Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  Calmer had no idea how to begin the conversation, if this would be another version of his talk with Coach Tinker, or something different, or worse.

  “One of them yours?” the scout said.

  Calmer was sitting a few feet away. The scout pulled on the Pall Mall and the smoke went in deep and only began leaking out as he spoke.

  Calmer pointed toward Spooner. “Over there,” he said, “the pitcher.”

  The scout nodded. “Well, he’s the one, all right. He’s got the live arm.”

  A kid came by selling hot dogs, and the scout bought two of them and asked for a receipt. Out on the field, a boy with an enormous head was laying a fresh chalk line up the first base side, smiling out from under the awning of his baseball cap, pushing a one-wheeled barrow, and the line behind him was perfect and straight. Calmer thought it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to lay chalk lines. He was catching himself at this all the time lately, picturing himself trading jobs, usually for some kind of work that would be finished for the day when it was finished for the day, that would leave him time to rest and read. Other jobs, other lives. It was strange how often it came up.

  The boy with the chalk marker moved at a slow, even pace out into the grass of the outfield, passing within a few yards of the place where Spooner was warming up, throwing effortlessly to a fat kid named Ken Jonny. Ken Jonny had been failing biology last fall when Tinker sent an assistant around to see Calmer about it, pressing him to use his influence with the teacher to get the boy a passing grade. Calmer had waited until Tinker’s assistant finished and then went to his bookshelf, picked out Introduction to Biology, handed him the book without a word and showed him out the door.

  Spooner seemed to be throwing a little harder now, and the scout watched him throw and set the cigarette next to him on the bleacher and began to eat a hot dog. Then he stopped, maybe the second bite still in his mouth, and set the hot dogs aside, on top of his notepad and, using the napkin, took out his upper plate and inspected it for some bit of hot dog bone that had gotten between it and his gums. He blew on the plate to clean it and then used the teeth to indicate Spooner. “Any ways you look at it, that’s damn unusual stuff,” he said. Then had one more look at his teeth and set them back in his mouth.

  Calmer watched, and presently, without any appreciable difference in effort, there was a change in the sound as the ball arrived into the catcher’s mitt. A cracking noise one time, a popping noise the next—you could almost think of firewood. And then the ball began to rise and dive and jag sideways, as if one side were heavier than the other, and Calmer sat in the stands—a physicist, a mathematician, a pilot, a man who knew and understood the principles of flight—trying to conceive what spin would account for the sudden movement of the ball as it reached the plate.

  The scout had taken his teeth out again and spoke as if he were reading Calmer’s mind. “That poop at the end of them pitches,” he said, “it’s something like a knuckler, but it don’t look like a knuckler coming to the plate onaccount of the ball gets to you so fast.”

  A hundred feet beyond Spooner, the kid with the chalk marker had come to the fence and turned around and was standing in the sunshine, smiling, looking something like an angel, waiting for someone to tell him what to do next. Calmer stretched in the sun and then thought again of telling Lily about Spooner, and that prospect rolled in on him like low, boiling clouds over the old trailer park, and scared the sun out of the sky.

  Calmer sat with the scout most of the afternoon, stunned at what he was seeing—nobody from Bloom Township could touch Spooner’s pitching—and at what he was thinking. Then the rain started, and then the lightning, and finally the umpire called the game.

  The storm blew over trees and street signs, and there were sightings of funnel clouds all over northern Illinois and Indiana. Calmer drove back to Shabbona Drive, oblivious of the weather.

  Lily was in the kitchen, waiting for him. It was still blowing outside, and a piece of hail the size of a baby’s fist had come through the utility room window and lay on the linoleum floor where it had landed, melting, and there were shards of glass all over the room. It looked like a migraine headache in there.

  “I thought something had happened,” she said, indicating that he was late.

  He heard echoes of old abandonments in her voice, of the death of her first husband, her father, Spooner’s twin brother. All of that wrapped up like a sandwich in waxed paper. Five ordinary words. How did she do it? He supposed you might as well ask Picasso the same question, or Sophia Loren, or that kid with Down syndrome laying down his perfect chalk lines to mark the field.

