Spooner (62 page)

Lester sat beside him in the front seat on the drive into town, all the meat gone off the bone and working what remained,
left to right, the way you might read the newspaper.

Ms. Levin was wearing pleated trousers with enough slack up front where she was beginning to bulge for a makeshift pouch,
about what you might need for feeding the chickens. She was reclined in her office chair with her feet crossed and resting
on top of a beautiful cherry desk.

She looked up, offering him not even the courtesy of appearing surprised.

“Do you have an appointment?” she said, and set a cigar in an ashtray. And it was a real cigar, not some white-tipped, unisex
cheroot.

Spooner had never been a cigar smoker himself and stared at the gooey end, thinking of the female apparatus. “I just dropped
by,” he said, “to say that your letter arrived, and your client, Mr. Dodge”—and now he consulted the clock—“has until, let’s
say, three o’clock this afternoon to take down his fence.”

S
pooner did not enforce the three o’clock deadline, but not over some sudden impulse to be reasonable. More, it was that old
problem of not having the right tools for the job, meaning the task ahead was too big for a hammer, and so three o’clock came
and he was not only waiting for the tool situation to improve—his friend Thorson was due home anytime and would lend Spooner
what he needed—he was also waiting for the grandson and Alexi Sug to show up because, after all, this was for them too.

He sat peacefully on the front steps of the guesthouse with Calmer, talking about an afternoon back in Milledgeville when
they’d all gone downtown, Margaret and Spooner and Darrow and Calmer, Calmer carrying Darrow upside down, as always, when
an enormous red-haired woman blew out the front door of Trout’s Sundry Goods and Liquor and bawled him out in the street for
carrying a baby like that. Calmer remembered the woman right down to her print dress and white gloves. And they talked and
time passed and pretty soon, maybe four-thirty, Thorson rolled up the driveway towing his bulldozer, which they had agreed
over the phone was the logical step up from a hammer, and they all had a beer or two together, and finally the grandson and
the bodybuilder appeared in their driveway, shoulder to shoulder in the looming albino-white Viper, and Spooner stood up and
dusted off the seat of his pants and said, “Well, off to work.”

He started at the top and drove the bulldozer downhill, splintering and unearthing fence posts whole, still attached to the
cement they’d been buried in, two, maybe three hundred pounds each, just
chewing the scenery
, he thought, and hoped he might get to use that phrase when Ms. Levin took the matter to court.

The noise as the posts and rails snapped and crackled, loud as it was, was pretty much smothered beneath the noise of the
bulldozer. Spooner saw Marlin and the bodybuilder when they came out the door, saw their expressions as they gradually understood
what they were seeing. Marlin said something to the bodybuilder, who disappeared into the house and was back in no time at
all with a video camera. It was the sort of thing Spooner never thought to do, to his considerable regret. Here, for instance,
were years of pleasurable viewing lost forever through lack of foresight, but then even if he’d thought of it, how long would
it have taken to find the camera? A month? Did he and Mrs. Spooner
have
a video camera? The bodybuilder turned the camera over to Marlin and stood by, flexing, while Marlin recorded the destruction
of his handmade, homemade fence, rail by rail, post by post.

Spooner reached the bottom of the fence line and turned the machine around, lifted the blade a few inches and slanted it forward
to collect the debris. It took longer cleaning the mess up than it had making it, but that of course was the oldest story
in the world.

Nevertheless, time flew, as they say, and much too soon the job was finished, and the fence wire had been rolled into the
shape of a wasp’s nest and stood five feet taller than the bulldozer itself and twice as wide. The nest-looking sculpture
was engulfed in a haze of dust and smoke, and suspended within it, like ornaments in a Christmas tree, were pieces of freshly
splintered post rails, unearthed beer bottles, the jawbone of a deer, half a doormat, and an entire sign that had once been
affixed to the giant maple at the entrance to Spooner’s side of the driveway.

Seacliff.

Yes, Spooner’s house had once had a name.

The previous occupants had come from a community just outside Seattle called Mercer Island, a land of deep pockets indeed.
They were dot-commers of some sort, just retired, all decked out to live in the woods and give the country life a stab; not
terrible people, but the kind you would not be surprised to find out named their houses. And they had come not just for a
stab at the country life but at rekindling the old spark, which had been extinguished over the years of counting money on
Mercer Island. (This information, by the way, did not come to Spooner through the usual island channels, that is the real
estate gossip you have to listen to in this neck of the woods to buy a house; but directly from the woman herself. As for
the husband, he excused himself when she started in on it and went outside, and a moment later Spooner saw him behind the
wheel of the new Land Rover in the driveway, reading the
Wall Street Journal
.)

