Spooner (20 page)

Calmer came down the steps calmly and walked to Spooner, who was standing barefoot, on the exact spot where the tire tracks
left the road.

Calmer looked him over, and Spooner put his fingers in his mouth. Margaret had come back down out of the house, following
Calmer, but he turned to her now and said, “You better go inside and tell your mother everybody’s all right.”

Calmer walked past Spooner and followed the car tracks through the crushed plum bushes. Spooner hurried to catch up. When
he had, Calmer said, “I want us to be sure about this, man to man. Were you playing in the car?”

Spooner shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. He did not usually call Calmer
sir
, it sounded to his ear like Lance Shaker talking to his father.

Calmer closed his eyes a moment and seemed to shake beneath the surface, but he held the shaking inside, the same way he had
the time he’d smashed his thumb with the hammer fixing the back steps. Spooner remembered now that the thumbnail had split
and then turned black the next day and fallen off a week later, in two parts, and he gave them to Spooner. He thought of himself
and Calmer together that morning in the woods.

Without another word, Calmer set off through the thorns and briars, Spooner following along, the stickers grabbing at his
legs and ankles. Ahead of him, Calmer reached the small clearing the car had made skidding on its roof to a stop. Spooner
came beside him, almost reached for his hand.

“Go on. Get out of the way,” Calmer said.

Spooner took a step back, and Calmer took a step forward and, without even removing the dog, took the running board in his
hands and rocked the car until it tipped, then rolled over onto its side. That was as far as he could get it, though, and
he opened the trunk and pulled out the three pieces of the jack, then slammed the trunk lid shut.

He put a rotted two-by-four, crawling with pale insect life, between the jack and the edge of the window, and in this way
jacked the Ford two feet off the ground, enough room to get his back under it, then bent at the knees and slowly stood up
under the weight. His face went red with the strain, and then dark red, and the car rose steadily, a foot and then another
half, and Calmer’s legs, not quite straightened, began to tremble, and then the car stopped rising. Calmer couldn’t move now,
either farther under it for a better angle, or out from under it entirely, and his whole body began to shudder beneath the
weight, not just his legs, and in that moment Spooner saw Mr. Ennis come out of his house and begin to run, cutting through
the thorns as if they weren’t there, shouting
Good Christ
, and when he got to the car he dropped next to Calmer and got hold in the open window frame, and his face gradually went
red also, but then the car began to rise again, barely moving at first, then reached a counterpoise, paused, and then the
two men seemed to heave together, and the car fell away from Calmer and Mr. Ennis, bouncing back onto its tires.

The dog attacked it all over again, and Calmer stumbled and sat on the ground, his arms bleeding from the thorns and briars,
and he sat still for a moment, spent, his face gone white as the moon.

Mr. Ennis was standing with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. “That right there,” he said, “is the damnedest
crazy thing I ever hope to see an educated man do.” He leaned over and threw up, then took a pack of cigarettes out of his
pocket and lit one up, offered another one to Calmer. “If you’ll pardon my saying so.”

Calmer waved to show no offense taken, and smiled in a good-natured way, but he’d been scared. He got back on his feet, his
legs still not right underneath him, never looking once at Spooner, and patted Mr. Ennis on the back to thank him for his
help. And then he got in the car and started the engine and backed out of the patch of wild plums, leaving Spooner where he
was.

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.

Prairie Glen

T
he 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.