by Pete Dexter
PART TWO
Vincent Heights
TEN
Spooner was four years old. It was April 1961, and the family lived at the top of a long, gradual rise of land, half a mile above a sawmill on the outskirts of Milledgeville, in the last house built in a poor white subdivision of town called Vincent Heights.
The house itself sat on a sun-scarred, twice-tiered lot on a narrow dirt road that looped off the paved road running through the rest of the development. The dirt loop was not technically in city limits and for that reason hadn’t been paved when paving came to Vincent Heights. His grandmother still seethed when she thought of it, the city coming out here with their surveyors and cheating poor old widows out of their pavement—the widows being the grandmother herself and Granny Otts next door. For that matter Spooner’s mother was also a widow, although technically the paving had occurred before she and Spooner and his sister moved in.
As Spooner understood it, the move in with Grandma came a week or so after the paving stopped at the circle where they lived, and a month or a year—he couldn’t keep it straight which was longer—after his father died of a stroke. He also didn’t quite twig how a stroke killed you—his understanding of the word stroke was that it meant petting a horse. Maybe the horse kicked him, but in any case this was the sort of information he knew better than to ask about at home. There was a rule in his grandmother’s house against bringing up the misfortunes of the past, which applied specifically to the matter of Spooner’s dead father but not to the unpaved circle in front of the house.
And while Spooner ran loose in Vincent Heights, telling the neighbors that his father had been killed by a horse, Calmer was back out in the world, picking his way from town to town in a 1949 Ford sedan, from the prairie into the midwestern states, then the South, headed for Georgia and in no hurry whatsoever to arrive. It was only the second time he’d left South Dakota. He liked the cities more than the towns, stopping at libraries and museums, but sometimes an old tractor or a historical marker along the road caught his attention, and he stopped to look at those too. Some days his car broke down—usually it was the carburetor, which he rebuilt three times in a month, or the radiator or the water pump, which he also rebuilt—and he would pull onto a gravel road or into a stand of trees and open the hood, the engine pouring steam if it was the radiator, and jury-rig what was broken, taking his time with that too. He enjoyed the repairing as much as the driving—the logic of the work, of the problem itself, the solid, familiar feel of tools, of knowing even before he opened the hood what was wrong underneath. Fixing things himself.
He’d left South Dakota this time with six hundred dollars in his money belt and had another two thousand that he’d never taken out of a savings account at Girard Bank back in Philadelphia. The job waiting for him in Georgia paid seventy-two hundred dollars a year.
Oddly enough, he’d been to the town itself once before, had spent three days there one August during his flight training, waiting for a new rudder cable for his plane. The air was unbreathable but otherwise he’d liked the place fine. General Sherman had come through on his march to break the South’s back and end the war, but for some reason he’d spared the town and its great old houses and orchards, most of which were still intact. There was a women’s college now on the grounds of the old penitentiary square, and a military school where Calmer had been hired to teach.
Calmer had lost his rudder on a training flight out of Pensacola back in 1950, and put the plane down on a dirt road leading to a complex of square brick buildings just outside town limits, climbed out of the plane into a hot wind, and, still standing on the wing, heard voices calling to him from the windows. He looked up, noticing the windows were barred, and then began to distinguish the shapes of people behind them, waving hankies, cheering. For a minute he felt like Ted Williams.
To the east, there was a small fenced field—perhaps twenty acres—and shirtless men bent at the waist, out in the afternoon sun digging peanuts. Guards watching, some of them with shotguns, cudgels attached to their belts. Between the field and the main building was a poultry yard.
There were also shirtless men in the poultry yard, two of them hidden in the shadow of a henhouse. One of them was having sex with a chicken and the other one was standing with his pants down around his knees, an erection like a divining rod, waiting his turn. Why he didn’t just get a chicken of his own, only the man himself might know. Maybe it was too much like a double date.
ELEVEN
The road in front of Spooner’s grandmother’s house was made of clay, orange and cracked open seven months of the year, so hot in July and August that you could feel it through your shoes. In October, after the first hard rain, it turned to mud, sometimes half a foot deep, and it would suck the shoes right off your feet. Nothing grew alongside the road that did not have thorns or stickers.
Behind the house was a shallow yard full of pine trees, a briar patch off to the side, a barbed-wire fence. After supper, Spooner was sometimes sent to sit on the porch steps to think it over when he’d broken some rule or another that day, this being his mother’s idea of punishment, and from here he could look out over a cow pasture and the muddy pond where the cattle collected at night, and beyond that to the sawmill, its chimney leaking black smoke into the sky all day and all night. To the right of the sawmill, downwind, was the Bottoms, where the colored people lived. That was what Spooner’s family called them, colored. His grandmother had fired a maid, who was a person of color herself, for using the word nigger in her house.
