Spooner (67 page)

Calmer took his regular nap when they got home and later Spooner saw him out in the meadow with old Dodge. They were down
there together almost every afternoon these days, sometimes even in the rain.

I
t was time to change the bandages again, but Calmer had gone into his bedroom after the morning walk and hadn’t come out,
even for lunch. He’d been slower out along the cliffs again, and reluctant to talk when they sat down at the bait shop.

Most likely, his hands were hurting. Spooner hoped that it was his hands, not what he’d said yesterday about whom you could
trust. He was still running a fever—it was half a degree higher, actually—but there was no pus in the dressings when the nurse
cut them off up in Coupeville, no streaks of infection running up his arms.

He’d had two beers and a Coke at the bait shop, and then turned on the hose when he got home and drunk from the nozzle a long
time. Spooner gave him another hour, and then another, and sometime close to two-thirty he tapped on the door and looked in.

Calmer was lying on his back, reading. There was a shine to his skin, and the light from the reading lamp collected in a damp
line of sweat across his forehead. Calmer had propped up one of his legs on a pillow. Lester was next to him, resting his
massive head across Calmer’s chest, and as Spooner moved closer the animal swept his tail slowly across the sheets, wrinkling
them one way, smoothing them out the other.

“Let’s run up to Coupeville and get the bandages changed,” Spooner said.

Calmer looked at his hands, at the bandages, and then rested one quietly on top of the animal’s head. Lester’s tail moved
across the sheets again.

“Let’s let it go this once,” he said.

Spooner took in the width of the dog’s skull—Christ, what a head—and then Calmer’s T-shirt, dark with sweat. “You feeling
all right?”

“Sleepy,” Calmer said. “Just sleepy,” and closed the book and laid it down over on the other side of Lester.

There was a chair under the window and Spooner sat down, then got back up and went to the icebox for a couple of bottles of
beer. Calmer gave his a taste and set it down on the reading table.

“No good?” Spooner said.

“Just some water, if you don’t mind.”

Spooner went into the other room again and filled a glass with ice and water, and this time when he got back Calmer had closed
his eyes.

Spooner set the water glass on the bed table and sat back down. He stared at the ceiling, remembering the mangled body under
the truck axle, wondering if Calmer had tried to lift it off his chest. But if that was it, why hadn’t he just used the jack?
From what Spooner had seen of it, the nature of Calmer’s disease didn’t affect reasoning or intelligence; his memory was what
it was after. He would have seen what needed to be done.

“You still don’t remember how it happened,” Spooner said, indicating Calmer’s hands, but Calmer only smiled, as if he were
waiting for him to get the joke.

Presently, the smile faded. “I wish I could help you,” he said.

S
pooner found him, still in bed with the dog; it was a little after seven o’clock. He’d brought over a glass of crackers and
milk at bedtime and left it on the reading table, and it was still there, untouched.

He opened the door and let Lester out, and the dog went to Mrs. Spooner’s garden and commenced a four-minute urination.

The coroner told Spooner it was impossible to estimate how long ago Calmer had been shot, but then made an estimate after
all, for the newspaper. He said it could have been a month. The bullet was in next to the femur, about halfway between Calmer’s
knee and his hip, the entrance wound from the front. The infection had gone into the bone.

“He would have lost the leg anyway,” the coroner said, and then offered up another opinion that would also make its way into
the paper. “A gunshot wound,” he said, “can be extremely dangerous.”

M
argaret had been in Boston and took the first flight west. Darrow drove from Montana with his wife and kids in the old VW
van, all his eggs in one basket. Phillip was in London, doing some kind of accounting that nobody in England knew how to do,
and he caught a nonstop flight to San Francisco and then a flight north, arriving in Seattle half an hour before Cousin Bill,
who had bought a trombone and was starting his first lesson when Spooner ran him down at his music teacher’s house out on
Beaver Island.

The marine forecast had called for a warm, calm day and they were all pretty good swimmers, but Phillip, who had not gotten
to the top of the New York City accounting world by taking chances, strapped himself nevertheless into a life jacket before
setting foot in the boat.

The boat itself was a rowboat—Darrow’s suggestion instead of the fishing boat Spooner had arranged to borrow. And it was a
better idea, the sound of the gulls, the quiet of the water, the oars breaking the surface, in and out, like breathing, and
only a week before, as it happened, Spooner’s friend Dr. Ploof had received a forty-year-old rowboat via UPS, bequeathed to
him by a patient who’d skipped town years before owing him a little over eight thousand dollars.

As to the matter of casting Calmer’s ashes into the sound, Spooner’s understanding of the way it worked was that the ashes
would be washed from the sound into the ocean, and from there into other oceans, and from them into other sounds and rivers
and inlets and outlets, and in the end Calmer would merge with all the various waters of the world and trickle here and there
all over kingdom come, and in this way gradually disappear into the currents of water and time.

And one of these days, it might rain a little Calmer too.

T
he ashes were in a box in Spooner’s lap. He was stationed toward the back of Dr. Ploof’s eight-thousand-dollar rowboat, on
the same seat with Margaret. Darrow sat in the next seat, rowing, and beyond him was Phillip in his life jacket, watching
over his shoulder as America disappeared, and Cousin Bill, who, although more of a sailor than a paddler, was quite a water-going
man himself and was anxiously waiting for his turn at the oars.

