by Pete Dexter
The surgeon opened the envelopes and took out the X-rays, fitted them into the light box and turned it on. He leaned in for a closer look at his work.
“Perfect,” he said, tracing his work, “great. Great, perfect.” He ran a finger along the picture of Spooner’s femur as if he were checking it for splinters. “See?” he said. “It’s perfect.”
The bone, Spooner saw, had been screwed together in seven places and then baled together in a haphazard way with wire. At least he’d missed the baling.
“What do you think?” the surgeon said, assuming the unmistakable pitch of a salesman, but to what purpose? Was Spooner being sold his own leg? Were they negotiating a price?
Spooner felt the familiar, cold wash that announced that he was again spinning down the shithouse walls, and even as the bottom dropped out of the world, he realized he had lost interest in his recovery, would as soon look at pictures from the bone doctor’s family reunion (hairy, monkeylike little children all making faces for the camera) as X-rays of his femur. Then again, at the present moment, he couldn’t think of anything he was interested in. Food, sex, sleep—what else did he like? Nothing came to mind. Boxing? Worse yet, it seemed the bone doctor, having ignored him the last three days, now craved his company and goodwill.
“So?” said the bone doctor. “You’re thinking, Where am I at in all this?”
Spooner looked but did not answer.
“You want to know how long it’s going to be, right?”
“Something happened,” Spooner said, although he had no inclination to get into it now.
He saw that he’d hurt the bone doctor’s feelings. Perhaps this was the moment, walking in with the X-rays, when the doctor customarily accepted thanks and congratulations. “What do you mean?” the doctor said. Yes, it was hurt feelings. A moment passed. “It went perfect,” he said, and referred again to the X-rays, as if they were the proof. “Everything went perfect.”
“I was awake,” Spooner said. “I felt you putting in the screws.”
The doctor smiled at that as if he were relieved and sat down on the side of the bed. To Spooner’s horror, the orthopod wanted to be pals. Maybe somebody had finally broken the news to him regarding Spooner’s identity, possibly even passing along the thought that a man who’d written openly of his wife’s menstrual cycle (In the morning, there were bears in the yard…) would have no qualms about violating whatever patient/doctor confidentiality was ordinarily in effect when a doctor drilled five of seven screws into a fully awake patient on the operating table.
Not that the true nature of Spooner’s aversion to the surgeon was medical incompetence. Spooner had a tolerance for incompetence of all kinds, which was clearly tied to ambition, which was the main thing, along with opposable thumbs, that separated humans from the rest of the creatures of the forest in the first place. No, what Spooner couldn’t abide in regard to the bone doctor was the ooze. The man was all ooze, too sure of himself by half, too comfortable in his own skin. Too comfortable in the world.
He was looking at Spooner now in a pitiful way, and there were flakes of dandruff in his eyebrows. “You had a dream,” the bone doctor said. “It’s a very common phenomenon for patients to dream as they come out of anesthesia.”
“You sometimes put them to sleep, then.”
The surgeon chose not to hear that. “The important thing,” he said, indicating the X-rays, “is the procedure. The procedure went perfectly.” He watched Spooner closely to see if he was making any headway.
And they sat there a little while, the bone doctor nodding away, encouraging Spooner to nod along with him.
Spooner would not nod, though, and when quite a bit of time had passed with nothing else coming out of the bone doctor, Spooner looked down and considered his leg from one side and then the other and said, “Image the fucking tap dance if you’d lost this one.”
The bone doctor chose a look of hurt and bewilderment, as if Spooner were making no sense to him at all, and a minute or two passed and he got up off the bed and left the room, which was all Spooner had wanted him to do in the first place.
FIFTY-TWO
Weeks passed. Spooner went home to the little lake in New Jersey, to his wife and daughter and his dog.
