Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  “And after the cow has rested its feet,” Calmer said, “it starts out and walks half the distance to Macon again, and again stops and rests its feet.”

  “When does it sleep?” Spooner said.

  “It sleeps while it rests its feet, and then eats breakfast, and then walks half the distance left to Macon again. And the cow proceeds in this way, walking and resting, each time covering half the distance left. And one day it comes to a post office and drops a card to its friends back in the pasture, saying the weather is fine and the grass is sweet and it should be in Macon by…”

  Calmer paused, looking from Spooner to Margaret. “But it doesn’t know when it will be in Macon, and that,” he said, “is the question. How long should yon bovine say it will take, each day walking half the distance left, to arrive in Macon?”

  Margaret thought a moment and began her calculations, writing careful, perfect numbers down the page, writing and erasing, subtracting and adding and dividing. Numbers all over. Spooner watched her work a little while and then looked away, back to the pasture, and presently, feeling Calmer’s eyes on him, he picked up his pencil and drew a cow. This was a distraction of course, as most of everything he did and said around Calmer was, hoping this time around that Calmer wouldn’t notice that he didn’t know how to do problems, or even write numbers, hoping somehow not to disappoint him. And the last thing he would do, or even think of doing, in the face of this convolution of time and miles and cows and saddle shoes, not to mention his sister’s furious calculations as she closed in on the answer, was admit that, as far as he could tell, the cow was never going to make it to Macon at all.

  To Spooner’s knowledge Margaret didn’t lie or make mistakes, but he still had his doubts when she told him Calmer was going to marry their mother.

  From what Spooner had seen—from what he’d heard through the heating vent—there was something his mother wanted from Calmer that he couldn’t give her, no matter how many walls he painted or how many times he climbed up onto the roof to fix a leak, or how hard he tried to cheer her up. Lately, there were times when he came over and she didn’t even come out of her bedroom to see him. Asthma, she said, and stayed in bed all day.

  It was sometimes Spooner’s job to take his mother lunch or a glass of water when she was sick, and she would be under a sheet in her nightgown, the room warm and thick with the smell of her sickness, and the skin on her throat pulling tight against the cords beneath it when she pumped in the medicine.

  His mother had been sick in this way, off and on, for as long as Spooner remembered, and he worried that Calmer would notice the smell and not want to come back.

  FOURTEEN

  In the fall, Margaret started second grade, and Spooner was shipped out to kindergarten. That was what Calmer called it, shipping out, which it was called back in the navy.

  His grandmother drove them to school that morning—his mother had an early class to teach at the college—and wouldn’t let Spooner roll down his window; she didn’t want the wind messing up Margaret’s hair on her first day. Spooner’s grandmother was a no nonsense, young man kind of grandmother, not the kind that gave presents, and he sat alone in the breezeless backseat of her old Kaiser, an automobile she could not shift without a noise that reminded him of the drill the dentist had used that spring to smooth out what was left of the front tooth he broke off falling into the curb in front of the bakery. Six stitches in his eyebrow and then the dentist. And now kindergarten.

  Spooner’s kindergarten and Peabody Elementary sat on the same street, a block apart. They stopped at the kindergarten first, and Margaret was too excited to wait and walked the rest of the way by herself. Spooner watched her go—skipping—thinking he might like school too if he could already read better than the teacher.

  His grandmother put an Indian-burn grip on his wrist and walked him through a gate in a chain-link fence, then through a swarm of children’s faces, some of them sticking out their tongues to be ugly. The place had a dirt yard and a small slide and a sandbox and a set of swings, things that were of no interest to Spooner at all. Beyond the playground was the school house itself, and she tightened her grip and pulled him straight ahead.

  The teacher was named Miss Julie Tuttle and stopped him dead in his tracks. Miss Tuttle had black hair that shone like Calmer’s shoes and smelled like flowers, and Spooner wanted to roll in that smell the way the Shakers’ coonhound rolled in cow shit after he’d been in the pond. And something more than that, something he felt crawling all over him, like impetigo.

