Spooner (25 page)

But that wasn’t all of it either.

Early in the spring, at the end of wrestling season, Coach Tinker was given a weekly column in the sports pages of the
Prairie Glen Mercury-News
, making, if you can believe this, an extra forty dollars a week, and when the first column appeared and the evidence was
there in front of Lily, in black and white, the absolute confirmation of who was getting ahead in the world, she closed shop
and more or less quit breathing for three days. Back open for business, her first act was to call the
Prairie Glen Mercury-News
and cancel her subscription. She wasn’t going to pay good money to read a rambling illiterate, she said, and hung up before
anybody could give her any lip. She spent the rest of that afternoon and most of the evening trying to start a boycott of
the paper, a stand against throwing away good money to read a rambling illiterate. All this talk about illiterates, by the
way, went on as if Spooner weren’t sitting right there at the kitchen table listening.

Over time Calmer tried—gently, gently—to persuade her that the situation had a humorous side, there in the columns themselves.
If a fair world was what you were looking for, he said, you had to appreciate irony. And their own time, he reminded her—Calmer
and Lily’s time—was coming. Dr. Baber was retiring, Metcalf had taken another job, and Calmer had been informally notified
that he would be the next principal. There would be money then for the addition.

And to a degree this mollified Lily and to a degree it didn’t, and she was not slow to remind him that she had learned the
hard way not to count her chickens before the eggs hatched.

L
ater that year Spooner began his career in organized baseball. The coach of the baseball team was Evelyn Tinker, who in addition
to being held almost blameless in the Lemonkatz boy’s injury was now rumored to be collecting sixty bucks a week for the newspaper
column, this in spite of Lily’s public campaign to have him fired, and being as Spooner was not old enough yet to have voted
for Richard Nixon, this joining of Tinker’s team constituted the single most disloyal thing a child of Lily Whitlowe Ottosson’s
had ever done.

How could he?

The question hung in the air at 308 Shabbona Drive, unspoken, like another dead father.

The answer—not that the answer mattered—was that Spooner had stopped at the baseball diamond on the way to the shopping center
after school, and watched through the fence as Russell Hodge pitched four innings of a practice game against Crete-Monee,
striking out twelve of the thirteen batters he faced. It was a tiny school, Crete-Monee, six hundred students, kindergarten
through twelfth grade, and two of the players were only thirteen years old. The smallest one—who wore number thirteen, and
was the only batter Russell Hodge did not strike out—was plunked between the shoulder blades as he turned away from an inside
fastball, and cried.

Half a dozen times Spooner started to leave but couldn’t, waiting around to see one more pitch, and in the end hung on the
wire fence more than an hour, leaving diamond-shaped imprints on the underside of his forearms, wrists to elbows, taking the
measure of Russell Hodge’s throws.

It came to him as he watched that Russell Hodge pitched in much the way he played linebacker, which is to say blind with rage.
But it was more difficult in baseball, a game that had very little maiming, to sustain a murderous rage than it was in football,
even for Russell Hodge, and after an inning or two Spooner thought he saw him working to conjure it up, sucking from the air
every bit of resentment he could find. Giving Russell Hodge his due, even in a practice game against little Crete-Monee, he
brought himself again and again to a state just short of foaming at the mouth—furious at the batter, at his own catcher, the
umpire, who, behind the mask and protective vest was only Mr. Kopex the math teacher, furious even at the ball itself—and
by the end appeared to have lost all his stuff.

Monday afternoon, Spooner showed up at the practice field in tennis shoes and shorts. He didn’t have a glove—he’d taken the
one he had out of his closet, but it was a toy and he could barely get his hand inside, and if he’d brought that along, he
might as well have worn his old cowboy hat too.

The players were already scattered in the outfield when he arrived, loosening up their arms or throwing each other grounders
or fly balls. The student manager was chalking the batters’ boxes. Spooner stood behind the fence, unsure how to announce
himself.

