Spooner

by Pete Dexter

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

National Book Award-winning author Pete Dexter excels at writing eccentric characters and comical, yet touching, prose. In Spooner, Dexter weaves the tale of Warren Spooner, a troubled boy whose father dies shortly after he’s born. When his mother marries Calmer Ottosson, a decorated Navy officer fallen from grace, Warren is saved by Calmer’s inexhaustible patience. As Warren grows up, the two men forge a bond that will carry them both through the hard times ahead.

Release date: September 5, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 480

Sample

Spooner was born a few minutes previous to daybreak in the historic, honeysuckled little town of Milledgeville, Georgia, in
a makeshift delivery room put together in the waiting area of the medical offices of Dr. Emil Woods, across the street from
and approximately in the crosshairs of a cluster of Confederate artillery pieces guarding the dog-spotted front lawn of the
Greene Street Sons of the Confederacy Retirement Home. It was the first Saturday of December 1956, and the old folks’ home
was on fire.


The birthing itself lacked cotton-picking, and grits, and darkies to do all the work, but otherwise had the history of the
South stamped all over it—misery, besiegement, injustice, smoke enough to sting the eyes (although this was as invisible as
the rest of it in the night air), along with an eerie faint keening in the distance and the aroma of singed hair. Unless that
was in fact somebody cooking grits.


As we pick up the story, though, three days preceding, the retired veterans are snug in their beds, and Spooner is on the
clock but fixing to evacuate the premises no time soon. Minutes pool slowly into hours, and hours into a day, and then spill
over into a new day and another.


And now a resident of the home dozes off with a half-smoked Lucky in his mouth, which falls into his beard, unwashed since
D-day or so and as flammable as a two-month-old Christmas tree, and it all goes up at once.


While back in Dr. Woods’s office, Spooner is still holding on like an abscessed tooth, defying all the laws of the female
apparatus and common sense—not that those two spheres are much overlapped in the experience of the doctor, who is vaguely
in charge of this drama and known locally as something of a droll southern wit. But by now Dr. Woods, like everyone else,
is exhausted as well as terrified of Spooner’s mother Lily, and no droll southern wittage has rolled off his tongue in a long,
long time.


It’s a stalemate, then, the first of thousands Spooner will negotiate with the outside world, yet even as visions of stillborn
livestock and dead mares percolate like a growling stomach through the tiny band of spectators, and Dr. Woods discreetly leaves
the room to refortify from the locked middle drawer of his office desk, and Lily’s sisters, who, sniffing tragedy, have assembled
from as far off as Omaha, Nebraska, but are at this moment huddled together at the hallway window to have a smoke and watch
for jumpers across the street, Spooner’s mother rolls out of bed on her own and gains her feet, and in those first vertical
moments, with one of her hands clutching a visitor’s chair for balance and the other covering her mouth against the possibility
of unpleasant morning breath, she issues Spooner, feet first and the color of an eggplant, the umbilical cord looped around
his neck, like a bare little man dropped through the gallows on the way to the next world.




As it happened, Spooner was second out the door that morning, a few moments behind his better-looking fraternal twin, Clifford,
who, in the way these things often worked out for Spooner’s mother, arrived dead yet precious as life itself, and in the years
of visitation ahead was a comfort to her in a way that none of the others (one before Spooner and two further down the line)
could ever be.


And was forever, secretly, the favorite child.

