by Pete Dexter
As his last official act as principal, Dr. Baber presented Coach Evelyn Tinker with the Teacher of the Year Award during graduation.
“Coach Tinker has given our students and staff a transfusion of new school spirit and pride into the entire student body, encouraging even some of our marginal citizens into a healthy interest and respect for athletics…” And he continued on from there until half the place had dozed off.
The same wording showed up again later that summer, word for word, in the school board’s press release announcing Coach Tinker’s promotion to the position formerly held by Dr. Dean Baber, principal of Prairie Glen High.
The board hadn’t told Calmer of Tinker’s promotion ahead of time, had let him think it was his right up until the announcement in the Mercury-News, and a week or two later when the president of the board thought he’d had enough time to cool off, he called Calmer one evening to say that he knew he could count on him to continue his excellent work for the district and for the community. “As you know,” he said, reading perhaps from a prepared text, “you, Calmer, are irreplaceable to us. And between you and I, this thing was a very close call. I want you to know—”
“Between you and me…” Calmer said.
The line went quiet. “Calmer?” Stallings said. “You still there, buddy?”
“Where else?”
“You were saying something, between you and I—”
“Me,” Calmer said. “I said between you and me.”
“Yes?”
“That’s it. You and me.”
The connection was broken and the president of the school board looked at the phone and then at his wife, who drank a little bit herself.
He said, “That was strange.”
Four days later, there was a call from another school board, this one in a place called Falling Rapids, South Dakota, about a new high school, just under construction. Calmer had been there twice in the last eighteen months for interviews.
“The only stipulation we’d have,” the man said, “is we’d need you as soon as possible.”
The bonus offers Spooner got were all for more money than Calmer made in a year. Thirty-eight thousand dollars was the one he took, from the Cincinnati Reds. Spooner’s mother was stunned at the figure and wandered around the house feeling purposeless for days, having hated rich people—all except the Kennedys—all her life. Spooner himself had a different feeling, as if he were being watched like a mouse in those first moments in the terrarium, before it sees the snake.
The check arrived special delivery, and Spooner opened the envelope and looked at the amount, thirty-eight thousand dollars and no cents, and was suddenly visited with the old feeling that he had been caught, and was suddenly and strangely reluctant to even touch it, did not want to accept the largest amount of money he’d ever seen or heard of, and tried handing it over to Calmer instead.
“Here,” he said, “I don’t need this.”
Calmer said, “You hold on to your money. You can never tell when you might need it,” and patted his hand, a strange gesture to interpret.
Still, Spooner could hear the South Dakota farmer in Calmer’s words and remembered sitting with him at a gas station back in Milledgeville one cold January day on the way to school—Calmer had been out in the driveway in the dark at five-thirty that morning with a flashlight, still in his robe and slippers, trying to fix the car’s heater and two hours later he sat behind the steering wheel in his uniform, his fingernails on one hand still black with crescents of grease, the windshield fogged over, sealing them in, and stared at the coins in the palm of his hand, trying to decide if he should go back into the station over a nickel. Shortchanged a nickel.
You can never tell when you might need it.
In September Calmer and Spooner’s mother and his two younger brothers moved to South Dakota, and Spooner bought a three-year-old Jeep and drove to Wichita, Kansas, to join the Reds’ AA club, the Wingnuts. Early the following spring, he was sent to the Billings Mustangs to work on his control, and there, six months shy of his nineteenth birthday and demoted to the bullpen, he picked up a baseball one afternoon to loosen his arm, and with that first easy toss, the most familiar and natural motion of his life, shattered his elbow like so much glass. He heard it before he felt it, and when the feeling came, it came first as an instant of bewilderment, and then he saw what he felt, looked down at the underside of the elbow where a shard of bone pressed up into his skin like a tent pole and then, at the softest possible touch, the skin tore and the shard sprung up, white and jagged, as if it were raising a point of order.
Calmer was there with him when he woke up after the first surgery. There would be eight more surgeries before they gave up on making an elbow of it again, and Calmer was always there when he woke up.
“It’s good news,” he said. “It was benign.” And an instant later remembered himself and said, “Your momma sends her love.”
PART FOUR
Philadelphia
THIRTY-ONE
Spooner came to the city on a train, in a snowstorm, a week before Christmas. He’d spent half his money on the one-way ticket from Florida, where everything he had except the dog and the clothes in the washing machine had gone up in fire. Regardless of all the places he’d been and was no longer welcome, and all the chances he’d had and blown, he was still surprised at these glimpses into the way things worked, at how little forgiveness was built in to the plans.
He had been sitting on the floor barefoot and naked on the afternoon of the fire, unemployed, on the outs with his wife, talking about the weather with his mongrel Harry. Harry had just come in out of the rain, as wet as new born and smelling like an army blanket, and they were watching the end of the storm through a screen door on the east side of a one-car garage that had been converted into a laundry room.
“Well, they say we need the rain,” Spooner said.
