by Pete Dexter
Spooner watched Calmer drive the car back up the hill. It was coated in orange dust, and dirt of the same color was packed into the door handles and wheel wells.
Leaving him behind.
And Spooner knew that something terrible had happened, or nearly happened, not because the Ford had rolled down the hill but because Calmer had gone crazy inside, not knowing what to do about him.
PART THREE
Prairie Glen
TWENTY
The family loaded up at daybreak, Calmer’s ancient V-8 Ford shining with dew, some of it pooling on the flat part of the roof where the car had rolled through Mr. Ennis’s plum bushes, lending it the old something not quite right there look—which was a pronouncement Spooner’s mother was apt to make on unfortunates she saw along the road—and headed north to the Village of Prairie Glen. That was the town’s official title, the Village of Prairie Glen.
Nine hundred and forty miles, four breakdowns, asthma attacks every two or three hours; six hard days in the saddle.
Vacation rules went into effect for the trip, and Spooner was assigned to the back seat, behind his mother, where Calmer could keep an eye on him in the rearview mirror. He was not allowed to open his window wide enough to hang an arm out or, more to the point, drop anything out of it that could blow out the tires or windshields of the cars coming up behind. He was not allowed in motel rooms by himself, or allowed in restaurants by himself, or to take matches or sugar or toothpicks off the table, even though they were free and obviously there to be taken. He could not touch the telephones in motel rooms, or the room keys, or lock bathroom doors.
Margaret was not subject to any particular rules except as to seating. She had the spot behind the driver and from there rested her cheek against the window, her head bouncing with the movement of the car, as if it was percolating with ideas. The dog lay on the floor between them, and from time to time Margaret would reach down and play with his ears. It was supposed to be Spooner’s dog, but like everybody else it preferred Margaret’s company and faced in her direction all the way to Illinois.
Darrow, a toddler now, was in front between Calmer and Spooner’s mother, fussing not at all, tilting out of the car seat Calmer had designed and built for the trip far enough to see the landscape sideways, more or less, as he was unable to arrange himself to see it upside down.
Some days Spooner’s mother drove an hour or two after lunch, shifting too late or too soon and lugging the engine, plugging along twenty miles an hour slower than traffic, muttering under her breath, such as it was, at drivers who pulled out and passed. She called them darn fools.
It made Calmer edgy when she drove, and to hide it he would take Darrow into his lap and point out the colors of license plates from different states. The game was too easy though, and pretty soon Calmer was using the plate numbers to teach him poker hands, explaining which ones beat others, and Darrow picked that up as fast as he’d picked up the colors, and then somewhere near the Kentucky state line, Calmer realized that in addition to learning to play poker, Darrow was remembering all the plate numbers that Calmer had pointed out since they left Milledgeville, and could recite them like his ABCs.
The dog, for his part, was depressed and uninterested in life, and threw up what he ate, and seemed somehow to have fathomed what suburbia meant for his kind, and if in fact something like that was on the animal’s mind, he was right on the money.
The Village of Prairie Glen was not a prairie, and not a glen, and no place for a dog. Eight years previous, it had been farmland, corn and hogs, but the hog farmers sold out to the developers and the developers hired city planners, and in no time to speak of the hog farms were laid out as a village. The village, in turn, was assembled all at once—houses, apartments, stores, the fire department, city hall, schools, even a historical society, which did not change the fact that the town had no history, except the histories of pigs and pig farmers, and there wasn’t a tree anywhere you couldn’t take down accidentally with a gas-powered lawn mower. But then there are some things that can be put up overnight, and there are some things that can’t.
