Spooner by Pete Dexter

Author:Pete Dexter [DEXTER, PETE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000
ISBN: 9780446558167
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-SIX

Gilman picked his new city editor from the ranks, a city hall reporter named Stradivarius, and a month later promoted him again, this time to managing editor, and soon came to depend on and love this Stradivarius like his own son, and for that reason more than any other reason also promoted Spooner, giving him a column and an office on the fourteenth floor, where he would not be in Stradivarius’s hair or even his line of sight.

Gilman was lying on the davenport with his eyes covered when he called Spooner in to inform him of the change. A cigarette was going in the ashtray on his stomach. “Nine hundred words,” he said, “three times a week. That’s it.” Yes, Gilman loved the lost causes, and yes, Spooner saw the connection, but took no offense. You might even say that he loved Gilman back.

“Now,” he said to Spooner, not unkindly but pointing in the direction of the window (had he meant to point toward the door?), “please get the fuck out of my office.”

In the years ahead, as they grew more and more familiar, this phrase would become a kind of code between Gilman and Spooner, meaning more or less that Spooner should get the fuck out of Gilman’s office, and Spooner, for reasons unknown, never received these words without a feeling of wild affection for his boss, and never left the man’s office without thinking that someday, when he had the money, he would find a way to repay Gilman, maybe buy him his own jockey.

Much later on the day of the promotion there was a phone call from South Dakota. Ten minutes before Spooner and the dog and the woman with the elegant behind had returned home from a remote spot in the Pine Barrens where they’d drunk several bottles of iced Boone’s Farm apple wine to celebrate Spooner’s new column, and by now had showered and put calamine lotion on the two hundred or so chigger bites they’d collected rolling around in the grass and pine needles, and Spooner picked up the phone, still naked, as the calamine hadn’t dried yet, catching his reflection in the big window at the back of the house, and stared at the image a moment—he did not look good freshly plucked—and even as he stared his mother’s voice was in his ear, telling him that Calmer had just gotten himself fired.

That was how she put it, gotten himself fired.

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