Spooner (57 page)

Calmer peed, holding his pecker like a cigarette because his fingers were still too stiff to hold it the usual way. They were
also too stiff to rezip his zipper and so he went into the living room and stirred the fire and stood in front of it awhile,
opening and closing his hands. He’d never made fires when Lily was alive—asthma again—but now, October to March, he had one
going all the time. From the fireplace he watched Larsson maneuver his car backwards into Cowhurl’s driveway, close up behind
the car that had come in while Calmer was shoveling the walk. Larsson got out, ducked under the crime-scene tape and went
to the front door, weaving in the wind like a drunk. He knocked and whoever answered noticed the wreath still hanging on the
door and took it down, and while Larsson waited to be asked in, a rectangle of light was cast from the house out across the
yard like the doorway to the underground shelter back on the farm in Conde, where Calmer’s family had once waited out tornadoes.

Calmer walked into his kitchen and stopped dead. A carton of eggnog had been left out on the kitchen table, and next to it
was a bottle of dark Bacardi rum.

He stepped back out of the kitchen and looked upstairs, listening, wondering if one of the kids had come home to spend Christmas
after all.

Calmer made the eggnog and took it to the front porch and sat down in the rocking chair. The crime-scene tape enclosed the
entire front of Cowhurl’s property and extended to the spot in the neighbor’s yard where the Jaguar had first left the street.
A lone cop had been left sitting in his cruiser outside to protect the scene, but he was asleep now, the engine running.

For a long time it was quiet.

Christmas night.

Calmer realized that he was sad, wishing that Lily had lived this long at least. The best Christmas of her life, wasted.

The porch was screened in. He’d spent the weekend before she died building plastic windows to insulate the space for winter.
She’d wanted real windows, custom-made, but the truth was she didn’t like being out there anyway, where the cold stirred up
her asthma and due to the bushes the only view to be had was directly across the street.

The wind had all but quit, and stars were visible in the sky—from the looks of things, the temperature would drop another
twenty degrees tonight—and the Peace sign still blinked on and off, casting its blue light across the snow.

Calmer sat on the porch and drank eggnog and thought of Lily. He’d seen her happy without reservations exactly twice in his
life—the night JFK was elected president and the day Richard Nixon quit the White House—and both times they’d drunk highballs
in the kitchen and she’d ended up singing old Theta sorority songs. He thought of the pure, pitch-perfect sound of her voice,
and for the first time in a long time he missed having her there with him in the house.

Oh, there would have been singing tonight.

D
ean Larsson came for Calmer a little after nine o’clock in the morning, looking like he’d slept on his face, his blue eyes
shot with blood and his skin creased and scraped raw by the cold. He had on fresh clothes, though—pressed blue jeans and cowboy
boots with silver toes and a homemade Christmas sweater that hung on him like lawn sod. Knitted into the sweater was a snowman
with the feet of a chicken. The snowman’s arms were twigs and stretched straight out, spanning Larsson nipple to nipple. The
name Frosty was stitched into the fabric with an exclamation point, and underlined, but at a slightly downhill angle from
Frosty himself, suggesting another plane, as if the famous snowman happened to be passing by as the word
FROSTY
! was sliding down an adjacent hill.

Calmer met him at the front door and left him there while he put on his overshoes and coat, thinking again of Lily. It wasn’t
hard to imagine what she would say, that he was letting them push him around. She would have called it obscene, just having
Larsson on the property.

In the car on the way to the country club he smelled alcohol in Larsson’s skin, percolating up under the Old Spice. He was
bigger by a hundred pounds than when Calmer met him, and made fun of himself over it in public. He drove one-handed and vaguely
out of breath, smoking a cigarette and sipping with the same hand at a cup of coffee that he held between his thighs. If the
coffee was laced, Calmer could not tell. Larsson’s stomach rubbed against the steering wheel when he turned corners. He caught
Calmer staring at his stomach and nodded along, patting it fondly. “Been living off the fat of the land so long, I turned
into it,” he said, and in spite of himself, Calmer felt an odd affection. The trouble, he thought, was that with Lily gone
there was nobody around to hold him to his grudges.

A live ash dropped off the end of Larsson’s cigarette and onto his stomach but he seemed unconcerned about setting fire to
the sweater. The tires chomped snow and ice, and Calmer looked out the window and a little later he heard Larsson sigh.

“That was some business,” Larsson said.

Calmer wondered if Larsson remembered it was the same thing he’d said last night, twice. Most likely he was just feeling around
for something to break the ice, and
some business
was all that came to mind. Ordinarily he would have talked sports. Larsson could tell you his shooting percentage, batting
average, yards per completion, and rebounds from every year he ever played anything, seventh grade to his last season at the
university, remembered the won-lost record of every team he ever played on, and seemed even to remember the games themselves,
all of them, inning by inning, play by play. Seventy-four years old and still coasting on what he’d done when he was fifteen.

