I met Pete Dexter last fall when he was in New York promoting his seventh novel, Spooner. Dexter was a wonderful newspaper columnist and is now one of our greatest novelists. First thing I noticed about him was that he was wearing a pink Yankees cap. So when I had a chance to interview him the Yankees were the first thing we talked about.

Here is our chat, which covers a lot more than the Bombers.

Enjoy.

Bronx Banter: I had no idea you were a Yankees fan.

Pete Dexter: No, it’s true. I’m a big Yankee fan. It started out as a way to irritate Mrs. Dexter who is a Yankee fan from way back. And so when they’d win I’d get into it just because it irritated her so damn bad, but then I started to look at them and–

BB: When was this, during the ’90s?

PD: Yeah. So when I found out that it irritated Mrs. Dexter I did it more and more. There have been a lot of teams in my life that I’ve rooted against, but I have never rooted for a team in my life before I rooted for the Yankees, including teams I played on.

BB: And the Yankees of all teams.

PD: Yeah, strangely enough. I didn’t even like baseball until the mid-’90s. And I enjoy it more every year. We get all the games on the cable. It’s the only thing that’s worth all the money I spend on cable.

BB: So can you deal with Michael Kay?

PD: Is he the “See Ya” guy?

BB: Yup.

PD: He’s okay, it’s the other two guys from ESPN that drive me crazy.

BB: Joe Morgan and Jon Miller.

PD: Jesus, the go on for hours and hours. Morgan was one of the most exciting players I ever saw and just absolutely the most boring human being on the face of the earth.

BB: Just goes to show there’s no correlation.

PD: Yeah, none at all.

BB: So, did you want to be a writer when you were growing up?

PD: No, never. I took two writing classes at the University of South Dakota but it was just because I found out that I didn’t want to be a mathematician. I started looking through the student book there and saw Creative Writing and figured if I can’t bullshit my way through that then I don’t deserve to graduate, even from the University of South Dakota. But I never took it even semi-seriously. I mean I didn’t read anything until…it’s a true story than when I wrote Deadwood [Dexter’s second novel], my brother Tom called me up and said, “You’ve now written a book longer than any book you’ve ever read.” And that was absolutely true. I stumbled into a newspaper office in Fort Lauderdale. I was 26 or 27 years old and in those days you could actually stumble into a newspaper office and get hired as a reporter. But I don’t have to tell you what it’s like now.

BB: Did you take to reporting pretty quickly or was it just another job?

PD: I hated it. They had me doing–I thought it was a joke actually at first–they came over the first day and gave me a list of seven or eight things and said, “These are your beats.” And I thought it was some kind of initiation rite. You know, juvenile court, the hospital district, poverty programs and tomatoes. There was agricultural products—tomatoes was a separate category. But there were literally seven or eight of them, none of which interested me even remotely. Hell, they gave me a county health thing and there was a doctor who ran the county health department. He was a nice guy and I’d call him up every Sunday night when I came in and ask him if he could stretch something into an epidemic. And he’d say, “Well, we’ve got four cases of measles…you could call that an epidemic.” So every Monday I’d have a story in the paper about a new epidemic. The bigger paper down there was the Fort Lauderdale News. It got the big guy there fired because I kept coming up with new epidemics and he couldn’t come up with any.

BB: Were you still a reporter when you got to Philadelphia?

PD: I went to West Palm as a reporter and then became a kind of feature writer sort of guy. And I didn’t like that very much. I liked it better though because they let me go do some things. I wasn’t sitting in meetings or pretending to. Then I came to the Philly Daily News as a reporter and that was going nowhere. And I was hard enough to have around and a new boss came in and he promoted a guy from within to be the new city editor and then made him the new managing editor/city editor.

BB: This is Gil Spencer?

PD: Yeah. And Spencer called me in…well, first the old city editor went in and tried to have me fired for insubordination and shit and Spencer fired him. Then he called me in and gave me the column. And that was the first time I remember liking being a newspaper guy. And that was probably the best place to write a column in the world. They just left me completely alone. There was no kind of behavior that they wouldn’t tolerate.

BB: So you didn’t have to write off the news then?

PD: No. Just whatever was there, on my mind. Spencer and [Zach] Stalberg. You could work in the newspaper business for a thousand years and not find one editor that was as good as either one of those guys to work for, and I fell into it. I mean I had to wait around for a year-and-a-half for it to happen. When Spencer left, Stallberg took over. And I was about through with it then but you just couldn’t beat those guys.

BB: Did they work closely with you on the text, line editing, or did they give you the freedom to do whatever you wanted to do?

