Spooner

by Pete Dexter

  They were an hour out of Falling Rapids when the sun set, and as the dark closed over the prairie it closed over Calmer too. Late for supper. Spooner watched his old man’s afternoon grace disappear into worry. Calmer stopped once to call home, but there was no answer. After that he held on to the steering wheel as if someone were trying to pull it away from him, and changed gears by rote, without regard to speed, and the engine coughed and bucked. A man who had landed planes on the decks of aircraft carriers driving like an eight-year-old farm boy having his first turn behind the wheel.

  They hit the city limits right at seven o’clock. Darrow and Cousin Bill in the backseat, Spooner up front with Calmer, all of them except Calmer still drinking, but quietly now; Calmer focused a long way down the road, no longer with them at all. Little cracks of worry everywhere in his face. They drove along the northern boundary of Kissler Park, past the brick mansions that stood facing it—car dealers, doctors, attorneys; Spooner’s mother had once claimed she could smell the Republican money—and then onto a street canopied in elm trees where the houses were not so big but were still a long ways up from Milledgeville and Prairie Glen, and drove another half block and stopped in front of the gray, two-story house that was the net financial return thus far into the life of Calmer Ottosson. Not much for what he had put into it; not even a farm, and most of it still belonged to the bank. The car was quiet a moment, then someone in the backseat moved and the beer bottles rattled. Seven-fifteen p.m., pitch dark, eerie as a pasture of blind cows.

  It was Cousin Bill who finally broke the silence. “Oh, boy,” he said, “the missus has turned out the lights.”

  Even his critics had to admit that Cousin Bill had an uncanny insight into the workings of human intercourse. In fact, it was one of the great mysteries of the Whitlowe family how, with this uncanny insight and his willingness to blurt it into the public arena, he’d managed his own human intercourse so well, or had ever gotten laid at all. But there he was, successful in business, lucky in love, beloved by his wife, who looked like more fun than the circus, and a large family—for all Spooner knew, the greatest man in Michigan.

  Calmer pulled the old Buick into the driveway, past the house to the garage. From there, they could see the back of the house, which was as dark as the front. It didn’t have the look of abandonment—the paint was fresh, there were no weeds in the yard—but at the same time it was a shade too quiet for a place just shut down for the night; what it really looked like was one of those farmhouses out in the country where the old farmer dies and the widow stuffs corncobs into the light fixtures to save on the electric bill.

  They went into the house through the side door and found her sitting in her bathrobe at the kitchen table, in the dark. Her atomizer was on the table, next to a glass of tap water, and when they walked in she gave herself a couple of hits off the atomizer, making sure that everyone understood the situation. Not only was the roast ruined, so was her ability to draw oxygen.

  They had all seen this kind of behavior before, of course, even Cousin Bill. It was the way generations of the Whitlowe women, one of whom, after all, was Cousin Bill’s mother, kept blood relatives in line.

  “The roast is ruined,” she said, as if the cow itself had died of inconsideration. She took another shot off the atomizer and pulled it deep into her chest. She had the humidifier on and the air in the room was as wet as fog. Spooner’s mother fought for every breath, and Spooner was suddenly conscious of his own breathing, and soon found that he could not clear his head of its mechanics, the in and out. When Spooner’s mother was on her game, she was as good as there was, or ever had been.

  Calmer appeared pole-axed but calm, at least not monitoring the workings of his own lungs.

  “Well, there’s still beer left,” Cousin Bill said, and he turned on the kitchen lights. Everyone squinted. Beyond his uncanny insight, Cousin Bill had another quality unique to the Whitlowe family; he could recover, could overlook the scene just presented, for instance, as if it had never happened. “There’s nourishment in beer,” he said. “Quite a few vitamins, actually.”

  Spooner’s mother said, “I’m afraid I don’t feel well.” Impenetrable even to the charms of Cousin Bill. She turned away from them, walking right past Calmer, moving like a much older woman would move, and disappeared into the bedroom.

  Calmer thought about it for only a second or two and then went in after her, and Spooner and his brother and his cousin did not see either of them again all night.

  They found the roast in the garbage under the sink, and it wasn’t bad, although Cousin Bill would remark the next morning that he thought it could have used a little more time in the oven. But then, his branch of the family liked their beef well done.

  And that was really all that happened. Five humans of various blood relations got together for a weekend, four of them drank beer and went hunting, three ate some beef out of the garbage. In the morning Calmer went back to work and Spooner’s mother came out of her bedroom and sliced cantaloupe for the boys without mentioning the previous evening, and in the afternoon the boys all started home, and a week after that, the letter arrived with Spooner’s morning mail.

  When Spooner thought about it later, it seemed to him that the letter was the closest thing to an apology his mother ever issued.

  Not that she specifically said she was sorry—not in this life—but she did offer an explanation for what happened, which went like this: Her father died, then Spooner’s twin brother died, then her first husband died, then the ruination of the roast beef.