  A shampoo. He wanted Miss Tuttle to give him a shampoo, and thus emerged Spooner’s pecker into the untidiness of the universe.

  Miss Tuttle was twenty-one years old, fresh out of college, and had chosen kindergarten because children of that age were cuter than seven- or eight-year-olds—cuter, smaller, easier to handle, more innocent—and was pretty much innocent herself, or at least unaware that a child still three months shy of his fifth birthday could already be connected in that dark, reptilian way to his pecker.

  She took Spooner’s hand from his grandmother, smiling down at him, and said something about meeting the other children. Spooner had no interest in meeting other children and wanted only to stay right there where he was with Miss Tuttle, or possibly closer. His hand was tingling now that his grandmother was no longer cutting off the circulation. She was behind him—his grandmother—and straightening him up, pushing her thumbs into his shoulder blades and reminding him to keep his fingers out of his mouth. She smiled at Miss Tuttle, talking about him like he wasn’t there, and reported that his finger sucking started that summer when he fell and broke his tooth, which was a lie, and then patted him on the shoulder and headed back to the gate.

  Miss Tuttle watched her go and then winked at him, as if they were in it together now, and said, “What a sweet little guy.” She laid her hand on his hair a moment and tousled it, then led him back in the direction of the playground to introduce him to his new classmates.

  And with his fingers in his mouth and his pecker doing the thinking, Spooner allowed himself to be led into the yard.

  Two weeks later Margaret was sent home with a letter saying she was being skipped ahead into third grade, and on that same day Spooner was also sent home with a letter, the contents of which were never discussed in his presence, but after which Spooner was a kindergartener no more.

  The complaint was only superficially that Spooner had been dipping his head in glue and finger paint so that Miss Tuttle would have to wash out his hair. The real complaint was that Miss Tuttle had noticed that while she was washing out his hair, his head rose up into her hand like a cat raising its rump as you stroked it, and it was not long before she noticed the little rise in his britches, and after that even the sight of his arrival at the schoolyard in the morning frightened and repelled her, and she went finally, in tears, to the principal. Who had been having thoughts of his own about Miss Tuttle, and expelled Spooner on the spot.

  Spooner listened to his mother and Calmer talking it over in the kitchen that night. He and Margaret and his grandmother were all in bed. A school day tomorrow, but not for Spooner.

  “Could you at least talk to him about it?” she said.

  Spooner could not figure out what she had on Calmer, why he always gave in and did what she wanted. Even so, this time it was quiet a pretty long time before he answered. “You know, it’s probably just a phase…”

  She said, “Please, Calmer. Children aren’t expelled from kindergarten because they’re going through a phase.”

  She was in her other voice now, the one she used for arguing politics with her sisters and her mother, all of whom were Republicans and had no idea what it was like to barely scrape by, to have to watch every penny.

  “The teacher’s just a kid herself, barely out of school,” he said. “She doesn’t know anything about children.”

  But it was too late; she was furious, so mad at him he might as well have been rich. A few moments passed; he
heard Calmer’s spoon scraping against the side of the glass, finishing his crackers and milk. He always finished everything, down to the last bit.

  “I suppose I’ll have to take him to the doctor,” she said. He’d let her down, that was clear as day—this by the way was an expression Spooner had picked up at kindergarten, so you couldn’t say it was all a waste of time.

  “I’ll take him to see Dr. Woods,” he said, “that’s no trouble at all. I just hate to see you so upset when nothing’s necessarily wrong.”

  It was quiet again, and then he said, “If you want, I’ll have a talk with him too. I just don’t think we ought to make too much of it…”

  But Spooner’s mother had made up her mind that something was wrong with Spooner and didn’t want any arguments. A little later he said, “Are you all right, my sweet?”

