Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  “You know,” Spooner said, “if you ever needed help…” and then stopped, not knowing how to finish it.

  Calmer continued to look at the spilled drink, or perhaps at his hands, one closed and resting in the palm of the other. “We’re all right,” he said. “You hold on to your money; you’ve got a family of your own now.” Although at this point, the baby was still on the way.

  Calmer hadn’t mentioned it at home yet, but he’d taken a second job, common labor on a construction site, starting Monday. A man at the very end of middle age, headed out into the heat of a South Dakota summer.

  Spooner set the drink on the table and sat back down. He felt unconnected to the years he had spent poor—could not quite remember what it was like to let a man touch his neck with a cattle prod for seventy dollars, or the feel of the flophouses he had lived in, in cities all over the country, the winter he’d spent in Minneapolis pushing cars up the hill outside his rooming house for tips when it snowed, and the week it didn’t snow and there was nothing to eat—seven days without even a piece of gum—all that could have been someone else. With one exception, now that he thought about it. There was a morning in New Orleans when he’d killed a pigeon in Jackson Square, chased it down and squashed it with a brick in front of a tour group of Orientals, some of whom had taken photographs, and carried it back to his rooming house to eat. He cleaned the bird and plucked it and boiled what was left, feet and all. He expected there was more meat on a human head.

  Even now the picture of that gray, naked, waterlogged creature steaming on a paper plate floated up to him at unexpected times, still sporting little patches of feathers—like someone who’d shaved in a hurry—still attached to its feet.

  Across the table Calmer smiled at nothing in particular and said, “We’ll be fine. Onward and upward.”

  Onward and upward, he had been saying that a long time too, as long as Spooner could remember.

  Spooner’s mother came into the kitchen a little before two, checking the clock, holding her hand over her mouth. Calmer got up when he heard her in the hallway and began cleaning up the spilled drink. “We were just talking about the addition to Warren’s family,” he said.

  But even with all the years that had passed since Prairie Glen, addition was not a safe word to use around Spooner’s mother.

  She looked at Calmer more closely and saw that he wasn’t feeling as bad about being fired as he had been before, which wasn’t what she’d come out into the kitchen expecting to see. Not at two o’clock in the morning. She eyed the drinks next and said, “Well, I just hope you’re both around long enough to see it graduate from high school.”

  The house creaked and settled, and in a little while Calmer opened the New Yorker to the story he’d been meaning to point out, a pitch-perfect John Cheever story about a man who decides to swim home one night to his house in the suburbs, one neighbor’s pool after another.

  Calmer pushed the open magazine across the table and stood up, stared a moment toward the back of the house, collecting himself, and hitched up his pajama bottoms and headed back in there to meet his fate. Yes, the man would face the music.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  When Spooner came home to South Dakota again, it was late September, and Calmer was helpless.

  “I don’t know what’s going on with him now,” she’d said on the phone. As if a breakdown were some harebrained idea he’d read about in the paper and decided to try for himself.

  Spooner found him in the bedroom, still in his pajamas, pressed into the wall at the far side of the bed. Embarrassed to be seen in this condition; barely able to talk. He smiled, trying to get something out. “Everything just stopped,” he said.

  Spooner went upstairs to shower. His brothers were already home, their suitcases lying on top of the bunk beds in the larger bedroom. Darrow had come from Chicago, Phillip from New Haven, where he was starting his second year at Yale.

  The upstairs bedrooms were full of trophies. Phillip was the defending chess champion of the five-state region, a title he’d held since sixth grade. In high school he’d been captain of the state-champion debate team. There was a picture of the debate team from his senior year on the wall, and the coach had written, For Phillip, the best debater I ever had. Good luck at Yale! Mr. Heater.

  Spooner hadn’t kept anything like that himself—now that he thought about it, he didn’t have anything like that to keep—but had never been much for trophies anyway. He imagined one for trespassing and wondered if he’d been as good at that as Phillip was at chess or debate. As Calmer said, each to his own.