PD: Oh yeah…I’ve never had anybody text edit me in my life. [Laughs] I probably should’ve. No, they just left me alone. And when things got wayout of hand we’d have these little talks. Spencer…well, it’s like in Spooner, he’d lie on that couch with a white cloth over his eyes, smoking two cigarettes at once setting the couch on fire. I’m thinking now of the time with another columnist Larry Fields. Like the guy in the book that I first saw laying there on the sheet with a butcher knife. Fields had a radio show—you probably heard about this. He had a talk show and he invited me in. He’d been there about a month. I brought a bartender and some stuff to drink. And he’d been on one of those liquid protein diets for about three months and he’s a little bitty guy and he’d blown up to about 220 pounds, not an ounce of muscle in his entire body. He’d gotten down to a 150 or something just by drinking liquid protein for months. And he had no tolerance for alcohol it turned out. That was the night, amongst other things, Spencer was accused of having served time in Joliet State Prison for child molestation. It just went from there. We put a chair against the door so that they couldn’t come in and stop the program. The next day Spencer pulls us into the office and he starts this big lecture and he just falls apart. He can’t do it. He was getting calls from Miami to fire both of us. He would never do it. And that’s the kind of guy he was. If you’d put a gun to his head that day and said, “You either fire Dexter and Fields or you’re gone he’d say I’m gone.” That’s just who he was. And you don’t find, especially now—Jesus, you would never find an editor like that. I met Ben Bradlee once and I thought he was an awfully nice guy and probably that kind of person that if you worked for him…

BB: He’d go to bat for you no matter what.

PD: Yeah. But I don’t think there’s very many of them.

BB: What was it like for you when you started writing columns?

PD: The size of it and the shape of it came naturally. I look back the very early stuff and some of it is okay and some of its not. But I look back and see myself learning things as I was going along. It probably would have been a lot harder if someone was telling me “You don’t want to do this, you don’t want to do that.” But like I said I was left alone and pretty soon being left alone and finding out what people like and what they don’t and what I like and what I didn’t gradually…it wasn’t hard but the reason it wasn’t hard at first was because I didn’t have any idea of what was good and what was bad and then as I did start to realize it, it sort of…as it came to me what I wanted to do, I sort of did it.

BB: Did you sense yourself building towards a novel while you were writing the column?

PD: No. Nothing like that. I don’t have any long-range plans even now. I just always assumed what was going to happen. I’m not a fatalist or anything, but I just assumed things would go some interesting way. And they did. But there was no plan or anything.

BB: So you never felt a desire to be a novelist?

PD: No, not really. I’m sure it went through my head. Like everyone is always saying they want to do that, they sit around bars talking about it, “I’d like to write a novel.” I didn’t even do too much of that. The column was enough for a while. It made me really happy. Christ, it was so much fun. Like I said I was being left alone. Then I did a little magazine stuff, enough to know that I didn’t want to do that.

BB: Was this the stuff you did for Inside Sports?

PD: Yeah and Esquire and Playboy, I think.

BB: Did fiction ever creep into your journalism? Because some of your columns almost read like short stories.

PD: They were certainly framed like that. Nothing was ever made up whole cloth but the quotes and stuff…if someone said something to me and it could be said better by half, I’d clean it up, instead of writing the whole thing. I’d do that without any sense of guilt or anything. To answer your question, yeah, I wasn’t exactly writing fiction but I was using those techniques, or some of the techniques that I know about now. I just felt like I was writing newspaper columns. I didn’t really know about newspaper columns until I came to Philadelphia. I never saw Royko’s stuff, or [Jimmy] Breslin’s, or Pete’s [Hamill], or anybody, even when I was working in the Florida papers.

BB: So you didn’t model yourself after any particular columnist?

PD: I didn’t know about any of ‘em. When I came to Philly there was a columnist named Tom Fox who went around saying he was the best columnist in America. Someone had once said that about him. There’s a lot of these guys…a guy like Royko didn’t brag, neither did Hamill. Breslin did, Tom Fox did. Fox wasn’t even the best columnist at our newspaper. That was a guy named Larry McMullen, who was just starting out. He’d been a columnist maybe two-or three years when I got there and I noticed what he was doing. When he was good he was just telling stories, stories about South Philly. And he really was good. I’ve never seen a better fit for a columnist, a city and a newspaper than Larry McMullen at the Philadelphia Daily News. I didn’t copy him or anything but if anyone woke me up to the fact that this kind of writing was going on in the world, of what was possible, it was McMullen. When I saw it, I immediately wanted to do that. And for a long time, or what seemed like a long time to me, it wasn’t really that long, it seemed that nobody was going to give me a shot to at anything like that. I couldn’t stand the city editor. And there was just a series of guys, these ambitious cocksuckers that you find everywhere who don’t really know what they are doing. They’re everywhere. Those guys are generally, it’s part of their protective mechanism, they’re not going to give anybody with more talent than they have a shot at being something that they can’t control. They’re just not. On the few occasions that I went out and did something before I became a columnist…you always hear newspaper guys sitting around bars complaining about their leads being cut and shit, but they’d take a piece and cripple it and I guess they’d feel good about it without knowing what they had done. So there it was.

BB: Did you ever feel constrained by the 800-count word count for a column?

PD: No, because if I wanted to go 2,000 words, they’d run that. The 800-word column is a natural space for telling a little story.

BB: So when you started God’s Pocket, your first novel—while you were recuperating from the fight you got into along with Tex Cobb down in South Philly—was it is a difficult adjustment, going from writing a column to a book? Did you just sit down and start writing or did you plan the novel and outline it?

