Spooner (8 page)

Living under the press of so many rules, Spooner was unnaturally jumpy for a child of his age, and often shivered in the aftermath
of breaking one of the rules and getting away with it—there was never a question of not breaking the rules—for instance, climbing
through a window and making it outside without permission. And he would shiver, even in August and July. Sometimes it was
like the little shiver after he’d tinkled, and sometimes it was like the Shakers’ coonhound coming out of the pond down in
the cow pasture and shaking off the water. The animal was called Rex but would come to any name you called it, up to and including
Fucker, and would chase a rock right into the water and then swim around in circles trying to figure out where it went. And
when he finally gave up and crawled out, he would shake front to back, throwing a cloud a yard deep of water and mud and pebbles
into the air, and if the sun was in the right place, Spooner would see a rainbow in the haze.

And that’s what it was like when, say, he climbed out his bedroom window while his mother was in her own bedroom crying—he’d
watched her cry once from a branch of the tree just west of the house, and it looked like she was eating her pillow—it felt
like loose shoes and rainbows.

Spooner’s grandmother belonged to a society for the protection of the native songbirds of the state of Georgia, and did volunteer
work, sending out pamphlets every month requesting donations to exterminate feral cats. The pamphlets included scientific
evidence that killing one cat saved 240,000 birds, some of them yet to be born—the society’s theory being that dead songbirds
don’t lay eggs. When she could locate Spooner on pamphlet days, his grandmother made him sit down at the kitchen table and
lick envelopes, and unless she cooked something worse for dinner, the taste of envelope glue would stay in his mouth until
he went to bed.

While this was going on, Spooner’s mother would be working at her job in the sociology department at the women’s college,
or, just as likely, in the bedroom with an asthma attack. She closed the door when she had asthma attacks, not wanting to
be seen, and once he’d climbed the tree outside her window to see what one looked like and it was like watching a nap.

All the houses on Spooner’s side of the road were built on a ridge, in a broken line perhaps thirty feet above the road. Spooner,
Granny Otts, and next to her, old man Stoppard. A kid named Kenny Durkin lived one house farther south. Kenny was a foot taller
than Spooner, already in second grade. His teeth lay across each other like scrap lumber, and he didn’t get sent to the back
steps to think it over for punishment; his father beat him with a board. Kenny’s house had different rules and fewer of them:
He was not allowed to get into his mother’s under things, or steal from her purse, or act like a sissy, and when he was beaten
it was usually on Friday, when his father and the other workers from down in the sawmill drank beer at the icehouse before
they came home from work. Kenny Durkin did not suffer quietly; you could hear the screaming and crying all over the neighborhood.

Mr. Durkin drove a truck for the sawmill, and went fishing on Sundays instead of sitting in church. He’d quit taking Kenny
after Kenny got a hook in his foot and whimpered all the way home. Mr. Durkin did not like having a sissy for a son. He’d
been in the war and killed, by his estimate, about a yard full of Japs, and on occasion was overheard to say he wouldn’t mind
killing a few more. He kept a pistol in the davenport cushions where he could get to it in case he saw one in the road, and
when Kenny Durkin and Spooner were over there alone, Kenny Durkin would sometimes take the gun out and empty the bullets out
of the cylinder, and sometimes he let Spooner hold one until he was ready to put them back.

Spooner liked the smell of the gun, but Kenny Durkin never let him touch it or even hold the bullet very long.

I
t was Spooner’s estimation that he crossed the line into criminality on a Friday afternoon early in June 1961 and once across
the line, had nothing left to lose. He was four years old, and nothing he’d seen so far indicated that the world was a forgive-and-forget
sort of proposition.

Kenny Durkin had passed second grade and had been hanging around Spooner’s house all day every day since school let out, the
way the Shakers’ coonhound hung around next door when Grandma Otts’s toy poodle Bitty went into heat. Spooner’s grandmother
didn’t like having the boy in the house and hid her purse whenever he showed up, but Kenny wasn’t haunting them that summer
to rob the grandmother but to hide. Kenny’s mother had got tired of finding him in her underpants and her purse—it had got
where she could not stand the sound of the beatings after she told her husband—and sent him outdoors to play in the morning
as soon as he’d eaten breakfast, sometimes even in the rain, where he was a sitting duck for the whole neighborhood, as he
was a soft child who cried easily and was terrified of boys his own age.

The Friday Spooner went bad, Kenny’s mother and father were gone shopping and he and Kenny were alone for once in Kenny’s
house, sitting on the tile living room floor while Kenny aimed his father’s pistol here and there around the room, sometimes
at Spooner’s head, making shooting noises as he pulled the trigger on the empty chamber. On the floor between them were the
six bullets that he’d removed from the cylinder when he first took it out of the davenport cushions to play.

As it happened, Kenny Durkin was holding the gun an inch from Spooner’s eyeball, slowly pulling the trigger, when the room
exploded, or seemed to, the noise shaking the glass in the front window. Spooner fell over backwards expecting to die and
glimpsed Kenny Durkin, terrified, dropping bullets as fast as he could collect them, and trying to load them back into the
gun. Spooner heard car doors slam, and realized the noise was only Kenny’s daddy’s Chevy coupe, backfiring when his daddy
turned it off. Maybe a little louder today than usual.