  “I’ve got some tightness in my chest,” she said, not about to call him my sweet too. It sounded like it might be Calmer’s fault. “I think I’ll go to bed.” Spooner heard her chair slide across the floor and then her footsteps going past his door on the way to her bedroom. Calmer stayed in the kitchen a few minutes, and then Spooner heard him scrape the glass again with his spoon, then wash it in the sink and put it into the cupboard, then let himself out the front door.

  They went to the doctor’s office on Saturday morning, Calmer and Spooner, in the same building where Spooner had been born. Calmer was wearing the heavy wool uniform that all the instructors at the military school wore at that time of year, with a tie and a folding cap. He had to drop Spooner back at home after the appointment and be at work by noon. It was warm for October, and Calmer took off his cap in the car and laid it on the seat between them. Spooner looked at the shiny major’s bars, worrying about them falling off and getting lost. But then, Spooner worried constantly about losing things, his hat, his catcher’s mitt, the bullet he’d stolen from Kenny Durkin’s father. He worried that Calmer would lose his car and not come to see them, and he worried at the movies when a cowboy rode into town and went into the sheriff’s office without tying the horse carefully to the rail.

  For a long time they rode in silence, neither one of them knowing what to say and both of them wishing Margaret were in the backseat, talking a mile a minute, and then, as they parked, Spooner glanced at the freshly painted artillery pieces across the street and had a thought. He said, “Did you kill any Krauts in the navy?”

  Calmer jumped at the sound of the voice, as if he’d forgotten Spooner was there. This was only the second time they’d gone anywhere alone since Calmer began seeing Spooner’s mother.

  Calmer took his time answering, and as he waited Spooner realized that he’d broken the dead-and-dying rule. He wasn’t supposed to talk about dying, or mention dead people or dead animals he saw along the road. He wasn’t even supposed to think about anything dead.

  “Germans,” Calmer said. “Let’s not call them Krauts.”

  “Mr. Durkin does. He says they were harder to kill than the Japs.”

  “Well, not everybody who talks like that knows what he’s talking about,” Calmer said. He’d had a look by now at Kenny Durkin’s father, heard him over there beating the kid.

  “He was in the war,” Spooner said.

  “A lot of people were in the war.”

  Spooner didn’t see what he meant. “Did you shoot anybody in the navy?”

  They got out of the car. There was a fence around what was left of the old folks’ home across the street—it still hadn’t been rebuilt after the fire, or even taken down—and the smell of that night was never completely out of the air.

  Dr. Woods was as old as Spooner’s grandmother and had been the Whitlowe family doctor since he got out of medical school. He’d delivered Lily and Uncle Phillip and two of Lily’s three sisters and both of Lily’s children. He was now forty-six years in the same office, and swore that he had never seen a more difficult labor than the one that produced Spooner. He mentioned this to Lily every time she brought in the boy for repairs, and it never failed to cheer her up to hear him say it.

  As for the child, he was injured often and in uncommon ways. Dr. Woods had some experience with this sort of patient—they came young and old, men and women, rummies and churchgoers alike, people who would stand in line to get hit by lightning—and was of the opinion that Spooner would not live to see his majority.

  And on the one hand, he considered it his obligation as a physician to prepare Spooner’s mother for that eventuality, and on the other hand, the woman was high-strung and prone to asthma attacks, so instead of talking about the boy as he was sewing up his head or setting a broken finger, he usually brought the conversation around to what a pretty, well-mannered little girl she had in Margaret Ward. And smart? My Lord, smart as a whip. Dr. Woods and his wife had no children of their own, but he had been around them since the day he set up his practice and saw them for what they were—whole little people. Good or bad, handsome or misshapen from the start, and he allowed himself to quietly judge which was which, to despise the ones he despised. The little Spooner girl was an angel and the boy, well, he’d been there himself but it was still hard to believe they come out the same rabbit hole.

  The man who brought the boy in was wearing a uniform from the military school, which meant he was a schoolteacher, and Dr. Woods only hoped Mrs. Spooner knew what she was doing. He did not think much of men as schoolteachers; he didn’t care if they wore a uniform or not. In his experience, most of them deviated from the norm, and even if it wasn’t that or something worse, not one of them ended up with a pot to piss in anyway, and if they weren’t smart enough to see that, what business did they have teaching anybody else?

