by Pete Dexter
Spooner did not answer right away, not wanting to embarrass himself further than he was already embarrassed.
“What’s going on?” the first cop asked. He could have been talking to Spooner, or he could have been talking to the other cop.
“Spooner,” the second cop said. “That’s who you are, right? Spooner?” He made some motion to the other cop, who stepped away.
“What are you doing out here, pal?” the second policeman said, and glanced out over the bridge. “You’re not despondent or nothing…”
Spooner had no idea. “There’s something in the car,” he said.
The second, older cop patted him on the shoulder. “Let’s see what we got,” he said, and this unexpected kindness touched Spooner, very nearly brought him to tears.
The second policeman held the door of his own car for Spooner, and Spooner got in, went quietly, as they say. They drove the seven or eight hundred yards back to the company car, which was still angled against the bridge walkway, the front door still open, the headlights shining off into the darkness over the Delaware River. Spooner’s shirt was soaked through with sweat.
“You been tootin’ the horn a little this evening, Warren?” the cop said. But Spooner was safe. What was after him tonight was not the criminal justice system.
They stopped and got out and approached Spooner’s car from behind, the younger cop holding his flashlight in one hand and resting the other hand on the butt of his pistol. He pointed the flashlight into the back and then, without saying a word, set it on the roof of the car, opened the door and yanked the man out by the feet. The man’s head bounced once on the running board and then hit the cement. More lightbulbs broke. One of the man’s shoes came off, and the policeman who’d pulled it off dropped it and stepped back, repulsed, as if the foot were still inside it. Spooner edged closer and looked. There was frost in the man’s beard, and little bubbles in the corner of his mouth. The bubbles popped and were replaced by other bubbles; the rest of the package was calm water. Spooner could not see him breathing, but bubbles didn’t just bubble up out of the dead. Or maybe they did. The man was wearing an argyle sock on the foot without the shoe, oily black with dirt at the bottom, and all his toes stuck through. The toes were swollen and some color of dark red approaching black, and all in all Spooner had seen better-looking toenails on chickens.
“Jesus,” the older cop said, “how long’s this guy been in the backseat? He’s practically froze.”
Spooner tried to remember the last time he’d looked in the backseat. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think they vacuum the cars once a week, when they wash them.” He supposed the man could have been back there a long time.
The other cop headed back to his cruiser, lights still blinking on and off, and Spooner heard him on the radio, calling for an ambulance.
“Ten minutes,” he said when he came back.
It was quiet a moment, Spooner studying the man’s foot. “You think we should put him back in the car?” he said to the older cop.
The older cop looked at him a moment, then scratched the back of his head. “No, you don’t want to do that. My advice is, you find somebody lying out on the bridge like this, you don’t touch nothing. You never know what happened, what kind of internal injuries he might have.” He looked at the body again. “He might of got hit by a truck before you found him and called for help.” He looked at Spooner and winked.
Spooner stood still, and the cop looked back over the bridge toward the city. “Why don’t you go home, leave this one to us?” he said. “You look like you could use some sleep.”
FORTY-TWO
Spooner headed home to the little house in the Pine Barrens. Back to his wife and daughter, safe and warm. He pictured them curled in bed, each into her own familiar curl, and then, against his will, thought again of the sound the man’s head had made when the cop pulled him out by the feet. The shoe that had come off; the hole in the end of the man’s sock. The toes. He could not stop picturing the toes.
Three hours later—it was now five o’clock in the morning—Spooner got quietly out of bed, walked outside and pried the lid off the septic tank.
Due to the unusually wet winter, not to mention the lake, the water table on Spooner’s lot was only about thirty inches beneath the ground, and things had been backing up septic-wise pretty much ever since October. You flushed and shapes blossomed up to you from the toilet bowl like nightmares.
He lifted the septic tank cover, dropping it an inch or two onto his fingernail, crushing it, spilling blood into the septic system and possibly vice versa, and then picked up the whole lid—the heaviest thing he’d picked up since Mrs. Spooner quit insisting on live Christmas trees—and threw it violently and as far as he could throw it, which was just barely far enough to clear his feet, and then stood slightly out of breath, beholding the proof that he was and had been for some time alive and functioning here on Earth.
He continued to behold the proof a moment longer, swaying over the open tank, trying to divine some solution for a moody septic system. Spooner squinted the way he had seen Calmer squint, trying to force into himself some mechanical intuitiveness, but just as well could have been trying to invent internal combustion. In the end his best idea was to run the garden hose from the tank across the road into the woods on the other side, and siphon it over there, the way you siphoned gas out of the car tank when you didn’t have enough to get the lawn mower started.
He stood thinking about that plan a moment longer, his thoughts coming to rest finally on the lawn mower.
The lawn mower.
Mrs. Spooner climbed half asleep out of her marital bed that morning to administer the five-thirty feeding to baby Spooner, so sleep-deprived as to not even notice Spooner’s absence at first, but did gradually notice a noise out front, then saw that the front door itself was open and, holding baby Spooner close to her chest against the cold, walked out the door and stood transfixed in the light of the moon as her husband mowed the front yard.
