Spooner (53 page)

It wasn’t that the cat was particularly innocent of murder—a cat is a cat—or was above slaughtering a koi or two for fun;
still, if history meant anything, the killers were egrets. Every year hundreds of people of all sexual persuasions moved to
the island, often after some sobering experience—retirement or divorce or running out of closet space in the city—reminded
them that the clock was running. They came to the island to find themselves, or maybe get in touch with nature and wildlife,
or just to smoke a little dope in the woods and take a class or two in creative writing. Glassblowing was also big. Everywhere
you looked these days, somebody was advertising to teach you how to express your creativity.

Before any of that could happen, though, you needed a fish pond.

For reasons still unknown, this sudden longing for creativity and/or meaning in life predisposed the island’s transplants
to koi, and well-heeled newcomers often built elaborate indoor/outdoor facilities with electric filters and heating controls
and underwater lights so the koi, a colorful member of the carp family, could be observed at night, and also for reasons still
unknown, this predisposition was especially prevalent among the same-tool set, but regardless of your sexuality, the egrets
would kill as many of those beauties as you could buy. Why? Well, the food chain came into it somewhere. The smaller fish,
at least, the ones you could get at Island Pets for $9.99 and that were a few inches long, these were snacks. But koi also
came in larger sizes and grew in proportion to the size of their pond, and for a couple of hundred dollars, say, plus a sixteen-dollar
round-trip ferry ride, you could get something on the mainland that no egret in the world could get down its throat. The egrets
would kill it anyway. For fun or target practice or just on principle—who besides maybe old Dodge knew what was in an egret’s
mind? What was known was that occasionally one of them would dive-bomb a koi pond without checking the depth and end up clogging
the pond’s water filter, often with a colorful, two-hundred-dollar member of the carp family still impaled on its beak.

“You’re on my property,” the grandson said.

And here Spooner said nothing at all, leaving the matter of property lines for later, after the fence was up. The grandson
turned away from him then and climbed back up onto the tractor, and the engine fired and the posthole digger jumped a little
forward, and Spooner jumped a little backward, and the would-be cat strangler picked up his shovel, and a moment later they
were back at work.

Spooner stayed a minute longer, watching, and then walked back up the driveway, still humming with adrenaline, realizing how
badly the afternoon could have gone if it had gone his way. Realizing that he could now be looking at a ride to the county
jail in handcuffs, charges of assault with a deadly weapon, months of front-page stories in the local paper, which came out
twice a week and would milk the incident like the last teat on the last cow in the world, not to mention huge lawyer fees,
also milking the incident like the last teat on the last cow in the world, even the possibility of jail.

He knew he was lucky that it had stopped when it stopped, but the feel of it was still all over him, and in his heart he wanted
to go back and hack off some toes. Not so much to hurt somebody, although that was part of it. What he really craved was that
look of surprise.

For weeks Spooner watched the fence project progress, the grandson and his bodybuilder digging postholes and setting posts,
mixing cement, hammering away at supporting rails. At least he supposed that was what they were called, supporting rails.
It was solid, handsome work, and personalities aside, you had to admit the fuckers knew how to build a fence.

O
n the day of the next incident, Mrs. Spooner had scheduled the island’s septic tank pumper to pump out their tank. Routine
maintenance. She oversaw these things as her part of the unwritten pact that kept the marriage so alive and strong. She kept
the septic tank pumped and supervised all matters relating to the physical upkeep of the house. She also wrote the checks,
and cooked, and kept files and warranties and troubleshooting manuals where she could find them, and did much of the troubleshooting
and tooling around herself.

But marriage is a two-way street, of course, and Spooner had his end of things too. He was in charge of emptying the dishwasher,
for instance, and unscrewing jar lids, and routinely offered to help in other ways except they both knew better than to let
him near the tool box. They had come a long ways, Spooner and Mrs. Spooner, without his physical involvement in the places
they’d lived, and in his heart of hearts, he still could not get his mind around the idea of something that didn’t move, like
a house, having so many moving parts.

The septic tank pumper was gray-haired and huge and over the years had developed a philosophy of life. Spooner had met enough
of them now—septic tank pumpers—to expect as much; those chosen to pump sewage were always philosophers, or in the process
of becoming philosophers, and not just
She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes
types, but the real thing, studying the meaning of life over the days and months and years they spent gazing down into the
abyss. Who was more entitled to an opinion? They occupied a dark, forlorn corner of the field of philosophy, these septic
tank pumpers, not a cockeyed optimist in the bunch, but Spooner had long suspected that it wasn’t the work turning them bleak,
that it might in fact be the other way around. That they might well have been bleak fellows from the beginning, and therefore
drawn to the work, and predisposed to—and perhaps in extreme cases even dependent upon—finding what they found when they lifted
the old lid off the tank.

After all, such people had to eat too. They couldn’t all be teaching college.

