Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  Meaning it didn’t have to be Kenny Durkin’s daddy’s.

  And that same afternoon stepped over the Shakers’ coonhound, who was asleep beneath Lance’s bedroom window, and climbed through the window into the Shaker residence. Lance and his mother were in the backyard at the time with the maid, chopping the head off a chicken for supper. There was nothing young Lance—as his father called him—enjoyed better than chasing a just-decapitated chicken around the yard, whacking it with a switch.

  The major himself was asleep on a chair in the living room, still in the uniform he wore to church, his lips loose and glistening with spit. The radio was on the table next to him, broadcasting Chicago Cubs baseball from Wrigley Field.

  Spooner took his time. He picked up Major Shaker’s shoes, which were set neatly together beside the foot stool, polished and shined. It was one of Lance’s orders of the day to polish his and his daddy’s shoes. Scuffed shoes meant demerits.

  Spooner took the shoes to the bedroom and set them on the floor, cocking his head like a piano tuner as he went back and forth between them, evening the pitch, one shoe to the other.

  On the way out, he noticed a small puddle on the floor at the foot of Lance’s bed. Just a few drops, really, and he looked around for something to wipe it up, but now came a change in the sound of Major Shaker’s breathing, and a moment later another sound as he got up off the chair, and Spooner was out the window.

  All in all, a neat, well-timed job, but still, the puddle. It nagged at him all day, like a guilty conscience. He didn’t know the word for the nagging then, but the nagging itself wasn’t new and had bothered him one way or another for a long time. Which is all to say that on top of trespassing, spying on his mother from trees, lying, sneaking out of the house, and being sexually unfit for kindergarten, Spooner was, on top of everything else, a perfectionist.

  Major Shaker called the police and again Sergeant Audry was sent to Vincent Heights. A reporter from the newspaper went through the neighborhood later that week, knocking on doors, interviewing housewives and the elderly in regard to the strange crime wave sweeping the area.

  The story ran on the front page in Friday’s paper, with a picture of old man Stoppard’s house, which the newspaper identified as the residence of Roger Durkin. A fiend was loose in the community, the paper said, breaking in to homes and committing acts of an unprintable nature.

  Margaret read the report to Spooner after supper, and he leaned in over her narrow arms and stared at the words he couldn’t read for himself, and at the picture of old man Stoppard’s place, glimpsing for the first time what newspapers did. The paper had most of it wrong, not just about old man Stoppard’s house but the times and places the fiend had struck, and yet gradually, over the next day or two, he began to notice that to the citizens of Vincent Heights, the paper saying it that way made it so, even though they knew for a fact that it wasn’t. Which kindled the theory that fibbing was only fibbing if you got caught by somebody more important, and if you became important enough—like the newspaper—you could get away with anything.

  Thus Spooner’s first interest in the printed word.

  SEVENTEEN

  They went shooting.

  It had been a long time since they’d been alone with each other, and things had changed. Spooner was enrolled in first grade at Peabody Laboratory School and Calmer was buying Granny Otts’s house next door, and there was a baby growing in Spooner’s mother’s stomach, and Calmer did not have to look for things to do these days, they were lined up in front of him the moment he got out of bed.

  They drove out to the lake and parked; Calmer closed his eyes and leaned back against the seat, tired and thinking. They had not spoken much lately, even after Sergeant Audry had come to the door one Sunday and reported that Spooner had been seen climbing the Blakemans’ roof out by the highway. Spooner had gotten the feeling lately that he was wearing Calmer out.

  It was Spooner who broke the silence. “Should we shoot at something?” he said.

  “Maybe just some bottles today,” he said, and motioned toward the rotted fence posts still standing at various angles along the property line. Somehow Calmer seemed to know he had no heart for killing rabbits. The field had been a cow pasture once, and there were still cow pies the size of hubcaps all over the ground, dried out and picked over by crows for the corn.

  Spooner set some bottles on the fence posts and plunked them off, hitting more than he missed. Afterwards, he looked back toward Calmer but already knew he wasn’t paying attention. They hadn’t come out here today to shoot. He opened the bolt to eject the shell, and a little circle of white smoke hung over the open breach. Calmer called him over.