Larsson blew smoke and sighed. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “Christmas Eve you’re out shoveling your own damn driveway and the
missus gets a bee in her bonnet to run over you, and in a goddamn Jaguar automobile you just gave her for your anniversary?
And then goes inside and has a squat and then comes back out and runs over you again? And then parks the damn car? And as
far as I know, there wasn’t even any reason. At least Merle wasn’t diddling anybody I know of.”

He looked over, maybe asking if Cowhurl had been diddling anybody he knew of, or maybe even if Calmer had some idea of what
the state of relations between Cowhurl and the missus was. People were always saying she used to be quite a package until
she let herself go, but that was before Calmer had met her. Lately, she’d been putting on weight, and looking at her you might
not have seen how she could get in and out of a Jaguar in the first place.

They both knew Cowhurl had had an affair with a secretary up in the administration building—she had some strange name, it
seemed to Calmer—and had taken her along to conventions in Denver and Minneapolis and Des Moines. Blushing, that was it. Darcy
Blushing. A tidy girl, always straightening things up, wrapping everything in rubber bands, the kind of girl who made the
best of what she had, always tuning and pruning herself into the little pat on the bottom she was. She was also the type of
girl other girls didn’t like, and as far as Calmer knew, she had no friends in the office of either sex, and had no use for
friends—unless you counted her special friend, Dr. Cowhurl, whom she used like all-purpose cleaner. She was smart and careful
and had a memory like a bank vault, and knew a thousand things she wasn’t supposed to know, and when the time came, she knew
enough to toss Dr. Cowhurl, D.Ed., and the whole school board over the railing like a sack of kittens. And when the time came,
the financial settlement came out to a little over nine hundred dollars for every day the woman had been employed. Enough
to buy a school district of her own.

Calmer had never told Lily about the settlement, not knowing what she might do with the information. She might call a talk
show.

The school board paid up, of course, and that, as far as Calmer knew, had been the end of Cowhurl’s wandering eye. On the
other hand, that spring Calmer was fired or demoted—whichever way you wanted to put it—with no settlement, and he was a long
time out of the loop by now, and to this day people who worked in the administration office were afraid to be seen with him,
afraid it would look like they weren’t part of the team.

The car was blowing hot air off the windshield and into his face, and Calmer unbuttoned his coat.

“What I think this might be about?” Larsson said, “he spoiled her. It’s always a fine line between happy and spoiled. I’ve
been married to the same female forty-four years, and I’ll deny this in federal court if you ever repeat it, but you got to
make them earn what they get. You just give them any damn thing comes into their head, they forget who’s boss. Next thing
you know you’ve got talking in the huddle.”

He looked at Calmer again and winked.

“I grant you the woman’s crazier than a loon, but that’s a given. You know she shoplifts? Anything that isn’t nailed down.
Been sticking a rib roast up under her skirt at Compton’s every week for years, holding it in there between her thighs while
she checks out, I guess. Old Marty, he just sent Merle the bill every month, no harm no foul. But what I’m getting at, you’ve
got to keep hold of the reins. Some way or the other, you got to have hold of the reins.

“Or you get talking in the huddle,” Calmer said.
Please let Lily be listening
.

“You’re fucking with me, Calmer, I know that. But mark my words, the next thing you’ll hear, she’ll be laying on the couch
while some fifty-dollar-an-hour psychologist is working up a case of temporary insanity. And she’ll get away with it, all
because Cowhurl didn’t have hold of the reins.”

The year previous to the Darcy Blushing settlement, the school district had expelled a C-minus student at the new high school
for getting herself in a family way. Calmer had fought Cowhurl over the expulsion, bitterly and personally, and when Cowhurl
expelled her anyway, saying students had to be taught to take responsibility for their actions, Calmer had gone over his head
to Larsson.

Responsibility
.

In the end, Calmer tutored the girl himself, got her through an equivalency test for a high school degree, and she was living
in Denver these days, married to a tire salesman, and sent Calmer a card every Christmas with pictures of her children and
the pets. This year’s card was sitting open right now on the dining room table, along with five or six others from students
he didn’t remember, even when he pulled out the yearbooks and looked at the pictures that went with the names.

L
arsson drove the Cadillac into the country club parking lot, parked, and reached into the backseat for the black Stetson hat
he’d lately taken to wearing, and then got out of the car. He left his keys in the ignition. The lot had been plowed that
morning, which had only made the layer of ice beneath the snow slicker and trickier to navigate than if they’d just left it
alone.

Larsson moved over it carefully, a step at a time, his arms held out seagull-style for balance, grinning at himself as he
slipped, stopping three times to shake hands with other members of the club who were also on the way in for the day-after-Christmas
brunch. Some of them read his sweater out loud.

“Frosty!” they said.

Calmer was a few feet behind, invisible to Larsson’s rich friends.