Spooner (55 page)

“Why do I need to know how to load a rifle?” she said. He told her again it was a shotgun and not a rifle, but when Mrs. Spooner
wasn’t interested in something, she didn’t pay attention to the details.

“Because of the coyotes,” he said. “They’ve been coming right into backyards all over the island for house cats.”

The next afternoon they went into the meadow and he showed her how to shoot. He wanted Marlin to hear it for himself, wanted
him to hear that they had a gun.

“It’s the coyotes,” he said to her again. “We could lose the cat.”

Falling Rapids

B
y the end of that year, citizens all over the state of South Dakota were saying they might as well live in New York City,
which in the state of South Dakota was not a compliment. Murder-wise, the world had gone upside down. First the number—four
homicides statewide, against the annual average of .8—and even more alarming, none of the killings occurred on any of the
state’s various reservations but were all east-of-the-river, white-on-white affairs, not an Indian in the bunch. Three males,
one female, the last to go being Dr. Merle Cowhurl, D.Ed., superintendent of the largest school district in the state. Cowhurl
was pronounced a goner at 5:25 p.m., Christmas Eve.

Dr. Cowhurl was described the following morning in the
Morning-Ledger
as an exacting sort of fellow, a stickler for respect and discipline and the district’s dress code, as well as a stickler
for being addressed as
doctor
, and not just by members of the various student bodies but by the faculties as well. Such warm remembrances were pieced together
in the half hour before deadline by a skeleton crew working the city desk of the newspaper and, in the way these things happen,
came to serve as Cowhurl’s legacy, and many people who’d never thought much of him while he was on the job thought better
of him, reading that, thought he was exactly what the school district needed all along.

There were arguments of course regarding the crime itself. Some elements of the population, undeluged as yet by Mothers Against
Drunk Driving, refused to count Cowhurl’s death as murder, would not accept a car accident as a homicide no matter how drunk
the driver was, a legitimate enough point for another time, perhaps, but in this particular instance obscured the larger,
more pressing question of how much of an accident the accident had been.

This much was inarguable: Dr. Cowhurl was run over in his own driveway by his own wife, Arlene, who at the time was behind
the wheel of a cheerful, cherry-red, twelve-cylinder Jaguar convertible he’d bought her as an anniversary present only seven
weeks before, in early November. The car had just 750 miles on the odometer and was still technically in the break-in period,
when sudden starts and stops were not recommended by the manufacturer. The dealership was 60 miles away in Omaha, Nebraska,
and the car had already been towed there twice, first when the fuel pump quit and then again after Mrs. Cowhurl pulled a little
too suddenly into a parking spot at the Alibi Lounge and liquor store and bent the front end of the frame. Cowhurl had been
furious at her carelessness and, as a lesson in personal responsibility, deducted the towing charge from her monthly allowance.

According to the medical examiner’s report, Mrs. Cowhurl was operating the Jaguar at approximately eighty-five miles an hour,
heading south on South Ninth Avenue, when she abruptly changed heading and barreled eastward across a neighbor’s lawn, blowing
through the tall hedge that served as a boundary between the neighbor’s yard and the Cowhurls’, and plucked him off the controls
of a new self-propelled Craftsman snowblower, which he’d given himself that same morning as an early Christmas present.

As per the warning instructions in the snowblower’s manual, Dr. Cowhurl was wearing goggles and earplugs when the end came,
in addition to his usual outdoor gear: insulated hunting boots, earmuffs, mittens, and a parka. Thus the educator was all
in all pretty well sealed off from the outside world, which in the following weeks his detractors would whisper had been his
modus operandi since the day he took over as superintendent, and in any case probably never recognized what was coming even
if he’d sensed it in time to look up, as Mrs. Cowhurl attacked out of the setting sun, which as it happened was also the direction
the snowblower was throwing snow at the time, into a fierce, cutting wind rolling down out of Canada, which in turn was throwing
the snow back into Dr. Cowhurl’s face.

Two weather fronts were closing in on the northern part of the state at the same time that afternoon, and the twenty-two-year-old
television weatherman had predicted a once-in-a-lifetime storm, and the old-timers had been predicting more or less the same
thing for three months—saying all along that a mild autumn promised a hard winter—and with this convergence of predictions
plus the timing of the storm itself, the event was named even before it was delivered: the Great Christmas Eve Blizzard, not
that it was anything compared to the Great Easter Blizzard, which occurred back in ’49 and froze to death half a dozen drunks
downtown yet didn’t cause the cancellation of a single church service in town, or even postpone the traditional Easter-egg
hunt in Keisler Park. But then, people in those days were made of harder stuff—ask anybody out at Sunset Convalescent—even
the children, and the Easter eggs were real eggs, not some chocolate/marshmallow thing wrapped in tinfoil.

