Spooner (16 page)

Perhaps it was Spooner’s attachment to Calmer, not wanting to disappoint him, or that being the Fiend of Vincent Heights itself
had begun to feel ordinary—it had been a year now—whatever the reason, Spooner eased gradually into retirement. Thus, the
idle mind being the devil’s playground, as his grandmother would say when it was time to lick stamps, as if licking stamps
was the next thing to algebra, he happened to find himself aimless one afternoon and wondering if he could throw an egg from
Major Shaker’s chicken coop across the road and into the always-open windows of Sergeant Audry’s patrol car. Sergeant Audry
reliably came home in the afternoon and parked the cruiser next to his house and slept in the front seat.

And so Spooner climbed to the roof of the Shakers’ chicken coop, a fresh egg in each of his pants pockets, to wait for Sergeant
Audry, and had heard the cruiser coming and then, not quite in time, saw that it was not Sergeant Audry but Major Shaker,
pulling into his driveway, and Spooner—it was already too late to ask why—tossed the egg he had intended to pitch into Sergeant
Audry’s car window onto the hood of the major’s car instead. Lance was in the car with Major Shaker, his head barely visible
at the side window. Spooner froze a moment, amazed at what he’d done, envisioning a whole new career, and then, in an escape
plan he had not completely thought out, climbed onto Major Shaker’s roof and flattened himself against the shingles, breathing
in the smell of the hot tar paper beneath his chin, and waited as Major Shaker first disappeared behind the dashboard and
then sat back up and threw open the door, a pistol in his hand, and ran to the chicken coop and then circled the house.

Lance had gone into the windshield when the major hit the brakes, and was still back in the car, wailing like he’d been run
over. The major went all the way round the house, keeping low and taking what cover he could, and then appeared again at the
spot where he’d stopped the car.

He noticed young Lance crying then, and shouted, “Will you shut the hell up?” which only made him cry louder.

His voice was hoarse and, except for the fact that the words were from the English language, did not sound human. A neighbor
came out her door to see what was going on. The neighbor had a clear view of Spooner on the roof, and she and the major’s
wife socialized together sometimes when their husbands went fishing. Lance was yowling like he was really hurt, but with Lance
you could never tell. He cried all the time, and from what Spooner had seen had cried and tattled his way right to perfect
grades in Miss Anderson’s first-grade class at Peabody School, even though he copied off everybody, and everybody but Miss
Anderson knew it. But then, giving him his due, he was the best speller in class, including the girls, and always won the
Friday spelling bee.

All his life, Spooner would mistrust people who could spell.

Major Shaker did another, slower circuit of the house and young Lance continued to go at it in the afternoon air, and Spooner
did not move from his spot on the roof, still in plain view of the neighbor and starting to bake. The neighbor had seen him,
he knew that, but hadn’t done anything about it yet, afraid maybe that Major Shaker would shoot him off the roof. He felt
nauseated, but put it less to the heat than the strain of trying to come up with a story. Whatever story he told, he would
have to tell it eventually to Calmer, who for all he knew could read his mind, and more and more lately gave him sudden, hard
looks when he fibbed. He tried but all he could come up with was something he’d heard Calmer say:
Time waits for no man
. It sounded intelligent but as a story it had some holes.

The major went back to the car and pulled Lance out—he had seen his own blood and was crying more earnestly now—just as Mrs.
Shaker came out the front door barefoot in a bathrobe, leaving wet footprints on the porch as she ran to him, her hair wrapped
in a towel. She saw the gun in one of the major’s hands and Lance in the other, and saw Lance was bleeding, and assumed the
worst. Screaming at her husband that he’d shot their beautiful boy.

Spooner had an orderly, mathematical mind and fought down a wild, reckless impulse to climb down and straighten everything
out.

Major Shaker left Lance on the walk holding on to his mother and went into the house. He was back out a minute later, no longer
armed, and got in his car, which he’d left running, and blew gravel up against the undercarriage backing out of the driveway.

Spooner waited a few minutes after the major left, listening to Lance sobbing into his mother’s titties, a come-and-go sound
to it, wa-wa, like a trumpet, and then they went inside and he dropped down off the roof onto the chicken coop, making no
sound at all as he landed, and climbed through the barbed-wire fence into the pasture and started home. Behind him, he could
still hear Lance crying, but Lance was running out of juice, and couldn’t keep it up.

He followed the fence line home. The sun was beginning to go down, and he ran at a few cows, bluffing them off their grazing
spots, but his heart wasn’t in it, and presently he came to a spot even with the back of his house, where the lowest strand
of barbed wire sagged all the way to the ground. He usually ducked through to cross into his yard. From this same spot, though,
he now saw Major Shaker’s green Henry J parked in the driveway, directly behind Calmer’s Ford. Major Shaker was standing to
one side of the car with his arms folded across his chest, and Calmer was in the driveway with the hose, washing the dried
egg off the Henry J hood.

