Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  And that was the question, all right, and had been for eighteen months. Spooner stood thinking it over. The driver gave up on him and climbed into the cab of his truck. He started the engine and then edged forward, over the curb, and as the car came over that same curb the undercarriage scraped the cement, and then there was a sound like someone blowing out a candle, and before the tow truck made the first cross street, the Japanese-engineered, Wankel-engine Mazda had lit up like homecoming at Texas A&M.

  Spooner stood in his towel, watching, aware suddenly of the coolness of the wet clover between his toes. The driver stopped beneath some palm trees and jumped out of the cab, leaving his door open, and ran to the back to unfasten the winch, and Spooner guessed that the truck belonged to him and not the towing company.

  Either way it was a kind of heroism you didn’t see much anymore.

  The fire was already too hot, though, and drove the driver back, and he appeared from the dense black smoke with his arms clearly smoking themselves and rubbed at the singed hair with his hands, oblivious to the possibility of setting them on fire too, and above and behind him the smoke rose into the palm trees that lined Palm Tree Way. Something was oozing up out of the car’s trunk, about the consistency of pancake batter. The heat was amazing. Spooner thought of the mice—he thought for a moment he heard little cries from inside—and then a tree was on fire too. The driver was screaming at him—probably at him, he couldn’t be sure—and from what Spooner could make of it, he wanted Spooner to call the fire department. It was almost as if he’d changed his mind about the car not being Spooner’s concern.

  Spooner and Harry stayed where they were, though, barefoot in the clover, spectators, like a couple of New Yorkers watching a mugging. Spooner in his towel, Harry looking like he’d just stepped out of the shower, and presently they turned away from the heat and looked at each other, wondering what they were going to do about supper.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Spooner by now was a newspaperman too. Not a good one, like his friend, or employed, like his friend, but still a newspaperman. It was not his most recent job—he had only that week turned in his dipstick rag at Ron’s Belvedere Standard—but it had a more dignified sound than gas pumper, or for that matter baby-picture salesman, or mail sorter or beer truck driver (the stint as a beer truck driver in particular had not ended well), or anything else he’d done since he left baseball.

  He’d begun his newspaper career walking home one day in August from his job in sales and he happened to pass the combined offices of the Ft. Lauderdale News and the Sun-Sentinel and saw what looked like a prairie of women in shallow skirts through the darkened window, many of them wearing white boots, and, reminded of the prairie, was strangely beckoned inside. Spooner had been to the prairie many times by now, on family vacations to Conde, South Dakota, and once had stepped through a cattle guard and broken his ankle, and afterwards would never understand how a whole herd of cattle could walk around all day without stepping into a cow guard or even a cow pie when he’d done both of those things in about fifteen minutes. He’d asked one of Calmer’s uncles about it after they all got back from the hospital, a joyless old farmer sitting in a hundred-year-old chair next to the family organ, in a living room with as much stir to it as the attic except Spooner was sitting there right in the middle of things, disturbing the gloom with his new blinding-white cast. For Calmer’s relations, dropping through a cattle guard and breaking a bone was no better than wasting food, and most of them had gone to bed right after supper, as if Spooner’s carelessness were a personal affront.

  The uncle looked over Spooner and his cast, perhaps estimating the lost days of work the injury represented—or would have represented if the boy had been his boy and known how to work.

  He said, “Common sense, I expect.”

  And years passed by, and Spooner got taller and older and smarter but showed no improvement in regard to common sense and watching where he stepped, but every dog has his day, and on this day he stepped into the editorial offices of the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel and fifteen minutes later he was a reporter.

  The job at the Sun-Sentinel lasted two years. The managing editor had been a baseball player too, and a bonus baby, and had played seven years in the minor leagues. His name was Sloan, and he brought Spooner on board under the misapprehension that Spooner shared his love for the game.

