Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  As if an adult human being ought to be ashamed of having nothing better to do with a weekday afternoon than watch high school football practice. As if nobody had told Tinker yet what he did for a living.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  There was in every sport Spooner ever played, on every team he ever joined, an outcast. Some kid who had been plucked from the safety of home and homeroom and tossed, often at the insistence of his own father, out into the world. Unprotected. Often this kid was the fattest, dopiest kid in school, someone who had been it every day of his life on the playgrounds, shunned or insulted one day, beaten up the next, and was now introduced to the rest of his life, which was more of the same except better organized, with the degree of abuse he suffered depending mostly on the mercies of the adults in charge.

  In the case of the 1973 Golden Streaks football squad, the adult in charge was the coach, Evelyn Tinker, and the outcast was a short, fat kid named Francis Lemonkatz, who had body hair, front and back, like some hibernating animal, and legs so short as to remind you of such an animal coached up onto his hind limbs to walk.

  Tinker had ignored young Lemonkatz in the beginning, assuming he would quit along with the rest of the momma’s boys and softies who came out every year thinking football would be fun, and who didn’t usually last even to the end of the first morning of the two-a-day August practices.

  Lemonkatz, however, did not quit. He had not come out thinking football would be fun, but instead was one of those kids you run into now and then who seem to have been born without a sense of what fun was, or what it was for, who arrived at puberty already resigned to the world as a trap, as miserable one place as another. And in this posture of resignation Lemonkatz came gradually into Tinker’s world, something fat out on the edges, a whining, slovenly presence at the periphery of team meetings, hiding among the practice dummies at practice, a kid unable to do a single push-up or sit-up, or even hold on to the chinning bar long enough to try a chin-up, who cheated on all his calisthenics, jumping jacks to six-count burpies, was dead last in wind sprints and shied from physical contact.

  And would not quit.

  Tinker, who valued practice time like a conjugal visit, was not inclined to waste it on rehabilitating the likes of Francis Lemonkatz, or even getting his name right—always called him Lemonstick—and instead went about finding him a use. Once, for instance, at the end of an afternoon’s practice, Tinker called the team together—“take a knee, gentlemen, take a knee”—and then called Lemonkatz up to the front. He held him by the arm with one hand, pointing at him with the other. There was a long silence, and then Coach Tinker yelled, “IS THIS HOW YOU WANT TO END UP?”

  The response was an explosion, “No, sir!” the collective voice deeper than any single voice in the bunch. And unmistakably one of those voices was Lemonkatz’s.

  For his part, Spooner was unmoved by threats of ending up like Lemonkatz. He didn’t think far enough ahead to worry about how he would end up, for one thing, and for another thing had his own Lemonkatz problem to worry about, the more and more frequent occasions when he found himself centered in the boy’s piteous, needy gaze, which was no different for Spooner than eating a ham sandwich in front of old Fuzz. Or in front of Lemonkatz, for that matter. And as the weeks went on and Lemonkatz suffered more and more piteously at the hands of his teammates and Coach Tinker, Spooner was more and more often drawn into these awful glimpses of Lemonkatz’s situation. It didn’t only happen at football practice; it was just as likely in English class or Spanish, or in the hallways between classes, or in locker rooms or buses, or sitting on the bench during games. Spooner would come back after a kickoff—he did not get to play much but was on the kickoff teams due to his willingness to throw his head in front of things moving in the other direction—and sometimes, if he’d gotten his head into things just right, the world would seem slightly unfamiliar for a while afterwards, and by the time he got back to the present, his eyes, without Spooner’s even knowing it had happened, would be settled on Lemonkatz, who was always there waiting for him, silently begging him for something, and what that was, Spooner could not even guess.

  Lemonkatz’s hair oozed oil and was infested with dandruff the size of cereal flakes. He had been shaving since sixth grade and since that time had been coming to school reeking of aftershave but something else too, like he was carrying cheese in his pocket. He never showered in the locker room shower, but would stand naked in a corner instead, away from the water, covering his genitalia with his hands and hiding as well as he could in the noise and steam until a whistle blew and it was time to dress for class.

  Worse than matters of personal hygiene though was the distinctive nasal puling that came out of Lemonkatz whenever his class was assigned to write an essay or read a chapter of a book, or even when Señor Rosenstein addressed the Spanish class in Spanish. Spooner suspected the noise was involuntary, as it occurred in spite of the fact that Lemonkatz had never done a homework assignment in his life. It takes one to know one, as they say.

  But then the puling wasn’t the worst of it either. The worst of it was that Spooner understood the puling, understood the feeling of knowing that every time things changed, everything got worse. And understood that the sound coming out of Lemonkatz was the sound of being torn, a kid afraid to let go of what he had, no matter how awful it was, and at the same time afraid of being left behind.

  He also puled during football practice, issuing that familiar, unmanly sound sometimes even at the announcement of plays in the huddle. Why some plays and not others? Who could say? Every play was the same for Lemonkatz—the ball would be snapped, the lineman across the line would run over him on his way to the ball carrier. Sometimes a linebacker would come in behind the lineman and also run over Lemonkatz. Sometimes a linebacker and then a safety. Lemonkatz would lie still, waiting for it to stop, resembling some dead pigeon out along U.S. 30, feathers ruffling in the wind as the traffic blew past.

