Spooner E-Book

Pete Dexter

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Oddball, accident-prone Warren Spooner doesn't so much get along with life as crash into it head-on. Through the awkward scrapes of his childhood, to a violent and troubled adulthood, the young man is nothing if not resilient, standing up to adversity in his own dark (often extremely dark) ways. Hilarious and heartbreaking, US National Book Award-winner Pete Dexter's autobiographical magnum opus is nothing short of a tragicomic tour de force.

Leseprobe

SPOONER

Pete Dexter is one of America’s great living novelists. He won the US National Book Award for Fiction for Paris Trout, two Penn West Awards for Best Novel of the Year (Paris Trout and The Paperboy), and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Novel for his last novel, Train.

ALSO BY PETE DEXTER

Paper Trails

Train

The Paperboy

Brotherly Love

Paris Trout

Deadwood

God’s Pocket

SPOONER

PETE DEXTER

First published in 2009 in the United States of America by Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

First published in Great Britain in 2010 in trade paperback by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2011 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Pete Dexter 2009

The moral right of Pete Dexter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

978 1 84887 340 7 eBook ISBN: 978 0 85789 302 4

Printed in Great Britain Atlantic Books An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Cousin Bill and Mrs. Dexter

SPOONER

CONTENTS

Part One

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Part Two

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Part Three

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Part Four

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Fifty

Fifty-One

Fifty-Two

Fifty-Three

Part Five

Fifty-Four

Fifty-Five

Fifty-Six

Fifty-Seven

Fifty-Eight

Fifty-Nine

Part Six

Sixty

Sixty-One

Sixty-Two

Sixty-Three

Sixty-Four

Sixty-Five

Sixty-Six

Sixty-Seven

Part Seven

Sixty-Eight

Sixty-Nine

Seventy

Seventy-One

Seventy-Two

Seventy-Three

Seventy-Four

Seventy-Five

Part Eight

Seventy-Six

Seventy-Seven

Seventy-Eight

Seventy-Nine

Eighty

Eighty-One

Eighty-Two

Eighty-Three

Eighty-Four

Eighty-Five

Eighty-Six

Eighty-Seven

Eighty-Eight

Eighty-Nine

Ninety

Ninety-One

Ninety-Two

Ninety-Three

PART ONE

Milledgeville

ONE

Spooner was born a few minutes previous to daybreak in the historic, honeysuckled little town of Milledgeville, Georgia, in a makeshift delivery room put together in the waiting area of the medical offices of Dr. Emil Woods, across the street from and approximately in the crosshairs of a cluster of Confederate artillery pieces guarding the dog-spotted front lawn of the Greene Street Sons of the Confederacy Retirement Home. It was the first Saturday of December 1956, and the old folks’ home was on fire.

The birthing itself lacked cotton-picking, and grits, and darkies to do all the work, but otherwise had the history of the South stamped all over it—misery, besiegement, injustice, smoke enough to sting the eyes (although this was as invisible as the rest of it in the night air), along with an eerie faint keening in the distance and the aroma of singed hair. Unless that was in fact somebody cooking grits.

As we pick up the story, though, three days preceding, the retired veterans are snug in their beds, and Spooner is on the clock but fixing to evacuate the premises no time soon. Minutes pool slowly into hours, and hours into a day, and then spill over into a new day and another.

And now a resident of the home dozes off with a half-smoked Lucky in his mouth, which falls into his beard, unwashed since D-day or so and as flammable as a two-month-old Christmas tree, and it all goes up at once.

While back in Dr. Woods’s office, Spooner is still holding on like an abscessed tooth, defying all the laws of the female apparatus and common sense—not that those two spheres are much overlapped in the experience of the doctor, who is vaguely in charge of this drama and known locally as something of a droll southern wit. But by now Dr. Woods, like everyone else, is exhausted as well as terrified of Spooner’s mother Lily, and no droll southern wittage has rolled off his tongue in a long, long time.

It’s a stalemate, then, the first of thousands Spooner will negotiate with the outside world, yet even as visions of stillborn livestock and dead mares percolate like a growling stomach through the tiny band of spectators, and Dr. Woods discreetly leaves the room to refortify from the locked middle drawer of his office desk, and Lily’s sisters, who, sniffing tragedy, have assembled from as far off as Omaha, Nebraska, but are at this moment huddled together at the hallway window to have a smoke and watch for jumpers across the street, Spooner’s mother rolls out of bed on her own and gains her feet, and in those first vertical moments, with one of her hands clutching a visitor’s chair for balance and the other covering her mouth against the possibility of unpleasant morning breath, she issues Spooner, feet first and the color of an eggplant, the umbilical cord looped around his neck, like a bare little man dropped through the gallows on the way to the next world.

As it happened, Spooner was second out the door that morning, a few moments behind his better-looking fraternal twin, Clifford, who, in the way these things often worked out for Spooner’s mother, arrived dead yet precious as life itself, and in the years of visitation ahead was a comfort to her in a way that none of the others (one before Spooner and two further down the line) could ever be.

And was forever, secretly, the favorite child.

TWO

Due to problems of tone and syntax, not to mention good taste (how, after all, are you supposed to fit a regular baby and a dead one into the same paragraph without ruining it for them both?), Spooner’s birth was left out of society editor Dixie Ander’s regular weekly account of local comings and goings in the Milledgeville World Telegraph, and the birth certificate itself was subsequently tossed by Miss Ander’s unmarried first cousin, Charlotte Memms, who at this point in her career had worked without oversight or supervision for thirty-six years in the Baldwin County Office of Registrations and Certificates, filing and discarding documents as she saw fit. There was a soaking rain on the day that news of Spooner’s birth arrived on her desk, and the afternoon before one of the Stamps niggers from down in the Bottoms had driven his turkey truck into town, parked in Miss Charlotte’s just-vacated spot in the courthouse parking lot and promptly got himself arrested inside, sassing the county clerk over the poultry tax, and Miss Charlotte saw that truck full of turkeys in her regular spot when she came to work in the morning, half of them drowned, and decided then and there that she’d had enough—she was tired of being taken for granted and tired of people without manners—and so it happened that until the census board caught up with her the following year, the rule of thumb in Baldwin County was that you did not get born here without references.