  It was warm for late September, and after dinner Spooner and his brothers sat outside in the driveway on lawn chairs and Spooner made them fresh screwdrivers. Spooner’s mother had gone to bed with the sun still in the sky. Asthma.

  Presently he felt the beginnings of a cramp crawling up the inside of his thigh and realized he’d been sitting quietly for some time, holding the frost-cold bottle of vodka between his thighs, gradually drifting off to a slightly less conscious state of consciousness, imagining Dr. Cowhurl coming out of his house and crossing the street to express his concern and best wishes. It rang true, exactly the sort of thing that this sort of big wheel did, on a whim, subsequent to squashing an underling. Maybe offer to shake hands, tell the boys it was never personal, or that he hoped there were no hard feelings. The South Dakota version of Chicken Man Testa’s appearance at Angelo Bruno’s funeral, everybody in South Philadelphia knowing who ordered the hit.

  Spooner got up and stamped his foot, trying to stretch the muscle before it knotted up, and the story started over with Cowhurl crossing the street again, and he was suddenly disgusted with himself, knowing that all he would do if Cowhurl came over was send him home. He set the vodka bottle down on the driveway and went in the house for an egg.

  It was the first thing he’d thrown in maybe fifteen years, and the elbow began to tear at the instant his hand began to move forward. There was a small noise, about like the first kernel of popcorn popping in a covered pan, and a moment later the egg lay wet and glistening in the grass—it had not even made it to the street—and Spooner lay in the grass too, glistening with sweat, wondering if the whole mechanism they’d assembled in his elbow had come apart.

  Presently he looked at the elbow, tried opening and closing the hinge. It was already swelling but nothing rattled inside and nothing poked through the skin, and he sat up in the grass, wondering if time had completely passed him by. Not just the elbow but Spooner himself, the whole idea of Spooner. If the whole idea of throwing an egg at your neighbor’s house had no meaning anymore, even if you still had the arm to get it there. He wondered if the injury might at least in some way demonstrate to Calmer how much he loved him.

  And then realized, suddenly, that Calmer was watching. The sun was murder at this time of the afternoon, blinding Spooner as he looked up toward the kitchen window, which he could see was open behind the screen. There was a slightly darker shape toward the middle of the screen, indistinct; it could have been a stain. Calmer standing at the sink behind the open window.

  “The plan,” Spooner said to Darrow, “was I throw eggs at his house to lure him over, and then you make him feel academically inadequate.” When cornered, Darrow had in the past left the occasional academic wishing he’d inflicted his advanced mind on a different dinner table.

  Spooner looked at Phillip then and saw that he’d left him out of the plan. Phillip had been out in the world a year or so and was still getting used to it, an insult at a time. Spooner didn’t know but thought that Yale was probably a place where nobody cared that you had been a child prodigy. Likely the school was full of those, children of singular intelligence—as they used to call it back when Spooner was in school and they were talking about Margaret—who showed up at Yale or Harvard and overnight weren’t singular anymore at all. Disarmed prodigies, you might say, left to fend for themselves, to find something besides their brains to set them apart, which would be Ph
illip’s situation more than most. He’d never spent any time with people his own age; how was he supposed to know where he fit?

  Spooner turned to him now, as if Phillip had been the key to the plan all along. “And in the meantime,” he said, “you run across the street and fuck his wife.”

  Phillip was quiet a moment. Had Spooner insulted him?

  “You know,” Phillip said finally, thoughtfully—and who could say if this was something he’d picked up in his years as a champion debater or something he’d picked up from Calmer?—“we haven’t heard both sides of the story yet. We haven’t heard the other side of it at all.”

  And Spooner looked back up at the kitchen window, but the dark shape in the screen was gone.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Four years after Spooner arrived in Philadelphia, cold and hungry and broke, another pilgrim from the southern climes got off the train at the Thirtieth Street station in much the same condition. His name, unfortunately enough, was Stanley Faint, and he was in many ways even more out of place in the city than Spooner had been.

