Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  Violet yelled at him again, apparently not having heard him. She said, “Damn it, Don, it’s a darn mule in the punch bowl…”

  Violet’s hearing was not what it used to be, so he repeated it. “Heah now,” he said, “this is a private party.”

  The oldest sister, Daisy—the only aunt Spooner had who could tolerate him for longer than a few minutes at a time, and vice versa—stood up and went directly to the animal to give it a piece of her mind. She was the prettiest of the sisters, her hair prematurely gray and wrapped up into a bun. “You shoo,” she said. “Shoo. Go back where you belong.”

  The mule was huge, almost the size of a horse. The steam still came up off its back, and flies circled the oozing spots of mange it had rubbed raw against a tree or a post, and it turned its head for a look-see at the source of the noise. The mule saw that Daisy did not have a stick to beat it over the head, and so it went back to the punch bowl without so much as lowering its ears, but then did a kind of double take just as Aunt Daisy, who was not used to being dismissed out of hand, stamped her foot. The mule reconsidered Daisy, and plucked the corsage off her blouse and ate it.

  Uncle Don took another step closer, not wanting his wife’s oldest sister to make him look like a sissy, but Violet called out to him to stop. “Don, don’t be a darn fool,” she said. “Let the police handle it.”

  Which was when the mule began to hum. It was, for reasons hard to explain, a disturbing noise coming from a mule, and even Daisy took a step back to reconsider.

  “Here now,” Uncle Don said, “that’s enough out of you.” He didn’t mean anything in particular by that, and then he took another step forward, as if to handle the situation, and a quiver rippled over the animal’s back, which was all Uncle Don had to see, and he retreated back into the adjoining yard.

  Likewise all of Spooner’s aunts except Daisy, who’d given as much ground as she intended to, and they picked up their plates and drinks and their youngest children and headed for safer ground. The older children, meanwhile, had begun darting in and out of range, touching the mule’s hindquarters and tail, and one of them—Cousin Billy Damn—even pulled its ear, and the aunts yelled at them to stop.

  The mule, meanwhile, continued to lick at the bowl with its awful, filthy tongue, teeth like Halloween corn, and then Violet’s youngest girl lay down under the porch steps—right under Spooner and Uncle Arthur—covered her ears and issued a note so shrill that even Uncle Arthur, who was a professional musician, had never heard anything like it, and a minute later the Shakers’ coonhound, perhaps fetched by the pitch of the little girl’s scream, came loping into the party and began snapping at guests and mule alike, also urinating on Sibilski’s card tables and the folding chairs Calmer had borrowed from the school.

  This, then, was the scene as Calmer came out the screen door carrying a tray of crackers: Beneath his feet a child was making an unearthly noise, and ahead the Shakers’ coonhound was snapping at anything that moved, and his sisters-in-law were huddled together with the smaller children in the next yard, where Uncle Don also was, explaining some fine point of property law to old man Stoppard, and Jaquith the one-armed attorney’s mule was licking the ice bowl and humming.

  Plus, Lily’s brother Arthur seemed to have had a breakdown and was sitting on the steps helplessly weeping.

  Calmer came down the stairs, turned, and set the tray on the step next to Uncle Arthur. “Excuse me,” he said, and then he walked straight to the punch bowl, kicked the dog off and grabbed the mule roughly by the tongue, yanked it out and to one side of the animal’s mouth for leverage, and led it in that fashion, making some unearthly noise, out of the yard and down the driveway in the direction of Jaquith’s property, which lay beyond the top of the hill and across Macon Highway.

  Uncle Arthur continued to weep from joy, and continued to drink champagne and smoke his black cigarettes even though his sisters wouldn’t go near the ice bowl after seeing the thing’s disgusting tongue all over it—the animal might as well have dry-humped it, as far as they were concerned—and from time to time the incident seemed to roll back over Uncle Arthur, and he dropped his head into his knees again and his back shook, and he had to wipe the tears out of his eyes to see.

