Spooner (46 page)

The bone doctor chose a look of hurt and bewilderment, as if Spooner were making no sense to him at all, and a minute or two
passed and he got up off the bed and left the room, which was all Spooner had wanted him to do in the first place.

W
eeks passed. Spooner went home to the little lake in New Jersey, to his wife and daughter and his dog.

Recovery, though, was slower than he’d expected, and injuries began to show up that nobody had noticed until the bigger, more
obvious injuries began to heal. It was two months before he found out he’d fractured his spine—two fractures, actually, one
about midpoint, the other at the base of his neck, and a month after that his own doctor noticed that a tendon had split in
Spooner’s forearm and rolled up like a snapped piano string into his elbow, and was the reason he couldn’t close his hand.
The pain in his hands gradually went away but was replaced with numbness, especially when he sat at the typewriter and tried
to work. The feeling of being flushed gave way to a quieter, more horizontal disorder that felt to him like his body had washed
up on a beach, the ocean sliding in underneath, his head bobbing in it like a cork.

More troubling than all that, something was between them now, Spooner and his wife. He’d been home only a couple of days when
he found her on her knees in the corner of their bedroom, sorting baby clothes in a bottom drawer so that he wouldn’t see
that she was crying.

She never said it out loud. She did all the things she’d done before—took care of him in all the ways he could be taken care
of, cooked, shopped, took their daughter to preschool, fucked him all the time and so carefully it never hurt him at all (and
he was still colorfully bruised in places and tender all over), and held him afterwards. It was in this holding afterwards
that he saw it most clearly, the damage that he’d done. Not that she would leave him—he never thought that—only that she had
gone sad, and he had lived around sad women all his life and couldn’t stand to think of her like that too.

He knew what she was thinking, that she had only a little time with him left. That she and then the baby had come along and
interrupted him while he was in the process of killing himself, and now he was back on schedule. That nothing had changed.

It had, though. Not on the night itself, or the operating table, but in the aftermath, watching her, seeing what it had done.
Yes, he was different, but there was no talking it over, because what he and Mrs. Spooner had together also depended on her
believing that he had come through this whole. Which is to say, she not only wanted him changed; she also wanted him back
the way he’d been.

Not for the first time Spooner was reminded that marriage was not the straightforward assembly the instruction book led you
to believe.

He remembered now that on the operating table, dancing along the very edges of his life, he hadn’t been able to remember her
name. That one especially he thought he might keep to himself.

So he held her and pretended the healing was all on track, and she held him and pretended that she wasn’t thinking that he
was still trying to get himself killed.

T
he cast came off Stanley’s arm in early April, and a couple of times a week Spooner, usually after his regular dental appointment,
drove up to Frazier’s gym in North Philadelphia to watch him spar. Spooner was still on crutches, and jumpy, and in this condition
no longer felt safe in North Philly.

On one hand, it was probably true that no major racial healing had occurred in the city while Spooner had been laid up, but
on the other hand, no one of color had ever done him any harm whatsoever, and he was nervous about things these days that
he had never thought about before. The sun would be low in the sky when he went in, and the streets were always dark when
he left. Sometimes with Stanley, sometimes alone.

And either way, he always felt worse when he left than he had coming in. And looked worse too. Not that somebody walking around—if
walking
was the word—on crutches, with temporary teeth, swollen lips, head scars still showing through a two-month growth of hair
and nerve damage everywhere in his body looked like springtime in the Rockies to begin with. But what was ruining Spooner’s
looks was worry.

The bone was the ulna, a word Stanley had at first insisted was associated with the female reproductive apparatus, but which
in the fact of the matter was one of the two bones connecting wrist to elbow, and thereby a fundamental connection between
Stanley’s brain and his hand. At least the part of his brain that wanted to fight. And as it became clearer—to everyone but
Stanley—that this ulna business had not mended the way it was supposed to, Spooner’s thoughts returned again and again to
the night in Devil’s Pocket, wishing he’d had the sense to take his sheared teeth home to bed after visit number one.

The damage he’d done was there in front of him every day. Mrs. Spooner continued remote and resigned, as if she were already
left alone with her child, to fend for herself, and Stanley, without his jab to hold the other fighters off, was eating punches
in the gym that he hadn’t eaten since those first months in Philadelphia. He must notice, Spooner thought, but Stanley persisted
in the view that the punches of other heavyweights were amusements, this in spite of the sure knowledge that a total was being
kept somewhere. No one, of course, knew what that number was, or what number was possible, or what happened when the number
was reached.

As for Spooner himself, nothing tasted the way it had before, particularly alcohol, and he was not sleeping much, and more
and more it seemed to him that going back to Devil’s Pocket had left them all sitting ducks in the world.

But it was more complicated than that too. Mrs. Spooner was certain that in Stanley Faint, Spooner had found someone trying
to kill himself even faster than Spooner was, and their continued connection—Spooner and Stanley’s—served to reinforce the
picture of sitting in some hospital waiting room all her life, waiting for the days to pass that would tell the story on Spooner’s
brain. It always came back to that, to the idea he was only comfortable leaning out a little too far over the railing.

He wondered sometimes why all the people he loved were so sure of what they knew.

Spooner had resumed his duties at the newspaper the week after he left the hospital. He wrote his columns from home at first,
and there was something between himself and his stories now too, and nothing came to him easily. His sense of taste was ruined,
and he gave up on drinking. He didn’t miss the bars—he was soon hearing better stories at the little gym in South Philadelphia,
and once he was off crutches, he was at the gym every afternoon, working himself back into shape, exhausting himself before
he went home. He loved the man and his son and the place in its way became another home, and he worried about it and them
accordingly.