Spooner looked up from the mowing and saw his wife crossing the lawn, wrapped in a blanket and holding the baby. She appeared to be hurrying and appeared to be thinking the same thing she’d been thinking that afternoon last summer when he’d set the porch on fire, and he was momentarily paralyzed with dread, knowing there was something going on that he was supposed to have seen for himself.
She had to yell because the lawn mower had no muffler. “What in the world are you doing?” she said. The words fogged in the morning air, and now baby Spooner turned in her arms and was looking at him, smiling. The baby, only a couple of months old, already got him completely, understood everything that mattered. He looked from one of them to the other, and the expressions on their faces could have been bookends for the entire encyclopedia of human experience.
Wrapped in her blanket, Mrs. Spooner appeared faintly biblical this morning, and he was struck by her purity. In answer to her question, he indicated the part of the lawn that he had finished mowing, as if it spoke for itself. Which, in fact, it did. Her gaze moved to the open septic tank and the garden hose leading across the street into the trees. She reached down and disconnected the cable from the lawn mower’s spark plug, and the morning turned eerily quiet.
“You’re going to wake up Lou and Penny,” she said. Lou and Penny Harker were the people next door, and as she said that, the lights in fact went on over there, and a moment later the front door opened and there they were, both of them wearing what looked like sleeping bonnets. They were good, frugal people, Lou and Penny, and kept the house cold at night.
“Everything okay?” Lou called over.
Except for no neighbors at all, Lou and Penny Harker were the best neighbors Spooner could imagine. They were quiet and loved their dog, and in the summer they liked to sit in the lawn chairs out by the lake and drink martinis, and kept their yard so clean that Spooner wiped his feet before he stepped over the short fence that served as the property line. Twice a week Mrs. Harker hung her
astonishing lingerie out on the clothesline, where it lifted and fell in the wind along with Lou’s checkered shirts and blue jeans.
Spooner waved at Lou, thinking how lucky he was to have good neighbors. “I’m mowing the lawn, Lou,” he called.
Lou nodded, as if that was pretty much in line with how things looked to him too. Then he looked out over his own lawn, white with frost, and called out, “It’s pretty early in the year; don’t cut too close or you’ll damage the roots.” He waved and closed the door.
Mrs. Spooner considered him closely. “What is it?” she said.
He shrugged. “The water table, I guess,” he said. She was still staring, perhaps looking for some sign that he was pulling her chain, which he did quite a bit when they were courting and was one of those qualities about him that she liked better later on, after he didn’t do it so much. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want my daughter growing up thinking she has to watch what’s in the toilet to make sure it flushes.”
“You’re mowing the grass,” she said.
“I was waiting to see if I’d fixed the septic system, and thought, Why waste the whole morning?”
She eyed the open septic tank and turned the baby’s face away, as if she were too young to know these kinds of things went on. “Come inside,” she said. “It’s cold out here.”
“And then the lawn looks like hell,” he said.
“Nobody can see the lawn,” she said, “it’s still night, and it’s probably going to snow again anyway.”
Not wanting to start an argument, Spooner put the lawn mower back in the shed and came inside. Mrs. Spooner was feeding the baby, and Spooner lay on the floor at her feet a little while, looking up, trying to see her from the baby’s perspective. Then he got up and began washing the dishes.
The dishes were already washed and sitting in the dish rack—Mrs. Spooner spent much of her life in those days trying to stay ahead of the mess, but might as well have been trying to drain the septic tank with the garden hose—but he did them anyway. And then took out all the dishes in the cabinets and washed them too. The feel of the water was somehow reassuring, hot enough to sting, and he was pleased to note that his fingertips had turned pink and wrinkled. Spooner’s plan was to keep doing dishes until daylight, and then take it from there.
“Why don’t you try lying down?” she said.
Spooner went back to bed. His wife finished the feeding and lay down behind him, curled into his back and holding on, and was asleep again in half a minute. She was tired; she slept. She was so pure, so purely what she was. If nothing else, he could have loved her just for that. Forget her bottom; he could love her for purity alone. It was how you came to love someone in the first place, he was thinking, you notice something pure. Thus the popularity of dogs and babies.
You had to admit that philosophically he was on a roll.
Unease was all over him these days and there was also a feeling of absence, something like living in the third person instead of the first. He hid this from Mrs. Spooner, and went through the motions, week after week. She would never guess that he had lost touch. He lay with her at night until she fell asleep, and then he quietly rose from bed and stayed up most of the night, counting every pill in the medicine cabinet, reciting the presidents of the United States, the states of the United States, teaching himself Christmas songs on the touch-tone telephone, putting the dog in the crib with baby Spooner to watch them sleep together—a sight that made him weep. He wept more in six weeks than he had in the previous thirty years.
He went to the gym, exhausting himself every afternoon, trying to empty himself so completely that what was wrong would empty out with the rest of it, and wrote his columns at the paper and was eerily absent from them too, and his own writing, which began to sound to him like the hushed conversations you hear in emergency rooms—we can order out for pizza when we get home—while some other, more important issue, the reason for being here, was being decided out of sight, and it was during this third-person period of absence that he wrote the column about the dead boy.