  “I was in Chicago Heights watching Warren,” Calmer said. “He’s quite a baseball player.”

  She was fixing a meat loaf for tomorrow’s dinner—it was Friday, so it would be fish sticks tonight—and at the mention of baseball, she dove bare-handed into the bowl of raw meat and raw eggs and onions as if she’d glimpsed Coach Tinker hiding at the bottom and meant to strangle him. Calmer waited, dripping rain on the kitchen floor, but she did not look up from her business. The storm blew and the curtains billowed over the broken window.

  “There was a fellow at the game,” Calmer said. “A baseball scout.”

  Now she did look up, daring him to say another word.

  “Apparently, he’s got unusual…”—he reached around for the word the scout used and found it—“poop. Quite unusual poop.” It was a satisfying word, poop, and he said it and waited, and in the quiet that followed, his thoughts went to a caving expedition a long time ago in the Black Hills, of that certain, dark stillness and sensing the presence of other living things.

  He waited for the air to explode in bats.

  He and Lily had arrived here at the old bat cave before, of course, and usually it was over Spooner. It was never said in exactly these words, but Spooner was hers, not theirs. Strangely, there was no such undercurrent when it came to Margaret, and had never been, but then, it was a different thing, worrying if Radcliffe would be a better school than Swarthmore or Stanford, and having to figure out what to do when your kid gives everybody Christmas presents stolen from Massey’s Hardware.

  “You know that I don’t think he should be playing baseball,” she said, and seemed to be talking more to the meat loaf than to him. “How is he going to get in to a decent school?”

  Calmer thought of having a Scotch but reconsidered—afraid it might be perceived as indifference. He sat down across from her at the table. She took her hands out of the bowl, bits of onion glistening like diamonds in the ground meat. And now he was thinking of a summer day not so long ago, the year Spooner began seventh grade and Calmer had gotten him a job mowing lawns at the high school, and they’d walked down a hallway after lunch, Spooner stopping a few seconds here, a few seconds there, still keeping up, and when Calmer turned to see what he was doing, the kid had opened half a dozen combination locks in the hallway lockers, apparently as easily as untying his shoes.

  “Next year he’ll be on his own,” she was saying, “and he can barely read. Did you see his report card?”

  Calmer had seen the report card, D in English, but it was only a midterm card and the D had been dropped on him by Miss Ethel Sandway, who was as crazy as a loon. Miss Sandway was an enormous woman with a master’s degree in education from Normal—what was it about that place, anyway?—who was working even now toward a doctorate. He trembled to think of what she might be planning to do with that.

  Lily wiped her hands on her apron and took the atomizer out of her pocket and squeezed two quick hits into her tonsils. All these years, and it still tore him to pieces to watch her fighting to breathe.

  “I’ll talk to Miss Sandway,” he said, “see what the problem is.”

  They had talked once before, Calmer and Miss Sandway. Miss Sandway had assigned a freshman class to memorize the poem “Trees” by Robert Frost. Margaret was in the class and told him what she’d given them to do, and Calmer went to the woman, thinking she’d pr
obably been in a hurry, or preoccupied, or had a mouthful of potato chips at the time, and found himself shortly in a pitched battle over the authorship of “Trees,” which Miss Sandway said she’d been teaching for twenty years and imagined she could continue to teach without interference from the science department. Calmer politely held his ground, as he always did, always would, and they walked to the school library together and looked the poem up, and seeing that the author was not Robert Frost, Miss Sandway slammed shut the book and poked a finger in his chest. “The whole point, Ottosson,” she said, “is the trees. He writes about the beauty of trees.”

  And Calmer—who admired Robert Frost above all other poets, and had fixed broken things all his life, making do with what was on hand, who had once landed an airplane using the wind against his open door to steer after the ailerons cable broke, who had delivered a dozen breech babies from the wombs of the animals on his father’s farm, and who had undertaken to mend the life of a woman for whom misery itself was a comfort—Calmer looked at the hulking figure of Miss Sandway and punted. Some things could be fixed, some things couldn’t.

