Spooner (27 page)

Right now, for instance, he faced the following choice every afternoon between fourth and fifth period: He could step into
a bathroom stall and quiet his reproductive system or take his chances on being caught with an erection in music appreciation.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, which—no happy coincidence—was what the reproductive system was all about. Meaning
the fear of being caught—he himself had been in the bathroom when Mr. Craddock, the dean of boys, had stormed in and broken
through a stall door trying to catch a kid named Wendell Jeeter smoking, and instead found him in the act of spilling his
seed—had to be weighed against the possibility of being called to the chalkboard by Miss Degruso. The problem with music appreciation
was that Spooner’s seat was directly in back of the smoldering figure of Dee Dee Victor, at whose back he stared all period
long, studying her details through the sometimes translucent shirts she wore, in love with her shoulders, her shoulder blades,
her blood pressure, every little pebble of her spine. And when she leaned forward to take notes, a narrow space would open
along the line of her skirt, and he would lean forward too, inhaling the air like it was loaded with roast beef, thinking
that what he was breathing that instant had just floated out from under her skirt. And then old Peckenpaw would float out
too, like a piece of driftwood, and begin to leak, and what if at this critical, boned, leaking, helpless moment Miss Degruso
asked him to come to the front and distinguish a piccolo from a fife? It was possible. In fact, that was what she’d asked
Russell Hodge to do on the day he’d broken her leg in the storage locker.

Now, however, as he and Russell Hodge continued to stare at each other in the hallway, Russell’s expression continued to change,
dread to misgivings, misgivings to confusion, and settling finally almost on the same empty look he’d had lying on the dirt
next to home plate after Spooner had plunked him in the head.

The fire alarm rang—one of the Ploof twins at it again probably—and Hodge jumped at the sudden noise, and then, regaining
himself, turned and looked up the wall to the spot where the bell was installed, and, finding the source of the noise, he
smiled. One of his front teeth had grown in crooked, and while Spooner watched, a line of saliva dropped half a foot from
his lip and then held, dancing in the eerie, artificial light, and then broke off and landed on his shirt.

Which was when Spooner noticed that Russell had his shirt on inside out.

Spooner next saw Russell Hodge half an hour before baseball practice. Hodge was sitting on a wooden bench in the caged locker
room area where the team dressed, naked except for his socks and cleats, studying a piece of stiff, crumpled gauze about the
size of a finch. He turned it one way and another, trying to place what it was. The gauze was crusted with dried blood, and
he abruptly shook it, and then held it up to his good ear to hear if it was ticking.

S
pooner did not like to be told how to throw a baseball, much less where to throw it. The throwing came from a thousand afternoons
outside his grandmother’s house back in Georgia, alone, with his mother inside, crying or sick, and it was secret then, the
things he did to get away from her, and somehow secret to him now.

Besides, everything that could be said about throwing a ball had already been said a thousand times, and he understood he
was exceptional at this one thing in his life and was chary of talking about it, of even thinking about it too much, afraid
of losing the sensation, afraid the happiness of it would dissolve. That was usually the story when he went over a thing too
much, began thinking about what he’d done or hadn’t done or should have done instead, or could have done if he’d only done
it better. Which is to say that before he’d finished chewing a thing over, it was tasteless.

Least of all was he inclined to discuss throwing with Tinker, but Tinker—who hadn’t got where he was by worrying if he was
wanted—continued to come to Spooner again and again, making sure, as he put it, that they were on the same page.

And Spooner continued to throw the ball where he wanted to throw it, and the local papers wrote their headlines, and then
one of the Chicago newspapers noticed the local papers and sent a stringer around, who wrote his own stories and pretty soon
even the first-string big-city reporters came around to look for themselves, some of them famous, and as the story gained
impetus Tinker pressed all the harder to be included.

Not long after the big-city reporters showed up, there were scouts, two of them, sitting behind the screen in hats and short
sleeves and ties, charting every pitch Spooner threw, and always Tinker would find a reason to call time-out when they were
in the seats, to walk slowly to the mound, put his arm around Spooner’s shoulder, and turn him away from the stands—the way
you might create a bit of privacy to tell someone bad news. He would say, “Let’s make sure we’re on the same page with this
guy, Spoonerman,” or simply, “Let’s move this guy off the plate.” Sometimes delivering this message in the middle of a string
of perfect innings.

After the game, on the bus ride home, he would drop into the seat next to Spooner—the seat next to Spooner was pretty much
always empty—and try to insinuate himself into the matter of Spooner’s throwing again. Always pushing him to throw more inside.
“What are you
afraid
of, Spoonerman? That’s what it looks like. It looks like you’re afraid.”

Which was not exactly it, but it was clearer to Spooner all the time that Russell Hodge was no longer Russell Hodge. He was
now timid at the plate, unable to find the strike zone on the occasions he was allowed to pitch and, more worrisome, seemed
to be taken over by an unnatural sweetness of disposition, and was often distracted as he stood out in his new position of
center field by some small creature or plant, and often was watching it or smelling it when fly balls were hit his way, and
only his great natural speed, unaffected by the beaning, had saved him from half a dozen embarrassing errors. Russell Hodge
was taking time to smell the roses, and it was a pitiful thing to watch, and it would have taken a colder heart than Spooner’s
not to regret being the cause.