Which is not meant to leave the impression that the birth went unrecorded. In Lily Spooner’s log of unspeakable ordeals, it was never lower than number five, and Lily, it could be said, had made her bones in matters of the unspeakable and knew the real goods when she saw it. And was wolfishly jealous of what was hers. And had Spooner’s brother only hung around a day or two, long enough to break bread, as they say, the tragedy might very well have made it all the way to the top.

Even so, no one even casually of Lily’s acquaintance thought of suggesting that he appreciated what she had endured, certainly no doctor or relative, and if some afternoon a month or a year after the event, perhaps in the throes of an asthma attack, she suddenly compared the grittiness of birthing twins—she lost one, you know—to a battlefield amputation, who was going to argue the point? You? Are you crazy? She said things like this just daring someone like you to say something like that. Daring you to say anything at all. And you wouldn’t, not even if you were standing there in the uniform of the United States Army, sprouting ribbons and medals on your chest like rows of porch pansies and peeking over the foot of her bed on stumps. You wouldn’t, because hanging over this opera was the strange possibility that she had suffered beyond what you could understand, or imagine, and to demonstrate her vantage in the field, she could easily refuse food for a week and simply live off bad luck and misfortune. And how would you feel then?

But hold on a minute, you’re thinking, sustain life on nothing but bad luck and misfortune?

To borrow one of Lily’s many lifelong expressions which always ran an involuntary shudder through Spooner, you darn tootin’. Bad luck and misfortune. You probably have to see it for yourself to see it, but the model is there in any grade school history book, in the carefree wanderings of our predecessor, the migratory Sioux, happy as a clam out on the prairie, employing every last bit of his buffalo right down to the molars. Which is the way you live off misfortune and bad luck, using everything, the same way you live off the pitiful salary paid to public schoolteachers. Waste not, want not.

Which could have been the family motto, if the family had had a motto, which it didn’t. As the cowboys say, they is some things you can get a rope around and some things you isn’t.

So in fairness to Spooner’s mother, it was an exhausting delivery at the end of an exhausting month: the heartbreak of Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson (again), followed by the death of her father, followed by the sudden and mysterious illness of her husband Ward, followed by this luckless, endless labor leading to the death of Spooner’s better-looking twin brother Clifford, her firstborn son.

And what came next? What did she have to show for her suffering?

Spooner.

Warren Whitlowe Spooner, five pounds, no ounces, fifty-three hours just getting through the door. Dr. Woods, who had predicted an easy birth, was humbled by and unable to influence the struggle taking place on his table and, before it was over was visiting the silver flask (Sigma Alpha Epsilon, University of Georgia, class of 1921) in his locked desk drawer so often that he’d quit locking it and was reduced to encouraging prayer and trying to keep the uneasy peace among the various family factions who had traveled to Georgia to help out, due to Ward’s sudden and mysterious condition.

As for Ward, he spent the entire fifty-three-hour delivery at home with Spooner’s sister Margaret, too weak even to drive Lily to the clinic when her water broke. And in spite of his previously unblemished record, the whole episode sniffed of neglect to Lily, but due to her own condition she was unable to get to the bottom of it then, and had to put off the investigation until later. When, of course, it was too late.

“Sometimes with twins,” the doctor said that second day—several times, in fact, as he drank and forgot what he’d said before, “they isn’t either one of them that wants to come out first.”

THREE

On the same day Warren Spooner was born, December 1, 1956, a 360-pound, eight-term U.S. congressman named Rudolph Toebox jerked up out of his seat on the forty-yard line at Municipal Stadium in South Philadelphia—a hot dog vendor would tell the first reporter on the scene, “Dat big man come up outde heah like he hook on to a fishin’ poe!”—rising to almost his full height before turning over in the air and flopping back onto two of the most expensive seats in Municipal Stadium, where he died sunny-side up across his wife’s lap, in a sleet storm, during the third quarter of the Army-Navy football game. Her name was Iris.

The wife didn’t scream or try to save him, only sat where she was, motionless, letting the news settle, watching the sleet glaze over Rudy’s glasses, her tiny, gloved hand resting across the expanse of his stomach. Dead weight. Two Teddy Roosevelts. Her mind took a strange drift, as it tended to do in moments of embarrassment, and she pictured how much worse it might have been if this had happened earlier, in their room at the Bellevue-Stratford, where Rudy, as was his habit, had been standing at the window looking down at the common folk, naked as a jaybird save his cigar and the pair of python-skin cowboy boots he was wearing everywhere these days and which he could not get into or out of by himself. Could she have gotten him dressed before she called for help? Or even taken off the damn boots? And what if he’d fallen the other way, through the window?

She noticed the stitching had come out of his zipper, and the button at the waist had popped off. He was always outgrowing his pants. Big-boned, his mother said. But then, his mother was also big-boned, in that same way. His father, at the other end of things, had been pint-size and full of squint, one of those mean little fellows you run into now and then out west, always spoiling for a fight, who just can’t leave a woman with a wide bottom alone.

Iris shifted out from under the press of his weight and he rolled off her knees and wedged between her shins and the seat back in front of them. Pinning her legs. A little air came out of him; it sounded like he’d sighed.