Presently, Tinker materialized and blew his whistle, and players jogged in and players jogged out, and pretty soon Mr. Kopex
took the mound and threw a few tepid fast balls in the direction of the plate, and the star players took turns and took their
cuts, and the players who were not stars chased the balls they hit.

Russell Hodge put one over the fence marking school property boundaries, fouled the next one off, and then lined a screamer
back up the middle, catching Mr. Kopex, who’d given him a D in slow-track Introduction to Algebra, in the foot. Mr. Kopex
was a large, fleshy fellow and he made one complete turn on the way down, 360 degrees, then lay on his back a long moment,
getting his bearings. Here and there were scattered his glasses, his glove, and his cap. Presently he sat up and took off
his shoe and sock, revealing a tiny, bone-white, misshapen foot, and lifted it up like a contortionist, cradling it, pulling
it up almost to his mouth, and rocked slightly back and forth, staring at Russell Hodge, hoping, Spooner imagined, to get
one more shot at him in slow-track algebra.

Coach Tinker went to the mound in a concerned jog but did not tell Mr. Kopex to run it off. Thanks perhaps to young Lemonkatz,
Tinker had tamed his wild impulse to make the injured run.

Meanwhile, Russell Hodge was still at the plate, stamping his feet, stoking the fire.

Coach Tinker studied the problem, which in essence was that Mr. Kopex was holding up practice, and pushed back his cap to
scratch his head. There was a scar there the shape of a smile from butting Lemonkatz. He nodded to Mr. Kopex and then turned
and yelled, “We need a pitcher.”

The other assistant coach, Mr. Speers, the typing teacher, was also a large, fleshy man and, like Mr. Kopex, pigeon-shaped
and had seen the line drive hit Mr. Kopex and was coming in from the field, walking at what appeared to be emergency walking
speed. Mr. Speers and Mr. Kopex were bachelors and best friends and had volunteered together to coach baseball, thinking they
could use the extra $250 the school district paid toward a European trip they hoped to take next summer. They were much alike
physically, although Mr. Kopex belted his pants beneath his stomach and Mr. Speers hitched his together just below the nipples.
They enjoyed exercise, that is, what they had considered exercise, the outdoors and fresh air and all that, hiking together
in the forest preserve, but coaching baseball for Tinker had turned out to be nothing like exercise as they had known it before.
On top of that the season was less than two weeks old and Mr. Speers had discovered he was allergic to dust and was runny-eyed
and sneezing all the time. For his part, Mr. Kopex had developed hammer toes over the years and worried constantly about someone
in spikes stepping on his feet. Unlike Mr. Speers, who wore black high-topped Converse sneakers, Mr. Kopex had played Little
League ball in his youth and, as a matter of dignity, spent the money for a new glove and spikes of his own, and had, a few
days earlier, admitted to Mr. Speers to a certain stirring at the sound they made as he walked over gravel.

Mr. Speers stood hesitantly over Mr. Kopex now, unsure if it was against the rules to help him up. “Get us off the field,
Frank,” Mr. Kopex said, and Mr. Speers nodded at his friend and then bent down and rooted his head through his armpit, and
tried to lift him up. Mr. Kopex was a loose handful though, slippery with sweat and pretty soon Mr. Speers gave up his hold
on the armpit and fastened on to whatever parts he could fasten on to, and before they had cleared the practice field the
two men had more or less reversed positions, with Mr. Kopex in a kind of headlock and making strangling noises as Mr. Speers
dragged him off.

Spooner had stopped cold at the sight of Mr. Kopex’s misshapen foot—had the man been tortured in Korea?—and now he also saw
Mr. Kopex’s glove, which lay brand-new and halfway open behind the pitching mound, where the imprint of the accident itself
could still be seen in the dirt. Spooner thought he could smell the leather.

