Spooner (40 page)

The dishes were already washed and sitting in the dish rack—Mrs. Spooner spent much of her life in those days trying to stay
ahead of the mess, but might as well have been trying to drain the septic tank with the garden hose—but he did them anyway.
And then took out all the dishes in the cabinets and washed them too. The feel of the water was somehow reassuring, hot enough
to sting, and he was pleased to note that his fingertips had turned pink and wrinkled. Spooner’s plan was to keep doing dishes
until daylight, and then take it from there.

“Why don’t you try lying down?” she said.

Spooner went back to bed. His wife finished the feeding and lay down behind him, curled into his back and holding on, and
was asleep again in half a minute. She was tired; she slept. She was so pure, so purely what she was. If nothing else, he
could have loved her just for that. Forget her bottom; he could love her for purity alone. It was how you came to love someone
in the first place, he was thinking, you notice something pure. Thus the popularity of dogs and babies.

You had to admit that philosophically he was on a roll.

Unease was all over him these days and there was also a feeling of absence, something like living in the third person instead
of the first. He hid this from Mrs. Spooner, and went through the motions, week after week. She would never guess that he
had lost touch. He lay with her at night until she fell asleep, and then he quietly rose from bed and stayed up most of the
night, counting every pill in the medicine cabinet, reciting the presidents of the United States, the states of the United
States, teaching himself Christmas songs on the touch-tone telephone, putting the dog in the crib with baby Spooner to watch
them sleep together—a sight that made him weep. He wept more in six weeks than he had in the previous thirty years.

He went to the gym, exhausting himself every afternoon, trying to empty himself so completely that what was wrong would empty
out with the rest of it, and wrote his columns at the paper and was eerily absent from them too, and his own writing, which
began to sound to him like the hushed conversations you hear in emergency rooms—
we can order out for pizza when we get home
—while some other, more important issue, the reason for being here, was being decided out of sight, and it was during this
third-person period of absence that he wrote the column about the dead boy.

T
he dead boy was a kid from South Philadelphia, a pipe fitter at the naval yard who’d gotten himself killed in the course of
some small drug transaction, hit from behind with a pipe or a bat. An eye had been knocked out of the boy’s head. Spooner
had been in Philadelphia five years now, which wasn’t long enough to know the city, but he had spent his share of time in
the neighborhoods, especially in South Philadelphia, and had glimpsed the rules that held the place together. Which is to
say that he should have seen the column for the intrusion it was.

Still, it looked harmless enough. He represented the kid in the way the kid was represented to him. Likable, not a bum or
a thief, a kid who could have had a whole life but who lately had struck various citizens of the neighborhood as a little
loopy on the street.

Spooner wrote the column as if the kid mattered to him, and he didn’t. The truth was that he couldn’t picture the dead boy,
and picturing him was the ground-floor requisite for this sort of newspaper column. Without it the column came out of Spooner’s
typewriter as dead as the boy himself, as ordinary as a box of cereal. There were two things Spooner absolutely knew about
writing, and the first one was that you can’t get away with pretending to care. The other one, if you’re interested, is that
nobody wants to hear what you dreamed about last night.

But live and learn. Spooner did what he did, and should have seen the insult in it but didn’t, and should have left it alone
until he could picture the kid and get some piece of who he was into the story, and some piece of what he meant to the people
who loved him. But he didn’t.

There were a dozen messages waiting when he got to the office, about average the day after a column, but six were from the
same number. The first few from a woman, then some from a man with the same last name. It came to him slowly whose last name
it was.

Spooner sat down at his desk, reread the column, took a minute to cringe and then picked up the telephone. The woman was the
dead boy’s mother, and she undertook wailing the instant Spooner spoke his name. The conversation went downhill. He understood
very little of what the mother was saying, but the nub of it was clear enough, that Spooner had brought back all her shock
and grief, and, in spite of the way he’d died, had gotten her boy all wrong.

That he had missed the kid entirely was probably true. Part of this was inevitable—even on a good day, the best you could
hope for was a glimpse—and part of it was Spooner’s strange disappearance from the first person. The volume seemed to fade
then, like a train gone past, and another voice came on the line, the other son.