PD: No, God, I’ve never outlined a book in my life. You know, I had my brains scrambled pretty good and one of the results was that it changed the way things tasted for me. And one of those things was alcohol. I got to the point where I just couldn’t put it in my mouth. Pretty soon, as much time as I’d spent in bars, and as many great stories as I saw happen in bars, if you’re sitting there not drinking, by 11:00 it gets pretty old, sloppy people hanging on you. So I started writing about being in the gym more. Not that I was a barroom columnist but on average there was one good funny story a week in those bars. But there was also one funny story a week at Rosati’s Gym too. I can’t even remember deliberately starting a novel I just remember one day before work playing around with it and the next thing I knew something was published and I’d read it and got horrified just before it came out. I thought it was way worse than it actually was. But I was like, “I just embarrassed myself.” It was nothing great but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I thought. The harder one to do was Deadwood. The first one, you are not a novelist, just because you wrote one novel. But I set out deliberately to write the second one and had in mind that this is what I was going to do, for a little while anyway. All of a sudden I had to take it more seriously because I was going to spend the time. I’ve never had writer’s block or anything but I took it more seriously the second time.

BB: Did you feel like you hit a stride when you wrote Paris Trout?

PD: No. There was no feeling from one book to another that I’d hit my stride. Something in me doesn’t think that way. None of the novels I’ve written matter. What matters is what I write today and tomorrow. When something’s done, it’s done. I’m removed from it. I have a real rooting interest how the books sells any everything and how it’s treated critically, but the truth is I’m not with it anymore, it’s out there by itself. My focus is on the next thing. I just started writing a book about elephants so that’s what I’m thinking about right now, elephants. I’m not thinking about Spooner. I’m not with Spooner anymore.

BB: So did the success of Paris Trout get in your head at all, in terms of feeling pressure to have the next book meet a certain standard, either critically or financially?

PD: It wasn’t that successful until it won a prize. What I couldn’t believe, they gave me the book award and the next year they gave the award to somebody else. I said, “Wait a minute.”

BB: You thought you had the patent on it?

PD: Well, I didn’t know. I couldn’t believe they gave it away. I didn’t say it was okay. The book did me some good economically. I couldn’t tell you in a hundred years what I got for Paris Trout, probably something like $35,000 I’m guessing. I know I got $8,000 for God’s Pocket, and Deadwood I did for so little that Random House felt guilty and gave me a little extra money when I turned it in. After Paris Trout, after winning the National Book Award, all of sudden you are in a different world. Not that it’s independently rich money or anything but…I didn’t quit newspaper writing because of money but at that point I could have. That was the first movie I ever wrote too.

BB: What was that like?

PD: Strangely enough—I understood this right off—a movie and a novel are two entirely different things. There is no way for a novel to be accurately represented on the screen. That just can’t happen. You can make real good movies out of novels but you can’t reproduce a novel. And I didn’t have to have that beaten over my head, I got that going in. When an agent first called and asked, “How’d you feel about adapting your book for the screen?” I remember I said, “I’ll take the money but I don’t know why they don’t just use the book.” I had some idea that they could just agree to a scene out of the book, memorize the lines in it and go do it. I know it sounds kind of naïve but I was a long, slow time coming into each one of these stages of a career writing. Realizing what they involved. The movie stuff still kind of surprises me. Essentially, a script is 120 pages, most of it white space, and the writing doesn’t really matter except the dialogue. That’s the opposite of writing a novel. I knew writing the script wasn’t going to take as long as writing a book or be as much work.

BB: Do you enjoy the process of writing a book?

PD: No. But I did with Spooner and that’s the first time I can say that. Especially the last year. Most people who tell you that they love to write, right away that tells you that they can’t. Then there are people who like it some days and don’t like it others, there’s a chance for them. But if you’re doing it, it’s really hard. I mean, if you are doing it well, you’re occupying a part of your brain that doesn’t want to be occupied. The best lines that you write, at least sometimes, are the truest lines, and they’ll sometimes startle you when they come out. And to get at that place, where things are really true, is often uncomfortable. At least for me. Maybe if I’d lived a nicer life it wouldn’t be. And the work part is not like going into a room that’s too warm for three hours and I’m going to be uncomfortable in it. It’s finding your way there, for me. The hard part is the work part. And you have to do that again and again. You write two or three good sentences and then you have to get it all cranked up again.

BB: Do you work in a linear fashion so that if you write a page one day, that you go over what you’ve written the next day before you continue?

PD: Yeah.

BB: And you don’t know where you’re going?

PD: No. Once I get about two-thirds of the way through I’ll begin to sense it. I know there are writers who outline and there are a hundred ways to do it so I’m not trying to say that my way is any better but to me it’s kind of self-defeating to try and lead this thing around because the interesting thing about it is the characters and where they are taking you. There was a line that Padgett Powell suggested to me about the accidental nature of true things. That’s really true. And it’s not just the accidental nature of incidents but the accidental nature of true sentences and the accidental nature of true pages and chapters and books. And that doesn’t come if you try to work it all out ahead of time like you would with a movie script.

BB: If you are too deliberate you are hemming yourself in.

PD: To me you should be letting it go where it wants to. I used to try and write movie scripts that way. Now you work on a movie and have a meeting with a studio head and tell him you don’t know what the story is going to be but he should trust you…well, you can get away with that for a little while, but then one of your scripts doesn’t get made for some reason, or somebody doesn’t like it for some reason, and word goes out, and then nobody wants to hear that. Especially these days, nobody wants to hear that. They don’t want to put all this money in and take a chance on that.