Recovery, though, was slower than he’d expected, and injuries began to show up that nobody had noticed until the bigger, more obvious injuries began to heal. It was two months before he found out he’d fractured his spine—two fractures, actually, one about midpoint, the other at the base of his neck, and a month after that his own doctor noticed that a tendon had split in Spooner’s forearm and rolled up like a snapped piano string into his elbow, and was the reason he couldn’t close his hand. The pain in his hands gradually went away but was replaced with numbness, especially when he sat at the typewriter and tried to work. The feeling of being flushed gave way to a quieter, more horizontal disorder that felt to him like his body had washed up on a beach, the ocean sliding in underneath, his head bobbing in it like a cork.
More troubling than all that, something was between them now, Spooner and his wife. He’d been home only a couple of days when he found her on her knees in the corner of their bedroom, sorting baby clothes in a bottom drawer so that he wouldn’t see that she was crying.
She never said it out loud. She did all the things she’d done before—took care of him in all the ways he could be taken care of, cooked, shopped, took their daughter to preschool, fucked him all the time and so carefully it never hurt him at all (and he was still colorfully bruised in places and tender all over), and held him afterwards. It was in this holding afterwards that he saw it most clearly, the damage that he’d done. Not that she would leave him—he never thought that—only that she had gone sad, and he had lived around sad women all his life and couldn’t stand to think of her like that too.
He knew what she was thinking, that she had only a little time with him left. That she and then the baby had come along and interrupted him while he was in the process of killing himself, and now he was back on schedule. That nothing had changed.
It had, though. Not on the night itself, or the operating table, but in the aftermath, watching her, seeing what it had done. Yes, he was different, but there was no talking it over, because what he and Mrs. Spooner had together also depended on her believing that he had come through this whole. Which is to say, she not only wanted him changed; she also wanted him back the way he’d been.
Not for the first time Spooner was reminded that marriage was not the straightforward assembly the instruction book led you to believe.
He remembered now that on the operating table, dancing along the very edges of his life, he hadn’t been able to remember her name. That one especially he thought he might keep to himself.
So he held her and pretended the healing was all on track, and she held him and pretended that she wasn’t thinking that he was still trying to get himself killed.
FIFTY-THREE
The cast came off Stanley’s arm in early April, and a couple of times a week Spooner, usually after his regular dental appointment, drove up to Frazier’s gym in North Philadelphia to watch him spar. Spooner was still on crutches, and jumpy, and in this condition no longer felt safe in North Philly.
On one hand, it was probably true that no major racial healing had occurred in the city while Spooner had been laid up, but on the other hand, no one of color had ever done him any harm whatsoever, and he was nervous about things these days that he had never thought about before. The sun would be low in the sky when he went in, and the streets were always dark when he left. Sometimes with Stanley, sometimes alone.
And either way, he always felt worse when he left than he had coming in. And looked worse too. Not that somebody walking around—if walking was the word—on crutches, with temporary teeth, swollen lips, head scars still showing through a two-month growth of hair and nerve damage everywhere in his body looked like springtime in the Rockies to begin with. But what was ruining Spooner’s looks wa
s worry.
The bone was the ulna, a word Stanley had at first insisted was associated with the female reproductive apparatus, but which in the fact of the matter was one of the two bones connecting wrist to elbow, and thereby a fundamental connection between Stanley’s brain and his hand. At least the part of his brain that wanted to fight. And as it became clearer—to everyone but Stanley—that this ulna business had not mended the way it was supposed to, Spooner’s thoughts returned again and again to the night in Devil’s Pocket, wishing he’d had the sense to take his sheared teeth home to bed after visit number one.
The damage he’d done was there in front of him every day. Mrs. Spooner continued remote and resigned, as if she were already left alone with her child, to fend for herself, and Stanley, without his jab to hold the other fighters off, was eating punches in the gym that he hadn’t eaten since those first months in Philadelphia. He must notice, Spooner thought, but Stanley persisted in the view that the punches of other heavyweights were amusements, this in spite of the sure knowledge that a total was being kept somewhere. No one, of course, knew what that number was, or what number was possible, or what happened when the number was reached.