  The city editor was named Jerry Bunns and he had never played baseball and had no misapprehensions about Spooner at all. Very likely he recognized a natural enemy. Spooner was assigned to cover tomatoes, juvenile crime, the health department, the hospital district and all the county agencies receiving monies from the federal government to improve the plight of the poor, which the newspaper railed against on its editorial pages about three times a week. The city editor was perhaps already planning to have Spooner fired—nobody lasted long on the poverty beat, as the powerful voices at the newspaper were prone to confuse the messenger with the message—but had completely underestimated Spooner’s ineptitude as a reporter of poverty programs, and mistaken his long, unbarbered hair for his politics, and Spooner’s colossal indifference to both progressive politics and poverty programs shone through his prose like headlights in the fog, and the powerful voices of the newspaper mistook this indifference for subtle contempt, and in this way Spooner became, fleetingly, the darling of the staff.

  In spite of that, nothing Spooner learned in Fort Lauderdale was what you could call useful in later life, even in regards to his continuing career in newspapers, although he did feel a certain prick of interest in the number of reporters who took offense at being called reporters, and insisted on being identified as staff writers or senior writers instead. From what Spooner could see, most of them were pretty good reporters—at least better reporters than he was—and from what he could see, none of them could be trusted in the vicinity of a thesaurus, especially when they were trying to flower things up. Some of them drank too much after work and threatened to write books.

  The stranger thing, though, was that even those without ambitions to write for the ages were savagely protective of their prose. They were something like the parents of ugly babies in this respect and gathered nightly in a bar across the street to complain to each other about editors and editing, and could recite word for word changes in their lead paragraphs from six months past. In the way these things often went, changes were perceived as insults, and unlike everything else about newspapering, insults did not go out with tomorrow’s trash but were stored and allowed to fester. Spooner sensed a story in all this festering, maybe even some recasting of his own story about Coach Tinker and his mother, but couldn’t put his finger on where it would naturally lead.

  As for ugly babies, Spooner could put his finger on that exactly. On the day he had passed the newspaper building and glanced inside, in fact, he was employed selling baby pictures door-to-door. Spooner’s boss in the baby-portrait business was a clean-cut, low-living sort of human outcast named Stroop, who had found his niche in the world selling door-to-door, an occupation that not coincidentally limited his exposure to the outside world to thirty minutes or less per inhabitant. In the art of selling, Stroop often said, timing was everything, and in baby pictures the timed thirty-minute visit was the ticket to success. This was probably true—mothers with new babies are often on tight schedules—and especially true in Stroop’s case, as at the moment one of these new mothers let him in the house, something was already stirring awake behind his dark, oddly-fitting sunglasses, and even as the cowhide brochures came out of the briefcase, the thing would be there in the room, a leering, foul, breathing presence that perhaps wanted breast milk too. Wanted its turn at the titty.

  In half an hour mom would be looking around the room for a weapon.

  Spooner had met Stroop in a conference room at the Holiday Inn on Flagler, where Spooner and two dozen other applicants who had answered a newspaper advertisement for a rewarding but unspecified career in sales had come for orientation. St
roop sat on a desk at the front of the room, wearing a suit and a nicely starched shirt, smiling confidently and saying not a single word until the whole room had fallen quiet. It was one of his selling techniques, possibly left over from his previous career at a company called Dare to be Great, where he often spoke to large groups of prospective employee/investors.

  The room gradually settled into quiet, and then Stroop stood up, walked to the window, and pointed like somebody in a play out into the parking lot.

  “That car,” he said, “that white Lincoln Mark III out there is brand-new. I bought it last week. I’m not sure I like the color yet, but if I don’t, I’ll go get me another one next week.”

  Somebody said, “Fuck me,” and got up and left, and this applicant was followed out two minutes later by another applicant, and then another, and another, then two at once, and exactly thirty minutes after Stroop had begun speaking, he and Spooner were the only people left in the conference room.

  “You think I’m discouraged?” Stroop said after the last nine applicants had walked out together. “Not in the least.”