FORTY-THREE
The dead boy was a kid from South Philadelphia, a pipe fitter at the naval yard who’d gotten himself killed in the course of some small drug transaction, hit from behind with a pipe or a bat. An eye had been knocked out of the boy’s head. Spooner had been in Philadelphia five years now, which wasn’t long enough to know the city, but he had spent his share of time in the neighborhoods, especially in South Philadelphia, and had glimpsed the rules that held the place together. Which is to say that he should have seen the column for the intrusion it was.
Still, it looked harmless enough. He represented the kid in the way the kid was represented to him. Likable, not a bum or a thief, a kid who could have had a whole life but who lately had struck various citizens of the neighborhood as a little loopy on the street.
Spooner wrote the column as if the kid mattered to him, and he didn’t. The truth was that he couldn’t picture the dead boy, and picturing him was the ground-floor requisite for this sort of newspaper column. Without it the column came out of Spooner’s typewriter as dead as the boy himself, as ordinary as a box of cereal. There were two things Spooner absolutely knew about writing, and the first one was that you can’t get away with pretending to care. The other one, if you’re interested, is that nobody wants to hear what you dreamed about last night.
But live and learn. Spooner did what he did, and should have seen the insult in it but didn’t, and should have left it alone until he could picture the kid and get some piece of who he was into the story, and some piece of what he meant to the people who loved him. But he didn’t.
There were a dozen messages waiting when he got to the office, about average the day after a column, but six were from the same number. The first few from a woman, then some from a man with the same last name. It came to him slowly whose last name it was.
Spooner sat down at his desk, reread the column, took a minute to cringe and then picked up the telephone. The woman was the dead boy’s mother, and she undertook wailing the instant Spooner spoke his name. The conversation went downhill. He understood very little of what the mother was saying, but the nub of it was clear enough, that Spooner had brought back all her shock and grief, and, in spite of the way he’d died, had gotten her boy all wrong.
That he had missed the kid entirely was probably true. Part of this was inevitable—even on a good day, the best you could hope for was a glimpse—and part of it was Spooner’s strange disappearance from the first person. The volume seemed to fade then, like a train gone past, and another voice came on the line, the other son.
The other son made several points, building his argument logically, from the ground up. Spooner was a motherfucker. The drug deal could only have been a first-time experiment because the kid had been a pipe fitter at the navy yard, and pipe fitters had to be alert. Spooner had ruined his mother’s life all over again, just when she was beginning to get over the shock. Spooner was a motherfucker. Spooner was a motherfucker’s motherfucker. On and on. Spooner guessed that the other son was saying this more for the mother than for Spooner, and that he did not believe the part about this being the kid’s first time with drugs any more than Spooner did. The rest of it, though, seemed sincere enough. Spooner heard the mother moving away, maybe back to her bedroom, wailing, the train gone round the bend.
Now, in a quieter voice that she wouldn’t hear, the other son began telling Spooner all the ways he was going to get even: broken legs, broken arms, broken fingers so Spooner could never write again. Spooner waited him out, trying to listen but paying less and less attention, and presently he found himself trying to remember the anatomical names of the bones the dead boy’s brother was threatening to break. Ulnas, femurs, carpals—or were those metacarpals? Or were metacarpals toes? Maybe it was phalanges. Christ, don’t break my toes. There could be a poem in the names of bones.
Finally the other son stopped, or at least ran out of bones he intended to break, then b
egan on how he planned to hunt Spooner down. He knew where Spooner worked, where he went at night, where he lived.
Spooner excused himself and interrupted. “Where are you?” he said.
The question stopped the other son a second, and then he gave Spooner the name of a bar in Devil’s Pocket, six till two, five nights a week.
“I don’t mean that,” Spooner said. “I mean where you are now. Maybe I could come over and talk to your mother.” Realizing what he’d just offered to do, picturing the scene at the dead boy’s house, Spooner was washed in the odor of Jaquith’s mule, and could no longer get enough air into his lungs.
“My mother don’t wanna fucking talk to you,” the other son said, and slammed down the phone. Spooner felt a tremendous wave of relief, the first one in quite a while.
“My mother don’t wanna fucking talk to you,” he said out loud, liking the sound, wondering if that could be the last line of the poem about the bones. Hoping she wouldn’t change her mind. Thinking that was the end of that.
It wasn’t, of course. Too late to picture the dead kid himself, Spooner began to picture the brother, to see how privileged his—Spooner’s—life must look to the other son, the dead boy’s brother, whose own privileges were most likely only what he could negotiate on the street.
Why this came into his head, why he should care about it, Spooner couldn’t say, except he was still barely removed from all those years when he had no say in things himself.
It had stayed cold and wet all winter, and now, early in February, it rained and then turned cold again and the rain froze and left the sidewalks and streets slick, with victims piling up in emergency rooms everywhere in the city.
He found a legal parking spot in front of Dirty Frank’s at Thirteenth and Pine, an event so rare that after he tucked his company car into the spot he sat still a little while trying to enjoy it, and a little time passed and the space wasn’t more fun than anyplace else, but still, it was a rare thing, a legal spot in front of Dirty Frank’s, and he took it for an omen.