Spooner (33 page)

“It makes you feel sort of frisky,” Stroop said.

H
e went back to Priscilla that night with seventy dollars in his pocket, a little queasy at the way Stroop’s mouth came slightly
open when Spooner allowed him to touch the cattle prod against the side of his neck. Spooner had the distinct feeling that
he’d sold his body.

“You let him stick you with a cattle prod?” she said. “For seventy dollars?” All her worst suspicions confirmed.

Priscilla had been a nursing student when he met her. The meeting place was the emergency room at Deaconess Hospital in Billings,
and he was still in his baseball uniform at the time, in spectacular pain, and she was standing right over his head, at the
very edge of his vision, and was there as they examined his elbow, and was still there watching while the technicians maneuvered
the arm for the first set of X-rays. The maneuvering for the X-rays caused the exposed bones to move, and brought forth soft,
broken noises from inside the joint, and even in all this discomfort Spooner could see that he cut a pretty romantic figure,
the young athlete maimed in his prime—not that he’d had a prime, but she didn’t know that. The point was that right from the
start she was attracted to pathos—you didn’t become a nursing student for no reason at all—and of which he had been a prime
example. He had thrown up the three helpings of Chinese noodles he had for breakfast and something that might have been a
silverfish, although he’d have to check back with the restaurant about that, and without being instructed to by the real nurses,
Priscilla took a cool washcloth and laid it on his forehead. Later, she would say it was love at first sight.

Still later, she would say it was no such thing.

She was there in the room the next day, along with Calmer, when Spooner woke from the first surgery, and there again after
the second surgery, and the third.

But all that was old news now, and pathos and broken bones can take you only so far in a marriage, and then you have to do
something to rekindle the flame, and the truth was that Spooner wasn’t sure he was up to it anymore. To get her back now he’d
have to end up in a body cast.

In the end, she left him the same week of the cattle-prod incident—actually she told him he had to leave, since the house
they were renting belonged to her cousin—and called it a trial separation. She got a job holding Slow, Men at Work signs at
highway construction sites.

For his part, after the split-up Spooner found that he lacked whatever small confidence around women he’d previously enjoyed,
and now was occasionally unable to even speak to them, thinking somehow that they’d all heard of his cattle prodding, or could
sense it there in his character, and while this perhaps did not bode well for a door-to-door baby-picture salesman, it had
no effect at all on his career in newspapers.

He hired on at the
Sun-Sentinel
and rented a tiny apartment across the street from a city park, and he and Harry moved in, sleeping together on a cot, and
the refrigerator made a noise like he had a maid in the kitchen humming, and a month later Priscilla came over with a heavy-equipment
operator she introduced as Garth Hodge, and told him that she and Garth were headed out West and she wanted to say good-bye
to Harry.

Spooner said, “There’s a coincidence. I once beaned a kid named Hodge,” but there was no family connection.

Garth was also a sign holder, and even Spooner had to admit a fine-looking one, sign-holding muscles just popping out from
under his shirt. They were both the color of Hawaiians. They were going to Texas, she said, where the highways were crumbling
due to the corruption in the prison labor system, and between the corruption and theft and the prisoner escapes, the legislature
had voted to quit using prison labor entirely, and now the state had to replace all those murderers and rapists with civilians,
so if Spooner wanted anything from the house, he had until the end of the week to get it.

Priscilla laid it all out in one long, breathless sentence, as if once the potholes started showing up in Texas the rest of
it was inevitable. And even as she told Spooner that she was leaving, she absently draped her hand through Garth’s forearm.
Spooner noticed his tattoo, a purple likeness of himself, and beneath it his name, written in script:
Garth
.

Later, thinking of the visit, what Spooner always remembered first was that small, familiar gesture, her hand going through
his arm. And he remembered the excitement.
Going to Texas.
Garth the sign holder was smiling but had his eye on Spooner every second. Spooner guessed that no matter what she’d told
him about the seventy-dollar cattle prodding, that no matter how big his arms and shoulders and muscles were, he understood
that you were never in control when somebody in the room had nothing to lose.

In the end, though, all Spooner did was pick up his basketball when she began to talk again and start to dribble, a slow,
rhythmical dribbling on the carpet, and pretty soon, between the dribbling and the refrigerator noise, she couldn’t hear herself
think, and as she raised her voice to talk over the dribbling, he dribbled his way out the front door, down the wooden steps
to the lawn, then onto the gravel driveway—you had to really pound the ball down to get it to come back to you in gravel—and
then across the street to the park.

Before he’d crossed the street, he heard her inside talking to Garth. She said, “Now do you see what I mean?”

