Spooner (66 page)

The paper ran a large, flattering picture of Lester across the top, side by side with a less flattering picture of Marlin
Dodge.

“Dead at 42” it said below Marlin.

Beneath Lester it said, “Too Late to Save Master.”

“Well, you saved a little,” Spooner said to the dog. “You didn’t eat his head.”

The tragedy was replayed the following week, but with a new slant. Coyotes.

Aberrant behavior
, the coroner called it, possibly due to a growing competition for food. “This could get a lot worse before it gets better,”
he said.

O
ld Dodge came home. The county dropped the hearing into his competency—not a word of apology—and Spooner hired a dump truck
to take away the nest of ruined fence, and Calmer and the old man resumed their afternoon visits, sometimes down in the meadow
drinking beer and shooting Calmer’s single-shot .22, and even though Mrs. Spooner still worried about the rifle, and Calmer
occasionally got up from supper to see if Lily needed anything in the bedroom, the grandson’s death had somehow returned the
place to its natural ambience, only sweeter now for the reminder that time was running out.

But if time running out made things sweeter, it also worked another direction, and Spooner, a man by now of some reputation
for going his own way, who had over the years taken pretty dramatic steps to be seen in that way, craved the good opinion
of his stepfather more than he could ever admit, and felt the chance to find out where he stood with him slipping away.

He had thought when Calmer first arrived that the answer would be obvious, or at least he would find a way to ask the question.
But there was a forty-year precedent at work against that and Spooner remembered like yesterday the awful silence that would
fall over the kitchen after any utterance, no matter how innocent, of this general subject was floated out over dinner.

And in the way things happen, forty-odd years had come and gone and with the exception of the one awful letter from his mother,
nothing was said. On the other hand, remembering the letter, Spooner sometimes conjured up a life where everyone poured out
his heart at dinner, and the mother cried over her dead husband and brought out pictures of her wedding to show what she’d
looked like back before she’d been cheated out of life, and glimpsing this scene Spooner rethought everything and had no objection
to this code of
omerta
after all.

Still, he wanted to hear from Calmer. It didn’t concern him much that what Calmer said wasn’t so dependable these days, only
that time was running out for him to say it at all.

As far as Spooner could tell, this need to know where he stood with Calmer had materialized in the hospital in Philadelphia,
on the operating table, where somehow he’d lost the ordinary capacity to see himself from a reliable, consistent perch. Such
capacity, when he thought about it, described one half of the two working parts of conscience, and even if conscience wasn’t
exactly what was missing, he knew that he had his finger on the right page in the catalog, and over the years had fixed on
Calmer, the most ethical man he’d ever known, to tell him how he was doing.

The preoccupation with time running out was a new development, probably traceable to the night in the driveway when he presided
over the disgorgement from Lester’s stomach of a huge, wet, perfectly intact chunk of Marlin Dodge’s calf, still bearing three
and a half letters of the four-letter tattoo, USMC. Spooner had been confused and worried at the time, floating around loose
in that world of blind spots that lies in the throw of a car’s headlamps, and as he stared at the heap Lester had disgorged,
he—Spooner, not Lester—briefly mistook the lettering, taking it for a USDA stamp of approval.

Realizing his mistake, Spooner had taken off his jacket and carefully wiped the animal’s chin clean of Marlin’s goop and then
taken his face into his hands, gently, but bringing into play a certain man/dog authority that was unusual between them, and
looked into Lester’s dark eyes, holding his attention a long moment and then directing it to the evidence at their feet—the
smoking gun of all time—and quietly, firmly, enunciated the word
no
.

T
he bandages on Calmer’s hands had to be kept dry and changed every forty-eight hours, and the trips to the doctor’s office
left him tired and edgy. “You don’t take a thirty-year-old horse to the vet,” he said. “They keep telling you it’s all for
your own good, but in the end, it doesn’t make any difference what they do. You live for a while and then you die.” More and
more, Spooner saw him receding into the old make-do days where he’d spent so much of his life.

They were on the way home from Coupeville. “You have to treat an infection. That can make a difference,” Spooner said.

Calmer turned in the seat and stared at him. “Listen,” he said, “you should know this by now. There are people you can’t trust—doctors,
lawyers, even your own family.”

Spooner thought he saw where things were headed. He remembered the conversation outside the house in Falling Rapids after
Calmer had been demoted, he and Phillip and Darrow sitting in lawn chairs, Phillip saying that they hadn’t heard the other
side of the story—the whole scene as clear to him now as Calmer’s shadow had been behind the screened kitchen window. A small
bad moment, yes, but a throwaway, he would have thought, in the sadness and disorder of that awful year. He saw though that
he’d misjudged it.

“He didn’t know what he was saying,” Spooner said. He felt Calmer’s eyes resting on him, waiting, attentive. “He was what,
sixteen, seventeen years old? With a brain like… It’s like you opened up a box of Cracker Jacks and found a million dollars.
No, wait—a tit. Everybody else gets a whistle or a little plastic gun, and he gets a tit. It doesn’t even fit in his pocket,
you following me here? He’d not sure what he’s supposed to do with it, he’s not even sure he’s supposed to have it.”