The Spooner family’s septic tank man arrived an hour before lunch in bib overalls and within twenty minutes had pumped out
enough of what was in the tank so that his apprentice could get inside it with the big suction hose and collect the bits and
pieces of stubborn residue, which the boss squirted off the sides of the tank with Mrs. Spooner’s garden hose. Spooner watched
them work, remembering the words of various coaches on the subject of teamwork, recalling as he watched that teamwork’s greatest
campaigners were never the ones who had to get in the tank.

But this was the way of the world. Somebody does the work, somebody else gets the glory. They knocked off for lunch at one
o’clock and sat down beside the open tank to eat, and Spooner ambled out to see if the family was getting enough roughage,
bringing along a couple of bottles of beer.

The boss was sitting against a tree in his socks, his work gloves lying across his rubber boots. The apprentice was looking
skyward, perhaps calculating a philosophy of his own.

Spooner said, “What about a beer?”

The boss looked at him as if he didn’t understand the question.

“Or a Coke, or something to wash that down?”

The boss, judging from the pile of bones next to him, was eating a whole family of quail. He shook his head, and Spooner noticed
his mouth was stuffed full. “State law,” he said. “We’re on the job.”

Spooner nodded that he understood; the world had not finished yet filling up with rules. The boss ripped off some part of
the quail and swallowed it without chewing, and then wiped his mouth and nose backhanded with his sleeve. “I need to talk
to the missus,” he said. “This could be a disaster.”

Spooner trembled.

“This septic system is a disaster waiting to happen,” he said.

Spooner took a step closer and stared down into the tank. It looked clean as a whistle. “Maybe I could tell her something
for you,” he said. “She isn’t feeling too well right now.”

Marriage, he had learned, in addition to the recently described division of work, was also a learning process, a process that
never ended, and Spooner was still learning a mile a minute, knowing her a little better every day, the moods and cycles and
flows, what made her laugh and what made her happy, and he knew to a certainty that talking to the septic tank pumper wasn’t
what made her happy. Plus, she loved quail as much as the old man next door loved egrets, and it felt to Spooner like his
life pretty much depended on keeping the septic tank pumper and his wife apart.

The boss shook his head. “There’s more grease in that tank than I’ve seen in a long time.”

“Grease?”

The apprentice was still looking at the sky—maybe he’d seen all the earth tones he could handle for the day.

“Grease, it must of been a foot thick in there. Is she using the garbage disposal instead of taking out the trash?”

“No, we take out the trash.” Actually, this was Spooner’s job, in addition to jar lids and emptying the dishwasher.

“The only thing that should ever go in your tank is shit,” the boss said, “if you follow me here. I can tell just looking
at a person’s tank if it’s a healthy situation, and this is not healthy.”

“We’re sick?”

Along with dizziness and the scaling feeling across his back and the teeth that kept falling out and all the rest of the side
effects, Spooner had emerged from the operating room in Philadelphia as a closet hypochondriac. He knew symptoms of dozens
of diseases that his doctors had never heard of. Particularly muscle diseases, which had become his specialty. Some time ago
he’d had to quit reading medical stories in the newspaper—he would develop symptoms the same day—up to and including obituaries,
and now this.

The septic tank man shrugged. “You get to know these things after a while,” he said, and the apprentice looked over and nodded,
apparently having seen the same signs the boss had. “But the main thing is, the missus is got to quit dumping all this grease
into the system. It gets into the drain field and you’ve got a disaster.”

Spooner loved his drain field in a way you cannot understand unless you have lived on a lake where the spring water table
is only a foot and a half beneath the ground. He felt threatened, and his stomach made preparations to toss lunch, and in
that very moment, perhaps the truest epiphany of his life, he realized what the problem was.

Before he could say a word, though, there came from next door a scream, and then the sound of trash cans spilled across a
driveway. Spooner looked in that direction, but the maples were thick with leaves at this time of year and cut off the view
between houses. It was not so unusual, though, to hear screams from next door.

The septic tank man seemed even more startled than he’d been by the grease in Spooner’s tank, and also looked in that direction
but he couldn’t see anything either because of the trees, and by and by there was another scream, this one a little longer
than the first one and not as human, and then there was the noise of someone running through bushes and small trees, and presently
the bodybuilder crashed through, bleeding from the nose, huge and shirtless and scary, crying like a baby.

The grandson appeared a moment later, twenty yards behind, rolling through the same opening in the brush like some bear chasing
campers. Out of breath and sweaty. The bodybuilder circled a little bit, his hands on either side of one of the elm trees,
and called the grandson a big fat bully. Those exact words,
a big fat bully
. The grandson charged but pulled up short, more of a bluff than a serious attack. No way was Marlin Dodge going to catch
Atlas Shrugged.

“What in the world is that?” the septic tank man said. He’d been sheltered, of course, coming as he did from a large, well-known
island family and spending his whole life here, on the southern, less sophisticated end of the island, with few associations
beyond his family and his customers, and had gazed into septic tanks all his adult life and had never seen anything remotely
as awful as what appeared before him now.

The grandson was edging toward the bodybuilder, trying to walk him down. The bodybuilder hung just out of range, keeping a
tree between them, still crying his heart out.