  He lit a cigarette and crossed his legs and looked out at the pine-tree horizon. “I don’t know if I mentioned my cousin Arlo to you,” he said after a while. “He lost three fingers at the polar bear exhibit at the zoo in Minneapolis.” Spooner turned and squinted up at him, into the sun. He couldn’t see much of Calmer’s face from here, but there was something uncomfortable in his voice, as there usually was when he talked about his other family back in South Dakota.

  Spooner said, “It bit off his fingers?”

  Calmer shook his head. “No, from what he said, it just swiped them off with its claw.”

  Spooner tried to picture it that way, but it wouldn’t come. “Did they shoot it?”

  “No, they don’t shoot bears for that. It was just being a bear. Arlo stuck his hand in the cage.”

  “Why?”

  Calmer shrugged. “To scratch her ears, he said.”

  “It was a girl?”

  Calmer looked out into the distance again, as if he was remembering. “He does things like that sometimes, but bears are bears and Arlo is Arlo. We all do things we regret…”

  “But what happened?”

  “That was it. They did what they could for him at the hospital and he went back home to the farm, and he learned to do as much work without his fingers as he did with them, and even though he’d done something foolish, everybody still loved him.” He narrowed his eyes, remembering something. “I think the city put up a sign that said Do not place hands inside bear cage.”

  Calmer stood up and shook out his leg, which had gone to sleep. “I just thought you might be interested in that.”

  “Were they friends again, then?”

  “Who?”

  “Cousin Arlo and the bear.”

  “Probably not,” Calmer said. “You can’t be friends with a bear.”

  Spooner shot for a while longer and then they put the gun in its place in the trunk and got in the car. As they reached the highway a wasp flew in the window and moved across the windshield, rattling like death itself, points of color glistening in the black wings, and seeing Spooner draw back, Calmer leaned forward into the steering wheel and trapped it between the windshield and the back of his hand, held it there a moment, mashing it side to side, and then picked up the carcass off the dashboard and dropped it out the window like a cigarette butt. He gave no sign that he’d been stung, but when they got home and walked up the steps to the front door, his hand was so thick he couldn’t get it in his pocket for the keys to the house.

  The fiend had struck again recently, and Spooner’s mother, like half the housewives in Vincent Heights, had taken to locking the front door.

  Spooner was never sure what Calmer was thinking or what he knew. He was thinking something, though, Spooner could see that, and it was about him. Something that he hadn’t told Spooner’s mother.

  Calmer bought Spooner and Margaret a puppy—a small, nervous Boston terrier, seven weeks old, that shook like change on top of the washing machine, a dog you could sneak up on and when you grabbed him he’d jump a foot off the ground. The dog would not come, or sit, or answer to his name, and sometimes Calmer sat holding it in the utility room—where they kept it at night—looking it over in the same peculiar way he sometimes looked at Spooner, when he thought Spooner wasn’t watching.

&nb
sp; Perhaps it was Spooner’s attachment to Calmer, not wanting to disappoint him, or that being the Fiend of Vincent Heights itself had begun to feel ordinary—it had been a year now—whatever the reason, Spooner eased gradually into retirement. Thus, the idle mind being the devil’s playground, as his grandmother would say when it was time to lick stamps, as if licking stamps was the next thing to algebra, he happened to find himself aimless one afternoon and wondering if he could throw an egg from Major Shaker’s chicken coop across the road and into the always-open windows of Sergeant Audry’s patrol car. Sergeant Audry reliably came home in the afternoon and parked the cruiser next to his house and slept in the front seat.

  And so Spooner climbed to the roof of the Shakers’ chicken coop, a fresh egg in each of his pants pockets, to wait for Sergeant Audry, and had heard the cruiser coming and then, not quite in time, saw that it was not Sergeant Audry but Major Shaker, pulling into his driveway, and Spooner—it was already too late to ask why—tossed the egg he had intended to pitch into Sergeant Audry’s car window onto the hood of the major’s car instead. Lance was in the car with Major Shaker, his head barely visible at the side window. Spooner froze a moment, amazed at what he’d done, envisioning a whole new career, and then, in an escape plan he had not completely thought out, climbed onto Major Shaker’s roof and flattened himself against the shingles, breathing in the smell of the hot tar paper beneath his chin, and waited as Major Shaker first disappeared behind the dashboard and then sat back up and threw open the door, a pistol in his hand, and ran to the chicken coop and then circled the house.

