Spooner (5 page)

And as that image came and passed, Lieutenant Jensen meandered up onto the bridge, blowing over the surface of a cup of coffee,
and sat down casually on the corner of the map table.

Calmer was still picturing the widow alone in the meat locker, and seeing Jensen he was suddenly unsure if holes had been
drilled in the floor of the casket. The holes should have been drilled at the funeral home, but the old undertaker was plainly
in some prolonged state of distraction, in the way old men sometimes were when the great distraction of their lives was no
longer much of a distraction and they saw what was left. Or, to put it another way, they’d let go of pussy matters only to
find themselves confronted with the big picture.

Calmer wondered if the big picture looked different if you’d been putting bodies in the ground all your life.

He looked around the wheelhouse, and everyone save Jensen was at work.

“Lieutenant,” he said, and Jensen stood up and saluted. He hadn’t noticed Calmer when he walked in.

“Yes, sir.”

Calmer motioned him closer and spoke so that the other officers and men couldn’t hear what he was saying. He did not chastise
officers in front of each other; ordinarily he didn’t have to chastise them at all. They knew he was paying attention, and
for most of them that was enough. “I have something for you to do,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

Calmer saw him begin to smile and had a corresponding impulse to pick him up by the neck. Instead, he moved a few inches even
closer and was pleased to see a look of alarm cross the second lieutenant’s face. “I want the coffin prepared for burial,”
he said.

“Aye-aye, sir.”

“Wait, just wait. I want you to go back down to the storage locker and station yourself outside the door. Am I clear so far?
You are outside the locker, she is inside, the door is shut.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A few minutes ahead of the ceremony, I will arrive to escort Mrs. Toebox to the deck. After we are no longer in the locker,
you will enter the room and check the coffin to make sure holes have been drilled into the bottom. There should be ten or
twelve holes, one inch in diameter. If there are not, you will drill them yourself. Are we clear?”

“Aye-aye, sir. Ten to twelve holes, one inch in diameter.”

“The casket is lying between two tables, so you won’t have to move it to gain access to the bottom.”

“Yes, sir. No problem, sir.”

Calmer studied him a few seconds longer. He thought of calling him off the job and doing it himself. Just drilling the holes
with her there in the room, but then he imagined the drill bit breaking through and slipping in too deep, pulling spiraled
flesh out of the bottom of the box.

No
, he thought,
not with her in the room
.

Still, he tried to cover his bases. “This is not a matter in which you are to exercise personal discretion, Lieutenant,” he
said.

“No, sir.”

Calmer studied him a moment and then nodded, dismissing him, and went back to the helm, lost in the image of the congressman
having at his poor smothering wife.

He cut the speed to three knots, the ship rolling now in five-foot swells. Approaching the spot. He went to collect the widow.

Jensen was outside her door, as ordered. He knocked once, waited a moment, and looked in. To his enormous relief, she was
still there. He felt ridiculous. What had he expected?

The crew was assembled in parade dress all along the port side of the deck. The reporters and photographers had come up from
the ship’s galley and were clustered together, apart from the sailors. Calmer stood with the widow and as he watched, one
of the photographers, an old-timer in a duck hunter’s hat and a black cigar took the cigar out of his teeth, leaned over the
side and vomited, some of it blowing back onto his pants and the cameras hanging from his neck. He put the cigar back in his
teeth, pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and dabbed here and there around the cigar to clean up his mouth and chin,
and then knelt and began working on his shoes.

Calmer hoped the rest of the media wouldn’t begin chucking breakfast too, which was the way it sometimes went. Somebody yodels
and a minute later you’ve got an avalanche. He couldn’t protect her from that.

There was motion behind him, the honor guard emerged from below, and behind it the coffin bearers and the coffin. Three sailors,
three civilians. The coffin was draped in a flag of the United States. Calmer had not seen who’d brought the coffin up from
the meat locker to its present spot, but two of his healthiest-looking enlisted men now lifted it from the deck and set it
carefully on the coffin bearers’ shoulders. Among the bearers were the congressman from the neighboring district and the two
Toebox aides. The color guard was all from Toebox’s home district and had been brought on board with the widow and politicians
for the ceremony. There was no official beginning, but the procession to the side of the ship began and the crew came to attention,
and a moment later even the members of the press fell silent, and in the quiet you could hear the flags overhead snapping
in the wind. The coffin bearers, meanwhile, sailors and civilians alike, took short, stumbling steps under the weight, and
the ship pitched and rolled. The wind had moved to the north, and the ship’s bow was no longer directly into it.

The civilians had all taken one side of the box, and the sailors from Toebox’s home district had taken the other. The sailors
were taller than the civilians, and stronger, and that side of the box was riding half a foot higher than the other. Calmer
now saw disaster everywhere he looked.

The congressman from the neighboring district had turned red, as if he were holding his breath, and then he stumbled, and
the whole civilian side of the casket seemed to stumble with him. The scene earlier on the deck came back to Calmer, the casket
lying in parts and the congressman face up, a quizzical cast to his expression, as if there were something about all this
that he still didn’t understand.

