Spooner (23 page)

Calmer saw them coming and turned back to Spooner and Margaret, still smiling, but close to desperate. “Let’s not mention
this to your mother,” he said. “It’s her vacation.”

A
nd time went by; the grass grew and Spooner mowed it.

Old Fuzz turned gray in the muzzle but even in old age still got loose every few months, and Prairie Glen being the sort of
place it was, there were always calls to the police department reporting him for chasing cars. Once a policeman came to the
door and issued Spooner’s mother a five-dollar ticket for not keeping a domesticated animal under control.

This constituted a very bad afternoon for the policeman, who came away from 308 Shabbona Drive with a new understanding of
how hard it was raising a family on the little money that teachers in the public schools make.

Spooner played football three of his four years in high school. He had no talent for the game except a certain craving for
collisions, which the coach, a tree stump of a human being named Evelyn Tinker, took for a sign of good character. Always
on the outlook for character was Coach Tinker, and on those occasions when he remembered who Spooner was, he was not reluctant
to predict that the boy would go a long way in life. Tinker wore football pants all year long and was never seen without his
whistle, which he was inclined to blow indoors, the smaller the room, the better.

Tinker’s salary had been published in the
Prairie Glen Mercury-News
that spring, three hundred a year less than Metcalf’s, eight hundred more than Calmer’s, which was also published, and seeing
these figures side by side in the newspaper was an outrage and an embarrassment that Spooner’s mother would not forgive. Not
the newspaper, not Tinker, not Calmer.

Coach Tinker was a lover of noise and also a man consumed with numbers, hell-bent to translate all human experience into percentages,
and each long, hot meeting of the two-a-day August practices was called together first by the sound of his whistle, which
he would blow as hard as a whistle can be blown and still whistle, and then with a short discussion of the day’s mathematics.
Tinker and his assistants would wait while the players assembled around them—“take a knee, gentlemen, take a knee”—and then,
slowly, one by one, he would inspect them for signs of character.

“What am I willing to give?” he would say, and you could almost picture him at the pulpit over at Faith United Protestant
Church, beginning a sermon. “It’s hotter than heck, and I’m tired, can I get by with ninety percent? It isn’t a game, it’s
only practice.” About here Spooner would find himself nodding along, as these were probably the most reasonable and intelligent
words Tinker would speak all year, but no, it was a trick question, and a moment later the coach, finding Spooner or someone
else in the crowd nodding along, was red-faced and screaming.

“No, goddamn it! No! What I demand from every individual is one hundred percent, every minute you’re out here. That and hit
the books. I want you guys going home and hitting the books.”

Some years before Tinker had lost the most vicious player he’d ever coached to bad grades—a kid named Gerald Tonkoo who was
from some island out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where all they had for a language was vowels, and who moved to America
and failed English, music appreciation, and shop class all the same semester—and there-after the coach took a personal interest
in his players’ academic progress, sometimes, if the player was important enough, even visiting a teacher to explain how a
passing grade could be the difference in the young man’s life. Tinker did not enjoy these visits into the regions of the school
where no one else wore whistles, and he often came away with the uncomfortable feeling that he’d been laughed at, and he never
ended football practice without reminding his players to hit the books when they got home. It was still August, and nobody
had found the right moment yet to tell him that school hadn’t started.

By the time school had started, Tinker was asking for 110 percent, and two weeks after that it was 120. Injuries were not
allowed at practice, nor drinking water—not a coddler, Evelyn Tinker. There was also a rule against the removal of helmets.
The helmets had a swampy smell, and the rubber padding was always slick with sweat and grime, and Spooner expected that if
his head was ever stuck in a pussy, it would feel something like a football helmet in August.

Currently the most vicious player on Tinker’s squad was a kid named Russell Hodge, a three-sport hero who once had kept his
helmet on all practice even though a yellow jacket crawled into the ear hole and eventually stung him deaf in one ear. Tinker
submitted an essay on the incident to the editorial page of the
Prairie Glen Mercury-News
, ending with this prediction:
Russell Hodge is a individual who will go a lot further in life with one ear than most of his generation will with the traditional
number of two!

When the time comes,
he wrote,
Hodge will be ready!!! He will know what it is like to give and take no quarters from the enemy!!!

The coach wrote the way he spoke, a machine gun of exclamation points, a lover of noise. The louder a thing was, the more
important. In Spooner’s experience, Tinker lowered his voice only to pray before football games and once in a while to comment
on the half-dozen geezers who assembled every day on a mound at the far side of the practice field and chewed on weeds and
smoked cigarettes while they watched practice. For reasons that were never clear to Spooner, Tinker did not like the spectators,
although he was unfailingly polite to their faces. “When the time comes,” he would say, his hushed voice scraping like a tailpipe
across the garage floor, “you won’t have to sit out here and watch high school football practice, because you’ll know you
gave it a hundred and twenty percent when you had the chance.”

As if an adult human being ought to be ashamed of having nothing better to do with a weekday afternoon than watch high school
football practice. As if nobody had told Tinker yet what he did for a living.

T
here was in every sport Spooner ever played, on every team he ever joined, an outcast. Some kid who had been plucked from
the safety of home and homeroom and tossed, often at the insistence of his own father, out into the world. Unprotected. Often
this kid was the fattest, dopiest kid in school, someone who had been
it
every day of his life on the playgrounds, shunned or insulted one day, beaten up the next, and was now introduced to the
rest of his life, which was more of the same except better organized, with the degree of abuse he suffered depending mostly
on the mercies of the adults in charge.

