Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  “You wet the bed?”

  Spooner shook his head again, thinking of what had happened in Kenny Durkin’s kitchen. The doctor stared at him a little longer, like he could read his mind, and then went on with the list.

  “How about animals?” the doctor said. “You ever hurt somebody’s kitty cat?”

  Spooner was bewildered. He stared at the doctor, forgetting that the doctor was staring at him. He didn’t reply, forgot, in fact, that the doctor had asked him a question.

  Dr. Woods saw that he was on to something. “You like to hurt things, do you?” he said.

  While Spooner continued to stare, the doctor’s cigarette hung in the corner of his mouth, and he squinted with one eye through the line of smoke and wrote something down. Then he set the clipboard aside, put the cigarette into an ashtray and stood up. “Well, let’s have a look,” he said.

  The doctor was sitting on a stool in front of Spooner, bent over like a doctor milking a cow. It went on a long time, the doctor not saying much as he poked around, humming now and then, and then finally, he leaned back, took off his glasses, and told Spooner to get dressed and look at some comic books in the waiting room while he talked to Major Ottosson. He said major like Calmer was no such thing.

  Spooner got into his underpants and his shorts and shoes and went to the waiting room. There weren’t any comics.

  Dr. Woods and Calmer were in the office; the door was closed. Spooner sat in the chair nearest the receptionist and could hear every word they said. The receptionist saw what he was up to and gave him a look, but next to Spooner’s grandmother she was an amateur at giving looks, and he ignored her.

  “That’s all I seen,” Dr. Woods was saying. “One of the boy’s testicles isn’t dropped, and later on, when the child comes to puberty, you-all might have to address that.” Spooner sat on the floor, positive he didn’t want to address a dropped testicle. No idea in the world what a testicle was supposed to be.

  “How complicated is the procedure?” Calmer said.

  What did that mean, procedure? Spooner could hear the worry in his voice and could hear that he didn’t want to be the one to tell Spooner’s mother about Spooner’s testicle, and you couldn’t blame him for that.

  “Generally, it’s simple,” Dr. Woods said. “Generally, just an injection at the site. And by then, of course, it might of already dropped on its own. Sometime they do, sometime they don’t.”

  “But it’s got nothing to do with the other thing,” Calmer said, talking about the thing that got Spooner sent home from school in the first place.

  Dr. Woods said, “Alas, who can say?”

  Spooner heard Dr. Woods light up another cigarette.

  “If I was you, sir, I’d have the child to a child psychologist, have the boy turned upside down and shook to find out what he had in store for me down the road. That way, you at least know what you got on your hands.” Dr. Woods was not naturally a patient man, particularly with the schoolteacher class, but would always make time to exercise his authority over their lives. It was one of the few day-to-day pleasures still left to a physician.

  Spooner got off the chair and sat on the floor. He put the middle and ring fingers of his left hand in his mouth, tasting the dirt off the floor.

  “Here now,” the receptionist said, “you can’t sit on the floor.”

  There was a night that would stay with Spooner the rest of his life, Calmer hitting his thumb while he nailed a hand rail onto the back steps, splitting the nail and the thumb open, blood dripping through the handkerchief Calmer had wrapped around it onto the steps, and while Spooner was frozen to the sight of so much blood, Margaret had run to the bathroom without being told to do it and come back with gauze and tape and a bottle of beer from the icebox. She taped up the bloody thumb while he sat on the steps, sweating and drinking his beer, smiling as he watched her work. Spooner realized conclusively that night that he would never catch up with her and gave up trying.

  Later, after their baths, she and Spooner both sat with him on the steps, and Calmer pointed up through the pine trees at the constellations, and she already knew them by name and could see the shapes in the sky.

  Spooner squinted up into the same sky, the same stars, and saw nothing but the sky and the stars themselves.

  Unaccountably, the weekend after the visit to Dr. Woods, Calmer took Spooner hunting. The following Tuesday he came over during lunch for a game of catch in the front yard, and it went on like that, hunting rabbits and playing catch, all that month and then the next and the next.

