Spooner (4 page)

Calmer followed this motion from the ground, sensing that the windlass operator was unsure of himself in the fog, wishing
he were operating it himself, and almost at the same moment this thought arrived, he saw two of the supporting lines go slack.
Then, in a kind of slow motion, the platform dropped open about sixty degrees and stopped, and Calmer, who decided later that
he must have been under the influence of the undertaker’s question about piano moving, in fact thought of a grand piano, somehow
turned upside down, the lid falling open. And then saw the piano player tumbling out of his own instrument.

And as Calmer imagined falling piano players, the casket dropped silently through the fog, and then began landing, three distinct
landings—two crashes and a tremendous thud, like God himself had fallen out of the nest, a noise that hung distinctly in Calmer’s
memory all day.

The casket and its lid and its various hardware were strewn across the deck, reminding Calmer of a pecan nut stomped open.
The congressman himself was lying belly up across a stairwell in the attitude of a man offering his face to the shower, or
the Lord, looking for all the world like somebody with nothing to hide.

On the bright side of things, beyond having come apart the casket did not appear damaged, so the problem was only a matter
of reassembly. And what could be assembled once could be assembled again.

Calmer issued orders quietly, and there was an equally quiet, insectlike scramble of sailors over the body and the various
parts of the casket, and a moment later the body and the various pieces of the casket were below deck and Calmer was surprised
to find himself washed in relief at having it all out of sight.

Calmer went into the room and locked the door.

The congressman’s body and the pieces of his casket were lying across two tables used for butchering. The room was airtight
and refrigerated, ventilated from the ceiling. Enormous sides of beef hung from hooks, pale blue and shiny, and there were
boxes of poultry, cheese, eggs, thousands of pounds of perishable food. The congressman looked vaguely uncomfortable, his
hair unmussed and perfect, decked out in a pinstriped Brooks Brothers suit which, truth be told, did him no favors, figure-wise,
an effect enhanced perhaps by the fact that he was barefoot, his feet a color of blue similar to the hanging meat, and swollen
well beyond the recognizable shape of human feet, as if they had been squeezed out of the pants’ legs like toothpaste.

Calmer used a thin nylon rope to hold the box together while the glue set, looping it top to bottom like some country girl’s
suitcase.

He closed the door behind him, hoping to borrow another hour against the moment the coffin had to be untied and brought back
up on deck. He found his body singing with optimism. The box would hold—it should hold—although the pallbearers would have
to carry it on their shoulders now because one of the railings had broken off the side and would never support the weight
of the full casket. It could be done, though. He’d lifted the body and gotten it back into the box alone; six men could get
it up onto their shoulders. The hard part would be navigating the stairway back to the deck. He pictured how that might go
and experienced a brief sagging in the singing optimism department, and behind that came a knee-buckling weight which is the
burden of optimism, at least when optimism flies in the face of common sense and perhaps the laws of physical science.

And now he remembered that three of the pallbearers would be politicians—a member of the House from a district adjacent to
Toebox’s and two of Toebox’s aides—and Calmer tried but could no longer remember what there had been to be optimistic about
in the first place. Politicians for pallbearers? The effect of cold temperature on quick-drying glue? A ship full of reporters
and photographers?

Thinking these thoughts, he turned a corner and very nearly flattened Iris Toebox.

T
he moment he laid eyes on this woman, a shot of desire fired somewhere so close to Calmer Ottosson that he could feel the
concussion, and a whole tree of blackbirds rose at once into the sky. Which is the romantic way of saying that he just wanted
to row her across Lake Michigan.

Iris was wearing a black coat over a black dress and a hat with a veil that was not yet dropped over her face. He had seen
her picture the day before in the
Philadelphia Bulletin
, but it had not prepared him for this. She was not beautiful so much as flawless. Everything perfectly in place, perfectly
in balance. Perfect calves, perfect ankles, perfect feet—although he couldn’t actually see the feet, which were inside the
shoes setting off her ankles and calves.

And the wings beat in his throat. All the panicked birds.

On her arm was a second lieutenant named Jerome Jensen, to Calmer’s knowledge the worst officer on his ship. A man of breathtaking
incompetence, no attention span, in love with detail and procedure and the uniform itself, and who habitually wrote up enlisted
men for the smallest infractions and informed confidentially on his fellow officers.

It spoke of them both perhaps that Jensen had no whiff that he and Calmer were not eye to eye.