He was dead, though. Her people were all ranchers from west of the river, and she recognized a dead thing when she saw it, had seen the exact expression that just crossed her husband’s face a hundred times in the slaughter shed, where the animals that they kept for themselves were butchered and, eerily enough, where Grandma Macon also cashed in one afternoon, in front of her, attending to the slaughter of a pig. In those days it was Iris’s job to scrub down the floor with bleach before the blood congealed and turned slippery and left the scent of slaughter in the cement. Like anything else, pigs could be dangerous when they smelled it coming.

On the morning she was remembering now—it was sometime in the week after Christmas—she’d stood in the doorway with a hose and a bucket and a mop, the nozzle leaking a spray of icy water through her fingers, and watched the look of dying drop over the pig’s face—like a cloud had crossed the sun—and then, with that same miraculous speed of shadows and clouds, cross the room to Grandma Macon and pass over her face too, as abruptly as the squirt of the animal’s blood had a moment earlier jumped into her hair.

Grandma Macon’s expression turned into that expression when the bottom drops out of your garbage bag. Iris had seen it enough to know that by the time you felt it coming loose, it was already too late—eggshells, Kotex, coffee grounds, a Band-aid with body hair stuck in the adhesive, that little bag of turkey organs they stick inside the bird at the factory, like they were sending it out into the world with a sack lunch—and there was no stopping it then. The mess was there for anybody to see, and had to be cleaned up.

And the people in the stands around them were beginning to move now, some trying to get away, some calling for doctors, one man shouting, “Air, give him air!” The embarrassment of dying, the odor. My God, he’d messed his trousers.

“Air!” the man shouted. “Air . . .”

They had been married, Iris and Rudy, in a little church overlooking the great river and its valley, an old windmill creaking outside a stained-glass window propped open with a chalkboard eraser. Thirty-one years together, and now this.

She was forty-seven; he was forty-nine, the only man she’d ever suffered. She reached down to him, wedged in against the seat, and took the glasses off his nose. She put them in her pocket, thinking, Just like that.

FOUR

On the upside, even at the moment itself, it was not hard to see that there would be life after Toebox. Not that Iris didn’t care, only that she would clearly survive. She found it was hard to take his death personally.

This was also the feeling back home, more or less, when word reached his constituents. It was like Montgomery Ward had gone out of business.

Not that Toebox was particularly worse than the other great public servants of his time, and in fact was in some ways probably better, at least kept in closer contact with the people. He probably knew a thousand of them by name—he had a trick of memory that helped him match names with faces—and this trick had naturally fostered in him the conceit that he was irreplaceable, which is a common enough conceit in the business, although in the hard light of day, Rudolph Toebox, like so many of his colleagues, was exactly as irreplaceable as the laces in your shoes.

He was drinking peppermint schnapps out of a leather-covered flask when the end came, sweating even in the cold, and had been trying to distract himself from an oncoming bout of food poisoning ever since he ate the hot dogs at the beginning of the second quarter. Three of them, heavy on the sauerkraut and onions. And now the same gimped-up little nigger harnessed into the aluminum box had reappeared at the end of the row of seats and was standing there, trying to get his attention, trying to sell him three more.

“Three mo’, big man. Three mo’ . . .”

The congressman ignored the vendor and concentrated on the problem. As it happened, he was known in Washington as a problem solver, and had his secrets for that too. One secret, actually, as at heart, like so many other distinguished public servants, he was a surprisingly simple fellow. A one-solution man, in fact.

No sudden moves.

That was the ticket. Long years of public servitude on behalf of one of the vast and barren regions of America—a thousand speeches at one-room schoolhouse graduations, at co-ops and churches and VFW halls—had taught him firsthand the nature of life on the prairie, and he had come to understand that nothing out there, not beast nor fowl, liked things to move suddenly; that sudden movement was always an invitation to stampede. Cattle, geese, bison, chickens, the common man: They were all the same, and now, in a moment of insight just before the end, he saw his theory also applied to diarrhea. Who knew, it might have been the key to the universe.

Too late for that, though. The seats he’d been given, wonderful as they were, were fifty yards from the closest bathrooms, and there was not a chance of making it. He didn’t have the time; he didn’t have the strength. He was weak in a way now that went beyond all the ways he had been weak before. In Toebox’s final moments, he could not have lifted his own bosom.

Which was why, even suffocating in his coat, he hadn’t been up to moving around enough to take it off. Instead, he sat inside it and sweated. The coat was made of vicuña and had been given to him for Christmas the previous year by the nation of Bolivia, along with a matching hat. Iris didn’t care for the hat and worried that it made him look like a Communist, but Toebox wore it anyway. He loved hats, and here, if you’d like to see it, is a list of the ones she cleaned out of the Washington apartment later that week after she got back from the funeral: an Elk’s cap, an honorary deputy sheriff ’s hat, a mortarboard he got from the state university where he received his honorary Ph.D., several Stetson cowboy hats that were presented to him as mementos for serving as grand marshal of various parades and rodeos in the western regions of his district, a Brooks Brothers fedora he was given—along with a pin-striped, double-breasted blue suit—when he toured the plant, a Beefeater’s hat like the ones the guards wear at Buckingham Palace (a gift from the British ambassador to the U.N.), a Japanese helmet with a bullet hole through the side—the only one he paid for himself—and a yarmulke he got at some Jewish deal that he never did find out what it was supposed to be about.

Back in the home district Toebox was known variously as A Man of Many Hats and Your Voice in Washington and The Working Congressman—there were highway signs that said those things everywhere you went—but while he was in fact many-hatted, and undeniably had a certain voice in Washington (forty-yard-line seats to the Army-Navy game spoke for themselves), the only work he’d ever done that you could call work was a stint in the U.S. Navy, where his specialty was waxing floors. Toebox’s floor waxing occurred in 1942, early in the war, and led to a Purple Heart when he stepped into a puddle of water as he operated the waxing machine, briefly dancing out into the land of cardiac arrest, then was brought back more or less along the same route, when a medic hooked up his toes to the same outlet, more or less inventing the defibrillator. After that, he would not even plug in a toaster, and was eventually designated Section 8 and sent home to Iris.

