by Pete Dexter
He glimpsed Margaret in the bathroom doorway, a hand faintly on Calmer’s shoulder as she peeked around him to see what had happened, and as he watched, her face went colorless and slack, as if she’d been slapped and her cheek hadn’t had time yet to begin to color. And in her reflection he saw the meaning of what was going on, and this was the thing he’d been afraid of when the weight pressed into him at night.
Calmer picked him up and set him in the bathtub, the spigot still running wide open, and laid him carefully in the cool water. When he looked again, Margaret had begun to cry, and Spooner tried crying too but somehow had forgotten how.
And now his mother was at the doorway behind Margaret, her fingers covering her mouth, and Calmer went over his scalp, scrubbing, and for a little while the air rained ants. He was still out of breath from the run, and knelt on one knee beside the tub, as if he were proposing marriage. He put his hand behind Spooner’s head and lowered him farther into the water, and it came up around his face. “Easy does it,” he said, “just take it easy.”
What that meant, Spooner had no idea. He lifted his head and his ears unclogged and cleared, and he heard his mother. “Calmer?” she said. She was beginning to wheeze, the onset of an attack. He knew that sound like the first verse of “Dixie.” She was trying to get closer to the tub, closer to the tragedy, but the bathroom was small, and Margaret wasn’t giving up her spot.
“Just a minute,” Calmer said without turning around, still catching his breath, almost like he didn’t have time for her now. He would make his apologies later, but for now he had his fingers against a spot on Spooner’s neck, counting his pulse, watching him breathe. Spooner had never heard him speak to her in that way before, or any of them, really. Calmer always paid attention.
“Should I call the doctor?” she said.
He nodded, still impatient. “Call the doctor,” he said.
Spooner lifted his head and looked down toward his feet, and the surface of the water was a blanket of dark bodies, some of them crawling up the sides of the tub. There were also ants on Calmer’s shirt and arms, and he noticed them at the same time Spooner did, and swept them off like crumbs, rolling their bodies into so many boogers before they dropped back into the water. He checked Spooner’s hair, and then his ears, and then lifted him out of the tub.
Spooner began to slip, and Calmer moved him to the other arm.
From here Spooner caught his reflection in the mirror, his eyelids swollen into the shape of eyeballs themselves, red welts up and down his arms and legs, splayed across his chest and stomach.
Calmer wrapped him in a towel and pulled the plug on the ants.
Spooner was suddenly sweating hot, and just as suddenly shivering with cold. Calmer carried him past Margaret and his mother and laid him in bed, and the sheets were cool and soft. Calmer put a thermometer under his arm and felt again at the place on his neck.
He heard his mother again, the wheezing deep and pronounced.
“Calmer?” she said, but the control she had over him was gone, and he seemed not to have heard her voice.
Calmer came in later with some popcorn—white delicacies in a dishpan—and a stack of Spooner’s comic books. He showed Spooner the bites on his own arms and neck and said that tomorrow they would look like they gave each other measles. Trying to pretend that by tomorrow it wouldn’t matter.
Spooner slept.
He woke, and it seemed like a long time had passed, and then he heard Calmer and Margaret in the kitchen and knew it wasn’t even her bedtime yet. His mother had gone to bed on Dr. Woods’s advice, and Calmer had put Darrow down with a bottle before dark and was doing the dishes, listening as Margaret went over her multiplication tables. Not American numbers, she was practicing them in French. Spooner heard him close the cupboard and sweep the floor, and then he tucked Margaret in and checked on Spooner’s mother. He was in there a little while, talking Shakespeare to her—Wouldst have something to eat, my love?—and then, much later, when the house was settled and quiet, Spooner’s bedroom door cracked open and Calmer came in quietly, not to wake him up, and sat staring at him in the dark.
