by Pete Dexter
“You let him stick you with a cattle prod?” she said. “For seventy dollars?” All her worst suspicions confirmed.
Priscilla had been a nursing student when he met her. The meeting place was the emergency room at Deaconess Hospital in Billings, and he was still in his baseball uniform at the time, in spectacular pain, and she was standing right over his head, at the very edge of his vision, and was there as they examined his elbow, and was still there watching while the technicians maneuvered the arm for the first set of X-rays. The maneuvering for the X-rays caused the exposed bones to move, and brought forth soft, broken noises from inside the joint, and even in all this discomfort Spooner could see that he cut a pretty romantic figure, the young athlete maimed in his prime—not that he’d had a prime, but she didn’t know that. The point was that right from the start she was attracted to pathos—you didn’t become a nursing student for no reason at all—and of which he had been a prime example. He had thrown up the three helpings of Chinese noodles he had for breakfast and something that might have been a silverfish, although he’d have to check back with the restaurant about that, and without being instructed to by the real nurses, Priscilla took a cool washcloth and laid it on his forehead. Later, she would say it was love at first sight.
Still later, she would say it was no such thing.
She was there in the room the next day, along with Calmer, when Spooner woke from the first surgery, and there again after the second surgery, and the third.
But all that was old news now, and pathos and broken bones can take you only so far in a marriage, and then you have to do something to rekindle the flame, and the truth was that Spooner wasn’t sure he was up to it anymore. To get her back now he’d have to end up in a body cast.
In the end, she left him the same week of the cattle-prod incident—actually she told him he had to leave, since the house they were renting belonged to her cousin—and called it a trial separation. She got a job holding Slow, Men at Work signs at highway construction sites.
For his part, after the split-up Spooner found that he lacked whatever small confidence around women he’d previously enjoyed, and now was occasionally unable to even speak to them, thinking somehow that they’d all heard of his cattle prodding, or could sense it there in his character, and while this perhaps did not bode well for a door-to-door baby-picture salesman, it had no effect at all on his career in newspapers.
He hired on at the Sun-Sentinel and rented a tiny apartment across the street from a city park, and he and Harry moved in, sleeping together on a cot, and the refrigerator made a noise like he had a maid in the kitchen humming, and a month later Priscilla came over with a heavy-equipment operator she introduced as Garth Hodge, and told him that she and Garth were headed out West and she wanted to say good-bye to Harry.
Spooner said, “There’s a coincidence. I once beaned a kid named Hodge,” but there was no family connection.
Garth was also a sign holder, and even Spooner had to admit a fine-looking one, sign-holding muscles just popping out from under his shirt. They were both the color of Hawaiians. They were going to Texas, she said, where the highways were crumbling due to the corruption in the prison labor system, and between the corruption and theft and the prisoner escapes, the legislature had voted to quit using prison labor entirely, and now the state had to replace all those murderers and rapists with civilians, so if Spooner wanted anything from the house, he had until the end of the week to get it.
Priscilla laid it all out in one long, breathless sentence, as if once the potholes started showing up in Texas the rest of it was inevitable. And even as she told Spooner that she was leaving, she absently draped her hand through Garth’s forearm. Spooner noticed his tattoo, a purple likeness of himself, and beneath it his name, written in script: Garth.
Later, thinking of the visit, what Spooner always remembered first was that small, familiar gesture, her hand going through his arm. And he remembered the excitement. Going to Texas. Garth the sign holder was smiling but had his eye on Spooner every second. Spooner guessed that no matter what she’d told him about the seventy-dollar cattle prodding, that no matter how big his arms and shoulders and muscles were, he understood that you were never in control when somebody in the room had nothing to lose.
In the end, though, all Spooner did was pick up his basketball when she began to talk again and start to dribble, a slow, rhythmical dribbling on the carpet, and pretty soon, between the dribbling and the refrigerator noise, she couldn’t hear herself think, and as she raised her voice to talk over the dribbling, he dribbled his way out the front door, down the wooden steps to the lawn, then onto the gravel driveway—you had to really pound the ball down to get it to come back to you in gravel—and then across the street to the park.
