Spooner (9 page)

Spooner was feeling left out—first the cheese, now the ice cream—and wouldn’t have minded climbing a tree and letting what
was left of daylight disappear. He looked back in the direction of Kenny Durkin’s house, still ashamed at the way he’d been
tossed out, and that night, with Margaret gone to the sleepover with the Garrett girls and his mother and grandmother asleep
in the room they shared, snoring back and forth in there like pond frogs, he climbed out of his window and crossed the backyard
barefoot. His yard, then Granny Otts’s yard, then old man Stoppard’s. The pine needles were dry against his feet and the ground
beneath it had gone cold, and he heard noises in the dark that he’d never noticed when he was in bed with the window open.

He got where he was going and waited a long moment outside the back porch, staring at the screen door, thinking of Kenny Durkin’s
daddy, the way he’d looked at Mrs. Durkin right before he told Spooner to git. A cow bawled in the pasture like somebody had
told it the future.

He opened the door wide enough to slip inside, careful for once not to let it slam.

The linoleum floor was colder than the ground outside, and the only light was the moon shining in through the window. He stood
dead still, feeling electricity singing down his arms, right down to the fingers, and gradually he began to make out the shapes
of things, and then the sounds coming from the back of the house. Sleeping sounds, heavy and wet.

He stepped and the floor creaked as his foot touched the spot, and he stopped in that same instant and remade the step, and
this time there was no noise. The breathing from the back of the house was deep and uneven and loose. He saw beer bottles
on the kitchen table and picked one up and drank what was left in the bottom. The lip of the bottle tasted like cheese, and
the beer was warm and bitter, like vomit, and he willed himself not to gag.

He set the bottle on the floor, making sure it was down flat and wouldn’t tip, and then stepped wide around it and farther
into the kitchen. He went to the icebox and opened it and was instantly blinded—Kenny Durkin’s daddy had screwed an outdoor
lightbulb into the back to replace one that burned out. The icebox smelled of fish and something else, maybe of the Durkins
themselves.

Spooner held still in the stunning light, listening, smelling, and then, just as he had in the dark, he began to distinguish
shapes. The cheese was lying on the bottom shelf, the butcher paper held by a rubber band, and lying next to it were eight
perch wrapped lengthwise in newspaper, the heads poking out the end, wide-eyed, like he’d just woke them up.

He took the package out, slipped off the rubber band, and pulled the butcher paper away. The paper fell to the floor, and
he held the cheese in his hand—it was heavier than it looked—not sure what to do with it and then, by itself, the cheese began
to sag, dropping like a divining rod, and then broke off, and made a noise when it hit the floor that sounded to Spooner like
an atom bomb.

Steps in the hallway.

Spooner stood in the light of the refrigerator, waiting to be murdered. And then somebody smarter than he was seemed to take
over, and he closed his eyes and held out his arms—the smaller piece of the cheese round still in his hands—as if he were
sleepwalking. They couldn’t murder you for sleepwalking.

A moment later, a door swung open, the pitch of the creaking hinges dropping slowly as the door swung, and then the door handle
bounced softly into the wall. Spooner turned away with his arms still out in front of him, like he was playing a piano from
a yard away, wondering if he should snore. And should he be walking back and forth, or did sleepwalkers just stand around
in the dark holding on to their cheese? Moments passed, and the current going through him went cold, and then he heard the
noise of Kenny Durkin’s daddy’s powerful tinkling straight into the middle of the bowl. (Spooner had been taught by his grandmother
to sit down on the toilet seat and tinkle into the front, above the waterline, to spare the ladies of the house the sound
of his urination.)

He stood frozen, his eyes still shut tight, and the tinkling went on and on, like he was in there filling the bathtub. Spooner’s
shoulders ached, and he began to feel the weight of his arms. A long time later, the pitch of the tinkling changed slightly,
growing higher, fading, and finally playing out.

Mr. Durkin proceeded to spasms now, like his battery was going dead, and then there was a soft, flabby sound as he shook out
the last drops. The toilet flushed and Spooner jumped at the sound.

He heard the footsteps again, but going the other way now, back to the bedroom. Spooner dropped his arms, and the aching in
his shoulders peaked and then passed.

He had a bite of the cheese. In spite of the mooing Kenny’s mother had done, it tasted about like all the other cheese he’d
tasted, and it was at that moment, with the cheese still in his mouth and Spooner undecided whether to swallow or spit it
out, that he noticed that even as Kenny Durkin’s daddy had been tinkling, he—Spooner—had been tinkling too. His shorts were
stuck against his leg, like something grabbing him in the dark, and thinking of being grabbed in the dark, he dropped what
was left of the cheese in front of him on the floor, and the puddle he’d made splashed up onto his feet and shins, and then,
not even closing the icebox, he ran for the door.

