Spooner (41 page)

He crossed the line into the Pocket a few minutes later.

Spooner stopped again before he went in, thinking there was something he’d forgotten, or forgotten to do, and stood kitty-corner
from the spot a minute or two, shaking in the cold, thinking, but couldn’t remember what it was.

The main entrance was on the corner; there was a side door farther down the street. He could see inside—a fat boy with red
hair sitting slump-shouldered at the bar, staring at the beer bottle like a picture of his own true love. At the far end of
the bar there were two other customers and the bartender—four citizens in all, grazing their way through life in the Pocket.
Twenty, twenty-five years old, and nothing new left in the world, and the smoke rose up through the artificial light and softened
the scene, as American as the cover of the
Saturday Evening Post
.

Spooner noticed the bar itself, a beautiful old U-shaped bar that obviously had a rosier future than its inhabitants. The
gentrifiers would surely hang on to it even as they tore up everything else and disposed of it, along with the locals.

He opened the door and some of the bar napkins blew off a stack of napkins and floated a little ways and settled on the floor.
The bartender’s face washed in surprise, and in that same moment Spooner realized his mistake, what he couldn’t remember when
he’d been standing across the street looking in. It wasn’t that he shouldn’t have come—although looking back on it, he could
have given that possibility more consideration—but that he’d made no allowance for an audience, and the audience changed everything.
There were only four of them in all—three spectators—but it was still an audience: the fat boy alone and gazing at his bottle,
and two stinky-looking kids sitting together at the other end of the bar, looking him over. Without them—if it had been only
Spooner and the dead boy’s brother—the place would have been as safe as a nursery.

Spooner walked farther in and took a seat. No introductions, everybody there already knew more or less who everybody was.
The three kids picked up their beers and headed in his direction, one of them covering the side door so Spooner couldn’t get
out. The bartender made a small,
don’t kill him yet
gesture, and the others slightly relaxed. The fat boy stirred, and Spooner guessed he was the one who had to be watched.

“Well, here we are,” Spooner said.

And ten minutes later, he came out of the place with most of his upper teeth sheared off at the gum.

I
t was Stanley Faint’s twenty-sixth birthday. He was living these days in a little place in New Jersey where the front door
locked and nobody was fucking anybody in his sink. He’d confided to Spooner that it was a nice enough place but it felt empty.
Tonight, though, he was throwing a party.

Spooner showed up about eleven, pretty much unkissable, with blood-crusted lips split open like the top of the pumpkin pies
his mother always made at Thanksgiving—he hated pumpkin pie—and half his teeth, and had a drink. The ice did not feel good
on the places his teeth were broken off.

“You look like somebody broke your heart,” Stanley said.

Spooner smiled but his lips didn’t feel like his lips anymore, and the gum line where his teeth had been sheared felt strange
and sharp, like the mouth of a fish, and he couldn’t stop running over it with his tongue.

“Things have been strange lately,” he said. He thought of telling Stanley about the panic and the feeling of living in the
third person, and oddly enough, Stanley, alone among his friends, would have understood what he was talking about. But this
was Stanley’s birthday, and his party, and there were a hundred people in the little house, all of them wanting to tell him
stories and hear him bray, and be his amigo. And Spooner, who had never been a line-cutter, only recapped the evening’s highlights
so far.

Hearing the story, Stanley did bray, and a hundred people stopped what they were doing and turned to look.

The point here being that life had kicked Stanley Faint around as much as it could, and for him it was still no end of merriment,
and for Spooner it wasn’t. Spooner had tried optimism for an hour or so one morning—this was months ago, before he started
thinking of himself in the third person—and it exhausted him, physically exhausted him, and by the time he sat down to work
that afternoon he couldn’t write a line.

Stanley asked if he needed to tie up loose ends.

Stanley watched him, waiting for an answer, and Spooner tried to decide if he needed to tie up the loose ends. Shortly, he
found himself wondering where the expression
loose ends
came from, and what sort of loose ends they had been, back in the days when tying them up was important. And if they were
supposed to be tied to something else or to each other. This was all familiar territory—one question mutating into a dozen
other questions, each one a step more removed from the question on the table.

“I guess so,” he said, and it was in fact a guess.

Stanley and Spooner got in Spooner’s company car. Behind the company car were two other cars carrying the following occupants:
an emergency medic/ambulance driver for the city fire department, a trombonist from the Philadelphia Symphony, a judo player
of self-inflated local reputation, Stanley’s pro bono lawyer, and the woman who owned the bookstore in Center City. The little
procession headed back over the Ben Franklin Bridge to Philadelphia and the Pocket. It was midnight and snowing now, and Spooner
sensed his lack of traction with the earth all the way there.

They parked across the street from the bar. There was no one on the street except a man who came out of his row house to move
his car, leaving it double-parked at the end of the block. If the snow kept up, the only cars moving tomorrow would be the
ones that were double-parked tonight.

Stanley said, “Well, Sunshine?”

“Here’s something I hadn’t thought of,” Spooner said. “There might be a gun behind the bar.”