The dog went with Spooner, but he stayed in there with her a little while first, making up his mind. Spooner didn’t know what
he’d do if Harry decided to go to Texas too, and when he finally heard the animal coming, he stopped and looked back, tears
welling up in his eyes, and there were clouds of dust hanging in the air about every four feet, everywhere the basketball
had bounced. It had been a dry summer, if you didn’t count humidity, none of the usual squalls or thunderstorms, and everywhere
you went somebody was saying we needed rain. He thought he heard her laugh, but it could have been his own stomach, or the
birds.

He shot baskets until it was too dark to see the rim, Harry running down the ball and trying to fuck it whenever Spooner missed,
and Priscilla and her boyfriend were gone when he got back to his place. Two days later he went to the house and picked up
his books, his Underwood typewriter, and the steam iron. Making sure she saw him take the iron. He told her good-bye, and
then said good-bye to their other dog, the one she was taking with her to Texas—a sweet little terrier named Pork who had
a taste for lizards.

Spooner didn’t know himself very well yet and did not expect to recover.

P
hiladelphia.

Spooner got off the train at the Thirtieth Street station and walked outside into twenty inches of snow. He was wearing tennis
shoes and jeans and carrying two Winn-Dixie shopping bags full of clothing. He set the bags down in the parking lot and put
on an extra shirt. The wind came up Market Street blowing newspapers and taco wrappings in front of it, and he thought of
Harry, back in Florida with his friend and his friend’s wife Honey until Spooner got himself established. He and the dog had
been sleeping in the same bed for two years, and every time he’d jerked awake on the train, heading farther north, Spooner
longed for the animal’s smell and the feel of his bones.

He rented a room for twenty dollars a week on the third floor of a small, windy hotel at the corner of Nineteenth and Race.
The shower was at the end of the hall, and the linoleum floor was warped where it met the walls and stuck to his bare feet
when he made his way down the hall to shower and shave before work. Sometimes he found awful things in the toilet, and once
one of the whores walked into his room while he was in the shower, tied his old tennis shoes together and dropped them over
the telephone wires under Spooner’s window. That morning he stuck his socks into his pants pocket and went shoe shopping barefoot.

On the good side, the place was as quiet as the Library of Congress in the morning—the hotel did its business at night, renting
rooms by the hour—and he never had to wait to use the shower. The hardest thing was the morning cold. The building was owned
by a family of Koreans who alternated shifts in the chair behind the front counter, night and day, sharing the same parka,
and the Koreans did not turn on the heat until evening, when the girls began bringing in their dates.

Spooner spent his evening hours those first few weeks in the bars along Pine Street—warm, crowded neighborhood bars, staying
in the background and the smoke where no one would notice he wasn’t buying anything to drink, watching the locals fall in
love or break it off, sometimes disappearing hand in hand into the bathrooms. A drunk, weeping lawyer came in at the same
time every evening and took the same stool at the bar, weeping, as far as Spooner could tell, because he was a drunk lawyer,
and on the next stool was always the same frail hypochondriac giving the lawyer daily updates on her various conditions. It
was possible she and the lawyer never heard a word each other said. Everywhere Spooner looked stories were playing out, and
lives were reeling out and in, and even on the happiest, loudest nights, a quiet malignancy hung in the smoke and reminded
him of family get-togethers back in Vincent Heights. The bars closed at two a.m., and he would walk back to the hotel in the
cold, and by then business would be dropping off for the evening.

Once, reaching the third floor of the hotel at two-thirty in the morning, he encountered a handcuffed man in horn-rimmed glasses
and diapers standing in the hallway, begging to be let back into the room. Spooner nodded as he went by and the man nodded
back, as if they’d just passed in the street, and a moment later the man was back at the door but whispering now. “Please,
Adrianna, this is too long. It’s not funny anymore.” And then Spooner heard her voice from the other side of the door, as
cold as an empty fireplace, laughing.

The girls who used the hotel knew Spooner but also knew that anybody who had any money wouldn’t be staying there longer than
an hour and on the whole ignored him when they passed on the staircase. Still, Spooner thought about them constantly, ranking
them sometimes, other times putting them into a sort of batting order in case they all came in at once to wish him Merry Christmas,
but he kept these feelings to himself and never said much to any of them beyond hello and wouldn’t have even if he’d had enough
money to afford them. For reasons that made no sense, he was as married now as he’d been before his wife went off to Texas
with the sign holder. Dear Jesus, the hours he spent trying to imagine why somebody would tattoo his name and face on his
own arm.

Sex and warmth were constantly in his thoughts—he found himself thinking quite a bit these days that he’d like to take a shot
at Fran of
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
—and once in a while when he was thinking of Fran, a sudden warm push of air came back to him, like a blown kiss, and then
he would remember what it was, the Mazda going up in flames.