BB: When you started Spooner, why did you choose to write a novel and not a memoir?

PD: Well, first of because I don’t like the whole memoir craze.

BB: Too self-indulgent?

PD: It’s self-indulgent and largely false. And the truth is I have huge gaps…I have no faith that I could write an accurate memoir. But more to the point, I wouldn’t want to. I’m just not a…I mean, I want to be able to write the story the way…and in a funny way, even though this Spooner character follows a lot of the things I did and goes to a lot of the places I did, I gave him some room. I let him do what he wanted to do. It’s not a memoir at all, it’s a novel. There is as much incorrect in there as there is correct.

BB: In terms of how much he’s like you?

PD: Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of things that happened to me that aren’t in Spooner and there are things in there that are intentionally not the way they happened to me. At the end of the day, this character Spooner is going to end up a lot like me but the way we get there in real life and the way we get there in the novel are sometimes the same way and sometimes completely different.

BB: One of the things that really struck me about the book is how much empathy you had for Spooner. For all the characters really but especially for Spooner. Was he a character that you particularly enjoyed?

PD: You mean Spooner or Calmer?

BB: Spooner.

PD: Oh.

BB: Calmer, I think goes without saying. I think the affection that Spooner has for him and that you, as the writer, have for him, comes across vividly. But I also thought you presented Spooner with a great deal of empathy.

PD: That’s true. I had a lot of empathy for Spooner and a lot of forgiveness for him. There was one other character named Charlie Utter in Deadwood that maybe spoke more directly for me, but Spooner ends up doing things and looking at things a lot the way I do.

BB: He’s not self-reflective either. I thought it was interesting that Spooner has siblings who are so accomplished academically and he doesn’t seem to share their interests or talents in that regard, and yet he winds up as a writer.

PD: That’s one of those places where if I was writing a biography or a memoir, that’s exactly true. Without ever setting out to, a series of circumstances presented themselves, to allow him to become a writer. And that was exactly how it happened for me. I was never any great self-starter or anything. I wasn’t going to be one of those guys who worked 70-hour weeks and then woke up a five o’clock in the morning to work on some secret novel. I never was that guy.

BB: But you did have an ego enough to want to put yourself out there and do it.

PD: I had something. Before I started the first novel I got a called from an agent in New York named Artie Pine who wanted to represent me if I ever wrote something book-length. He was a nice old guy. I ended up with his son, this little dickhead who thought he was important. I fired him for Deadwood. Well, I didn’t fire him exactly, I told him I did the negotiations for Deadwood myself and if he was going to be my agent I had to trust the guy and I didn’t. I said, “I’ll give you ten percent of what I got for this but I want it understood you’re not my agent until I trust you.” He didn’t say anything. I went up to New York and told him this and then he sent me a letter saying he’d invested too much time and trouble and work in his career to put up with that from a first-time novelist. So, shit, that was great. I didn’t really have to fire him. At any rate, it was his father who’d sent me a note about representing me, so I had a pretty good idea that if I did write a book somebody would publish it. And I hope that if I’d gotten halfway through it and realized I couldn’t do it, or that I couldn’t do it well, that I would have known enough to not do it at all.

BB: In the afterward of Spooner you write about how much time you spent cutting stuff out. Was it really hard to you to make those choices and cut it down or was that actually enjoyable?

PD: I didn’t dislike the process. Two hundred and fifty pages were cut and most of it was culling sections, cutting them down. There’s probably 50 pages I cut from the high school section, and 50 pages out of the Philadelphia section. I guess I did sort of enjoy it because as I was doing it I could see I was making it better, and that’s not always the case.There are times I’ll spend a whole night re-writing and cutting stuff and the next day I’ll go in and look at it and could see I’ve uh…I might as well of just died a day earlier because this is worthless. But with Spooner I had the whole book lying there, and I had perspective. I knew where the story was going and what it was about. I always had the feeling that every day it was getting better. I did more than just tighten it. It’s the first book I’ve done where you can see the final version was really a full second draft. It was marketedly different, certainly marketedly shorter.

BB: You also mentioned that you had a group of friends who read versions of the book. Is that something you do with each book or do you generally have a firm sense of what is working by yourself?

PD: I give a copy to [former Esquire and SI senior editor] Rob Fleder because I really trust his instincts. The only thing wrong with Rob as a reader is, he’s such a good guy and an enthusiastic guy, and he’s such a decent human being, if I sent him something he didn’t like…

BB: He’s too gentlemanly to tell you?

PD: He would let me know in some way but he wouldn’t let me know how bad it was. But I really trust his eye. He’s a really smart guy and a really good, experienced reader and you don’t run into those too often. I trust him and listen to what he says. Of course the book editor looks at it and I pay attention to that. My agent, Esther Newberg gets it.

BB: What about Mrs. Dexter?

PD: Mrs. Dexter doesn’t read anything until it comes out. But no, we don’t…I don’t have any idea what that would be like living with somebody who had some opinion of my work, a literary opinion.

BB: That sounds like a relief in a way.

PD: Yeah, if I asked her to do it, she’d do it but it would be reluctantly. One of the nice things about Mrs. Dexter is that she has…I can’t say that she knows what she’s talking about. Nah, I can’t think of anything nice about her. [Laughs]

BB: Pete, you have this incredible eye for detail. Do you find that you notice things in daily life that you’ll later incorporate into something? Do you keep a note pad or scribble down observations?

