Spooner (50 page)

Arlo moved behind her and stuck the remaining finger of his left hand into his mouth all the way to the ring, wetting it so
that a little line of spit hung between the tip of his finger and his lips as he took it out, and then moved up on her from
behind and screwed it into her ear.

“God
damn
it, Arlo,” she said, and pulled loose from him and grabbed the Minnesota Twins baseball cap off his head and used it to scour
out her ear, using that same twisting motion that he’d used to befoul her. Then she spit into the cap and set it back on his
head.

He said to Calmer, “She just loves that.”

It wasn’t pheasant season, as one of the Whitlowes—an environmentalist, it developed—pointed out, and Arlo patiently explained
that he wasn’t shooting pheasants, he was killing them with the truck.

The pheasants came up to the road at dusk to eat gravel, and Arlo bore down on them at seventy, eighty miles an hour, sometimes
catching two at a time as they scattered and ran or tried to fly. Hearing the thump or thumps, Arlo would slam on the brakes,
putting the truck into a slide, and then his dog Dick—who went with him everywhere—would be out of the truck bed even before
they’d stopped, and back thirty seconds later with the bird.

Hearing this so repulsed the environmentalists of the Whitlowe side of the family that half a dozen of them or so went into
the living room and discussed turning him in.

Arlo looked at Calmer, shaking his head. He said, “What you got yourself into now, Calmer?”

Spooner saw the play in Calmer’s eyes, and thought for a moment that they might have lost him back to the other side.

The day after the funeral, Spooner found Calmer sitting alone in the garage. The Ottossons had gotten up at dawn to go home
to their farms, but there were still Whitlowes all over the house, and Calmer was out there reading the
Minneapolis Tribune
by the light of the single bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. Sitting in a lawn chair, a glass and a bottle of the Beefeater
on the cement floor next to him, a lit cigarette tipped into the ashtray in his lap. The line of smoke came up like he’d been
shot in the balls with a Roman candle.

Spooner took a chair from a stack of chairs against the wall and wiped off the spiderwebs. He sat down a few feet from Calmer.
It was cool in here and smelled of gasoline and cut grass. Spooner wondered if Calmer had come to the garage out of habit—he
couldn’t smoke in the house because of her asthma—or if he’d just wanted to get away from all the random noise and movement
inside.

They sat together a little while, neither of them talking, and Calmer handed him the sports section of the paper and nodded
in the direction of the gin bottle on the floor. Spooner spotted a paper cup on a cross beam, emptied the nails inside into
a coffee can, then cleaned out the cup with his T-shirt and poured himself a little straight gin. He took a seat and presently
lay the newspaper in his lap and looked up into the rafters, feeling like there was something he should say, but nothing came.

His eyes adjusted to the bare bulb, and he made out a coil of rope up there, and a wagon, and beyond that, in the front corner
where the lines of the roof all came together, a wasps’ nest as big as a grapefruit. He tried to image how he might go about
taking care of it without getting stung, but nothing came.

Nothing came.

It was the start of something new, sipping gin in the garage and reading the morning paper, letting all the small problems
and complications inside the house take care of themselves, Calmer seemingly no longer weighed down with responsibility and
dread, with his wife’s asthma, with his wife.

Spooner was hit with an impulse to acknowledge his father’s new life. He said, “Maybe you should get a dog.”

And realized even as he said it that he’d mistaken capitulation for recovery.

Whidbey Island

A
long time after Philadelphia, after his teeth had been capped and the caps had fallen off and been replaced with other caps,
which also fell off and were finally replaced with implants, and he could smile over his implanted teeth without feeling the
lumps of scar tissue in his lips, after he could sit and work again without the eerie, scalding pain crawling over his back,
and could lie down at night without the pillow floating beneath his head, and without drifting back to the operating table
and what had happened there, one day on an island three thousand miles away, in a place as far removed from the city of Philadelphia
as you could find, Spooner looked up from a very bad sentence and saw his daughter flying up the driveway like fire.

It was three in the afternoon; the driveway was a sheer quarter-mile climb from the road to the house. The child weighed eighty-five
pounds and was strapped into a backpack full of school books.

For the previous half hour, Spooner had been nosing back and forth over this same bad sentence, poking here and poking there,
like some sweet old bitch trying to rouse the still puppy in her litter, and now he stopped, grateful for the interruption,
and watched her make the last hundred yards, admiring the way she finished it all the way to the top, remembering that feeling
of breaking into a sudden all-out run for home, for no reason except you could do it, and exactly pictured his own long, unhinged
charge down the paved hill from the highway in Vincent Heights, past a dozen houses whose closets he had attended as the Fiend,
and felt the wild pull of the hill itself, the feeling of running for your life, and then hitting the red-dirt circle at the
bottom, too fast and out of control, past two more houses he had broken into, and here the road evened out a bit and he slowed,
the wind cool in his hairline sweat, and he turned right at Granny Otts’s driveway and headed straight up it, almost as steep
as the roof of her house—yes, he had been on her roof—and across the yard to his own front steps, willing himself to run even
those last eleven brick steps up to the porch and the front door, and then at the door turning back to admire the distance
he’d come, hands on his knees and feeling the trembling in the muscles of his thighs, and feeling his lungs—too small to feed
the engine pounding in his chest—looking back at the far hill, at the amazing distance, and seeing clearly that he had done
something that could be seen and measured, something real, and in that same moment seeing that it was all as pointless as
mud.