And there, as the district’s first war hero returned live from combat, he ran for and was elected to public office, and spoke mysteriously of the hidden scars of war, and while he was not reluctant to wear his medals and ribbons at parades and VFW speeches and appearances at high school gymnasiums, the specific incident behind his own hidden scars Toebox would not discuss. More than once some smart little crapper in the audience asked if he’d smothered an enemy grenade—there was always one at every school assembly bringing his size into it—and he would eye the kid for a long minute before he answered, pointing him out for the principal to deal with later, and say the same thing: “The real heroes didn’t come back, son.” Which would shut the kid up, all right, and as a rule dropped the rest of them into a respectful silence too.

The farmers and ranchers in Toebox’s part of the country were appreciative of his visits to their children’s schools and his stand against higher taxes to raise the salaries of teachers and other public workers, and liked his billboards and his short, snappy-looking wife, and he was elected again and again.

His district was the entire state, a flat, dry rectangle of prairie and plains out in that part of the country that is all rectangles and plains, and occupied by farmers and ranchers and the salesmen in ties half a foot wide who followed them, selling them Oldsmobiles and John Deere tractors. Yet, in spite of the congressman’s prairie roots, and hers, Iris decided to have the body buried at sea. Perhaps because of his service in the navy—he’d won the Purple Heart, after all—or perhaps it was the expense. It was not the cheapest thing in the world to ship 360-odd pounds across the country, especially refrigerated, which in itself seemed like a ridiculous waste of money at this time of year. Iris had spent her twenties in the Great Depression and had seen hard times and was tight with a dollar.

But whatever the reason she decided that her husband should be returned to the sea instead of the prairie, the point here is the way things happen—in this case, the end of the congressman and the beginning of Spooner—the long way around telling you that after a sparsely attended funeral, Toebox’s casket was driven to the naval station in South Philadelphia, and the next morning loaded on board the U.S.S. Buck Whittemore, a 2,800-ton Forrest Sherman–class destroyer under the command of Commander Calmer Ottosson, a polite, soft-spoken farm boy from South Dakota turned wunderkind at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, turned youngest commander in the United States Navy, and now, still polite and soft-spoken, plainly an officer on the fast track to the top.

Except things morbid and unexpected happened one after another that day on the Buck Whittemore, and after that day, the only place Calmer Ottosson was going as far as the navy was concerned was back to wherever he came from, the sooner the better.

And which accounts, indirectly, for how he became Spooner’s father.

FIVE

Calmer Ottosson had not received the coffin containing Rudolph Toebox gladly. The congressman came with reporters and photographers, for one thing, and a widow and a congressional aide and other congressmen and their congressional aides, and Calmer, who didn’t like on-board ceremonies in the first place, or, now that he thought it over, on-board politicians, resented the waste of money and time just to drop one over the side. In this way he was unlike most of his classmates back at Annapolis, who were drawn into the service by ceremony and/or the uniform itself.

But then, Calmer was bare-bones itself. Except for physical-education classes, he’d had no social life at all at the academy, no girls, no card games, no sports, no fistfights, very little self-abuse. He was reclusive and self-reliant, never comfortable asking for anything, even the salt and pepper. His only authorized activity beyond the ordinary academic life of a midshipman was caring for the school’s mascot, Bill, a sweet, low-key angora goat whom he fed and groomed throughout his junior and senior years, and for whom he kept a secret, oddly romantic diary entitled TheQuiet Yearnings of Bill, a Castrated Goat.

He held himself to a short regimen of nightly calisthenics and taught himself to write with his feet. This foot writing was accomplished by holding a pencil between his second and third toes (counting from the inside out), and before he gave it up he could write in script or block letters and even turn the pencil around and erase his mistakes.

He was a natural student with a tireless curiosity and could stay awake forty-eight hours and still think clearly over an exam. He played the piano and did square roots in his head, and could read sheet music and in some way hear it almost as if he were remembering it.

He kept these things to himself and kept himself apart, yet never seemed to stir the kind of resentment and misunderstandings that you might expect, this sort of person in this sort of place. And nothing about this ever changed. Sixth in his class at Annapolis, first at flight school in Memphis, and right to the end had no enemies below or above.

If the question occurs to you as to how or why a human being teaches himself to write with his feet, it began, at least in this case, with a letter from home. Calmer’s mother wrote all the letters and cards that came out of the house, and he received one every week, Wednesday or Thursday, usually six pages long, as it was her habit to compose a page a day, usually after the supper dishes were done, and rest on the Sabbath. The letters were full of weather forecasts, crop reports, news of broken drive belts, what the coyotes had killed while she and Dad were at church (My, but thevarmint has got Father’s dander up this time! He’s still setting up there in the upstairs bathroom window with his 30-30 and a flashlight, wouldn’t even come down for supper . . .), stories of broken fences and heartburn, car wrecks, tractor accidents. And newspaper clippings. Sometimes it seemed like she’d clipped the whole Conde Record. Winners and losers of the turkey shoot down at the Rod and Gun Club, football scores, honor rolls, high school graduations, marriages, births, obituaries. The letters were always signed Love,Father and Mom.