PD: No, but you do that unconsciously all the time and then when you are trying to draw something out it comes to you that way. And I think that’s better too because if you have some great image and great sentence in your mind you’re going to plug it in when it’s not time to do it. You’re going to plug it in when it doesn’t quite fit. That’s one of the things I learned early on writing columns. You don’t do that.

BB: That requires a lot of discipline. I used to paint a lot and I remember I’d fall in love with a part of the painting but have to have the balls to paint over it if it wasn’t serving the picture as a whole.

PD: Aw, shit, it kills you.

BB: Murder your darlings, isn’t that the phrase?

PD: I hadn’t heard that but it’s true.

BB: Since you’ve been primarily a novelist over the past 25 some odd years have you become a more voracious reader as well?

PD: I’ve become more of a reader, yeah. I was never, and I’m still not voracious. But I read more now. I’ve never really asked my brothers and sister about it specifically but I can’t believe that as smart as they were that when they were fifteen-sixteen and required to read the classics they really understood what they meant. All of them have great memories and all of them were great students and everything but I think there are some things that you just can’t understand when you are fifteen.

BB: Ulysses wasn’t meant to be read by a high school…or college kid, even.

PD: …Yeah, or…

BB: A fifty-year old kid.

PD: [Laughs] Yeah, the second you said that I got a headache, right down the front of my head.

BB: Have there been writers over the years that you’ve read and said, “Oh yeah, this is it, I really like this.”

PD: The first person that I read and understood this is what writing is was Robert Frost. And then the first person I read in terms of reading everything somebody has ever written, and not only having read it but really understand it and love it was Flannery O’Connor. I’ve probably read all of Hemingway. I started in my thirties and my opinion never changed on that stuff and that was his short stories were awful good sometimes. I still think the novels are pretty much unreadable. I’ve read most of the twentieth century Americans probably and a lot of contemporary people. I’ve poked around that stuff enough to know what it’s about and in some cases be really entertained by it.

BB: When you are reading do you find that you are involved in the story first, or are you more absorbed by the craft of it all?

PD: I want the story first but if the craft is bad it’ll get in the way and pretty soon I’ll just put it aside, depending on how bad it is.

BB: And what turns you off? Florid writing?

PD: That and self-important stuff.

BB: So are you of the school that the story is the most important thing and everything that gets in the way is just that, distraction.

PD: Yeah, that’s true if the craft if part of the story. I don’t want to read somebody who goes on for 200 pages beautifully and at the end of 200 pages nothing has happened. I just don’t, whether it’s non-fiction writers or writers of fiction. Then, there’s a guy like Richard Russo. About a year ago the New York Times called me and they wanted to know what was the best novel of the last 25 years. So I stared to think what I’ve really enjoyed. Entertainment is a really important part of a book for me and I was really entertained by Richard Russo’s Straight Man and Nobody’s Fool. All those novels. And there’s a guy—he really is a storyteller. He’s a very competent writer, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not…a great stylist. You are never going to confuse his stuff with Updike but on the other hand, he’s exactly good enough to carry those great stories and those great characters and that warmth that he has about the places and people that he writes about. He’s exactly good enough to do what he does and to me that’s the definition of what it is to be a serious writer. Which is to be good enough to talk about what you’re talking about without being so good that it’s all about your brilliance.

BB: Showing off.

PD: Right, exactly.

BB: So that the style is supposed to serve the story and not the other way around.

PD: I think so. And if you start noticing style, you can sort of admire it, but if you’re stopping every now and then to look at a sentence—unless you are doing it because you love it so much—it gets in the way.

[photo credit: Stuart Isett for the New York Times]

We’re proud to present the following excerpt from Pete Dexter’s new book–his seventh novel–Spooner. This section picks up the story when Spooner is in high school. We just got through Spooner’s adventures on the football team where a sadistic coach named Tinker terrorized a fat kid, Lemonkatz. Spooner’s mother, Lily, is furious with the coach, as she is with many things in life, especially those things that are Republican. Then, young Spooner turns to baseball.

From Spooner:

By Pete Dexter.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Later that year Spooner began his career in organized baseball. The coach of the baseball team was Evelyn Tinker, who in addition to being held almost blameless in the Lemonkatz boy’s injury was now rumored to be collecting sixty bucks a week for the newspaper column, this in spite of Lily’s public campaign to have him fired, and being as Spooner was not old enough yet to have voted for Richard Nixon, this joining of Tinker’s team constituted the single most disloyal thing a child of Lily Whitlowe Ottosson’s had ever done.

How could he?

The question hung in the air at 308 Shabbona Drive, unspoken, like another dead father.

The answer—not that the answer mattered—was that Spooner had stopped at the baseball diamond on the way to the shopping center after school, and watched through the fence as Russell Hodge pitched four innings of a practice game against Crete-Monee, striking out twelve of the thirteen batters he faced. It was a tiny school, Crete-Monee, six hundred students, kindergarten through twelfth grade, and two of the players were only thirteen years old. The smallest one—who wore number thirteen, and was the only batter Russell Hodge did not strike out—was plunked between the shoulder blades as he turned away from an inside fastball, and cried.