Tinker called again for a new pitcher, and Spooner walked onto the field, just like he belonged there, straight to Mr. Kopex’s
glove. He picked up the glove as if it were his own and retrieved the same ball that had bounced off Mr. Kopex’s ankle. There
were another fifty or sixty balls in a basket behind the mound, all of them scuffed and brown with dirt. The glove was still
damp from Mr. Kopex’s hand, and Spooner remembered being introduced to him a long time ago at a faculty Christmas party. Spooner
might have been eleven or twelve, and Mr. Kopex’s hand was no bigger than his own. He conjured up the feel of that hand exactly,
it was like someone had passed him one of Phillip’s wet diapers.

Russell Hodge pounded the plate.

On the sidelines, Mr. Speers eased Mr. Kopex to the ground—not that he had been so far off the ground—and Tinker bent down
in front of him with his hands on his knees and proceeded to scruff his hair playfully and compliment him on giving 120 percent,
which was all that anybody could ask. Tinker was not easy with those sorts of compliments—for instance, Spooner couldn’t imagine
poor stubby-legged Mrs. Tinker getting even an 85 or 90, even if she fucked him on a trapeze.

A certain look came over Mr. Kopex’s face. This was the third day of the second week of practice, meaning Mr. Kopex had been
hearing Tinker’s percentages tossed around for nine days, and now, removed from the business of assistant coaching and back
on his home turf, he returned fire.

“A hundred and twenty percent of what?” he said.

“A hundred and twenty percent,” Tinker said, as if percentages were self-evident, like your won-lost record.

Mr. Kopex, who was still sitting on the ground and in pain, nevertheless picked up a small stick and drew a circle. “Show
me,” he said, and handed him the stick.

Spooner felt a stillness in his heart, waiting to hear Mr. Kopex discuss percentages with Coach Tinker, and likewise could
barely breathe in anticipation of pitching to Russell Hodge.

“Let’s say this is the whole,” Mr. Kopex was saying.

Spooner decided to let Russell Hodge wait.

Coach Tinker set his cap back a little on his forehead again—this was his thinking mode—and said, “The whole what?”

“The whole whatever. The whole pie. And what you’re trying to say is that you want it all. You want a hundred percent.”

“It’s not for me,” Tinker said. “It’s for the youth. I want them to learn to give more than a hundred percent.”

Back in the other direction, Russell Hodge was pounding the plate again with his bat.

“Ah, but that’s just the point,” Mr. Kopex said. “One hundred percent is all there is. That is the whole. That is the definition
of the whole.”

“The whole what?”

“The pie. The world. Everything. Where is the extra twenty percent?”

Mr. Speers was nodding along as Mr. Kopex spoke, and Coach Tinker was staring at the circle Mr. Kopex had drawn in the dirt,
also nodding, as if he saw what Mr. Kopex was getting at too.

Coach Tinker said, “What I’m trying to instill in these individuals is to want a bigger pie,” and he leaned in even closer
and looked at Mr. Kopex’s foot, which had blossomed like an orchid. “You might want to tape that,” he said. “Keep moving it
around so it doesn’t stiffen up on you.”

Presently Mr. Speers and the student trainer eased themselves under Mr. Kopex’s arms and began to walk him very slowly back
in the direction of school.

Tinker had another quick look at the circle Mr. Kopex had drawn in the dirt, then scrubbed it out with his shoe and turned
away from the world of geometry and all its inhabitants. He clapped his hands and blew his whistle. “Let’s go, let’s go, move
it…”

Tinker could not stand to waste practice time.

And all around Spooner the throwing and catching resumed, and Russell Hodge pounded the plate again and cocked the bat and
waited for Spooner to feed him the ball.

He had never pitched from a mound before—even the roof of Major Shaker’s chicken house was flat—and as he threw he experienced
a sensation like stepping into an unseen swale in the road.

The baseball headed east, just missing the wire backstop, passed a foot over Tinker’s head, curving slightly to the north,
and vectored on out in the direction of Mr. Kopex, who was holding his injured foot behind him and a few inches off the ground
and using Mr. Speers and the student manager as crutches. It hit him, of course, as Spooner already knew it would, struck
him exactly on the knob of the heel of the hammer-toed, orchid-blossomed bare foot that Russell Hodge had just mangled with
his line drive.