Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  “We aren’t hungry this afternoon?” she said.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  There was no ultimatum. All she said was “You can’t do this to us,” and he knew that was true even if he didn’t know which us she meant—Spooner and her, or the baby and her, or maybe all three of them together. She said that—whispered it, really—and then got up and kissed him on the forehead and left.

  Spooner turned his head and saw that Mr. Graves was asleep, twitching his dog-like twitches as he dreamed. He envied Mr. Graves not just his morphine but his situation. No questions lingered over that broken body, no guilt, nothing of that sort in his head at all, only an inexhaustible disbelief at what Mrs. Graves had done to his person and his new car. Also, he was apparently free of the sensation of being flushed down a toilet.

  Spooner had begun to think that the sensation of flushing was brought on by too much introspection. It was, in a way, what had gotten him into this mess in the first place, and now, unable to get to a septic tank or a lawn mower or a typewriter, there was nothing he could do to make it stop.

  Later in the day, two heavies from the X-ray department came in and moved him onto a cart for the ride down to the second floor for more pictures of his various broken bones, and then to the first floor for pictures of his brain.

  The X-ray department boys bounced Spooner going onto the elevator and again coming off. They said, “Sorry, Mr. Spooner,” but they were furniture movers at heart, and if they’d dropped Spooner down a flight of stairs or even the elevator shaft, they would have just collected him from the bottom and said, “Sorry, Mr. Spooner,” in that same tone, and delivered him to the X-ray station as if nothing had happened.

  And if anybody asked, he’d been like this when they picked him up.

  Mrs. Graves was back in her regular spot when Spooner was wheeled back into the room. She was sobbing quietly into her handkerchief, which by now was more or less regular too. Mr. Graves was overdue for morphine again and in no mood for the Gospel or taking pictures, which was all she had at the moment to offer. It appeared to Spooner that the lateness of Mr. Graves’s morphine deliveries was deliberate; the nurses seemed to have decided that he was spoiled, and even when one of them finally showed up with the juice it was always administered as if it was against her better judgment, the way you finally give in and cork the baby with a pacifier to shut it up.

  And so Spooner returned and Mrs. Graves was weeping, and Mr. Graves was going over the details of the accident again, how she had to go and squashed him twice and there was something comforting in the sounds of their voices by now, and he fell off into a jumpy half sleep.

  Calmer came to the hospital right from the airport. His pants were wrinkled and he was still carrying his suitcase. The suitcase had been in Calmer’s family fifty years, and the leather was soft and worn, like an old, favorite baseball glove. He set it down inside the door, and the weight of the thing was there in the way he stood up.

  He looked at Spooner from the doorway, worn out in much the same way he’d been the last time Spooner saw him, after he’d lost his job and, as he’d put it then, things just stopped. He smiled hesitantly, taking stock, and Spooner saw that he wasn’t sure he was in the right room.

  Spooner said, “It’s me, all right.”

  Calmer came farther in and was again momentarily arrested, this time by the sight of Mr. Graves, as everyone was on first entering the room, and then took the chair where Mrs. Spooner had been sitting earlier and crossed his legs. He began to speak but didn’t. Spent beyond words.

  “It isn’t as bad as it looks,” Spooner said, and remembered that he’d provoked Mrs. Spooner with exactly those words. “It’s just the stitches…”

  Again Calmer seemed about to speak and nothing came out.

  “This here the newspaper boss?” Mr. Graves said. “Man, you somethin’, ain’t you? You got fighters and reporters and flowers comin’ in here like you was big britches.” He’d finally gotten a shot of morphine while Spooner slept, and was floating as high and happy as the Goodyear blimp.

  Calmer looked across Spooner’s body at the man suspended from the ceiling and then stood up to introduce himself.

  “This is my father, Calmer Ottosson,” Spooner said. “Calmer, this is Sylvester Graves.”

  “Howdy-do.”

  Calmer nodded politely and said, “Good to meet you.”

  “They got us in here all fucked up together on the nurse schedule,” Mr. Graves said, “but your boy Spooner ain’t complained once. And he don’t even get nothin’ to make the time pass.”

  “He means morphine,” Spooner said. “I don’t get morphine.”

  Calmer nodded as if he understood, but in some way the information wasn’t getting all the way through. A minute passed and he got to his feet and gently fingered the bandages perched on Spooner’s head, like a blind man picking out a melon, then squeezed his shoulder—as much intimacy as men ever showed one another back in the place he’d come from—and stood over him awhile, his head bowed in reflection, or exhaustion. And as small as the gesture had been—Calmer putting his hand on Spooner’s shoulder—it choked Spooner, and for a little while he did not trust himself to talk.

  Calmer continued to watch him, and then he finally found the words. He said, “Why this?”

  Why this?

  Spooner tried to think but nothing came. “It’s just the way things turned out,” he said.

  “That’s God’s truth,” Mr. Graves said. “You go to park the car and the missus run over you twice. What is a man to do? You buy the car, somebody got to park it. Cain’t just drive it around in circles.”

  Calmer had turned to Mr. Graves to listen to what he said, and now he looked back at Spooner for a translation.

