Spooner (31 page)

These days the tennis shoes were it, vis-à-vis footwear.

“Good afternoon, sir,” the driver said. He had a practiced bad-news voice that Spooner had heard before. “Conforming to state
law, I am required to inform you of your rights.”

Spooner waited to hear his rights, not optimistic. But now the man paused and seemed to lose his place, staring at the two
raised, rootlike scars that grew in opposite directions from Spooner’s elbow, a reminder of his career as a hurler of balls
and eggs and rocks.

“You are entitled,” he said, and tried to remember where he was, “you are entitled to remove any and all of your personal
belongings from the impounded vehicle.” Twice in his life Spooner had been given his Miranda rights, and both times it was
a better reading than this. This was just words.

Spooner waited, but he and the repossessor of cars seemed to have hit an impasse.

“That’s it?” Spooner said.

“Sir,” the man said, “I’m just a cog in the machine.” He was distracted by the scars, and trying not to stare. Spooner turned
his palm right side up to give him a better look.

“It was a lightning strike,” Spooner said.

The driver leaned closer. When you looked at the scars closely they were jagged, like the surgeon had used pinking shears,
and you could see they didn’t just meet at the elbow but crossed and then headed off in altered directions for half an inch
or so, the skid left from a collision of slugs maybe. Spooner rarely looked at his elbow these days unless he was drinking,
and then he would imagine the squeal of tiny suction cups, the little wet mouths forming horrified O’s as the distance closed…

The driver’s hands were enormous and hung a little low for a human, and there was more hair on either one than Spooner had
left on his head. Seeing these hands, Spooner realized that the driver never could have played any musical instrument that
required fingering. He didn’t look like he could even play pool, unless there was someone else there to fish the balls out
of the pockets.
You wonder how people end up in a job like this
, Spooner thought;
there is always a reason
. Spooner had empathy to a fault, perhaps had learned it from Calmer.

He followed the driver around to the front of the house, where his car and all his personal belongings were being repossessed,
a particularly public repossession, it seemed to him, the butt end of his old Wankel-engine Mazda hanging from the cable at
the end of the tow truck. The house address was 419 Palm Tree Way, and the smell of gasoline was everywhere.

“I would offer to assist you,” the driver said, “but under state law, I cannot touch anything you own. Technically speaking,
if you were to make a complaint, Tallahassee could pull my license.”

Spooner did not move, except to retuck the towel around his waist. He was considering what things weighed, what could be carried.
There was an ancient Underwood typewriter in the trunk and fifty pages of a story he was trying to write about a showdown
back in Prairie Glen between his mother and Coach Tinker. He’d stalled on it after she’d given the coach until noon to pack
up and leave. There was also a basketball and a box of books, and a few of the books mattered to him, and most of them didn’t.
The truth was, Spooner still wasn’t much of a reader. There was also a high school yearbook from his sophomore year, with
pictures of Margaret as homecoming queen and Dee Dee Victor as Miss Pep. For reasons he couldn’t remember, he’d gone through
it with scissors a long time ago and cut out all the pictures of himself, removing the evidence that he’d been there at all.

In the backseat were Coleman coolers of several different sizes and a Sunbeam steam iron he had claimed from the big split-up,
and nothing in the entire spectacle of his life—including standing barefoot and toweled in this patch of clover watching most
of it being repossessed—was as ridiculous to him at this moment as carrying an iron around in his car all this time to impress
her somehow that he had plans too. That this time he was going out into the world pressed.

“Sir?” the driver said. “Could we stay focused here?”

He was already running out of patience.

“I’m trying,” Spooner said, “but it’s not that easy.”

The driver lifted his hand to look at his watch, which lay half buried in the hair of his wrist. And his
thumbs
. Had he been able to suck his thumb as a child? Had he choked up hairballs?

“Look,” he said, “I’m trying to be polite, but I’ve got a pretty full day.” It occurred to Spooner that the man might be angling
for a tip. “So, cut to the chase. Do you want a hand getting your stuff out of there or not?”

Spooner spotted a pool of liquid beneath the car, winking blue and green with the changing light. The car had a leak somewhere
in the gas tank that showed up at about six gallons, and instead of having it fixed he’d just gotten in the habit of putting
in only a dollar’s worth at a time. Spooner pointed at the puddle. “You know, that’s coming from the car,” he said.

But the driver wanted to cut to the chase, and knew a stall when he heard one. “The car is no longer your problem, sir,” he
said. “It is that simple. The only question is this: Do you or do you not want to remove your possessions?”

But it wasn’t as simple as that. For one thing, the car also had mice. A litter had been born under the passenger seat sometime
earlier in the week; the mother was nursing the babies and living herself off the spillage of Spooner and Harry’s one meal
of the day in the parking lot of Hamburger Heaven, a restaurant about a mile from the flophouse where they currently resided.
Who would feed her if they took the car? Hamburger Heaven sat beneath a blue neon halo that was turned off every night exactly
at ten. At ten-fifteen, a kid in a chef’s hat and blue jeans would come out the back door and throw everything they hadn’t
sold that day into the dumpster, and every night Spooner and Harry ate there in the parking lot, in the quiet of the front
seat, the food leaking out of both sides of the animal’s mouth. He’d clean it up, though, even the crumbs, before he started
on the next one. Once Harry had gagged, trying to swallow too much at once, and Spooner had ended up giving him a Heimlich
maneuver to clean his air passage, and afterwards Harry cleaned up what he’d choked up, and then went back for another cheeseburger.

