Spooner by Pete Dexter Page B

Atlanta.
    And even now Calmer, newly married, went back and forth into the house, making sure everybody had clean glasses and plates
     and all the Ritz crackers they wanted. He did not stop moving once. Uncle Arthur was watching this from the back steps, Spooner
     sitting on the step below him, each of them smoking a black cigarette. Uncle Arthur put his hand on Spooner’s shoulder and
     said, “She’s got him on his toes, hasn’t she, old man?”
    Calmer was passing the aunts a minute later when one of them, Violet, the one who was married to Uncle Don and lived in Birmingham,
     Alabama, reached out and touched his arm to point out the puddle beneath the table holding the ice bowl. “Calmer, dear,” she
     said, “I think it would last longer if you moved it into the shade.”
    The sun had shifted now, and the sisters had shifted with it.
    Calmer went to the punch bowl and lifted it up without seeming to try, and then Uncle Don made to drag the card table into
     the shade of the house near the driveway, but tripped over a tree root as he backed up and fell on the seat of his pants and
     claimed to have broken his coccyx, but nobody paid any attention and Calmer waited patiently while he got up and brushed himself
     off, checking his behind from one side and then the other, like a woman in a dress shop. Then he pulled the table the rest
     of the way to the shade and Calmer set the ice bowl back on top of it, and if the ice had gotten cold or heavy against his
     arms or hands, he didn’t let it show.
    The aunts applauded his feat of strength, as by now they had been drinking half the afternoon, and Calmer smiled modestly
     and walked back into the house for more Ritz crackers and cheese spread, and the aunts commented to each other for the hundredth
     time what a godsend it was that he’d come along when he did, one of them even going so far as to call it proof that God existed,
     which surprised Spooner, because he had been thinking not exactly that but something like that himself.
    And then if more proof of God were needed, a well-known mule belonging to Jaquith the one-armed attorney wandered up Spooner’s
     driveway and went straight for the punch. Calmer was still inside the house. The mule had recently rolled in mud and was still
     wet, and the steam rose up off his back and the animal commenced licking the outside of the bowl with a tongue a foot long
     and a color Spooner recognized as the color of a skinned rabbit.
    Uncle Arthur saw it first and laid his hand on Spooner’s shoulder. “Hold on, old man,” he said, “here we go.” As if he’d been
     expecting something like this all along.
    Aunt Violet noticed it next, the thing’s awful blue tongue flattening itself against the edge of the ice, again and again,
     as if it meant to lick through to the flowers inside.
    It is perhaps worth mentioning here that while Uncle Don had done quite well as a judge and before that as an attorney, and
     lived in a lakeside house and bought a new Cadillac every year just like Uncle Arthur except Uncle Arthur always bought convertibles—all
     this, by the way, and Violet still enjoyed torturing Spooner’s mother by saying that she was on a budget too—Uncle Don was
     not and never had been in the legal profession for the money. It was love, pure and simple. Love of the law and, more than
     that, of the sound of his voice expounding on the law, which he still did at the slightest provocation, from the bench in
     his robes or a stool at the drugstore, to anybody who would listen, or had to, even sometimes to Spooner, although it was
     not clear that he knew exactly who Spooner was, and always ended with the pronouncement that the law alone stood between man
     and anarchy. And was at this moment making that very pronouncement to old man Stoppard, who’d wandered out of the house in
     sandals and underpants to see what was going on, but was interrupted by the shrieking of his wife. Uncle Don stopped midsentence—in