Spooner (52 page)

The grandson’s truck could be picked out of any parking lot on the south end of the island, not just for its cleanliness but
also for its oversize tires and built-up suspension, which left the operator’s seat at about the height of a tennis umpire’s
chair. It had California license plates, highway-patrol-like antennae, custom air intakes, glass-pack mufflers, a sound system
that could blow you right out of bed. Still, it wasn’t technically the noise that woke Spooner when Marlin came in late at
night. That is, he did not wake up hearing the truck as much as feeling it, a faint shaking in the dark, the nurse trying
to wake him up after surgery, a metaphor that would bring him wide awake and buzzing with dread even as the truck’s mufflers
and state-of-the-art sound system rattled the windows of the bedroom.

Not that it had been dead quiet at night before the grandson arrived, there was always some sound outside, owls, the wind,
the coyotes. The coyotes in particular couldn’t kill a mouse without commencing a celebration.

The noise and shaking grew as the truck climbed the driveway, and then died suddenly. The door would slam shut and Spooner
would lie awake, waiting, listening to the ticking of the huge engine as it cooled, and then sometimes he would hear Marlin
yelling at the old man, bullying him one moment, nagging him the next, like some Fishtown princess born to dispense misery
wherever she went. You would never guess, listening to it, whose house it was. But even if old Dodge was physically afraid
of the grandson, Spooner could tell that in some way he was still holding his own. Not shouting or arguing, just quietly refusing
to give in.

In the beginning Marlin would appear one week and be gone the next. Sometimes he returned in the company of Atlas Shrugged,
whose hair changed color every time Spooner saw him—platinum blond now—and who appeared never to leave the house without taking
off his shirt and oiling his body.

Spooner had to admit they worked hard, the grandson in his sleeveless shirts and the boyfriend in his oily muscles, hauling
in topsoil and gravel and bags of cement; shovels, wheelbarrows, rakes, and rented machinery lying all over the yard; they
were out there all day sometimes doing what they did. He could appreciate that—how many times over the years had he made admiring
remarks regarding some stranger’s character on this very evidence?—but realized that in this case he would never get around
his personal disgust. He could have overlooked the muscle boy’s grotesqueries, both of body and mind, could have overlooked
the grandson’s upper arms, arms like the fat lady’s thighs, dimpled and so white on the underside as to appear faintly blue,
and could have overlooked the various gold chains they wore and the stud earrings and the tattoos (one ran vertically up Marlin’s
calf, displaying the initials USMC, and Spooner still hadn’t made up his mind about that; it was hard to imagine, but these
days you just never knew), and might even have been able to overlook Marlin’s obvious desire to steal everything the old man
had. At least, if he hadn’t known the old man, he could. If he hadn’t known the old man he might have assumed, looking at
the way the grandson turned out, that somewhere along the line the old man had probably stolen most of it himself. Spooner
had lived long enough now to understand that even if aging slowed you down and straightened you out, it didn’t erase what
you’d done, or who you were.

Still, all that he could have overlooked. What he could not overlook was the other thing, Marlin’s navel. His sleeveless shirts
were all snug around the belly; buttons popped off the shirts that had buttons, delineating this navel, which stuck out of
the round swell of his stomach like a boil. It was possible of course that Marlin had been born like that and couldn’t be
blamed, and possible it was some herniated piece of viscera. Spooner had read somewhere that 3 or 4 percent of the population
was similarly affected, but as open minded as he considered himself to be, he could not rationalize away his disgust. There
are some things you can abide, and some things you can’t.

Old Dodge was also disgusted by his grandson, and more so once the bodybuilder began showing up with him. He was also disgusted
by the spectacle of the oversize truck rolling up the driveway at three in the morning, the bass thumping in the night air
like some malicious heart, but for reasons of his own he was unwilling to throw him out. Spooner thought it was probably an
obligation to the women in his life who were gone now, one of whom had brought Marlin into the world. Leaving him helpless
to change a thing.

And for a long time the old man made himself scarce.

He saw old Dodge one afternoon paused on the hill leading to Bailey’s Corner, paused and adrift in some thought while Lester
worried over a patch of grass like he’d lost his keys.

The old man’s face was often bruised these days, but it wasn’t clear that anyone was hitting him. Old Dodge had looked fruit
stained or punched up most of the time even before Marlin’s arrival. He appeared unsure of his footing today, and held on
to a road sign as he waited for Lester to finish looking over the patch of grass.
Blind Entrance 400 Feet
.

Spooner pulled his truck off the road a few yards ahead of the sign and opened the passenger-side door.

It was early summer, and the old man was wearing his shirt buttoned as always to the neck. A bruise ran down his forehead
that seemed to have bled from the hairline into his eye, and he was carrying a twenty-pound bag of dog food on his shoulder,
which Spooner had no trouble imagining the animal eating in a single sitting. Old Dodge had begun to decline Spooner’s offer
of a lift to the top of the hill, but Lester loved to ride and got in as soon as Spooner opened the door, and sat up close
against him, making room for the old man, waiting patiently for him to get in too.

Old Dodge set the bag of food on the floor and climbed slowly into the cab. The bag fell sideways as Spooner started back
onto the road, and the old man reached down to set it upright, and for a moment seemed disinclined to straighten back up,
as if he’d decided this moment and this place were as far as he wanted to go.