Calmer stayed a long time, just looking, and then softly sighed. One of his knees cracked as he stood up, or perhaps it was his back. He picked up the popcorn bowl and the pieces that had fallen on the sheets, and went out of the room, and half a lifetime later Spooner could still call up that night exactly. The man sitting in the dark on the chest beside the bed, helpless, and the child lying in the dark beneath him, pretending to sleep, also helpless. Strangely enough, Spooner would remember the scene not from the bed but from Calmer’s spot on the chest, and would see himself as Calmer had seen him, through his eyes. A kamikaze aimed right at the middle of everything he had and loved. But more than that, the living evidence of the man who had been here first and who was more precious to Lily than Calmer ever was or ever would be.
Spooner was down three days with a fever. He scratched the bites until they bled and then picked at the scabs. The doctor came to the house again, looked him over, and left iodine to put on the sores and cough syrup to quiet the itching. Dr. Woods rarely saw a patient whose condition could not be improved with cough syrup.
Calmer was downhearted all week and barely spoke. On Dr. Woods’s suggestion, they were putting mittens on Spooner’s hands at night, but Spooner was a born picker and picked at his scabs anyway. He worked the scabs off carefully, taking his time, lifting one side a little and then the other, trying to take each one whole. Afterwards, he put the biggest ones on the windowsill and ate the rest, put the mittens back on and went to sleep. Why Spooner ate some and saved others, he didn’t know. If you’d asked him, he could have said only that eating the perfect ones never entered his mind.
By morning, though, the scabs had dried and curled at the edges, and you could hardly tell them from dirt.
Each morning Calmer came into the bedroom before work and inspected Spooner’s sores, which were concave to the skin and crusted at the edges—his arms resembled a battlefield—and cleaned out the infected ones with Mercurochrome, which stung less than iodine, and then he checked them again at night, when he oversaw Spooner’s bath. Afterwards, he helped Spooner into his pajamas, trying every way he could to keep his mother from seeing the sores. Warren eating his own flesh? No, she wouldn’t make much of that.
Calmer seemed confused when he first came on newly opened sores, as confused as he was by the idea of sitting down in an anthill in the first place, but kept it to himself. It seemed to Spooner that all that week Calmer kept everything he thought to himself.
On Friday, nine days after the incident, Spooner returned to Peabody School and saw the look on Miss Bell’s face, perhaps imagining what this human scab would look like at her wedding.
Friday supper: fish sticks, macaroni and cheese, frozen peas. They always had fish sticks on Friday, just like the Catholics. Better safe than sorry. Spooner had gone to sleep on the cool kitchen floor when he got home from school, and in his sleep felt his mother stepping over him half a dozen times, going from the icebox or the sink to the oven. He got up with no feeling at all in one of his arms, and everything else itched.
Calmer got home just before they ate, carrying a brown and black puppy. It was bigger than the Boston terrier and had long hair that stuck straight out as if it had been recently vacuumed. Clumps of it came out at the least tugging. He set the animal carefully into Spooner’s arms, and it had only been there a second when it squirmed out, trailing dog hair, and then stepped onto the table and, passing on the fish sticks, went straight for the macaroni and cheese, skidding over the table toward Margaret, and Spooner’s mother fell back into her default setting, a spontaneous attack of asthma.
They named the animal Fuzzy, although Spooner wanted to call him Brown Fury, and put him in the tiny utility room with the washing machine. Then they put some of the dog food left over from the Boston terrier into a pie tin and poured milk over it, and Fuzzy/Brown Fury stepped into the mi
ddle of it to eat, and when he’d finished and stepped out, the surface behind him was matted thick with his hair.
Spooner’s mother disappeared into her bedroom, breathing impaired. Asthma, fish sticks, the puppy, the baby, Spooner—it was all too much. Supper reconvened without her, however, after Calmer had fixed her a plate of food and picked as much of the dog’s hair out of it as he could, and Spooner had taken it back to her bedroom, and when he returned to the table Calmer, who had been quiet all week, was suddenly animated again, as if the puppy had cheered him up even if it was strangling Spooner’s mother. He leaned in on Margaret and said, “So, my dear, how goeth the struggle?”
“What struggle, my dear?” she said. Everything came to her so easily.