  Then again, in other ways he was already at home. Stanley Faint was a prizefighter, and Philadelphia was the place for that. There were hundreds of boxing gyms in the city’s neighborhoods, and even winos brawling in the street threw jabs and hooks and butted each other in the clinches. Stanley loved the gyms and the streets and the winos. He loved hitting and being hit, he loved public adoration.

  And loved his public. The adoration was not a one-way street, at least, and his fans became his friends, and he often took some miserable example of the human race under wing and set him up in business. As a heavyweight contender, he made money suddenly and in huge amounts, and financed more bars, quarter horses, dojos, dancing halls, pool halls, churches and hardware stores than he could keep track of, and if the money he lent never came back to him, which it did not, nothing about that surprised him at all. To Stanley such was the nature of business and money, and nothing about it mattered to him anyway.

  In spite of this monumental indifference to matters of finance, however, Stanley was regarded in the boxing world as hungry, a quality familiar among young fighters making their way up out of poverty. Stanley Faint was hungry another way, something like the way you are hungry when you first step into the street after a month in the hospital, when you want to see and smell and taste the world again all at once. There was no greediness about him, no hint of the meanness that usually went with being hungry, even in the ring, and in this way he was more like an old fighter than the young fighter he was, the old ones—most of them anyway—having achieved a certain serenity that comes in life when there is nothing left to prove.

  Which is all to say that Stanley was a complicated human being, and for that reason Spooner was a long time coming to understand that he did not fight for complicated reasons. Oh, they talked it over, but it wasn’t about growing up without a father—like Spooner’s father, Stanley’s had died early on—or some mystical awareness of who he was coming over him in the ring, nothing like that at all. The reason Stanley fought was that it was easier than working for a living and so far it was what he did best.

  Even at this early stage of his career, Stanley had been hit quite a bit, although he’d never been tipped over. But even Spooner, his greatest supporter, admitted that for a practitioner of the art of self-defense, Stanley had a curious indifference to the subject of defense. Until now, he’d fought his fights in states like New Mexico and Oklahoma and Arkansas, against the kind of fighters that came from places like that, which is to say fighters who couldn’t fight much, but were still big, rough, scary-looking people with scars and missing teeth—no one whose usage you might correct in a barroom—and most of them were low hitters and head-butters and not disinclined to use their thumbs and elbows, as fighters who can’t fight much often are. Stanley did not hold bad sportsmanship against them though, understanding, as he put it, that we all do the best we can with the tools we are given to work with. And he knocked them out, one after another, beginning with an eighteen-second, one-punch dusting of a 280-pound Mexican oil rigger, for which Stanley and the Mexican made a hundred dollars each, and spent together that night in a bar. But the opponents, like the money, were in some way beside the point.

  The point was simply that Stanley woke up one day with an egg in his nest—an egg in his nest as opposed to a nest egg—and determined to sit on it for as long as it took to hatch. This required a kind of faith that someone like Spooner, full of self-doubt, both admired and could not begin to understand. It was in some way the underpinning of the friendship—Spooner not only unsure of himself as a novelist, but at the bottom of things not even sure he was good enough to write a column for the Daily News, and Stanley believing heart and soul that he was the next heavyweight champion of the world. It struck them both as humorous.

  Previous to departing Texas, Stanley had signed a contract with a third-rank fight promoter who paid for his ticket north and gave him a few hundred dollars a month toward living expenses. It wasn’t much of a contract, but from the beginning Stanley signed contracts the way movie stars signed autographs, paying exactly that much attention to what was on the paper. He contemplated no trouble when it was time to go another way, as they said in the business world, and smiled tolerantly at his pro bono lawyer’s warning that the pen was mightier than the sword.