  The final exodus had come when he’d broken the news that it was baby pictures. Spooner did not comment on what Stroop said about not being discouraged, but he couldn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t be. Spooner himself was still here only out of habit. In theaters and airplanes and church—not that he had been on any planes lately, or in church since he left home—he always waited until the aisle cleared before he got up to leave.

  Stroop said, “Can you guess why I’m not discouraged? Let’s call this an aptitude test for the job.”

  Spooner saw this was probably an old habit, giving tests, laying traps. Holding out the carrot. They waited each other out a little while, and it was Stroop who finally broke.

  “They’re losers!” he said happily, as if Spooner himself had guessed the right answer. “I’ve got a new Lincoln to pay for; they’re looking for jobs. I’ve got a blond girlfriend and a color television set and a dozen suits just like the one I’m wearing, and I didn’t get all this wasting my time on losers.”

  Spooner had his doubts about the woman, but he was married to one and by now nothing that any of them took into her heart or head surprised him completely.

  Presently, Stroop pulled some album brochures out of a worn leather briefcase and gave them to Spooner to take home and study. He also gave him a pamphlet, which he referred to repeatedly as the bible of the baby-picture industry. Stroop had apparently written and illustrated the pamphlet himself, a seven-page, stapled, mimeographed instruction sheet that included crudely drawn pictures of top-heavy young mothers with squalling babies. Spooner noticed the breasts first, which were disproportionately large and leaking milk, but on closer review saw that they were not in fact as disproportionately large as the young mothers’ calves. All the mothers had massive, muscular calves.

  Beneath the drawings were instructions: what to wear, when to smile, what to say when you first saw the baby, tricks to get in the door without seeming to come in the door. There was a set of responses he was supposed to memorize to overcome buyer reluctance. There was another set of responses—Stroop called them bailouts—if things were going badly. If, for instance, the person who answered the door was black, or if the baby had died. “You will run into that,” Stroop said, loving the craziness of it all. “In this business you run into everything.”

  The next meeting Spooner had with Stroop was in the Lincoln, and the one after that was in Stroop’s house, which was in a run-down section of Pompano Beach out near the racetrack. This was before Spooner had a car of his own, so he’d taken the bus. The baby-picture business wasn’t going well, although by now Spooner was addicted to the smell of their heads.

  Stroop answered the door smelling of sour milk, although Spooner hardly noticed, accustomed as he was by now to dairy-based odors at the front door. He took a seat at the table near the only window in the place. It was June in South Florida, and the plastic chair cover stuck against all the places it touched his skin.

  Stroop got them iced tea out of the refrigerator—Spooner could see from where he sat that there was nothing else in it—and began to quiz him on situations presented in the bible of the baby-picture industry, reminding him again and again of his motto, which was Buyers are liars. Trying to figure out why Spooner wasn’t closing any sales.

  “What do you do, you’re setting there, the baby goes red-faced and messes his diaper?” he asked. Spooner did not answer, and Stroop said, “Too late, it’s got to be second nature. The answer is, you offer to change it yourself. They won’t let you, you don’t have to worry about that, but you make the offer.”

  Spooner stared at him and offered nothing back. He noticed that Stroop had tied knots in his shoelaces when they’d broken. The shoes themselves were wingtips, black and freshly shined.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Stroop said. “A true story. One of my salesmen went to a lady’s house Thursday morning and sold her the whole package—a twenty-four-month contract with bimonthly sittings and the cowhide leather album—in fifteen minutes. How do you think he did that?”

  “No idea.” Spooner did not believe for a minute that Stroop had other salesmen.

  “Concentrate. How did he do it?”

  “No,” Spooner said. “This isn’t something I should concentrate on.”

  But Stroop hadn’t gotten into a brand-new Lincoln by taking no for an answer. Persistence, as he said again and again, was what separated the winners from the losers. That and timing. Timing was everything, but then, so was persistence. It was how you made it in the world. Not just baby pictures, everything. And anyone could do it, that’s what people didn’t understand. They could be like Stroop himself if they’d just have persistence.

