooner’s guesthouse was divided into three parts. The north side was the guest quarters—a bedroom, a bathroom, and a sitting
room—and the south side was the office where Spooner worked, which also had a bathroom although Spooner preferred to walk
outdoors and use the bushes. Although Mrs. Spooner preferred that he didn’t.

Between the office and the guest quarters was a long, narrow room with a small kitchen on one end and a pool table and some
exercise equipment on the other, and a couple of comfortable leather chairs with good lamps for reading. Calmer spent most
of his time in this room, reading, napping, teaching himself to play pool, fascinated as the laws of physics materialized
in front of his eyes. He was eighty years old, and this was the first pool stick he’d ever had in his hands.

After their morning walk, Calmer and Spooner—and Dodge’s dog, if he was visiting—ordinarily repaired to the guesthouse, where
Calmer would drink a glass of milk and shoot pool for an hour or two and then nap in one of the leather chairs, and Spooner
and Lester would close themselves into the office to work. The place was well insulated, and Spooner would only notice the
sound of the pool balls clicking when it stopped, meaning Calmer had put away his cue and gone into his bedroom to rest, and
in the sudden quiet Spooner would hear even fainter noises—the sound of the Union Pacific over on the mainland, two miles
straight across the water, rolling north to Canada, or a swarm of birds passing through the trees, also on their way north,
and every forty minutes or so the muffled sound of the icemaker dropping ice into the collection plate in the freezer, and
the faint concussions of pistol shots from a mile farther up the hill, where one of Spooner’s neighbors ran a gun shop out
of his garage.

All these small sounds were familiar and Spooner was at home and comfortable and working pretty well one afternoon when the
door to his office flew abruptly open and she was standing there, Mrs. Spooner, the old nostrils flaring—never a good sign—and,
strangely for someone so clearly in the mood to talk, unable to enunciate even a single word.

He waited and by and by found himself wondering about the expression
cat got your tongue
. Was it just Spooner, or does that strike you as a little gory for what it is meant to put across? Spooner had begun noticing
expressions like these not too long ago, and they were everywhere in the language, lying right out in the open, like little
headless bodies on the patio after the cat—speaking of the cat—has been out all night hunting. Where did they come from?
Explode onto the scene
.
Stop dead in your tracks
.
Pants on fire.
Was it the Old Testament?

Was it the Irish?

For her part, Mrs. Spooner simply pointed, stabbed her finger yonder, toward the front of the house, and with this physical
action found her voice, issuing those two basic words as fundamental to the mysterious male/female equation as the monthlies
itself. She said, “Do something.”

Spooner got up and went with her, noticing that in spite of the obvious excitement in the air, the dog, who enjoyed an occasional
woof in the yard as much as the next Lab, remained lying on his back, his rear legs both suspended in the air, following the
Spooners only with his eyes. He was tired. But then, already today he’d eaten a loaf of bread and a pound package of Morrell’s
bacon that Mrs. Spooner had laid out on the counter for breakfast, then accompanied Spooner and Calmer on their regular walk
to the foot of the island, and now seemed to have scheduled a little me time to sleep it off.

Spooner and Mrs. Spooner, meanwhile, walked together in the direction she had pointed—was still pointing—and although she
was walking beside him, it was not a regular side-by-side thing, the way they had once gone into the First National Bank of
Collingswood, New Jersey, to be married, but more the way you and the beast napping in the office might walk if you were holding
still another pound of Morrell’s bacon in your hand, and in this fashion they—Spooner and Spooner’s woman—progressed yonderly
through the guesthouse to the double doors leading outside. And reaching the doors, looked out.

There
, she pointed,
there
. And the two chattiest deaf people in the world had never spoken more clearly with their hands.

It could be useful to mention here that Mrs. Spooner, in spite of her lovely bottom and a wide-ranging and fascinating internal
life, had not come into this world with a penchant to nurture. Her ancestors were obviously hunters and trackers, bred to
eat the stragglers, not nurse them back to health.

In spite of this, she held Calmer in deep affection, and not only for his small kindnesses and acts of chivalry and his level
head when things went upside down and her husband’s—Spooner’s—obvious and deep attachments to the man who had raised him.
More than any of that, Calmer was established in some way in the middle of her daughter’s heart, and she cared as much for
the child’s heart as her own.

Still, there sat an eighty-year-old man with undeniable signs of dementia cross-legged on an army blanket down in the meadow
with his rifle, dressed, bottom to top, in the following manner: black shoes, dark socks, boxer shorts, white T-shirt, German
military helmet, circa World War I.

Calmer aimed the rifle up into the air and squeezed off a shot and then lowered it and waited, scanning the meadow (was a
duck supposed to fall out of the sky?) and then reloaded and fired again.

Spooner had never seen Calmer shooting into the sky before, but he understood straightaway what was going on. The image of
a towheaded Calmer sitting alone in an unplowed field in South Dakota firing this very same gun into the air, trying to bring
one back in right on top of himself had been with Spooner since the night Calmer had told him the story. Spooner had been
in bed shivering with fever after he’d sat in the anthill, Calmer trying to find some way to recast what Spooner had done
into something different from what it was. Perhaps trying to recast Spooner himself into something different.

