Spooner (22 page)

On the day construction began, Lily woke to the distant sounds of heavy machinery, something vaguely poisonous in the air,
like mildew or cat dander or ragweed, sounds so faint that no one else in the house could hear. Calmer was in the kitchen
eating breakfast with Darrow; Margaret was showering.

Spooner was dressed for school but back in bed, in his shoes, whacking off as he thought of Mrs. Metcalf, who struck him as
something of a looker. Thinking of her lipstick.

Spooner’s mother walked into the kitchen in her robe, her hand cupped over her mouth because she hadn’t brushed her teeth.

“That noise is driving me crazy,” she told Calmer.

Which was a perfect example, if anyone needed one, of putting the horse before the cart, but was also in its way true. On
the other hand, the sounds of construction drew her, and for that month and then the next, every morning—rain or shine, asthma
or clear pipes—she walked the three short blocks to Mohawk Street to check on the progress of the addition, and often ended
up sitting in Mrs. Metcalf’s kitchen over a cup of coffee, watching the construction workers through the window over the sink.
In this way Lily became familiar with the job, with the problems that always came up when you were building an addition, unexpected
delays, cost overruns, sloppy workmanship. There were four workers on the job, five if you counted the boss, but the boss
was overseeing two other job sites and the workers took breaks every hour when he was away, standing together smoking cigarettes
and drinking coffee, shooting the breeze, and took their sweet time getting back at it, nobody moving until the last cigarette
had been finished, the last lid screwed back on the last thermos. These workers were what was called semi-skilled labor and
made six dollars an hour—more than a starting schoolteacher—and Lily watched the four men sitting together smoking, and thought,
twenty-four dollars an hour.
More than four starting schoolteachers.

She reported on the addition’s progress nightly over supper. It would drive you crazy, she said, trying to keep track of four
of them at once, making sure they were all working.

Strangely enough, Mrs. Metcalf was not bothered by the slacking or the cost. As impossible as it was to Spooner’s mother,
Mrs. Metcalf apparently had decided to whistle her way through life and ignore the hosing she was taking along the way. And
as Lily made her evening reports, it began to sound almost as if she were glad not to be getting an addition herself, glad
for once not to be the one getting hosed.

Still, before she’d finished, she would gaze wistfully out the window over the kitchen sink and say, “It must be nice.”

Calmer did what he could to divert her attention. He bought the family a television set and got her pregnant again. Even so,
she continued to follow the construction like it was the pennant race, up there every day even though it was November now
and getting cold, and the cold air set off her asthma attacks. On days she was too sick to get out of bed, Mrs. Metcalf came
over in the afternoon, after she’d finished her own work, to see if there was something she could do to help. Sometimes she
brought dinner. Spooner could walk in the door and tell from the aroma if Mrs. Metcalf had been in the house. As a rule Mrs.
Metcalf herself smelled good enough to eat, although the food she brought over, as a rule, didn’t.

The new baby was called Phillip Whitlowe, after Spooner’s mother’s father, and was born without any ordeal to speak of, leaving
Spooner the undisputed champion of nearly killing his mother in childbirth. In a family of exceptional children, Spooner had
that to hold on to, and his throwing arm.

The same year Phillip was born, the sixth-grade guidance counselor at Mohawk Elementary counseled Spooner to begin thinking
about trade school. Refrigeration and plumbing in particular paid well. The counselor made this suggestion sounding not a
little bitter and in fact spent the rest of Spooner’s hour—each student was required to go through an hour of counseling before
starting junior high school, so he would know what to do with his life—listing many different kinds of manual labor that paid
better than teaching.

“A
garbage man
makes more than a starting teacher,” he said at the end. They always closed the show with that one, the garbage man being
the final word in any discussion of the comparative esteem that society held for its educators.

The counselor was apparently unaware that Spooner himself came from a teacher’s family and had heard all this before, mostly
from his mother, and knew it by heart. “No, sir,” the counselor said, and leaned across his desk to feel Spooner’s bicep,
“there’s nothing wrong with making a living with your hands.” Somehow by now the counselor had gotten the idea that Spooner’s
dad was in the building trades, possibly a plumber.

And in fact the house, like all the houses in Prairie Glen, was cheaply built, and something was always up with the pipes.
Calmer would spend one weekend replacing faucets, the next underneath the sink, the next caulking around the bathtub. On weekends
when nothing was wrong with the plumbing, he undertook
projects
—built bookshelves or a kitchen cabinet, or rewired the bathroom, or repainted it and the kitchen to cover water marks. He
was tired at times but never complained of having too much work—it seemed to relax him, fixing things that had broken or worn
out.

Whatever the project, it was stop-and-go—diapers to change, lunches to fix, Margaret’s piano lessons, Darrow’s piano lessons,
checking in on Lily every thirty minutes when she was in bed with asthma—and then back to wiring the kitchen.

Then the workweek itself would begin, and he went to work, and at night he checked homework, and changed diapers, and made
dinner if Lily was feeling punk. He changed tubes in the television set; he powdered the baby’s rash. But where Darrow was
the spitting image, the baby resembled the Whitlowe side of the family, and did not like to be held upside down and in other
ways was not such a happy little crapper as had been Darrow.

