Spooner (26 page)

Mr. Kopex dropped to the ground again, bringing the student manager down with him. He cried out, “Oh, for the love of Christ,”
and it sounded like he was begging for mercy, but of course if what you are looking for is mercy, high school isn’t the place
for you anyway.

Tinker stared at Spooner, trying to remember who he was, then turned to the outfield and called for a new pitcher. And then
headed out to tend to Mr. Kopex again.

One of the second stringers fielding balls in the outfield jogged in to throw batting practice. Spooner watched the kid coming,
realizing he’d just gone through all the chances he was ever going to get.

He picked a ball out of the basket and motioned Russell Hodge back to the plate. When he looked again, trying to judge how
much time he had left until Tinker returned, Mr. Kopex was writhing in the dirt, in a circular motion around his foot, which
seemed strangely fixed to one point, as if somebody had pinned it to the ground with a compass from geometry class.

Russell Hodge pounded the plate and stepped in, pointed his bat at Spooner, aiming at him down the barrel. Spooner laid his
fingers carefully across the stitches before he threw, putting a little extra pressure on the middle finger so that the ball
would tail to the right, and as a result, the pitch hit Russell Hodge in his deaf ear instead of the mouth.

The sound was like breaking the seal on a pickle jar. Russell Hodge curled on the ground, holding both ears, as if the volume
of the world was suddenly turned way too high. The thought passed at a strange, leisurely pace through Spooner’s brain that
he’d killed Russell Hodge.

His first whiff of celebrity.

He stayed where he was, looking for signs of life, not really sure if he wanted to see any or not, not even sure if he’d hit
him on purpose—if the thought had been there before he let the ball go or if his arm had just taken over. It hadn’t been an
accident the way hitting Mr. Kopex was an accident, though. Spooner had known when the ball left his hand where it was headed.

What had Margaret said? “I think they just put you in the ground and you rot”?

Tinker knelt beside Russell Hodge and gently rolled him onto his back. “Everybody get back,” he yelled. “Give him air.”

But there wasn’t anybody close enough to suck up Russell Hodge’s air. Most of the players took one look and were inching as
far away as they could get. Russell Hodge lay cockeyed in the dust with his eyelids half open, staring off into the blue.

Tinker looked around, frightened. He lifted one of Hodge’s eyelids, stared for a moment and then let it go. He took Hodge’s
mouth in his hand, puckering the boy’s lips, and moved his head slowly back and forth. “All right, Hodge,” he said, “let’s
shake it off.” But even Tinker—who privately was still of the opinion that running a few laps on a broken femur wasn’t as
bad as it looked on paper—even he knew better than that.

He rocked back on his heels, looking at Russell Hodge, and then went forward again and gently fitted his hands under the body—two
hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce—and took him up in his arms and stood, and then walked slowly east, back in the direction
of school, casting a surprisingly long shadow for a fellow of his height.

Tuesday morning Dr. Baber came on the loudspeaker to announce that Russell Hodge was still in the hospital with a brain injury,
but doing well and expected to make a full recovery. A cluster of troublemakers booed from the back of Señor Rosenstein’s
second-year Spanish class, where Spooner was at the time, and were sent to Dr. Baber’s office for detention slips. The two
cheerleaders in the class both wept in gratitude, and one later claimed to have prayed for his recovery.

Tinker had spent all night and most of the day at Russell’s bedside, and, in the way these things sometimes turn out, news
of this simple act of concern went a long way toward repairing his reputation among those who had criticized him after the
Lemonkatz affair, and also served as a cooling-off period in another matter, as only last Friday Tinker had caught a student
named Richard D. Peck lying under the bleachers reading
Othello
when he was supposed to be taking the sit-ups portion of his national youth fitness test, and threatened to kill him.

Peck’s family had already notified the school board of its intention to sue.

That afternoon found Spooner standing alone as warm-ups began, Mr. Kopex’s glove curled under his chin like a baby’s head.
He felt no guilt about stealing the glove, which he viewed as no worse than grave robbing—
grave robbing
being one of the terms Spooner still misunderstood at this stage of his matriculation, thinking it meant taking something
old or unwanted. Kopex had been in the hallway on crutches when Spooner saw him earlier that day between classes, overwhelmed
by the movement and jostling and noise, fighting for breath, sweat soaked and old overnight. No, Kopex wouldn’t want the glove
anymore, wouldn’t even want it around the house where it could fall out of the closet and remind him of what had happened.

