Spooner (15 page)

Mr. Durkin did not answer, and in a second Sergeant Audry wheeled on him, faster than you would have thought a fat man could
wheel, and poked a finger that looked for all the world like a baby’s leg into the middle of Mr. Durkin’s narrow chest. Mr.
Durkin was taken off balance and fell back a step.

“Lissen a me, cocksucker,” Sergeant Audry said, and the logical part of it was over now, “I been on the police seventeen years,
and I guess by now I can tell nigger crime from a domestic disturbance.”

He backed himself into the front seat of the car and sat down and lifted his legs in after him, one at a time, grunting with
the effort, and then slammed the door, and came close to running over Roger Durkin’s feet on the way out.

Mr. Durkin stood in the driveway as Sergeant Audry drove off, stunned, his hand still on the pistol tucked into the front
of his pants, like he might be thinking of shooting off his own pecker. His wife was watching from the front door, terrified,
and Mr. Durkin looked down at his slippers—before this, he’d worn his black work shoes whenever he went outside, even if it
was only to wash the car—and what he was thinking Spooner could not guess.

Spooner tried all day but could not get back to the feeling of standing in Kenny Durkin’s refrigerator-lit kitchen and tinkling
into Mr. Durkin’s shoes. The feeling had been apart from and unconnected to the incident of the unshared cheese, or the fact
that Kenny Durkin’s mother would never give him a drink of ice water out of a glass, and always told him to use the hose instead.
Or even, really, with the pleasant picture of Mr. Durkin taking his shoes out of the icebox and slipping his feet inside,
then stopping cold in his tracks, as it were, knowing they weren’t just cold but something worse, and waiting for his brain
to tell him what it was.

In the end, this inability to reclaim the feeling of greatness would be a lifelong affliction. For all of Spooner’s life,
the only way back to the feeling was back to the icebox.

Sunday, after Sunday school, Spooner climbed the six steps out of the basement of the Methodist church, the clammiest place
in Milledgeville, Georgia, and still in the wash of a crowded room of children who had to a person heard the word and felt
Jesus in their hearts, heard something himself:
The world is full of shoes.

Meaning it didn’t have to be Kenny Durkin’s daddy’s.

And that same afternoon stepped over the Shakers’ coonhound, who was asleep beneath Lance’s bedroom window, and climbed through
the window into the Shaker residence. Lance and his mother were in the backyard at the time with the maid, chopping the head
off a chicken for supper. There was nothing young Lance—as his father called him—enjoyed better than chasing a just-decapitated
chicken around the yard, whacking it with a switch.

The major himself was asleep on a chair in the living room, still in the uniform he wore to church, his lips loose and glistening
with spit. The radio was on the table next to him, broadcasting Chicago Cubs baseball from Wrigley Field.

Spooner took his time. He picked up Major Shaker’s shoes, which were set neatly together beside the foot stool, polished and
shined. It was one of Lance’s orders of the day to polish his and his daddy’s shoes. Scuffed shoes meant demerits.

Spooner took the shoes to the bedroom and set them on the floor, cocking his head like a piano tuner as he went back and forth
between them, evening the pitch, one shoe to the other.

On the way out, he noticed a small puddle on the floor at the foot of Lance’s bed. Just a few drops, really, and he looked
around for something to wipe it up, but now came a change in the sound of Major Shaker’s breathing, and a moment later another
sound as he got up off the chair, and Spooner was out the window.

All in all, a neat, well-timed job, but still, the puddle. It nagged at him all day, like a guilty conscience. He didn’t know
the word for the nagging then, but the nagging itself wasn’t new and had bothered him one way or another for a long time.
Which is all to say that on top of trespassing, spying on his mother from trees, lying, sneaking out of the house, and being
sexually unfit for kindergarten, Spooner was, on top of everything else, a perfectionist.

Major Shaker called the police and again Sergeant Audry was sent to Vincent Heights. A reporter from the newspaper went through
the neighborhood later that week, knocking on doors, interviewing housewives and the elderly in regard to the strange crime
wave sweeping the area.

The story ran on the front page in Friday’s paper, with a picture of old man Stoppard’s house, which the newspaper identified
as the residence of Roger Durkin. A fiend was loose in the community, the paper said, breaking in to homes and committing
acts of an unprintable nature.