The car and the various noises it made were well known in Vincent Heights, particularly to Spooner, who had even ridden in
it once when he went along with Kenny on Mr. Durkin’s paper route. Mr. Durkin delivered the
World Telegraph
on Sundays before he went fishing, and took Kenny along to tote the papers up to the houses, particularly the two houses
in the Bottoms, so he wouldn’t have to sit in the driveway blowing the horn until the nigger inside decided to come out and
get it. Mr. Durkin did not believe he was put on earth to service people of color.

Spooner recalled the car had a hula dancer with a grass skirt stuck onto the dashboard who shimmied when you poked her tummy.
Kenny’s daddy called her his good-luck baby.

Spooner glanced at Kenny, who couldn’t seem to stick the bullets into the cylinder, and when Spooner looked back out the window,
Kenny Durkin’s daddy and mother were already started up the driveway. She was trying to get at a package wrapped in butcher
paper that he was holding over his head, wrestling and giggling as they came up the driveway to the house.

Kenny Durkin, meanwhile, continued to scramble around like nine pups on eight titties. Spooner turned back outside and watched
them wrestling—he’d never seen grown-ups wrestling before, not like this—and then somewhere behind him Kenny Durkin began
to cry. But then Kenny cried all the time, once when he lost his skate key, another time when Spooner told him that everyone
dies. And then again one Friday when Spooner’s grandmother made him go home.

Now he heard Kenny Durkin say, “Why, Warren. You know you ain’t supposed to be playin’ with Daddy’s gun. You know better than
that.”

Spooner turned and looked at him, but Kenny Durkin had already seen that blaming Spooner wasn’t going to work and, hearing
them just outside the door, pushed the gun and all the loose bullets under the davenport, then got up, leaving Spooner where
he was, and ran to his mother as she stepped inside the screen door and hugged her around the waist. His daddy watched him,
knowing unnatural behavior when he saw it. He said, “Goddamn, Charlene, you’ll have that kid sucking dicks next,” which was
the way Mr. Durkin talked when he came home on Fridays, after he’d been down at the icehouse with the boys on the way home
from the sawmill.

Mrs. Durkin was a fat, pretty woman with red hair, and she was out of breath and sweating from trying to get at the package.
“Roger,” she said, “watch your language. Little pitchers have big ears…”

It sounded to Spooner like she’d been drinking with the boys down at the icehouse too.

As Spooner watched, one of the bullets rolled out from underneath the davenport in a circle, and he stared at it a moment,
then picked it up and put it in his pocket. Not on purpose, particularly, but at the same time knowing he was stealing a bullet.
He was four and a half years old now, and Kenny Durkin’s daddy’s bullet was the first thing he’d ever taken that wasn’t his,
and he liked the way stealing felt.

The Durkins all walked back toward the kitchen, leaving Spooner sitting on the floor, thinking of stealing the pistol too.
In the end, he couldn’t think of a place to hide it, and got up instead and went into the kitchen to see what was in Kenny
Durkin’s daddy’s package.

Mr. Durkin had laid the package flat on the kitchen table and cut the string with his switchblade knife, which had been used
previously to finish off a few of the Japs. It was his lucky knife, and he never went outside without it. He had a lot of
lucky things, in fact almost everything he had was lucky. Maybe he didn’t keep anything around if it wasn’t lucky. Carefully,
he unfolded the paper. Spooner stood on his toes, trying to see what it was.

Cheese.

It was just cheese. All that wrestling for
cheese.

The cheese came in a circle, bright orange, about half as big as the tabletop itself. Kenny Durkin’s mother seemed to be trying
to crawl over his daddy to get at it, which to Spooner, was like getting all het up over licking envelopes.

Mr. Durkin made two small cuts along the edge and handed the triangle that came out to Kenny’s mother, still on the point
of the blade. She took it off with her fingers and set it carefully in her teeth, as if she was trying not to hurt it, and
then she closed her eyes and swooned a little bit, in love with this cheese, and made a certain mooing sound that Spooner
had heard before but couldn’t remember where.

Mr. Durkin took a minute watching her mouth, then cut a piece for himself, which he ate directly off the blade, and then one
for Kenny, who was afraid of the blade, like his mother, and took it with his fingers. And then there was another piece for
her, and for himself, and Kenny.

Presently, Mrs. Durkin stopped mooing and noticed Spooner standing there in her kitchen, and even though Spooner didn’t like
cheese any better now than he had five minutes ago, he did want to take a piece of it off the knife blade in his teeth.

She moved a step sideways, her considerable amplitude cutting the cheese off from his line of sight, and behind her Mr. Durkin
began wrapping it back up. She smiled at Spooner and said, “You better run along, Warren. I hear your grammy calling you for
supper.” She licked three of her fingers, one at a time, and Kenny Durkin’s daddy was watching her in a strange way again,
even as he re-wrapped the butcher paper, and then he turned on Spooner and Kenny both.

“Go on, now,” he said, “git.” The way you might speak to the Shakers’ hound if it showed up begging cheese in your kitchen.

Spooner went back to his grandmother’s house and sat on the front steps, and presently his sister came home from playing with
the Garrett girls across the road and sat with him. Mrs. Garrett had invited her to sleep over—for supper and then a drive
into town for an ice cream cone—and Margaret was waiting for their mother to come home from work to ask permission. She wasn’t
going to ask their grandmother because Grandma could always think of something youngsters ought to be doing instead of what
they wanted to do. She thought licking stamps was good for anybody.