The Mercer Islanders were in the early stages of divorce, and the woman wept a bit when she said she would have bittersweet
memories of the place and would take comfort in knowing it would be in good hands, a family with all its connections intact.
Everybody smiled—the Spooners, the woman, the real estate agent—and Mrs. Spooner, this completely out of character, even held
the woman a moment as she cried, and on reflection, it was perhaps not the most sensitive thing Spooner ever did when, on
an impulse fifteen minutes later, he stopped on the way out at the driveway entrance and levered the Seacliff off the old
maple and tossed it into the bushes.

Spooner maneuvered Thorson’s bulldozer back and forth, tidying up, moving the entire mess up the hill to a spot just this
side of the grandson’s driveway, where lay the property line, and left it there, the dust settling over the ground, the garage,
and the looming albino-white Viper. And for a moment perhaps experienced that feeling Hemingway wrote about all the time—that
he’d
worked well
.

This feeling of self-congratulation lasted all day and into the evening, even after he and Mrs. Spooner went out to buy groceries
and saw that in all the excitement he had bulldozed his own mailbox.

Later, after dinner, he walked over to the guesthouse to say goodnight to Calmer. “There’ll be trouble now,” he said.

Calmer said, “I wasn’t thinking this was a good time to borrow a cup of sugar.” Smiling, way ahead of him, and yet in the
morning, an hour after their walk, Spooner stepped outside the guesthouse to relieve himself in the bushes and saw Calmer
next door with a pail and the squeegee, on a ladder, washing the old man’s bedroom window.

And saw that sweet old Lester had been chained to a tree.

Spooner checked the driveway; the Viper was gone. He wondered if Calmer had considered that before he went over. More likely,
the slugs had slimed up his windows and he’d gone over to clean off old Dodge’s after he’d cleaned off his own.

He watched Calmer work, moving at a speed as familiar to him as the stroke of his voice, the same speed he ate and shaved,
patient but slightly hurried, as if there were always more to do than time to do it. Spooner made no move to retrieve him.
How was that supposed to go, anyway?
I thought we agreed you’d stay in your own yard
?

He’d heard of something like this before, of course, parents turning into the children and children turning into the parents,
but he didn’t see how such a change was possible without starting over from the beginning, as if everything that had passed
between them didn’t count.

Calmer finished the window and carried the ladder into Dodge’s garage—in a house fire, he’d put away his tools—and presently
Dodge came out of the back door in his underwear, carrying a couple of beers, and Spooner went back to the typewriter.

The dog was another matter, something that couldn’t be set aside so that he could work.

How would Lester sleep? It was his practice by now to squeeze between them, facing Mrs. Spooner, and usually upside down with
his nose nestled into the backs of her knees, and from this position any sound in the night would set off his tail—an enormously
thick and heavy appendage—into big, loopy circles, whacking Spooner glancing blows across the ears. Spooner assumed there
was some similar arrangement with the old man, although he doubted that the old man occasionally rolled over in the night,
as he did, half asleep and hoping for a little late-night affection and poked the dog in the hip blade instead of Mrs. Spooner.

No, he did not expect that the animal would sleep much chained to a tree in the yard.

Spooner could not stand to see a dog on a chain.

T
he next morning out along the cliff Calmer suddenly stopped, staring at a clearing ahead tucked beneath the top of the cliff.
There was a single tree here, sprouting out almost sideways, its roots tangled and exposed, a jerry-built-looking sort of
tree that appeared so faintly attached that a canary might bring the whole thing down.

A moment passed and Calmer scratched his ear. “Those kids scare me to death,” he said. “Oh, I suppose they’re strong enough.
They’re like monkeys, really, every one of them, but still, it frightens me. They should stay on the path.” And he surveyed
the steep, loose patch of dirt beneath the tree now, looking for the girls.

“Darrow’s kids?”

Calmer nodded. “That stuff looks all right, but it breaks off under your feet.” Spooner looked at him, realizing that he’d
been out there himself, testing the footing for the girls.

Days passed, a week, then two, with Lester chained to the tree. Night and day. A pail of water was set out for him in the
morning, but once the animal had lapped the trunk a few times the radius of his circle was so short that he couldn’t reach
it.

Sometimes when the grandson and Alexi were gone, Spooner saw the old man come out of the house and untangle him, looking around
as he worked as if he were afraid of being caught.