  He settled in to a section of town with a depressed housing market, as he called it, and socialized at night in the local clubs and ran for an hour or two in the morning and trained in the afternoon at Joe Frazier’s gym on North Broad Street, where five or six world-ranked heavyweights were also in residence. Stanley was thrown in with these fighters from the first day, and it is possible that in the history of the democracy no citizen has ever had his nose broken by so many different people in one week. He ate dinner in those early days with cotton packed into his nostrils, and leaked blood as he ate, and occasionally shot a blood-soaked ball of gauze across the table when he brayed, a terrifying noise to the uninitiated which, perhaps due to Stanley’s peculiar wiring and social skills, did not always seem to fit the situation.

  A month or two after he arrived, word made its way back to Texas that Stanley’s progress had slowed owing to his not being able to breathe, and the promoter himself flew up to supervise his medical treatment, taking him to a friend in West Philadelphia who happened to be a veterinarian—not the last time Stanley would be worked on by a vet—and who removed all the various pieces of broken cartilage from his nose, filled the cavities with gauze, and had him back in the gym the next afternoon.

  It was Stanley’s slant on the human condition that a visit to the veterinarian for a nose job was an amusement, and likewise living in an apartment without heat or a lock on the front door was an amusement, as were the needles and syringes and scalded spoons, ladies’ dainties, used condoms, etc. that he sometimes found in and around his kitchen sink. It was a mystery to him, what sort of people would come into a strange house and fuck in a kitchen sink—not to mention what sort of people could fuck in a kitchen sink—and even tried it himself once or twice, but more comfortable than that was being punched in the face back at Joe Frazier’s gym.

  Strangely enough, especially considering the jaded nature of the fighting public in general and in Philadelphia in particular, Stanley developed a following in the city very early in his career. The following was an odd collection of women, some of whom would happily try it in the sink, and an odd collection of friends. He was never short of friends and women, except at Frazier’s gym, where there were no women, and his peers—as Stanley referred to the other fighters—had begun to sense that the poundings he was taking were not discouraging him, as they were intended to, but were, like everything else at the time, amusements. And in this happy frame of mind, Stanley was learning, and slowly narrowing the gap. Understandably, the peers found this insulting.

  FORTY

  It is not a well-known fact, but the last time anybody remembers seeing he
r upright and under her own power, Margaret Truman was in the vicinity of Spooner and Stanley Faint. It could be said that this was the day they all met, except Margaret did not say as much as howdy-do to Spooner and left without exchanging a single pleasantry with Stanley. This in spite of the fact that Stanley and Spooner had both rearranged their social schedules to fit her in.

  Still, it could be said that Margaret Truman brought them together—Spooner and Stanley Faint—and this meeting occurred not in some bar or after Stanley had flattened someone in Atlantic City or Las Vegas, but at a fifty-dollar-a-plate literary luncheon sponsored annually by the Philadelphia Inquirer and held in the grand ballroom of the Sheridan Hotel on Market Street in Center City. A frontal system had moved in that morning from the south, and the grand ballroom was standing-room-only and smelled like a Mississippi terrarium—a certain sweet mildew that Spooner had noticed before at gatherings of aged women. Chairs were set up for a thousand of them that day, fourteen to a table, and every seat was taken, with the exception of a single table on the left side down in front, which was surrounded by chairs recently vacated, left out of true with the table settings, napkins tossed into plates or on the floor, a few glasses of water with lipstick-blotted rims, all emanating a feeling to Spooner, sitting above the table at the dais at the end of the room, of a bird nest ravaged by a cat.

  Sitting alone in this nest was a large, freely perspiring man in jogging pants and a sweatshirt that read I’M ON THE RAG, but who somehow, in spite of the jogging shoes and the jogging togs, didn’t look like a jogger.

  But live and learn. Until fifteen minutes before, the specimen at the otherwise-empty table had in fact been jogging, or at least running at some mingling speed through Center City, and had rounded the corner on Market Street and spotted the sign on the hotel marquee.