Before he’d crossed the street, he heard her inside talking to Garth. She said, “Now do you see what I mean?”
The dog went with Spooner, but he stayed in there with her a little while first, making up his mind. Spooner didn’t know what he’d do if Harry decided to go to Texas too, and when he finally heard the animal coming, he stopped and looked back, tears welling up in his eyes, and there were clouds of dust hanging in the air about every four feet, everywhere the basketball had bounced. It had been a dry summer, if you didn’t count humidity, none of the usual squalls or thunderstorms, and everywhere you went somebody was saying we needed rain. He thought he heard her laugh, but it could have been his own stomach, or the birds.
He shot baskets until it was too dark to see the rim, Harry running down the ball and trying to fuck it whenever Spooner missed, and Priscilla and her boyfriend were gone when he got back to his place. Two days later he went to the house and picked up his books, his Underwood typewriter, and the steam iron. Making sure she saw him take the iron. He told her good-bye, and then said good-bye to their other dog, the one she was taking with her to Texas—a sweet little terrier named Pork who had a taste for lizards.
Spooner didn’t know himself very well yet and did not expect to recover.
THIRTY-FOUR
Philadelphia.
Spooner got off the train at the Thirtieth Street station and walked outside into twenty inches of snow. He was wearing tennis shoes and jeans and carrying two Winn-Dixie shopping bags full of clothing. He set the bags down in the parking lot and put on an extra shirt. The wind came up Market Street blowing newspapers and taco wrappings in front of it, and he thought of Harry, back in Florida with his friend and his friend’s wife Honey until Spooner got himself established. He and the dog had been sleeping in the same bed for two years, and every time he’d jerked awake on the train, heading farther north, Spooner longed for the animal’s smell and the feel of his bones.
He rented a room for twenty dollars a week on the third floor of a small, windy hotel at the corner of Nineteenth and Race. The shower was at the end of the hall, and the linoleum floor was warped where it met the walls and stuck to his bare feet when he made his way down the hall to shower and shave before work. Sometimes he found awful things in the toilet, and once one of the whores walked into his room while he was in the shower, tied his old tennis shoes together and dropped them over the telephone wires under Spooner’s window. That morning he stuck his socks into his pants pocket and went shoe shopping barefoot.
On the good side, the place was as quiet as the Library of Congress in the morning—the hotel did its business at night, renting rooms by the hour—and he never had to wait to use the shower. The hardest thing was the morning cold. The building was owned by a family of Koreans who alternated shifts in the chair behind the front counter, night and day, sharing the same parka, and the Koreans did not turn on the heat until evening, when the girls began bringing in their dates.
Spooner spent his evening hours those first few weeks in the bars along Pine Street—warm, crowded neighborhood bars, staying in the background and the smoke where no one would notice he wasn’t buying anything to drink, watching the locals fall in love or break it off, somet
imes disappearing hand in hand into the bathrooms. A drunk, weeping lawyer came in at the same time every evening and took the same stool at the bar, weeping, as far as Spooner could tell, because he was a drunk lawyer, and on the next stool was always the same frail hypochondriac giving the lawyer daily updates on her various conditions. It was possible she and the lawyer never heard a word each other said. Everywhere Spooner looked stories were playing out, and lives were reeling out and in, and even on the happiest, loudest nights, a quiet malignancy hung in the smoke and reminded him of family get-togethers back in Vincent Heights. The bars closed at two a.m., and he would walk back to the hotel in the cold, and by then business would be dropping off for the evening.
Once, reaching the third floor of the hotel at two-thirty in the morning, he encountered a handcuffed man in horn-rimmed glasses and diapers standing in the hallway, begging to be let back into the room. Spooner nodded as he went by and the man nodded back, as if they’d just passed in the street, and a moment later the man was back at the door but whispering now. “Please, Adrianna, this is too long. It’s not funny anymore.” And then Spooner heard her voice from the other side of the door, as cold as an empty fireplace, laughing.