Thinking this brought Spooner back now and then to his last conversation with Kenny Durkin’s father. Mr. Durkin had been fired from the sawmill right before the move and was staging a kind of vigil for the common man all week, out on the porch drinking beer morning to night, one after another, sucking them down to the foam, sitting in his underwear and black work shoes, his feet propped against the railing, looking out at the world like he was seeing it for the first time for the stab-in-the-back place that it was. The belches that rolled out of him echoed to the far ends of Vincent Heights, and sometimes when he pissed he got up and pissed off the porch, into Mrs. Durkin’s flower box, and when he pissed he sometimes lifted up his shirt and rubbed his stomach and even by Vincent Heights standards it was pretty uncouth. By now the ladies of the neighborhood avoided looking anywhere in the vicinity of Mr. Durkin’s porch, and tried not to listen, and said to each other that it was a pity for Mrs. Durkin and the little boy but it was no wonder that man was fired.
Spooner himself had forgotten Mr. Durkin was on the porch and passed beneath it that last Friday in Georgia and was stopped cold at the sound of pissing behind him, close behind—if he knew anything by sound, it was the sound of urination—and turned and saw the sun sparkling in the colorless arc that at one end was eating a small hole in Mrs. Durkin’s bed of petunias. He followed the arc back to its origin, back to Mr. Durkin, who was leaning out over the porch railing, murderous, holding on to his pecker with his fist, like he had his nigger by the neck at last.
“Hey you, Wendell,” he said—on those rare occasions Mr. Durkin called him by name, he always called him Wendell—“Kenny repo’ts you-all is gone up north to live in the cold with the coons.” He continued to gaze at Spooner and the gaze turned black and then clouded over, as if he were looking at something else. He put away his pecker and went for another beer, and Spooner walked away.
Spooner recalled Mr. Durkin’s remark these days, wishing he’d turned out to be right, but there weren’t any colored people in Prairie Glen, which was part of the strangeness of the place, and he felt their absence, and the absence of trains coming through, and train tracks, and high-tension wires and pine trees, and the smell of the old men who sat in chairs outside the feed store spitting lines of tobacco between their shoes, and the smell of the sawmill and even the air itself—hot summer air, full of insects, humming with appointments. They didn’t have air like that in Prairie Glen.
What they did have were sidewalks and Little League fields. The streets and schools and parks were named for Indian tribes. Dogs and bicycles had to have licenses—you were required to pass a written test and turn it in to the police department, signed by your parent or legal guardian, to prove that you knew the proper hand signals—and the stores were all packed into one place, like a cluster headache, and dogs were not allowed in there, even on leashes, and bicycles had to be dismounted and walked.
According to ordinances posted at every entrance, you could be jailed for littering, a word that Spooner understood only in the context of puppies and kittens.
The houses were all constructed from three basic blueprints and laid next to each other, eight to an acre, with square, flat lawns and ordinances spelling out the covenants and required maintenance of property.
Spooner’s grandmother, as promised, stayed back in Milledgeville to die. To live and die in Dixie, just like the song, and carry on the family name in the town where she and the Whitlowes had once been important, intending to battle feral cats to the bitter end and save the native songbirds of Georgia.
Pretty soon, as if she were already dead, she began to fade away from Spooner, she and the house and the pasture, the sawmill—everything faded but the various aromas of the place and a few scenes caught like snapshots in his head: the surface of the bathtub water alive with ants, Jaquith’s mule igniting in the burn pit like a piece of the newspaper thrown in the
fireplace, Mr. Durkin’s shoes side by side in the refrigerator, loaded with piss—these things were cut deeper into the stone and were indelible.
That house that Calmer and Spooner’s mother bought was gray shingled and less than a block from the new high school where Calmer oversaw the departments of science and math. The street in front of the house was named Shabbona Drive. Twice a week Spooner delivered the town’s morning newspapers, beginning two hours before school and in the winter it was often still dark when he finished. Once in a while a garage door would open as he walked past, and he would stop and watch as the car slowly emerged, the wife behind the wheel usually, still in curlers and a housecoat, her face puffy and creased with sleep, driving the breadwinner off to the train station. Most everybody worked in Chicago, twenty-odd miles to the northeast.
