Spooner (48 page)

And Jesus, did he not want to get into that.

And because he didn’t want to get into it, the letter was still lying open and unanswered on his desk the night Calmer called
with the news that she was gone. While they were still on the phone, Spooner imagined him going through her things and finding
the letter he would have written, slowly realizing what it was about. And Spooner, who had never experienced writer’s block
before in his life, realized that this one occurrence had saved his neck.

T
he details: Spooner’s mother had died during a regular meeting of the Greater Falling Rapids Great Books Club, the first fatality
in the club’s history. The meetings were held once a month in the living rooms of alternating members, and this month’s host,
who had joined the group only the month before and had suggested they take on
Swann’s Way
, was a retired admiral, a Democrat, who lived in a big new house on the fourth hole of the country club with a snow-white,
asthmatic bulldog named Silly.

Spooner’s mind wandered even as Calmer told him the story. How many people in South Dakota had read
Swann’s Way
? How many dogs were named Silly? How many Democrats lived out at the country club? What were the odds, what were the odds?

Spooner’s mother hadn’t known there was a dog in the house, or she wouldn’t have come. Dogs set off her asthma. As did cats,
dust, mold, smoke from Morrell’s meat plant at the edge of the city, cigarette smoke, and mammal dander of every kind she
had been tested for. Beyond that, she secretly didn’t think the great books were so hot, and most likely she hadn’t read
Swann’s Way
, which was no mark against her as far as Spooner was concerned. He’d tried a couple of pages of it himself once and failed
to find a pulse.

It wasn’t the Proust that finished her off, though, it was the dog. The navy man, it developed, had given Silly a tranquilizer
and put her in a back room, where she would not bother or be bothered by his guests. The animal, it further developed, could
match Spooner’s mother allergy for allergy, and was particularly prone to asthma attacks and hysteria whenever strangers came
to the door.

Spooner’s mother had been in the house about ten minutes when she asked Calmer to get her atomizer, the little one she kept
in the glove compartment of the Buick. The group was having refreshments—cocktails, wine, peanuts, crackers, pâté—and had
not yet begun to discuss Marcel Proust.

Calmer asked if she thought they should leave, but no, she would be all right. It was probably just autumn pollen. “I’m just
a little tight in the chest,” she said.

He got her atomizer. The evening grew longer and the refreshments kept coming, and the members of the Great Books Club drank
quite a bit of alcohol, and some of them confessed that they hadn’t read
Swann’s Way
, and others had read a page or two and quit, and Spooner’s mother disappeared into the bathroom more and more often to discreetly
inhale from her inhaler.

Calmer offered again to take her home, but she was having a good time now—the discussion had moved off literature and on to
politics—and didn’t want to leave.

Then, a little after nine, one of the other guests, a professor in the math department at Augustana College who had food and
wine stains in his beard, reeled down the hallway to use the admiral’s toilet but opened the wrong door and roused the beast.

Tranquilized or not, Silly tore into the living room like Christmas morning, her nails clicking and scratching across the
oak floor, and there confronted the entire Greater Falling Rapids Great Books Club, the force of her barking lifting her front
paws off the floor, backing away from one guest and into another, wheezing and making terrible wet guttural noises, and then
began to sneeze, and mists of dog snot blew across the room, settling Jesus knew where.

And now the animal’s breathing shortened, and you could see her ribs as she worked to pull oxygen into her trembling body.
The admiral tried to coax her back into the bedroom, but the dog was too upset. She backed away, bumping into one guest and
then another, whirling to cover her flank, wheezing, drooling, growling, violently sneezing, and eventually bumped into Spooner’s
mother, who had ducked her nose and mouth into her blouse, filtering out as much of the air with its microscopic dander and
dog snot as she could, and now leaned back into the sofa and picked up her feet.

From there, they both went downhill fast.

The dog collapsed shortly, her breathing shallow and strangled, rattling. It was hard for the many animal lovers among the
club’s membership to listen to her struggling to hang on to life.

Calmer took Spooner’s mother out of the house, but she did not think she could make it to the car and they sat down on the
steps, she and Calmer, and then she lay down, trying to get some air into her lungs. Panic was everywhere, and feeding on
itself. Calmer made a pillow of his coat, and called inside for someone to call an ambulance.

Inside, the bulldog had gone into shock. The retired admiral sat with her on the floor, weeping, holding her head in his lap,
running his hand over her coat while fifteen feet away, on the other side of the living room wall, Calmer, absent the weeping,
did the same for Lily.

And in the end, neither of them made it.

Spooner’s mother died on the way to Falling Rapids Memorial Hospital and Silly was likewise DOA at the vet.