Calmer was holding Darrow with one hand, eating with the other, and now he dropped his eating hand under the table and grabbed her bare foot. “The struggle for civilization, my dear,” he said, “for shoes…” And like that he was back with them again, back to being Calmer.
Weeks passed. “When I was your age,” Calmer said one night, talking just above a whisper because it was late, “there was no one to play with, and sometimes after church…” He took a moment, as if he wasn’t sure if he should go ahead, “after church, I used to sit out in the middle of a field we left fallow that year—fallow, that means it’s not growing anything on it, giving it a rest—and shoot my gun into the air just to see how close I could come”—Spooner didn’t understand at first—“to getting one to fall right back on top of my noggin.”
Spooner saw what he was talking about, and the scene opened up for him like the start of a Technicolor movie. “I had my dad’s helmet from the war,” Calmer was saying, “and I’d shoot up into the air and then put the helmet on and wait to see where it landed. You could see the little puffs of dust.”
“Did you?”
Calmer shook his head. “Close a few times, though,” he said. He put his hand on Spooner’s head and rubbed his hair, setting off a wild itching. It was the first time he’d put his hand on Spooner in a friendly way since he’d sat in the anthill. But then Calmer was never much of a toucher. He stood up to leave, his bedtime too. “Moderation, man,” he said—called him man—“that’s the key. Men of our ilk, we have to practice moderation.”
Spooner dropped off to sleep happy and woke up early in the morning thinking of being in a field with a gun and a helmet and a hard wind, and bringing one in right on top of his noggin.
NINETEEN
During the family’s last spring in Georgia, Calmer took Spooner for a walk one morning in the woods at the edge of Vincent Heights. They were moving to Illinois at the end of the school year—everybody but Spooner’s grandmother, who said she thought she’d just as soon stay there alone in Vincent Heights and die.
Earlier that day, Calmer had tied a chain to the dog’s collar, to get him used to his new life in Illinois. The dog had fought the chain until he foamed at the mouth and bled, biting into it.
“It’s a brand-new place,” Calmer said, meaning Illinois, “a fresh start for everybody.” It did not have to be explained to him whose fresh start Calmer was talking about. After quitting cold for a long time, Spooner was back breaking into houses and pissing in shoes, although not with the old enthusiasm. He hadn’t been caught yet, or even seen in the vicinity, but he’d heard Kenny Durkin’s father talking about him one afternoon to his wife:
“Well, the boy ain’t his, so he’s afraid to touch him. It’s a manner of pussy-whipped.”
“Well, I wisht somebody would whip him,” she said.
The newspaper was running stories again, “The Fiend of Vincent Heights Returns,” and a policeman Spooner had never seen before came to the door one afternoon and talked to Calmer down on the road in front of the house. Still, Calmer had never asked him about it directly, and if he did, Spooner didn’t know what he would say. Lying to Calmer was harder for him all the time.
And so—maybe instead of asking him directly—Calmer took him for a walk in the woods and talked about starting fresh and wiping the slate clean, and Spooner, who had not believed before that such a thing was possible, found himself weeping, and bore down on it and promised himself to change then and there, and that same afternoon, unaccountably, Calmer’s car rolled down the hill in front of the house.
Spooner and Margaret were outside when it happened; Margaret was playing with the Ennis girls, Spooner in the yard with the dog, peeling scabs off the animal’s head from where he’d been kicked two weeks previous by one of the garbagemen riding the back end of the city garbage truck. The dog had the instinct to chase cars—cars, cats, deer, anything that was moving away—which was one of the reasons he had to be chained up when they moved north. That and the Village of Prairie Glen had rules and dog laws.
The old black Ford was perched in its usual spot in front of the house at the top of the hill, and suddenly, slowly, of its own volition, began to roll, and in that same instant the dog was gone, as if something had torn him out of Spooner’s arms.
Margaret looked up and saw the car had got loose, and she was off running too, crossing the dirt road going one way while the dog and then Spooner crossed it going the other. They almost touched, Spooner and his sister, and then she was taking the front steps two at a time to report what had happened.
