Spooner (63 page)

At night, in bed with Mrs. Spooner, Spooner awoke to an eerie howling next door, a sad, unnatural noise that woke Mrs. Spooner
too, and they lay together listening in the cool, clean sheets, no trace of dog breath or dog flatulence in the room, no press
of dog elbows pinning their own legs to the mattress, or violent shaking as some small itch tingled into the beast’s consciousness
and was obliterated by the wild thumpings of whichever hind leg could be used to get at it, or yips and twitching as he dreamed
his retriever dreams; and they lay together in the quiet, settled room, Spooner and his wife, in clean, smooth sheets, and
could not get back to sleep for missing him, for thinking of him over there chained to a tree.

She was up first in the morning, just at dawn, brushed her teeth and combed her hair and put on a pair of jeans. She walked
out into the backyard in her slippers, rolling the bedroom’s sliding door open as quietly as she could. He heard the noise
though—these days even when he slept, he was never all the way asleep—and got up too, stepped barefoot outside onto the cold
patio tiles and watched Mrs. Spooner bending over the dog, trying for a little while to untangle the chain’s metal knots but
in the end simply unhitching the collar and leaving it there, still attached to the chain.

He was a skeleton of his former self by now—which is to say that you could tell he had bones—and lapped at a pail of water
Spooner got him from the utility room, and ate a couple of sandwiches that Spooner made out of some of the leftovers that
had taken over the top two shelves of the refrigerator in the animal’s absence, and then the dog and Spooner went back to
bed, each to his regular spot, and after Mrs. Spooner had made breakfast for their daughter and walked her down to the road
to catch the school bus, she came back to bed too, and they all slept together until noon.

Saturday afternoon, with Mrs. Spooner and Spooner’s daughter gone for the weekend to Seattle and Spooner unable to get anything
done, tar-babied to one sentence after another, he heard the distinctive pop of Calmer’s .22 from the meadow.

Grateful for the interruption, he went to the door and then sat down on the steps and watched Calmer and old Dodge taking
turns down there, trading the rifle and the helmet and fresh beers back and forth, the shots echoing from the hills across
the road as if someone were shooting back.

Spooner sat down and watched, and listened to them laughing, and he ached to be down there with them, for a little while to
be one of the coots himself, drinking beer in the meadow, laughing. It just made you want to retire.

Presently the grandson emerged from the house next door and stepped out onto the patio. He was next to naked—nothing on but
his Jockey briefs—and his stomach was huge and smooth and perfectly round, and on it rested a pair of awful-looking saggers
that from this distance called to mind the faces of housebound, indolent children.

The grandson took a step or two forward, gingerly, as he was barefoot, and called out to the old man, scolding him the way
you would scold the dog—
Get back over here, goddamn it
—but the old man seemed not to hear, and when the grandson called him again and danced out a few threatening steps farther,
Dodge calmly handed his beer to Calmer, took the rifle, and fired off a shot in the grandson’s general direction—a shot in
the dark, you could say, the old man being at least half blind without his glasses—that was exactly as likely to kill young
Marlin as lightning.

The deputy arrived half an hour later with the coots still in the meadow. The deputy had been here before, a year or so ago
on the day Mrs. Spooner had chased Marlin and the bodybuilder off with a claw hammer, and now she stepped out of the squad
car, saw the rifle and instantly dropped behind the fender on her haunches, covering her head. It made Spooner’s knees ache,
just the sight of somebody that size on her haunches.

She called out to them from behind the car to put down their weapons.

The grandson had apparently seen the sheriff’s cruiser first and was already out there beside her, telling his side of the
story. He had dressed—shirt and shorts and loafers without socks—and pointed across the meadow as he spoke, striking some
classic tattletale’s pose that Spooner recognized from a lifetime of trouble with teachers and city editors.

Spooner jogged down the hill toward the deputy on legs that had been rebuilt seven times in various operating rooms across
America, legs like an old dog’s, and set about to defuse the situation. It was a mark of his new maturity that he thought
to defuse the situation rather than exacerbate it, although even as the word
defuse
passed through his mind he found himself thinking of fuses and that little white string dangling out of Mrs. Spooner’s nest
the day previous, after she’d emerged from the shower to dress for the trip into the city, and he considered and rejected
working this image into his conversation with the deputy.

He nodded politely at the deputy and then glanced out into the field, as if he’d just noticed the geezers with the rifle.
“There’s been a misunderstanding, I think,” he said, dripping maturity. “They’re just plunking at some cans and bottles.”