Calmer continued to wait him out.

“So the way these things can go, he said something just to be part of things, that’s all, something as a matter of fact that
he’d heard from you.
Listen to both sides
…”

It was quiet a minute and Spooner took two or three false starts at what came next, gradually seeing that a tit in a Cracker
Jacks box wasn’t the metaphor it had been cracked up to be when it first skipped into his head.

“Let’s forget the tit in the Cracker Jacks,” he said finally.

Calmer smiled and held up one of his bandaged hands. That fast, his good mood was back. “Ah, but ‘the moving finger writes,’
” he said, “ ‘and having writ moves on; nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line.’ ”

Spooner would have loved to say something in that vein back, to remind Calmer that he was also a literary man these days,
but all that would come to mind was the part of Humpty Dumpty where the egg couldn’t be put back together.

I
t took longer to reach the end of the island than it usually did, Calmer walking more slowly, stopping every forty or fifty
yards to look around, as if marking his place. It seemed to Spooner he might be favoring his left leg, but it was pointless
to ask. Calmer would as soon admit that his leg hurt as admit that he didn’t like what Mrs. Spooner had made for supper.

They sat on the bait shop’s steps, drinking seventy-five-cent beer, and presently Calmer patted himself down and found a pencil
in his shirt pocket, and in spite of his bandaged fingers wrote a series of numbers across a napkin.

Four, six, nine, thirteen, nineteen, and after that a blank space for what came next. It was the old game from the years in
Milledgeville, Calmer and Margaret and Spooner sitting at the kitchen table after supper, Calmer making up the numbers.

At first it had gone like this:

2, 4, 6, 8, ___ or 3, 6, 9, 12, ___

They hadn’t gone too far with that before a disagreement came up that you might say spelled out the future. Calmer wrote down,
1, 4, 9, 16, 25, ___, and Margaret had the answer—thirty-six, six times six—before Calmer even put the five on twenty-five.

Part of the game was the right number; the other part was the reason.

Spooner sat looking at the answer a little while, just staring at it until Calmer began in his patient way to show him where
it came from. But Spooner knew where it came from; he was thinking of something else. “It can be any number,” he said.

It was still only a month or so after the wedding, probably before it had begun to sink in with Calmer what he had on his
hands.

He said, “How now, brown cow?” which set Margaret off giggling, as it could be counted on to do.

Spooner said, “You could have a different rule.”

“But not in the middle of the game. One rule for all the numbers in the line. You can have any rule you want for the next
line.”

Still Spooner stared at the numbers.

“What other number could it be?” Calmer said.

Spooner shrugged, picked his birthday. “One,” he said.

Calmer crossed out thirty-six and wrote a one on the end of the sequence, looked at Spooner, and raised his eyebrows in an
exaggerated way. “And what, pray tell, is the rule?” he said. Talking Shakespeare now, the way he sometimes did.

“Whatever the number is, that’s the rule.”

“But how would one say it? How can it be expressed?” Calmer had not talked to them yet about equations, didn’t see any reason
to muddy the water with the word before they understood what it was for.

Spooner said, “The rule is the last number is one.”

Calmer studied him a moment and then smiled, and when Margaret looked up at him to see if that was fair, he shrugged, as if
Spooner was right. “The anarchist,” he said.

And here they were, forty-odd years later, Spooner and Calmer sitting on the bait house steps, playing the old game. He picked
the pencil carefully out of Calmer’s fingers and wrote, 25.

Calmer said, “Magnifico!”

The truth was that Calmer had a partiality for prime numbers, and once you knew that, the rest of it was simple addition.

“You remember what we were talking about yesterday?” Spooner said. “I wanted to be sure we understood each other about that.”

He waited, but there was no sign that Calmer remembered anything at all.

“Your kids turned out fine, Dad, especially Phillip.”

Calmer shook his head and smiled at the misunderstanding. “No, we weren’t talking about him. The other one, in the city.”

“Phillip’s the one in the city,” Spooner said. “He lives in Manhattan, in an apartment on Lexington Avenue.”

Calmer cocked his head, rethinking it. He killed the last warm swallow of foam in the bottle and made to get up and leave.

Spooner sat where he was. “Right?” he said.

Calmer assumed a familiar, patient expression, then lowered his voice in a way that it was understood what he said wasn’t
for any of the others to hear. “The other one,” he said. “The one in Philadelphia.”

Calmer got up and went to the trash can to deposit his empty bottle. Spooner followed along after him, like a catfish just
whacked with the fish whacker, and in this condition they commenced the second half of the morning’s walk, the more difficult
half, mostly uphill, following the natural rise of the cliff. Calmer was out in front, unusually deliberate about where he
put his feet, as if his shoes were too small and it hurt him to step.

And Spooner followed along behind, wondering if Calmer was doing the arithmetic now, figuring out who he was.