Half a dozen times Spooner started to leave but couldn’t, waitingaround to see one more pitch, and in the end hung on the wire fence more than an hour, leaving diamond-shaped imprints on the underside of his forearms, wrists to elbows, taking the measure of Russell Hodge’s throws.

It came to him as he watched that Russell Hodge pitched in much the way he played linebacker, which is to say blind with rage. But it was more difficult in baseball, a game that had very little maiming, to sustain a murderous rage than it was in football, even for Russell Hodge, and after an inning or two Spooner thought he saw him working to conjure it up, sucking from the air every bit of resentment he could find. Giving Russell Hodge his due, even in a practice game against little Crete-Monee, he brought himself again and again to a state just short of foaming at the mouth—furious at the batter, at his own catcher, the umpire, who, behind the mask and protective vest was only Mr. Kopex the math teacher, furious even at the ball itself—and by the end appeared to have lost all his stuff.

* * * *

Monday afternoon, Spooner showed up at the practice field in tennis shoes and shorts. He didn’t have a glove—he’d taken the one he had out of his closet, but it was a toy and he could barely get his hand inside, and if he’d brought that along, he might as well have worn his old cowboy
hat too.

The players were already scattered in the outfield when he arrived, loosening up their arms or throwing each other grounders or fly balls.The student manager was chalking the batters’ boxes. Spooner stood behind the fence, unsure how to announce himself.

Presently, Tinker materialized and blew his whistle, and players jogged in and players jogged out, and pretty soon Mr. Kopex took the mound and threw a few tepid fast balls in the direction of the plate, and the star players took turns and took their cuts, and the players who were not stars chased the balls they hit.

Russell Hodge put one over the fence marking school property boundaries, fouled the next one off, and then lined a screamer back up the middle, catching Mr. Kopex, who’d given him a D in slow-track Introduction to Algebra, in the foot. Mr. Kopex was a large, fleshy fellow and he made one complete turn on the way down, 360 degrees, then lay on his back a long moment, getting his bearings. Here and there were scattered his glasses, his glove, and his cap. Presently he sat up and took off his shoe and sock, revealing a tiny, bone-white, misshapen foot, and lifted it up like a contortionist, cradling it, pulling it up almost to his mouth, and rocked slightly back and forth, staring at Russell Hodge, hoping, Spooner imagined, to get one more shot at him in slow-track algebra.

Coach Tinker went to the mound in a concerned jog but did not tell Mr. Kopex to run it off. Thanks perhaps to young Lemonkatz, Tinker had tamed his wild impulse to make the injured run.

Meanwhile, Russell Hodge was still at the plate, stamping his feet, stoking the fire.

Coach Tinker studied the problem, which in essence was that Mr. Kopex was holding up practice, and pushed back his cap to scratch his head. There was a scar there the shape of a smile from butting Lemonkatz. He nodded to Mr. Kopex and then turned and yelled, “We need a pitcher.”

The other assistant coach, Mr. Speers, the typing teacher, was also a large, fleshy man and, like Mr. Kopex, pigeon-shaped and had seen the line drive hit Mr. Kopex and was coming in from the field, walking at what appeared to be emergency walking speed. Mr. Speers and Mr. Kopex were bachelors and best friends and had volunteered together to coach baseball, thinking they could use the extra $250 the school district paid toward a European trip they hoped to take next summer. They were much alike physically, although Mr. Kopex belted his pants beneath his stomach and Mr. Speers hitched his together just below the nipples. They enjoyed exercise, that is, what they had considered exercise, the outdoors and fresh air and all that, hiking together in the forest preserve, but coaching baseball for Tinker had turned out to be nothing like exercise as they had known it before. On top of that the season was less than two weeks old and Mr. Speers had discovered he was allergic to dust and was runny-eyed and sneezing all the time. For his part, Mr. Kopex had developed hammer toes over the years and worried constantly about someone in spikes stepping on his feet. Unlike Mr. Speers, who wore black high-topped Converse sneakers, Mr. Kopex had played Little League ball in his youth and, as a matter of dignity, spent the money for a new glove and spikes of his own, and had, a few days earlier, admitted to Mr. Speers to a certain stirring at the sound they made as he walked over gravel.

Mr. Speers stood hesitantly over Mr. Kopex now, unsure if it was against the rules to help him up. “Get us off the field, Frank,” Mr. Kopex said, and Mr. Speers nodded at his friend and then bent down and rooted his head through his armpit, and tried to lift him up. Mr. Kopex was a loose handful though, slippery with sweat and pretty soon Mr. Speers gave up his hold on the armpit and fastened on to whatever parts he could fasten on to, and before they had cleared the practice field the two men had more or less reversed positions, with Mr. Kopex in a kind of headlock and making strangling noises as Mr. Speers dragged him off.

Spooner had stopped cold at the sight of Mr. Kopex’s misshapen foot—had the man been tortured in Korea?—and now he also saw Mr. Kopex’s glove, which lay brand-new and halfway open behind the pitching mound, where the imprint of the accident itself could still be seen in the dirt. Spooner thought he could smell the leather.

