Pete Dexter - Spooner

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright 2009 Pete Dexter

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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First eBook Edition: September 2009

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ISBN: 978-0-446-55816-7

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For Cousin Bill and Mrs. Dexter

S pooner 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 itmisery, 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. Woodss office, Spooner is still holding on like an abscessed tooth, defying all the laws of the female apparatus and common sensenot 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 Spooners mother Lily, and no droll southern wittage has rolled off his tongue in a long, long time.

Its 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 Lilys 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, Spooners 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 visitors 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 Spooners 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.

D ue 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?), Spooners birth was left out of society editor Dixie Anders regular weekly account of local comings and goings in the Milledgeville World Telegraph, and the birth certificate itself was subsequently tossed by Miss Anders 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 Spooners 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 Charlottes 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 shed had enoughshe was tired of being taken for granted and tired of people without mannersand 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 Spooners 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 Spooners 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 Lilys 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 twinsshe lost one, you knowto 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 wouldnt, 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 wouldnt, 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, youre thinking, sustain life on nothing but bad luck and misfortune?