  But it was more than that. Things happen, after all, in a context. The Whitlowes had once been wealthy and prominent in Milledgeville, only to be ruined during the Depression. Her father, who was dead years before Spooner hit the ground, had been a famous football player at Brown University, then a famous coach at the state university, then a state senator, and then a businessman of sorts, part owner of a lumberyard, and then the Depression hit, and, like most people who went into business for themselves, he didn’t know what he was doing and went broke.

  Spooner’s grandfather was a legend now, a man’s man and the relative whom Spooner was supposed to favor most, although it was Spooner’s brother Phillip who resembled all the pictures of him that Spooner had seen. But then, Spooner was no good at matching faces with pictures and by now had lost even the sense of what he himself looked like, and often caught himself glancing at his own reflection in windows, like some dog sticking his nose into his own rectum every ten minutes to remind himself who he is.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  By his own estimate, it was now the second half of Spooner’s life, which was not some actuarial calculation of middle age but the hard fact that his point of view had been altered, and there was no going back to the way things had looked before, when he was closer to the ground.

  He hadn’t come gradually into his second half, but all at once, in those minutes he’d been left awake on the operating table, and afterwards, as evidence of the change, his body, which did not care for the new perch, began a sort of food strike, regularly tossing whatever arrived into his stomach back out into the world. This was now his body’s answer to miseries of all kinds—worry, torn knees, torn nails, broken bones, form letters from the IRS, Mrs. Spooner’s PMS, other people’s vomit, dead pets—whatever it was, he’d blow lunch. Afterwards, perhaps not so strangely, he would feel lighter, and often relieved.

  Thus, the minute Spooner saw his mother’s handwriting on the envelope from South Dakota, his stomach stirred, and he took the letter into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub to read it. Forewarned is forearmed. Due to his mother’s penmanship and the length of the manuscript, it took him half an hour to finish. But he did finish, every line right down to Love, Your Mother, and then had to move only a step or two to reach the toilet, where he chipped a tooth—one of his replacements from the evening in Devil’s Pocket—on the bowl. It was a small chip, but felt strange to his tongue.

  He put the letter
on his desk, waiting to feel lighter and relieved, but another half hour passed and he didn’t feel relieved at all, and the letter was still there, nine pages long, folded into thirds, lying face-up in a shaft of sunlight from the window, opening on its own like some poisonous flower. Spooner didn’t want to read it again—he didn’t want to touch it again—but he would, he knew, and he did. Twice that week, and then again, after she died. But never after meals.

  For Spooner, the worst of it was a single line at the bottom of page six:… and then Calmer came along, and you two kids needed a father, and so that was that.

  There were other parts that were not good—after all, it was a nine-pager—but that line, that single line. Spooner would always wonder what she expected him to think when he read it, and he was reminded again that he’d grown up under strange rules. The strangest of these rules, of course, erased the fact of Spooner and Margaret’s father from history, but this was barely stranger perhaps than the apparent understanding between Lily and Calmer never to have cross words with each other in front of the children. Somewhere, somehow, it had been decided that parental conflict wasn’t good for children’s development. How exactly this conflict avoidance was supposed to groom Spooner and his sister and brothers for adult life was never clear, and when Spooner’s first marriage began to fall apart, they might as well have put him in a room with a screwdriver and a hammer and told him to fix the television. Spooner sometimes wondered if the whole family wouldn’t have been better off if they’d all just blown lunch when they were miserable, like he did.

  Or, absent that, if his mother could have brought herself to get it out of her system some other way, to scream at them—You drunk bastards ruined the roast!—and throw a pan at Calmer’s head, or at Spooner’s head (he wouldn’t have minded) and then a week or two later drop him a post card saying Sorry about your head, instead of a nine-pager containing the story of her life. The difference being that Spooner would never hold a lump on the head against anyone. That was miles from unforgivable, and who was he, after all, to cast stones? Still, there was a line somewhere, and the letter from his mother crossed it and somehow obliged him to declare where he stood.

  And Jesus, did he not want to get into that.

  And because he didn’t want to get into it, the letter was still lying open and unanswered on his desk the night Calmer called with the news that she was gone. While they were still on the phone, Spooner imagined him going through her things and finding the letter he would have written, slowly realizing what it was about. And Spooner, who had never experienced writer’s block before in his life, realized that this one occurrence had saved his neck.

  FIFTY-SIX

  The details: Spooner’s mother had died during a regular meeting of the Greater Falling Rapids Great Books Club, the first fatality in the club’s history. The meetings were held once a month in the living rooms of alternating members, and this month’s host, who had joined the group only the month before and had suggested they take on Swann’s Way, was a retired admiral, a Democrat, who lived in a big new house on the fourth hole of the country club with a snow-white, asthmatic bulldog named Silly.

  Spooner’s mind wandered even as Calmer told him the story. How many people in South Dakota had read Swann’s Way? How many dogs were named Silly? How many Democrats lived out at the country club? What were the odds, what were the odds?

  Spooner’s mother hadn’t known there was a dog in the house, or she wouldn’t have come. Dogs set off her asthma. As did cats, dust, mold, smoke from Morrell’s meat plant at the edge of the city, cigarette smoke, and mammal dander of every kind she had been tested for. Beyond that, she secretly didn’t think the great books were so hot, and most likely she hadn’t read Swann’s Way, which was no mark against her as far as Spooner was concerned. He’d tried a couple of pages of it himself once and failed to find a pulse.