Tinker called again for a new pitcher, and Spooner walked onto the field, just like he belonged there, straight to Mr. Kopex’s glove. He picked up the glove as if it were his own and retrieved the same ball that had bounced off Mr. Kopex’s ankle. There were another fifty or sixty balls in a basket behind the mound, all of them scuffed and brown with dirt. The glove was still damp from Mr. Kopex’s hand, and Spooner remembered being introduced to him a long time ago at a faculty Christmas party. Spooner might have been eleven or twelve, and Mr. Kopex’s hand was no bigger than his own. He conjured up the feel of that hand exactly, it was like someone had passed him one of Phillip’s wet diapers.

Russell Hodge pounded the plate.

On the sidelines, Mr. Speers eased Mr. Kopex to the ground—not that he had been so far off the ground—and Tinker bent down in front of him with his hands on his knees and proceeded to scruff his hair playfully and compliment him on giving 120 percent, which was all that anybody could ask. Tinker was not easy with those sorts of compliments—for instance, Spooner couldn’t imagine poor stubby-legged Mrs. Tinker getting even an 85 or 90, even if she fucked him on a trapeze.

A certain look came over Mr. Kopex’s face. This was the third day of the second week of practice, meaning Mr. Kopex had been hearing Tinker’s percentages tossed around for nine days, and now, removed from the business of assistant coaching and back on his home turf, he returned fire.

“A hundred and twenty percent of what?” he said.

“A hundred and twenty percent,” Tinker said, as if percentages were self-evident, like your won-lost record.

Mr. Kopex, who was still sitting on the ground and in pain, nevertheless picked up a small stick and drew a circle. “Show me,” he said, and handed him the stick.

Spooner felt a stillness in his heart, waiting to hear Mr. Kopex discuss percentages with Coach Tinker, and likewise could barely breathe in anticipation of pitching to Russell Hodge.

“Let’s say this is the whole,” Mr. Kopex was saying.

Spooner decided to let Russell Hodge wait.

Coach Tinker set his cap back a little on his forehead again—this was his thinking mode—and said, “The whole what?”

“The whole whatever. The whole pie. And what you’re trying to say is that you want it all. You want a hundred percent.”

“It’s not for me,” Tinker said. “It’s for the youth. I want them to learn to give more than a hundred percent.”

Back in the other direction, Russell Hodge was pounding the plate again with his bat.

“Ah, but that’s just the point,” Mr. Kopex said. “One hundred percent is all there is. That is the whole. That is the definition of the whole.”

“The whole what?”

“The pie. The world. Everything. Where is the extra twenty percent?”

Mr. Speers was nodding along as Mr. Kopex spoke, and Coach Tinker was staring at the circle Mr. Kopex had drawn in the dirt, also nodding, as if he saw what Mr. Kopex was getting at too.

Coach Tinker said, “What I’m trying to instill in these individuals is to want a bigger pie,” and he leaned in even closer and looked at Mr. Kopex’s foot, which had blossomed like an orchid. “You might want to tape that,” he said. “Keep moving it around so it doesn’t stiffen up on you.”

Presently Mr. Speers and the student trainer eased themselves under Mr. Kopex’s arms and began to walk him very slowly back in the direction of school.

Tinker had another quick look at the circle Mr. Kopex had drawn in the dirt, then scrubbed it out with his shoe and turned away from the world of geometry and all its inhabitants. He clapped his hands and blew his whistle. “Let’s go, let’s go, move it . . .”

Tinker could not stand to waste practice time.

And all around Spooner the throwing and catching resumed, and Russell Hodge pounded the plate again and cocked the bat and waited for Spooner to feed him the ball.

He had never pitched from a mound before—even the roof of Major Shaker’s chicken house was flat—and as he threw he experienced a sensation like stepping into an unseen swale in the road.

The baseball headed east, just missing the wire backstop, passed a foot over Tinker’s head, curving slightly to the north, and vectored on out in the direction of Mr. Kopex, who was holding his injured foot behind him and a few inches off the ground and using Mr. Speers and the student manager as crutches. It hit him, of course, as Spooner already knew it would, struck him exactly on the knob of the heel of the hammer-toed, orchid-blossomed bare foot that Russell Hodge had just mangled with his line drive.

Mr. Kopex dropped to the ground again, bringing the student manager down with him. He cried out, “Oh, for the love of Christ,” and it sounded like he was begging for mercy, but of course if what you are looking for is mercy, high school isn’t the place for you anyway.

Tinker stared at Spooner, trying to remember who he was, then turned to the outfield and called for a new pitcher. And then headed out to tend to Mr. Kopex again.

One of the second stringers fielding balls in the outfield jogged in to throw batting practice. Spooner watched the kid coming, realizing he’d just gone through all the chances he was ever going to get.

He picked a ball out of the basket and motioned Russell Hodge back to the plate. When he looked again, trying to judge how much time he had left until Tinker returned, Mr. Kopex was writhing in the dirt, in a circular motion around his foot, which seemed strangely fixed to one point, as if somebody had pinned it to the ground with a compass from geometry class.

Russell Hodge pounded the plate and stepped in, pointed his bat at Spooner, aiming at him down the barrel. Spooner laid his fingers carefully across the stitches before he threw, putting a little extra pressure on the middle finger so that the ball would tail to the right, and as a result, the pitch hit Russell Hodge in his deaf ear instead of the mouth.