  They hunted in an empty field that lay beside a shallow mud lake a mile from town, just across Macon Highway from the state reformatory for incorrigible youth. A metal fence and barbed wire lined the circumference of the field against escapee delinquents, and there were signs on the highway that Margaret had read out loud last year on their regular trip to Macon for new shoes, instructing motorists not to pick up hitchhikers, but cars stopped for hitchhikers all the same and the gate was never locked. Spooner was hoping to see an incorrigible or two, but what escapees there were didn’t escape to camp out across the street. Most of them headed for Florida.

  Calmer never left the car where it could be seen from the road, did not want to precipitate an escape attempt, and so always drove to the back end of the lake and parked in a stand of pines. It about broke Spooner’s ribs laughing, driving where there was no road, bouncing over dead pines in the weeds, and sometimes Calmer let him sit in his lap and steer. It was the best part of hunting, driving to the other end of the lake.

  The gun was a Remington single-shot .22 rifle that Calmer’s dad had given him when he was six, and the moment Calmer put it in his hands Spooner felt himself changed—the weight, or maybe it was the connection to Calmer as a boy his own size, or the smell of oil and gunpowder. He didn’t care much for killing rabbits but thought he might like to shoot a snake. He also thought about being shot himself, winged in the shoulder, and pictured himself lying in Miss Tuttle’s lap, his arm in a sling as she shampooed his hair.

  In the end, all that got shot were the rabbits, but only three or four—no more than they would eat—and after that, they shot at bottles or cans. Calmer could hit bottles on the fence posts from across the lake, so far away that Spooner could barely make out their shapes. Calmer cleaned and skinned the rabbits in the lake, gutting them and then cutting off the heads and tails and stripping them down to purple muscles, leaving the fur and guts on the ground, inside out, and after he’d finished, what was left—the bare little bodies—did not look big enough for all the insides that came out of them.

  They took the rabbits home in a pail, and it didn’t matter who did the cooking or how long it lasted, or what vegetables and seasonings were thrown in with them, the animals came out of the pot as wiry as they went in, and even the smallest pieces were like biting into something still alive.

  Something else about it too, back at the lake. Spooner had begun looking at the wet piles of fur and organs they left behind, crawling with flies and bees, and feeling uneasy about what they’d done, about leaving the evidence of it in plain sight. He never said anything about this feeling to Calmer—in the first place, as far as he knew he wasn’t supposed to notice the rabbits were dead—and in the second place, he was afraid that anything he might say would get back to his mother, and there would be no more hunting.

  As to the matter of playing catch in the yard, Calmer was not as good at catch as he was at shooting, and didn’t have a glove of his own and sometimes missed the ball when it came right into his hands.

  One night he heard them talking in the kitchen. He heard Calmer telling her that the balls Spooner threw had begun to break, and Spooner went to the closet and took the ball out of his catcher’s mitt and looked it over but couldn’t see that it was broken at all, and he wondered if Calmer was telling her it was so that he wouldn’t have to play catch anymore.

  There was no question about whose idea it had been, by the way, all this huntin
g rabbits and catch.

  Months passed and still no one spoke to him directly regarding his expulsion from kindergarten, but he understood it was still on their minds and could see them watching him all the time, bathtime especially. He was no longer allowed to bathe with Margaret, for one thing, and these days if he got out of the tub and his mother or grandmother saw that his pecker was sticking out, Calmer had to come over during lunch the next day and play catch, even in the rain.

  It didn’t make much sense, but then these were people who looked up into the night sky and saw the shapes of animals in the stars.

  FIFTEEN

  Early in May, Calmer and Spooner’s mother were married in the backyard. A preacher from the Methodist church downtown presided, not the Sunday-morning Methodist preacher but one of his assistants. Spooner’s grandmother said they should have hired a Baptist. She’d gone over to the Baptist side some years earlier, even though the family had belonged to the Methodist church since before the Civil War. The Baptists, she said, didn’t treat you like white trash if you had a reversal in fortune.