The dog, meanwhile, was delighted at the way the afternoon was turning out—a truck ride, a new bag of dog food on the floor;
how good could things get?—and gradually leaned more deeply into Spooner’s side and then licked his neck and jaw, then stepped
squarely into his lap and into his line of vision, and now his damp pecker was resting on Spooner’s bare arm. Lester stuck
his enormous, sweet head out Spooner’s window, and the wind blew open the flaps that covered his teeth, and for a little while
you could almost think he was whistling.

Spooner leaned back to see past the dog, but old Dodge had turned his face away, and looked out his window a long time, as
if there were something spellbinding in the ditch, and Spooner saw clearly the meaning of the old man’s hiding the bruise.

Another afternoon, not long afterwards, he saw them, Atlas Shrugged and Marlin, in the driveway, in flip-flops, washing the
truck.

Marlin had the garden hose. He was sporting a pair of Bermuda shorts, each calf a collage of swollen, blue veins, but otherwise
milk-white, muscular, and hairless. Soviet legs, which perhaps explained the attraction. Spooner noticed another, smaller
Marine Corps tattoo encircling Marlin’s ankle: Semper Fi Forever. It seemed like everywhere he went these days, Spooner was
witness to America’s crying need for more copy editors.

Not to mention dermatologists. A constellation of acne sprayed across Alexi’s powerful back and neck, and across his powerful
shoulders, and his powerful forehead, which was lumped up like the worst headache in history. His own shorts were cut off
at the lap, like a Times Square whore, and his tattoos, beyond the mandatory ring of barbed wire around each bicep, were dark
blue panthers in repose across each of his shoulders, oblivious to their own beds of angry red pimples.

As Spooner watched, the bodybuilder suddenly bucked and barked and darted a few feet away from the truck, which had already
had its daily bath and was sparkling in the sun, and half a second behind him came an arc of water from the hose, and he dodged
away happily and arched his back and shrieked as a drop or two found him, and Spooner watched them play, the grandson with
the hose, the bodybuilder with his body: the playful squirtings of love.

And until the day that Spooner’s daughter came up the driveway crying, that was as much as Spooner had to do with Marlin and
Atlas Shrugged.

T
he landscapers were still at the bottom of the driveway, the scene precisely as his daughter had described it. Two piles of
posts and one pile of cement bags were near them on the ground, neatly stacked. The grandson was on a rented tractor with
a posthole digger, digging postholes. He had dug half a dozen of them so far, perfectly spaced, and Spooner could see at a
glance that they were at least twenty feet inside his (Spooner’s) side of the property line.

The bodybuilder noticed him first and paused, glistening sweat, striking one of his possibly involuntary poses.

The attachment to dig postholes worked off the back of the tractor and looked something like a five-hundred-pound corkscrew,
and Spooner had a moment of apprehension when he got close enough to sense its weight, and perhaps for that reason did not
step up onto the tractor and pull the grandson off his seat, as he had expected to do, but took a position directly in the
way instead, shutting down the site, as they might say down at the union office.

The grandson stared at him a little while, waiting for him to move out of the way, and finally shook his head and turned off
the engine.

Spooner noticed the bodybuilder was barefoot.

“The tractor is rented by the day?” the grandson said. “So if you don’t mind…”

The bodybuilder turned at the hips and stuck the shovel into a pile of loose dirt, in one movement giving better display to
his obliques, his barbed-wire biceps, and his black-panthered shoulders. Spooner was exactly a lifetime past waiting around
to be hurt and made a note of where the shovel was. When it got past this stage, the first casualties would be the toes of
Atlas Shrugged. After that, it might go in a hundred ways, but this much of it had been decided a long time ago, before he’d
ever heard of Whidbey Island: He would never start from as far behind as he had in Devil’s Pocket.

He spoke to Marlin, not the weight lifter. “What’s this about the cat?”

It was the bodybuilder who answered. “It’s dead,” he said. “End of story. If I get him, I’ll drown him; I like to get them
by the neck where you can feel them die. I get off on that sick shit, you know? It’s just the way I am.”

He smiled, enjoying this part, showing off for Marlin. Spooner imagined how he must look to them, skinny and old, not much
more to worry about than the old man. He would get to the shovel, though, and for a literal fact would separate the bodybuilder
from some of his toes. The main requisite for something like that wasn’t muscles, or even quickness, but simply a willingness
in the moment, and Spooner would not have come down if he hadn’t been willing.

Spooner stood still and waited, feeling an old, icy calmness settling in. Yes, the first step in negotiations would be cutting
some toes off the bodybuilder. What happened after that happened after that.

“Just keep the fucking cat away from our koi fish, we got no problem,” the grandson said, flat-voiced, as if Spooner were
boring him to death.

The bodybuilder said, “Those things are seventy-five bucks apiece, Dad, and he’s killed seven or eight of them now. Every
time we look outside, one of them’s floating around on top of the water.”

Dad.

The bodybuilder changed poses, possibly in some state of sexual anticipation. “Next time, though, he’s dead. That’s a promise.
Keep your fucking kitty cat inside.” Getting pretty carried away with it now, all this posing.

Spooner spoke again to the grandson, who had finally stepped down off the tractor. He glanced at the grandson’s boots, which
looked new and had ornamental gold buckles, wishing he were barefoot too.