  Nobody said it then—it takes a little while for these things to settle out—but the truth was that for most of a week, Lily’s relatives had been watching Calmer clean house and fetch drinks, remarking to each other on the miracle of his arrival, and his wonderful housekeeping, and his devotion to Lily and the kids, and how good he was with the children, especially Margaret, and referring to him generally as the godsend—all this noted with an unmistakable pleasure, Lily having settled on a eunuch—but into this picture had wandered Jaquith’s mule, and half an hour later, with the size and smell and awfulness of that creature implanted forever in their memories, all matters of courage and manliness were taken off the table, and the sisters contented themselves with knowing how much a schoolteacher made.

  SIXTEEN

  Half a year after the break-in, Kenny Durkin’s father still said he couldn’t get a night’s sleep until he shot a nigger to get even. “This heah has got implications,” he said dangerously, and on that platform campaigned across Vincent Heights, usually on Friday afternoons, not that most of Vincent Heights needed to be campaigned to.

  Outrages of this sort did not diminish with use and time, like tooth enamel or tire tread, and by now the story of the break-in at Mr. Durkin’s house had grown and the coloreds had violated his home not once but three times, and not just pissed on his floor but stolen his toaster, the Hoover vacuum, his wristwatch, and the food right out of his icebox. Hearing this, some Vincent Heighters took to locking their doors at night and others, who knew Roger Durkin better, didn’t. He had a flair for the dramatic, especially on Friday afternoons, although no one in the neighborhood doubted that given the chance he would for a fact plug one in the yard.

  The only pluggable colored people who ever came through Vincent Heights, though, were the dollar-a-day house maids from down at the Bottoms and the toothless old vagrant who had skin speckled like the three-cent-a-pound bananas at the Piggly Wiggly, and some kind of table leg for a calf. He came around early in the afternoon, before the men got home from work, and went methodically through one garbage can after another, up one side of Vincent Heights and down the other, looking for something to eat. He had been bitten by half the dogs in Vincent Heights, and shot from ambush by children with BB guns, and chased off again and again by the police, but in spite of this he took his time and was neat and systematic about his work, picking up what he’d spilled, carefully replacing the garbage cans’ lids.

  The truth was, the possible shooting of the old colored man presented a dilemma. On one hand, he was a damn nuisance, and it was a known fact that where one of them found garbage today, twenty of them would come searching tomorrow, and the next thing you knew the whole place would be crawling with them, and nobody could get a night’s sleep then. On the other hand, the Shakers’ coonhound also went through garbage cans but left them tipped over in the driveway, so how could you logically shoot the one and not shoot the other?

  There was also the fact that the old colored man’s fingers were two times normal size, so stiff he had to use a stick to get the lids off and on the garbage cans. How was he going to break into somebody’s house? Another thing was, he stayed down in the Bottoms with his sister, slept on the ground under her house, and had as much use for a vacuum cleaner as he did for roller skates.

  In the end, the discussion came down more to Roger Durkin himself than if the old man had broken into his house.

  Roger had been in the war and shot a hundred Japs, and times being what they were, people took his word for that, and times being what they were, they’d all heard stories about soldiers who had come home from the war and done crazy-mean things that would make shooting one old nigger seem like common sense.

  For his part Spooner had a feeling of acquaintance with the
old man and had occasionally followed him on his rounds through Vincent Heights, one garbage can to another, putting things in his mouth to consider if they were edible, spitting out what wasn’t, like coffee grounds or steel wool, and he didn’t see that Mr. Durkin shooting him would make it easier for anybody to sleep.

  Five-thirty in the morning, half an hour before dawn. The pine needles were wet and stuck to Spooner’s feet, and the sky was just beginning to show light over the sawmill. He hadn’t planned anything, just woke up having to tinkle, and then padded right past the bathroom and out the back door. Just like that. He was barefoot and walked on his toes, and due to the excitement could barely hold off urinating on the way over.

  The Durkins’ screen door was locked and Spooner stepped back for a longer view. The frame had been painted earlier in the year, and even in the faint predawn light, Spooner could see bumps where the gnats had stuck as it dried.

