Spooner

Pete Dexter

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781848873407
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857893024
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Oddball, accident-prone Warren Spooner doesn't so much get along with life as crash into it head-on. Through the awkward scrapes of his childhood, to a violent and troubled adulthood, the young man is nothing if not resilient, standing up to adversity in his own dark (often extremely dark) ways.

Hilarious and heartbreaking, US National Book Award-winner Pete Dexter's autobiographical magnum opus is nothing short of a tragicomic tour de force.

PART ONE

Milledgeville

ONE

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.

TWO

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.”

THREE

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.

FOUR

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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Part One
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Nine
• Part Two
• Ten
• Eleven
• Twelve
• Thirteen
• Fourteen
• Fifteen
• Sixteen
• Seventeen
• Eighteen
• Nineteen
• Part Three
• Twenty
• Twenty-One
• Twenty-Two
• Twenty-Three
• Twenty-Four
• Twenty-Five
• Twenty-Six
• Twenty-Seven
• Twenty-Eight
• Twenty-Nine
• Thirty
• Part Four
• Thirty-One
• Thirty-Two
• Thirty-Three
• Thirty-Four
• Thirty-Five
• Thirty-Six
• Thirty-Seven
• Thirty-Eight
• Thirty-Nine
• Forty
• Forty-One
• Forty-Two
• Forty-Three
• Forty-Four
• Forty-Five
• Forty-Six
• Forty-Seven
• Forty-Eight
• Forty-Nine
• Fifty
• Fifty-One
• Fifty-Two
• Fifty-Three
• Part Five
• Fifty-Four
• Fifty-Five
• Fifty-Six
• Fifty-Seven
• Fifty-Eight
• Fifty-Nine
• Part Six
• Sixty
• Sixty-One
• Sixty-Two
• Sixty-Three
• Sixty-Four
• Sixty-Five
• Sixty-Six
• Sixty-Seven
• Part Seven
• Sixty-Eight
• Sixty-Nine
• Seventy
• Seventy-One
• Seventy-Two
• Seventy-Three
• Seventy-Four
• Seventy-Five
• Part Eight
• Seventy-Six
• Seventy-Seven
• Seventy-Eight
• Seventy-Nine
• Eighty
• Eighty-One
• Eighty-Two
• Eighty-Three
• Eighty-Four
• Eighty-Five
• Eighty-Six
• Eighty-Seven
• Eighty-Eight
• Eighty-Nine
• Ninety
• Ninety-One
• Ninety-Two
• Ninety-Three
• Acknowledgements