  “Mr. Graves was in a car accident in a parking lot,” Spooner said.

  “Yeah, that’s what they callin’ it now,” Sylvester said. “But how you gone run over somebody twiced by accident? How you did that without malice? That’s what we been trying to get to the bottom of here. You an educated man, sir, what would be your opinion in regard to the matter, if you was in my place, that is.”

  Calmer said, “Well, I like to give a person the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Oh, I agree wit that. I agree you there, yessir. But I already married the girl. That’s benefit of the doubt right there.”

  “Oh, it was your wife.”

  “Yessir, thirty-some years. She keep sayin’ she never done nothin’ like this before, but then again, how long it been festering around in her to do it? You see what I mean? Her mother like that too, she hit the old man in the head with a car battery, him asleep in the bed.”

  Calmer nodded, considering Mr. Graves’s family situation from one side and then another. Even engaging a stranger, he was careless with nothing.

  “But it was only this once,” Calmer said.

  “Once and twiced both,” Mr. Graves said. “All the same time.”

  Calmer said, “But it’s not a pattern of behavior.”

  “How many times you think I’m gone stand back there while she park the damn car after this?”

  “Still,” Calmer said, “it’s not a pattern.”

  Mr. Graves said, “That car got six hundred miles on the clock. The first new car I ever drove.”

  Perhaps thinking of the Bonneville on the street, perfect and shining, Mr. Graves closed his eyes and dozed off into the morphine, and Calmer sat back down in the chair next to Spooner, possibly thinking of what he would tell Lily when he called home.

  And Spooner slept.

  Having Calmer there in the room, knowing he was there with him, Spooner was finally able to sleep.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Calmer carried his suitcase down Market Street toward the train stop that would take him to New Jersey, to wait with Spooner’s wife until the situation settled out into whatever it would be. He still ached to have somehow been there with her when the news came in.

  It was almost dark and beginning to
snow. A freezing wind had come up from the east while he was inside with Spooner, and people made their way into it sideways or backwards, some of them lifting their spectacles to dab at their eyes with Kleenex. The bag was heavy and bounced into his legs, and he stumbled as he walked. Inside it, along with his clothes, were some pages from his journal.

  Calmer himself had been hospitalized only once, an infection during his last year at the academy. He’d kept a diary in those days—two diaries if you counted the one he kept for the goat—as he’d been doing pretty much since he’d learned to read and write. He’d begun feeding the chickens when he was four and half a century later, if he wanted to do it, he could look up the name of any hen in his father’s henhouse and the hiding places she used for her eggs. He’d only quit the journal after he got married and realized that nothing was his own anymore, no place, no time of day, not even for that.

  Oddly enough, the same week Calmer came down with his infection, Bill got sick too. The notations from those days included Bill’s temperature, heart rate, appetite, urination frequency, general alertness, stomach softness, and a certain melancholy that Calmer had noticed even before the goat’s fever began to spike. These notes ran side by side with Calmer’s own symptoms, filling a whole sheet of notepaper at the end of each day’s entry, with Calmer’s numbers growing progressively worse until he was hospitalized, delusional, with a temperature of 105.

  He’d found his journals in the basement and brought this part of it along, thinking that, passive as it was, what he’d done—not reporting to the infirmary until the infection nearly killed him—might bear some resemblance to whatever it was that led Spooner out to the very edge, and always had. Thinking he might show him the notes, and that Spooner would see it for himself. But see what? That he’d been in a hospital? That the goat’s heartbeat topped out at 192? That once he almost died himself?

  No. He’d left the pages in the suitcase, and here he was again, helpless and uneasy and mostly useless, he supposed, as he’d been all the boy’s life, and even now, with Spooner lying in the hospital beaten half to death and Calmer fighting his way down Market Street into the howl of the storm, he felt a quiet strum of apprehension simply at the thought of trying to approach him on the subject again.

  And thinking of how he might go about it this time, he realized that if what he was looking for was a parallel with Spooner, it was the night he’d finally gone drinking with his classmates from the academy and got up the next morning with a tattoo:

  E = mc2

  high on his shoulder.

  It wasn’t much, but it was as much damage as he’d ever inflicted on himself intentionally.

  Or maybe not. Considering where he was, who he was, how he’d gotten here, maybe not.

  FORTY-NINE

  They came for him at fifteen minutes before six in the morning. Spooner had seen his X-rays and knew the femur had to be realigned, but he couldn’t remember anybody telling him this was the morning they meant to do it.

  He said good-bye to Mr. Graves, who was scheduled for his own surgery in the afternoon—the sixth in three weeks—and then was rolled off into the cold. He’d become attached to the old man and imagined himself dropping in to visit him after they both got out.

  The hallway outside the operating room smelled like meat.

  FIFTY

  He came awake the first time seemingly an instant after he’d gone to sleep, paralyzed. He remembered the shot of Valium, then something else, and being asked to count backwards. And an instant later here he was—there is no sense of time passing under anesthesia; what it imitates is not sleep but death—awake, unable to draw breath or open his eyes. Above him somewhere he heard the bone doctor giving orders—he wanted this, he wanted that, no, not that, that—and felt an occasional dull tugging in the area of his hip, and there was no air to breathe, and it reminded him of times when he’d stayed down too long underwater, of that last ten or fifteen feet to the surface.