Due to problems of tone and syntax, not to mention good taste (how, after all, are you supposed to fit a regular baby and a
dead one into the same paragraph without ruining it for them both?), Spooner’s birth was left out of society editor Dixie
Ander’s regular weekly account of local comings and goings in the Milledgeville World Telegraph, and the birth certificate itself was subsequently tossed by Miss Ander’s unmarried first cousin, Charlotte Memms, who at
this point in her career had worked without oversight or supervision for thirty-six years in the Baldwin County Office of
Registrations and Certificates, filing and discarding documents as she saw fit. There was a soaking rain on the day that news
of Spooner’s birth arrived on her desk, and the afternoon before one of the Stamps niggers from down in the Bottoms had driven
his turkey truck into town, parked in Miss Charlotte’s just-vacated spot in the courthouse parking lot and promptly got himself
arrested inside, sassing the county clerk over the poultry tax, and Miss Charlotte saw that truck full of turkeys in her regular
spot when she came to work in the morning, half of them drowned, and decided then and there that she’d had enough—she was
tired of being taken for granted and tired of people without manners—and so it happened that until the census board caught
up with her the following year, the rule of thumb in Baldwin County was that you did not get born here without references.


Which is not meant to leave the impression that the birth went unrecorded. In Lily Spooner’s log of unspeakable ordeals, it
was never lower than number five, and Lily, it could be said, had made her bones in matters of the unspeakable and knew the
real goods when she saw it. And was wolfishly jealous of what was hers. And had Spooner’s brother only hung around a day or
two, long enough to break bread, as they say, the tragedy might very well have made it all the way to the top.


Even so, no one even casually of Lily’s acquaintance thought of suggesting that he appreciated what she had endured, certainly
no doctor or relative, and if some afternoon a month or a year after the event, perhaps in the throes of an asthma attack,
she suddenly compared the grittiness of birthing twins—she lost one, you know—to a battlefield amputation, who was going to
argue the point? You? Are you crazy? She said things like this just daring someone like you to say something like that. Daring
you to say anything at all. And you wouldn’t, not even if you were standing there in the uniform of the United States Army,
sprouting ribbons and medals on your chest like rows of porch pansies and peeking over the foot of her bed on stumps. You
wouldn’t, because hanging over this opera was the strange possibility that she had suffered beyond what you could understand, or imagine, and to demonstrate her vantage in the field, she could easily refuse
food for a week and simply live off bad luck and misfortune. And how would you feel then?


But hold on a minute, you’re thinking, sustain life on nothing but bad luck and misfortune?

To borrow one of Lily’s many lifelong expressions which always ran an involuntary shudder through Spooner, you darn tootin’.
Bad luck and misfortune. You probably have to see it for yourself to see it, but the model is there in any grade school history
book, in the carefree wanderings of our predecessor, the migratory Sioux, happy as a clam out on the prairie, employing every
last bit of his buffalo right down to the molars. Which is the way you live off misfortune and bad luck, using everything, the same way you live off the pitiful salary paid to public schoolteachers. Waste not, want not.


Which could have been the family motto, if the family had had a motto, which it didn’t. As the cowboys say, they is some things
you can get a rope around and some things you isn’t.




So in fairness to Spooner’s mother, it was an exhausting delivery at the end of an exhausting month: the heartbreak of Eisenhower
over Adlai Stevenson (again), followed by the death of her father, followed by the sudden and mysterious illness of her husband
Ward, followed by this luckless, endless labor leading to the death of Spooner’s better-looking twin brother Clifford, her
firstborn son.


And what came next? What did she have to show for her suffering?

Spooner.

Warren Whitlowe Spooner, five pounds, no ounces, fifty-three hours just getting through the door. Dr. Woods, who had predicted
an easy birth, was humbled by and unable to influence the struggle taking place on his table and, before it was over was visiting
the silver flask (Sigma Alpha Epsilon, University of Georgia, class of 1921) in his locked desk drawer so often that he’d
quit locking it and was reduced to encouraging prayer and trying to keep the uneasy peace among the various family factions
who had traveled to Georgia to help out, due to Ward’s sudden and mysterious condition.


As for Ward, he spent the entire fifty-three-hour delivery at home with Spooner’s sister Margaret, too weak even to drive
Lily to the clinic when her water broke. And in spite of his previously unblemished record, the whole episode sniffed of neglect
to Lily, but due to her own condition she was unable to get to the bottom of it then, and had to put off the investigation
until later. When, of course, it was too late.


