Spooner (18 page)

His teacher came to the house one afternoon after school to talk over the problem with Calmer. This was Miss Bell, who was
also a looker but no Miss Tuttle. Miss Bell was getting married in June and had invited the whole class to her wedding. They
sent Spooner outside to play.

Spooner sat on the steps, pulling ticks the size of lima beans out of the Shakers’ coon dog’s ears, waiting for Calmer and
Miss Bell to finish talking and tell him what they’d decided to tell him, and it was while he sat on the steps waiting that
he began to wonder if something was wrong with him that the rest of them all knew about but hadn’t said, like the puppy being
deaf. Maybe they knew about the weight on his chest; maybe they knew that eventually it was going to press all the air out
of his body.

The more Spooner thought about that, the more sense it made, and thinking about it had a certain beneficial effect in that
he stopped worrying about his brother strangling at night and worried instead about himself. He was still afraid to go to
sleep, and occasionally was so afraid at three or four o’clock in the morning that he whiffed the faint odor of Jaquith’s
mule splitting open in the burn pit.

A week passed, and then another, and nothing changed or got better, and he could not stop being afraid or thinking of being
afraid, which were the same thing, and one day after school, without particularly even realizing what he was doing, Spooner
walked out into the treeless empty lot that lay between his grandmother’s house and the woods, carrying the pail and shovel
he’d gotten when they’d gone to the beach in Savannah, and dug around in an anthill roughly the size of the back porch, stirring
the nest into wildness, and then sat down in the middle of it, his arms around his legs, his chin resting on his knees, like
some teenager dreaming of her true love.

The burning started inside his thigh, where he’d felt them crawling a few seconds earlier, tickling him, and then came rolling
in like bad weather. The ants crawled into his underpants and up his back, and between his arms and his chest, and Spooner
stayed where he was, lost at the center of a wild, live fire, in a place without order, or patterns, and a little later, he
threw back his head and yelled.

Calmer had just seated himself in the kitchen to administer a bottle of formula. It was the baby’s face that changed first—some
shadow of worry passing over it—and then the sound came to Calmer too, faintly, nothing more really than a stir in the still
kitchen air, and he looked again at the child, his beautiful, pale-haired son, and understood somehow something had happened.

He handed Darrow to Spooner’s mother on the way out the door. Darrow loved to eat and fussed some at being taken away from
the table empty. Lily and her mother were sitting in the front room, drinking iced tea—they were friendlier now that they
weren’t under the same roof—and he heard Lily’s mother issue a particular snort that she often issued as he left the house,
then heard her say, “He’ll spoil that child rotten.”

Calmer came down the steps sideways, like a dancer.

Spooner went loose with relief, knowing he was saved, and tried to stand to meet him, but his eyes were swollen nearly shut,
and the day went light and dark, and he tipped and fell, landing on his face in the same spot where he had been sitting. His
nose hit first and broke like an egg, and he lay stunned while the world passed over him, blistering everything it touched,
blood and dirt in his teeth, the ants on his lips, his cheeks, his legs. Inside his ears. He felt them differently now, as
something almost liquid, a slow, scalding wash that seemed to raise him up as if he were floating.

And then he was lifted up and was astonished at being airborne, at the feel of cool air moving across his face.

Calmer had him in his arms and against his chest, the way he would carry firewood, and he was running. It was strange to be
held like this—it was so long since he had been held—and strange to feel the power loose in Calmer, to think this was what
had been inside him all the time. He could feel Calmer’s heart pounding, or perhaps hear it, and his fear, and in the next
few moments, pounding for home, he knew Calmer as well as he ever would and was as close to him as he would ever be.

He tried to open his eyes, wanting to see Calmer’s face, but his vision had been cropped by the swelling down to a narrow
line, and someplace outside that line, the whole world was rolling and unattached. He thought of the baby and wondered if
this was how Vincent Heights looked upside down. And then Calmer was running up the steps, eleven brick steps, Spooner had
counted them a thousand times, and then they were through the door and out of the sun, and the air was cool and familiar.

He heard his mother somewhere in the distance, asking what was wrong, the old edge of tragedy in her voice, and that was familiar
too.

Calmer took Spooner straight to the bathroom and holding him in one arm, leaned over to fill the tub. He brushed the ants
off Spooner’s arms and legs, roughly, as if he were angry, then pulled off Spooner’s clothes, shirt and shorts and underpants,
uncovering what looked like a whole new nest of them when his underpants came off, running around all over his pecker like
it was recess. He felt them in his ears again, and his hair.

He glimpsed Margaret in the bathroom doorway, a hand faintly on Calmer’s shoulder as she peeked around him to see what had
happened, and as he watched, her face went colorless and slack, as if she’d been slapped and her cheek hadn’t had time yet
to begin to color. And in her reflection he saw the meaning of what was going on, and this was the thing he’d been afraid
of when the weight pressed into him at night.

Calmer picked him up and set him in the bathtub, the spigot still running wide open, and laid him carefully in the cool water.
When he looked again, Margaret had begun to cry, and Spooner tried crying too but somehow had forgotten how.

And now his mother was at the doorway behind Margaret, her fingers covering her mouth, and Calmer went over his scalp, scrubbing,
and for a little while the air rained ants. He was still out of breath from the run, and knelt on one knee beside the tub,
as if he were proposing marriage. He put his hand behind Spooner’s head and lowered him farther into the water, and it came
up around his face. “Easy does it,” he said, “just take it easy.”

What that meant, Spooner had no idea. He lifted his head and his ears unclogged and cleared, and he heard his mother. “Calmer?”
she said. She was beginning to wheeze, the onset of an attack. He knew that sound like the first verse of “Dixie.” She was
trying to get closer to the tub, closer to the tragedy, but the bathroom was small, and Margaret wasn’t giving up her spot.

“Just a minute,” Calmer said without turning around, still catching his breath, almost like he didn’t have time for her now.
He would make his apologies later, but for now he had his fingers against a spot on Spooner’s neck, counting his pulse, watching
him breathe. Spooner had never heard him speak to her in that way before, or any of them, really. Calmer always paid attention.

“Should I call the doctor?” she said.

He nodded, still impatient. “Call the doctor,” he said.

Spooner lifted his head and looked down toward his feet, and the surface of the water was a blanket of dark bodies, some of
them crawling up the sides of the tub. There were also ants on Calmer’s shirt and arms, and he noticed them at the same time
Spooner did, and swept them off like crumbs, rolling their bodies into so many boogers before they dropped back into the water.
He checked Spooner’s hair, and then his ears, and then lifted him out of the tub.

Spooner began to slip, and Calmer moved him to the other arm.

From here Spooner caught his reflection in the mirror, his eyelids swollen into the shape of eyeballs themselves, red welts
up and down his arms and legs, splayed across his chest and stomach.

Calmer wrapped him in a towel and pulled the plug on the ants.

Spooner was suddenly sweating hot, and just as suddenly shivering with cold. Calmer carried him past Margaret and his mother
and laid him in bed, and the sheets were cool and soft. Calmer put a thermometer under his arm and felt again at the place
on his neck.

He heard his mother again, the wheezing deep and pronounced.

“Calmer?” she said, but the control she had over him was gone, and he seemed not to have heard her voice.

Calmer came in later with some popcorn—white delicacies in a dishpan—and a stack of Spooner’s comic books. He showed Spooner
the bites on his own arms and neck and said that tomorrow they would look like they gave each other measles. Trying to pretend
that by tomorrow it wouldn’t matter.