Spooner (7 page)

Calmer went home too. He worked the fields for his dad, and in the fall and winter helped Cousin Arlo, who had almost a thousand
acres. He lived upstairs in Arlo’s house, in constant proximity to Arlo and his wife the arm wrestler, and after supper they
would all drink shots of Jim Beam chased with Falstaff beer, sometimes playing whist, sometimes listening to the radio, night
after night. Arlo’s wife liked to pop off the bottle caps against the kitchen table, and sometimes the glass lip would come
off with it too, and she would drink the beer anyway, right out of the bottle. Sunshine itself.

Sometimes, half a dozen beers into the evening, Calmer would find himself falling into a quiet melancholy over the congressman’s
wife and Arlo would see the change coming and send Arlene to bed, then put his stocking feet up on the kitchen table—his white
socks turned the color of the earth after a day in the fields—and try to head off the sadness. “Let me tell you about the
bears,” he would say.

He never asked what had happened, just let Calmer tell him about it in his own time, his own way. Arlo was everyone’s favorite,
and there were reasons for that.

Vincent Heights

S
pooner was four years old. It was April 1961, and the family lived at the top of a long, gradual rise of land, half a mile
above a sawmill on the outskirts of Milledgeville, in the last house built in a poor white subdivision of town called Vincent
Heights.

The house itself sat on a sun-scarred, twice-tiered lot on a narrow dirt road that looped off the paved road running through
the rest of the development. The dirt loop was not technically in city limits and for that reason hadn’t been paved when paving
came to Vincent Heights. His grandmother still seethed when she thought of it, the city coming out here with their surveyors
and cheating poor old widows out of their pavement—the widows being the grandmother herself and Granny Otts next door. For
that matter Spooner’s mother was also a widow, although technically the paving had occurred before she and Spooner and his
sister moved in.

As Spooner understood it, the move in with Grandma came a week or so after the paving stopped at the circle where they lived,
and a month or a year—he couldn’t keep it straight which was longer—after his father died of a stroke. He also didn’t quite
twig how a stroke killed you—his understanding of the word
stroke
was that it meant petting a horse. Maybe the horse kicked him, but in any case this was the sort of information he knew better
than to ask about at home. There was a rule in his grandmother’s house against bringing up the misfortunes of the past, which
applied specifically to the matter of Spooner’s dead father but not to the unpaved circle in front of the house.

And while Spooner ran loose in Vincent Heights, telling the neighbors that his father had been killed by a horse, Calmer was
back out in the world, picking his way from town to town in a 1949 Ford sedan, from the prairie into the midwestern states,
then the South, headed for Georgia and in no hurry whatsoever to arrive. It was only the second time he’d left South Dakota.
He liked the cities more than the towns, stopping at libraries and museums, but sometimes an old tractor or a historical marker
along the road caught his attention, and he stopped to look at those too. Some days his car broke down—usually it was the
carburetor, which he rebuilt three times in a month, or the radiator or the water pump, which he also rebuilt—and he would
pull onto a gravel road or into a stand of trees and open the hood, the engine pouring steam if it was the radiator, and jury-rig
what was broken, taking his time with that too. He enjoyed the repairing as much as the driving—the logic of the work, of
the problem itself, the solid, familiar feel of tools, of knowing even before he opened the hood what was wrong underneath.
Fixing things himself.

He’d left South Dakota this time with six hundred dollars in his money belt and had another two thousand that he’d never taken
out of a savings account at Girard Bank back in Philadelphia. The job waiting for him in Georgia paid seventy-two hundred
dollars a year.

Oddly enough, he’d been to the town itself once before, had spent three days there one August during his flight training,
waiting for a new rudder cable for his plane. The air was unbreathable but otherwise he’d liked the place fine. General Sherman
had come through on his march to break the South’s back and end the war, but for some reason he’d spared the town and its
great old houses and orchards, most of which were still intact. There was a women’s college now on the grounds of the old
penitentiary square, and a military school where Calmer had been hired to teach.

Calmer had lost his rudder on a training flight out of Pensacola back in 1950, and put the plane down on a dirt road leading
to a complex of square brick buildings just outside town limits, climbed out of the plane into a hot wind, and, still standing
on the wing, heard voices calling to him from the windows. He looked up, noticing the windows were barred, and then began
to distinguish the shapes of people behind them, waving hankies, cheering. For a minute he felt like Ted Williams.

To the east, there was a small fenced field—perhaps twenty acres—and shirtless men bent at the waist, out in the afternoon
sun digging peanuts. Guards watching, some of them with shotguns, cudgels attached to their belts. Between the field and the
main building was a poultry yard.

There were also shirtless men in the poultry yard, two of them hidden in the shadow of a henhouse. One of them was having
sex with a chicken and the other one was standing with his pants down around his knees, an erection like a divining rod, waiting
his turn. Why he didn’t just get a chicken of his own, only the man himself might know. Maybe it was too much like a double
date.

T
he road in front of Spooner’s grandmother’s house was made of clay, orange and cracked open seven months of the year, so hot
in July and August that you could feel it through your shoes. In October, after the first hard rain, it turned to mud, sometimes
half a foot deep, and it would suck the shoes right off your feet. Nothing grew alongside the road that did not have thorns
or stickers.