Spooner continued after the runaway car and the runaway dog, down the hill, and then stopped in his tracks when the car veered left off the road and into Mr. Ennis’s briar patch. Spooner and Margaret had picked wild plums around the edge of this same patch every summer of their lives. The car tilted up and rolled briefly on two wheels, then fell over and came to rest on its roof and was immediately attacked by the dog, who’d apparently had something like this in mind ever since he’d started chasing automobiles.
Spooner looked back toward the house just as Calmer came out of the front door and stood for a moment with his hands on Margaret’s shoulders. Spooner estimated the car was barely visible from there, upside down and a yard deep into Mr. Ennis’s briars, the tires still spinning, and he waved to show Calmer where it was. The dog was biting the tailpipe and appeared to have gone crazy with the lust to kill.
Calmer came down the steps calmly and walked to Spooner, who was standing barefoot, on the exact spot where the tire tracks left the road.
Calmer looked him over, and Spooner put his fingers in his mouth. Margaret had come back down out of the house, following Calmer, but he turned to her now and said, “You better go inside and tell your mother everybody’s all right.”
Calmer walked past Spooner and followed the car tracks through the crushed plum bushes. Spooner hurried to catch up. When he had, Calmer said, “I want us to be sure about this, man to man. Were you playing in the car?”
Spooner shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. He did not usually call Calmer sir, it sounded to his ear like Lance Shaker talking to his father.
Calmer closed his eyes a moment and seemed to shake beneath the surface, but he held the shaking inside, the same way he had the time he’d smashed his thumb with the hammer fixing the back steps. Spooner remembered now that the thumbnail had split and then turned black the next day and fallen off a week later, in two parts, and he gave them to Spooner. He thought of himself and Calmer together that morning in the woods.
Without another word, Calmer set off through the thorns and briars, Spooner following along, the stickers grabbing at his legs and ankles. Ahead of him, Calmer reached the small clearing the car had made skidding on its roof to a stop. Spooner came beside him, almost reached for his hand.
“Go on. Get out of the way,” Calmer said.
Spooner took a step back, and Calmer took a step forward and, without even removing the dog, took the running board in his hands and rocked the car until it tipped, then rolled over onto its side. That was as far as he could get it, though, and he opened the trunk and pulled out the three pieces of the jack, then slammed the trunk lid shut.
He put a rotted two-by-four, crawlin
g with pale insect life, between the jack and the edge of the window, and in this way jacked the Ford two feet off the ground, enough room to get his back under it, then bent at the knees and slowly stood up under the weight. His face went red with the strain, and then dark red, and the car rose steadily, a foot and then another half, and Calmer’s legs, not quite straightened, began to tremble, and then the car stopped rising. Calmer couldn’t move now, either farther under it for a better angle, or out from under it entirely, and his whole body began to shudder beneath the weight, not just his legs, and in that moment Spooner saw Mr. Ennis come out of his house and begin to run, cutting through the thorns as if they weren’t there, shouting Good Christ, and when he got to the car he dropped next to Calmer and got hold in the open window frame, and his face gradually went red also, but then the car began to rise again, barely moving at first, then reached a counterpoise, paused, and then the two men seemed to heave together, and the car fell away from Calmer and Mr. Ennis, bouncing back onto its tires.
The dog attacked it all over again, and Calmer stumbled and sat on the ground, his arms bleeding from the thorns and briars, and he sat still for a moment, spent, his face gone white as the moon.
Mr. Ennis was standing with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. “That right there,” he said, “is the damnedest crazy thing I ever hope to see an educated man do.” He leaned over and threw up, then took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one up, offered another one to Calmer. “If you’ll pardon my saying so.”
Calmer waved to show no offense taken, and smiled in a good-natured way, but he’d been scared. He got back on his feet, his legs still not right underneath him, never looking once at Spooner, and patted Mr. Ennis on the back to thank him for his help. And then he got in the car and started the engine and backed out of the patch of wild plums, leaving Spooner where he was.