They’d put the boat in near the bait shop at the south end of the island, stopping inside to buy beer for a last toast, and
paddled a mile or so out, beyond the bay to open, deeper water where the wind picked up and the current began to take the
rowboat south. According to the marine forecast, the surface temperature of the sound was thirty-eight degrees—so cold that
the inch or so that had already leaked into the bottom of Dr. Ploof’s rowboat was numbing Spooner’s feet—and the wind off
the water dried the sweat off Spooner’s face and scalp, and then began, a little at a time, to chill him, and he wondered
if he should have brought a sweater.

They went out into it, farther, a little farther, and a little more, and when it finally seemed like far enough, Darrow, his
lips edged blue by now, like everybody else’s, turned the little boat into the wind and waited.

And everywhere in Dr. Ploof’s rowboat were freezing Whitlowes, waiting for Spooner to make his move.

Spooner reconsidered the dark, square box in his hands. It was heavier than he’d imagined it would be, and there was more
of it. He opened the top and fixed his eyes on the contents, not really contemplating his stepfather, as the other passengers
may have thought, but quietly imagining the box they’d need to haul his own ashes out to sea. At this point in his life, Spooner
had accumulated titanium rods running down the inside of both femurs, ceramic hips, a small metal plate under his scalp, fourteen
implanted teeth, three screws in his bad ankle, one screw in his good ankle, and Jesus only knew how many screws holding his
elbow in place. He imagined the sounds of the scattering of his ashes, the plopping as the screws hit the water, the splashing
pieces of titanium.

He glanced again into the box and Calmer was smooth as brownie mix. Never any trouble for anyone.

And the family was waiting.

The wind seemed to pick up again, blowing Spooner’s shirt flat against his chest, and there were clouds on the horizon now,
and the temperature dropped a few degrees in not many minutes and pretty soon, marine forecast or not, it could have been
October. He ran his hand over his chest and his nipples were like BBs. Still, no one spoke, no one hurried him at all. And
he sat looking at the ashes, trying to feel what he was feeling more clearly, looking for some better connection prior to
chucking the remains of the greatest man he’d ever known, or at least the greatest man who had ever known him, into the Puget
Sound.

And then he saw it, what was going to happen. Saw Calmer’s remains blowing back into their faces, the ashes sticking to everything
wet and floating around in what was by now half a foot of water in the bottom of the boat, saw them tasting the ashes in their
mouths and all of them spitting over the side, and saw that this whole idea of throwing Calmer away was too much like emptying
a half-full can of Coke out a car window at eighty miles an hour anyway and, reconsidering the whole scene, began to think
of the ceremony as littering. He saw that it would be better and more dignified to simply set the box into the water and let
it sink—it was two or three hundred feet deep here at least—and allow the currents to do the dispersing out of sight.

He closed the top and then leaned over the side, the boat rocking dangerously at the motion, and set the box in the water.

It was a heavy little box, but then, so was a Chris-Craft.

Which is to say it didn’t sink.

There was not a word from his cousin or his brothers or sister—on reflection, Spooner sometimes pictured this scene as another
family’s: he as the full-grown, still-lovable Mongoloid child, doing his best but mucking up the works for the thousandth
time even as the siblings retreated into an old silent agreement, sheltering him from knowing that he has mucked up the works
again, from knowing the one thing he does know, absolutely, that he is
special
.

It was Cousin Bill who finally commented. “Oh boy,” he said.

The little box bobbed in the chop that had come up with the breeze, and drifted away from the rowboat, southeast, toward Seattle.
And there was a thought, Calmer’s ashes washing up intact in West Seattle. Spooner turned and looked at Darrow, who was smarter
and would have an idea—and at the risk of undermining not only that statement but the countless other references to Darrow’s
superior intelligence, it is perhaps not unfair to remind you whose idea the rowboat was in the first place—waiting to hear
how they were going to re-collect Calmer’s ashes.

“What did you just do?” Darrow said. Nothing accusatory in the question, that wasn’t the tone, although you couldn’t call
it strictly informational either.

Spooner said, “My thought was that it would sink.”

Cousin Bill, meanwhile, climbed to the bow and began making the same sort of motions with his hands that you make for someone
parking in a tight space. He was a water-going man and knew a few things about currents and tides, and seemed now to have
taken charge of the ship. Darrow took no offense at being replaced, and for a few minutes he followed instructions, pulling
hard on one oar and then the other, his strokes smooth and rhythmical, and for a little while you could actually see what
the expression
having an oar in the water
was all about.

For their part, the civilians—Spooner, Margaret, and Phillip—sat where they had been sitting, trying not to look one another
in the eye, wary of unspoken messages passed at such an emotional moment, knowing that something might be said with a single
glance that could never be taken back. The word
stupid
floated in the air like colored balloons after the flashbulb goes off, but nobody uttered a word.

And Dr. Ploof’s eight-thousand-dollar rowboat continued to fill with the Puget Sound, and just prior to drawing even with
the box of ashes, Cousin Bill looked back to make sure the crew was ready to make the retrieval, and noticed the water. “Bailer,”
he said, “we need a bailer.” He leaned far to the right—Spooner’s side of the boat—his fingers just brushing the box, and
then he was past it, empty handed.

Spooner, who had the better angle, leaned out and also touched the box, but it was slippery and too big to be plucked up with
the tips of his fingers, and he was angry suddenly, as if he—or Calmer—were being teased, and he reached for it again, this
time with both hands, wanting this thing settled straightaway. Darrow flattened one of the paddles against the current and
pulled with the other, bringing the side of the boat around in the direction of the box of ashes, and it is likely that if
Spooner had just waited a second or two longer the ashes would have come to him, right to the side of the boat, and it is
also likely that his reaching would not have caused the rowboat to flip over—although not completely upside-down over, just
out from under the passengers—as it did, as rowboats sometimes do.