Behind the house was a shallow yard full of pine trees, a briar patch off to the side, a barbed-wire fence. After supper,
Spooner was sometimes sent to sit on the porch steps to think it over when he’d broken some rule or another that day, this
being his mother’s idea of punishment, and from here he could look out over a cow pasture and the muddy pond where the cattle
collected at night, and beyond that to the sawmill, its chimney leaking black smoke into the sky all day and all night. To
the right of the sawmill, downwind, was the Bottoms, where the colored people lived. That was what Spooner’s family called
them,
colored
. His grandmother had fired a maid, who was a person of color herself, for using the word
nigger
in her house.

An older, plumper grandmother than Spooner’s grandmother had the house next door, Granny Otts, who had a dog called a toy
poodle even though it wasn’t. She called it Bitty and painted its fingernails. She also had a granddaughter, Marlis, who was
fifteen and homely in a way that fixing up couldn’t fix. The granddaughter smoked cigarettes and said
nigger
and spit, and had pretty much given up on humans and spent all her time with her horses, Gypsy Lee and Scout. Spooner and
his sister were not allowed near the stable. Marlis had no use for Granny Otts or Bitty or Spooner or Margaret or any other
people or animals that were not horses, and when Spooner told her that his father had been killed by a horse she said, “Wasn’t
the horse’s fault.”

She had no friends that Spooner ever saw but had taught the older horse—Gypsy Lee—to kiss her lips, although she had to hold
a sugar cube between her teeth to get the horse to do it. She cut school more than she went and spent all day in the stable
and smelled like it, which was not such a bad smell, at least to Spooner. Hay and sweet manure. Granny Otts didn’t mind her
cutting school, but often sitting in the kitchen she said to Spooner and Margaret that she wished the girl would take the
time to pretty herself up. “A little toilet water wouldn’t hurt her chances,” she said. And Spooner, who did not know toilet
water except as water in the toilet, didn’t see how it could hurt either. Granny Otts was still looking for a boyfriend herself
and kept the bait in the water, never leaving the house without perfume and lipstick and jewelry, even to hang laundry. She
liked to have Spooner and his sister inside for Kool-Aid and sandwich cookies she bought from the A&P, and seemed to favor
their company over Marlis’s, and never let them out of her kitchen without warning them to stay clear of the stable. Those
horses were biters, she said, one worse than the other.

The house itself had five rooms, six if you counted the toilet, which Spooner did, but his mother did not. She complained
about it regularly—living in five tiny rooms—and he regularly corrected her, listing the rooms one by one on his fingers.
The last time he’d corrected her, she buried her face in a dish towel and distinctly screamed the word
shit.
Then she cried, “
God
,
how long can I stand it?
”

Spooner was alone in the kitchen with her at the time—his grandmother had a moment before walked out the back door and let
it slam behind her because his mother said that Dwight D. Eisenhower was spending too much time on the golf course when he
should be running the country—and he sat there motionless as she cried, feeling the scene blowing across his face, like a
dog riding halfway out the car window.

And then he’d said, “Maybe Grandma will die,” and his mother got up and wailed off into the back of the house and that night
after supper he was sent outside to sit on the porch steps and think it over. And as he thought it over, it seemed to him
that the words had just popped out, the way shit popped out of cows. She’d been crying into the dish towel,
God, how long can I stand it?
and he didn’t know if he was supposed to answer or not—this being a dilemma that would follow him all his life, by the way—but
in the end, being the one who’d made her cry in the first place by saying the bathroom counted as a room, he pressed himself
to say something to make her feel better and so he said what he said, which was the best he could do. And now he was out on
the porch to think it over.

And he continued to sit on the porch steps and think it over, and the house continued to have six rooms. He knew a room when
he saw it, and he knew how to count. There were three closets in the house, one in each bedroom and one in the hallway, nine
windows, six faucets. There were seventeen lightbulb sockets—three in one lamp in the living room—and thirteen electrical
outlets in the walls. Each month, a new Shell pest strip was hung over the kitchen sink, laden at the moment with exactly
sixty-two dead or dying insects, mostly flies. Thirty-one on each side. Spooner took a count every morning and every night,
and brought spiders or june bugs in from the yard to keep the sides even.

The rooms were all small and poorly lit, even the kitchen, where he sometimes lay on the floor in hot weather and watched
bits of dust floating in the shaft of sun coming through the screen door. The house was full of dust, and secrets, and rules,
and these things he didn’t try to count because they were countless.

There was the rule against feeling sorry for past misfortunes, against leaving the house without permission, against climbing
trees, against being on the roof. A rule against setting fires. There were rules about standing up straight, how tightly he
was allowed to buckle his belt, how much water he could use to comb his hair in cold weather, and the correct way to tie his
shoes so that he wouldn’t trip when he ran. He was not allowed to suck his fingers—he liked the two middle ones on his right
hand—and he was supposed to address strangers as
sir
and
ma’am
, and he was not supposed to talk to strangers, and he was supposed to look strangers in the eye when he spoke to them. He
was not supposed to cry. He was not allowed to let the screen doors slam. He was not allowed anywhere near the sawmill or
the horses next door. There was a rule about how much sugar he could put on his cereal in the morning, how much peanut butter
he could put on a peanut butter sandwich. There were even rules for sleeping. A clothesline was hung across the middle of
the bedroom where he and Margaret slept, and in the night sometimes the blanket hung across the line would rise up like a
curtain in the wind, and his grandmother would appear, her hair the color of the moon, unpinned and fallen the length of her
back, and pull his fingers out of his mouth or his hands out of his pajama bottoms.