Spooner (30 page)

As his last official act as principal, Dr. Baber presented Coach Evelyn Tinker with the Teacher of the Year Award during graduation.

“Coach Tinker has given our students and staff a transfusion of new school spirit and pride into the entire student body,
encouraging even some of our marginal citizens into a healthy interest and respect for athletics…” And he continued on from
there until half the place had dozed off.

The same wording showed up again later that summer, word for word, in the school board’s press release announcing Coach Tinker’s
promotion to the position formerly held by Dr. Dean Baber, principal of Prairie Glen High.

The board hadn’t told Calmer of Tinker’s promotion ahead of time, had let him think it was his right up until the announcement
in the
Mercury-News
, and a week or two later when the president of the board thought he’d had enough time to cool off, he called Calmer one evening
to say that he knew he could count on him to continue his excellent work for the district and for the community. “As you know,”
he said, reading perhaps from a prepared text, “you, Calmer, are irreplaceable to us. And between you and I, this thing was
a very close call. I want you to know—”

“Between you and me…” Calmer said.

The line went quiet. “Calmer?” Stallings said. “You still there, buddy?”

“Where else?”

“You were saying something, between you and I—”

“Me,” Calmer said. “I said between you and me.”

“Yes?”

“That’s it. You and me.”

The connection was broken and the president of the school board looked at the phone and then at his wife, who drank a little
bit herself.

He said, “That was strange.”

Four days later, there was a call from another school board, this one in a place called Falling Rapids, South Dakota, about
a new high school, just under construction. Calmer had been there twice in the last eighteen months for interviews.

“The only stipulation we’d have,” the man said, “is we’d need you as soon as possible.”

The bonus offers Spooner got were all for more money than Calmer made in a year. Thirty-eight thousand dollars was the one
he took, from the Cincinnati Reds. Spooner’s mother was stunned at the figure and wandered around the house feeling purposeless
for days, having hated rich people—all except the Kennedys—all her life. Spooner himself had a different feeling, as if he
were being watched like a mouse in those first moments in the terrarium, before it sees the snake.

The check arrived special delivery, and Spooner opened the envelope and looked at the amount, thirty-eight thousand dollars
and no cents, and was suddenly visited with the old feeling that he had been caught, and was suddenly and strangely reluctant
to even touch it, did not want to accept the largest amount of money he’d ever seen or heard of, and tried handing it over
to Calmer instead.

“Here,” he said, “I don’t need this.”

Calmer said, “You hold on to your money. You can never tell when you might need it,” and patted his hand, a strange gesture
to interpret.

Still, Spooner could hear the South Dakota farmer in Calmer’s words and remembered sitting with him at a gas station back
in Milledgeville one cold January day on the way to school—Calmer had been out in the driveway in the dark at five-thirty
that morning with a flashlight, still in his robe and slippers, trying to fix the car’s heater and two hours later he sat
behind the steering wheel in his uniform, his fingernails on one hand still black with crescents of grease, the windshield
fogged over, sealing them in, and stared at the coins in the palm of his hand, trying to decide if he should go back into
the station over a nickel. Shortchanged a nickel.

You can never tell when you might need it.

In September Calmer and Spooner’s mother and his two younger brothers moved to South Dakota, and Spooner bought a three-year-old
Jeep and drove to Wichita, Kansas, to join the Reds’ AA club, the Wingnuts. Early the following spring, he was sent to the
Billings Mustangs to work on his control, and there, six months shy of his nineteenth birthday and demoted to the bullpen,
he picked up a baseball one afternoon to loosen his arm, and with that first easy toss, the most familiar and natural motion
of his life, shattered his elbow like so much glass. He heard it before he felt it, and when the feeling came, it came first
as an instant of bewilderment, and then he saw what he felt, looked down at the underside of the elbow where a shard of bone
pressed up into his skin like a tent pole and then, at the softest possible touch, the skin tore and the shard sprung up,
white and jagged, as if it were raising a point of order.

Calmer was there with him when he woke up after the first surgery. There would be eight more surgeries before they gave up
on making an elbow of it again, and Calmer was always there when he woke up.

“It’s good news,” he said. “It was benign.” And an instant later remembered himself and said, “Your momma sends her love.”

Philadelphia

S
pooner came to the city on a train, in a snowstorm, a week before Christmas. He’d spent half his money on the one-way ticket
from Florida, where everything he had except the dog and the clothes in the washing machine had gone up in fire. Regardless
of all the places he’d been and was no longer welcome, and all the chances he’d had and blown, he was still surprised at these
glimpses into the way things worked, at how little forgiveness was built in to the plans.

He had been sitting on the floor barefoot and naked on the afternoon of the fire, unemployed, on the outs with his wife, talking
about the weather with his mongrel Harry. Harry had just come in out of the rain, as wet as new born and smelling like an
army blanket, and they were watching the end of the storm through a screen door on the east side of a one-car garage that
had been converted into a laundry room.

“Well, they say we need the rain,” Spooner said.

Spooner would turn thirty later that fall; the dog would be three the same day. Gonad-wise, neither had been altered, although
there had been attempts on them both. More than Spooner, Harry was streetwise, and could see trouble coming a mile away.

Just now he laid back his ears and slightly lifted the flaps covering his teeth. You could almost think he was smiling.

The tow truck driver appeared as a shadow in the screen door, shading his eyes as he leaned in to it to look inside. Spooner
saw the hands first and thought of bat wings, of the possibility that he’d just stumbled across the greatest bat in the history
of the South. Capture the bat, and the world will beat a path to your door.

Finally, a plan.

A face appeared, but Spooner couldn’t tell that it was a face yet, at this point could only say in regard to what was on the
other side of the screen that even if it wasn’t a bat, it appeared to be carrying diseases.

“Mr. Spooner?”

The laundry room and the attached house belonged to the only friend Spooner had left in Florida in those days, with the exception
of the mongrel next to him on the floor. Ever since the marriage broke up, the dog never left him alone more than a few minutes
at a time. The friend came from eastern Tennessee and had once had a hillbilly band called Melancholy Panties, and a hit song
the band was named for about going through a drawer full of heartbreaking panties, and in those days it seemed like every
girl in the South wanted a ride on his bus. Now he was a newspaperman, and a good one, not bitter or used up, but he’d had
his own band when he was twenty years old and the truth was that nothing since had much caught his attention.

How the friend had gotten here from there was a long story, and mostly about his wife. She had been one of the girls who took
a ride on the bus but when the ride was over she’d refused to get off. Sometimes that’s how it happens—one of them refuses
to leave. Her name was Honey, and she was a woman now, and like so many women of Spooner’s acquaintance, she’d looked at him
one day and seemed to come all at once to her senses. It was always the same, like they’d wandered into a pet store and almost
bought a monkey. There had been a load of them by now, these wives of his friends, women who gave off a certain playful, warm
tenderness in his direction at first, as if Spooner were something she and her husband might share, and then one day froze
over, with the smile still intact, and began watching every move he made and making notes for later, thinking perhaps that
itemizing his faults would somehow arrest the Spoonerly leanings of her own husband. What button in them he pushed, Spooner
never knew. It had been going on a long time, though. In Minneapolis, his own cousin’s wife once broke into tears at the sight
of him on the front porch.

Spooner got up, wrapped a towel around his waist, and stepped to the door. He didn’t put on his tennis shoes because that
was where his wallet and his money were stashed, and beyond that, both pairs of his socks were in the washer, and as far as
the shoes themselves were concerned, he would as soon stick his bare feet in the septic tank.