He followed Stanley to Las Vegas and Texas and Atlantic City for fights that were always close and increasingly awful to watch.
And he saw more clearly all the time that Stanley was a diminished prizefighter.

And on the night Stanley finally got his chance, when he fought for the championship and lost every round, Spooner went into
the dressing room afterward and waited while Stanley urinated into a cup for the Texas State Athletic Commission. “Lookit
here, Sunshine,” Stanley said, and Spooner looked at Stanley Faint’s urine, and it was the color of coffee.

Over in the other tent, the champion could barely move his hands. As Stanley would tell a couple of hundred reporters later
that night at the press conference, he could fuck up a pair of hands like nobody’s business. “Van Cliburn, Tchaikovsky, Rubinstein,
we’ve got offers on the table to all the piano players.”

From all accounts, it was one of Stanley’s greatest press conferences, but even if he’d known Stanley was going to call out
Tchaikovsky, Spooner still wouldn’t have gone. He went back to his hotel room instead and called Mrs. Spooner. “It was awful,”
he said. “I don’t know what kept him up.” She was quiet, and he pictured her at home, not knowing what to say.

“Is it over, then?” she said finally.

Spooner said, “Yeah, I think it is.”

Hours later, three or four in the morning, Stanley knocked on Spooner’s door. The excitement was gone; Stanley had left everything
he had in the ring and in the hours that had gone by since the thing ended. They sat at a window, keeping the lights in the
room off, and Stanley drank half a gallon of orange juice while he tried to get some hold on the meaning of what had happened.

He seemed to want Spooner to explain it, how he’d lost fifteen straight rounds on the night he’d been pointing to all his
adult life. He was more confused than embarrassed, which isn’t to say he wasn’t embarrassed, and more embarrassed than hurt.
Which isn’t to say he wasn’t hurt. His eyes lay small and blue in the swelling, like glimpses of clear sky in a storm, and
his lips were cracked open in half a dozen places they were not already stitched, and there were lumps all over his face,
particularly the forehead, like he’d gotten into a nest of wasps. What Spooner could not take his own eyes off, though, was
a small, jagged cut an inch below one of his eyes, about the shape of a fingernail, that had somehow gone so deep as to sever
a tear duct, and as they sat talking and thinking the tear duct leaked and the fluid ran down his cheek, and the lights of
Houston blinked on and off in the window, and it looked for all the world like Stanley Faint was crying blood.

Falling Rapids

A
week before she died, Spooner’s mother wrote him a letter. She didn’t know she was out of time, it wasn’t about that, although
the letter was melancholy enough to make him wonder later on if she’d had a premonition. But probably not. Probably, in her
own way, she was apologizing, and, also in her own way, it was to the wrong person.

The letter began in an ordinary enough way, a description of the new Oldsmobile 98 convertible that Superintendent Cowhurl
had bought his wife and that was parked, even as she wrote, red as a fire engine in his driveway directly across the street.
It had a standard opening; a cheerful reminder of the unfairness of life, which took only about the same amount of space and
time as Spooner’s other correspondents’ reports on the weather. Just running a few scales, clearing the pipes before the start
of the opera.

Superintendent Cowhurl bought his wife a convertible every other autumn, just before the new models came out and the prices
for the current year’s models went down. There had been an incident four years previous when Cowhurl’s wife had been stopped
by the city police driving around the perimeter of the park in another new convertible with the top down—but, as Spooner’s
mother always pointed out, with the heated seats heating away (
it must be nice
)—sobbing, naked, and drunk on New Year’s day, but that little incident, as Spooner’s mother called it, hadn’t ever made the
paper, even after, to her certain knowledge, an anonymous caller had made the editors aware of the story, and the school board
hadn’t brought the matter up either, much less fired Cowhurl, or demoted
him
to teaching English.

So now the Cowhurls had three cars—the old convertible had been handed down to their youngest son, who had just turned sixteen—and
Spooner’s mother and Calmer were still driving the old stick-shift Buick, white with black seats, as unadorned as any car
ever made, and Calmer was still working two jobs to make ends meet, and beyond that, Mrs. Cowhurl, currently visiting the
manic phase of her manic depression, was tooting the horn whenever she left home for a ride, and tooting again as she pulled
into the driveway on the way back. That was what Spooner’s mother had to wake up to every morning, the prospect of tooting.

Spooner pictured his mother at the kitchen table, composing this letter in a decaying bathrobe, the pockets stuffed with damp
Kleenex, keeping an eye on Cowhurl’s house from the window over the sink, waiting for some sign that calamity had finally
struck over there, waiting for the Cowhurls to find out what it was like. Waiting for things to even out.

The woman had spent her life waiting for things to even out. The thought that she could be ahead in the game never entered
her head.

By now—only two-thirds of the way down the first page—Spooner knew what was coming. The letter wasn’t about Mrs. Cowhurl or
the new convertible or the unfairness of life, which was old news; it was about her own behavior the week before, when Spooner
and Darrow and Cousin Bill Damn from Beaver Island, Michigan, had come to Falling Rapids for the opening of pheasant season,
and spent a Sunday afternoon road-hunting with Calmer. This is not to say that any of them came halfway across the country
to kill a pheasant, or, with the exception of Cousin Bill—who occasionally, from his second-floor bathroom window, picked
off the woodchucks that were undermining his foundation—had any particular inclination to kill anything at all; it was only
about getting into a car with loaded shotguns and cold beer and Cousin Bill, who was a piece of work by anyone’s estimation,
to see what would happen.