“Sometimes with twins,” the doctor said that second day—several times, in fact, as he drank and forgot what he’d said before,
“they isn’t either one of them that wants to come out first.”


On the same day Warren Spooner was born, December 1, 1956, a 360-pound, eight-term U.S. congressman named Rudolph Toebox jerked
up out of his seat on the forty-yard line at Municipal Stadium in South Philadelphia—a hot dog vendor would tell the first
reporter on the scene, “Dat big man come up outde heah like he hook on to a fishin’ poe!”—rising to almost his full height
before turning over in the air and flopping back onto two of the most expensive seats in Municipal Stadium, where he died
sunny-side up across his wife’s lap, in a sleet storm, during the third quarter of the Army-Navy football game. Her name was
Iris.


The wife didn’t scream or try to save him, only sat where she was, motionless, letting the news settle, watching the sleet
glaze over Rudy’s glasses, her tiny, gloved hand resting across the expanse of his stomach. Dead weight. Two Teddy Roosevelts.
Her mind took a strange drift, as it tended to do in moments of embarrassment, and she pictured how much worse it might have
been if this had happened earlier, in their room at the Bellevue-Stratford, where Rudy, as was his habit, had been standing
at the window looking down at the common folk, naked as a jaybird save his cigar and the pair of python-skin cowboy boots
he was wearing everywhere these days and which he could not get into or out of by himself. Could she have gotten him dressed
before she called for help? Or even taken off the damn boots? And what if he’d fallen the other way, through the window?


She noticed the stitching had come out of his zipper, and the button at the waist had popped off. He was always outgrowing
his pants. Big-boned, his mother said. But then, his mother was also big-boned, in that same way. His father, at the other
end of things, had been pint-size and full of squint, one of those mean little fellows you run into now and then out west,
always spoiling for a fight, who just can’t leave a woman with a wide bottom alone.


Iris shifted out from under the press of his weight and he rolled off her knees and wedged between her shins and the seat
back in front of them. Pinning her legs. A little air came out of him; it sounded like he’d sighed.


He was dead, though. Her people were all ranchers from west of the river, and she recognized a dead thing when she saw it,
had seen the exact expression that just crossed her husband’s face a hundred times in the slaughter shed, where the animals
that they kept for themselves were butchered and, eerily enough, where Grandma Macon also cashed in one afternoon, in front
of her, attending to the slaughter of a pig. In those days it was Iris’s job to scrub down the floor with bleach before the
blood congealed and turned slippery and left the scent of slaughter in the cement. Like anything else, pigs could be dangerous
when they smelled it coming.


On the morning she was remembering now—it was sometime in the week after Christmas—she’d stood in the doorway with a hose
and a bucket and a mop, the nozzle leaking a spray of icy water through her fingers, and watched the look of dying drop over
the pig’s face—like a cloud had crossed the sun—and then, with that same miraculous speed of shadows and clouds, cross the
room to Grandma Macon and pass over her face too, as abruptly as the squirt of the animal’s blood had a moment earlier jumped
into her hair.


Grandma Macon’s expression turned into that expression when the bottom drops out of your garbage bag. Iris had seen it enough
to know that by the time you felt it coming loose, it was already too late—eggshells, Kotex, coffee grounds, a Band-aid with
body hair stuck in the adhesive, that little bag of turkey organs they stick inside the bird at the factory, like they were
sending it out into the world with a sack lunch—and there was no stopping it then. The mess was there for anybody to see,
and had to be cleaned up.


And the people in the stands around them were beginning to move now, some trying to get away, some calling for doctors, one
man shouting, “Air, give him air!” The embarrassment of dying, the odor. My God, he’d messed his trousers.


“Air!” the man shouted. “Air…”

They had been married, Iris and Rudy, in a little church overlooking the great river and its valley, an old windmill creaking
outside a stained-glass window propped open with a chalkboard eraser. Thirty-one years together, and now this.


