Spooner (14 page)

Uncle Arthur continued to weep from joy, and continued to drink champagne and smoke his black cigarettes even though his sisters
wouldn’t go near the ice bowl after seeing the thing’s disgusting tongue all over it—the animal might as well have dry-humped
it, as far as they were concerned—and from time to time the incident seemed to roll back over Uncle Arthur, and he dropped
his head into his knees again and his back shook, and he had to wipe the tears out of his eyes to see.

Nobody said it then—it takes a little while for these things to settle out—but the truth was that for most of a week, Lily’s
relatives had been watching Calmer clean house and fetch drinks, remarking to each other on the miracle of his arrival, and
his wonderful housekeeping, and his devotion to Lily and the kids, and how good he was with the children, especially Margaret,
and referring to him generally as the godsend—all this noted with an unmistakable pleasure, Lily having settled on a eunuch—but
into this picture had wandered Jaquith’s mule, and half an hour later, with the size and smell and awfulness of that creature
implanted forever in their memories, all matters of courage and manliness were taken off the table, and the sisters contented
themselves with knowing how much a schoolteacher made.

H
alf a year after the break-in, Kenny Durkin’s father still said he couldn’t get a night’s sleep until he shot a nigger to
get even. “This heah has got implications,” he said dangerously, and on that platform campaigned across Vincent Heights, usually
on Friday afternoons, not that most of Vincent Heights needed to be campaigned to.

Outrages of this sort did not diminish with use and time, like tooth enamel or tire tread, and by now the story of the break-in
at Mr. Durkin’s house had grown and the coloreds had violated his home not once but three times, and not just pissed on his
floor but stolen his toaster, the Hoover vacuum, his wristwatch, and the food right out of his icebox. Hearing this, some
Vincent Heighters took to locking their doors at night and others, who knew Roger Durkin better, didn’t. He had a flair for
the dramatic, especially on Friday afternoons, although no one in the neighborhood doubted that given the chance he would
for a fact plug one in the yard.

The only pluggable colored people who ever came through Vincent Heights, though, were the dollar-a-day house maids from down
at the Bottoms and the toothless old vagrant who had skin speckled like the three-cent-a-pound bananas at the Piggly Wiggly,
and some kind of table leg for a calf. He came around early in the afternoon, before the men got home from work, and went
methodically through one garbage can after another, up one side of Vincent Heights and down the other, looking for something
to eat. He had been bitten by half the dogs in Vincent Heights, and shot from ambush by children with BB guns, and chased
off again and again by the police, but in spite of this he took his time and was neat and systematic about his work, picking
up what he’d spilled, carefully replacing the garbage cans’ lids.

The truth was, the possible shooting of the old colored man presented a dilemma. On one hand, he was a damn nuisance, and
it was a known fact that where one of them found garbage today, twenty of them would come searching tomorrow, and the next
thing you knew the whole place would be crawling with them, and nobody could get a night’s sleep then. On the other hand,
the Shakers’ coonhound also went through garbage cans but left them tipped over in the driveway, so how could you logically
shoot the one and not shoot the other?

There was also the fact that the old colored man’s fingers were two times normal size, so stiff he had to use a stick to get
the lids off and on the garbage cans. How was he going to break into somebody’s house? Another thing was, he stayed down in
the Bottoms with his sister, slept on the ground under her house, and had as much use for a vacuum cleaner as he did for roller
skates.

In the end, the discussion came down more to Roger Durkin himself than if the old man had broken into his house.

Roger had been in the war and shot a hundred Japs, and times being what they were, people took his word for that, and times
being what they were, they’d all heard stories about soldiers who had come home from the war and done crazy-mean things that
would make shooting one old nigger seem like common sense.

For his part Spooner had a feeling of acquaintance with the old man and had occasionally followed him on his rounds through
Vincent Heights, one garbage can to another, putting things in his mouth to consider if they were edible, spitting out what
wasn’t, like coffee grounds or steel wool, and he didn’t see that Mr. Durkin shooting him would make it easier for anybody
to sleep.

Five-thirty in the morning, half an hour before dawn. The pine needles were wet and stuck to Spooner’s feet, and the sky was
just beginning to show light over the sawmill. He hadn’t planned anything, just woke up having to tinkle, and then padded
right past the bathroom and out the back door. Just like that. He was barefoot and walked on his toes, and due to the excitement
could barely hold off urinating on the way over.

The Durkins’ screen door was locked and Spooner stepped back for a longer view. The frame had been painted earlier in the
year, and even in the faint predawn light, Spooner could see bumps where the gnats had stuck as it dried.

Spooner broke a piece of the splintered wood off the bottom of the door, where it was warped and didn’t close, and then climbed
onto one of the empty paint cans that had been sitting in the Durkins’ backyard all summer, and used the wood to lift the
hook out of the eyehole. Except for the need to urinate, he had all the time in the world, and familiar early-morning noises
came up out of the dark to him from the pasture.

He stepped off the paint can, set it to the side, and pulled open the screen. The back door was locked too. He looked around
a moment and then went directly to Mrs. Durkin’s flower box, nailed to the sill beneath the kitchen window, knowing somehow
it was where she would put the key.