  Lance had gone into the windshield when the major hit the brakes, and was still back in the car, wailing like he’d been run over. The major went all the way round the house, keeping low and taking what cover he could, and then appeared again at the spot where he’d stopped the car.

  He noticed young Lance crying then, and shouted, “Will you shut the hell up?” which only made him cry louder.

  His voice was hoarse and, except for the fact that the words were from the English language, did not sound human. A neighbor came out her door to see what was going on. The neighbor had a clear view of Spooner on the roof, and she and the major’s wife socialized together sometimes when their husbands went fishing. Lance was yowling like he was really hurt, but with Lance you could never tell. He cried all the time, and from what Spooner had seen had cried and tattled his way right to perfect grades in Miss Anderson’s first-grade class at Peabody School, even though he copied off everybody, and everybody but Miss Anderson knew it. But then, giving him his due, he was the best speller in class, including the girls, and always won the Friday spelling bee.

  All his life, Spooner would mistrust people who could spell.

  Major Shaker did another, slower circuit of the house and young Lance continued to go at it in the afternoon air, and Spooner did not move from his spot on the roof, still in plain view of the neighbor and starting to bake. The neighbor had seen him, he knew that, but hadn’t done anything about it yet, afraid maybe that Major Shaker would shoot him off the roof. He felt nauseated, but put it less to the heat than the strain of trying to come up with a story. Whatever story he told, he would have to tell it eventually to Calmer, who for all he knew could read his mind, and more and more lately gave him sudden, hard looks when he fibbed. He tried but all he could come up with was something he’d heard Calmer say: Time waits for no man. It sounded intelligent but as a story it had some holes.

  The major went back to the car and pulled Lance out—he had seen his own blood and was crying more earnestly now—just as Mrs. Shaker came out the front door barefoot in a bathrobe, leaving wet footprints on the porch as she ran to him, her hair wrapped in a towel. She saw the gun in one of the major’s hands and Lance in the other, and saw Lance was bleeding, and assumed the worst. Screaming at her husband that he’d shot their beautiful boy.

  Spooner had an orderly, mathematical mind and fought down a wild, reckless impulse to climb down and straighten everything out.

  Major Shaker left Lance on the walk holding on to his mother and went into the house. He was back out a minute later, no longer armed, and got in his car, which he’d left running, and blew gravel up against the undercarriage backing out of the driveway.

  Spooner waited a few minutes after the major left, listening to Lance sobbing into his mother’s titties, a come-and-go sound to it, wa-wa, like a trumpet, and then they went inside and he dropped down off the roof onto the chicken coop, making no sound at all as he landed, and climbed through the barbed-wire fence into the pasture and started home. Behind him, he could still hear Lance crying, but Lance was running out of juice, and couldn’t keep it up.

  He followed the fence line home. The sun was beginning to go down, and he ran at a few cows, bluffing them off their grazing spots, but his heart wasn’t in it, and presently he came to a spot even with the back of his house, where the lowest strand of barbed wire sagged all the way to the ground. He usually ducked through to cross into his yard. From this same spot, though, he now saw Major Shaker’s green Henry J parked in the driveway, directly behind Calmer’s Ford. Major Shaker was standing to one side of the car with his arms folded across his chest, and Calmer was in the driveway with the hose, washing the dried egg off the Henry J hood.

  Spooner turned and headed the other direction, downhill, toward the sawmill. The cattle had begun their regular evening ambulation to the swale in the pasture where the pond was, moving single file through the changing light, their shadows long and slow. They would spend the night at the pond, lying so close together that from the house they looked like a low black hill.

  In front of Spooner lay the sawmill, quiet and empty. He stopped a moment and watched for the guard, who lived on-site in a tiny trailer between the sawmill and the Bottoms.

