Spooner (2 page)

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.”

O
n 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
.

O
n 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.