Spooner Read Online Free PDF

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