It was toward the end of one of her letters, after a detailed, strangely nonpartisan account of a monthlong battle of wits between Father and a weasel that was raising cain in the henhouse that she dropped in the news about Arlo:

I suppose you heard by now that Cousin Arlo finally run out of Luck with that polar bear in Minneapolis and had Three Fingers de-gloved on his left hand, which I am given to understand means the bear got it all but the Bones, which the docs proceeded to Lop off at the hospital anyways. He made all the papers and the UPI news wire, and said he didn’t blame nobody at the Zoo, lest of all the bear, who was just doing the job she was hired to do. Just his luck to be left handed! I am certain he’ll be looking at those missing fingers for the rest of his Life, and think about what a darn Fool he was to be getting drunk with that crowd in the first place. But that’s Arlo for you, the one that’s always got to find out everything for himself.

And off this news, Calmer taught himself to write with his feet. More out of curiosity than sympathy, wondering what he would do if he lost his own fingers. As the fitness reports always said—right up until the day he was ruined—Calmer Ottosson was an officer prepared for contingencies.

But more to the point, teaching himself to write with his feet was the sort of thing he had been up to all his life. Making his own fun, as the great writer called it.

But then, like the great writer, he’d grown up alone.

An adopted only child on a break-even two-hundred-acre farm fourteen miles southeast of Conde, South Dakota, a tiny spot up in the northeast corner of the map near Aberdeen, who at seven years old enjoyed sitting barefoot in a plowed field, balancing his father’s helmet from the war on his head and firing his single-shot Remington .22 into the air, correcting for the breeze as the little puffs of dust appeared in the spots where the bullets landed, trying to bring one right in on top of his head. He was a child who listened to what he was told and never bragged about his good marks at school or his shooting, just as years later, at the academy, he never mentioned that he could write with his feet. Not to anyone there, not in any of his letters home. Not even the ones to Cousin Arlo, although Arlo would have been tickled to hear of it—Arlo was everybody’s favorite, and not just because he led a colorful life and visited the twin cities and Chicago and came home with stories on himself, but also because, unlike the rest of them, he knew how to accept a compliment without feeling indebted, which led to family resentments. Most of them wouldn’t smile if you gave them the Nobel Prize. On the other hand, Arlo was a damn-the-torpedoes drinker, especially at family celebrations, and Calmer didn’t want the relatives hearing about his foot writing at a baptism or a funeral and coming away thinking that he’d got so fancy in college that he was having fun these days off the misfortunes of his own cousin, which would just kill his mother.

Once in a while, though, alone on a Saturday night, he might take off his shoes and socks and stand on his desk, ducking his head to accommodate the ceiling, and write a letter:

Dear Arlo,

Greetings and salutations! Mother wrote with the happy news that you have finally quit biting your nails.

Or something of that nature, which was the nature of Calmer and Arlo around each other, and had always been. Calmer was no mischief maker himself, but he had an appreciation for those who were, and even when his luck ran out and he lost all the things he’d worked for and was drained empty, he never quit trying to see himself in the world as Arlo did, as part of the story.

SIX

If it is fair to say that Calmer Ottosson got where he was in spite of an inclination to avoid human entanglements, it is also fair to say that he got where he was because of it, loners and leaders so often turning out to be the same people. This solitary bent was his nature, but it was also a practical thing. Humans, he’d noticed early on, even before the academy, followed best when they couldn’t see who was leading.

There was another reason for keeping apart, demonstrated in his awkwardness at finding himself off duty and in the proximity of the same men who took his orders. He accepted this awkwardness, knowing better than to try to change it, knowing his shyness was as set in him as the shape of his head. On duty, though, there was no shyness; he was fair with people and respectful, played no favorites, kept no enemies. Kept to himself. Privately, he did not trust even the best of them to do their jobs, particularly at sea, and constantly took the ship’s signs himself, often knowing instinctively where trouble was coming—the engine room, communications, the kitchen, the mood of the crew—even before it arrived.

He did these things quietly and in order of importance, leaving time enough during the day to do his own work too.

How he kept this schedule was anybody’s guess, except that for a human being Calmer could do with very little sleep. Beyond that, what was most in his favor was an innate sense of how things were put together and the way one part affected another—an engine, a horse, a septic tank, an outbreak of flu on ship—if a thing had moving parts, he could find a logic behind the movement, and when it broke, he would see how to fix it.

He was slower to see himself in the same way, though, and it was only later on that he came to understand that he’d done too much of the work himself, kept to himself too long. It had affected his judgment, this being alone, and led to what happened, and made him see things that were not there.

SEVEN

The sky was still dark when the congressman was delivered to the pier, not a glimpse of light in the east. The congressman arrived in a gray Cadillac hearse, the driver an old man in a black suit and a jet-black toupee who owned a funeral home on South Broad Street and did quite a bit of business with the navy. Calmer came off the ship to personally supervise the unloading and introduced himself to the undertaker.

“Calmer?” the undertaker said. “I never heard that one before.” Then he squeezed Calmer’s bicep and said, “You ever done any piano moving, sonny?”

It was a few minutes before six in the morning, and there were already eight or nine reporters on board, along with half again as many photographers. It was cold, and the newspapermen were all down in the galley, some of them eating, some of them drinking laced coffee against the chill of the morning, talking about the stories they’d covered that were better stories than this one.

The casket was made of mahogany and weighed, fully loaded, something over five hundred pounds. It emerged from the Cadillac dark and gleaming (rollers had been installed at the business end of the vehicle, and they rang faintly as they spun) and was gathered up into the hands of as many sailors as could squeeze in to grab hold. Wherever Calmer went in the navy, it was always the enlisted men—not the officers—who went out of their way not to disappoint him.

He signed for the congressman and shook the funeral man’s hand—it felt as small and fragile as a child’s—and the casket was placed carefully in the center of a platform attached by four lines to a windlass operated from the deck of the Buck Whittemore.

Calmer checked the lines himself, then motioned to the operator, and the platform lifted slowly into the air, Calmer leaning farther and farther back to follow its progress. There was a whining noise from the electric motor and the platform climbed slowly into the fog and then stopped. The noise changed pitch and the platform jerked sideways, commencing a swinging motion that continued even as the casket dropped slowly toward the deck.