  These days Miss Sandway kept an office on the second floor that smelled strongly of canned fish, even from the hallway. She maintained her person like some contented hobo, folds of fat sacked into her worn, unwashed print dresses, old sweat lines stained into the armpits like age rings in trees, and was defiant of all authority save Dr. Baber himself. She had intimated to colleagues that she had been told she was in the running for his job.

  Calmer sat a moment, ruminating on the oddness of it, the unwanted people who found their way into your kitchen, into your life. He got up, went into the utility room, and began sweeping up the glass, and tried but could not quite remember how the ball had moved when Spooner threw it.

  At dinner, before a single fish stick had been poked, Spooner’s mother announced that there would be no more baseball this year because of Spooner’s D in English. The rules, she said, were the rules. Spooner looked up briefly, then back at his plate, feeling, among other things, a strange relief.

  The fish sticks lay on a plate on the table, cooling, glistening, limper by the second, as appetizing as a pile of dicks. Moments passed, and in the end it was Phillip who spoke up. “That’s ex post facto,” he said.

  Spooner looked up, thinking for a moment that his little brother had developed a speech impediment.

  Spooner’s mother had not come unprepared for arguments. “We all have to live by rules,” she said. “What if your father decided he just didn’t want to go to work? What if I decided I didn’t feel like making dinner?”

  Spooner looked at the fish sticks, considering that.

  Phillip was five years old, always trying out something he’d just read. Now he said, “It’s ex post facto if it wasn’t against the law at the time.” He looked up at Calmer, expecting to see him tickled to death, as he normally was when Phillip was showing it off. But Calmer hadn’t seemed to hear what he said.

  “It is not ex post facto,” Spooner’s mother said. “I studied Latin too, mister. We have to live in this community.”

  He said, “We can’t live here if Warren plays baseball?” He was just learning sarcasm, and the tone was purely hers.

  Then, even before she could warn him not to take that tone of voice with her, they all seemed to look across the table at once, and there was Darrow, his eyes brimming over with tears. Spooner looked at his brother and thought of all the little tortures he’d inflicted on this kid over the years. Thinking he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen him cry.

  Calmer sat motionless and stunned. He had thought she’d agreed to let him talk it over with Sandway, to find out what had happened, and for a little while there was no sound in the kitchen save the scraping of Phillip’s silverware against the plate. He had begun to eat after he’d staked his ex post facto claim. Five years old and ready for the debate team tomorrow.

  Spooner’s mother abruptly stood up. “Well,” she said, “I don’t seem to have much of an appetite,” possibly laying the blame for the stricken mood on those who might feel like eating, and headed off into the back of the house, where all the years had come and gone and there was still no addition.

  And later that night—as Lily slept and Calmer, as always when these things happened, could not sleep—later that night, it all came back to him, Spooner taking in what she’d said almost as if it didn’t matter, then silence, then Phillip and his Latin—where had he picked that up?—and then Darrow, Calmer’s spitting image, sitting across the table, blinking tears.

  His spitting image.

  Saturday broke clear and warm, a beautiful day for baseball, and without Spooner, the Golden Streaks lost to Thornton 19–1. The second loss of the year.

  THIRTY

  No one but the participants themselves knows exactly what went on the next afternoon in the small office Miss Sandway shared these days—technically—with a mouse-gray chemistry teacher named Mr. Hinter.

  Hinter was seventy-one years old and a groper of female students for as long as anybody at the school could remember. Complaints were first filed in the late 1960s, back when women’s liberation started to catch on, and were handled quietly by Dr. Baber, who issued Hinter warnings and at the same time just managed to hide a smile at the old guy’s spunk. Finally, after the lawyers took over the world and every other time the phone rang it was somebody threatening to sue the school district, Baber issued orders barring Mr. Hinter from entering the supply room with female students and, as further precaution, assigned him to share an office with Miss Sandway.