In the case of the 1973 Golden Streaks football squad, the adult in charge was the coach, Evelyn Tinker, and the outcast was
a short, fat kid named Francis Lemonkatz, who had body hair, front and back, like some hibernating animal, and legs so short
as to remind you of such an animal coached up onto his hind limbs to walk.

Tinker had ignored young Lemonkatz in the beginning, assuming he would quit along with the rest of the momma’s boys and softies
who came out every year thinking football would be fun, and who didn’t usually last even to the end of the first morning of
the two-a-day August practices.

Lemonkatz, however, did not quit. He had not come out thinking football would be fun, but instead was one of those kids you
run into now and then who seem to have been born without a sense of what fun was, or what it was for, who arrived at puberty
already resigned to the world as a trap, as miserable one place as another. And in this posture of resignation Lemonkatz came
gradually into Tinker’s world, something fat out on the edges, a whining, slovenly presence at the periphery of team meetings,
hiding among the practice dummies at practice, a kid unable to do a single push-up or sit-up, or even hold on to the chinning
bar long enough to try a chin-up, who cheated on all his calisthenics, jumping jacks to six-count burpies, was dead last in
wind sprints and shied from physical contact.

And would not quit.

Tinker, who valued practice time like a conjugal visit, was not inclined to waste it on rehabilitating the likes of Francis
Lemonkatz, or even getting his name right—always called him Lemonstick—and instead went about finding him a use. Once, for
instance, at the end of an afternoon’s practice, Tinker called the team together—“take a knee, gentlemen, take a knee”—and
then called Lemonkatz up to the front. He held him by the arm with one hand, pointing at him with the other. There was a long
silence, and then Coach Tinker yelled, “IS THIS HOW YOU WANT TO END UP?”

The response was an explosion, “
No, sir!
” the collective voice deeper than any single voice in the bunch. And unmistakably one of those voices was Lemonkatz’s.

For his part, Spooner was unmoved by threats of ending up like Lemonkatz. He didn’t think far enough ahead to worry about
how he would end up, for one thing, and for another thing had his own Lemonkatz problem to worry about, the more and more
frequent occasions when he found himself centered in the boy’s piteous, needy gaze, which was no different for Spooner than
eating a ham sandwich in front of old Fuzz. Or in front of Lemonkatz, for that matter. And as the weeks went on and Lemonkatz
suffered more and more piteously at the hands of his teammates and Coach Tinker, Spooner was more and more often drawn into
these awful glimpses of Lemonkatz’s situation. It didn’t only happen at football practice; it was just as likely in English
class or Spanish, or in the hallways between classes, or in locker rooms or buses, or sitting on the bench during games. Spooner
would come back after a kickoff—he did not get to play much but was on the kickoff teams due to his willingness to throw his
head in front of things moving in the other direction—and sometimes, if he’d gotten his head into things just right, the world
would seem slightly unfamiliar for a while afterwards, and by the time he got back to the present, his eyes, without Spooner’s
even knowing it had happened, would be settled on Lemonkatz, who was always there waiting for him, silently begging him for
something, and what that was, Spooner could not even guess.

Lemonkatz’s hair oozed oil and was infested with dandruff the size of cereal flakes. He had been shaving since sixth grade
and since that time had been coming to school reeking of aftershave but something else too, like he was carrying cheese in
his pocket. He never showered in the locker room shower, but would stand naked in a corner instead, away from the water, covering
his genitalia with his hands and hiding as well as he could in the noise and steam until a whistle blew and it was time to
dress for class.

Worse than matters of personal hygiene though was the distinctive nasal puling that came out of Lemonkatz whenever his class
was assigned to write an essay or read a chapter of a book, or even when Señor Rosenstein addressed the Spanish class in Spanish.
Spooner suspected the noise was involuntary, as it occurred in spite of the fact that Lemonkatz had never done a homework
assignment in his life. It takes one to know one, as they say.

But then the puling wasn’t the worst of it either. The worst of it was that Spooner understood the puling, understood the
feeling of knowing that every time things changed, everything got worse. And understood that the sound coming out of Lemonkatz
was the sound of being torn, a kid afraid to let go of what he had, no matter how awful it was, and at the same time afraid
of being left behind.

He also puled during football practice, issuing that familiar, unmanly sound sometimes even at the announcement of plays in
the huddle. Why some plays and not others? Who could say? Every play was the same for Lemonkatz—the ball would be snapped,
the lineman across the line would run over him on his way to the ball carrier. Sometimes a linebacker would come in behind
the lineman and also run over Lemonkatz. Sometimes a linebacker and then a safety. Lemonkatz would lie still, waiting for
it to stop, resembling some dead pigeon out along U.S. 30, feathers ruffling in the wind as the traffic blew past.

Spooner had heard that Lemonkatz’s father had been a football player back in college, but you could never tell about those
things, if the fathers were really what they said they had been. Spooner had also heard that he taped his son’s ankles and
fed him T-bone steaks for breakfast on game days—this in spite of the fact that Lemonkatz would never in his football career
play a single down in a game against another team—a regular reminder of the disappointment Lemonkatz was to them both.