Spooner (12 page)

“You wet the bed?”

Spooner shook his head again, thinking of what had happened in Kenny Durkin’s kitchen. The doctor stared at him a little longer,
like he could read his mind, and then went on with the list.

“How about animals?” the doctor said. “You ever hurt somebody’s kitty cat?”

Spooner was bewildered. He stared at the doctor, forgetting that the doctor was staring at him. He didn’t reply, forgot, in
fact, that the doctor had asked him a question.

Dr. Woods saw that he was on to something. “You like to hurt things, do you?” he said.

While Spooner continued to stare, the doctor’s cigarette hung in the corner of his mouth, and he squinted with one eye through
the line of smoke and wrote something down. Then he set the clipboard aside, put the cigarette into an ashtray and stood up.
“Well, let’s have a look,” he said.

The doctor was sitting on a stool in front of Spooner, bent over like a doctor milking a cow. It went on a long time, the
doctor not saying much as he poked around, humming now and then, and then finally, he leaned back, took off his glasses, and
told Spooner to get dressed and look at some comic books in the waiting room while he talked to Major Ottosson. He said
major
like Calmer was no such thing.

Spooner got into his underpants and his shorts and shoes and went to the waiting room. There weren’t any comics.

Dr. Woods and Calmer were in the office; the door was closed. Spooner sat in the chair nearest the receptionist and could
hear every word they said. The receptionist saw what he was up to and gave him a look, but next to Spooner’s grandmother she
was an amateur at giving looks, and he ignored her.

“That’s all I seen,” Dr. Woods was saying. “One of the boy’s testicles isn’t dropped, and later on, when the child comes to
puberty, you-all might have to address that.” Spooner sat on the floor, positive he didn’t want to address a dropped testicle.
No idea in the world what a testicle was supposed to be.

“How complicated is the procedure?” Calmer said.

What did that mean,
procedure
? Spooner could hear the worry in his voice and could hear that he didn’t want to be the one to tell Spooner’s mother about
Spooner’s testicle, and you couldn’t blame him for that.

“Generally, it’s simple,” Dr. Woods said. “Generally, just an injection at the site. And by then, of course, it might of already
dropped on its own. Sometime they do, sometime they don’t.”

“But it’s got nothing to do with the other thing,” Calmer said, talking about the thing that got Spooner sent home from school
in the first place.

Dr. Woods said, “Alas, who can say?”

Spooner heard Dr. Woods light up another cigarette.

“If I was you, sir, I’d have the child to a child psychologist, have the boy turned upside down and shook to find out what
he had in store for me down the road. That way, you at least know what you got on your hands.” Dr. Woods was not naturally
a patient man, particularly with the schoolteacher class, but would always make time to exercise his authority over their
lives. It was one of the few day-to-day pleasures still left to a physician.

Spooner got off the chair and sat on the floor. He put the middle and ring fingers of his left hand in his mouth, tasting
the dirt off the floor.

“Here now,” the receptionist said, “you can’t sit on the floor.”

There was a night that would stay with Spooner the rest of his life, Calmer hitting his thumb while he nailed a hand rail
onto the back steps, splitting the nail and the thumb open, blood dripping through the handkerchief Calmer had wrapped around
it onto the steps, and while Spooner was frozen to the sight of so much blood, Margaret had run to the bathroom without being
told to do it and come back with gauze and tape and a bottle of beer from the icebox. She taped up the bloody thumb while
he sat on the steps, sweating and drinking his beer, smiling as he watched her work. Spooner realized conclusively that night
that he would never catch up with her and gave up trying.

Later, after their baths, she and Spooner both sat with him on the steps, and Calmer pointed up through the pine trees at
the constellations, and she already knew them by name and could see the shapes in the sky.

Spooner squinted up into the same sky, the same stars, and saw nothing but the sky and the stars themselves.

Unaccountably, the weekend after the visit to Dr. Woods, Calmer took Spooner hunting. The following Tuesday he came over during
lunch for a game of catch in the front yard, and it went on like that, hunting rabbits and playing catch, all that month and
then the next and the next.

