Spooner (64 page)

As for Spooner, he was picturing the scene that could erupt if she got more careless than she already had and maybe shot off
her own toe. They could have their own Ruby Ridge, Spooner and Calmer and old Dodge, and for a long second this not only seemed
possible but logical, where he and Calmer had been headed from the start.

She holstered her firearm, though, turning her back on the grandson, who continued to press the issue as if he had not noticed
her change of heart, and then, unaccountably, she was on the verge of tears.

Calmer laid a hand on her shoulder and walked her a little ways back to the cruiser. He picked her hat up and dusted it off,
and she wiped at her eyes and then got in the car and backed carefully down the driveway.

And then she was gone, and Spooner sent Marlin home and went back to work, and Calmer and old Dodge sat back down and picked
up shooting and drinking where they’d left off.

S
pooner found Calmer early in the morning, half an hour or so after sunrise, sitting out in front of the guesthouse reading
Friday’s
New York Times
. He’d folded the paper into quarters, the edges lining up exactly, and was staring at a story about an opera singer—at least
there was a picture, upside down to Spooner, of someone in pigtails and a set of horns alongside the article.

Weather-wise, it was already a perfect spring day in the Great Northwest, gray skies and a mist in the air, although Calmer
hadn’t seemed to notice, and he sat in a windbreaker with his legs crossed and mud on his shoes and the bottom of his trousers,
looking at the page as if something about the opera singer worried him. Beverly Sills? Was that Beverly Sills? There was some
age, Spooner thought, when women couldn’t bring off the horns-and-pigtails look anymore.

“Beverly Sills?” Spooner said.

There was a peculiar, unsettled cast to Calmer’s expression this morning that Spooner hadn’t seen since Lily was at large.

“They came and…” Calmer hesitated, trying to come up with the name. “The fellow next door, they came by earlier and got him.
The police and a lawyer and someone from the county.” He paused again, remembering it. “They said they’d be back for his clothes.”

They looked at each other, the suddenness of what had happened still in Calmer’s face.

Spooner sat down on one of the big rocks that lined the walkway between the two houses, feeling obligated to explain and soften
some fact of life, except there was no such fact, just this small morning impasse that constituted the present moment.

Calmer said, “He was pretty quick, but they had him outnumbered,” and picturing that, Spooner remembered a panicked grosbeak
that had gotten into the garage last weekend, careening wildly into one window after another, leaving little dustings of feathers
in the air every place it hit while Mrs. Spooner closed in from below with her butterfly net to save it.

The moment passed and Calmer looked back at the newspaper. Next door, a truck turned in to the driveway, most likely Marlin
was returning from wherever it was that they’d deposited old Dodge for storage, but Calmer did not look up at the sound, already
absorbed in the article on Beverly Sills.

The grandson got out of the truck and went in the front door, and then a little time went by and the garage door opened, and
he emerged with a car jack and his toolbox.

And now Lester also appeared from around the side of the guesthouse, pine needles sticking to his coat and his nose, and he
had a seat beside Spooner, his tongue narrow and raised along the side edges, like the brim of a Texas Ranger’s hat, and there
were specks of dirt and pine needles stuck to it too, and to the ragged black ribbons covering the lower teeth in back, and
Spooner began picking the pine needles off, cleaning him up.

“She said there’d be a hearing,” Calmer said. Spooner looked up and found him staring at the house next door. “The woman from
the county. She said there’d be a hearing into his competence.”

T
he grandson went back into the garage and came out this time rolling two tires along in front of him, one with each hand.
He stopped and let the tires roll a little ways of their own accord until they slowed and wobbled and fell into each other,
coming to rest not far from the truck. He went into the garage again and came out with two more. Half of the people on the
island had pickups, and this was the first Spooner had ever seen or heard of any of them changing out winter tires for summer.
People with cars did that sometimes, but not trucks. He recalled asking Dodge what Marlin did for a living, back when the
grandson first showed up, and the old man had chewed it over a moment and said, “Marlin keeps a very shiny truck.” In point
of fact, he lived off some monthly stipend left to him by his mother, and the truck was the closest thing to a job he’d ever
had.

Marlin came out of the garage again, carrying what looked like brake liners. He blocked the back tires with pieces of firewood
and got down on his hands and knees to look for the right spot to set the jack, then pulled himself back to his feet, like
some arthritic old knight just knighted by the queen, and set the jack, and then gradually, an inch at a time, lifted the
far front quarter of the truck off the ground. The fender came up first, the axle hanging beneath it, and it rose half a foot
or more before the tire left the ground. He continued his jacking until there was a foot of clearance, tire to driveway, stopping
now and then to check how much room he’d made for himself to work.

Calmer made a small, humming sound, as if something had surprised him, and he brought the paper closer and began the story
about Beverly Sills, which to Spooner’s knowledge he had already read twice in the last twenty minutes.

H
e woke with the sun on his face, in a chair, still half in some dream regarding women with cow-horn helmets. The cloud cover
had burned off and he was sweating in spite of a pretty stiff breeze that had come up off the water. He stood and took off
his jacket, then noticed that a newspaper had been blown apart and lay in sheets around the yard.