As for Spooner himself, nothing tasted the way it had before, particularly alcohol, and he was not sleeping much, and more and more it seemed to him that going back to Devil’s Pocket had left them all sitting ducks in the world.
But it was more complicated than that too. Mrs. Spooner was certain that in Stanley Faint, Spooner had found someone trying to kill himself even faster than Spooner was, and their continued connection—Spooner and Stanley’s—served to reinforce the picture of sitting in some hospital waiting room all her life, waiting for the days to pass that would tell the story on Spooner’s brain. It always came back to that, to the idea he was only comfortable leaning out a little too far over the railing.
He wondered sometimes why all the people he loved were so sure of what they knew.
Spooner had resumed his duties at the newspaper the week after he left the hospital. He wrote his columns from home at first, and there was something between himself and his stories now too, and nothing came to him easily. His sense of taste was ruined, and he gave up on drinking. He didn’t miss the bars—he was soon hearing better stories at the little gym in South Philadelphia, and once he was off crutches, he was at the gym every afternoon, working himself back into shape, exhausting himself before he went home. He loved the man and his son and the place in its way became another home, and he worried about it and them accordingly.
He followed Stanley to Las Vegas and Texas and Atlantic City for fights that were always close and increasingly awful to watch. And he saw more clearly all the time that Stanley was a diminished prizefighter.
And on the night Stanley finally got his chance, when he fought for the championship and lost every round, Spooner went into the dressing room afterward and waited while Stanley urinated into a cup for the Texas State Athletic Commission. “Lookit here, Sunshine,” Stanley said, and Spooner looked at Stanley Faint’s urine, and it was the color of coffee.
Over in the other tent, the champion could barely move his hands. As Stanley would tell a couple of hundred reporters later that night at the press conference, he could fuck up a pair of hands like nobody’s business. “Van Cliburn, Tchaikovsky, Rubinstein, we’ve got offers on the table to all the piano players.”
From all accounts, it was one of Stanley’s greatest press conferences, but even if he’d known Stanley was going to call out Tchaikovsky, Spooner still wouldn’t have gone. He went back to his hotel room instead and called Mrs. Spooner. “It was awful,” he said. “I don’t know what kept him up.” She was quiet, and he pictured her at home, not knowing what to say.
“Is it over, then?” she said finally.
Spooner said, “Yeah, I think it is.”
Hours later, three or four in the morning, Stanley knocked on Spooner’s door. The excitement was gone; Stanley had left everything he had in the ring and in the hours that had gone by since the thing ended. They sat at a window, keeping the lights in the room off, and Stanley drank half a gallon of orange juice while he tried to get some hold on the meaning of what had happened.
He seemed to want Spooner to explain it, how he’d lost fifteen straight rounds on the night he’d been pointing to all his adult life. He was more confused than embarrassed, which isn’t to say he wasn’t embarrassed, and more embarrassed than hurt. Which isn’t to say he wasn’t hurt. His eyes lay small and blue in the swelling, like glimpses of clear sky in a storm, and his lips were cracked open in half a dozen places they were not already stitched, and there were lumps all over his face, particularly the forehead, like he’d gotten into a nest of wasps. What Spooner could not take his own eyes off, though, was a small, jagged cut an inch below one of his eyes, about the shape of a fingernail, that had somehow gone so deep as to sever a tear duct, and as they sat talking and thinking the tear duct leaked and the fluid ran down his cheek, and the lights of Houston blinked on and off in the window, and it looked for all the world like Stanley Faint was crying blood.
PART FIVE
Falling Rapids
FIFTY-FOUR
A week before she died, Spooner’s mother wrote him a letter. She didn’t know she was out of time, it wasn’t about that, although the letter was melancholy enough to make him wonder later on if she’d had a premonition. But probably not. Probably, in her own way, she was apologizing, and, also in her own way, it was to the wrong person.