  Spooner broke a piece of the splintered wood off the bottom of the door, where it was warped and didn’t close, and then climbed onto one of the empty paint cans that had been sitting in the Durkins’ backyard all summer, and used the wood to lift the hook out of the eyehole. Except for the need to urinate, he had all the time in the world, and familiar early-morning noises came up out of the dark to him from the pasture.

  He stepped off the paint can, set it to the side, and pulled open the screen. The back door was locked too. He looked around a moment and then went directly to Mrs. Durkin’s flower box, nailed to the sill beneath the kitchen window, knowing somehow it was where she would put the key.

  This brought Spooner back in front of Kenny Durkin’s icebox, exactly the spot he’d been before, dancing slightly but pinching his pecker shut with his fingers, holding off the sweetness of letting go, picking the exact spot. Draining the lizard, he’d heard Mr. Durkin call it that.

  As it had before, the bare bulb in the icebox threw a rectangle of light across the floor, and at the edge of the light just under the kitchen table, he saw Mr. Durkin’s heavy black shoes. He picked them up and set them in the icebox, the only shoes he’d ever seen Mr. Durkin wear. He sprinkled them left to right, and some of the pleasure was in the relief of finally letting it go and some of it was in the tingle of apprehension in the room, and some of it in the sound itself, there in the silent house, a sound that pretty soon turned musical, like when a flower bed has taken as much water out of the hose as it can hold. He swung back and forth, evening the pitch, draining the lizard. And when he’d finished and shaken, he closed the refrigerator door and left, locked the back door behind him, and headed back as unhurried as if he was kicking a can home, the house key in the palm of his hand for later, and the sky had turned a little pink now over the sawmill and the Bottoms.

  Spooner lay in bed unable to sleep, the greatness of what he’d done still fresh every time he went over it in his head, the picture of the shoes set neatly beside each other in the icebox—it just killed him, how perfect that looked—and then he finally slept, and then he woke up and ten minutes later was sitting in front of the same shredded wheat and milk that he’d been sitting in front of all his known life, and things were as ordinary as the hum of the day. And the feeling was lost.

  Later that morning, Sergeant Audry of the Milledgeville Police Department pulled his patrol car into Kenny Durkin’s driveway, blew the horn several times, and when nobody came out exited the vehicle with no small effort and went to the screen door, pounded on it twice, and then walked in.

  Sergeant Audry lived in Vincent Heights, in a half-charred brick house up on the hill, across the street from the Shakers’ place. He was the town of Milledgeville’s most familiar policeman due to his size and a well-publicized shooting spree downtown earlier in the year in the height of the rabies epidemic, when he shot four mongrel dogs and then winged the Fuller boy Danny with a ricochet. A mitigating factor, offered at his administrative hearing, was that Sergeant Audry had recently been dog-bitten himself, and it had taken five stitches on his wrist to close the wound. On the other hand, this mitigation was somewhat mitigated itself with the subsequent disclosure that it was Audry’s own dog that had bitten him, an incident that occurred in public during a scramble for a chicken leg that had fallen off the sergeant’s plate during the town’s annual police and fire department picnic dinner.

  Still, the episode of the chicken leg had set him on edge, and then two weeks later came a failed arson attempt on the sergeant’s house, which perhaps not coincidentally had been sitting around unsold in a depressed housing market for eighteen months. The job had been botched, though, and when Audry and his wife and his boy Junior returned from a long weekend at the beach in Brunswick, the façade of the place was singed black, and black water was still running off the roof into the missus’s flower beds, and the fire department was still inside, hosing down the closets, and the whole place reeked of gasoline and yet miraculously, according to the insurance adjuster, was structurally intact, and off that news Sergeant Audry began shooting law-abiding dogs in the middle of downtown Milledgeville. The house still stank, even from the road, and the odor triggered the sergeant’s allergies, and his eyes were always bloodshot these days, and his uniforms smelled like mildewed wool, and he hadn’t been the best-smelling officer in the South to begin with, being of the old Saturday-night-bath school, and also the fattest man in Vincent Heights.