The sound was like breaking the seal on a pickle jar. Russell Hodge curled on the ground, holding both ears, as if the volume of the world was suddenly turned way too high. The thought passed at a strange, leisurely pace through Spooner’s brain that he’d killed Russell Hodge.

His first whiff of celebrity.

He stayed where he was, looking for signs of life, not really sure if he wanted to see any or not, not even sure if he’d hit him on purpose—if the thought had been there before he let the ball go or if his arm had just taken over. It hadn’t been an accident the way hitting Mr. Kopex was an accident, though. Spooner had known when the ball left his hand where it was headed.

What had Margaret said? “I think they just put you in the ground and you rot”?

* * * *

Tinker knelt beside Russell Hodge and gently rolled him onto his back. “Everybody get back,” he yelled. “Give him air.”

But there wasn’t anybody close enough to suck up Russell Hodge’s air. Most of the players took one look and were inching as far away as they could get. Russell Hodge lay cockeyed in the dust with his eyelids half open, staring off into the blue.

Tinker looked around, frightened. He lifted one of Hodge’s eyelids, stared for a moment and then let it go. He took Hodge’s mouth in his hand, puckering the boy’s lips, and moved his head slowly back and forth. “All right, Hodge,” he said, “let’s shake it off.” But even Tinker—who privately was still of the opinion that running a few laps on a broken femur wasn’t as bad as it looked on paper—even he knew better than that.

He rocked back on his heels, looking at Russell Hodge, and then went forward again and gently fitted his hands under the body—two hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce—and took him up in his arms and stood, and then walked slowly east, back in the direction of school, casting a surprisingly long shadow for a fellow of his height.

Tuesday morning Dr. Baber came on the loudspeaker to announce that Russell Hodge was still in the hospital with a brain injury, but doing well and expected to make a full recovery. A cluster of troublemakers booed from the back of Señor Rosenstein’s second-year Spanish class, where Spooner was at the time, and were sent to Dr. Baber’s office for detention slips. The two cheerleaders in the class both wept in gratitude, and one later claimed to have prayed for his recovery.

Tinker had spent all night and most of the day at Russell’s bedside, and, in the way these things sometimes turn out, news of this simple act of concern went a long way toward repairing his reputation among those who had criticized him after the Lemonkatz affair, and also served as a cooling-off period in another matter, as only last Friday Tinker had caught a student named Richard D. Peck lying under the bleachers reading Othello when he was supposed to be taking the sit-ups portion of his national youth fitness test, and threatened to kill him.

Peck’s family had already notified the school board of its intention to sue.

* * * *

That afternoon found Spooner standing alone as warm-ups began, Mr. Kopex’s glove curled under his chin like a baby’s head. He felt no guilt about stealing the glove, which he viewed as no worse than grave robbing—grave robbing being one of the terms Spooner still misunderstood at this stage of his matriculation, thinking it meant taking something old or unwanted. Kopex had been in the hallway on crutches when Spooner saw him earlier that day between classes, overwhelmed by the movement and jostling and noise, fighting for breath, sweat soaked and old overnight. No, Kopex wouldn’t want the glove anymore, wouldn’t even want it around the house where it could fall out of the closet and remind him of what had happened.

Spooner was thinking of Mr. Kopex and the glove—grave robbing wasn’t stealing, but it must have been something because he kept thinking about it—when Coach Tinker appeared at his side. “Spoonerman,” he said, and Spooner jumped at the sound of his voice, “I know you’re worried about Hodge.”

Spooner nodded, although the only specific worrying he’d done about Russell Hodge was that he would get out of the hospital and kill him. “The best thing you can do,” Tinker said, “is go out there and give it a hundred and twenty percent. That’s what he’d want.”

Two questions at once: Did this mean Hodge was dead, and was Tinker, after everything that had happened, still going to let him pitch? Spooner hadn’t expected another chance. He was now two pitches into his career in organized baseball, after all, and one had taken out the heart of the school’s math department—Mr. Kopex’s heel was cracked, while the roof of the foot, where Hodge’s line drive had drilled him, was only bruised—and the other had possibly killed the greatest all-around athlete in the history of the Prairie Glen High Golden Streaks.

“How is he?” Spooner said. The truth was Hodge dying still didn’t strike him as the worst way this could end.

“Who?”

“Hodge. Is he dead?”

Tinker gave Spooner a little elbow in the ribs, as if he had just told him a joke or wanted to point out a set of tits. It left Spooner’s ribs tender all week. “Don’t worry about old Hodgie,” he said, “he’ll shake it off. You just throw the baseball. Keep us in it until he gets back.”

* * * *

Tinker divided his players into two teams that afternoon and put Spooner on the mound to pitch to both sides.

They played three innings before it rained, Spooner getting used to the mound, to the movement of a new unscuffed baseball, to the sense of the players behind him in the field, depending on what he did. The center of attention. He walked two batters and struck out the other eighteen he faced. No hits, no runs, nobody hurt except the catcher, Ken Jonny, a perfect toad of a kid who, although apparently designed without a neck, was in fact hit twice in the neck when balls skipped over his mitt and under his face mask.

Copyright © 2009 Pete Dexter

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