Spooner (19 page)

Spooner slept.

He woke, and it seemed like a long time had passed, and then he heard Calmer and Margaret in the kitchen and knew it wasn’t
even her bedtime yet. His mother had gone to bed on Dr. Woods’s advice, and Calmer had put Darrow down with a bottle before
dark and was doing the dishes, listening as Margaret went over her multiplication tables. Not American numbers, she was practicing
them in French. Spooner heard him close the cupboard and sweep the floor, and then he tucked Margaret in and checked on Spooner’s
mother. He was in there a little while, talking Shakespeare to her—
Wouldst have something to eat, my love?—
and then, much later, when the house was settled and quiet, Spooner’s bedroom door cracked open and Calmer came in quietly,
not to wake him up, and sat staring at him in the dark.

Calmer stayed a long time, just looking, and then softly sighed. One of his knees cracked as he stood up, or perhaps it was
his back. He picked up the popcorn bowl and the pieces that had fallen on the sheets, and went out of the room, and half a
lifetime later Spooner could still call up that night exactly. The man sitting in the dark on the chest beside the bed, helpless,
and the child lying in the dark beneath him, pretending to sleep, also helpless. Strangely enough, Spooner would remember
the scene not from the bed but from Calmer’s spot on the chest, and would see himself as Calmer had seen him, through his
eyes. A kamikaze aimed right at the middle of everything he had and loved. But more than that, the living evidence of the
man who had been here first and who was more precious to Lily than Calmer ever was or ever would be.

Spooner was down three days with a fever. He scratched the bites until they bled and then picked at the scabs. The doctor
came to the house again, looked him over, and left iodine to put on the sores and cough syrup to quiet the itching. Dr. Woods
rarely saw a patient whose condition could not be improved with cough syrup.

Calmer was downhearted all week and barely spoke. On Dr. Woods’s suggestion, they were putting mittens on Spooner’s hands
at night, but Spooner was a born picker and picked at his scabs anyway. He worked the scabs off carefully, taking his time,
lifting one side a little and then the other, trying to take each one whole. Afterwards, he put the biggest ones on the windowsill
and ate the rest, put the mittens back on and went to sleep. Why Spooner ate some and saved others, he didn’t know. If you’d
asked him, he could have said only that eating the perfect ones never entered his mind.

By morning, though, the scabs had dried and curled at the edges, and you could hardly tell them from dirt.

Each morning Calmer came into the bedroom before work and inspected Spooner’s sores, which were concave to the skin and crusted
at the edges—his arms resembled a battlefield—and cleaned out the infected ones with Mercurochrome, which stung less than
iodine, and then he checked them again at night, when he oversaw Spooner’s bath. Afterwards, he helped Spooner into his pajamas,
trying every way he could to keep his mother from seeing the sores.
Warren eating his own flesh?
No, she wouldn’t make much of that.

Calmer seemed confused when he first came on newly opened sores, as confused as he was by the idea of sitting down in an anthill
in the first place, but kept it to himself. It seemed to Spooner that all that week Calmer kept everything he thought to himself.

On Friday, nine days after the incident, Spooner returned to Peabody School and saw the look on Miss Bell’s face, perhaps
imagining what this human scab would look like at her wedding.

Friday supper: fish sticks, macaroni and cheese, frozen peas. They always had fish sticks on Friday, just like the Catholics.
Better safe than sorry. Spooner had gone to sleep on the cool kitchen floor when he got home from school, and in his sleep
felt his mother stepping over him half a dozen times, going from the icebox or the sink to the oven. He got up with no feeling
at all in one of his arms, and everything else itched.

Calmer got home just before they ate, carrying a brown and black puppy. It was bigger than the Boston terrier and had long
hair that stuck straight out as if it had been recently vacuumed. Clumps of it came out at the least tugging. He set the animal
carefully into Spooner’s arms, and it had only been there a second when it squirmed out, trailing dog hair, and then stepped
onto the table and, passing on the fish sticks, went straight for the macaroni and cheese, skidding over the table toward
Margaret, and Spooner’s mother fell back into her default setting, a spontaneous attack of asthma.

They named the animal Fuzzy, although Spooner wanted to call him Brown Fury, and put him in the tiny utility room with the
washing machine. Then they put some of the dog food left over from the Boston terrier into a pie tin and poured milk over
it, and Fuzzy/Brown Fury stepped into the middle of it to eat, and when he’d finished and stepped out, the surface behind
him was matted thick with his hair.

Spooner’s mother disappeared into her bedroom, breathing impaired. Asthma, fish sticks, the puppy, the baby, Spooner—it was
all too much. Supper reconvened without her, however, after Calmer had fixed her a plate of food and picked as much of the
dog’s hair out of it as he could, and Spooner had taken it back to her bedroom, and when he returned to the table Calmer,
who had been quiet all week, was suddenly animated again, as if the puppy had cheered him up even if it was strangling Spooner’s
mother. He leaned in on Margaret and said, “So, my dear, how goeth the struggle?”