  Still, the widow was asthmatic, and excitable, and had the two children, one of them this hellion, and he supposed in her situation you took what come along.

  The schoolteacher was at the desk outside Dr. Woods’s office, trying to persuade his receptionist, a middle-aged woman named June Oakley, to let him speak privately with Dr. Woods regarding the boy’s situation. Miss June had married into an old Milledgeville family far above her own family’s social station, then was divorced out of it, and having tasted the good life once, could not abide having her authority questioned by anybody common. Dr. Woods watched her a little while and when he saw that she was about to cry or quit—which she did once or twice a month—he came out of his office to head it off, and asked Miss June would she kindly take the boy back to the examining room while he and the gentleman spoke. He led Calmer back into his office and lit a cigarette.

  The schoolteacher was ill at ease, and Dr. Woods did nothing to make him more comfortable. The room smelled of alcohol and warm vitamins.

  “So, Major Ottosson,” Woods said, “I perceive there is a certain amount of discomfiture regarding the situation heah which you do not see fit to disclose to my receptionist.” Letting him know right off that he’d been to college too.

  “I didn’t want to embarrass anyone needlessly.”

  The doctor smiled at that and said, “No cause to worry there. That woman is got skin as thick as a barefoot nigger,” then waited to see what the schoolteacher would say to that.

  “I’m not sure it’s even a medical problem,” Calmer said.

  “Well, as long as you come all the way down heah, why don’t let’s let me decide?”

  Calmer shrugged. “They sent Warren home from kindergarten with a note for staring at the teacher.”

  “What teacher is that?”

  “Miss Tuttle. He was putting finger paint in his hair so she’d have to wash it. She seemed to think there was something sexual—”

  Dr. Woods stroked his chin and looked at the ceiling. “Well,” he said, “I heard of something like this before, but never in a white family. Colored children, you know, they tend to start at an earlier age. Especially the girls.”

  Spooner was sitting in the examination room in his undershorts. Dr. Woods did not speak to the boy when he came in, and Spooner sat nailed to the spo
t, his bare legs sweating against the butcher paper they used to cover the table. They had been here before, he and Dr. Woods, and it was never pleasant.

  Dr. Woods looked him over and then went to the cabinet and pulled out a long syringe and laid it on a tray. He always did that, to show who was boss. Next, he took out a thermometer and a small rubber hammer and a stethoscope. Then a tongue depressor.

  Dr. Woods attached the stethoscope to his neck and approached Spooner from the side. He took the boy by the elbow, a little roughly, and placed the thermometer in his armpit and then closed it down. He put the cold end of the stethoscope against Spooner’s chest. Spooner sat still while the doctor listened, then took deep breaths when Dr. Woods moved behind him and told him to breathe. As if he needed to be told.

  He ran his fingers through Spooner’s hair, looking for ticks, and then tapped at his knees to check his reflexes. He looked in Spooner’s ears and opened Spooner’s mouth and had a look down his throat. Spooner smelled cigarettes and aftershave and saw dried blood on the doctor’s jawline where he’d cut himself shaving.

  Dr. Woods took a step back and sat down on his stool. He picked up a pencil and a clipboard and then balanced it on his lap while he lit a cigarette. “So,” he said, “what’s this bi’nis heah all about?”

  Spooner didn’t care for sitting undressed in front of Dr. Woods. It reminded him of whichever chicken Major Shaker’s maid had picked out for supper being carried off to the chopping block by the feet, all the other chickens in the coop watching.

  “You start fires?” the doctor asked, referring now to the clipboard.

  Spooner shook his head. He’d thought of it a few times, pictured the fire engines and the sirens, but that was after Miss Tuttle had asked the kindergarten class what they wanted to be when they grew up, and every boy in the class, Spooner included—she’d asked him last—said a fireman. Which seemed to be the right answer.