And while Calmer worked—what he sometimes called making a
joyful noise unto the Lord
(Spooner never knew or asked exactly where Calmer stood on the matter of religion)
—
Spooner’s mother lay in bed with her atomizer, pining for a den like the Metcalfs’.

In that entire first year in Prairie Glen, Spooner never saw Calmer sit down with a drink or a smoke before eight o’clock
at night. The second year, one afternoon in April, Calmer built an awning over the doghouse door, to provide old Fuzz some
shade for the summer ahead, and at dinner asked if anyone had noticed the new addition, and for a little while the table went
quiet as Stonehenge and Spooner sat speculating that Calmer had gone nuts, or that it was a dare, something he’d dared himself
to do. And he wondered if he and Calmer were secretly connected after all.

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Phillip Whitlowe turned a year old and was obviously going to be ahead of his age group all his life. From all the early signs,
he was as smart as Margaret and Darrow. He was a touchy child, though, given to tantrums, and not much interested in Spooner.
You could say that from the very first he preferred being with his own kind.

T
he grass grew, Spooner mowed it. Every Saturday, year after year. In winter, he shoveled the snow. On days he forgot, he would
come home and find Calmer doing the job.

I
t was summer and Margaret was headed off to Harvard in the fall. She’d been the homecoming queen in high school, a cheerleader,
perfect grades, on and on—if they’d stayed in Georgia somebody would have built her a statue.

This particular morning, as they crossed the state line into Iowa, she’d turned to Spooner and said, “If I wanted to, I could
just open the door and jump out of the car.” Spooner didn’t make much of that—the family was on vacation, and who hadn’t thought
of jumping out of the car?—but then a few hours later, as if continuing the same sentence, she dropped this in his lap too:
“And then I’d be dead and rotting too.”

It was two-thirty in the afternoon, and those were the first words she’d spoken to him since the remark about exiting the
vehicle. The family, as mentioned, was on vacation, a merciless trip they took every August from Prairie Glen to Conde, South
Dakota, to visit Cousin Arlo and the rest of Calmer’s more or less living relatives. The old Ford had progressed to the city
limits of Boone, Iowa, and was sitting at the pump in a Sinclair gas station, the regularly scheduled two-thirty break. Spooner
had returned from the men’s room, where Calmer had walked in five seconds too late to catch him pissing in the sink, and was
alone with Margaret in the backseat. She hadn’t gone to the bathroom since they hit the state line, or eaten anything for
breakfast.

Spooner for once did not have to ask what she was talking about, which was their dead father. Spooner had imagined until now
that she pictured him in heaven. Regarding that matter, Spooner had told enough lies of his own to recognize one when he heard
it (and likewise had begun to recognize a certain accidental quality in things that were true), and this particular story—robes
and sandals and angels and harps—was so obviously a string of lies, one after another, each one made up to cover the last
one, that it would have embarrassed him to tell it. He wondered now why he’d assumed all this time that Margaret couldn’t
see that for herself.

She turned away and stared at a silo standing in the farm yard across the highway. “He’s rotting,” she said slowly, as if
she could see it happening, as if the silo were his headstone. “They just bury you, and you rot.”

There is something in sports called refusing the gate; the horse comes to the fence and slams on the brakes and the man in
the lawn-jockey outfit floats on over by himself. Spooner sat in the backseat with Margaret, refusing the gate, unable to
engage the idea that roaming around inside his sister’s brain were thoughts of rotting in the grave. It had been his understanding
from the beginning that he was the one who would think about rotting, etc., leaving Margaret and his brothers free to cogitate
on Voltaire and Tchaikovsky and Calculus, and people of that general ilk.

Calmer came back to the car then with Darrow in one hand—Darrow was getting too heavy for this but still liked being toted
upside down, Calmer holding him by a foot, the way you carry a chicken—and two small bottles of Coke in the other, which he
had by the necks, and handed them through the open window. Spooner took them awkwardly—he had sore fingers—and gave one to
his sister.

Calmer placed Darrow in the front seat and then got in behind the wheel and turned to look at them. “Why so quiet?” he said.

There was no answer, and presently, Calmer laid one of his thick forearms across the seat back and turned to them further,
smiling, vaguely worried, sweat in his hairline. “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord…”

Spooner sat still, holding his Coke bottle in the palm of his hand to protect the tips of his fingers. Normally, he would
have come up with something to say to hide what they’d been talking about, but the revelation of what was going on with Margaret
was skipping through him like a current—a sensation he’d been introduced to only the evening before when he’d tried to blow
the fuses at the Dude Ranch Motel in Davenport by sticking a paper clip into the wall socket. The tips of his fingers had
blistered and hurt now when he even brushed them against his shorts.

“We were talking about dying,” Margaret said.

Just like that.

Calmer nodded, still smiling, no idea what to say. A minute or two later Spooner’s mother emerged from the ladies’ room with
Phillip. He was a strange, lonely sort of kid, Phillip, as precocious in his way as Margaret or Darrow had been but more aware
of the spotlight, a three-year-old who preferred the company of adults to other children, wanting to show off his brain where
it would be appreciated. And you had to admit it was some brain. Privately, Spooner worried he was using it too much, putting
all his eggs in one basket.