  Why this?

  And he lay on the table, waiting to break back into the breathing world, and then went beyond that into new territory, passing through random passing thoughts, and then came a certain reflexive panic, and presently the panic dimmed with everything else, and in the place where it had been was something strangely familiar, the process of dying.

  Then the bone doctor’s voice: “What the hell’s going on over there?”

  Into the random thoughts a series of hallucinations: he was locked in a box, in a closet, and finally in the trunk of a car. There was a kid back in Vincent Heights named John Arthur Ramsey whose daddy took him fishing one Sunday morning, locked him in the trunk, and shot himself in the ear.

  Was that Calmer he heard looking for him somewhere outside?

  He thought of causing some sound, some tiny movement, but what that might be he didn’t know. He could cause nothing in this world.

  And life moved away a little at a time. It seemed to Spooner that a long time ago the bone doctor had asked an excellent question—What the hell’s going on over there?—but there had been no answer. Had he meant something else? Was someone masturbating in the corner?

  He heard a faint whistle as breath went in and out of someone’s nose, and dropped further away, so far away, he realized, that Calmer would never find him now, and then abruptly a tube of some sort was being forced roughly into his throat—gouging the sides as it went down, he thought, like picking your nose with a hangnail—and a moment later, unexpectedly, he felt his lungs fill with air, and Spooner, mute and helpless, dead meat, came fully alive again without moving a muscle.

  He heard the bone doctor again, perhaps speaking to the anesthesiologist—not a nurse, anyway, to someone of his own station. He said, “Imagine the fucking tap dance we’d have to do if we lost this one.”

  Someone laughed—a man’s voice—and then abruptly stopped when nobody laughed with him.

  That was all Spooner heard. Someone laughed alone, and then Spooner went back into the dark.

  What now?

  He felt the tugging at his hip more distinctly than before, and a moment later a feeling rose through his body at amazing speed, and nothing had moved through him like that since he’d tried to short out all the lights in that motel in Iowa on the family’s annual trip to Conde, South Dakota, and blown himself halfway across the room instead.

  There was a pause, and things settled and went still. He thought about his grandmother, wondering if she was still alive. He couldn’t remember her now, what she looked like.

  And oh, lord, it came through him again, and the sound and the feeling converged into one thing, and then it was quiet again, and in the quiet he realized what it was. A drill. They were using an electric drill to screw home the bolts and screws into his bone, and it came again and stopped again and the elements of the thing, the pain and the noise and the electricity, settled out during the quiet, one from another, and then rose together in an instant, and Christ in heaven he was not supposed to be feeling this, was not supposed to know something like this existed, and he lay helpless to open his eyes, to move even the smallest muscle.

  Then it was quiet, and then it coursed through him again, and again, and another screw went home into the bone.

  Why this?

  He could taste something burning. The screws went in and he tasted the burning and then they paused and there was the tugging again as they pulled aside muscle or tendons to clear a section of the bone for the next screw, or manipulated the bone itself into a new position, and then would come the stillness and quiet, a kind of blessing before it washed through him again. He thought of his wife and could not remember her name.

  The bone doctor was five screws into the job before he looked over at the heart monitor and noticed Spooner’s vital signs. “Now what?” he said. As if a child were tugging at his pants leg, nagging him while he tried to work.

  And then mercifully the world went black and dead, and Spooner went with it.

  How long had it gone on?

/>   He couldn’t say.

  Fifteen minutes?

  A voice in it now, whose he didn’t know.

  Look, time’s got nothing to do with it. Try buying your dog a wristwatch; see how much time means to him.

  Still, time had passed somewhere, and when Spooner and the world reconvened on the other side of it, Spooner found it—the world—subtly distorted, and realized a little at a time that he hadn’t quite made it all the way back.

  FIFTY-ONE

  The nurse was too loud.

  He was in the recovery room, he knew that. And she was a nurse, he saw the uniform, an angry nurse. Wait, not exactly angry, querulous. She was talking to him in a certain querulous tone taken by adult children when the old deaf codger tries to walk out of the house without his pants on.

  “Warren? Wake up, Warren. Warren, do you know where you are, Warren?”

  Spooner didn’t mind short, simple sentences and had no real objection to being watched to make sure he had his pants on before he went outside. The volume, though. The volume was unnecessary. He touched his index finger to his lips and tried to make the shush sound, but with his teeth sheared and his finger splinted, nothing came out, and the stitches tickled his lips.

  The nurse left for a few moments, and then she was back. “Warren,” she said, “wake up, Warren. Do you know where you’re at?”

  “Why do you have to say at?” he said. “Why can’t you say, ‘Do you know where you are?’ ”

  He slept.

  The surgeon appeared late in the afternoon, carrying the X-rays under his arm, affecting the appearance of someone interested in Spooner’s condition. Spooner was awake again, sucking on ice, disinclined to conversation until he was surer about where he’d been dropped off on the way home.