Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  In spite of the slick sidewalks, he walked to the place he was going. No traction at all under his feet. It was only a mile or so but a walk that ordinary citizens did not often undertake, even when the pavement was dry. Like most of the neighborhoods on the edges of Center City, Devil’s Pocket was in a process of gentrification—Gilman’s own house was only a block from the understood boundaries of the neighborhood—but civilization was slow in coming to the Pocket, and in spite of its proximity to Center City and all its cultural advantages (this was a phrase that often came up when Spooner’s mother was talking about places she didn’t live) the area was still among the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city, at least to outsiders. There were parts of Kensington and North Philadelphia and West Philadelphia where they killed more of their own, but for maltreatment of outsiders, you could hardly beat the Pocket.

  Spooner walked past a corner where a sweet-natured, gentle soul, a man everyone called Pally, had made his stand the previous year. One o’clock in the morning, the witnesses reported two black men in a car. The car slowed, a window went down. Strangers talking to strangers, words that meant nothing, and could change nothing, except in the moment. Pally was eleven days on a respirator, and then he died.

  Spooner stopped at the spot where Pally’s head had hit the curb, and wondered what he had been thinking when the car slowed, what he’d thought was at stake. Or if that night he had just been throwing it all away. In spite of where he was and what he was about to do, nothing in the way of similarities came into Spooner’s mind.

  He crossed the line into the Pocket a few minutes later.

  Spooner stopped again before he went in, thinking there was something he’d forgotten, or forgotten to do, and stood kitty-corner from the spot a minute or two, shaking in the cold, thinking, but couldn’t remember what it was.

  The main entrance was on the corner; there was a side door farther down the street. He could see inside—a fat boy with red hair sitting slump-shouldered at the bar, staring at the beer bottle like a picture of his own true love. At the far end of the bar there were two other customers and the bartender—four citizens in all, grazing their way through life in the Pocket. Twenty, twenty-five years old, and nothing new left in the world, and the smoke rose up through the artificial light and softened the scene, as American as the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

  Spooner noticed the bar itself, a beautiful old U-shaped bar that obviously had a rosier future than its inhabitants. The gentrifiers would surely hang on to it even as they tore up everything else and disposed of it, along with the locals.

  He opened the door and some of the bar napkins blew off a stack of napkins and floated a little ways and settled on the floor. The bartender’s face washed in surprise, and in that same moment Spooner realized his mistake, what he couldn’t remember when he’d been standing across the street looking in. It wasn’t that he shouldn’t have come—although looking back on it, he could have given that possibility more consideration—but that he’d made no allowance for an audience, and the audience changed everything. There were only four of them in all—three spectators—but it was still an audience: the fat boy alone and gazing at his bottle, and two stinky-looking kids sitting together at the other end of the bar, looking him over. Without them—if it had been only Spooner and the dead boy’s brother—the place would have been as safe as a nursery.

  Spooner walked farther in and took a seat. No introductions, everybody there already knew more or less who everybody was. The three kids picked up their beers and headed in his direction, one of them covering the side door so Spooner couldn’t get out. The bartender made a small, don’t kill him yet gesture, and the others slightly relaxed. The fat boy stirred, and Spooner guessed he was the one who had to be watched.

  “Well, here we are,” Spooner said.

  And ten minutes later, he came out of the place with most of his upper teeth sheared off at the gum.

  FORTY-FOUR

  It was Stanley Faint’s twenty-sixth birthday. He was living these days in a little place in New Jersey where the front door locked and nobody was fucking anybody in his sink. He’d confided to Spooner that it was a nice enough place but it felt empty. Tonight, though, he was throwing a party.

  Spooner showed up about eleven, pretty much unkissable, with blood-crusted lips split open like the top of the pumpkin pies his mother always made at Thanksgiving—he hated pumpkin pie—and half his teeth, and had a drink. The ice did not feel good on the places his teeth were broken off.

  “You look like somebody broke your heart,” Stanley said.

  Spooner smiled but his lips didn’t feel like his lips anymore, and the gum line where his teeth had been sheared felt strange and sharp, like the mouth of a fish, and he couldn’t stop running over it with his tongue.

  “Things have been strange lately,” he said. He thought of telling Stanley about the panic and the feeling of living in the third person, and oddly enough, Stanley, alone among his friends, would have understood what he was talking about. But this was Stanley’s birthday, and his party, and there were a hundred people in the little house, all of them wanting to tell him stories and hear him bray, and be his amigo. And Spooner, who had never been a line-cutter, only recapped the evening’s highlights so far.

  Hearing the story, Stanley did bray, and a hundred people stopped what they were doing and turned to look.

  The point here being that life had kicked Stanley Faint around as much as it could, and for him it was still no end of merriment, and for Spooner it wasn’t. Spooner had tried optimism for an hour or so one morning—this was months ago, before he started thinking of himself in the third person—and it exhausted him, physically exhausted him, and by the time he sat down to work that afternoon he couldn’t write a line.

  Stanley asked if he needed to tie up loose ends.