On reflection, Calmer would see that in regard to what happened that morning vis-à-vis the widow Toebox, it was his own imagination
at fault; he had never imagined that even Jensen could make a botched job of greeting the congressman’s widow. Calmer had
intended to meet her himself but after the loading accident wanted as much time to put the congressman and his box right as
he could get, and so had turned it over to the first officer he saw, which was Jensen. It seemed like a good idea, in fact,
as Jensen looked like an officer and always wore his uniform spotless and freshly pressed. Calmer was very clear with the
orders: Greet Mrs. Toebox when she arrived at the ship, apologize for Calmer’s absence, escort her to Calmer’s quarters to
await the burial. Make her comfortable. Offer her coffee or a drink, something to eat if she wanted it, the morning papers,
and then leave her alone.

He had given these orders slowly, patiently, and Jensen had nodded along just as patiently, yet here he stood, slightly behind
her in the passageway, looking confident and not a little self-satisfied.

“Commander Ottosson,” he said, “may I present Mrs. Toebox. She has asked to be with her husband.”

She smiled and offered Calmer her hand. Pale, tapered fingers lay cool and light against his palm. Her wedding ring had been
moved to her right hand, which he remembered was the custom of widows back in his part of South Dakota, too.

He tried not to look at Jensen, afraid he might strangle him. “Allow me to offer you my quarters, Mrs. Toebox,” he said, and
now he did glance quickly at Jensen. “It’s warmer, and there’s something to drink. I’m sure you’ll be more comfortable.”

“Thank you,” she said, “but I prefer to be with my husband.”

She spoke directly and evenly, and her voice did not begin to break as he thought it might. She waited a moment longer, then
smiled politely and looked back at Jensen. “This way, you said?”

“Yes ma’am,” and he nodded at Calmer as if he had everything under control. She started around him in the direction of the
storage room. She was smooth and perfectly balanced, giving nothing away. Bereaved as a house cat, from her outward appearance.

He stood a moment watching her from behind, aching to protect her—always his first impulse with women who attracted him. He
realized this was not an ordinary impulse, not even faintly tangent to sexual intercourse, but there it was and had always
been. Except this time there were birds and the ache to protect her mingled with the woman’s scent.

He got to the door first. “I’m afraid there was a small accident bringing the casket on board,” he said. She didn’t seem to
hear that, just waited for him to open the door.

It was colder inside than he remembered. The casket also seemed different now: lying over the tables against the far wall,
tied up like a hostage. Moisture had condensed on the lid.

He sent Jensen to get Mrs. Toebox a chair, and for a few minutes he was alone with her in cold storage, and the panicked birds
pounded in his throat.

She seemed to think he had other things on his mind. “I’m quite comfortable here, Captain,” she said. “I’m sure you have more
important matters to address.”

“Commander,” he said, “I’m only a commander.” He saw that she didn’t understand the difference, but he was satisfied just
to have set the record straight. He noticed that she hadn’t remarked on the condition of the casket or asked what sort of
accident he’d meant.

He heard himself say, “I understand your husband was a navy man.” Polite conversation for Calmer was like dancing, trying
to remember the steps.

She gazed at the casket, and he couldn’t read her at all.

“He was in the war,” she said. “He got the Purple Heart.”

And then Jensen came back with a chair, and as time passed it occurred to Calmer that everything he had ever been and done
was aimed at this single morning, that she was what he had come this far to find.

The
Buck Whittemore
cleared port at Philadelphia at 0800 hours and headed for deep water. Calmer reluctantly left Iris in cold storage and went
to the bridge, checking the course and the radar. A light fog lay over the water, but a breeze was coming up from the south,
beginning to clear it off, and he could see into it almost to the curve of the earth. His eyesight was still exceptional;
the doctors at flight school had never seen anything like it.

He thought of the widow Toebox down in the storage room alone with the corpse, sitting next to it in the chair Jensen had
brought, her legs crossed, feeling the roll and the size of the sea. And thought of the way she presented herself, even in
mourning, as if nothing from life had laid a finger on her yet. In his experience the widow’s appearance was an oddity for
a woman who had grown up on a ranch. As a rule, ranch work—like farmwork, there wasn’t much difference for the women—left
its mark on them early, even if they married and moved into town. The womanly side dried up ahead of time, and year by year
what was left was distinguishable from the men, who also were drying up, but more slowly and in a different way. Which is
to say the men dried up mostly from the work, the women from the worry.

The wives of Calmer’s cousins, for instance, were all wrung out by now, most of them still only in their thirties. Arlo’s
wife was sunshine itself, but already whiskery and the best arm wrestler in the family.

But nothing about the widow Toebox reminded Calmer of any of his cousins’ wives. He pictured her now inspecting the casket—which
he hadn’t quite gotten shut all the way, leaving the width of a dime between the box and the lid, a crack he expected would
be hidden by the flag—and then had another picture, which he had been picturing on and off ever since he’d seen the photograph
of Toebox and his wife that ran with the obituary in the
Evening Bulletin
. How had it looked, the act itself between the congressman and his small, tidy wife? From the photograph in the
Bulletin
, it must have looked like a fat man fucking a mattress.