Spooner (21 page)

The husbands, from what Spooner saw, were partial to fur hats in the winter and wore parkas over their suits and ties, and
galoshes over their shoes; they smoked cigarettes and stared poker-faced out the car windows as their wives backed out of
the driveway, expressions deadened into some joyless exhaustion, the same look Spooner saw these days in poor old Fuzz, as
if the world had been drained of taste and color and even the notion of escape.

The dog himself was clearly ruined. He’d come a thousand miles on the floor of Calmer’s old Ford, lying half over the driveshaft
hump, panting the whole way, scolded when he moved because of the hair that came up off him like his aroma and rode the currents
into the front seat where Spooner’s mother sat, allergic to the entire world but especially to dog hair, fighting for every
breath. And the chain. Always attached to his chain, which he still fought and did not understand.

In Prairie Glen, Calmer built the dog a doghouse and the chain was fastened to a stake a few feet from the open doorway, the
entire living quarters just outside the kitchen window, where the breeze carried his hair into Spooner’s mother’s lungs as
she cooked or washed the breakfast dishes. And this was where the old boy spent the rest of his life, lying in the backyard
all day, lying in the garage all night. Once a day, after school, Spooner took him across Saulk Trail Road to a derelict old
Catholic church and cemetery, and allowed him to dig holes in the churchyard and sniff gravestones and urinate on the ones
where other dogs had urinated, names cut into granite a hundred years earlier and already half erased by time and weather.
And dog piss, of course.

A fat man and a bulldog came into the cemetery once, the man dropping the leash once they had crossed Saulk Trail, and then
he watched as the dog raced across the field for them, the leash bouncing behind him, and Spooner saw the animal’s intentions
and then saw the look in his own dog’s eyes and took the chain off Fuzz’s collar too and let them fight, and by the time the
fat man arrived, old Fuzz was crazy with lust, punctured and bleeding a dozen places and missing half an ear—just having a
wonderful time of it—and the bulldog, who was bred for this, had also lost an ear and was bleeding at the throat and a back
leg and there was a long, wide gash in the folds of flesh below his neck, and the fat man began to yell at Spooner as he arrived—or
maybe at old Fuzz, it was hard to say because he was out of breath—and then kicked at Fuzz as he continued to maul the bulldog,
not that Fuzz minded being kicked at such times, or even noticed, and continued on until the bulldog had lost another ear,
and the fat man was screaming as he kicked, screaming at the dog that he intended to sue him, and at that point Spooner lifted
old Fuzz off the bulldog—both animals coming a foot or two off the ground before Fuzzy let go of the bulldog’s throat and
dropped him on the ground—and left, putting the dog back on his chain and jogging away, ignoring the fat man who was now demanding
to speak to Spooner’s parents.

As far as recreation went, that was about it for old Fuzz. One attempted murder. Maybe twice a year the animal slipped his
collar or uprooted the chain and chased cars or a bicycle up Shabbona Drive, or snapped teeth through a chain-link fence with
a German shepherd who lived on Marquette Place, or dry-humped some child’s leg, but in the end the old dog was not a suburban
sort of dog and would have been just as happy back in Georgia with Spooner’s grandmother, licking stamps. Spooner fed him
at bedtime, a can of Rival dog food that slid out whole on its own grease and was eaten whole the second it landed, maybe
without changing shape.

That was pretty much it for the dog and Prairie Glen, and pretty much it for Spooner. Watching the animal eat, Spooner would
sometimes think of the way he’d fought when Calmer first put him on the chain, and wonder if he’d somehow known what was coming.

It was dark outside, a Wednesday night during that first winter in Prairie Glen. Supper was over, the dishes washed and dried
and put away, and Calmer was smoking a cigarette, looking over the
Sun-Times
. They took the
Sun-Times
even though Calmer preferred the
Tribune
, which was the better paper, but the
Tribune
was owned and run by Republicans, and Lily would not put a cent of honest money into a Republican’s pocket. Darrow was next
to Calmer at the kitchen table, having milk and crackers before bed, staring at the back of the paper as Calmer read the front.
It was the first breather Calmer had had all day.

“Cubs drop two more to Pirates,” said Darrow.

Calmer lowered the paper and looked at his son, unsure what he’d said. Then, still watching him, he turned the paper around
and stared at the headline across the top of the sports section. And while he was staring at that, Darrow said, “Cops nab
rape suspect in Calumet City.”

So, just like that. First poker, now reading. And not only a word here and there, like Spooner, but whole sentences. How long
he’d been able to read or how he’d learned, nobody knew. Spooner for once was not suspected of involvement.

