Spooner (29 page)

And Calmer—who admired Robert Frost above all other poets, and had fixed broken things all his life, making do with what was
on hand, who had once landed an airplane using the wind against his open door to steer after the ailerons cable broke, who
had delivered a dozen breech babies from the wombs of the animals on his father’s farm, and who had undertaken to mend the
life of a woman for whom misery itself was a comfort—Calmer looked at the hulking figure of Miss Sandway and punted. Some
things could be fixed, some things couldn’t.

These days Miss Sandway kept an office on the second floor that smelled strongly of canned fish, even from the hallway. She
maintained her person like some contented hobo, folds of fat sacked into her worn, unwashed print dresses, old sweat lines
stained into the armpits like age rings in trees, and was defiant of all authority save Dr. Baber himself. She had intimated
to colleagues that she had been told she was in the running for his job.

Calmer sat a moment, ruminating on the oddness of it, the unwanted people who found their way into your kitchen, into your
life. He got up, went into the utility room, and began sweeping up the glass, and tried but could not quite remember how the
ball had moved when Spooner threw it.

At dinner, before a single fish stick had been poked, Spooner’s mother announced that there would be no more baseball this
year because of Spooner’s D in English. The rules, she said, were the rules. Spooner looked up briefly, then back at his plate,
feeling, among other things, a strange relief.

The fish sticks lay on a plate on the table, cooling, glistening, limper by the second, as appetizing as a pile of dicks.
Moments passed, and in the end it was Phillip who spoke up. “That’s ex post facto,” he said.

Spooner looked up, thinking for a moment that his little brother had developed a speech impediment.

Spooner’s mother had not come unprepared for arguments. “We all have to live by rules,” she said. “What if your father decided
he just didn’t want to go to work? What if I decided I didn’t feel like making dinner?”

Spooner looked at the fish sticks, considering that.

Phillip was five years old, always trying out something he’d just read. Now he said, “It’s ex post facto if it wasn’t against
the law at the time.” He looked up at Calmer, expecting to see him tickled to death, as he normally was when Phillip was showing
it off. But Calmer hadn’t seemed to hear what he said.

“It is not ex post facto,” Spooner’s mother said. “I studied Latin too, mister. We have to live in this community.”

He said, “We can’t live here if Warren plays baseball?” He was just learning sarcasm, and the tone was purely hers.

Then, even before she could warn him not to take that tone of voice with her, they all seemed to look across the table at
once, and there was Darrow, his eyes brimming over with tears. Spooner looked at his brother and thought of all the little
tortures he’d inflicted on this kid over the years. Thinking he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen him cry.

Calmer sat motionless and stunned. He had thought she’d agreed to let him talk it over with Sandway, to find out what had
happened, and for a little while there was no sound in the kitchen save the scraping of Phillip’s silverware against the plate.
He had begun to eat after he’d staked his ex post facto claim. Five years old and ready for the debate team tomorrow.

Spooner’s mother abruptly stood up. “Well,” she said, “I don’t seem to have much of an appetite,” possibly laying the blame
for the stricken mood on those who might feel like eating, and headed off into the back of the house, where all the years
had come and gone and there was still no addition.

And later that night—as Lily slept and Calmer, as always when these things happened, could not sleep—later that night, it
all came back to him, Spooner taking in what she’d said almost as if it didn’t matter, then silence, then Phillip and his
Latin—where had he picked that up?—and then Darrow, Calmer’s spitting image, sitting across the table, blinking tears.

His spitting image.

Saturday broke clear and warm, a beautiful day for baseball, and without Spooner, the Golden Streaks lost to Thornton 19–1.
The second loss of the year.

N
o one but the participants themselves knows exactly what went on the next afternoon in the small office Miss Sandway shared
these days—technically—with a mouse-gray chemistry teacher named Mr. Hinter.

Hinter was seventy-one years old and a groper of female students for as long as anybody at the school could remember. Complaints
were first filed in the late 1960s, back when women’s liberation started to catch on, and were handled quietly by Dr. Baber,
who issued Hinter warnings and at the same time just managed to hide a smile at the old guy’s spunk. Finally, after the lawyers
took over the world and every other time the phone rang it was somebody threatening to sue the school district, Baber issued
orders barring Mr. Hinter from entering the supply room with female students and, as further precaution, assigned him to share
an office with Miss Sandway.

