Spooner (36 page)

Spooner flew out to South Dakota and stopped at a store on the way from the airport for a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black.
Calmer would never buy good Scotch for himself, and they put away most of the bottle that night, sitting at the kitchen table,
and Spooner’s mother came out of the bedroom at hourly intervals to fill her water glass and then squint at the clock. She
wore an old robe with Kleenex stuffed into the pockets, and covered her mouth with her hand, not to offend anyone with her
sleep breath. All her sisters did that, one of the tricks of the trade they’d picked up learning to be ladies in the grand
old house in Milledgeville.

“Are you two going to stay up all night?”

“I’ll be in in a little while, my love,” he said. He’d called her
my love
since the day she accepted his proposal of marriage, all those years ago, and all those years ago she had stopped hearing
it.

Around midnight, Calmer went to the sink and made drinks—he used a shot glass to measure, something in his nature wanting
the exact amount—and with his back turned, affording him at least that bit of privacy, Spooner asked what had happened.

Calmer didn’t answer at first. He brought the drinks back to the table and sat down. Spooner saw that the whole thing was
too big for Calmer to get hold of now, that he didn’t know where to start. Spooner was familiar with the feeling.

Calmer rubbed his eyes and considered his drink. He remembered something then and reached over the drink for an old copy of
the
New Yorker
magazine lying behind the salt and pepper shakers, and the heel of his hand bumped the rim of the glass and spilled it over.
Calmer made no move to catch the glass, did not even set it upright on the table. He did pick up the magazine to keep it from
getting soaked, and watched the ice cubes drop off the table one by one, and pretty soon what was left of the drink pooled
and began to drip through the crack where the two sides of the table fit together.

He smiled at Spooner and shrugged, as if the spill were the explanation. Spooner got up and made another drink and then looked
out the kitchen window and thought of Calmer stepping out his front door every morning to pick up the newspaper, and every
morning glancing across the street at the house where Cowhurl lived.

“You know,” Spooner said, “if you ever needed help…” and then stopped, not knowing how to finish it.

Calmer continued to look at the spilled drink, or perhaps at his hands, one closed and resting in the palm of the other. “We’re
all right,” he said. “You hold on to your money; you’ve got a family of your own now.” Although at this point, the baby was
still on the way.

Calmer hadn’t mentioned it at home yet, but he’d taken a second job, common labor on a construction site, starting Monday.
A man at the very end of middle age, headed out into the heat of a South Dakota summer.

Spooner set the drink on the table and sat back down. He felt unconnected to the years he had spent poor—could not quite remember
what it was like to let a man touch his neck with a cattle prod for seventy dollars, or the feel of the flophouses he had
lived in, in cities all over the country, the winter he’d spent in Minneapolis pushing cars up the hill outside his rooming
house for tips when it snowed, and the week it didn’t snow and there was nothing to eat—seven days without even a piece of
gum—all that could have been someone else. With one exception, now that he thought about it. There was a morning in New Orleans
when he’d killed a pigeon in Jackson Square, chased it down and squashed it with a brick in front of a tour group of Orientals,
some of whom had taken photographs, and carried it back to his rooming house to eat. He cleaned the bird and plucked it and
boiled what was left, feet and all. He expected there was more meat on a human head.

Even now the picture of that gray, naked, waterlogged creature steaming on a paper plate floated up to him at unexpected times,
still sporting little patches of feathers—like someone who’d shaved in a hurry—still attached to its feet.

Across the table Calmer smiled at nothing in particular and said, “We’ll be fine. Onward and upward.”

Onward and upward
, he had been saying that a long time too, as long as Spooner could remember.

Spooner’s mother came into the kitchen a little before two, checking the clock, holding her hand over her mouth. Calmer got
up when he heard her in the hallway and began cleaning up the spilled drink. “We were just talking about the addition to Warren’s
family,” he said.

But even with all the years that had passed since Prairie Glen,
addition
was not a safe word to use around Spooner’s mother.

She looked at Calmer more closely and saw that he wasn’t feeling as bad about being fired as he had been before, which wasn’t
what she’d come out into the kitchen expecting to see. Not at two o’clock in the morning. She eyed the drinks next and said,
“Well, I just hope you’re both around long enough to see it graduate from high school.”

The house creaked and settled, and in a little while Calmer opened the
New Yorker
to the story he’d been meaning to point out, a pitch-perfect John Cheever story about a man who decides to swim home one
night to his house in the suburbs, one neighbor’s pool after another.

Calmer pushed the open magazine across the table and stood up, stared a moment toward the back of the house, collecting himself,
and hitched up his pajama bottoms and headed back in there to meet his fate. Yes, the man would face the music.

W
hen Spooner came home to South Dakota again, it was late September, and Calmer was helpless.

“I don’t know what’s going on with him now,” she’d said on the phone. As if a breakdown were some harebrained idea he’d read
about in the paper and decided to try for himself.

Spooner found him in the bedroom, still in his pajamas, pressed into the wall at the far side of the bed. Embarrassed to be
seen in this condition; barely able to talk. He smiled, trying to get something out. “Everything just stopped,” he said.