  “He went to that baby like he couldn’t help himself,” Stroop said. “Picked it up, told the mother that when his associates saw the negatives of that child, they’d want to use it as a model for the company brochure. That she probably wouldn’t have to pay for a thing, because this baby, her little baby, was so perfect. The company might even end up paying her.”

  Spooner had no more intention of telling anyone a story like that than of changing a stranger’s diapers.

  “It always works,” Stroop said. “Sixty, seventy percent of the time. My salesman made two hundred and seventy dollars on that sale, and it could of been you.”

  Spooner did not react, but he pictured the look on Priscilla’s face if he came in the door with two hundred and seventy dollars in his pocket. He was always picturing the look on Priscilla’s face. He did not know yet that she had other plans.

  “This girl had huge legs,” Stroop said, polishing it a little. “Not fat, just muscular. Great big calves, the kind that can just crush your head.” He made a crushing motion with his hands, as if this were a naturally appealing thing.

  Spooner, it should be said, did not lack for sexual imagination, starting with his expulsion from kindergarten, but until he’d met Stroop the baby-picture salesman he had never thought in a sexual way of having his head crushed by a lactating woman with muscular calves. Stroop, he noticed, seemed to be working himself into a sweat as he continued the story. And then something strange. As Stroop spoke, he walked out of the kitchen and returned a few seconds later holding a cattle prod. A casual sort of thing, like he’d just picked up the cat. He pressed a button and the appliance made a purring sound, never interrupting the story of his salesman and the woman with the head-crushing calves.

  Spooner was sure now of a few things. He was sure that Stroop didn’t have any blond girlfriend. The Lincoln was a fact, the suits were still a possibility, although every time he’d seen Stroop, he was in the same one—he was wearing the pants with a T-shirt today—but there was no girlfriend, blond or otherwise. That much he knew.

  Stroop looked fondly at the cattle prod. “What is the most money that you can imagine making?” he said. This was the same question he’d asked the assembled job applicants b
ack at the Holiday Inn. Spooner guessed it might be something he also asked himself, to keep on track. “In one day,” he said. “What’s the most money you can imagine making in a day? The perfect day.”

  Spooner thought he was about to hear again about the time Stroop sold half a dozen twenty-four-month contracts in one afternoon. That was a story he loved so much that he told it pretty much every day, the way lovebirds were always telling each other they’re in love.

  “Perfect days,” Spooner said, “I don’t work.”

  “You know, I suppose I could let you have your weekly draw early,” Stroop said. “I’m not supposed to; I’m supposed to hold it back four weeks.”

  Spooner was pretty sure by now he would never make a baby-picture sale, and the weekly draw only seemed fair. He’d been knocking on doors for two weeks and the closest he’d come was a woman sitting in a cloud of marijuana smoke who thought he was her dealer and tried to give him a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Take your wife out to dinner,” Stroop was saying, “come home and get a little of that pussy.”

  Spooner nodded, not liking the direction the conversation had taken, but at the same time not wanting Stroop to change his mind about the money. It was strange to be so hungry for seventy dollars. He never thought these days of his signing bonus or of where all that money had gone.

  “You ever felt one of these?” Stroop said, turning the cattle prod off and then on again. And although he had been to South Dakota at least ten times, ridden a horse, fed chickens, picked flowers, and broken his ankle in a cattle grate, when it came to cattle themselves, Spooner had never touched one, much less a cow prod.

  “It makes you feel sort of frisky,” Stroop said.

  THIRTY-THREE

  He went back to Priscilla that night with seventy dollars in his pocket, a little queasy at the way Stroop’s mouth came slightly open when Spooner allowed him to touch the cattle prod against the side of his neck. Spooner had the distinct feeling that he’d sold his body.