  It wasn’t the Proust that finished her off, though, it was the dog. The navy man, it developed, had given Silly a tranquilizer and put her in a back room, where she would not bother or be bothered by his guests. The animal, it further developed, could match Spooner’s mother allergy for allergy, and was particularly prone to asthma attacks and hysteria whenever strangers came to the door.

  Spooner’s mother had been in the house about ten minutes when she asked Calmer to get her atomizer, the little one she kept in the glove compartment of the Buick. The group was having refreshments—cocktails, wine, peanuts, crackers, pâté—and had not yet begun to discuss Marcel Proust.

  Calmer asked if she thought they should leave, but no, she would be all right. It was probably just autumn pollen. “I’m just a little tight in the chest,” she said.

  He got her atomizer. The evening grew longer and the refreshments kept coming, and the members of the Great Books Club drank quite a bit of alcohol, and some of them confessed that they hadn’t read Swann’s Way, and others had read a page or two and quit, and Spooner’s mother disappeared into the bathroom more and more often to discreetly inhale from her inhaler.

  Calmer offered again to take her home, but she was having a good time now—the discussion had moved off literature and on to politics—and didn’t want to leave.

  Then, a little after nine, one of the other guests, a professor in the math department at Augustana College who had food and wine stains in his beard, reeled down the hallway to use the admiral’s toilet but opened the wrong door and roused the beast.

  Tranquilized or not, Silly tore into the living room like Christmas morning, her nails clicking and scratching across the oak floor, and there confronted the entire Greater Falling Rapids Great Books Club, the force of her barking lifting her front paws off the floor, backing away from one guest and into another, wheezing and making terrible wet guttural noises, and then began to sneeze, and mists of dog snot blew across the room, settling Jesus knew where.

  And now the animal’s breathing shortened, and you could see her ribs as she worked to pull oxygen into her trembling body. The admiral tried to coax her back into the bedroom, but the dog was too upset. She backed away, bumping into one guest and then another, whirling to cover her flank, wheezing, drooling, growling, violently sneezing, and eventually bumped into Spooner’s mother, who had ducked her nose and mouth into her blouse, filtering out as much of the air with its microscopic dander and dog snot as she could, and now leaned back into the sofa and picked up her feet.

  From there, they both went downhill fast.

  The dog collapsed shortly, her breathing shallow and strangled, rattling. It was hard for the many animal lovers among the club’s membership to listen to her struggling to hang on to life.

  Calmer took Spooner’s mother out of the house, but she did not think she could make it to the car and they sat down on the steps, she and Calmer, and then she lay down, trying to get some air into her lungs. Panic was everywhere, and feeding on itself. Calmer made a pillow of his coat, and called inside for someone to call an ambulance.

  Inside, the bulldog had gone into shock. The retired admiral sat with her on the floor, weeping, holding her head in his lap, running his hand over her coat while fifteen feet away, on the other side of the living room wall, Calmer, absent the weeping, did the same for Lily.

  And in the end, neither of them made it.

  Spooner’s mother died on the way to Falling Rapids Memorial Hospital and Silly was likewise DOA at the vet.

  Spooner and Calmer were on the phone most of an hour that night, all the sounds still fresh in Calmer’s mind, the clatter of the animal’s claws as she ran up the hall toward the living room, the rattle as she tried to breathe, the strange noise in Spooner’s mother’s chest outside on the porch steps, and then at the end, in the ambulance, a different, draining-sink note in her chest after she’d sighed and stopped breathing.

  Calmer finished the story and stopped, and in the silence that followed added, “At least she didn’t suffer,” which, Christ knows, was not the way she would have told it.

  When he hung up Mr
s. Spooner was standing in the half-light of the bedroom door. He was sitting at his desk.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. She had been a good sleeper when they met, but not so much these days, even though she still dropped off half a minute after the lights went off. These days she woke up at the smallest noise, frightened; these days she was always expecting bad news.

  “Mom’s dead,” he said. He saw her watching him to see how he was.

  “An accident?”

  “No, it was a bulldog. She had an asthma attack. She went to a meeting of the Great Books Club, and there was a bulldog there. It had asthma too…”

  He had to stop before he lost control. She came to him and put her arms around his head and held him against her stomach, and he hiccuped, once and then again, and she held him tighter, and they stayed together like that a pretty long time, Spooner allowing her to think whatever she was thinking, and then he stood up and she noticed his erection.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Spooner arrived in Falling Rapids, having changed planes in Chicago and Omaha and then been re-routed to Sioux City, and headed to the liquor store before he even thought about going home. He had intended to buy Scotch but ended up instead with two cases of Beefeater gin, twenty-four bottles of it, imagining the sight of a whole shelf of the stuff—a shining red-coated guard on label after label, quiet, orderly, there to do his job—every time Calmer opened the cupboard to get a plate or a glass. Calmer was not anybody’s idea of a big drinker, and under torture Spooner could not have explained why he’d bought so much of the stuff.