Spooner would turn thirty later that fall; the dog would be three the same day. Gonad-wise, neither had been altered, although there had been attempts on them both. More than Spooner, Harry was streetwise, and could see trouble coming a mile away.
Just now he laid back his ears and slightly lifted the flaps covering his teeth. You could almost think he was smiling.
The tow truck driver appeared as a shadow in the screen door, shading his eyes as he leaned in to it to look inside. Spooner saw the hands first and thought of bat wings, of the possibility that he’d just stumbled across the greatest bat in the history of the South. Capture the bat, and the world will beat a path to your door.
Finally, a plan.
A face appeared, but Spooner couldn’t tell that it was a face yet, at this point could only say in regard to what was on the other side of the screen that even if it wasn’t a bat, it appeared to be carrying diseases.
“Mr. Spooner?”
The laundry room and the attached house belonged to the only friend Spooner had left in Florida in those days, with the exception of the mongrel next to him on the floor. Ever since the marriage broke up, the dog never left him alone more than a few minutes at a time. The friend came from eastern Tennessee and had once had a hillbilly band called Melancholy Panties, and a hit song the band was named for about going through a drawer full of heartbreaking panties, and in those days it seemed like every girl in the South wanted a ride on his bus. Now he was a newspaperman, and a good one, not bitter or used up, but he’d had his own band when he was twenty years old and the truth was that nothing since had much caught his attention.
How the friend had gotten here from there was a long story, and mostly about his wife. She had been one of the girls who took a ride on the bus but when the ride was over she’d refused to get off. Sometimes that’s how it happens—one of them refuses to leave. Her name was Honey, and she was a woman now, and like so many women of Spooner’s acquaintance, she’d looked at him one day and seemed to come all at once to her senses. It was always the same, like they’d wandered into a pet store and almost bought a monk
ey. There had been a load of them by now, these wives of his friends, women who gave off a certain playful, warm tenderness in his direction at first, as if Spooner were something she and her husband might share, and then one day froze over, with the smile still intact, and began watching every move he made and making notes for later, thinking perhaps that itemizing his faults would somehow arrest the Spoonerly leanings of her own husband. What button in them he pushed, Spooner never knew. It had been going on a long time, though. In Minneapolis, his own cousin’s wife once broke into tears at the sight of him on the front porch.
Spooner got up, wrapped a towel around his waist, and stepped to the door. He didn’t put on his tennis shoes because that was where his wallet and his money were stashed, and beyond that, both pairs of his socks were in the washer, and as far as the shoes themselves were concerned, he would as soon stick his bare feet in the septic tank.
These days the tennis shoes were it, vis-à-vis footwear.
“Good afternoon, sir,” the driver said. He had a practiced bad-news voice that Spooner had heard before. “Conforming to state law, I am required to inform you of your rights.”
Spooner waited to hear his rights, not optimistic. But now the man paused and seemed to lose his place, staring at the two raised, rootlike scars that grew in opposite directions from Spooner’s elbow, a reminder of his career as a hurler of balls and eggs and rocks.
“You are entitled,” he said, and tried to remember where he was, “you are entitled to remove any and all of your personal belongings from the impounded vehicle.” Twice in his life Spooner had been given his Miranda rights, and both times it was a better reading than this. This was just words.
Spooner waited, but he and the repossessor of cars seemed to have hit an impasse.
“That’s it?” Spooner said.
“Sir,” the man said, “I’m just a cog in the machine.” He was distracted by the scars, and trying not to stare. Spooner turned his palm right side up to give him a better look.
“It was a lightning strike,” Spooner said.
The driver leaned closer. When you looked at the scars closely they were jagged, like the surgeon had used pinking shears, and you could see they didn’t just meet at the elbow but crossed and then headed off in altered directions for half an inch or so, the skid left from a collision of slugs maybe. Spooner rarely looked at his elbow these days unless he was drinking, and then he would imagine the squeal of tiny suction cups, the little wet mouths forming horrified O’s as the distance closed…
The driver’s hands were enormous and hung a little low for a human, and there was more hair on either one than Spooner had left on his head. Seeing these hands, Spooner realized that the driver never could have played any musical instrument that required fingering. He didn’t look like he could even play pool, unless there was someone else there to fish the balls out of the pockets. You wonder how people end up in a job like this, Spooner thought; there is always a reason. Spooner had empathy to a fault, perhaps had learned it from Calmer.
He followed the driver around to the front of the house, where his car and all his personal belongings were being repossessed, a particularly public repossession, it seemed to him, the butt end of his old Wankel-engine Mazda hanging from the cable at the end of the tow truck. The house address was 419 Palm Tree Way, and the smell of gasoline was everywhere.
“I would offer to assist you,” the driver said, “but under state law, I cannot touch anything you own. Technically speaking, if you were to make a complaint, Tallahassee could pull my license.”
