Spooner (65 page)

He looked at his hands, which he held down and away, the fingers spread, like a girl drying her nail polish, and the blood
followed the line from his palms to the tips of his fingers, and then beyond the fingers, dripping off the lowest points,
the half inch or so of empty, loose skin dangling below each of the nails. They had the look of gloves pulled inside out.
His head and hands throbbed, and all of it floated in a wild clamor, and it was a long time settling down.

And again he remembered the voice. Not the boy’s—it was a man’s voice. His own, he thought, it must have been his own voice.
A single word: “Hey…”

S
uppertime, Spooner knocked at the bedroom door. Calmer had been in there all afternoon, hadn’t come out even to meet Spooner’s
daughter as she got off the school bus. He never missed that, walking her up the driveway carrying her books, talking about
her teachers or what one of her friends had worn to school. What was
cool
. Lester had also been missing all afternoon, and it was close to time to eat. The dog had a hard rule about missing meals.

Spooner looked quickly out the back door, checking that the animal hadn’t been chained again to the tree, and then out the
front. No dog, but Marlin was still in the driveway under his truck, working.

Spooner knocked again and then tried the door, which was unlocked—Calmer never locked the doors here on the island and took
some small pleasure in not having to, returning to a time and place where no one broke in to houses.

Spooner poked his head in and saw Calmer asleep in bed. It was strange to see him in bed while it was still daylight—in the
old days he was always up, in Georgia and Prairie Glen and South Dakota, always going, daybreak until nine or ten at night,
and even when he stopped for a few minutes to have a drink or a smoke, he was looking around for something to do while he
rested.

These days he went to bed early and napped an hour or two on the couch, and it seemed possible that an enormous exhaustion
had built up over the years, over the decades, and was finally coming due.

Well, Calmer had earned his naps.

He’d covered himself with a light blanket, looking small underneath it, but he had always seemed smaller to Spooner when he
slept, as if some of the air had been let out, and was always turned on his side and curled down into his knees, covering
whichever ear wasn’t buried in the pillow with the meat of his forearm, like a soldier waiting for the next incoming shell.
Looking at him, Spooner thought of the scene at the funeral home, how he’d curled up about like this in the box, and for a
while no one had known what to do until Darrow had leaned in for a closer look and Calmer had gotten out and stretched, complaining
about the hardness of the casket’s floor on his back.

Spooner thought passingly of the missing dog and then noticed that Calmer’s hand was wrapped in a towel, and then that blood
had soaked through underneath, where it covered his palm.

The towel was loose and slightly overhung the tips of Calmer’s fingers. It looked like a lot of blood, but then it didn’t
take a lot of blood to look like a lot of blood. There was more of it on the floor leading to the bathroom and Spooner went
in there, and it was splashed over the sink and the edge of the bathtub, and soaked into the shirt Calmer had been wearing
earlier and was now stuffed into the hamper. The wastebasket held a pile of bandages and tape, stiff and almost black with
dried blood.

He went back to the bed and gently rolled Calmer’s shoulder. His eyes opened, clear and alert, and he sat straight up. He
checked his wristwatch, and at the movement the towel dropped off his hand—his left hand—into his lap. He looked at the hand,
one side and then the other, skin dangling off the end of his fingers and the fingers themselves, raw and caked black at the
edges, like they’d been burned. He took the other hand out from under the blanket, and some of the towel came up with it,
stuck to his palm.

“Well, for the love of Pete,” he said. He took the blanket off his feet, maybe to check that his toes were intact. The hand
attached to the towel began to seep blood, not so much from one place or another, just all over.

Spooner said, “Good Christ. You burned up your hands.”

Calmer held up one of the hands between them—the one not stuck to the towel—as if to suspend judgment until all the facts
were in. Then he moved it up to his nose and sniffed. “I don’t think so,” he said. “There’s no odor.” Interested in the puzzle,
if not the injury itself, but then, even back when he was razor sharp, Calmer might reach for a pepper shaker or a pencil
and notice a fingernail had been smashed or was half torn from the bed underneath it, and would need a minute or two to remember
that he’d closed it that morning in the car door.

He pulled the towel the rest of the way off his right hand, and there was a peeling sound as the cloth separated from the
wound, and in the moment before blood began to pool, Spooner saw what looked like a series of shallow excavations. The pads
of Calmer’s palm were missing, as well as the three billowed areas of each finger. While Calmer watched himself bleed, Spooner
walked back into the bathroom, shut the door, and did the thing he could be counted on to do in moments like this. He was
still bent over the toilet when Calmer came in behind him, ignoring the regurgitation, and went to the sink. He put his hands
under the faucet, the water as cold as it would come out, and hummed to himself as it ran.

Afterwards, together, they wrapped his hands in clean towels and headed for the hospital, which was in Coupeville, thirty
miles north on the highway, but first Calmer insisted on apologizing to Mrs. Spooner for ruining supper, and Mrs. Spooner
in turn insisted on seeing his hands, then said nothing at all for a moment when she saw them, and in this silence was everything
that could be said.