An older, plumper grandmother than Spooner’s grandmother had the house next door, Granny Otts, who had a dog called a toy poodle even though it wasn’t. She called it Bitty and painted its fingernails. She also had a granddaughter, Marlis, who was fifteen and homely in a way that fixing up couldn’t fix. The granddaughter smoked cigarettes and said nigger and spit, and had pretty much given up on humans and spent all her time with her horses, Gypsy Lee and Scout. Spooner and his sister were not allowed near the stable. Marlis had no use for Granny Otts or Bitty or Spooner or Margaret or any other people or animals that were not horses, and when Spooner told her that his father had been killed by a horse she said, “Wasn’t the horse’s fault.”
She had no friends that Spooner ever saw but had taught the older horse—Gypsy Lee—to kiss her lips, although she had to hold a sugar cube between her teeth to get the horse to do it. She cut school more than she went and spent all day in the stable and smelled like it, which was not such a bad smell, at least to Spooner. Hay and sweet manure. Granny Otts didn’t mind her cutting school, but often sitting in the kitchen she said to Spooner and Margaret that she wished the girl would take the time to pretty herself up. “A little toilet water wouldn’t hurt her chances,” she said. And Spooner, who did not know toilet water except as water in the toilet, didn’t see how it could hurt either. Granny Otts was still looking for a boyfriend herself and kept the bait in the water, never leaving the house without perfume and lipstick and jewelry, even to hang laundry. She liked to have Spooner and his sister inside for Kool-Aid and sandwich cookies she bought from the A&P, and seemed to favor their company over Marlis’s, and never let them out of her kitchen without warning them to stay clear of the stable. Those horses were biters, she said, one worse than the other.
The house itself had five rooms, six if you counted the toilet, which Spooner did, but his mother did not. She complained about it regularly—living in five tiny rooms—and he regularly corrected her, listing the rooms one by one on his fingers. The last time he’d corrected her, she buried her face in a dish towel and distinctly screamed the word shit. Then she cried, “God, how long can I stand it?”
Spooner was alone in the kitchen with her at the time—his grandmother had a moment before walked out the back door and let it slam behind her because his mother said that Dwight D. Eisenhower was spending too much time on the golf course when he should be running the country—and he sat there motionless as she cried, feeli
ng the scene blowing across his face, like a dog riding halfway out the car window.
And then he’d said, “Maybe Grandma will die,” and his mother got up and wailed off into the back of the house and that night after supper he was sent outside to sit on the porch steps and think it over. And as he thought it over, it seemed to him that the words had just popped out, the way shit popped out of cows. She’d been crying into the dish towel, God, how long can I stand it? and he didn’t know if he was supposed to answer or not—this being a dilemma that would follow him all his life, by the way—but in the end, being the one who’d made her cry in the first place by saying the bathroom counted as a room, he pressed himself to say something to make her feel better and so he said what he said, which was the best he could do. And now he was out on the porch to think it over.
And he continued to sit on the porch steps and think it over, and the house continued to have six rooms. He knew a room when he saw it, and he knew how to count. There were three closets in the house, one in each bedroom and one in the hallway, nine windows, six faucets. There were seventeen lightbulb sockets—three in one lamp in the living room—and thirteen electrical outlets in the walls. Each month, a new Shell pest strip was hung over the kitchen sink, laden at the moment with exactly sixty-two dead or dying insects, mostly flies. Thirty-one on each side. Spooner took a count every morning and every night, and brought spiders or june bugs in from the yard to keep the sides even.
The rooms were all small and poorly lit, even the kitchen, where he sometimes lay on the floor in hot weather and watched bits of dust floating in the shaft of sun coming through the screen door. The house was full of dust, and secrets, and rules, and these things he didn’t try to count because they were countless.
There was the rule against feeling sorry for past misfortunes, against leaving the house without permission, against climbing trees, against being on the roof. A rule against setting fires. There were rules about standing up straight, how tightly he was allowed to buckle his belt, how much water he could use to comb his hair in cold weather, and the correct way to tie his shoes so that he wouldn’t trip when he ran. He was not allowed to suck his fingers—he liked the two middle ones on his right hand—and he was supposed to address strangers as sir and ma’am, and he was not supposed to talk to strangers, and he was supposed to look strangers in the eye when he spoke to them. He was not supposed to cry. He was not allowed to let the screen doors slam. He was not allowed anywhere near the sawmill or the horses next door. There was a rule about how much sugar he could put on his cereal in the morning, how much peanut butter he could put on a peanut butter sandwich. There were even rules for sleeping. A clothesline was hung across the middle of the bedroom where he and Margaret slept, and in the night sometimes the blanket hung across the line would rise up like a curtain in the wind, and his grandmother would appear, her hair the color of the moon, unpinned and fallen the length of her back, and pull his fingers out of his mouth or his hands out of his pajama bottoms.
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.
TWELVE
It 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 Spoon
er’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.