The husbands, from what Spooner saw, were partial to fur hats in the winter and wore parkas over their suits and ties, and galoshes over their shoes; they smoked cigarettes and stared poker-faced out the car windows as their wives backed out of the driveway, expressions deadened into some joyless exhaustion, the same look Spooner saw these days in poor old Fuzz, as if the world had been drained of taste and color and even the notion of escape.
The dog himself was clearly ruined. He’d come a thousand miles on the floor of Calmer’s old Ford, lying half over the driveshaft hump, panting the whole way, scolded when he moved because of the hair that came up off him like his aroma and rode the currents into the front seat where Spooner’s mother sat, allergic to the entire world but especially to dog hair, fighting for every breath. And the chain. Always attached to his chain, which he still fought and did not understand.
In Prairie Glen, Calmer built the dog a doghouse and the chain was fastened to a stake a few feet from the open doorway, the entire living quarters just outside the kitchen window, where the breeze carried his hair into Spooner’s mother’s lungs as she cooked or washed the breakfast dishes. And this was where the old boy spent the rest of his life, lying in the backyard all day, lying in the garage all night. Once a day, after school, Spooner took him across Saulk Trail Road to a derelict old Catholic church and cemetery, and allowed him to dig holes in the churchyard and sniff gravestones and urinate on the ones where other dogs had urinated, names cut into granite a hundred years earlier and already half erased by time and weather. And dog piss, of course.
A fat man and a bulldog came into the cemetery once, the man dropping the leash once they had crossed Saulk Trail, and then he watched as the dog raced across the field for them, the leash bouncing behind him, and Spooner saw the animal’s intentions and then saw the look in his own dog’s eyes and took the chain off Fuzz’s collar too and let them fight, and by the time the fat man arrived, old Fuzz was crazy with lust, punctured and bleeding a dozen places and missing half an ear—just having a wonderful time of it—and the bulldog, who was bred for this, had also lost an ear and was bleeding at the throat and a back leg and there was a long, wide gash in the folds of flesh below his neck, and the fat man began to yell at Spooner as he arrived—or maybe at old Fuzz, it was hard to say because he was out of breath—and then kicked at Fuzz as he continued to maul the bulldog, not that Fuzz minded being kicked at such times, or even noticed, and continued on until the bulldog had lost another ear, and the fat man was screaming as he kicked, screaming at the dog that he intended to sue him, and at that point Spooner lifted old Fuzz off the bulldog—both animals coming a foot or two off the ground before Fuzzy let go of the bulldog’s throat and dropped him on the ground—and left, putting the dog back on his chain and jogging away, ignoring the fat man who was now demanding to speak to Spooner’s parents.
As far as recreation went, that was about it for old Fuzz. One attempted murder. Maybe twice a year the animal slipped his collar or uprooted the chain and chased cars or a bicycle up Shabbona Drive, or snapped teeth through a chain-link fence with a German shepherd who lived on Marquette Place, or dry-humped some child’s leg, but in the end the old dog was not a suburban sort of dog and would have been just as happy back in Georgia with Spooner’s grandmother, licking stamps. Spooner fed him at bedtime, a can of Rival dog food that slid out whole on its own grease and was eaten whole the second it landed, maybe without changing shape.
That was pretty much it for the dog and Prairie Glen, and pretty much it for Spooner. Watching the animal eat, Spooner would sometimes think of the way he’d fought when Calmer first put him on the chain, and wonder if he’d somehow known what was coming.
It was dark outside, a Wednesday night during that first winter in Prairie Glen. Supper was over, the dishes washed and dried and put away, and Calmer was smoking a cigarette, looking over the Sun-Times. They took the Sun-Times even though Calmer preferred the Tribune, which was the better paper, but the Tribune was owned and run by Republicans, and Lily would not put a cent of honest money into a Republican’s pocket. Darrow was next to Calmer at the kitchen table, having milk and crackers before bed, staring at the back of the paper as Calmer read the front. It was the first breather Calmer had had all day.
“Cubs drop two more to Pirates,” said Darrow.