Calmer followed this motion from the ground, sensing that the windlass operator was unsure of himself in the fog, wishing he were operating it himself, and almost at the same moment this thought arrived, he saw two of the supporting lines go slack. Then, in a kind of slow motion, the platform dropped open about sixty degrees and stopped, and Calmer, who decided later that he must have been under the influence of the undertaker’s question about piano moving, in fact thought of a grand piano, somehow turned upside down, the lid falling open. And then saw the piano player tumbling out of his own instrument.

And as Calmer imagined falling piano players, the casket dropped silently through the fog, and then began landing, three distinct landings—two crashes and a tremendous thud, like God himself had fallen out of the nest, a noise that hung distinctly in Calmer’s memory all day.

The casket and its lid and its various hardware were strewn across the deck, reminding Calmer of a pecan nut stomped open. The congressman himself was lying belly up across a stairwell in the attitude of a man offering his face to the shower, or the Lord, looking for all the world like somebody with nothing to hide.

On the bright side of things, beyond having come apart the casket did not appear damaged, so the problem was only a matter of reassembly. And what could be assembled once could be assembled again.

Calmer issued orders quietly, and there was an equally quiet, insectlike scramble of sailors over the body and the various parts of the casket, and a moment later the body and the various pieces of the casket were below deck and Calmer was surprised to find himself washed in relief at having it all out of sight.

Calmer went into the room and locked the door.

The congressman’s body and the pieces of his casket were lying across two tables used for butchering. The room was airtight and refrigerated, ventilated from the ceiling. Enormous sides of beef hung from hooks, pale blue and shiny, and there were boxes of poultry, cheese, eggs, thousands of pounds of perishable food. The congressman looked vaguely uncomfortable, his hair unmussed and perfect, decked out in a pinstriped Brooks Brothers suit which, truth be told, did him no favors, figure-wise, an effect enhanced perhaps by the fact that he was barefoot, his feet a color of blue similar to the hanging meat, and swollen well beyond the recognizable shape of human feet, as if they had been squeezed out of the pants’ legs like toothpaste.

Calmer used a thin nylon rope to hold the box together while the glue set, looping it top to bottom like some country girl’s suitcase.

He closed the door behind him, hoping to borrow another hour against the moment the coffin had to be untied and brought back up on deck. He found his body singing with optimism. The box would hold—it should hold—although the pallbearers would have to carry it on their shoulders now because one of the railings had broken off the side and would never support the weight of the full casket. It could be done, though. He’d lifted the body and gotten it back into the box alone; six men could get it up onto their shoulders. The hard part would be navigating the stairway back to the deck. He pictured how that might go and experienced a brief sagging in the singing optimism department, and behind that came a knee-buckling weight which is the burden of optimism, at least when optimism flies in the face of common sense and perhaps the laws of physical science.

And now he remembered that three of the pallbearers would be politicians—a member of the House from a district adjacent to Toebox’s and two of Toebox’s aides—and Calmer tried but could no longer remember what there had been to be optimistic about in the first place. Politicians for pallbearers? The effect of cold temperature on quick-drying glue? A ship full of reporters and photographers?

Thinking these thoughts, he turned a corner and very nearly flattened Iris Toebox.

EIGHT

The moment he laid eyes on this woman, a shot of desire fired somewhere so close to Calmer Ottosson that he could feel the concussion, and a whole tree of blackbirds rose at once into the sky. Which is the romantic way of saying that he just wanted to row her across Lake Michigan.

Iris was wearing a black coat over a black dress and a hat with a veil that was not yet dropped over her face. He had seen her picture the day before in the Philadelphia Bulletin, but it had not prepared him for this. She was not beautiful so much as flawless. Everything perfectly in place, perfectly in balance. Perfect calves, perfect ankles, perfect feet—although he couldn’t actually see the feet, which were inside the shoes setting off her ankles and calves.

And the wings beat in his throat. All the panicked birds.

On her arm was a second lieutenant named Jerome Jensen, to Calmer’s knowledge the worst officer on his ship. A man of breathtaking incompetence, no attention span, in love with detail and procedure and the uniform itself, and who habitually wrote up enlisted men for the smallest infractions and informed confidentially on his fellow officers.

It spoke of them both perhaps that Jensen had no whiff that he and Calmer were not eye to eye.

On reflection, Calmer would see that in regard to what happened that morning vis-à-vis the widow Toebox, it was his own imagination at fault; he had never imagined that even Jensen could make a botched job of greeting the congressman’s widow. Calmer had intended to meet her himself but after the loading accident wanted as much time to put the congressman and his box right as he could get, and so had turned it over to the first officer he saw, which was Jensen. It seemed like a good idea, in fact, as Jensen looked like an officer and always wore his uniform spotless and freshly pressed. Calmer was very clear with the orders: Greet Mrs. Toebox when she arrived at the ship, apologize for Calmer’s absence, escort her to Calmer’s quarters to await the burial. Make her comfortable. Offer her coffee or a drink, something to eat if she wanted it, the morning papers, and then leave her alone.

He had given these orders slowly, patiently, and Jensen had nodded along just as patiently, yet here he stood, slightly behind her in the passageway, looking confident and not a little self-satisfied.

“Commander Ottosson,” he said, “may I present Mrs. Toebox. She has asked to be with her husband.”

She smiled and offered Calmer her hand. Pale, tapered fingers lay cool and light against his palm. Her wedding ring had been moved to her right hand, which he remembered was the custom of widows back in his part of South Dakota, too.

He tried not to look at Jensen, afraid he might strangle him. “Allow me to offer you my quarters, Mrs. Toebox,” he said, and now he did glance quickly at Jensen. “It’s warmer, and there’s something to drink. I’m sure you’ll be more comfortable.”