Calmer went about the yard picking up the sheets of paper, hurrying against Lily coming out of the house and seeing the mess
and worrying herself into another asthma attack. She had it in her head these days that Cowhurl was vandalizing the place,
and there was no talking her out of it. Ever since he’d been fired—demoted—she felt them watching every minute of the day;
keeping secret records.
Just waiting for us to make a mistake
, she said.

The fact was that a pack of stray dogs was running loose, tipping over Calmer and Lily’s garbage cans Thursday nights—Friday
was trash collection day—scattering their stuff up and down the street. He remembered the panicked way she got him up the
first time it happened, like the garage was on fire. There was no calming her down, no telling her it was only garbage and
that everyone else’s garbage cans, including Cowhurl’s, had been tipped over and strewn over the neighborhood too.

And so these days he took the garbage out Friday mornings, at first light.

The newspaper had been blown to kingdom come and he spotted another sheet of it, out past the garage, pressed against some
bushes along the driveway. The paper seemed to breathe as the wind blew and died. He picked it up, checking around to make
sure he’d gotten it all, and began to ball it up with the rest but then stopped when he noticed her picture, a little heavy
these days but still a package of songbird he found very appealing, and he folded it carefully and stuck it into his pants
pocket, thinking it might be something good to read in front of a fire later, and only then remembered that they couldn’t
have fires. Remembered Lily’s asthma.

The breeze came through the trees whistling, and branches dead all winter cracked and fell through other branches and landed
with surprising force—as he watched, one of them as tall as a man fell out of an alder and stuck a foot deep into the earth,
quivering like an arrow.

The wind rose and fell, and tree limbs cracked and broke, and small single clouds rolled at remarkable speed across the sky,
and yet for all the movement there was also an absence of movement, a blossoming unease.

The kids.

And for a long moment he couldn’t catch his breath.

Where were the kids?

He looked at the alder branch, still upright in the ground, and in that instant he might as well have been speared himself,
bug-style and pinned to the felt in some museum. How long had it been since he’d seen them? He tried to remember where they’d
been, if they’d been together. Then a moment resembling relief. Margaret was across the road with the Ennis girls. He remembered
now. She’d told them where she was going, which left the other one, the one you always had to worry about anyway. Calmer quieted
himself, was still until he could think. It wasn’t necessarily so bad. The kid could be in a tree or on the roof or setting
fires somewhere. Or have broken in to somebody’s closet and at this moment was pissing away into their shoes. The “Fiend,”
they’d called him.

He thought of the car. The car. Oh Christ, the car.

He checked the driveway, already knowing it wasn’t there, and then looked north, out toward the two great, dead maples that
stood near the property line, and then beyond them, to the bottom of the hill. It was more or less what he’d expected now
that he thought about it, the car coming to rest at a strange, tilted angle, and he dropped his chin onto his chest and started
out across the yard running.

He thought of himself and his father in the front seat of the old flatbed, idling at a train crossing on the dirt road to
Aberdeen, his mother in the backseat in a dress and sun hat. The dust blew in, the train blew past, so close that he could
feel the rattling in his legs.

And he pounded through the trees and brush, all the fear set aside, one thing at a time. Christ, was he still inside there?
Underneath?

There was wind to consider—if a gust caught her sideways as he moved in close to the dock—no, wait, not that.

He thought of Ennis flying out the back door and then next to him at the running board, putting his back into it too, to set
the car upright. Calmer had never said it to anyone—who would he say it to but Ennis himself, and Ennis was a man who suffered
to be told good morning—but a second before Ennis grabbed hold, Calmer had put together the shaking in his body and the shaking
he’d felt hundreds of times when an airplane began to stall, and realized that like an airplane, he had loaded some mechanical
part of himself beyond its limits and set off a series of failures in the various systems that kept him up. Which is to say
he’d known he was right at the edge.

It was what the boy was after every day of his life.

Calmer cleared the small stand of trees twenty yards from the car. He began to call out the boy’s name—not that he expected
an answer—and then stopped. The name had slipped his mind.

Wait
,
calm down
. There was an inch or two of clearance beneath the running board, and he got down on his hands and knees and peered into
the darkness, hardened against what he might see. His eyes corrected for the darkness, and he glimpsed the shoes. And followed
them to the legs and the legs to the body, everything bigger from this angle than it should be, an illusion. Still, what was
there was there, the twisted, strange angles aside, it was what it was, and he knew he could never let her see the boy like
this, ruined. That would be as heartless as the news itself.

Something moved.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s all right now. Everything’s all right.” He hurried to the front of the car, to the thing that
had to be done, and, facing away from the wreck, bent his knees until his hands found the hard, narrow edge of the low side
of the bumper and lifted with all his strength.

The car seemed to stir, almost as if it had come awake, and then a violent force tore the bumper out of Calmer’s hands, skinning
the pads of his fingers down to the tips, and there was a scalding pain and a wild, ringing clamor, and for a little while
the throbbing in his head seemed worse than the throbbing in his fingers. Strangely, he thought he’d heard a voice. At the
moment the car was torn from his hands, he thought he’d heard a single spoken word, and realized he must have spoken it himself.