  Stanley watched him, waiting for an answer, and Spooner tried to decide if he needed to tie up the loose ends. Shortly, he found himself wondering where the expression loose ends came from, and what sort of loose ends they had been, back in the days when tying them up was important. And if they were supposed to be tied to something else or to each other. This was all familiar territory—one question mutating into a dozen other questions, each one a step more removed from the question on the table.

  “I guess so,” he said, and it was in fact a guess.

  Stanley and Spooner got in Spooner’s company car. Behind the company car were two other cars carrying the following occupants: an emergency medic/ambulance driver for the city fire department, a trombonist from the Philadelphia Symphony, a judo player of self-inflated local reputation, Stanley’s pro bono lawyer, and the woman who owned the bookstore in Center City. The little procession headed back over the Ben Franklin Bridge to Philadelphia and the Pocket. It was midnight and snowing now, and Spooner sensed his lack of traction with the earth all the way there.

  They parked across the street from the bar. There was no one on the street except a man who came out of his row house to move his car, leaving it double-parked at the end of the block. If the snow kept up, the only cars moving tomorrow would be the ones that were double-parked tonight.

  Stanley said, “Well, Sunshine?”

  “Here’s something I hadn’t thought of,” Spooner said. “There might be a gun behind the bar.”

  “That’s a thought, all right,” Stanley said, and got out of the car anyway. Once Stanley decided to do something, it was at that moment officially too late to reconsider, especially over something like the possibility of a pistol or a shotgun behind a bar. Not a tortured life of second guessing was Stanley Faint’s.

  They crossed the street and went into the bar. Spooner, Stanley, the trombonist, the judo guy, the emergency medic, Stanley’s pro bono attorney. The streets here looked meaner than they had from New Jersey, and the woman from the bookstore reconsidered and decided to wait in the car. Still, not an unformidable collection of humanity, although Spooner was already squashed, and the
attorney was in his late fifties, a happy, agreeable man of pale, freckled skin who resembled a dumpling.

  The bartender and the same three inhabitants were still at their stations. The bartender saw Spooner and then saw that he was not alone. He was surprised again, and also afraid, and the moment Spooner saw his face he knew there was no shotgun behind the bar and felt better than he had all night. It was surprising to him how good it felt, knowing he was not about to be shot.

  Stanley and Spooner walked directly to the bartender, who at first said he had nothing to say and then began to plead his case, telling Stanley about his brother and his mother and the newspaper and what Spooner had written. The bartender did not know that Stanley was at the time the fourth-ranked heavyweight prizefighter in the World Boxing Association, but there are certain people in this life who explain themselves simply by walking in a door, and the bartender seemed to realize the gist of Stanley Faint immediately, and also came to see that violence was not the answer to the world’s problems after all.

  Stanley listened to the bartender without comment. The bartender took this for a bad signal, although the truth was that Stanley was listening, that Stanley listened to everything and everybody—except the few people left in his world who still tried to tell him what to do. And he was not unsympathetic. Stanley had seen firsthand that newspapers were a flawed source of information. Beyond that, he had a mother of his own, and several brothers.

  When the bartender ran out of things to say Stanley turned to Spooner. “What do you want to do?” he said.

  It was another crucial moment in Spooner’s personal history, and he had nothing short and to the point to say, not even a sense of how he would like the place to look when he left. His mouth still hurt when he swallowed, but he could already see that it was no better to walk into a bar with Stanley and the medic and the judo player and the trombonist and turn the place into a parking lot than it was for the citizens of Devil’s Pocket to have sheared off his teeth when he’d come in alone earlier. That was where his mind was now, ethics.

  “What do you want to do?” Stanley said again, slower this time, and perhaps a little impatient—not unlike the repo man back in Florida who’d come for the Mazda. The bartender looked at Spooner and waited to see if he was going to be thrown through a window, or perhaps the wall, and as this was going on, the fat boy with the red hair, the one Spooner had liked the looks of even less than the others during his earlier visit, got up from the bar and skipped right past Stanley’s pro bono attorney and out the side door.

  Meanwhile, Spooner and the bartender looked each other over. What Spooner wanted, he decided, was for the bartender to understand that safety was relative. That even here, nestled in with all his bar-rag friends and neighbors, he couldn’t shear off Spooner’s teeth with immunity.

  “It’s not the same now, is it?” Spooner said.

  By way of answer, the bartender glanced at the door where the fat boy with rotten teeth had disappeared. A minute or two had passed, no more.

  “Is it possible,” Stanley said to Spooner, “that sometime this evening you could get to the point?” He seemed edgy, which, if Spooner had not been absorbed in questions of ethics, he might have correctly seen as a clearer omen to the evening than finding an open parking space in front of Dirty Frank’s. Stanley was never edgy about the ordinary things that put humans on edge.