Spooner was living closer to the vest these days, now that he had no standing in the outside world, and looked forward all
day to watching the dog eat. Harry preferred cheeseburgers to hamburgers but didn’t care for pickles. Even swallowing the
cheeseburgers whole—as he would the first two or three—even swallowing the wrapping paper, he would somehow sort out the pickles
and leave them beside him on the seat, as whole and shiny as they’d come out of the jar.

Spooner had been hearing peeping noises for days whenever he started the engine. He supposed the babies connected the shaking
to being nursed.

“You don’t mind me offering a word of advice,” the driver said, “from my experience? What gets people into this situation
in the first place is indecision. Indecision and procrastination, those are the big two.”

“What do you get for this, anyway?” Spooner said. “For repossessing a car.” The driver looked at him in a different way but
didn’t answer the question. Spooner said, “I mean, do you work for the finance company, or do they hire you by the job?”

“I don’t see where that’s relevant to the situation.” The repo man got his back up at the thought of somebody like Spooner
poking around in his private business.

Spooner said, “I mean, if you got paid by the job, you might make more money just putting the car back on the ground and saying
you couldn’t find it.” This was the wildest sort of bluff. Spooner had twenty-eight dollars lying in his tennis shoes on top
of the washer. That and a check for ninety-nine dollars from the gas station where he’d been working until last Tuesday was
it. Net worth.

The driver shook his head as if he pitied Spooner, as if there was no hope for him at all. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “What
world do you people live in? You think I happened to be just driving by today and saw your car? You think I keep some list
of them in my head?”

Spooner glanced back at the house, noticing for the first time that Honey’s car was gone from the driveway. Realizing what
had happened. He didn’t take it personally, although he did wonder if they paid her a finding fee, or if it was only that
she didn’t want Spooner using her washer and dryer anymore. He could understand that. She’d been referring to her house as
the commune in front of him quite a bit lately.

“It’s out of my hands,” the driver said. “Ethically, from the moment I winch the wheels off the ground, it’s out of my hands.
Now, I repeat, do you or do you not wish to unload your personal belongings?”

And that was the question, all right, and had been for eighteen months. Spooner stood thinking it over. The driver gave up
on him and climbed into the cab of his truck. He started the engine and then edged forward, over the curb, and as the car
came over that same curb the undercarriage scraped the cement, and then there was a sound like someone blowing out a candle,
and before the tow truck made the first cross street, the Japanese-engineered, Wankel-engine Mazda had lit up like homecoming
at Texas A&M.

Spooner stood in his towel, watching, aware suddenly of the coolness of the wet clover between his toes. The driver stopped
beneath some palm trees and jumped out of the cab, leaving his door open, and ran to the back to unfasten the winch, and Spooner
guessed that the truck belonged to him and not the towing company.

Either way it was a kind of heroism you didn’t see much anymore.

The fire was already too hot, though, and drove the driver back, and he appeared from the dense black smoke with his arms
clearly smoking themselves and rubbed at the singed hair with his hands, oblivious to the possibility of setting them on fire
too, and above and behind him the smoke rose into the palm trees that lined Palm Tree Way. Something was oozing up out of
the car’s trunk, about the consistency of pancake batter. The heat was amazing. Spooner thought of the mice—he thought for
a moment he heard little cries from inside—and then a tree was on fire too. The driver was screaming at him—probably at him,
he couldn’t be sure—and from what Spooner could make of it, he wanted Spooner to call the fire department. It was almost as
if he’d changed his mind about the car not being Spooner’s concern.

Spooner and Harry stayed where they were, though, barefoot in the clover, spectators, like a couple of New Yorkers watching
a mugging. Spooner in his towel, Harry looking like he’d just stepped out of the shower, and presently they turned away from
the heat and looked at each other, wondering what they were going to do about supper.

S
pooner by now was a newspaperman too. Not a good one, like his friend, or employed, like his friend, but still a newspaperman.
It was not his most recent job—he had only that week turned in his dipstick rag at Ron’s Belvedere Standard—but it had a more
dignified sound than
gas pumper
, or for that matter
baby-picture salesman
, or
mail sorter
or
beer truck driver
(the stint as a beer truck driver in particular had not ended well), or anything else he’d done since he left baseball.

He’d begun his newspaper career walking home one day in August from his job in sales and he happened to pass the combined
offices of the
Ft. Lauderdale News
and the
Sun-Sentinel
and saw what looked like a prairie of women in shallow skirts through the darkened window, many of them wearing white boots,
and, reminded of the prairie, was strangely beckoned inside. Spooner had been to the prairie many times by now, on family
vacations to Conde, South Dakota, and once had stepped through a cattle guard and broken his ankle, and afterwards would never
understand how a whole herd of cattle could walk around all day without stepping into a cow guard or even a cow pie when he’d
done both of those things in about fifteen minutes. He’d asked one of Calmer’s uncles about it after they all got back from
the hospital, a joyless old farmer sitting in a hundred-year-old chair next to the family organ, in a living room with as
much stir to it as the attic except Spooner was sitting there right in the middle of things, disturbing the gloom with his
new blinding-white cast. For Calmer’s relations, dropping through a cattle guard and breaking a bone was no better than wasting
food, and most of them had gone to bed right after supper, as if Spooner’s carelessness were a personal affront.

The uncle looked over Spooner and his cast, perhaps estimating the lost days of work the injury represented—or would have
represented if the boy had been his boy and known how to work.

He said, “Common sense, I expect.”

And years passed by, and Spooner got taller and older and smarter but showed no improvement in regard to common sense and
watching where he stepped, but every dog has his day, and on this day he stepped into the editorial offices of the
Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
and fifteen minutes later he was a reporter.