  Miss Sandway had previously had the office to herself and resented the intrusion, and seeing Hinter’s various bottles of cologne as he was moving in, threatened on the spot to break his fingers in the desk drawer if he ever even thought of getting frisky with her. Hinter, who did not know exactly what sort of behavior constituted friskiness, thereafter kept himself scarce.

  Meaning that when Coach Tinker, still smarting from the beating the Golden Streaks had taken Saturday from Thornton High, called on Miss Sandway Monday afternoon to discuss Spooner’s midterm grade, there were no eyewitnesses to what happened. Hinter was outside the office, waiting for her to leave so he could go in and retrieve his nasal spray, which he kept in his desk.

  It was commonly known that Miss Sandway used this period after lunch to grade papers and polish off whatever was left of the package of Oreo cookies she bought each morning on the way to school, and it is easy to imagine the cookies were lying out in the open, exposed and vulnerable, when Tinker blundered in, uninvited, and might even have closed the door behind him. Not realizing perhaps that he’d just closed off the avenue of escape. This is a familiar and tragic pattern, of course, to forest rangers who investigate the killing of tourists by bears.

  So the door closed and a moment later Hinter, who was waiting in the hallway, heard growling inside, distinctly heard growling, and then voices were raised, and there was crashing into walls, and glass broke and then the door flew open again and Tinker, red-faced and bleeding from scratch marks across his forehead, cords as thick as your fingers standing up in his neck, pointed back into the office and screamed, “If you were a man, I’d beat the hell out of you, buddy!”

  Calmer came into the bedroom early that morning, before daybreak, and when Spooner first opened his eyes and saw him, knowing it was too early to get up, he thought for a moment that someone had died. Calmer was wearing the same expression last year, after the news arrived that one of his uncles had been killed trying to put his little Cessna down in the cow pasture at night.

  Spooner sat up and Calmer touched his lips, not wanting to wake up Darrow, asleep in the upper bunk bed. He started to say something and then stopped. He hadn’t shaved, which was the first thing he did in the morning, and it didn’t look like he’d slept. He sat down on the foot of the bed a moment and gathered his thoughts. Then he patted Spooner’s foot. “You go ahead and play baseball,” he said.

&
nbsp; Just those words, and then he got up and left. And Jesus knew what that cost him with her.

  In the end, a letter was put in Miss Sandway’s file, noting the assault on Coach Tinker, and Spooner got out of her survey of American literature course with a C-plus, and graduated from high school with a 1.9 GPA and a 0.24 ERA, and was offered signing bonuses by both the Cubs and the Cincinnati Reds. There were more spectators at the last game he pitched than would show up later that month for graduation. People filled the stands and sat five deep on blankets and lawn chairs along both foul lines all the way to the fence. Behind the blankets, they sat in their cars and on their cars, and they crowded next to each other along the fence in the outfield, some waving school banners, some with homemade signs, and cheered every pitch Spooner threw until he finally gave up a hit, a cheap, soft liner over the shortstop’s glove to start the fifth inning.

  Lemonkatz and his friends were there too, and pretty soon had an area all to themselves near the left-field foul pole, and played their car radios so loud nobody near them could hear the public address system, and blew their horns and passed quart bottles of beer back and forth in brown paper sacks.

  The police were called, but Lemonkatz’s father appeared from the stands when they showed up and gave each of the officers his business card and threatened to sue them personally for harassment.

  There was some applause in the stands for that, and then Russell Hodge fouled a liner right into the policemen’s parked cruiser, and dented the door, and the whole place went crazy.

  A moment later Russell delivered one of his Howitzer shots reminiscent of the old Russell Hodge before he himself got dented, and it landed fifty feet beyond all the cars and spectators and then disappeared into a pile of pipes left over from the irrigation system the school had installed the year before, and in the end that was all the Golden Streaks needed and they won their twenty-second game of the season, 2–0, and a spot in the regional finals.