“Thank you,” she said, “but I prefer to be with my husband.”

She spoke directly and evenly, and her voice did not begin to break as he thought it might. She waited a moment longer, then smiled politely and looked back at Jensen. “This way, you said?”

“Yes ma’am,” and he nodded at Calmer as if he had everything under control. She started around him in the direction of the storage room. She was smooth and perfectly balanced, giving nothing away. Bereaved as a house cat, from her outward appearance.

He stood a moment watching her from behind, aching to protect her—always his first impulse with women who attracted him. He realized this was not an ordinary impulse, not even faintly tangent to sexual intercourse, but there it was and had always been. Except this time there were birds and the ache to protect her mingled with the woman’s scent.

He got to the door first. “I’m afraid there was a small accident bringing the casket on board,” he said. She didn’t seem to hear that, just waited for him to open the door.

It was colder inside than he remembered. The casket also seemed different now: lying over the tables against the far wall, tied up like a hostage. Moisture had condensed on the lid.

He sent Jensen to get Mrs. Toebox a chair, and for a few minutes he was alone with her in cold storage, and the panicked birds pounded in his throat.

She seemed to think he had other things on his mind. “I’m quite comfortable here, Captain,” she said. “I’m sure you have more important matters to address.”

“Commander,” he said, “I’m only a commander.” He saw that she didn’t understand the difference, but he was satisfied just to have set the record straight. He noticed that she hadn’t remarked on the condition of the casket or asked what sort of accident he’d meant.

He heard himself say, “I understand your husband was a navy man.” Polite conversation for Calmer was like dancing, trying to remember the steps.

She gazed at the casket, and he couldn’t read her at all.

“He was in the war,” she said. “He got the Purple Heart.”

And then Jensen came back with a chair, and as time passed it occurred to Calmer that everything he had ever been and done was aimed at this single morning, that she was what he had come this far to find.

The Buck Whittemore cleared port at Philadelphia at 0800 hours and headed for deep water. Calmer reluctantly left Iris in cold storage and went to the bridge, checking the course and the radar. A light fog lay over the water, but a breeze was coming up from the south, beginning to clear it off, and he could see into it almost to the curve of the earth. His eyesight was still exceptional; the doctors at flight school had never seen anything like it.

He thought of the widow Toebox down in the storage room alone with the corpse, sitting next to it in the chair Jensen had brought, her legs crossed, feeling the roll and the size of the sea. And thought of the way she presented herself, even in mourning, as if nothing from life had laid a finger on her yet. In his experience the widow’s appearance was an oddity for a woman who had grown up on a ranch. As a rule, ranch work—like farmwork, there wasn’t much difference for the women—left its mark on them early, even if they married and moved into town. The womanly side dried up ahead of time, and year by year what was left was distinguishable from the men, who also were drying up, but more slowly and in a different way. Which is to say the men dried up mostly from the work, the women from the worry.

The wives of Calmer’s cousins, for instance, were all wrung out by now, most of them still only in their thirties. Arlo’s wife was sunshine itself, but already whiskery and the best arm wrestler in the family.

But nothing about the widow Toebox reminded Calmer of any of his cousins’ wives. He pictured her now inspecting the casket—which he hadn’t quite gotten shut all the way, leaving the width of a dime between the box and the lid, a crack he expected would be hidden by the flag—and then had another picture, which he had been picturing on and off ever since he’d seen the photograph of Toebox and his wife that ran with the obituary in the Evening Bulletin. How had it looked, the act itself between the congressman and his small, tidy wife? From the photograph in the Bulletin, it must have looked like a fat man fucking a mattress.

And as that image came and passed, Lieutenant Jensen meandered up onto the bridge, blowing over the surface of a cup of coffee, and sat down casually on the corner of the map table.

Calmer was still picturing the widow alone in the meat locker, and seeing Jensen he was suddenly unsure if holes had been drilled in the floor of the casket. The holes should have been drilled at the funeral home, but the old undertaker was plainly in some prolonged state of distraction, in the way old men sometimes were when the great distraction of their lives was no longer much of a distraction and they saw what was left. Or, to put it another way, they’d let go of pussy matters only to find themselves confronted with the big picture.

Calmer wondered if the big picture looked different if you’d been putting bodies in the ground all your life.

He looked around the wheelhouse, and everyone save Jensen was at work.

“Lieutenant,” he said, and Jensen stood up and saluted. He hadn’t noticed Calmer when he walked in.

“Yes, sir.”

Calmer motioned him closer and spoke so that the other officers and men couldn’t hear what he was saying. He did not chastise officers in front of each other; ordinarily he didn’t have to chastise them at all. They knew he was paying attention, and for most of them that was enough. “I have something for you to do,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

Calmer saw him begin to smile and had a corresponding impulse to pick him up by the neck. Instead, he moved a few inches even closer and was pleased to see a look of alarm cross the second lieutenant’s face. “I want the coffin prepared for burial,” he said.

“Aye-aye, sir.”

“Wait, just wait. I want you to go back down to the storage locker and station yourself outside the door. Am I clear so far? You are outside the locker, she is inside, the door is shut.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A few minutes ahead of the ceremony, I will arrive to escort Mrs. Toebox to the deck. After we are no longer in the locker, you will enter the room and check the coffin to make sure holes have been drilled into the bottom. There should be ten or twelve holes, one inch in diameter. If there are not, you will drill them yourself. Are we clear?”

“Aye-aye, sir. Ten to twelve holes, one inch in diameter.”

“The casket is lying between two tables, so you won’t have to move it to gain access to the bottom.”

“Yes, sir. No problem, sir.”

