Spooner (44 page)

And while Mrs. Spooner was tidying him up, a nurse appeared and took his vital signs and his temperature, and then noticed
his lunch tray, sitting just as it had been delivered. Except the beans didn’t look as good as they used to.

“We aren’t hungry this afternoon?” she said.

T
here was no ultimatum. All she said was “You can’t do this to us,” and he knew that was true even if he didn’t know which
us
she meant—Spooner and her, or the baby and her, or maybe all three of them together. She said that—whispered it, really—and
then got up and kissed him on the forehead and left.

Spooner turned his head and saw that Mr. Graves was asleep, twitching his dog-like twitches as he dreamed. He envied Mr. Graves
not just his morphine but his situation. No questions lingered over that broken body, no guilt, nothing of that sort in his
head at all, only an inexhaustible disbelief at what Mrs. Graves had done to his person and his new car. Also, he was apparently
free of the sensation of being flushed down a toilet.

Spooner had begun to think that the sensation of flushing was brought on by too much introspection. It was, in a way, what
had gotten him into this mess in the first place, and now, unable to get to a septic tank or a lawn mower or a typewriter,
there was nothing he could do to make it stop.

Later in the day, two heavies from the X-ray department came in and moved him onto a cart for the ride down to the second
floor for more pictures of his various broken bones, and then to the first floor for pictures of his brain.

The X-ray department boys bounced Spooner going onto the elevator and again coming off. They said, “Sorry, Mr. Spooner,” but
they were furniture movers at heart, and if they’d dropped Spooner down a flight of stairs or even the elevator shaft, they
would have just collected him from the bottom and said, “Sorry, Mr. Spooner,” in that same tone, and delivered him to the
X-ray station as if nothing had happened.

And if anybody asked, he’d been like this when they picked him up.

Mrs. Graves was back in her regular spot when Spooner was wheeled back into the room. She was sobbing quietly into her handkerchief,
which by now was more or less regular too. Mr. Graves was overdue for morphine again and in no mood for the Gospel or taking
pictures, which was all she had at the moment to offer. It appeared to Spooner that the lateness of Mr. Graves’s morphine
deliveries was deliberate; the nurses seemed to have decided that he was spoiled, and even when one of them finally showed
up with the juice it was always administered as if it was against her better judgment, the way you finally give in and cork
the baby with a pacifier to shut it up.

And so Spooner returned and Mrs. Graves was weeping, and Mr. Graves was going over the details of the accident again, how
she had to go and squashed him twice and there was something comforting in the sounds of their voices by now, and he fell
off into a jumpy half sleep.

Calmer came to the hospital right from the airport. His pants were wrinkled and he was still carrying his suitcase. The suitcase
had been in Calmer’s family fifty years, and the leather was soft and worn, like an old, favorite baseball glove. He set it
down inside the door, and the weight of the thing was there in the way he stood up.

He looked at Spooner from the doorway, worn out in much the same way he’d been the last time Spooner saw him, after he’d lost
his job and, as he’d put it then, things just stopped. He smiled hesitantly, taking stock, and Spooner saw that he wasn’t
sure he was in the right room.

Spooner said, “It’s me, all right.”

Calmer came farther in and was again momentarily arrested, this time by the sight of Mr. Graves, as everyone was on first
entering the room, and then took the chair where Mrs. Spooner had been sitting earlier and crossed his legs. He began to speak
but didn’t. Spent beyond words.

“It isn’t as bad as it looks,” Spooner said, and remembered that he’d provoked Mrs. Spooner with exactly those words. “It’s
just the stitches…”

Again Calmer seemed about to speak and nothing came out.

“This here the newspaper boss?” Mr. Graves said. “Man, you somethin’, ain’t you? You got fighters and reporters and flowers
comin’ in here like you was big britches.” He’d finally gotten a shot of morphine while Spooner slept, and was floating as
high and happy as the Goodyear blimp.

Calmer looked across Spooner’s body at the man suspended from the ceiling and then stood up to introduce himself.

“This is my father, Calmer Ottosson,” Spooner said. “Calmer, this is Sylvester Graves.”

“Howdy-do.”

Calmer nodded politely and said, “Good to meet you.”

“They got us in here all fucked up together on the nurse schedule,” Mr. Graves said, “but your boy Spooner ain’t complained
once. And he don’t even get nothin’ to make the time pass.”

“He means morphine,” Spooner said. “I don’t get morphine.”

Calmer nodded as if he understood, but in some way the information wasn’t getting all the way through. A minute passed and
he got to his feet and gently fingered the bandages perched on Spooner’s head, like a blind man picking out a melon, then
squeezed his shoulder—as much intimacy as men ever showed one another back in the place he’d come from—and stood over him
awhile, his head bowed in reflection, or exhaustion. And as small as the gesture had been—Calmer putting his hand on Spooner’s
shoulder—it choked Spooner, and for a little while he did not trust himself to talk.