She was forty-seven; he was forty-nine, the only man she’d ever suffered. She reached down to him, wedged in against the seat,
and took the glasses off his nose. She put them in her pocket, thinking, Just like that.


On the upside, even at the moment itself, it was not hard to see that there would be life after Toebox. Not that Iris didn’t
care, only that she would clearly survive. She found it was hard to take his death personally.


This was also the feeling back home, more or less, when word reached his constituents. It was like Montgomery Ward had gone
out of business.


Not that Toebox was particularly worse than the other great public servants of his time, and in fact was in some ways probably
better, at least kept in closer contact with the people. He probably knew a thousand of them by name—he had a trick of memory
that helped him match names with faces—and this trick had naturally fostered in him the conceit that he was irreplaceable,
which is a common enough conceit in the business, although in the hard light of day, Rudolph Toebox, like so many of his colleagues,
was exactly as irreplaceable as the laces in your shoes.


He was drinking peppermint schnapps out of a leather-covered flask when the end came, sweating even in the cold, and had been
trying to distract himself from an oncoming bout of food poisoning ever since he ate the hot dogs at the beginning of the
second quarter. Three of them, heavy on the sauerkraut and onions. And now the same gimped-up little nigger harnessed into
the aluminum box had reappeared at the end of the row of seats and was standing there, trying to get his attention, trying
to sell him three more.


“Three mo’, big man. Three mo’…”

The congressman ignored the vendor and concentrated on the problem. As it happened, he was known in Washington as a problem
solver, and had his secrets for that too. One secret, actually, as at heart, like so many other distinguished public servants,
he was a surprisingly simple fellow. A one-solution man, in fact.


No sudden moves.

That was the ticket. Long years of public servitude on behalf of one of the vast and barren regions of America—a thousand
speeches at one-room schoolhouse graduations, at co-ops and churches and VFW halls—had taught him firsthand the nature of
life on the prairie, and he had come to understand that nothing out there, not beast nor fowl, liked things to move suddenly;
that sudden movement was always an invitation to stampede. Cattle, geese, bison, chickens, the common man: They were all the
same, and now, in a moment of insight just before the end, he saw his theory also applied to diarrhea. Who knew, it might
have been the key to the universe.


Too late for that, though. The seats he’d been given, wonderful as they were, were fifty yards from the closest bathrooms,
and there was not a chance of making it. He didn’t have the time; he didn’t have the strength. He was weak in a way now that
went beyond all the ways he had been weak before. In Toebox’s final moments, he could not have lifted his own bosom.


Which was why, even suffocating in his coat, he hadn’t been up to moving around enough to take it off. Instead, he sat inside
it and sweated. The coat was made of vicuña and had been given to him for Christmas the previous year by the nation of Bolivia,
along with a matching hat. Iris didn’t care for the hat and worried that it made him look like a Communist, but Toebox wore
it anyway. He loved hats, and here, if you’d like to see it, is a list of the ones she cleaned out of the Washington apartment
later that week after she got back from the funeral: an Elk’s cap, an honorary deputy sheriff’s hat, a mortarboard he got
from the state university where he received his honorary Ph.D., several Stetson cowboy hats that were presented to him as
mementos for serving as grand marshal of various parades and rodeos in the western regions of his district, a Brooks Brothers
fedora he was given—along with a pin-striped, double-breasted blue suit—when he toured the plant, a Beefeater’s hat like the
ones the guards wear at Buckingham Palace (a gift from the British ambassador to the U.N.), a Japanese helmet with a bullet
hole through the side—the only one he paid for himself—and a yarmulke he got at some Jewish deal that he never did find out
what it was supposed to be about.