Spooner was thinking of Mr. Kopex and the glove—grave robbing wasn’t stealing, but it must have been something because he
kept thinking about it—when Coach Tinker appeared at his side. “Spoonerman,” he said, and Spooner jumped at the sound of his
voice, “I know you’re worried about Hodge.”

Spooner nodded, although the only specific worrying he’d done about Russell Hodge was that he would get out of the hospital
and kill him.

“The best thing you can do,” Tinker said, “is go out there and give it a hundred and twenty percent. That’s what he’d want.”

Two questions at once: Did this mean Hodge was dead, and was Tinker, after everything that had happened, still going to let
him pitch? Spooner hadn’t expected another chance. He was now two pitches into his career in organized baseball, after all,
and one had taken out the heart of the school’s math department—Mr. Kopex’s heel was cracked, while the roof of the foot,
where Hodge’s line drive had drilled him, was only bruised—and the other had possibly killed the greatest all-around athlete
in the history of the Prairie Glen High Golden Streaks.

“How is he?” Spooner said. The truth was Hodge dying still didn’t strike him as the worst way this could end.

“Who?”

“Hodge. Is he dead?”

Tinker gave Spooner a little elbow in the ribs, as if he had just told him a joke or wanted to point out a set of tits. It
left Spooner’s ribs tender all week. “Don’t worry about old Hodgie,” he said, “he’ll shake it off. You just throw the baseball.
Keep us in it until he gets back.”

Tinker divided his players into two teams that afternoon and put Spooner on the mound to pitch to both sides.

They played three innings before it rained, Spooner getting used to the mound, to the movement of a new unscuffed baseball,
to the sense of the players behind him in the field, depending on what he did. The center of attention. He walked two batters
and struck out the other eighteen he faced. No hits, no runs, nobody hurt except the catcher, Ken Jonny, a perfect toad of
a kid who, although apparently designed without a neck, was in fact hit twice in the neck when balls skipped over his mitt
and under his face mask.

R
ussell Hodge came back to school on Friday morning, looking like he’d been lifting weights in the hospital. He was wearing
a yellow dress shirt, open to the waist. Spooner was sitting in the hallway beside his locker with one foot bare, attaching
a Band-aid to a toe blister, when he apprehended a certain menace in the milieu, as Calmer might say, and looked up to find
Russell Hodge standing over him, looming up there in the hallway’s artificial light, and experienced in that moment a clear
perception of himself as a lawn mower and Russell Hodge as a mower of lawns, about to set his boot on his chest to hold him
in place while he grabbed the starter cord and yanked off his head.

Spooner put his shoe back on and got to his feet and, possibly making a bad situation worse, found himself staring at the
spot where the baseball had broken through Russell’s cranium and momentarily entered his brain. Not that there was much to
see, really, at least no imprint of the ball. Only a short line of thick black stitching farther back on his head where they’d
gone in to ease the pressure and swelling.

Spooner realized now that he was still holding his sock, and realized he’d been staring at Russell Hodge’s head a long time.
Safety-wise, this was like napping on the highway, but he found himself unable to look away, and wondered idly if Coach Tinker
would visit him in the hospital too. He ruminated awhile, there under the gaze of Russell Hodge, coming eventually to the
realization that beyond pain and mortification, what was about to happen would embarrass Calmer and mortify his mother, who
still worked that pump like a spare lung—the disgrace waiting for them all if he was ever in trouble at school. Public humiliation,
a ruinous effect on Calmer’s career, especially now that he was going to be principal. And the newspapers. The newspapers
would have a field day.

Spooner’s mother lived her life with the certain knowledge that the whole thing—cradle to grave—was an ambush. Spooner didn’t
necessarily disagree with that, but had never seen any reason to take it personally. The incident about to occur, for instance,
would end up in the archives as one more piece of evidence that the world was out to ruin
her
.

But even as these things floated through Spooner’s brain, some other information was coming in right behind it. As impossible
as it seemed, Russell Hodge appeared at this moment to be having misgivings, that or had forgotten who Spooner was, or couldn’t
make up his mind how he wanted to kill him.

But wait, it was dread. Spooner saw dread in Russell Hodge, and he knew dread when he saw it like the palm of his hand. These
two things, by the way, dread and masturbation, went together all of Spooner’s life once the reproductive system checked in,
initially preparing him perhaps for all the dilemmas and complexities that would mark the affairs of the heart all his life.