“What struggle, my dear?” she said. Everything came to her so easily.

Calmer was holding Darrow with one hand, eating with the other, and now he dropped his eating hand under the table and grabbed
her bare foot. “The struggle for civilization, my dear,” he said, “for shoes…” And like that he was back with them again,
back to being Calmer.

Weeks passed. “When I was your age,” Calmer said one night, talking just above a whisper because it was late, “there was no
one to play with, and sometimes after church…” He took a moment, as if he wasn’t sure if he should go ahead, “after church,
I used to sit out in the middle of a field we left fallow that year—
fallow
, that means it’s not growing anything on it, giving it a rest—and shoot my gun into the air just to see how close I could
come”—Spooner didn’t understand at first—“to getting one to fall right back on top of my noggin.”

Spooner saw what he was talking about, and the scene opened up for him like the start of a Technicolor movie. “I had my dad’s
helmet from the war,” Calmer was saying, “and I’d shoot up into the air and then put the helmet on and wait to see where it
landed. You could see the little puffs of dust.”

“Did you?”

Calmer shook his head. “Close a few times, though,” he said. He put his hand on Spooner’s head and rubbed his hair, setting
off a wild itching. It was the first time he’d put his hand on Spooner in a friendly way since he’d sat in the anthill. But
then Calmer was never much of a toucher. He stood up to leave, his bedtime too. “Moderation, man,” he said—called him
man
—“that’s the key. Men of our ilk, we have to practice moderation.”

Spooner dropped off to sleep happy and woke up early in the morning thinking of being in a field with a gun and a helmet and
a hard wind, and bringing one in right on top of his noggin.

D
uring the family’s last spring in Georgia, Calmer took Spooner for a walk one morning in the woods at the edge of Vincent
Heights. They were moving to Illinois at the end of the school year—everybody but Spooner’s grandmother, who said she thought
she’d just as soon stay there alone in Vincent Heights and die.

Earlier that day, Calmer had tied a chain to the dog’s collar, to get him used to his new life in Illinois. The dog had fought
the chain until he foamed at the mouth and bled, biting into it.

“It’s a brand-new place,” Calmer said, meaning Illinois, “a fresh start for everybody.” It did not have to be explained to
him whose fresh start Calmer was talking about. After quitting cold for a long time, Spooner was back breaking into houses
and pissing in shoes, although not with the old enthusiasm. He hadn’t been caught yet, or even seen in the vicinity, but he’d
heard Kenny Durkin’s father talking about him one afternoon to his wife:

“Well, the boy ain’t his, so he’s afraid to touch him. It’s a manner of pussy-whipped.”

“Well, I wisht somebody would whip him,” she said.

The newspaper was running stories again, “The Fiend of Vincent Heights Returns,” and a policeman Spooner had never seen before
came to the door one afternoon and talked to Calmer down on the road in front of the house. Still, Calmer had never asked
him about it directly, and if he did, Spooner didn’t know what he would say. Lying to Calmer was harder for him all the time.

And so—maybe instead of asking him directly—Calmer took him for a walk in the woods and talked about starting fresh and wiping
the slate clean, and Spooner, who had not believed before that such a thing was possible, found himself weeping, and bore
down on it and promised himself to change then and there, and that same afternoon, unaccountably, Calmer’s car rolled down
the hill in front of the house.

Spooner and Margaret were outside when it happened; Margaret was playing with the Ennis girls, Spooner in the yard with the
dog, peeling scabs off the animal’s head from where he’d been kicked two weeks previous by one of the garbagemen riding the
back end of the city garbage truck. The dog had the instinct to chase cars—cars, cats, deer, anything that was moving away—which
was one of the reasons he had to be chained up when they moved north. That and the Village of Prairie Glen had rules and dog
laws.

The old black Ford was perched in its usual spot in front of the house at the top of the hill, and suddenly, slowly, of its
own volition, began to roll, and in that same instant the dog was gone, as if something had torn him out of Spooner’s arms.

Margaret looked up and saw the car had got loose, and she was off running too, crossing the dirt road going one way while
the dog and then Spooner crossed it going the other. They almost touched, Spooner and his sister, and then she was taking
the front steps two at a time to report what had happened.

Spooner continued after the runaway car and the runaway dog, down the hill, and then stopped in his tracks when the car veered
left off the road and into Mr. Ennis’s briar patch. Spooner and Margaret had picked wild plums around the edge of this same
patch every summer of their lives. The car tilted up and rolled briefly on two wheels, then fell over and came to rest on
its roof and was immediately attacked by the dog, who’d apparently had something like this in mind ever since he’d started
chasing automobiles.

Spooner looked back toward the house just as Calmer came out of the front door and stood for a moment with his hands on Margaret’s
shoulders. Spooner estimated the car was barely visible from there, upside down and a yard deep into Mr. Ennis’s briars, the
tires still spinning, and he waved to show Calmer where it was. The dog was biting the tailpipe and appeared to have gone
crazy with the lust to kill.