Spooner did not move, except to retuck the towel around his waist. He was considering what things weighed, what could be carried. There was an ancient Underwood typewriter in the trunk and fifty pages of a story he was trying to write about a showdown back in Prairie Glen between his mother and Coach Tinker. He’d stalled on it after she’d given the coach until noon to pack up and leave. There was also a basketball and a box of books, and a few of the books mattered to him, and most of them didn’t. The truth was, Spooner still wasn’t much of a reader. There was also a high school yearbook from his sophomore year, with pictures of Margaret as homecoming queen and Dee Dee Victor as Miss Pep. For reasons he couldn’t remember, he’d gone through it with scissors a long time ago and cut out all the pictures of himself, removing the evidence that he’d been there at all.
In the backseat were Coleman coolers of several different sizes and a Sunbeam steam iron he had claimed from the big split-up, and nothing in the entire spectacle of his life—including standing barefoot and toweled in this patch of clover watching most of it being repossessed—was as ridiculous to him at this moment as carrying an iron around in his car all this time to impress her somehow that he had plans too. That this time he was going out into the world pressed.
“Sir?” the driver said. “Could we stay focused here?”
He was already running out of patience.
“I’m trying,” Spooner said, “but it’s not that easy.”
The driver lifted his hand to look at his watch, which lay half buried in the hair of his wrist. And his thumbs. Had he been able to suck his thumb as a child? Had he choked up hairballs?
“Look,” he said, “I’m trying to be polite, but I’ve got a pretty full day.” It occurred to Spooner that the man might be angling for a tip. “So, cut to the chase. Do you want a hand getting your stuff out of there or not?”
Spooner spotted a pool of liquid beneath the car, winking blue and green with the changing light. The car had a leak somewhere in the gas tank that showed up at about six gallons, and instead of having it fixed he’d just gotten in the habit of putting in only a dollar’s worth at a time. Spooner pointed at the puddle. “You know, that’s coming from the car,” he said.
But the driver wanted to cut to the chase, and knew a stall when he heard one. “The car is no longer your problem, sir,” he said. “It is that simple. The only question is this: Do you or do you not want to remove your possessions?”
But it wasn’t as simple as that. For one thing, the car also had mice. A litter had been born under the passenger seat sometime earlier in the week; the mother was nursing the babies and living herself off the spillage of Spooner and Harry’s one meal of the day in the parking lot of Hamburger Heaven, a restaurant about a mile from the flophouse where they currently resided. Who would feed her if they took the car? Hamburger Heaven sat beneath a blue neon halo that was turned off every night exactly at ten. At ten-fifteen, a kid in a chef’s hat and blue jeans would come out the back door and throw everything they hadn’t sold that day into the dumpster, and every night Spooner and Harry ate there in the parking lot, in the quiet of the front seat, the food leaking out of both sides of the animal’s mouth. He’d clean it up, though, even the crumbs, before he started on the next one. Once Harry had gagged, trying to swallow too much at once, and Spooner had ended up giving him a Heimlich maneuver to clean his air passage, and afterwards Harry cleaned up what he’d choked up, and then went back for another cheeseburger.
Spooner was living closer to the vest these days, now that he had no standing in the outside world, and looked forward all day to watching the dog eat. Harry preferred cheeseburgers to hamburgers but didn’t care for pickles. Even swallowing the cheeseburgers whole—as he would the first two or three—even swallowing the wrapping paper, he would somehow sort out the pickles and leave them beside him on the seat, as whole and shiny as they’d come out of the jar.
Spooner had been hearing peeping noises for days whenever he started the engine. He supposed the babies connected the shaking to being nursed.
“You don’t mind me offering a word of advice,” the driver said, “from my experience? What gets people into this situation in the first place is indecision. Indecision and procrastination, those are the big two.”
“What do you get for this, anyway?” Spooner said. “For repossessing a car.” The driver looked at him in a different way but didn’t answer the question. Spooner sa
id, “I mean, do you work for the finance company, or do they hire you by the job?”
“I don’t see where that’s relevant to the situation.” The repo man got his back up at the thought of somebody like Spooner poking around in his private business.
Spooner said, “I mean, if you got paid by the job, you might make more money just putting the car back on the ground and saying you couldn’t find it.” This was the wildest sort of bluff. Spooner had twenty-eight dollars lying in his tennis shoes on top of the washer. That and a check for ninety-nine dollars from the gas station where he’d been working until last Tuesday was it. Net worth.
The driver shook his head as if he pitied Spooner, as if there was no hope for him at all. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “What world do you people live in? You think I happened to be just driving by today and saw your car? You think I keep some list of them in my head?”
Spooner glanced back at the house, noticing for the first time that Honey’s car was gone from the driveway. Realizing what had happened. He didn’t take it personally, although he did wonder if they paid her a finding fee, or if it was only that she didn’t want Spooner using her washer and dryer anymore. He could understand that. She’d been referring to her house as the commune in front of him quite a bit lately.
“It’s out of my hands,” the driver said. “Ethically, from the moment I winch the wheels off the ground, it’s out of my hands. Now, I repeat, do you or do you not wish to unload your personal belongings?”