  A month or so before the wedding Calmer suspended hunting and games of catch in the yard and spent every free moment doing touch-up work outside the house, painting the picnic table, raking pine needles, hanging decorations, and then, on Friday, while an assembly of Spooner’s aunts and uncles and cousins were inside drinking lemonade and beer in front of the fans that Calmer had borrowed and set up all over the house, Calmer himself was making trips back and forth to his school to pick up folding chairs for the party. The chairs didn’t fit easily into the car and it took four trips, and Spooner went along, carrying one chair while Calmer carried six, three in each hand.

  At home, they put the chairs in rows in the backyard, then went back for more. When there were enough chairs, they collected two card tables Calmer borrowed from his friend Sibilski, who taught mathematics at the school, and then went to the A&P to pick up ham and cheese and Ritz crackers, then to a liquor store for refreshments.

  All week the relatives had been coming into town, most of them checking in to the Baldwin Hotel downtown. In the days before the wedding, they arrived at the house in the middle of the morning, and Calmer worked like a crazy man, finding reasons to be somewhere else.

  All the aunts from Spooner’s mother’s side showed up, and most of their children. Uncle Arthur, the famous concert pianist, flew into Atlanta from his home in New York, then hired a taxi to drive him to Milledgeville. He paid for all the family’s rooms at the hotel.

  There was no one from South Dakota.

  One night after supper, with the relatives in the house and Calmer doing dishes in the kitchen, Uncle Don, who was a circuit judge in Birmingham, Alabama, had several drinks and offered the observation that in his experience, a man was best served to begin all endeavors boldly, particularly marriage. Not running errands like the maid. Uncle Don was a tiny, round-shaped human much admired in Birmingham legal circles for pronouncements of just this sort, issued in a resonant, deep baritone that didn’t seem possible, coming from his small, soft body.

  The air in the house was heavy and wet from all the relatives inside, and in this sort of proximity to each other the aunts were like high-strung dogs, snapping blindly at any movement out on the periphery, and if one of them took a step back—showed weakness to the others—it was woe is me for her.

  On the other hand, the aunts were all tender for Uncle Arthur. He was famous and rich and talented—the living proof, in spite of the financial calamities and shame that had befallen the family when they were children, that the Whitlowes were still an accomplished and exceptional house. He got drunk and would laugh sometimes until he cried, and he hugged his sisters all the time, occasionally two at the same time (which, to Calmer’s eyes, recalled priming chickens for a cockfight), but the sisters all seemed to take some pleasure in Uncle Arthur’s hugging, even two at a time, although as a rule the family did not enjoy the press of one another’s flesh, which is not to suggest that the sisters didn’t hug and kiss hello and good-bye, as none of them wanted to be seen as the one who couldn’t stand it, an unmistakable sign of weakness, and each of them understood that any such sign of weakness was an instinctive signal to the others to go ahead and rip out her throat.

  Thus by the time the wedding rolled around, the aunts had been bristling at each other and baring teeth and generally mixing it up for three days, and their husbands had been trying to stay out of the way—all except Uncle Don, who loved the sound of his own voice too much for his own good and was roughed up several times when he didn’t know enough to shut up—and in the end things sorted out the same way they always sorted out, which was that Daisy, the oldest, could still make the rest of them cry.

  The wedding was short and hot, and afterward a spectacular bowl carved out of ice arrived in a truck from Atlanta, and Uncle Arthur filled it with champagne punch and then poured Spooner a glass and gave him one of his black, European cigarettes. Uncle Arthur addressed him as Warren, old man. Spooner’s aunts sat in the folding chairs, getting louder as they drank, two of them recalling that Arthur hadn’t got them fancy ice bowls for their weddings (not to mention the hundreds of pansies frozen inside it), and remarking with some satisfaction on the growing number of bugs floating in the champagne, and the pity that the ice had to melt, that the beauty of it couldn’t be preserved forever. And guessed how much it must have cost him to have something like that trucked in from Atlanta.