The girls who used the hotel knew Spooner but also knew that anybody who had any money wouldn’t be staying there longer than an hour and on the whole ignored him when they passed on the staircase. Still, Spooner thought about them constantly, ranking them sometimes, other times putting them into a sort of batting order in case they all came in at once to wish him Merry Christmas, but he kept these feelings to himself and never said much to any of them beyond hello and wouldn’t have even if he’d had enough money to afford them. For reasons that made no sense, he was as married now as he’d been before his wife went off to Texas with the sign holder. Dear Jesus, the hours he spent trying to imagine why somebody would tattoo his name and face on his own arm.
Sex and warmth were constantly in his thoughts—he found himself thinking quite a bit these days that he’d like to take a shot at Fran of Kukla, Fran and Ollie—and once in a while when he was thinking of Fran, a sudden warm push of air came back to him, like a blown kiss, and then he would remember what it was, the Mazda going up in flames.
Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc. published two papers in the city and occupied most of the 400 block of North Broad Street, nine blocks from Spooner’s hotel. He worked for the smaller paper, the Daily News, and arrived at the office on the seventh floor every morning in one of the three or four shirts he owned, all of them short-sleeved. When a comment was made on his clothes he would say that he was still cooling off from all those years in Florida. Sometimes he even opened the window near his desk.
These were the sorts of lies Spooner would tell all his life. He would as soon be caught naked in the hallway in handcuffs and a diaper as have anybody know that he didn’t have enough money yet to buy a coat.
The paper itself was nothing like the paper he’d worked for in Florida, but editors were the same everywhere he went. They were all like his friends’ wives: They liked him a little bit at first and then wanted him to go away. He had no way of knowing what he’d stumbled onto at the time—he was not a student of newspapers, had never been an intern or a copyboy or a city kid who grew up dreaming of his own byline—and there had even been a moment on the train ride up from Florida when he realized that this was how it could all end up for him, making his living as a spectator, and he’d come pretty close to getting off at the next stop and going back.
But then, in the way these things happen, one morning in that first spring in Philadelphia the elevator for reasons of its own ran past his regular floor and did not stop until it reached the fourteenth, opening into the waiting room of the complex of offices used by the paper’s columnists, and onto the spectacle of Jimmy Lester, the Daily News’s asthmatic gossip columnist, passed out and drooling on the waiting room couch, making rooting noises in his sleep, dressed in monogrammed silk pajamas and Italian loafers, his tiny plump hand wrapped around the handle of a machete. Jimmy had once attended a reception for Princess Grace of Monaco, gotten drunk and stepped on her dress—white dress, mud-ringed Italian loafers—as she stood in the reception line, and rebuked by the princess herself, remarked that back in the days when she was a movie star, Her Highness had blown everybody in Hollywood to get good parts, and moments later, as the princess’s private security force was dragging him out, Jimmy had yelled words across the ballroom that would always strike Spooner as pretty much immortal: “Gracie, you’ve got no class and you never did.” And even though Spooner still knew next to nothing about newspapers, and less than that about being a reporter, he had experienced a strange summoning when he heard that story, maybe what a homing pigeon feels on the way home, and now, presented with the legend in the flesh, the chubby, wet cheek pressed flat against the machete blade, he knew for the first time in his life that he was in the right place.
Spooner had been getting paid now regularly for several months and had moved out of the hotel into an apartment on Eighth Street just off Pine. The apartment had a fireplace and kitchen appliances. Spooner had brought in a mattress, a telephone, a boning knife with an eight-inch serrated blade, and a chair. He checked out a company car over the weekend and drove it to Florida, eighty miles an hour, down and back, and collected his dog. In Spooner’s life, no human had ever been as glad to see him.