Spooner turned and headed the other direction, downhill, toward the sawmill. The cattle had begun their regular evening ambulation
to the swale in the pasture where the pond was, moving single file through the changing light, their shadows long and slow.
They would spend the night at the pond, lying so close together that from the house they looked like a low black hill.

In front of Spooner lay the sawmill, quiet and empty. He stopped a moment and watched for the guard, who lived on-site in
a tiny trailer between the sawmill and the Bottoms.

At the other end of the mill—the southern end—was a domed tin-roofed structure with an open door and a smokestack. Black smoke
was floating up out of it, as it did night and day, every day of the year, giving Vincent Heights its peculiar sweet smell,
like a dog passing air. Even on Sundays, the fire never went out, and sometimes after dark, when Spooner was sent outside
to think over something he’d done, he could see fire glowing in the open door.

Spooner went under the fence at the bottom of the pasture, then crossed a plywood bridge over a creek and headed for the building,
suddenly wanting to see the fire for himself.

He stopped a moment in the doorway, the heat nearly turning him around, but then went farther in. He thought his pants might
catch fire. The floor of the building had been dug out, a crater almost as big as the building itself, and around the edge
was an earthen path a yard wide. There was another open doorway on the opposite side, and a conveyor belt of some kind led
from there into the building, and there were still pieces of lumber on it, the frayed ends sparking and rising with the heat
to the roof. In the morning the belt would begin to move again, and these pieces would be the first to fall into the pit.
Spooner now stared into the pit itself. The surface was dark but seemed to boil, and the smoke went up through the hole in
the roof.

Spooner went farther in, stopping finally at a point where it seemed as far to one opening as the other, staring all the while
into the pit, which was beginning to glow in the coming darkness. A moment passed, and he thought of the strangeness of the
place, that you could step off the ledge and two minutes later be smoke yourself.

A figure appeared in the doorway, a small man with one hand in his pants pocket. He looked the pit over and then turned away
and Spooner saw the empty sleeve. Spooner pressed himself back as far as he could go, remembering a story Kenny Durkin told
him that during the war Jaquith cut off his own arm for something to eat and never lost the taste for human flesh, and now
they let him eat dead people because he was a veteran and a lawyer.

Spooner felt his spine pressing into the hard inward slant of the wall.

Jaquith turned again and walked out of sight.

Time passed, and it was darker outside every time Spooner looked, and in the darkness the pit glowed and began to turn rosy.
Spooner thought of Calmer washing the egg off Major Shaker’s car.

He heard a starter weakly turning an engine. The engine coughed and then sighed, like somebody sick in bed, and then caught,
and then the engine revved, again and again, until you could hear the insides hammering against the walls of the cylinders.

The headlights went on, and Spooner saw the beams in the dark, angled high and uneven, pointed like a blind man’s eyes, and
then he saw the car itself, moving slowly into view, mud-covered and dilapidated, the muffler dragging along the ground underneath.
The car moved slowly past the opening and disappeared to the right, and a moment later Jaquith’s mule appeared from the left.
The mule was dead and, from what Spooner could see, attached to the car by a rope. The rope had pulled the animal’s ears up
against its head into a kind of bouquet, and it seemed to fight the rope, jerking and bouncing as it was dragged along slowly
to the opening, losing ground all the time.

When the mule was even with the opening, the engine quit and popped once, and then Jaquith opened the door and got out. He
stood for a moment, looking the situation over, and then went back to the car, leaned in to the trunk and came into sight
again with an oar.

He pushed the oar deep under the mule, using his foot to drive it, as if he were spading the earth, and then set his shoulder
under the oar and heaved up. The mule rocked and settled, perhaps a few inches closer to the fire. Jaquith went to the other
end and stuck the oar beneath the animal’s behind and lifted it again. He grunted under the strain, raising up on tiptoes
to lift the oar as high as he could, then went back to the other end and started the process over again, making a similar
noise, and in this way, the mule was gradually levered closer and closer to the fire, until finally, a point of balance was
reached and the creature seemed to hang a moment on the edge, and then dropped in, the rear legs first, then the front. A
puff of ash came up around the body, and a moment later it slid in farther and seemed to float for a few seconds, and then
began to smoke, and then caught fire all at once, as if it had finally given in. There were popping noises at first, then
a small explosion as the mule split wide open, and an instant later Spooner inhaled a putrefaction that engraved itself instantly
and forever in his brain, and for as long as he lived, whenever he was truly scared—those times when he thought he was dead
or as good as—he would catch a whiff of that exploded mule.