  And even now Calmer, newly married, went back and forth into the house, making sure everybody had clean glasses and plates and all the Ritz crackers they wanted. He did not stop moving once. Uncle Arthur was watching this from the back steps, Spooner sitting on the step below him, each of them smoking a black cigarette. Uncle Arthur put his hand on Spooner’s shoulder and said, “She’s got him on his toes, hasn’t she, old man?”

  Calmer was passing the aunts a minute later when one of them, Violet, the one who was married to Uncle Don and lived in Birmingham, Alabama, reached out and touched his arm to point out the puddle beneath the table holding the ice bowl. “Calmer, dear,” she said, “I think it would last longer if you moved it into the shade.”

  The sun had shifted now, and the sisters had shifted with it.

  Calmer went to the punch bowl and lifted it up without seeming to try, and then Uncle Don made to drag the card table into the shade of the house near the driveway, but tripped over a tree root as he backed up and fell on the seat of his pants and claimed to have broken his coccyx, but nobody paid any attention and Calmer waited patiently while he got up and brushed himself off, checking his behind from one side and then the other, like a woman in a dress shop. Then he pulled the table the rest of the way to the shade and Calmer set the ice bowl back on top of it, and if the ice had gotten cold or heavy against his arms or hands, he didn’t let it show.

  The aunts applauded his feat of strength, as by now they had been drinking half the afternoon, and Calmer smiled modestly and walked back into the house for more Ritz crackers and cheese spread, and the aunts commented to each other for the hundredth time what a godsend it was that he’d come along when he did, one of them even going so far as to call it proof that God existed, which surprised Spooner, because he had been thinking not exactly that but something like that himself.

  And then if more proof of God were needed, a well-known mule belonging to Jaquith the one-armed attorney wandered up Spooner’s driveway and went straight for the punch. Calmer was still inside the house. The mule had recently rolled in mud and was still wet, and the steam rose up off his back and the animal commenced licking the outside of the bowl with a tongue a foot long and a color Spooner recognized as the color of a skinned rabbit.

  Uncle Arthur saw it first and laid his hand on Spooner’s shoulder. “Hold on, old man,” he said, “here we go.” As if he’d been expecting something like this all along.

  Aunt Violet noticed it next, the thing’s awful blue tongue flattening itself against the edge
of the ice, again and again, as if it meant to lick through to the flowers inside.

  It is perhaps worth mentioning here that while Uncle Don had done quite well as a judge and before that as an attorney, and lived in a lakeside house and bought a new Cadillac every year just like Uncle Arthur except Uncle Arthur always bought convertibles—all this, by the way, and Violet still enjoyed torturing Spooner’s mother by saying that she was on a budget too—Uncle Don was not and never had been in the legal profession for the money. It was love, pure and simple. Love of the law and, more than that, of the sound of his voice expounding on the law, which he still did at the slightest provocation, from the bench in his robes or a stool at the drugstore, to anybody who would listen, or had to, even sometimes to Spooner, although it was not clear that he knew exactly who Spooner was, and always ended with the pronouncement that the law alone stood between man and anarchy. And was at this moment making that very pronouncement to old man Stoppard, who’d wandered out of the house in sandals and underpants to see what was going on, but was interrupted by the shrieking of his wife. Uncle Don stopped midsentence—in fact the entire gathering stopped, even the mule. Aunt Violet pointed at the animal and called to her husband. “Don,” she yelled, “for God’s sake, Don…”

  And Uncle Don looked up from his lecture on anarchy only to find himself staring it in the face. He was stunned at the size of this affront, not to mention the size of the beast—anarchy personified—not to mention the proximity of the beast’s arrival to his discussion of the rule of law, and was momentarily at a loss for words. Which, as he would explain later in the evening, was the reason—not cowardice—he did not take matters into his own hands then and there. Pretty soon, though, he cleared his throat and made the sort of joke that had won Aunt Violet’s heart in the first place. He said, “Heah now, this is private property.”