  Spooner noticed the snow when the fat boy appeared in the side door again. It was coming down in big, wet flakes, and it was beautiful falling through the headlights of the two cars parked on the sidewalk just outside. The fat boy came in and stopped, smiling in some anticipation, and behind him an army of local inhabitants poured through the door, each one carrying a bat or a tire iron or a taped piece of reinforced steel stolen from some construction site. The establishment’s other door opened then, and the second wave came in, similarly outfitted, and then for a while this little piece of the Pocket was a wonderful place to be from, if not to visit.

  The little party from New Jersey made its way to the door, and then out the door, and then Spooner and Stanley were somehow alone among the horde of locals. Where everyone had gone Spooner never knew, but you couldn’t blame anybody for leaving.

  Stanley was hit first, one of them sneaking up from behind, the black tire iron in perfect focus even in the night. Stanley dropped where he stood, and seeing this amazing sight, which no one in Texas or Philadelphia or any of the places in between had ever seen before, Spooner spotted the flaw in his exit strategy, as they say at congressional hearings, realized that there was no contingency plan for Stanley’s dying first, and determined that as a gesture he would at least try to make his way to the boy with the crowbar and bite off his cheek. He took a step or two in that direction, but again there was no traction, and then he was distracted by the barrel of a ball bat homing in, not a foot away—he could read the label. Louisville, it said—and in that same moment, still before the bat arrived, there was a noise from behind, nothing monumental, about like the snapping of a pencil in half.

  So that was it, the way things end. No thoughts of his wife or his child, no settling up accounts, no thoughts at all actually beyond the desire to bite off that fucker’s cheek. If it had been like this for Pally, he thought, it wasn’t too bad.

  All these thoughts came later, of course, after he’d been brought back to the here and now and the ice-covered sidewalk of Devil’s Pocket. A different kind of noise had revived him, something from hell itself. It said—distinctly said—“If he’s dead, so is every one of you. Every one of you motherfuckers is dead.”

  You may notice the use of the word is. In times of stress, Stanley Faint often reverted to correct grammar, which indicated to Spooner that he—Stanley—wasn’t dead, which further indicated that neither was Spooner. In fact, it turned out that Stanley was barely scathed, relatively speaking, suffering only what looked like an inconsequential break of the ulna of his left arm. The tire iron hadn’t knocked him out, or even down; he’d slipped.

  To Spooner’s huge relief, he looked up into the night sky, and found it full of Stanley’s remarkable face. That boneless nose. “Another night in the life of a big-city columnist,” Stanley said, and picked Spooner up off the street with his good right arm. Spooner achieved verticality, but noticed that one of his legs had ceased to function. Absolutely would not move.

  “We’ve got to go,” Stanley said.

  Spooner tried to walk with him back in the direction of the car they’d driven over in, but the leg stayed where it was. “My leg won’t move,” Spooner said. He tried again, but the leg might as well have been cut off and lying in the street for all the attention it was paying to Spooner.

  Stanley looked down the expanse of row houses where the locals had run—somewhere out there they were regrouping. “We don’t have time for your leg not to move, Sunshine,” he said.

  Spooner stared down at the leg again, trying to see what was wrong with it, and pretty soon the blood that was running from his scalp found its way through his eyebrows and into his eyes, and his vision blurred. “You think it’s serious?” he said.

  “It could be if we don’t get out of here,” Stanley said.

  “I know how odd this sounds to you, but it just won’t move.”

  Without another word, Stanley put his head under Spooner’s arm and walked him/carried him back to the company car, then deposited him in the front seat and got in the other side and started the engine.

  “So where are we going?” Spooner said a little later.

  Stanley checked the rearview mirror. “The hospital, unless there’s some place you’ve got to be.”

  “You think it’s that bad?”

  And Stanley looked at him again and began to bray, and it was good to hear that noise again, although here in the confines of the company car, it set off a ringing, like standing in the street when the fire engine blows by.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Stanley pulled Spooner out of the car and carried him throug
h the doors to the emergency room at Hahnemann Hospital, where he was taken right to the front of the line—some of the other victims of the night complaining that they were there first—and before long an emergency room doctor came in and began sewing Spooner’s scalp and lips back together, and then an orthopedic surgeon came in to look at his leg, and a brain surgeon came in to look at his brain.

  Pictures were taken of everything and two shots of Spooner’s brain were fastened onto a lighted viewing board where the brain surgeon studied them, back and forth, apparently disapproving of everything he saw. Spooner tried to engage the doctor, asking if one of the pictures might show why he’d been living in the third person lately, but it was two-thirty in the morning now, and Spooner’s mouth was swollen snug against his gums, affecting his speech, and the doctor was in no mood for Spooner even if he could have understood what he was saying.

  The emergency room doctor was finishing up sewing pieces of his lip back into place.

  Would this embarrass the family? How much school would he miss?

  There were hints now that Spooner was in the wrong time zone. He thought it over and was pretty sure that he’d graduated from high school.

  “How old am I, anyway?” he said, and at the sound of his voice the emergency room doctor spooked and his hands jumped, and a piece of Spooner’s lip dropped onto his teeth.

  “Quietly, please,” the doctor said, “I am working on these lips.” He was a high-strung fellow, a native of some country where the people were small and brown.