Calmer studied him a few seconds longer. He thought of calling him off the job and doing it himself. Just drilling the holes with her there in the room, but then he imagined the drill bit breaking through and slipping in too deep, pulling spiraled flesh out of the bottom of the box.

No, he thought, not with her in the room.

Still, he tried to cover his bases. “This is not a matter in which you are to exercise personal discretion, Lieutenant,” he said.

“No, sir.”

Calmer studied him a moment and then nodded, dismissing him, and went back to the helm, lost in the image of the congressman having at his poor smothering wife.

He cut the speed to three knots, the ship rolling now in five-foot swells. Approaching the spot. He went to collect the widow.

Jensen was outside her door, as ordered. He knocked once, waited a moment, and looked in. To his enormous relief, she was still there. He felt ridiculous. What had he expected?

The crew was assembled in parade dress all along the port side of the deck. The reporters and photographers had come up from the ship’s galley and were clustered together, apart from the sailors. Calmer stood with the widow and as he watched, one of the photographers, an old-timer in a duck hunter’s hat and a black cigar took the cigar out of his teeth, leaned over the side and vomited, some of it blowing back onto his pants and the cameras hanging from his neck. He put the cigar back in his teeth, pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and dabbed here and there around the cigar to clean up his mouth and chin, and then knelt and began working on his shoes.

Calmer hoped the rest of the media wouldn’t begin chucking breakfast too, which was the way it sometimes went. Somebody yodels and a minute later you’ve got an avalanche. He couldn’t protect her from that.

There was motion behind him, the honor guard emerged from below, and behind it the coffin bearers and the coffin. Three sailors, three civilians. The coffin was draped in a flag of the United States. Calmer had not seen who’d brought the coffin up from the meat locker to its present spot, but two of his healthiest-looking enlisted men now lifted it from the deck and set it carefully on the coffin bearers’ shoulders. Among the bearers were the congressman from the neighboring district and the two Toebox aides. The color guard was all from Toebox’s home district and had been brought on board with the widow and politicians for the ceremony. There was no official beginning, but the procession to the side of the ship began and the crew came to attention, and a moment later even the members of the press fell silent, and in the quiet you could hear the flags overhead snapping in the wind. The coffin bearers, meanwhile, sailors and civilians alike, took short, stumbling steps under the weight, and the ship pitched and rolled. The wind had moved to the north, and the ship’s bow was no longer directly into it.

The civilians had all taken one side of the box, and the sailors from Toebox’s home district had taken the other. The sailors were taller than the civilians, and stronger, and that side of the box was riding half a foot higher than the other. Calmer now saw disaster everywhere he looked.

The congressman from the neighboring district had turned red, as if he were holding his breath, and then he stumbled, and the whole civilian side of the casket seemed to stumble with him. The scene earlier on the deck came back to Calmer, the casket lying in parts and the congressman face up, a quizzical cast to his expression, as if there were something about all this that he still didn’t understand.

Calmer stood beside the widow Toebox, and she moved slightly in to him, her shoulder touching his arm, but he could not be sure if she had wanted him closer or if it was only the rolling of the ship. She did not pull away, though, and the spot where they connected issued some sweet, unknown buzzing.

The casket bearers reached the spot and set the casket down. Relieved of his load the congressman from the neighboring district pitched violently and pulled the flag off the flag-draped coffin in an effort to save himself from the fall. And Calmer felt her still there against him, slightly pressed in to him, all of her attention straight ahead. Did she even know they were touching? He did not move even an inch, afraid to lose the connection.

He tried to think of something to say but nothing came. Small talk again. The honor guard stood at attention behind them, rifles at their sides, and then he did think of something—he saw he could tell her to cover her ears before they fired off the salute. It felt like a blessing, this small thing he’d been given to say. He saw her gaze shift to the mechanism that would release the casket into the sea. Beyond it the sea looked as hard and gray as the side of the ship itself.

The ship’s chaplain stepped forward and set about putting death in perspective. Not the end of things but the beginning. She moved slightly away and stood next to the casket, laid her gloved hand on top.

Calmer noticed Jensen then, off to the side in his dress whites, his mind a hundred miles away. Calmer remembered that he’d once heard him say the navy was his life.

The wind was picking up, pressing the widow’s skirt into her legs, revealing her as clearly as if, in the same clothes, she’d just been pulled out of a swimming pool. She did not fuss with the skirt or turn away from the wind. She stood, her hand resting on the casket.

The chaplain finished his opening remarks and two members of the honor guard stepped forward to remove the flag, folding it into a tight triangle—the folding took a long time because of the wind—and then laid it in the widow’s hands. She accepted it awkwardly, as you might take a baby if you were handed one with a loaded diaper. Then she stepped back to the place she had been before and again leaned slightly in to Calmer’s arm, as if they’d made up after a quarrel.

The congressman from the neighboring district came forward now, holding a Bible. He faced her, smiling kindly, and then opened to Psalm 19 and began to read. It turned out he’d been a Bible thumper himself before he got into politics. He had to speak up to be heard over the wind, and to hold the page with the flat of his hand to keep it from blowing him into the New Testament, and after he finished, he put his hand on Mrs. Toebox’s shoulder and then bent toward her and spoke into her hair. Calmer could not hear what he said. The widow stepped back and shook her head, and the congressman nodded to the chaplain, and then the chaplain nodded to another officer, who nodded to an enlisted man, who saluted the officer and tripped the mechanism that sprung the board, and in that exact moment, the wind died and the world held its breath.

The board dropped, the sound of the casket sliding off into eternity was like a long jump shot getting nothing but net, and then followed a moment of silence so long that you could almost think something had snared the box on the way down.

Finally, though, the splash. As if together they had willed it to hit the water. Calmer relaxed and could not even guess at what he had been afraid had gone wrong. Gravity?