Miss Sandway had previously had the office to herself and resented the intrusion, and seeing Hinter’s various bottles of cologne
as he was moving in, threatened on the spot to break his fingers in the desk drawer if he ever even thought of getting frisky
with her. Hinter, who did not know exactly what sort of behavior constituted friskiness, thereafter kept himself scarce.

Meaning that when Coach Tinker, still smarting from the beating the Golden Streaks had taken Saturday from Thornton High,
called on Miss Sandway Monday afternoon to discuss Spooner’s midterm grade, there were no eyewitnesses to what happened. Hinter
was outside the office, waiting for her to leave so he could go in and retrieve his nasal spray, which he kept in his desk.

It was commonly known that Miss Sandway used this period after lunch to grade papers and polish off whatever was left of the
package of Oreo cookies she bought each morning on the way to school, and it is easy to imagine the cookies were lying out
in the open, exposed and vulnerable, when Tinker blundered in, uninvited, and might even have closed the door behind him.
Not realizing perhaps that he’d just closed off the avenue of escape. This is a familiar and tragic pattern, of course, to
forest rangers who investigate the killing of tourists by bears.

So the door closed and a moment later Hinter, who was waiting in the hallway, heard growling inside, distinctly heard growling,
and then voices were raised, and there was crashing into walls, and glass broke and then the door flew open again and Tinker,
red-faced and bleeding from scratch marks across his forehead, cords as thick as your fingers standing up in his neck, pointed
back into the office and screamed, “If you were a man, I’d beat the hell out of you, buddy!”

Calmer came into the bedroom early that morning, before daybreak, and when Spooner first opened his eyes and saw him, knowing
it was too early to get up, he thought for a moment that someone had died. Calmer was wearing the same expression last year,
after the news arrived that one of his uncles had been killed trying to put his little Cessna down in the cow pasture at night.

Spooner sat up and Calmer touched his lips, not wanting to wake up Darrow, asleep in the upper bunk bed. He started to say
something and then stopped. He hadn’t shaved, which was the first thing he did in the morning, and it didn’t look like he’d
slept. He sat down on the foot of the bed a moment and gathered his thoughts. Then he patted Spooner’s foot. “You go ahead
and play baseball,” he said.

Just those words, and then he got up and left. And Jesus knew what that cost him with her.

In the end, a letter was put in Miss Sandway’s file, noting the assault on Coach Tinker, and Spooner got out of her survey
of American literature course with a C-plus, and graduated from high school with a 1.9 GPA and a 0.24 ERA, and was offered
signing bonuses by both the Cubs and the Cincinnati Reds. There were more spectators at the last game he pitched than would
show up later that month for graduation. People filled the stands and sat five deep on blankets and lawn chairs along both
foul lines all the way to the fence. Behind the blankets, they sat in their cars and on their cars, and they crowded next
to each other along the fence in the outfield, some waving school banners, some with homemade signs, and cheered every pitch
Spooner threw until he finally gave up a hit, a cheap, soft liner over the shortstop’s glove to start the fifth inning.

Lemonkatz and his friends were there too, and pretty soon had an area all to themselves near the left-field foul pole, and
played their car radios so loud nobody near them could hear the public address system, and blew their horns and passed quart
bottles of beer back and forth in brown paper sacks.

The police were called, but Lemonkatz’s father appeared from the stands when they showed up and gave each of the officers
his business card and threatened to sue them personally for harassment.

There was some applause in the stands for that, and then Russell Hodge fouled a liner right into the policemen’s parked cruiser,
and dented the door, and the whole place went crazy.

A moment later Russell delivered one of his Howitzer shots reminiscent of the old Russell Hodge before he himself got dented,
and it landed fifty feet beyond all the cars and spectators and then disappeared into a pile of pipes left over from the irrigation
system the school had installed the year before, and in the end that was all the Golden Streaks needed and they won their
twenty-second game of the season, 2–0, and a spot in the regional finals.