They hunted in an empty field that lay beside a shallow mud lake a mile from town, just across Macon Highway from the state
reformatory for incorrigible youth. A metal fence and barbed wire lined the circumference of the field against escapee delinquents,
and there were signs on the highway that Margaret had read out loud last year on their regular trip to Macon for new shoes,
instructing motorists not to pick up hitchhikers, but cars stopped for hitchhikers all the same and the gate was never locked.
Spooner was hoping to see an incorrigible or two, but what escapees there were didn’t escape to camp out across the street.
Most of them headed for Florida.

Calmer never left the car where it could be seen from the road, did not want to precipitate an escape attempt, and so always
drove to the back end of the lake and parked in a stand of pines. It about broke Spooner’s ribs laughing, driving where there
was no road, bouncing over dead pines in the weeds, and sometimes Calmer let him sit in his lap and steer. It was the best
part of hunting, driving to the other end of the lake.

The gun was a Remington single-shot .22 rifle that Calmer’s dad had given him when he was six, and the moment Calmer put it
in his hands Spooner felt himself changed—the weight, or maybe it was the connection to Calmer as a boy his own size, or the
smell of oil and gunpowder. He didn’t care much for killing rabbits but thought he might like to shoot a snake. He also thought
about being shot himself, winged in the shoulder, and pictured himself lying in Miss Tuttle’s lap, his arm in a sling as she
shampooed his hair.

In the end, all that got shot were the rabbits, but only three or four—no more than they would eat—and after that, they shot
at bottles or cans. Calmer could hit bottles on the fence posts from across the lake, so far away that Spooner could barely
make out their shapes. Calmer cleaned and skinned the rabbits in the lake, gutting them and then cutting off the heads and
tails and stripping them down to purple muscles, leaving the fur and guts on the ground, inside out, and after he’d finished,
what was left—the bare little bodies—did not look big enough for all the insides that came out of them.

They took the rabbits home in a pail, and it didn’t matter who did the cooking or how long it lasted, or what vegetables and
seasonings were thrown in with them, the animals came out of the pot as wiry as they went in, and even the smallest pieces
were like biting into something still alive.

Something else about it too, back at the lake. Spooner had begun looking at the wet piles of fur and organs they left behind,
crawling with flies and bees, and feeling uneasy about what they’d done, about leaving the evidence of it in plain sight.
He never said anything about this feeling to Calmer—in the first place, as far as he knew he wasn’t supposed to notice the
rabbits were dead—and in the second place, he was afraid that anything he might say would get back to his mother, and there
would be no more hunting.

As to the matter of playing catch in the yard, Calmer was not as good at catch as he was at shooting, and didn’t have a glove
of his own and sometimes missed the ball when it came right into his hands.

One night he heard them talking in the kitchen. He heard Calmer telling her that the balls Spooner threw had begun to break,
and Spooner went to the closet and took the ball out of his catcher’s mitt and looked it over but couldn’t see that it was
broken at all, and he wondered if Calmer was telling her it was so that he wouldn’t have to play catch anymore.

There was no question about whose idea it had been, by the way, all this hunting rabbits and catch.

Months passed and still no one spoke to him directly regarding his expulsion from kindergarten, but he understood it was still
on their minds and could see them watching him all the time, bathtime especially. He was no longer allowed to bathe with Margaret,
for one thing, and these days if he got out of the tub and his mother or grandmother saw that his pecker was sticking out,
Calmer had to come over during lunch the next day and play catch, even in the rain.

It didn’t make much sense, but then these were people who looked up into the night sky and saw the shapes of animals in the
stars.

E
arly in May, Calmer and Spooner’s mother were married in the backyard. A preacher from the Methodist church downtown presided,
not the Sunday-morning Methodist preacher but one of his assistants. Spooner’s grandmother said they should have hired a Baptist.
She’d gone over to the Baptist side some years earlier, even though the family had belonged to the Methodist church since
before the Civil War. The Baptists, she said, didn’t treat you like white trash if you had a reversal in fortune.