But Christmas Eve:

The cherry-red British convertible meanders peacefully up Ninth Avenue, twelve English cylinders humming sweetly together
beneath the hood, Mrs. Cowhurl behind the wheel in sunglasses and a scarf. A sound then, something like clearing your throat,
and the machine seems to slightly buck, and an instant later it is moving at eighty-three miles an hour, a speed it is still
going a few seconds later when it slams into the six-inch curb at the edge of her neighbor’s property, bending the Jaguar’s
frame (five thousand minimum for that, as Mrs. Cowhurl’s previous jounce into the curbing down in front of the Alibi was much
gentler and cost $1675) and then goes airborne, crossing the first twenty feet of the neighbor’s yard in sudden and complete
silence, the mighty twelve-cylinder Jaguar engine having seized shut with vapor lock just previous to leaving the ground—the
sad truth is, reliability has never been British Motors’ long suit. At any rate, the automobile, with its huge twelve-cylinder
engine, is more than a little nose heavy, and it lands as you might expect on the front tires and front bumper and skids in
that posture across most of what is left of the neighbor’s lawn, taking out a section of the hedge and then a section of Dr.
Cowhurl himself, catching him just at the knickers, breaking both his legs, and, according to investigating officers on the
scene, catapulting him twenty-nine yards into the branches of the fir tree in the middle of his front yard. Thus, twenty-nine
yards becomes the official distance Cowhurl was flung, although a blind man can see that the whole lot itself is barely thirty
yards wide and that the investigating officer has confused yards with feet. Still, the report is the report and twenty-nine
yards is and will remain the official distance, just as the verb
catapulting
is and will always be the incident’s official verb, at least the one that will be used by the
Morning-Ledger
and every radio and television station in the state whenever the incident is rehashed. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of stories,
and Dr. Cowhurl catapults through them, every one.

Although no one claims to have seen the actual impact, it is surmised that Dr. Cowhurl rebounded slightly off the ground after
he dropped out of the fir tree because a banana-shaped piece of his scalp is found wedged into the car’s front bumper, accordioned
by the force of impact—
accordioned
being another verb that will appear whenever the event is reworked in the press.

But a little scalping is the least of the damage, as a moment after the banana-shaped section is removed from his hairline,
the automobile’s left front tire rolls over his head, leaving a detailed if slightly elongated likeness of the doctor’s profile
in the snow—right down to the front teeth and earplug—and even if the skull itself looks remarkably intact to the eye, it
is not so to the touch, and the medical examiner is surprised and not a little queasy when he lifts it later and finds that
it is soft and hard in random places, like a thawing chicken.

The medical examiner is late to the scene, due to family obligations and the weather—it is Christmas Eve, after all—but once
arrived wastes no time pronouncing that the automobile hit Dr. Cowhurl at a high rate of speed, as it takes violent impact
to
retroflex
a human’s patellae, not to mention catapulting him twenty-nine yards into a fir tree, not to mention squashing his skull
and dragging him beneath the rear undercarriage all the way to the house, where the vehicle finally comes to rest. And that
fast,
retroflex
joins
catapulting
and
accordioned
as part of the incident’s official language.

A neighbor appears and reports that a moment after the Jaguar crossed his yard and took Dr. Cowhurl off his machine, Mrs.
Cowhurl exited her vehicle, walked calmly into the house and opened the bathroom window, where she could be heard to enjoy
a long tinkle, then, by her own admission, she combed her hair and put on fresh makeup and returned to the car, checking one
way and then the other, before backing it out of the yard, over Dr. Cowhurl, and then parking it in the garage. Innocently
hoping, as her attorneys would posit at her trial, that Dr. Cowhurl would not notice the damage to the car.

N
ews of Dr. Cowhurl’s sudden end spread through the city like the previous spring’s epidemic of Dutch elm disease, which had
claimed all the trees that once canopied South Ninth Avenue, and left the neighborhood looking frail and bald, something like
the aftermath of chemotherapy. Yet the two blocks of South Ninth Avenue where Calmer lived had for fifty years been the city’s
unofficial center for Nativity scenes, and the tradition held fast, unaffected by the naked look of the neighborhood. As always,
there were angry letters to the newspaper charging idea-stealing and copycatting, and hard feelings, and grudges, and a fistfight/wrestling
match that had gone on for half an hour before the police arrived to break it up. Lawsuits were filed and half a dozen lawyers
were already at work on the case.

But like every other year for the past fifty years, endless lines of cars had driven past the various Ninth Avenue depictions
of the birth of Baby Jesus, some featuring live livestock, and now, as news of the death passed through the little city, the
populace bundled up and headed back out into the teeth of the two-front storm again, even though it was Christmas Eve, when
traditionally the Christmas-display looking was over and there were family dinners and stocking hangings and present-opening
traditions to attend, not to mention church services to remind the children of the true meaning of Christmas.

Calmer watched the procession outside from the living room, sitting on the sofa with his feet crossed on the coffee table.
Cars crawled past the house, children pressed wet-mouthed against the back windows. The Peace sign blinked pale blue from
the roof across the street, the color growing brighter as the afternoon turned dark.

It was Calmer’s first Christmas Eve alone, and his was the only house on the block without at least a token Nativity display,
not even a wise man in the bushes in front of the porch. He had turned off the kitchen and living room lights before he sat
down, and the only illumination in the place came from a tiny red glowing button on the hi-fi. It was enough to see by though,
and he looked around the room thinking this was it, where they’d ended up, as close as he ever came to making her happy.

He had been carrying around a dose of the flu for ten days, a strain bad enough that he’d called off his regular holiday trip
to Montana to be with Darrow and his family. He hated to miss the little girls—four of them, all rock climbers and long-distance
runners; miracles—but more than that he hated missing Darrow with the little girls. In that version of his son, he saw himself.