Spooner went upstairs to shower. His brothers were already home, their suitcases lying on top of the bunk beds in the larger
bedroom. Darrow had come from Chicago, Phillip from New Haven, where he was starting his second year at Yale.

The upstairs bedrooms were full of trophies. Phillip was the defending chess champion of the five-state region, a title he’d
held since sixth grade. In high school he’d been captain of the state-champion debate team. There was a picture of the debate
team from his senior year on the wall, and the coach had written,
For Phillip, the best debater I ever had. Good luck at Yale! Mr. Heater.

Spooner hadn’t kept anything like that himself—now that he thought about it, he didn’t have anything like that to keep—but
had never been much for trophies anyway. He imagined one for trespassing and wondered if he’d been as good at that as Phillip
was at chess or debate. As Calmer said, each to his own.

It was warm for late September, and after dinner Spooner and his brothers sat outside in the driveway on lawn chairs and Spooner
made them fresh screwdrivers. Spooner’s mother had gone to bed with the sun still in the sky. Asthma.

Presently he felt the beginnings of a cramp crawling up the inside of his thigh and realized he’d been sitting quietly for
some time, holding the frost-cold bottle of vodka between his thighs, gradually drifting off to a slightly less conscious
state of consciousness, imagining Dr. Cowhurl coming out of his house and crossing the street to express his concern and best
wishes. It rang true, exactly the sort of thing that this sort of big wheel did, on a whim, subsequent to squashing an underling.
Maybe offer to shake hands, tell the boys it was never personal, or that he hoped there were no hard feelings. The South Dakota
version of Chicken Man Testa’s appearance at Angelo Bruno’s funeral, everybody in South Philadelphia knowing who ordered the
hit.

Spooner got up and stamped his foot, trying to stretch the muscle before it knotted up, and the story started over with Cowhurl
crossing the street again, and he was suddenly disgusted with himself, knowing that all he would do if Cowhurl came over was
send him home. He set the vodka bottle down on the driveway and went in the house for an egg.

It was the first thing he’d thrown in maybe fifteen years, and the elbow began to tear at the instant his hand began to move
forward. There was a small noise, about like the first kernel of popcorn popping in a covered pan, and a moment later the
egg lay wet and glistening in the grass—it had not even made it to the street—and Spooner lay in the grass too, glistening
with sweat, wondering if the whole mechanism they’d assembled in his elbow had come apart.

Presently he looked at the elbow, tried opening and closing the hinge. It was already swelling but nothing rattled inside
and nothing poked through the skin, and he sat up in the grass, wondering if time had completely passed him by. Not just the
elbow but Spooner himself, the whole idea of Spooner. If the whole idea of throwing an egg at your neighbor’s house had no
meaning anymore, even if you still had the arm to get it there. He wondered if the injury might at least in some way demonstrate
to Calmer how much he loved him.

And then realized, suddenly, that Calmer was watching. The sun was murder at this time of the afternoon, blinding Spooner
as he looked up toward the kitchen window, which he could see was open behind the screen. There was a slightly darker shape
toward the middle of the screen, indistinct; it could have been a stain. Calmer standing at the sink behind the open window.

“The plan,” Spooner said to Darrow, “was I throw eggs at his house to lure him over, and then you make him feel academically
inadequate.” When cornered, Darrow had in the past left the occasional academic wishing he’d inflicted his advanced mind on
a different dinner table.

Spooner looked at Phillip then and saw that he’d left him out of the plan. Phillip had been out in the world a year or so
and was still getting used to it, an insult at a time. Spooner didn’t know but thought that Yale was probably a place where
nobody cared that you had been a child prodigy. Likely the school was full of those, children of
singular intelligence—
as they used to call it back when Spooner was in school and they were talking about Margaret—who showed up at Yale or Harvard
and overnight weren’t singular anymore at all. Disarmed prodigies, you might say, left to fend for themselves, to find something
besides their brains to set them apart, which would be Phillip’s situation more than most. He’d never spent any time with
people his own age; how was he supposed to know where he fit?

Spooner turned to him now, as if Phillip had been the key to the plan all along. “And in the meantime,” he said, “you run
across the street and fuck his wife.”

Phillip was quiet a moment. Had Spooner insulted him?

“You know,” Phillip said finally, thoughtfully—and who could say if this was something he’d picked up in his years as a champion
debater or something he’d picked up from Calmer?—“we haven’t heard both sides of the story yet. We haven’t heard the other
side of it at all.”

And Spooner looked back up at the kitchen window, but the dark shape in the screen was gone.

F
our years after Spooner arrived in Philadelphia, cold and hungry and broke, another pilgrim from the southern climes got off
the train at the Thirtieth Street station in much the same condition. His name, unfortunately enough, was Stanley Faint, and
he was in many ways even more out of place in the city than Spooner had been.

Then again, in other ways he was already at home. Stanley Faint was a prizefighter, and Philadelphia was the place for that.
There were hundreds of boxing gyms in the city’s neighborhoods, and even winos brawling in the street threw jabs and hooks
and butted each other in the clinches. Stanley loved the gyms and the streets and the winos. He loved hitting and being hit,
he loved public adoration.