Spooner and Calmer were on the phone most of an hour that night, all the sounds still fresh in Calmer’s mind, the clatter
of the animal’s claws as she ran up the hall toward the living room, the rattle as she tried to breathe, the strange noise
in Spooner’s mother’s chest outside on the porch steps, and then at the end, in the ambulance, a different, draining-sink
note in her chest after she’d sighed and stopped breathing.

Calmer finished the story and stopped, and in the silence that followed added, “At least she didn’t suffer,” which, Christ
knows, was not the way she would have told it.

When he hung up Mrs. Spooner was standing in the half-light of the bedroom door. He was sitting at his desk.

“What’s wrong?” she said. She had been a good sleeper when they met, but not so much these days, even though she still dropped
off half a minute after the lights went off. These days she woke up at the smallest noise, frightened; these days she was
always expecting bad news.

“Mom’s dead,” he said. He saw her watching him to see how he was.

“An accident?”

“No, it was a bulldog. She had an asthma attack. She went to a meeting of the Great Books Club, and there was a bulldog there.
It had asthma too…”

He had to stop before he lost control. She came to him and put her arms around his head and held him against her stomach,
and he hiccuped, once and then again, and she held him tighter, and they stayed together like that a pretty long time, Spooner
allowing her to think whatever she was thinking, and then he stood up and she noticed his erection.

S
pooner arrived in Falling Rapids, having changed planes in Chicago and Omaha and then been re-routed to Sioux City, and headed
to the liquor store before he even thought about going home. He had intended to buy Scotch but ended up instead with two cases
of Beefeater gin, twenty-four bottles of it, imagining the sight of a whole shelf of the stuff—a shining red-coated guard
on label after label, quiet, orderly, there to do his job—every time Calmer opened the cupboard to get a plate or a glass.
Calmer was not anybody’s idea of a big drinker, and under torture Spooner could not have explained why he’d bought so much
of the stuff.

Relatives had begun to filter into town, and the neighbors brought over hams and macaroni salads, and Calmer sat at the kitchen
table, not so much bereaved as distracted. By now he’d quit trying to keep track of the growing loads of food and relatives
being dropped off at the door. He didn’t seem pestered in the least by all the movement and attention, although to Spooner
the place felt like it was being ransacked.

The doorbell rang again, and Calmer came back into the kitchen carrying a ham the size of a pygmy.

They went to the funeral home in the morning to see her, in two cars: Darrow and Phillip and Calmer in the Buick, Margaret
and her husband and Spooner in the rental Spooner had picked up at the airport.

Spooner had taken a pain pill when he woke up in his old bedroom that morning, then had another one when he heard they were
going to the funeral home. But even drugged and sweet, he did not want to see his mother. The rest of them did, though, as
Spooner had known they would.

Spooner could not predict what note the sight of their mother’s body might sound in his sister or brothers, except that Darrow,
who was born wise and calm in that same familiar way Calmer was, could be counted on to keep his head and conduct business.
To take that weight at least off Calmer’s shoulders. He was younger than Spooner, but in a world that made any sense would
have been the older brother.

The leadership of the expedition having been conceded to Darrow, Spooner envisioned his own function as the muscle, like one
of those fellows standing behind the president in sunglasses with that doohickey in his ear, there just in case. If something
happened, he would be the one to throw himself on the grenade, which, everything considered, was not such a bad way to go,
a painless death plus you got to miss the funeral.

Margaret rode with Spooner in the front seat of the rented car. Her husband was in back, reading the obituary that had run
that morning in the newspaper, the stem of his unlit pipe clamped into his mouth all the way back to the molars. Calmer and
Phillip and Darrow had left ten minutes ahead of them in the old Buick.

Spooner looked over at Margaret now, gazing through the passenger window at the town. She’d left home for college before Calmer
took the job in South Dakota, and although she came home most summers to visit, the place was never the place you come back
to for her, the way Prairie Glen might have been if they’d stayed there. And even though Spooner was no more tied to Falling
Rapids than she was, he found himself sorry that Margaret had no connection to the place. She was hungry for these things,
and for as long as he could remember she had tried to hold on to whatever small pieces of the past she could. He supposed
it was the difference in their ages. It was only eighteen months but in some way she’d known their father and lost him, while
for Spooner he was missing from the start. And out of this difference came her hard claims on the things she had left, while
Spooner lived more or less on the other side of the mirror, never believing anything was his for good until it was so generally
worthless that nobody else would want it.

The dog, for instance. The dog was definitely his.

Harry was deaf and blind and brittle now, horrible to smell, always gnawing away at some part of his body, a leg or his tail
or his pecker, apparently trying to whittle himself out of this world. He still occasionally wandered the small dirt road
along the south shore of the little lake where they lived, yearning perhaps for one last feel of some fluffy white poodle’s
throat in his jaws, but mostly these days he just stayed home, gnawing.