  At the other end of the mill—the southern end—was a domed tin-roofed structure with an open door and a smokestack. Black smoke was floating up out of it, as it did night and day, every day of the year, giving Vincent Heights its peculiar sweet smell, like a dog passing air. Even on Sundays, the fire never went out, and sometimes after dark, when Spooner was sent outside to think over something he’d done, he could see fire glowing in the open door.

  Spooner went under the fence at the bottom of the pasture, then crossed a plywood bridge over a creek and headed for the building, suddenly wanting to see the fire for himself.

  He stopped a moment in the doorway, the heat nearly turning him around, but then went farther in. He thought his pants might catch fire. The floor of the building had been dug out, a crater almost as big as the building itself, and around the edge was an earthen path a yard wide. There was another open doorway on the opposite side, and a conveyor belt of some kind led from there into the building, and there were still pieces of lumber on it, the frayed ends sparking and rising with the heat to the roof. In the morning the belt would begin to move again, and these pieces would be the first to fall into the pit. Spooner now stared into the pit itself. The surface was dark but seemed to boil, and the smoke went up through the hole in the roof.

  Spooner went farther in, stopping finally at a point where it seemed as far to one opening as the other, staring all the while into the pit, which was beginning to glow in the coming darkness. A moment passed, and he thought of the strangeness of the place, that you could step off the ledge and two minutes later be smoke yourself.

  A figure appeared in the doorway, a small man with one hand in his pants pocket. He looked the pit over and then turned away and Spooner saw the empty sleeve. Spooner pressed himself back as far as he could go, remembering a story Kenny Durkin told him that during the war Jaquith cut off his own arm for something to eat and never lost the taste for human flesh, and now they let him eat dead people because he was a veteran and a lawyer.

  Spooner felt his spine pressing into the hard inward slant of the wall.

  Jaquith turned again and walked out of sight.

  Time passed, and it was darker outs
ide every time Spooner looked, and in the darkness the pit glowed and began to turn rosy. Spooner thought of Calmer washing the egg off Major Shaker’s car.

  He heard a starter weakly turning an engine. The engine coughed and then sighed, like somebody sick in bed, and then caught, and then the engine revved, again and again, until you could hear the insides hammering against the walls of the cylinders.

  The headlights went on, and Spooner saw the beams in the dark, angled high and uneven, pointed like a blind man’s eyes, and then he saw the car itself, moving slowly into view, mud-covered and dilapidated, the muffler dragging along the ground underneath. The car moved slowly past the opening and disappeared to the right, and a moment later Jaquith’s mule appeared from the left. The mule was dead and, from what Spooner could see, attached to the car by a rope. The rope had pulled the animal’s ears up against its head into a kind of bouquet, and it seemed to fight the rope, jerking and bouncing as it was dragged along slowly to the opening, losing ground all the time.

  When the mule was even with the opening, the engine quit and popped once, and then Jaquith opened the door and got out. He stood for a moment, looking the situation over, and then went back to the car, leaned in to the trunk and came into sight again with an oar.

  He pushed the oar deep under the mule, using his foot to drive it, as if he were spading the earth, and then set his shoulder under the oar and heaved up. The mule rocked and settled, perhaps a few inches closer to the fire. Jaquith went to the other end and stuck the oar beneath the animal’s behind and lifted it again. He grunted under the strain, raising up on tiptoes to lift the oar as high as he could, then went back to the other end and started the process over again, making a similar noise, and in this way, the mule was gradually levered closer and closer to the fire, until finally, a point of balance was reached and the creature seemed to hang a moment on the edge, and then dropped in, the rear legs first, then the front. A puff of ash came up around the body, and a moment later it slid in farther and seemed to float for a few seconds, and then began to smoke, and then caught fire all at once, as if it had finally given in. There were popping noises at first, then a small explosion as the mule split wide open, and an instant later Spooner inhaled a putrefaction that engraved itself instantly and forever in his brain, and for as long as he lived, whenever he was truly scared—those times when he thought he was dead or as good as—he would catch a whiff of that exploded mule.