Back in the home district Toebox was known variously as A Man of Many Hats and Your Voice in Washington and The Working Congressman—there
were highway signs that said those things everywhere you went—but while he was in fact many-hatted, and undeniably had a certain
voice in Washington (forty-yard-line seats to the Army-Navy game spoke for themselves), the only work he’d ever done that
you could call work was a stint in the U.S. Navy, where his specialty was waxing floors. Toebox’s floor waxing occurred in
1942, early in the war, and led to a Purple Heart when he stepped into a puddle of water as he operated the waxing machine,
briefly dancing out into the land of cardiac arrest, then was brought back more or less along the same route, when a medic
hooked up his toes to the same outlet, more or less inventing the defibrillator. After that, he would not even plug in a toaster,
and was eventually designated Section 8 and sent home to Iris.


And there, as the district’s first war hero returned live from combat, he ran for and was elected to public office, and spoke
mysteriously of the hidden scars of war, and while he was not reluctant to wear his medals and ribbons at parades and VFW
speeches and appearances at high school gymnasiums, the specific incident behind his own hidden scars Toebox would not discuss.
More than once some smart little crapper in the audience asked if he’d smothered an enemy grenade—there was always one at
every school assembly bringing his size into it—and he would eye the kid for a long minute before he answered, pointing him
out for the principal to deal with later, and say the same thing: “The real heroes didn’t come back, son.” Which would shut
the kid up, all right, and as a rule dropped the rest of them into a respectful silence too.


The farmers and ranchers in Toebox’s part of the country were appreciative of his visits to their children’s schools and his
stand against higher taxes to raise the salaries of teachers and other public workers, and liked his billboards and his short,
snappy-looking wife, and he was elected again and again.


His district was the entire state, a flat, dry rectangle of prairie and plains out in that part of the country that is all
rectangles and plains, and occupied by farmers and ranchers and the salesmen in ties half a foot wide who followed them, selling
them Oldsmobiles and John Deere tractors. Yet, in spite of the congressman’s prairie roots, and hers, Iris decided to have
the body buried at sea. Perhaps because of his service in the navy—he’d won the Purple Heart, after all—or perhaps it was
the expense. It was not the cheapest thing in the world to ship 360-odd pounds across the country, especially refrigerated,
which in itself seemed like a ridiculous waste of money at this time of year. Iris had spent her twenties in the Great Depression
and had seen hard times and was tight with a dollar.


But whatever the reason she decided that her husband should be returned to the sea instead of the prairie, the point here
is the way things happen—in this case, the end of the congressman and the beginning of Spooner—the long way around telling
you that after a sparsely attended funeral, Toebox’s casket was driven to the naval station in South Philadelphia, and the
next morning loaded on board the U.S.S. Buck Whittemore, a 2,800-ton Forrest Sherman–class destroyer under the command of Commander Calmer Ottosson, a polite, soft-spoken farm boy
from South Dakota turned wunderkind at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, turned youngest commander in the United States
Navy, and now, still polite and soft-spoken, plainly an officer on the fast track to the top.


Except things morbid and unexpected happened one after another that day on the Buck Whittemore, and after that day, the only place Calmer Ottosson was going as far as the navy was concerned was back to wherever he came
from, the sooner the better.


And which accounts, indirectly, for how he became Spooner’s father.

Calmer Ottosson had not received the coffin containing Rudolph Toebox gladly. The congressman came with reporters and photographers,
for one thing, and a widow and a congressional aide and other congressmen and their congressional aides, and Calmer, who didn’t
like on-board ceremonies in the first place, or, now that he thought it over, on-board politicians, resented the waste of
money and time just to drop one over the side. In this way he was unlike most of his classmates back at Annapolis, who were
drawn into the service by ceremony and/or the uniform itself.


But then, Calmer was bare-bones itself. Except for physical-education classes, he’d had no social life at all at the academy,
no girls, no card games, no sports, no fistfights, very little self-abuse. He was reclusive and self-reliant, never comfortable
asking for anything, even the salt and pepper. His only authorized activity beyond the ordinary academic life of a midshipman
was caring for the school’s mascot, Bill, a sweet, low-key angora goat whom he fed and groomed throughout his junior and senior
years, and for whom he kept a secret, oddly romantic diary entitled The Quiet Yearnings of Bill, a Castrated Goat.