Calmer lowered the paper and looked at his son, unsure what he’d said. Then, still watching him, he turned the paper around and stared at the headline across the top of the sports section. And while he was staring at that, Darrow said, “Cops nab rape suspect in Calumet City.”
So, just like that. First poker, now reading. And not only a word here and there, like Spooner, but whole sentences. How long he’d been able to read or how he’d learned, nobody knew. Spooner for once was not suspected of involvement.
Later that month, early on a Saturday morning, Calmer took Darrow via commuter train to the University of Chicago’s Department of Child Development for testing. One test and then another and another, the scientists giving each other certain rolling-eyed looks at first, as if this were a trick they had seen before, and then as morning changed to afternoon, the expressions gradually changed too, and they realized they hadn’t seen this before after all. In the end they kept him all day—nine until six-thirty at night—and one of them, a young white-haired man with a foreign accent, asked Calmer if he might bring the little fellow back the following Saturday for more tests and perhaps also to discuss designing a program of study for him there at the school.
Calmer said he would think it over—the tests—but was not sending his three-year-old son off to the University of Chicago.
Still, it was a festive mood at 308 Shabbona that night when Calmer and Darrow got home from the university, especially for Spooner, who loved celebrations, although not being much of a test taker himself didn’t quite get the nuts and bolts of what this one was about. For Spooner, it was like being in the audience after Uncle Arthur had polished off Tchaikovsky and everyone around him stood up and applauded and yelled Bravo! and Spooner would stand with everyone else and clap like a wild man and yell Bravo! until the other people in the crowd began to look at him like he’d robbed the collection plate. He enjoyed his uncle’s concerts, except for the music, and wondered sometimes what the tunes would have sounded like in English.
Tonight they all sat at the kitchen table until midnight, Calmer looking as optimistic as Spooner ever saw him, drinking Scotch, smiling in a contented, satisfied way that infected the whole house, and bedtimes were forgotten and ice cream came out of the freezer, but then about twelve-thirty something about all the happiness got on Spooner’s mother’s nerves—most likely just the look on Calmer’s face; he’d been sitting there for hours by now, smiling like he had all the luck in the world—and she turned cross and likely wanted to slap him across the head with the Sun-Times to bring him back to his senses.
Yet even as Calmer bathed in contentment at the kitchen table, three blocks from the table, his friend Metcalf, his first friend in Prairie Glen and his truest friend, was up late too, sitting with his wife at their kitchen table, drawing outlines on table napkins, little square pictures that for Calmer migh
t as well have been mushroom clouds.
Metcalf was assistant principal of the high school, five years younger than Calmer, energetic, bursting with decency and honesty and compassion, yet all in some strange combination that did not make you hate his guts. He made eleven hundred dollars a year more than Calmer made, and drove a two-year-old Ford instead of a twelve-year-old Ford, but in spite of all that, even Spooner’s mother did not pine for his destruction. The reason for this was as simple as niceness itself. You peeled back layer after layer, and Metcalf was nice all the way through. His clothes were nice, his voice was nice; he probably had a nice pancreas. And his wife was nice, and they lived in a single-story, pigeon-gray shingled house with bad plumbing that wasn’t big enough for the family, a carbon copy of the house on Shabbona Drive right down to the floor plan, and the Metcalfs also had three children and a dog—a pure-bred beagle that didn’t shed—and the children were all clean and polite and together did not get into as much trouble in a year as Spooner could on a weekend, but on the other hand, none of them was as smart or pretty as Margaret, and none of them was busting up high school IQ tests when they were three years old. And if Metcalf exuded an unmistakable aroma of success, he showed deference to Calmer, and to Lily, even if he was technically Calmer’s boss. All to say, again, Metcalf was nice. Enthusiasm unbounded and good intentions, a man who read the books Calmer recommended and believed in the Democratic Party and in education, and laughed easily and knew the principal—a gray-toothed politico named Baber—for what he was, and knew the board of education for what it was too. Somehow all these things together evened out in Lily’s books; in her book she and Mrs. Metcalf were even-steven.