Calmer stood beside the widow Toebox, and she moved slightly in to him, her shoulder touching his arm, but he could not be
sure if she had wanted him closer or if it was only the rolling of the ship. She did not pull away, though, and the spot where
they connected issued some sweet, unknown buzzing.

The casket bearers reached the spot and set the casket down. Relieved of his load the congressman from the neighboring district
pitched violently and pulled the flag off the flag-draped coffin in an effort to save himself from the fall. And Calmer felt
her still there against him, slightly pressed in to him, all of her attention straight ahead. Did she even know they were
touching? He did not move even an inch, afraid to lose the connection.

He tried to think of something to say but nothing came. Small talk again. The honor guard stood at attention behind them,
rifles at their sides, and then he did think of something—he saw he could tell her to cover her ears before they fired off
the salute. It felt like a blessing, this small thing he’d been given to say. He saw her gaze shift to the mechanism that
would release the casket into the sea. Beyond it the sea looked as hard and gray as the side of the ship itself.

The ship’s chaplain stepped forward and set about putting death in perspective. Not the end of things but the beginning. She
moved slightly away and stood next to the casket, laid her gloved hand on top.

Calmer noticed Jensen then, off to the side in his dress whites, his mind a hundred miles away. Calmer remembered that he’d
once heard him say the navy was his life.

The wind was picking up, pressing the widow’s skirt into her legs, revealing her as clearly as if, in the same clothes, she’d
just been pulled out of a swimming pool. She did not fuss with the skirt or turn away from the wind. She stood, her hand resting
on the casket.

The chaplain finished his opening remarks and two members of the honor guard stepped forward to remove the flag, folding it
into a tight triangle—the folding took a long time because of the wind—and then laid it in the widow’s hands. She accepted
it awkwardly, as you might take a baby if you were handed one with a loaded diaper. Then she stepped back to the place she
had been before and again leaned slightly in to Calmer’s arm, as if they’d made up after a quarrel.

The congressman from the neighboring district came forward now, holding a Bible. He faced her, smiling kindly, and then opened
to Psalm 19 and began to read. It turned out he’d been a Bible thumper himself before he got into politics. He had to speak
up to be heard over the wind, and to hold the page with the flat of his hand to keep it from blowing him into the New Testament,
and after he finished, he put his hand on Mrs. Toebox’s shoulder and then bent toward her and spoke into her hair. Calmer
could not hear what he said. The widow stepped back and shook her head, and the congressman nodded to the chaplain, and then
the chaplain nodded to another officer, who nodded to an enlisted man, who saluted the officer and tripped the mechanism that
sprung the board, and in that exact moment, the wind died and the world held its breath.

The board dropped, the sound of the casket sliding off into eternity was like a long jump shot getting nothing but net, and
then followed a moment of silence so long that you could almost think something had snared the box on the way down.

Finally, though, the splash. As if together they had willed it to hit the water. Calmer relaxed and could not even guess at
what he had been afraid had gone wrong. Gravity?

He was watching her when the casket hit the water, and saw no flinch at the sound, no reaction at all, and saw that she would
hold together. Like women of the prairie from the very beginning of the prairie, who buried their husbands and stood their
ground. Mrs. Toebox was no faint heart.

The officer who had nodded to the enlisted man who released the coffin now called the honor guard to attention: by naval regulations,
a three-gun salute. “Ready,” he said.

Calmer leaned closer to her and for a moment felt her hair blow against his lips.

“Aim…”

“You may want to cover your ears,” he said.

“I’m sorry?” she said.

The rifles went off, not quite in unison, and after the concussion there was a moment like the moment after you hit the water
from the high board, when all the noise in the pool is suddenly mute. The widow herself seemed unaffected. She had not moved
an inch at the sound and now returned her attention to the wall of gray sea.

He felt the tickle of her hair across his skin, and then, perhaps due to the soft fog in his ears from the rifle noise, perhaps
not even hearing the words himself, he choked out, “Iris…” And somehow butted her just over the temple.

She fell back a step and turned to him with a quick, strange look, touching the spot where he’d butted her and then the guns
went off again and seemed to remind her of where she was, and her gaze softened and moved back out in the direction of the
sea, where her husband was settling into his eternal digs.

Calmer had not moved an inch, as slow as the widow to realize what had just happened.

“Excuse me. I’m terribly…”

And then stopped, realizing she was paying no attention. It was possible that the rifles firing and the head butting had rendered
her deaf. She still stared out into the endless water, her gaze moving slowly aft as the ship made its three knots, and now
the wind came up again, but from the other direction, the south. Weatherwise, a strange, strange day.

The guns fired again, this time catching him by surprise, and he realized he’d lost count. Not just of the firing of the rifles,
but of the day itself. The details didn’t seem to have any order.

And when he looked at her again he saw the same confusion in her expression, as if she were lost or didn’t understand what
they were doing. And the chaplain, what was wrong with the chaplain?

The widow finally spoke. “Excuse me,” she said, as if nothing had happened between them, as if a moment earlier he hadn’t
butted her and breathed her name into her ear, “but isn’t it supposed to be sinking?” She had a sweet, flat twang that reminded
him of home.