Over Calmer’s protests that it was nothing, they all went together to the hospital, she and Spooner’s daughter in the backseat,
Spooner and his dad up in front, the Spooners out for a family outing, and Calmer remarked that it was good to have everyone
together like this and that they should do it more often.

The doctor advised keeping Calmer overnight, but Calmer only smiled and, using one of the same hands the nurse had just bandaged,
shook the medical man’s hand with a grip that had drained a million cows of their juice—you could see the surprise in the
doctor’s face—and patted him audibly on the shoulder blade, saying thanks, but he wouldn’t want to take a hospital bed from
somebody who might need it. His blood pressure and heartbeat and respiration were all steady and strong, good for a man half
his age, although he was running a low-grade fever—100.7. He still hadn’t mentioned pain or acted as if he were in pain, even
when the nurse moved his fingers around to bandage them one by one.

While that had been going on, Spooner’s daughter had turned white and fainted, and Calmer sat with her in back on the way
home, holding her a little while and then pretending to faint at the sight of cows along the road.

I
t is not entirely accurate to say Spooner found the body. At least not in the sense of finders keepers. In the sense of finders
keepers, the body was found by Lester, who, in the weeks he’d spent chained to the elm tree in the grandson’s backyard, had
lost perhaps thirty pounds. Thus, he could now urinate from the classic three-point stance and was beginning to look like
he had a rib cage, and seeing this new, sleek version of the beast, Mrs. Spooner had gone to a veterinarian and bought a fifty-pound
sack of diet dog food and instructed Spooner not to give it to him all at once, and in other ways laid down the law that Lester,
for his own good, was through as a recreational eater.

Meaning that ever since his rescue, Lester had been served only the daily recommended diet for animals his size (the new,
sleek size, not his previous 160–180 pounds) twice daily, feedings he finished in seven or eight seconds, and even though
he would look up at Spooner afterwards with that
you’re shitting me
expression, he was in all other ways his old happy self, from the moment he woke up every morning wedged into his old happy
slot between Spooner and Mrs. Spooner, knowing in his own way that he was integral to the whole sweet, happy mess.

The sun set on the trip back from the hospital and cast the driveway in a dark gloom, steeped as it was on either side with
maples and firs and alders, bringing horse blinders to mind, or the Lincoln Tunnel, and then two eerie lights appeared straight
ahead, and Spooner stood up on the brakes.

Lester was standing neon-eyed along the tree line, just outside of the beams of the headlights, and the instant Spooner recognized
him—even before he saw that something was wrong with the shape of his body—he realized that in all the excitement a near-calamity
had occurred: Nobody had fed the dog.

Spooner got out and walked to the animal, crossing through one headlight and then the other, throwing shadows two directions
at once. The dog looked steadily into the lights, not having picked up yet on Spooner’s aroma. His tail wagged cautiously,
not in its usual big happy loops, waiting to see what this was coming out of the dark.

Then Spooner spoke his name, and in the instant the word
Lester
was released into the air the dog closed the distance like Spooner was chicken pot pie.

There was something lopsided about the animal’s shape, and Spooner lay him down in the driveway in the headlights and knelt
down with him, afraid that he’d strayed out onto the road and been hit. He pressed his fingers into him lightly at first and
then more deeply, watching the dog’s expression for some sign of pain, but the animal only groaned sweetly and thumped the
driveway with his tail. You got the same thing when you asked Calmer about his hands.

Mrs. Spooner was out of the car now too, and behind her their daughter. “Is he all right?” Mrs. Spooner said.

“He seems all right,” he said. “I was afraid something hit him.” And ran his hand over Lester’s coat again, top to bottom.
“He’s swollen through here, but he seemed to be moving okay.”

Having heard Mrs. Spooner’s voice, Lester could not contain himself another minute and scrambled to his feet and buried his
nose in Mrs. Spooner’s cookies, as he always liked to do by way of greeting.

“Good God,” she said, “look at his stomach.”

And that was it, all right, his stomach.
Distended
, as they said. Not the way it had been distended before, when he was 180 pounds, but stretched and taut, like he was pregnant.

“Good God,” she said again.

Then, as if to ease her worried mind, Lester backed up a step and tossed it all up, and even in the glare of the headlights
and the darkness of the night, there was no mistake about what he’d had to eat while he was waiting for supper.

T
he local paper made Marlin Dodge a front-page story and did what it could to come up with a hero. The paper had been sold
recently to a small chain and it was a business now, and heroes and pictures of heroes sold newspapers, and as a rule the
paper did not like to run tragic stories without one, a little good news with the bad. In this particular case—“South Whidbey
Man Dies Under Truck”—the editors had settled on Lester. “Dog Summons Neighbor to Scene of Accidental Death.” Which Spooner,
still a newspaper man at heart, did not think quite caught the gist of what had happened. Not that he was going to contradict
it.