This brought Spooner back in front of Kenny Durkin’s icebox, exactly the spot he’d been before, dancing slightly but pinching
his pecker shut with his fingers, holding off the sweetness of letting go, picking the exact spot. Draining the lizard, he’d
heard Mr. Durkin call it that.

As it had before, the bare bulb in the icebox threw a rectangle of light across the floor, and at the edge of the light just
under the kitchen table, he saw Mr. Durkin’s heavy black shoes. He picked them up and set them in the icebox, the only shoes
he’d ever seen Mr. Durkin wear. He sprinkled them left to right, and some of the pleasure was in the relief of finally letting
it go and some of it was in the tingle of apprehension in the room, and some of it in the sound itself, there in the silent
house, a sound that pretty soon turned musical, like when a flower bed has taken as much water out of the hose as it can hold.
He swung back and forth, evening the pitch, draining the lizard. And when he’d finished and shaken, he closed the refrigerator
door and left, locked the back door behind him, and headed back as unhurried as if he was kicking a can home, the house key
in the palm of his hand for later, and the sky had turned a little pink now over the sawmill and the Bottoms.

Spooner lay in bed unable to sleep, the greatness of what he’d done still fresh every time he went over it in his head, the
picture of the shoes set neatly beside each other in the icebox—it just killed him, how perfect that looked—and then he finally
slept, and then he woke up and ten minutes later was sitting in front of the same shredded wheat and milk that he’d been sitting
in front of all his known life, and things were as ordinary as the hum of the day. And the feeling was lost.

Later that morning, Sergeant Audry of the Milledgeville Police Department pulled his patrol car into Kenny Durkin’s driveway,
blew the horn several times, and when nobody came out exited the vehicle with no small effort and went to the screen door,
pounded on it twice, and then walked in.

Sergeant Audry lived in Vincent Heights, in a half-charred brick house up on the hill, across the street from the Shakers’
place. He was the town of Milledgeville’s most familiar policeman due to his size and a well-publicized shooting spree downtown
earlier in the year in the height of the rabies epidemic, when he shot four mongrel dogs and then winged the Fuller boy Danny
with a ricochet. A mitigating factor, offered at his administrative hearing, was that Sergeant Audry had recently been dog-bitten
himself, and it had taken five stitches on his wrist to close the wound. On the other hand, this mitigation was somewhat mitigated
itself with the subsequent disclosure that it was Audry’s own dog that had bitten him, an incident that occurred in public
during a scramble for a chicken leg that had fallen off the sergeant’s plate during the town’s annual police and fire department
picnic dinner.

Still, the episode of the chicken leg had set him on edge, and then two weeks later came a failed arson attempt on the sergeant’s
house, which perhaps not coincidentally had been sitting around unsold in a depressed housing market for eighteen months.
The job had been botched, though, and when Audry and his wife and his boy Junior returned from a long weekend at the beach
in Brunswick, the façade of the place was singed black, and black water was still running off the roof into the missus’s flower
beds, and the fire department was still inside, hosing down the closets, and the whole place reeked of gasoline and yet miraculously,
according to the insurance adjuster, was structurally intact, and off that news Sergeant Audry began shooting law-abiding
dogs in the middle of downtown Milledgeville. The house still stank, even from the road, and the odor triggered the sergeant’s
allergies, and his eyes were always bloodshot these days, and his uniforms smelled like mildewed wool, and he hadn’t been
the best-smelling officer in the South to begin with, being of the old Saturday-night-bath school, and also the fattest man
in Vincent Heights.

His son, Junior—his given name, Junior Audry—was thirteen and still in fifth grade (started late, and left behind twice) and
the fattest
boy
in Vincent Heights, and had once made Spooner hold still while he drooled tobacco juice on his bare feet.

Spooner watched from his bedroom window now, and presently Sergeant Audry reemerged from the house with Mr. Durkin a step
or two behind. Mr. Durkin was wearing long pants and suspenders, and a T-shirt without sleeves that revealed a tattoo of a
grass-skirted girl who looked quite a bit like the grass-skirted doll on his dashboard. The screen door slammed behind them,
and Mr. Durkin jumped at the noise and then hurried to catch up, and then walked alongside Sergeant Audry back to his cruiser,
crablike, trying to keep up and plead his case at the same time, the case being that if this was what it finally come down
to, the niggers was now pissing in white people’s shoes, then it was war.

His voice carried over the neighborhood, and you could tell he’d cracked open the first beer quite a while ago, possibly when
he got up that morning and found his shoes in the icebox. Mr. Durkin had his pistol stuck into the front of his pants and
was gesturing with his right hand, pointing every direction except directly at Sergeant Audry. He used his left hand to hold
the gun in place.

Sergeant Audry did not like to be called out to Vincent Heights in the first place—perhaps he resented being reminded of where
he lived, or the fire, or his previous plans to move into town after he sold his house—and appeared to pay no attention to
what Mr. Durkin was saying. Back at the police car, though, he stopped at the still-open door while Mr. Durkin continued to
talk, and inspected his fingernails, as if he was about to say something logical. And when he did speak, it did sound logical,
at least to Spooner. He didn’t raise his voice or even turn in Mr. Durkin’s direction, only said, “Lemme ast you somethin’,
Roger. You think I ain’t got nothin’ more impo’ent to have did at the end of the day but come out heah and lookit where somebody
pissed in somebody’s shoes?”