It was a homey spot, Harry and Spooner, the fireplace and the mattress, the telephone, but sometimes, particularly in the morning, Spooner was lonely. He brought women up once in a while, but it was harder getting them out than getting them in and he couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted from them anyway. On the weekends there were calls from Priscilla, usually about money, and lately he couldn’t make up his mind about what he wanted from her either. She’d gotten tired of holding road signs in Texas and was back in Florida these days, living with a tax lawyer, and off this news, he woke up one morning with his mouth full of dog hair, hungover and smelling of a different kind of smoke than he usually smelled of in the morning—which is to say real smoke, not barroom smoke—and, looking around, saw that he’d burned the chair in the fireplace, which more or less cut his furniture in half.
For a while Priscilla called every weekend, usually at night, always about money and divorce. The tax lawyer was under the impression that Spooner had accumulated some wealth during the trial separation, and wanted an inventory of his assets—Spooner at least, was giving her the benefit of the doubt regarding whose idea it was.
It was fifteen minutes into one of these calls when Spooner, trying to change the subject, said, “How’s Pork?” and there followed a silence at the other end as she covered the receiver, presumably consulting the tax lawyer before she answered.
Presently she came back with a flattened tone that was familiar to him from the years they’d lived together. “We had to get rid of her,” she said. Just like that. The next moment, strangely, Spooner couldn’t hear. He wasn’t deaf—the words were clear enough—but something had disconnected, and there was a sound in his head like breaking waves and then he looked around the apartment and couldn’t remember the word for the refrigerator. “We’re moving into a new place,” she was saying, “and they don’t take pets.”
The line went quiet, and when he got himself back together he said, “Where is she?” Thinking he could drive down again and pick her up too.
Pork, if you are interested in family sagas, was Harry’s mother. She bore him no resemblance, though, and was almost perfectly round, a little balloon of an animal, which Spooner hoped had nothing to do with why Harry was always trying to fuck the basketball. He’d bought her for five dollars when he and Priscilla were first married and living on St. Ann’s Street in New Orleans, brought her home on a bus under his shirt, no more than a pound or two, feeling her shaking the whole way.
“This is the part you aren’t going to like,” she said.
“I already don’t like it.”
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��Well, I couldn’t actually do it. We were taking her to the animal shelter, but I couldn’t do it, so we just stopped and let her out beside the road.”
Spooner hung up without another word, still unable to match the refrigerator to the word refrigerator, and the next day sent Priscilla a check for a few hundred dollars, which was all he had, all there was in his account, and then later that morning, gathering clothes for his regular visit to the laundromat, came across his boning knife in the sheets. The knife had been missing for a couple of weeks and presumed lost. It was the only utensil in the place and the only tool, and he used it to open cans and tighten screws and pick gravel out of the tread of his tennis shoes and cut the knots out of Harry’s coat, and he held the knife in his hand a moment, as if he were sensing the balance, and then, glancing at the refrigerator and again unable to think of what it was called, he stabbed it. Stabbed the refrigerator and left the knife there, buried to the hilt, as a reminder.
Not that he needed one. For the rest of his life every time Spooner smelled Freon—an odor which you run into more frequently than you might imagine—he thought of the round little dog standing along some two-lane county highway, watching the car disappear. Other changes were that he could no longer keep ice cream in the apartment, and he quit thinking of himself as married.
THIRTY-FIVE
A woman came along now who was not the kind of woman who could be talked into leaving an old dog out beside the road. She showed up late one afternoon at the newspaper office, emerging from the elevator in jeans and a clean white shirt, talking apparently to someone still on the elevator, and while strangers wandered through the place all the time holding conversations with unseen parties, they were not ordinarily in clean shirts. Ordinarily when the elevator opened what came out was someone tilted way off the here and now—addicts of one kind or another, schizophrenics, community activists—some of them still without the laces that were taken from their shoes at the Round House. Murderers, as a class, were overrepresented—one visitor in thirty, forty?—and often came directly from the scene of the crime looking for the paper’s famous columnist of African extraction, who would accompany them to the police station. At this time in Philadelphia, at least in certain neighborhoods of Philadelphia, there was a certain cachet to having this columnist walk you into the Round House after you had killed someone, and beyond the prestige there was the practical consideration that showing up with the press pretty much immunized you against a thumping at the hands of the police, at least any thumping that would show.