He held himself to a short regimen of nightly calisthenics and taught himself to write with his feet. This foot writing was
accomplished by holding a pencil between his second and third toes (counting from the inside out), and before he gave it up
he could write in script or block letters and even turn the pencil around and erase his mistakes.


He was a natural student with a tireless curiosity and could stay awake forty-eight hours and still think clearly over an
exam. He played the piano and did square roots in his head, and could read sheet music and in some way hear it almost as if
he were remembering it.


He kept these things to himself and kept himself apart, yet never seemed to stir the kind of resentment and misunderstandings
that you might expect, this sort of person in this sort of place. And nothing about this ever changed. Sixth in his class
at Annapolis, first at flight school in Memphis, and right to the end had no enemies below or above.




If the question occurs to you as to how or why a human being teaches himself to write with his feet, it began, at least in
this case, with a letter from home. Calmer’s mother wrote all the letters and cards that came out of the house, and he received
one every week, Wednesday or Thursday, usually six pages long, as it was her habit to compose a page a day, usually after
the supper dishes were done, and rest on the Sabbath. The letters were full of weather forecasts, crop reports, news of broken
drive belts, what the coyotes had killed while she and Dad were at church (My, but the varmint has got Father’s dander up this time! He’s still setting up there in the upstairs bathroom window with
his 30-30 and a flashlight, wouldn’t even come down for supper…), stories of broken fences and heartburn, car wrecks, tractor accidents. And newspaper clippings. Sometimes it seemed like
she’d clipped the whole Conde Record. Winners and losers of the turkey shoot down at the Rod and Gun Club, football scores, honor rolls, high school graduations,
marriages, births, obituaries. The letters were always signed Love, Father and Mom.

It was toward the end of one of her letters, after a detailed, strangely nonpartisan account of a monthlong battle of wits
between Father and a weasel that was raising cain in the henhouse that she dropped in the news about Arlo:


I suppose you heard by now that Cousin Arlo finally run out of Luck with that polar bear in Minneapolis and had Three Fingers
de-gloved on his left hand, which I am given to understand means the bear got it all but the Bones, which the docs proceeded
to Lop off at the hospital anyways. He made all the papers and the UPI news wire, and said he didn’t blame nobody at the Zoo,
lest of all the bear, who was just doing the job she was hired to do. Just his luck to be left handed! I am certain he’ll
be looking at those missing fingers for the rest of his Life, and think about what a darn Fool he was to be getting drunk
with that crowd in the first place. But that’s Arlo for you, the one that’s always got to find out everything for himself.

And off this news, Calmer taught himself to write with his feet. More out of curiosity than sympathy, wondering what he would
do if he lost his own fingers. As the fitness reports always said—right up until the day he was ruined—Calmer Ottosson was
an officer prepared for contingencies.


But more to the point, teaching himself to write with his feet was the sort of thing he had been up to all his life. Making
his own fun, as the great writer called it.


But then, like the great writer, he’d grown up alone.

An adopted only child on a break-even two-hundred-acre farm fourteen miles southeast of Conde, South Dakota, a tiny spot up
in the northeast corner of the map near Aberdeen, who at seven years old enjoyed sitting barefoot in a plowed field, balancing
his father’s helmet from the war on his head and firing his single-shot Remington .22 into the air, correcting for the breeze
as the little puffs of dust appeared in the spots where the bullets landed, trying to bring one right in on top of his head.
He was a child who listened to what he was told and never bragged about his good marks at school or his shooting, just as
years later, at the academy, he never mentioned that he could write with his feet. Not to anyone there, not in any of his
letters home. Not even the ones to Cousin Arlo, although Arlo would have been tickled to hear of it—Arlo was everybody’s favorite,
and not just because he led a colorful life and visited the twin cities and Chicago and came home with stories on himself,
but also because, unlike the rest of them, he kn