Thus reengaged with his childhood, Spooner did not notice his own child was sobbing until she had stopped at the walkway,
a few steps from the front door, and taken off her backpack and sat down on top of it and dropped her face into her arms.

He watched a moment longer, giving her a moment to collect herself because she didn’t like to cry in front of him, and then
he couldn’t wait any more and stood up, thinking maybe something had happened at school. He knew how little it sometimes took.
The child was twelve years old and didn’t cry much and never had, especially in front of him. Spooner was forty-seven now
and loved her crazily, and went crazy at the sight of her weeping and always had, and she understood him and protected him
as much as she could from the facts of her twelve-year-old life.

He walked out the side door, coming to her from around the house, giving her a little more time, and then from her blind side
sat down in her lap. She screamed, laughing and crying at the same time, and he slid off her lap and put his arm around her
and felt her smoothing out, and then waited another few minutes, until she could talk.

“What’s up, doc?”

He’d been saying that when she was sad or hurt or scared since the day they brought her home from the hospital.

There were two of them over there now besides the old man, commuters, landscapers, and truck polishers by day, citizens of
the wild side by night. Marlin Dodge—the old man’s grandson—and Alexi Sug, Marlin’s Ukrainian weight lifter who seemed unable
to move without first considering the positioning of his body to best show off the cut of his muscles. The old man’s aversion
to the pair could not have been plainer, but he seemed obligated in some way to let them stay. On the few occasions he and
Spooner had spoken about them, the old man referred to them as
the grandson
and
Atlas Shrugged
.

The grandson and Atlas Shrugged had been at the bottom of the hill digging postholes with a rented tractor when Spooner’s
daughter got off the bus, and the one driving the tractor—the grandson—had choked off the engine and called her over to tell
her that he was going to kill her cat. The cat was named Whitlowe, and had been with them awhile, a small, limping, twitching
ball of muscle whose X-rays had revealed a piece of buckshot still lodged in his shoulder. He was half wild and covered with
scars, his ears ragged-edged, like they’d been chewed by moths. The animal was a stray who’d come into the yard two or three
years ago and still would not allow himself to be touched except by Spooner’s daughter, and followed her room to room in the
house and slept with her at night, his chin resting against the top of her head on the pillow, his drool in her hair when
she woke up. Last winter she’d tried making him mittens.

The evidence against the cat was apparently all circumstantial. Marlin had seen him loitering in the area of his koi pond
lately, and lately his koi were being murdered in the night.

As Marlin spoke, Alexi had moved closer, finally standing over her, huge and sweating, so close she could feel the heat off
his body. He enjoyed a certain pretense of danger, this Ukrainian, presenting the world a moody, reckless, unpredictable sort
of gunslinger with something slightly off upstairs, and when Marlin had finished speaking he said, “Do you know how much koi
fish cost, little girl? More than your allowance, I bet.”

Spooner had noticed that many of the landscaping set were same-toolers these days, but this was the first of the breed Spooner
had run into who aspired to be menacing to society.

The grandson, on the other hand, was not a bodybuilder but what used to be called stout, back in the days when girth and a
good appetite were in fashion, and most likely a bully all the way back to first grade, and had apparently come to a certain
menace of his own without the aid of human growth hormone or steroids or hours in the gym with free weights.

T
he trouble next door had begun in the spring, seven months previous, when Marlin first arrived. Before that, it was just the
old man and his dog—a sweet, 160-pound beast called Lester.

Hiram Dodge was a quiet, courteous gentleman who had once taught literature at Peed College in Oregon but had fallen out with
his department and then the college itself during those years when English departments everywhere were being turned over to
the politically entitled. Not that he’d quit on principle. In the end, it wasn’t about the vandalism of literature, as he
called it, more that he was sick of looking at their faces. Faculty and student body alike. In the beginning there had been
exchanges of unkind words with the politically entitled, which led in about two minutes to charges of racism and sexism, homophobia,
etc., which old Dodge had dismissed with the back of his hand, which led to campus demonstrations and demands for his removal,
and outraged alumni, and story after story in the sympathetic Portland-area media—sympathetic to the politically entitled,
not to old Dodge—and thus, outcast and friendless and surrounded by snipers, old Dodge bought a puppy and named it Lester
Maddox and took it with him everywhere he went, referring to the animal by name every chance he got, which prompted a decision
by Peed College to offer Dodge an enormous buyout, and perhaps because he was sick of looking at them, and sick of the students
and all their entitlements, and because he could see that the administration had made the offer knowing that he would refuse
it on principle, he took the money and left.