Calmer continued to watch him, and then he finally found the words. He said, “Why this?”

Why this?

Spooner tried to think but nothing came. “It’s just the way things turned out,” he said.

“That’s God’s truth,” Mr. Graves said. “You go to park the car and the missus run over you twice. What is a man to do? You
buy the car, somebody got to park it. Cain’t just drive it around in circles.”

Calmer had turned to Mr. Graves to listen to what he said, and now he looked back at Spooner for a translation.

“Mr. Graves was in a car accident in a parking lot,” Spooner said.

“Yeah, that’s what they callin’ it now,” Sylvester said. “But how you gone run over somebody twiced by accident? How you did
that without malice? That’s what we been trying to get to the bottom of here. You an educated man, sir, what would be your
opinion in regard to the matter, if you was in my place, that is.”

Calmer said, “Well, I like to give a person the benefit of the doubt.”

“Oh, I agree wit that. I agree you there, yessir. But I already married the girl. That’s benefit of the doubt right there.”

“Oh, it was your wife.”

“Yessir, thirty-some years. She keep sayin’ she never done nothin’ like this before, but then again, how long it been festering
around in her to do it? You see what I mean? Her mother like that too, she hit the old man in the head with a car battery,
him asleep in the bed.”

Calmer nodded, considering Mr. Graves’s family situation from one side and then another. Even engaging a stranger, he was
careless with nothing.

“But it was only this once,” Calmer said.

“Once and twiced both,” Mr. Graves said. “All the same time.”

Calmer said, “But it’s not a pattern of behavior.”

“How many times you think I’m gone stand back there while she park the damn car after this?”

“Still,” Calmer said, “it’s not a pattern.”

Mr. Graves said, “That car got six hundred miles on the clock. The first new car I ever drove.”

Perhaps thinking of the Bonneville on the street, perfect and shining, Mr. Graves closed his eyes and dozed off into the morphine,
and Calmer sat back down in the chair next to Spooner, possibly thinking of what he would tell Lily when he called home.

And Spooner slept.

Having Calmer there in the room, knowing he was there with him, Spooner was finally able to sleep.

C
almer carried his suitcase down Market Street toward the train stop that would take him to New Jersey, to wait with Spooner’s
wife until the situation settled out into whatever it would be. He still ached to have somehow been there with her when the
news came in.

It was almost dark and beginning to snow. A freezing wind had come up from the east while he was inside with Spooner, and
people made their way into it sideways or backwards, some of them lifting their spectacles to dab at their eyes with Kleenex.
The bag was heavy and bounced into his legs, and he stumbled as he walked. Inside it, along with his clothes, were some pages
from his journal.

Calmer himself had been hospitalized only once, an infection during his last year at the academy. He’d kept a diary in those
days—two diaries if you counted the one he kept for the goat—as he’d been doing pretty much since he’d learned to read and
write. He’d begun feeding the chickens when he was four and half a century later, if he wanted to do it, he could look up
the name of any hen in his father’s henhouse and the hiding places she used for her eggs. He’d only quit the journal after
he got married and realized that nothing was his own anymore, no place, no time of day, not even for that.

Oddly enough, the same week Calmer came down with his infection, Bill got sick too. The notations from those days included
Bill’s temperature, heart rate, appetite, urination frequency, general alertness, stomach softness, and a certain melancholy
that Calmer had noticed even before the goat’s fever began to spike. These notes ran side by side with Calmer’s own symptoms,
filling a whole sheet of notepaper at the end of each day’s entry, with Calmer’s numbers growing progressively worse until
he was hospitalized, delusional, with a temperature of 105.

He’d found his journals in the basement and brought this part of it along, thinking that, passive as it was, what he’d done—not
reporting to the infirmary until the infection nearly killed him—might bear some resemblance to whatever it was that led Spooner
out to the very edge, and always had. Thinking he might show him the notes, and that Spooner would see it for himself. But
see what? That he’d been in a hospital? That the goat’s heartbeat topped out at 192? That once he almost died himself?

No. He’d left the pages in the suitcase, and here he was again, helpless and uneasy and mostly useless, he supposed, as he’d
been all the boy’s life, and even now, with Spooner lying in the hospital beaten half to death and Calmer fighting his way
down Market Street into the howl of the storm, he felt a quiet strum of apprehension simply at the thought of trying to approach
him on the subject again.

And thinking of how he might go about it this time, he realized that if what he was looking for was a parallel with Spooner,
it was the night he’d finally gone drinking with his classmates from the academy and got up the next morning with a tattoo:

E = mc
²

high on his shoulder.

It wasn’t much, but it was as much damage as he’d ever inflicted on himself intentionally.

Or maybe not. Considering where he was, who he was, how he’d gotten here, maybe not.