by Pete Dexter
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.
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 coul
dn’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.
THIRTEEN
The 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.
“For the sake of argument,” Calmer said one night, indicating the pasture beyond the fence, “let us say that yon cow is in need of shoes, a pair of saddle shoes perhaps.” They’d all driven to Macon that week for shoes; Margaret was beginning first grade on Monday. They were sitting at the picnic table in the backyard, an hour after he’d finished the dishes. Spooner, Margaret, Calmer. The air was hot and wet and full of insects, and no fre
sher to breathe, even though the sun had dropped into the cloud of awful, sweet smoke that hung over the sawmill, completely out of sight.
Spooner turned to look and saw the last few stragglers ambling downhill to the pond, where they spent the night together in a pile. A pile of cows. Calmer reached under the table and took Margaret’s bare foot in his hand. “Now, the problem, my dear,” he said, “as you may already know, cows have quite dainty feet—like yourself.”
Spooner squinted, trying to make out the cows’ dainty feet, and Calmer turned to him. “But the real problem is that yon cow will not ride in the family car. It’s undignified, it thinks, and they push and pull and beg and cajole, but the animal will not budge, and in the end it has its own way and it walks. Thirty-two miles.”
At the edge of his vision, Spooner saw Margaret write down the number thirty-two. These days she carried a notepad and a pencil everywhere she went, getting ready for school. Calmer had gotten him a notepad too—like his new shoes, so he wouldn’t feel left out—but Spooner had used it only once, balling up a few pieces of paper, trying to set fire to the patch of briars at the edge of the woods. He had very little use for a notepad otherwise—he couldn’t write yet, not numbers or letters, and wasn’t even much at drawing.
“And so beginneth the journey,” Calmer said. “But miles pass, and time, and eventually, exactly halfway to Macon the cow stops.”
“Why?” Spooner said.
Calmer shrugged. “Well, his feet hurt,” he said. “He is barefoot.” Which bent Margaret over until her nose touched the notepad, and as she giggled, a line of drool dropped from her mouth onto the paper and pooled. She’d lost one of her front teeth the week before and another one was looser every day.