Margaret read the report to Spooner after supper, and he leaned in over her narrow arms and stared at the words he couldn’t
read for himself, and at the picture of old man Stoppard’s place, glimpsing for the first time what newspapers did. The paper
had most of it wrong, not just about old man Stoppard’s house but the times and places the fiend had struck, and yet gradually,
over the next day or two, he began to notice that to the citizens of Vincent Heights, the paper saying it that way made it
so, even though they knew for a fact that it wasn’t. Which kindled the theory that fibbing was only fibbing if you got caught
by somebody more important, and if you became important enough—like the newspaper—you could get away with anything.

Thus Spooner’s first interest in the printed word.

T
hey went shooting.

It had been a long time since they’d been alone with each other, and things had changed. Spooner was enrolled in first grade
at Peabody Laboratory School and Calmer was buying Granny Otts’s house next door, and there was a baby growing in Spooner’s
mother’s stomach, and Calmer did not have to look for things to do these days, they were lined up in front of him the moment
he got out of bed.

They drove out to the lake and parked; Calmer closed his eyes and leaned back against the seat, tired and thinking. They had
not spoken much lately, even after Sergeant Audry had come to the door one Sunday and reported that Spooner had been seen
climbing the Blakemans’ roof out by the highway. Spooner had gotten the feeling lately that he was wearing Calmer out.

It was Spooner who broke the silence. “Should we shoot at something?” he said.

“Maybe just some bottles today,” he said, and motioned toward the rotted fence posts still standing at various angles along
the property line. Somehow Calmer seemed to know he had no heart for killing rabbits. The field had been a cow pasture once,
and there were still cow pies the size of hubcaps all over the ground, dried out and picked over by crows for the corn.

Spooner set some bottles on the fence posts and plunked them off, hitting more than he missed. Afterwards, he looked back
toward Calmer but already knew he wasn’t paying attention. They hadn’t come out here today to shoot. He opened the bolt to
eject the shell, and a little circle of white smoke hung over the open breach. Calmer called him over.

He lit a cigarette and crossed his legs and looked out at the pine-tree horizon. “I don’t know if I mentioned my cousin Arlo
to you,” he said after a while. “He lost three fingers at the polar bear exhibit at the zoo in Minneapolis.” Spooner turned
and squinted up at him, into the sun. He couldn’t see much of Calmer’s face from here, but there was something uncomfortable
in his voice, as there usually was when he talked about his other family back in South Dakota.

Spooner said, “It bit off his fingers?”

Calmer shook his head. “No, from what he said, it just swiped them off with its claw.”

Spooner tried to picture it that way, but it wouldn’t come. “Did they shoot it?”

“No, they don’t shoot bears for that. It was just being a bear. Arlo stuck his hand in the cage.”

“Why?”

Calmer shrugged. “To scratch her ears, he said.”

“It was a girl?”

Calmer looked out into the distance again, as if he was remembering. “He does things like that sometimes, but bears are bears
and Arlo is Arlo. We all do things we regret…”

“But what happened?”

“That was it. They did what they could for him at the hospital and he went back home to the farm, and he learned to do as
much work without his fingers as he did with them, and even though he’d done something foolish, everybody still loved him.”
He narrowed his eyes, remembering something. “I think the city put up a sign that said Do not place hands inside bear cage.”

Calmer stood up and shook out his leg, which had gone to sleep. “I just thought you might be interested in that.”

“Were they friends again, then?”

“Who?”

“Cousin Arlo and the bear.”

“Probably not,” Calmer said. “You can’t be friends with a bear.”

Spooner shot for a while longer and then they put the gun in its place in the trunk and got in the car. As they reached the
highway a wasp flew in the window and moved across the windshield, rattling like death itself, points of color glistening
in the black wings, and seeing Spooner draw back, Calmer leaned forward into the steering wheel and trapped it between the
windshield and the back of his hand, held it there a moment, mashing it side to side, and then picked up the carcass off the
dashboard and dropped it out the window like a cigarette butt. He gave no sign that he’d been stung, but when they got home
and walked up the steps to the front door, his hand was so thick he couldn’t get it in his pocket for the keys to the house.

The fiend had struck again recently, and Spooner’s mother, like half the housewives in Vincent Heights, had taken to locking
the front door.

Spooner was never sure what Calmer was thinking or what he knew. He was thinking something, though, Spooner could see that,
and it was about him. Something that he hadn’t told Spooner’s mother.

Calmer bought Spooner and Margaret a puppy—a small, nervous Boston terrier, seven weeks old, that shook like change on top
of the washing machine, a dog you could sneak up on and when you grabbed him he’d jump a foot off the ground. The dog would
not come, or sit, or answer to his name, and sometimes Calmer sat holding it in the utility room—where they kept it at night—looking
it over in the same peculiar way he sometimes looked at Spooner, when he thought Spooner wasn’t watching.