And so he held Tinker off, one advance after another, like a girl in the backseat who didn’t want to be felt up.

The truth was, Tinker did not much understand baseball, a sport in which no one was doing anything 90 percent of the time.
To Tinker, it was more like a
student activity
than a sport, and he had taken over as the head baseball coach only after hearing the manager Billy Martin on television
one day saying that baseball was a contest of wills over who owned the inside part of the plate. Tinker, who had trained himself
to think in these terms, saw immediately that life was also a contest of wills over who owned the inside of the plate. He
coached it and wrote it in his column and used it in public appearances.

By now the whole Village of Prairie Glen hung on every word he said and still this kid Spoonerman wouldn’t listen.

His fee for public speaking these days was one hundred and fifty dollars, and you can imagine what she said when she heard
about that.

Nine games into the season, a columnist showed up from the
Chicago Tribune
, arrived late and watched only the last inning of a rain-shortened game, and wrote that an instant before Spooner’s slider
reached the plate, an intervention seemed to take place, and a pitch would dance out like a fish hitting the lure, and predicting
its movement was like predicting the thoughts of a rainbow trout on the hook.

It was about this time that Spooner began to understand that newspaper writers were going to write what they were going to
write no matter what they saw when they arrived on the scene.

A
nd so it happened that Calmer looked up from his desk one afternoon and saw Evelyn Tinker standing in the doorway, the ceiling
lights reflecting off his skull, which had been shorn of hair down to maybe a sixteenth of an inch.

“Welcome, pilgrim,” Calmer said.

There was a yellowed black-and-white picture on the wall of a professor out somewhere on the prairie, with a dozen students
before him on their knees, pressing their ears against a railroad track. The professor was holding a sledgehammer. Tinker
knew it was a professor because he had glasses and a beard. He stared at the picture a long time.

Calmer’s tie was loose and his sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, and when Tinker finally turned away from the picture,
he noticed Calmer’s forearms and wondered if he’d played ball in high school. He wondered if in some way Ottosson’s forearms
might explain how Spooner could throw a baseball.

Calmer motioned to the empty chair on the other side of his desk. Tinker took it and rolled up onto one hip to cross his legs.
There was something discordant about Tinker with crossed legs, like a cowboy riding into town sidesaddle. The legs themselves
were thickened, and perhaps shortened, by years of four-hundred-pound squats in the weight room, and his forward foot protruded
like the beginnings of an erection.

Tinker had another look at the picture. “I like that,” he said. “I could use it myself to help motivate some of these kids
I’ve got.”

Calmer smiled and waited. The coach continued to stare at the picture.

“So, Evelyn, what can I do for you?”

Tinker turned back to Calmer, not much caring for the familiar use of his first name by an ordinary member of the faculty.
He liked to be called
coach.
Even Mrs. Tinker called him Coach.

He said, “It’s about our boy,” and realized that he’d just at that moment forgotten Spooner’s name, although now that he thought
about it, he wasn’t sure he’d known it in the first place. It wasn’t Ottosson, that much he knew.

“Warren?”

It didn’t sound right, but Tinker nodded along, thinking Ottosson should know. He said, “See, Warren seems to be one of these
kids that come along now and then that you can’t coach. That isn’t coachable, if you follow what I mean.”

Calmer nodded as if he had some idea of what Tinker was talking about. “In what way?” he said.

“Well, you know, you coach him, but he doesn’t listen.”

A fire alarm went off in the hallway, the Ploof twins strike again. Every time one of them pulled the alarm, the whole school
had to exit in an orderly manner, single file, and stand in the parking lot until the fire department got there and shut off
the alarm. The Ploofs themselves were untouchable. Even if an eyewitness saw one of them do it, each of them would only blame
the other.

Tinker turned in his chair and stared as the students in the hallway filed out. Smoking, horsing around, dancing—not orderly
and single-file at all. “Right there,” he said, “that’s exactly what I mean.”

Calmer got up and closed the door against the sound of the alarm, and when he sat down again it was on the edge of his desk.
“You were talking about Warren…”

“Let’s just say I’m not sure he follows everything, if you get my meaning. I thought maybe it was something you’d run into
with him at home.” There was a pause, Tinker beginning to feel uncomfortable, like somehow it was his fault the kid was slow.
“But the important thing now is the scouts. They’re out there every day, and they’re interested, I can tell you that. This
could be the chance of a lifetime.”

“Scouts?”

“Big-league scouts. They’re required by the state to notify me before they can make contact with the student; it’s a state
law.” There had been only the two scouts, and one of them had only stayed a few days and left. The other one was still hanging
around.

Tinker turned for another look at the picture on the wall, feeling Calmer watching. He wished he could tell him to sit back
down behind his desk where he belonged.

“And what is it again that you want him to listen to?”

“To coaching.”

“About what?”

“About playing ball. That’s what we’re talking about. This could be his chance.”