The deputy jumped at the sound of his voice and then screamed at him to get down. “Get your ass down! Now,” pointing at the
ground to indicate the correct direction. Pointing, in fact, with her black, semi-automatic pistol, and screaming “
Down, goddamn it! Are you deaf?
” A passerby might think he was witnessing the world’s harshest puppy training.

And then she turned and screamed in the other direction, bawling at the old men to drop their weapons.

“They can’t hear you,” Spooner said. “They put toilet paper in their ears.”

“I’m telling you for the last time,” she said. “Get down.”

The grandson shifted his weight, dropping off his haunches to a knee. “It’s partly my fault, officer,” he said to the deputy.
“I should have seen this coming.”

She glanced over at him quickly, then rose a little and peeked through the windows to check on the old men. She moved to the
side, trying to duck-walk up toward the front of the car, but took only one step and then lost her balance and rolled a little
ways downhill. How do ducks do it, anyway?

She sat up, got to her knees, specks of grass and dirt on the back of her shirt, and used the door handle—holding it with
both hands—to maneuver herself back up to her haunches. Overweight as she was, the deputy was as comfortable haunched as Spooner
was sitting down. Spooner had read somewhere that this was how women of certain tribes delivered their babies.

The deputy took half a dozen deliberate breaths—huge flap-happy lungs pressing into the name tag on one side of her shirt
and the badge on the other—and wiped at her forehead, her whole face glistening like a fresh turd in the desert, and it was
hard to say if she was catching her breath from the effort to pull herself back up, or if she was trying to collect herself
and calm down. It was also hard to say what she had in mind regarding Calmer and old Dodge; for all Spooner knew she was readying
herself to charge the bunker.

Instead, she cracked open the cruiser’s door and crawled back inside, low to the seat until she was wedged in beneath the
dashboard, and called on the radio for backup.

It was what they needed, all right. More deputies.

“My grandfather suffers from dementia,” Marlin said, even as the deputy was signing off. Perhaps believing that if he kept
the lie alive a little while it would sprout and have a life of its own.

The deputy crawled backwards out of the car, still keeping low. Her hat had fallen off when she lost her balance, and rolled
a pretty good distance out into the open. The sheriff’s insignia on the crown caught the sun and twinkled.

The grandson was saying, “This time we’re going to have to do something, get him in some kind of supervised living facility
where he’ll be safe.” The deputy gave no sign that she’d heard. “That other one,” the grandson said, indicating Calmer, “I
don’t know what his story’s supposed to be.”

Spooner looked down at the grandson and said, “You’re something, aren’t you?”

She said, “Sir, I’m telling you for the last time,” good news to Spooner, who didn’t like being nagged even under the best
of circumstances—that is, by the unarmed—and without giving it another moment’s consideration he walked out into the meadow
where Calmer and the old man were still drinking beer and enjoying the afternoon.

Spooner took the toilet paper out of one of Calmer’s ears. “Let me have it for a second, will you?” he said.

Calmer checked to make sure the safety was on—you can’t be too careful with firearms, he’d been saying that for as long as
Spooner could remember—and handed him the rifle, and old Dodge, who hadn’t realized yet that he was in the middle of a police
emergency, handed Spooner a beer, which he polished off without pausing once for oxygen. He’d never been much of a beer drinker
but could have been except for the taste.

The deputy arrived from behind then, armed and dangerous. “Facedown! On the ground now!” she said. “Do it!”

Calmer got to his feet and pulled old Dodge up after him.

“I said on the ground!” Still screaming. Calmer smiled politely, with no intention whatsoever of lying on the ground.

The deputy looked quickly at the grandson, who had followed along behind and arrived on the crime scene last. “Which one of
them fired at you, sir?” she said.

For a moment the grandson couldn’t seem to make up his mind who he wanted to finger. “Him,” he said finally, and indicated
Calmer. “It was him.” But now she stared at him a moment, perhaps beginning to smell a rat.

“It was
he
,” Calmer said to the grandson and then addressed the deputy. “Madam,” he said, “no such thing occurred.”

And there was some kindliness for her in his voice that had nothing to do with the words themselves, some consideration of
her situation perhaps, of the embarrassment at being stuffed into this absurd outfit that did nothing but exaggerate her obesity
and awkward, mannish appearance, and she seemed to just give up, sagged and let the gun drop to her side, and in that surrender,
you could see the powerful sway of Calmer Ottosson’s kindness.