The other son made several points, building his argument logically, from the ground up. Spooner was a motherfucker. The drug
deal could only have been a first-time experiment because the kid had been a pipe fitter at the navy yard, and pipe fitters
had to be alert. Spooner had ruined his mother’s life all over again, just when she was beginning to get over the shock. Spooner
was a motherfucker. Spooner was a motherfucker’s motherfucker. On and on. Spooner guessed that the other son was saying this
more for the mother than for Spooner, and that he did not believe the part about this being the kid’s first time with drugs
any more than Spooner did. The rest of it, though, seemed sincere enough. Spooner heard the mother moving away, maybe back
to her bedroom, wailing, the train gone round the bend.

Now, in a quieter voice that she wouldn’t hear, the other son began telling Spooner all the ways he was going to get even:
broken legs, broken arms, broken fingers so Spooner could never write again. Spooner waited him out, trying to listen but
paying less and less attention, and presently he found himself trying to remember the anatomical names of the bones the dead
boy’s brother was threatening to break. Ulnas, femurs, carpals—or were those metacarpals? Or were metacarpals toes? Maybe
it was phalanges.
Christ, don’t break my toes
. There could be a poem in the names of bones.

Finally the other son stopped, or at least ran out of bones he intended to break, then began on how he planned to hunt Spooner
down. He knew where Spooner worked, where he went at night, where he lived.

Spooner excused himself and interrupted. “Where are you?” he said.

The question stopped the other son a second, and then he gave Spooner the name of a bar in Devil’s Pocket, six till two, five
nights a week.

“I don’t mean that,” Spooner said. “I mean where you are now. Maybe I could come over and talk to your mother.” Realizing
what he’d just offered to do, picturing the scene at the dead boy’s house, Spooner was washed in the odor of Jaquith’s mule,
and could no longer get enough air into his lungs.

“My mother don’t wanna fucking talk to you,” the other son said, and slammed down the phone. Spooner felt a tremendous wave
of relief, the first one in quite a while.

“My mother don’t wanna fucking talk to you,” he said out loud, liking the sound, wondering if that could be the last line
of the poem about the bones. Hoping she wouldn’t change her mind. Thinking that was the end of that.

It wasn’t, of course. Too late to picture the dead kid himself, Spooner began to picture the brother, to see how privileged
his—Spooner’s—life must look to the other son, the dead boy’s brother, whose own privileges were most likely only what he
could negotiate on the street.

Why this came into his head, why he should care about it, Spooner couldn’t say, except he was still barely removed from all
those years when he had no say in things himself.

It had stayed cold and wet all winter, and now, early in February, it rained and then turned cold again and the rain froze
and left the sidewalks and streets slick, with victims piling up in emergency rooms everywhere in the city.

He found a legal parking spot in front of Dirty Frank’s at Thirteenth and Pine, an event so rare that after he tucked his
company car into the spot he sat still a little while trying to enjoy it, and a little time passed and the space wasn’t more
fun than anyplace else, but still, it was a rare thing, a legal spot in front of Dirty Frank’s, and he took it for an omen.

In spite of the slick sidewalks, he walked to the place he was going. No traction at all under his feet. It was only a mile
or so but a walk that ordinary citizens did not often undertake, even when the pavement was dry. Like most of the neighborhoods
on the edges of Center City, Devil’s Pocket was in a process of gentrification—Gilman’s own house was only a block from the
understood boundaries of the neighborhood—but civilization was slow in coming to the Pocket, and in spite of its proximity
to Center City and all its cultural advantages (this was a phrase that often came up when Spooner’s mother was talking about
places she didn’t live) the area was still among the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city, at least to outsiders. There
were parts of Kensington and North Philadelphia and West Philadelphia where they killed more of their own, but for maltreatment
of outsiders, you could hardly beat the Pocket.

Spooner walked past a corner where a sweet-natured, gentle soul, a man everyone called Pally, had made his stand the previous
year. One o’clock in the morning, the witnesses reported two black men in a car. The car slowed, a window went down. Strangers
talking to strangers, words that meant nothing, and could change nothing, except in the moment. Pally was eleven days on a
respirator, and then he died.

Spooner stopped at the spot where Pally’s head had hit the curb, and wondered what he had been thinking when the car slowed,
what he’d thought was at stake. Or if that night he had just been throwing it all away. In spite of where he was and what
he was about to do, nothing in the way of similarities came into Spooner’s mind.