“It’s nothing,” Spooner said to his wife. Rifle shots were no more out of the ordinary on the south end of the island than
cookouts.

“He’s in his underwear,” she said, “shooting a gun.”

Mrs. Spooner had an underwear phobia, part of a larger phobia connected to invasions of her privacy, and kept the bedroom
shades drawn at night, and the bathroom shades drawn day and night, even though there was nobody out there to look in but
the raccoons.

Spooner started down toward the meadow, maybe two hundred yards from the guesthouse, and Calmer fired off another one. “You
have to say something to him,” she said.

“I will, I will.”

He meandered downhill in a head-of-household style, like there wasn’t much more to this than unscrewing the pickle-jar lid.
He fought an urge to run—not away but right at Calmer, to get it over with—but if he’d learned anything living the accident-prone
life, it was that you never run downhill at someone with a rifle who doesn’t know you are coming, and who one of these days
isn’t going to remember who you are.

Calmer was working the bolt action again, reloading. Spooner hurried the last few steps and began to speak but saw that Calmer
had plugged his ears with Kleenex, so instead of speaking, Spooner moved around to the side where he would be visible out
on the periphery of his vision, and waved.

Calmer brought the gun up and fired it again and then watched the meadow a few seconds, then looked over at Spooner, opening
the breech to reload, as if he’d known he was there all along. He handed him the German helmet, which Spooner accepted and
put on Mrs. Spooner’s head as she arrived.

“The school bus is coming along soon, Dad,” Spooner said, and where that came from he didn’t know but it seemed to him that
he’d hit one out of the park.

Calmer checked his watch and then nodded and stood up from his cross-legged position all in a single motion, not using the
gun or even his hand to push off the ground, and Spooner watched in open admiration, forgetting for the moment that Mrs. Spooner
was there expecting him to lay down the law and that in certain moods she was pretty limber-bodied herself, in fact in the
right mood would climb all over you like a porch monkey looking for a hidden banana.

For now though he found himself trying to remember if there was ever a time in his life when he could have gotten up like
that, or even a time he could have sat with his legs folded up in front of him in the first place.

Calmer smiled at Mrs. Spooner and patted her in a friendly way on top of her German helmet. He gathered up the blanket, folding
it miraculously into a perfectly even rectangle, and then headed up the hill.

T
he following week there arrived via certified mail a letter from Hillary Levin & Associates, a two-woman Langley firm representing
Marlin Dodge. Ms. Levin was the most famous and successful attorney on the south end of Whidbey Island, specializing in divorces
and anti-discrimination suits brought on behalf of aggrieved minorities, and while the divorce end of the business stayed
pretty flat—she did not represent men in divorce cases, except in the cases of same-tool domestic partnership split-ups—the
aggrieved minority suits side of things was expanding nicely, outpacing even the discovery of new aggrieved minorities.

She had city-girl mannerisms—was probably the fastest walker in Island County—and city-girl manners, and would pass the citizens
of Langley on the street without a word in response to the occasional
Good morning, counselor
, and on the one and only occasion she and Spooner had been invited to the same party, he’d caught her staring at him all
night, lethal as a castration machine, with an expression that said,
Everything in good time, sport.

So it was no surprise to Spooner that Ms. Levin’s letter did not strike a warm or conciliatory tone but simply laid out the
complaints of Marlin Dodge, her client, and threatened immediate action if such complaints were not satisfactorily addressed.

One: intimidation. An elderly occupant of Spooner’s home had on at least two occasions fired off a rifle in the front yard,
for no apparent purpose except the intimidation of Marlin Dodge, and/or to cause Mr. Dodge and his household unnecessary clamor
and discomfort, possibly as reprisal for his nontraditional lifestyle. And here Ms. Levin also noted that Spooner had in the
past threatened Mr. Dodge with bodily injury, at one point brandishing a hammer, causing Mr. Dodge to seek protection from
the county sheriff’s department.

Two: trespassing. The previously mentioned elderly occupant of Mr. Spooner’s household had several times trespassed onto Mr.
Dodge’s property, climbing over the fence Mr. Dodge had erected to afford himself and his domestic partner, Alexi Sug, some
measure of privacy and protection, and in so doing had upset Mr. Dodge’s aged grandfather, Hiram Dodge, who suffered not only
panic attacks but manic depression and some degree of dementia and disorientation.

Three: stolen livestock. The Spooner household had all but stolen Mr. Dodge’s grandfather’s beloved black Labrador retriever,
Lester Maddox, holding him in the Spooner residence and/or on their premises for days at a time, with the animal’s absence
adding daily to Mr. Dodge’s grandfather’s growing state of confusion and agitation.

And that was it.

Sincerely, Hillary Levin, Esq.

It was lunchtime and Spooner put the letter in his pocket and opened the refrigerator and looked around for something for
Lester. The dog had gotten up when the shooting stopped, hungry after his nap. Spooner spotted a ham in the back, wrapped
in aluminum foil, maybe a pound of meat encasing a bone about the size of an exhaust pipe. As always when he saw a healthy-looking
bone, Spooner felt a pang of regret that he couldn’t somehow use it himself.