The letter began in an ordinary enough way, a description of the new Oldsmobile 98 convertible that Superintendent Cowhurl had bought his wife and that was parked, even as she wrote, red as a fire engine in his driveway directly across the street. It had a standard opening; a cheerful reminder of the unfairness of life, which took only about the same amount of space and time as Spooner’s other correspondents’ reports on the weather. Just running a few scales, clearing the pipes before the start of the opera.
Superintendent Cowhurl bought his wife a convertible every other autumn, just before the new models came out and the prices for the current year’s models went down. There had been an incident four years previous when Cowhurl’s wife had been stopped by the city police driving around the perimeter of the park in another new convertible with the top down—but, as Spooner’s mother always pointed out, with the heated seats heating away (it must be nice)—sobbing, naked, and drunk on New Year’s day, but that little incident, as Spooner’s mother called it, hadn’t ever made the paper, even after, to her certain knowledge, an anonymous caller had made the editors aware of the story, and the school board hadn’t brought the matter up either, much less fired Cowhurl, or demoted him to teaching English.
So now the Cowhurls had three cars—the old convertible had been handed down to their youngest son, who had just turned sixteen—and Spooner’s mother and Calmer were still driving the old stick-shift Buick, white with black seats, as unadorned as any car ever made, and Calmer was still working two jobs to make ends meet, and beyond that, Mrs. Cowhurl, currently visiting the manic phase of her manic depression, was tooting the horn whenever she left home for a ride, and tooting again as she pulled into the driveway on the way back. That was what Spooner’s mother had to wake up to every morning, the prospect of tooting.
Spooner pictured his mother at the kitchen table, composing this letter in a decaying bathrobe, the pockets stuffed with damp Kleenex, keeping an eye on Cowhurl’s house from the window over the sink, waiting for some sign that calamity had finally struck over there, waiting for the Cowhurls to find out what it was like. Waiting for things to even out.
The woman had spent her life waiting for things to even out. The thought that she could be ahead in the game never entered her head.
By now—only two-thirds of the way down the first page—Spooner knew what was coming. The letter wasn’t about Mrs. Cowhurl or the new convertible or the unfairness of life, which was old news; it was about her own behavior the wee
k before, when Spooner and Darrow and Cousin Bill Damn from Beaver Island, Michigan, had come to Falling Rapids for the opening of pheasant season, and spent a Sunday afternoon road-hunting with Calmer. This is not to say that any of them came halfway across the country to kill a pheasant, or, with the exception of Cousin Bill—who occasionally, from his second-floor bathroom window, picked off the woodchucks that were undermining his foundation—had any particular inclination to kill anything at all; it was only about getting into a car with loaded shotguns and cold beer and Cousin Bill, who was a piece of work by anyone’s estimation, to see what would happen.
And what happened was that for a little while Calmer ran loose. Spooner and Darrow and Cousin Bill drank Falstaff beer until their feet could not touch the car floor for the empty bottles, and along the way Calmer decided he wouldn’t mind having one or two himself, even though he was at the wheel, and they drove all over the dirt roads of eastern South Dakota all afternoon, the back roads of Calmer’s childhood, stopping for warm nuts and beer at the little stores where the dirt roads crossed, talking to the locals—although this appealed more to Spooner and Darrow than to Cousin Bill, who had not ended up on an island in the middle of Lake Michigan because he craved the company of strangers—then back in the car, speculating on the sex peculiarities of the family’s cousins and aunts and uncles.
It was a wonderful hunt, nobody so much as winged or deafened; in fact no shotgun was even discharged within the confines of the car. For all Spooner knew, it was the safest hunt in the history of the Whitlowe family, and half an hour into it Calmer was himself again, almost the way he’d been in the years before he was ruined professionally, moving in and out of the car like a dancer, as if there was nothing in the world he dreaded, and then, too soon, they seemed to notice all at once that the sun was going down, and it was time to head home. Spooner’s mother was fixing a roast.