The screen door slammed behind him as he crossed the driveway into old man Stoppard’s backyard, running blind and seeing all
kinds of shapes in the trees, and a moment later he was in Granny Otts’s yard, his shorts as cold as ice and sticking to his
skin, pine needles and dirt and pine sap lodged in his toes. His throat threw out dry, grabbing noises as his feet hit the
ground, that sounded something like crying. And then he was in his own yard, and then at his own window, and then crawling
back into his own house.

He stood still then, listening.

Nothing.

His knee had been scraped, climbing back in, and it bled down his shin onto his foot. He put his shorts and underpants in
the bathroom hamper and crept to the bedroom and then lay awake, his face jumping here and there all over, and the only sounds
in the place were his own breathing and the pounding of his heart in his ears and the snoring from the other bedroom. His
skin was wet with sweat and tinkle and chilled him as it dried. Time passed, and his breathing quieted and his bed turned
warm, and he thought over what had happened, remembering the electricity singing through him the whole time he was inside
the house, terrified and tinkling into his own shorts, amazed at what had happened. He thought it probably felt something
like being famous.

By morning the following day, word had already passed through the neighborhood that the niggers had broken into the Durkin
house and pissed on the floor, and Mr. Durkin was prepared to kill the next one he saw on his property.

T
he man who would be Spooner’s father showed up in July, toward the end of the month. He did not intrude suddenly—Spooner had
no memory of a first meeting—but one day was simply there, dropping in most nights after supper, and always with a can of
olives or a sack of popcorn or a book or a Chinese finger puzzle, and then, perhaps to avoid being thanked, he might read
them a story from the book or make a bowl of the popcorn (
white delicacies in a dishpan
, he said) or look around for something that needed to be fixed, or built. He kept his tools in a box in the trunk of his
car, everything exactly in its place, and before he started he always changed into work clothes that smelled like work, hanging
his clean pants and shirt on the bathroom door. Sometimes he let Spooner saw a little bit or hammer a nail, but he stayed
close and ready to intervene, and Spooner saw that it made him nervous not to be the one holding the tools.

Afterwards, when he’d finished what he’d started and put away his tools and taken a bath if he’d gotten dirty, and Spooner
and Margaret and Spooner’s grandmother had been sent off to bed, he and Spooner’s mother would sit together in the kitchen,
talking and listening to the radio. Sometimes Calmer had a glass of crackers and milk. As for giggling and wrestling, like
Mr. and Mrs. Durkin when Mr. Durkin brought home the cheese, Spooner never heard it. He had a spot near the heating vent where
he could lie after Margaret went to sleep and hear them as if he were in the kitchen himself, and he never heard anything
playful going on and did not expect to. Spooner was fairly sure that people like his mother and Calmer had more important
things on their minds.

In spite of all the time he was putting in, Calmer was still not much relaxed and comfortable when he came over, particularly
in the vicinity of Spooner’s grandmother, who watched him like she watched the maid around loose change, and under her roof
Calmer was always on his feet, possibly to keep himself a moving target. He opened doors and carried groceries and painted
most of the inside of the house. He fixed every leak in the plumbing, every leak on the roof. He took a loose tooth out of
Margaret’s mouth, and read the poems she wrote, and before very long she was spending more time with him than Spooner’s mother
was. Margaret was a conversationalist in those days, full of questions, and Calmer had not gotten over the surprise of her
yet, all the things she knew, the intelligence of her questions. She had her own diary, and sometimes they sat on the davenport
together, Margaret and Calmer, and she read to him what she’d written, looking up to check his face when she came to the important
parts. She cooked him soup and made her finger bleed trying to sew a button back on his uniform shirt. She’d been hugging
him when he came in the door since the second or third week, and Spooner watched from a doorway, sucking his fingers, wishing
he could hug him too.

Sometimes Calmer took Margaret and Spooner with him downtown on errands, or to his office at the school, and one night they
went out to the football field to look at the eclipse of the moon through the school’s telescope. Margaret knew the names
of all the constellations. On weekends, he made popcorn and sat with them in the backyard, playing a game called Numbers.
He would write down four numbers and leave a space for the fifth, and he and Margaret had to guess what came next and explain
the rule the numbers were following. He took them for ice cream and to the drugstore for grilled cheese sandwiches. Spooner
would eat some and stick the rest in his pocket when Calmer wasn’t looking and give it either to the Shakers’ coonhound or
the old one-legged colored boy who came through Vincent Heights once in a while looking into garbage cans—either one of them
would eat anything.

The first time they’d gone to the drugstore for grilled cheese sandwiches, Margaret had taken Calmer’s hand on the way back
to the car. She was eighteen months older than Spooner was, half a foot taller, twice as fast, twice as smart, and as far
as he knew had been born knowing how to read. And pretty, even Spooner could see that she was pretty. Without knowing he was
doing it, Spooner reached for a hand too, and got Calmer’s little finger instead, and they walked that way to the end of the
block, and then Calmer stopped and gently pried him loose.

“Men don’t hold hands,” he said.