Later that month, early on a Saturday morning, Calmer took Darrow via commuter train to the University of Chicago’s Department
of Child Development for testing. One test and then another and another, the scientists giving each other certain rolling-eyed
looks at first, as if this were a trick they had seen before, and then as morning changed to afternoon, the expressions gradually
changed too, and they realized they hadn’t seen this before after all. In the end they kept him all day—nine until six-thirty
at night—and one of them, a young white-haired man with a foreign accent, asked Calmer if he might bring the little fellow
back the following Saturday for more tests and perhaps also to discuss designing a program of study for him there at the school.

Calmer said he would think it over—the tests—but was not sending his three-year-old son off to the University of Chicago.

Still, it was a festive mood at 308 Shabbona that night when Calmer and Darrow got home from the university, especially for
Spooner, who loved celebrations, although not being much of a test taker himself didn’t quite get the nuts and bolts of what
this one was about. For Spooner, it was like being in the audience after Uncle Arthur had polished off Tchaikovsky and everyone
around him stood up and applauded and yelled
Bravo!
and Spooner would stand with everyone else and clap like a wild man and yell
Bravo!
until the other people in the crowd began to look at him like he’d robbed the collection plate. He enjoyed his uncle’s concerts,
except for the music, and wondered sometimes what the tunes would have sounded like in English.

Tonight they all sat at the kitchen table until midnight, Calmer looking as optimistic as Spooner ever saw him, drinking Scotch,
smiling in a contented, satisfied way that infected the whole house, and bedtimes were forgotten and ice cream came out of
the freezer, but then about twelve-thirty something about all the happiness got on Spooner’s mother’s nerves—most likely just
the look on Calmer’s face; he’d been sitting there for hours by now, smiling like he had all the luck in the world—and she
turned cross and likely wanted to slap him across the head with the
Sun-Times
to bring him back to his senses.

Yet even as Calmer bathed in contentment at the kitchen table, three blocks from the table, his friend Metcalf, his first
friend in Prairie Glen and his truest friend, was up late too, sitting with his wife at their kitchen table, drawing outlines
on table napkins, little square pictures that for Calmer might as well have been mushroom clouds.

Metcalf was assistant principal of the high school, five years younger than Calmer, energetic, bursting with decency and honesty
and compassion, yet all in some strange combination that did not make you hate his guts. He made eleven hundred dollars a
year more than Calmer made, and drove a two-year-old Ford instead of a twelve-year-old Ford, but in spite of all that, even
Spooner’s mother did not pine for his destruction. The reason for this was as simple as niceness itself. You peeled back layer
after layer, and Metcalf was nice all the way through. His clothes were nice, his voice was nice; he probably had a nice pancreas.
And his wife was nice, and they lived in a single-story, pigeon-gray shingled house with bad plumbing that wasn’t big enough
for the family, a carbon copy of the house on Shabbona Drive right down to the floor plan, and the Metcalfs also had three
children and a dog—a pure-bred beagle that didn’t shed—and the children were all clean and polite and together did not get
into as much trouble in a year as Spooner could on a weekend, but on the other hand, none of them was as smart or pretty as
Margaret, and none of them was busting up high school IQ tests when they were three years old. And if Metcalf exuded an unmistakable
aroma of success, he showed deference to Calmer, and to Lily, even if he was technically Calmer’s boss. All to say, again,
Metcalf was nice. Enthusiasm unbounded and good intentions, a man who read the books Calmer recommended and believed in the
Democratic Party and in education, and laughed easily and knew the principal—a gray-toothed politico named Baber—for what
he was, and knew the board of education for what it was too. Somehow all these things together evened out in Lily’s books;
in her book she and Mrs. Metcalf were even-steven.

And then, out of the blue, this likable Metcalf with his easy smile and good intentions lobbed a grenade right into Calmer’s
lap. This nice, decent, fucking Metcalf with his three polite children and his beagle decided to build his wife an addition
to the house.

The Metcalfs were going to have a den.

The news hit without warning, and for weeks the occupants of Spooner’s home treaded lightly indeed around his mother, while
three blocks away at the Metcalfs’ birds chirped and flowers bloomed and optimism was in the air. Plans were drawn and bids
offered and accepted, and permits were issued, and construction itself was begun. All in six weeks. And while it was generally
accepted in the Village of Prairie Glen that such a project would take six months to get under way, no one was much surprised
at how quickly Metcalf had gotten his paperwork done. He was the sort of person you just wanted to help.