  His son, Junior—his given name, Junior Audry—was thirteen and still in fifth grade (started late, and left behind twice) and the fattest boy in Vincent Heights, and had once made Spooner hold still while he drooled tobacco juice on his bare feet.

  Spooner watched from his bedroom window now, and presently Sergeant Audry reemerged from the house with Mr. Durkin a step or two behind. Mr. Durkin was wearing long pants and suspenders, and a T-shirt without sleeves that revealed a tattoo of a grass-skirted girl who looked quite a bit like the grass-skirted doll on his dashboard. The screen door slammed behind them, and Mr. Durkin jumped at the noise and then hurried to catch up, and then walked alongside Sergeant Audry back to his cruiser, crablike, trying to keep up and plead his case at the same time, the case being that if this was what it finally come down to, the niggers was now pissing in white people’s shoes, then it was war.

  His voice carried over the neighborhood, and you could tell he’d cracked open the first beer quite a while ago, possibly when he got up that morning and found his shoes in the icebox. Mr. Durkin had his pistol stuck into the front of his pants and was gesturing with his right hand, pointing every direction except directly at Sergeant Audry. He used his left hand to hold the gun in place.

  Sergeant Audry did not like to be called out to Vincent Heights in the first place—perhaps he resented being reminded of where he lived, or the fire, or his previous plans to move into town after he sold his house—and appeared to pay no attention to what Mr. Durkin was saying. Back at the police car, though, he stopped at the still-open door while Mr. Durkin continued to talk, and inspected his fingernails, as if he was about to say something logical. And when he did speak, it did sound logical, at least to Spooner. He didn’t raise his voice or even turn in Mr. Durkin’s direction, only said, “Lemme ast you somethin’, Roger. You think I ain’t got nothin’ more impo’ent to have did at the end of the day but come out heah and lookit where somebody pissed in somebody’s shoes?”

  Mr. Durkin did not answer, and in a second Sergeant Audry wheeled on him, faster than you would have thought a fat man could wheel, and poked a finger that looked for all the world like a baby’s leg into the middle of Mr. Durkin’s narrow chest. Mr. Durkin was taken off balance and fell back a step.

  “Lissen a me, cocksucker,” Sergeant Audry said, and the logical part of it was over now, “I been on the police seventeen years, and I guess by now I can tell nigger crime from a domestic disturbance.”

  He backed himself into the front seat of the car and sat down and lifted his legs in after him, one at a time, grunting with the effort, and then slammed the door, and ca
me close to running over Roger Durkin’s feet on the way out.

  Mr. Durkin stood in the driveway as Sergeant Audry drove off, stunned, his hand still on the pistol tucked into the front of his pants, like he might be thinking of shooting off his own pecker. His wife was watching from the front door, terrified, and Mr. Durkin looked down at his slippers—before this, he’d worn his black work shoes whenever he went outside, even if it was only to wash the car—and what he was thinking Spooner could not guess.

  Spooner tried all day but could not get back to the feeling of standing in Kenny Durkin’s refrigerator-lit kitchen and tinkling into Mr. Durkin’s shoes. The feeling had been apart from and unconnected to the incident of the unshared cheese, or the fact that Kenny Durkin’s mother would never give him a drink of ice water out of a glass, and always told him to use the hose instead. Or even, really, with the pleasant picture of Mr. Durkin taking his shoes out of the icebox and slipping his feet inside, then stopping cold in his tracks, as it were, knowing they weren’t just cold but something worse, and waiting for his brain to tell him what it was.

  In the end, this inability to reclaim the feeling of greatness would be a lifelong affliction. For all of Spooner’s life, the only way back to the feeling was back to the icebox.

  Sunday, after Sunday school, Spooner climbed the six steps out of the basement of the Methodist church, the clammiest place in Milledgeville, Georgia, and still in the wash of a crowded room of children who had to a person heard the word and felt Jesus in their hearts, heard something himself: The world is full of shoes.