  Spooner had heard that Lemonkatz’s father had been a football player back in college, but you could never tell about those things, if the fathers were really what they said they had been. Spooner had also heard that he taped his son’s ankles and fed him T-bone steaks for breakfast on game days—this in spite of the fact that Lemonkatz would never in his football career play a single down in a game against another team—a regular reminder of the disappointment Lemonkatz was to them both.

  Then came an afternoon about halfway through October when Tinker gathered his players at the beginning of practice and announced that he intended to make Lemonkatz into a football player. The reason for the announcement was anybody’s guess. Possibly Lemonkatz’s father had called him, asking him to make his boy a man—Spooner had heard of things like that, throwing the child into the river to teach him to swim—or maybe it had nothing to do with Lemonkatz; maybe Mrs. Tinker hadn’t been giving Coach 100 percent on the home front. Whatever the cause, something had changed, and as always for Lemonkatz, the change was not good.

  Fifteen minutes after the announcement was made, Tinker caught Lemonkatz cheating on his six-count burpies and sent him twice around the goalposts carrying a tackling dummy, then brought him up from the back of the line six times in a row to face Russell Hodge in agility drills.

  Russell Hodge was an invulnerable, unapproachable knot of muscle and hostility—invulnerable from the left, at least; you could sneak up on him from the right where the yellow jacket had stung him deaf—a consensus all-conference linebacker for three straight years, second-team All-State in his junior year. Or had been until the afternoon he tossed Miss Degruso the music teacher into an open locker and slammed the door shut on her fingers and knee. Miss Degruso suffered two broken metacarpals and a cracked femur in the attack, and Russell was suspended not only from school but, several days later, in spite of Tinker’s calling in favors from his friends on the school board, from the football team. Miss Degruso was a tiny thing—had fit nearly entirely into the locker—and until this incident, had bee
n quite a cellist.

  Tinker called a special meeting of the squad to break the news. There had been only one other special meeting that year, when a kid named Neal Meredith was killed crossing the train tracks on his way home. Tinker said now what he’d said then, that setback was only another word for opportunity.

  In spite of that speech, the Golden Streaks lost 33–20 in a game that was not as close as the score. Leaving Coach Tinker 8-1 for the second year in a row, so close and yet so far, and nothing for comfort but the bitter satisfaction that Miss Degruso’s string quartet had canceled its annual Thanksgiving recital because her left leg couldn’t comfortably accommodate her instrument. Comfortably, he loved that. In the end, you always found out who wanted it bad enough and who didn’t.

  The struggle to change Lemonkatz continued through the long last month of the season. Week after week, Tinker screamed and blew his whistle, and week after week Lemonkatz dropped the dummies when he held them in blocking practice or turned away from other linemen in the agility drills, sometimes even covering his head. He feigned new injuries and once was discovered lying among the blocking dummies—it was uncanny how a human of his amplitude could disappear into a horizon of smaller objects—eating a whole box of Baby Ruth candy bars that he’d smuggled into practice under his jersey.

  Tinker grabbed him from behind and dragged him back to practice, candy bars falling out here and there like pieces of Lemonkatz himself. Later half a dozen of his teammates tied him to the bicycle rack, and the following day they threw him into the bleak, icy waters of the school lagoon, where he clutched his heart and screamed that he couldn’t swim. And through all this, he cowered and puled and sometimes cried, but he would not be moved from the place he occupied in his life and had decided was his.

  At every practice a time would come when Tinker seemed to remember that day with the candy bars and stopped whatever he was doing, the afternoon suddenly quiet, and called for Lemonkatz, and eventually that singular, awful, puling noise would be heard in the silence and Lemonkatz would appear from his hiding place behind the rest of the players and get into his lineman’s stance, his behind too high in the air, the hip pads coming out of his pants and all his weight on the back of his feet—almost like a circus act, that moment Spooner could never stand to watch before the elephant or the bear was forced up onto its hind legs—and wait in that posture for the whistle that would signal Russell Hodge or Ken Jonny or one of the others that it was all right to maim him. It was like a reward to be given Lemonkatz in this way, and depending on Tinker’s mood it could go on for ten straight minutes, sometimes five turns for two or three different players in a row.

  Afterwards, when it was over for the day, Lemonkatz would collect himself slowly, limping or holding his stomach or his wrist or his groin, and go back to his spot at the end of the line.

  The day came, inevitably, when Lemonkatz would not get up. When he lay in the dirt and wouldn’t move, even with Tinker kneeling next to him, blowing his whistle into Lemonkatz’s earhole and screaming that he wasn’t giving even 10 percent.

  Tinker assumed—the truth was, everybody assumed—that Lemonkatz was pretending again that he was hurt, and Tinker threw down his clipboard and picked him up as if he weighed no more than the uniform itself, just lifted him up off the ground and set him on his feet and began to scream in his bleeding-voice-box voice that if Lemonkatz didn’t fire up now, he would be lying in the dirt for the rest of his life. At least that was what he seemed to be saying. The words were unintelligible, lost in the spit and noise Tinker made getting them out, a noise, it seemed to Spooner, that might have been around back when language was first invented, when all of us had pelts like Lemonkatz’s and our most artistic ancestors first felt the urge to articulate their cravings to eat or murder or fuck something squirmy, and it all came out of Tinker at once, in one long, horrible howl.