“That’s a thought, all right,” Stanley said, and got out of the car anyway. Once Stanley decided to do something, it was at
that moment officially too late to reconsider, especially over something like the possibility of a pistol or a shotgun behind
a bar. Not a tortured life of second guessing was Stanley Faint’s.

They crossed the street and went into the bar. Spooner, Stanley, the trombonist, the judo guy, the emergency medic, Stanley’s
pro bono attorney. The streets here looked meaner than they had from New Jersey, and the woman from the bookstore reconsidered
and decided to wait in the car. Still, not an unformidable collection of humanity, although Spooner was already squashed,
and the attorney was in his late fifties, a happy, agreeable man of pale, freckled skin who resembled a dumpling.

The bartender and the same three inhabitants were still at their stations. The bartender saw Spooner and then saw that he
was not alone. He was surprised again, and also afraid, and the moment Spooner saw his face he knew there was no shotgun behind
the bar and felt better than he had all night. It was surprising to him how good it felt, knowing he was not about to be shot.

Stanley and Spooner walked directly to the bartender, who at first said he had nothing to say and then began to plead his
case, telling Stanley about his brother and his mother and the newspaper and what Spooner had written. The bartender did not
know that Stanley was at the time the fourth-ranked heavyweight prizefighter in the World Boxing Association, but there are
certain people in this life who explain themselves simply by walking in a door, and the bartender seemed to realize the gist
of Stanley Faint immediately, and also came to see that violence was not the answer to the world’s problems after all.

Stanley listened to the bartender without comment. The bartender took this for a bad signal, although the truth was that Stanley
was listening, that Stanley listened to everything and everybody—except the few people left in his world who still tried to
tell him what to do. And he was not unsympathetic. Stanley had seen firsthand that newspapers were a flawed source of information.
Beyond that, he had a mother of his own, and several brothers.

When the bartender ran out of things to say Stanley turned to Spooner. “What do you want to do?” he said.

It was another crucial moment in Spooner’s personal history, and he had nothing short and to the point to say, not even a
sense of how he would like the place to look when he left. His mouth still hurt when he swallowed, but he could already see
that it was no better to walk into a bar with Stanley and the medic and the judo player and the trombonist and turn the place
into a parking lot than it was for the citizens of Devil’s Pocket to have sheared off his teeth when he’d come in alone earlier.
That was where his mind was now, ethics.

“What do you want to do?” Stanley said again, slower this time, and perhaps a little impatient—not unlike the repo man back
in Florida who’d come for the Mazda. The bartender looked at Spooner and waited to see if he was going to be thrown through
a window, or perhaps the wall, and as this was going on, the fat boy with the red hair, the one Spooner had liked the looks
of even less than the others during his earlier visit, got up from the bar and skipped right past Stanley’s pro bono attorney
and out the side door.

Meanwhile, Spooner and the bartender looked each other over. What Spooner wanted, he decided, was for the bartender to understand
that safety was relative. That even here, nestled in with all his bar-rag friends and neighbors, he couldn’t shear off Spooner’s
teeth with immunity.

“It’s not the same now, is it?” Spooner said.

By way of answer, the bartender glanced at the door where the fat boy with rotten teeth had disappeared. A minute or two had
passed, no more.

“Is it possible,” Stanley said to Spooner, “that sometime this evening you could get to the point?” He seemed edgy, which,
if Spooner had not been absorbed in questions of ethics, he might have correctly seen as a clearer omen to the evening than
finding an open parking space in front of Dirty Frank’s. Stanley was never edgy about the ordinary things that put humans
on edge.

Spooner noticed the snow when the fat boy appeared in the side door again. It was coming down in big, wet flakes, and it was
beautiful falling through the headlights of the two cars parked on the sidewalk just outside. The fat boy came in and stopped,
smiling in some anticipation, and behind him an army of local inhabitants poured through the door, each one carrying a bat
or a tire iron or a taped piece of reinforced steel stolen from some construction site. The establishment’s other door opened
then, and the second wave came in, similarly outfitted, and then for a while this little piece of the Pocket was a wonderful
place to be from, if not to visit.

The little party from New Jersey made its way to the door, and then out the door, and then Spooner and Stanley were somehow
alone among the horde of locals. Where everyone had gone Spooner never knew, but you couldn’t blame anybody for leaving.

Stanley was hit first, one of them sneaking up from behind, the black tire iron in perfect focus even in the night. Stanley
dropped where he stood, and seeing this amazing sight, which no one in Texas or Philadelphia or any of the places in between
had ever seen before, Spooner spotted the flaw in his exit strategy, as they say at congressional hearings, realized that
there was no contingency plan for Stanley’s dying first, and determined that as a gesture he would at least try to make his
way to the boy with the crowbar and bite off his cheek. He took a step or two in that direction, but again there was no traction,
and then he was distracted by the barrel of a ball bat homing in, not a foot away—he could read the label.
Louisville
, it said—and in that same moment, still before the bat arrived, there was a noise from behind, nothing monumental, about
like the snapping of a pencil in half.

So that was it, the way things end. No thoughts of his wife or his child, no settling up accounts, no thoughts at all actually
beyond the desire to bite off that fucker’s cheek. If it had been like this for Pally, he thought, it wasn’t too bad.