  Even under this remarkable assault, Lemonkatz remained Lemonkatz. He dropped back onto the ground as soon as Tinker let go of him, nursing his leg. Tinker picked him up again and head-butted him—this while Lemonkatz was still inside his helmet—opening a gash on Tinker’s forehead so wide that it seemed to have lips.

  The blood blossomed up and then ran like a leak in the bathroom pipes over Tinker’s face and shirt, and when he blew his whistle again little bits of blood-covered spit came out of the top and blew into Lemonkatz’s face too. And he screamed, “Run it off, Lemonstick! Run it off,” and then he turned Lemonkatz around and punted him, lifting him slightly off the ground. Lemonkatz started for the far goalpost, limping badly, weeping. It took the rest of the afternoon for him to finish four laps, which was the standard distance for running it off.

  Tinker’s blood dripped steadily off his head as Lemonkatz did his laps, and various members of the team were inspired by this bloodletting into murderous acts of their own, which set off murderous acts of retaliation, and by the time practice ended, half a dozen players required stitches and fingers were bitten and broken and there was hardly an unbloodied face on the team and Tinker was joyous with the afternoon’s work and with life itself, and jogged in happily with his players, not noticing that Lemonkatz had stayed behind, collapsed beside a blocking dummy. And was still out there five hours later, ten o’clock at night, weeping, when his mother and father found him and took him to the hospital in Chicago Heights.

  Russell Hodge, it developed, had broken Lemonkatz’s femur, coincidentally in the same spot he had broken Miss Degruso’s, four inches above the knee. Lawsuits were filed, legal depositions taken, state-mandated student-injury reports filled out. Tinker himself filled out one of these reports, taking full responsibility for what had happened, although noting in the additional comments section that in fairness to all concerned, Lemonstick had NOT specifically notified anyone that his leg was broken.

  In football you have injuries, he wrote, and if anyone was to blame, it was the inventors of the Game of Football and those like myself, committed in the effort of molding today’s youth!

  The team went 8–1, again, and as an addendum to his financial settlement with the school district, Lemonkatz was given a varsity letter and allowed to ride on the team bus to the last two away games. He sat alone, still the outcast, and still there.

  A month later the school board issued its findings in the matter, mildly remanding Coach Tinker for leaving Lemonkatz among the blocking dummies but also noting that due to the darkness of the hour, it was an understandable error to have made.

  Spooner’s mother read the school board’s findings in the paper and swooned at the injustice.

  But not only that.

  That same week—the week after the season ended—the Lions Club threw a standing-room-only luncheon on Coach Tinker’s behalf at the VFW meeting hall and presented him with a five-hundred-dollar gift certificate from Goldblatt’s department store.

  And Spooner’s mother counted the days until some Lions Club do-gooder wandered up Shabbona Drive and tried to sell her raffle tickets. It is probably unnecessary by now to point out that she took these things personally, but it was strange even to Spooner that of all the people she talked to about it, she seemed angriest when she brought the matter up with Calmer.

  But that wasn’t all of it either.

  Early in the spring, at the end of wrestling season, Coach Tinker was given a weekly column in the sports pages of the Prairie Glen Mercury-News, making, if you can believe this, an extra forty dollars a week, and when the first column appeared and the evidence was there in front of Lily, in black and white, the absolute confirmation of who was getting ahead in the world, she closed shop and more or less quit breathing for three days. Back open for business, her first act was to call the Prairie Glen Mercury-News and cancel her subscription. She wasn’t going to pay good money to read a rambling illiterate, she said, and hung up before anybody could give her any lip. She spent the rest of that afternoon and most of the evening trying to start a boycott of the paper, a stand against throwing away good mone
y to read a rambling illiterate. All this talk about illiterates, by the way, went on as if Spooner weren’t sitting right there at the kitchen table listening.

  Over time Calmer tried—gently, gently—to persuade her that the situation had a humorous side, there in the columns themselves. If a fair world was what you were looking for, he said, you had to appreciate irony. And their own time, he reminded her—Calmer and Lily’s time—was coming. Dr. Baber was retiring, Metcalf had taken another job, and Calmer had been informally notified that he would be the next principal. There would be money then for the addition.

  And to a degree this mollified Lily and to a degree it didn’t, and she was not slow to remind him that she had learned the hard way not to count her chickens before the eggs hatched.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Later that year Spooner began his career in organized baseball. The coach of the baseball team was Evelyn Tinker, who in addition to being held almost blameless in the Lemonkatz boy’s injury was now rumored to be collecting sixty bucks a week for the newspaper column, this in spite of Lily’s public campaign to have him fired, and being as Spooner was not old enough yet to have voted for Richard Nixon, this joining of Tinker’s team constituted the single most disloyal thing a child of Lily Whitlowe Ottosson’s had ever done.