Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  “What’s wrong with that child?” she asked Clive Sr. as she moved from the front to the side window so she could watch the young woman and the child climb the porch steps. It was a little girl, Miss Beryl decided, and all she was wearing from the waist up was a thin T-shirt.

  When Miss Beryl heard the outside door grunt open, she opened the door to her own flat to confront the young woman, who apparently intended to head upstairs to Sully’s apartment. “Move it, Birdbrain,” she said, apparently to the child, though she was looking directly at Miss Beryl when she spoke.

  “May I help you?” Miss Beryl said, not particularly trying to convey any real desire to be helpful.

  “He up there?” the young woman wanted to know. Up close, she looked vaguely familiar, like she might once have been one of Miss Beryl’s eighth-graders.

  “Who?” Miss Beryl said. Sully had few visitors, and Miss Beryl knew most of them by sight, if not by name.

  “The guy who lives up there,” said the young woman with undisguised irritation.

  “He’s not in,” Miss Beryi said.

  “Good,” said the young woman. “Something was bound to go right today if I waited long enough.”

  Miss Beryl paid no attention to this. She was looking at the child, who stood motionless at her mother’s side, staring at Miss Beryl. Or she would have been staring, if something hadn’t been wrong with one of her eyes, which looked off at a tragic angle, at nothing at all. Miss Beryl felt her heart quake but was only able to say, “This child should be wearing a coat. She’s shivering.”

  “Yeah, well, I told her to stay in the car,” the young woman said, “so whose fault is it?”

  “Yours,” Miss Beryl said without hesitation.

  “Right, mine,” the young woman said, as if she’d heard this before. “Listen. Do me a megafavor and mind your own business, okay?”

  The sheer outrageousness of this suggestion left Miss Beryl momentarily speechless. She hadn’t been sassed since she retired from teaching, and she’d forgotten what she used to do about it. The moment of stunned silence was apparently enough for the young woman to reconsider her tactics.

  “listen,” she said, her shoulders slumping. “Don’t mind me, okay? Everything is mega-screwed up right now. I don’t usually yell at old ladies.”

  Just children, Miss Beryl almost said, but held her tongue. That was how she’d always handled sassing, she remembered. She’d said nothing and glared at the miscreant until it dawned on him or her that a serious mistake had been made and that Miss Beryl hadn’t been the one who’d made it.

  “It’s just Birdbrain here,” she explained. “I’d like to give her to you for about an hour, just for laughs.”

  They were both studying the silent child now. The little girl, for her part, might as well have been standing all alone in the hallway for all the sense she conveyed of being in the proximity of other human beings.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” Miss Beryl said, and hoped that she wasn’t glowering at the child as she had been at her mother. She’d more than once been accused of frightening small children, though no one had ever explained to her precisely what she was doing to frighten them.

  “That’s a good idea,” the young woman said. “Make friends with this nice old lady while Mommy makes a phone call.” Then, to Miss Beryl, “He got a phone up there?”

  “Use mine,” Miss Beryl said, still not sure she should be allowing the young woman into her tenant’s flat. Not that Sully probably would have minded or had any cause to object, since he never locked up when he left.

  “Suit yourself,” the young woman said, slipping her shoes off. “I wasn’t planning on stealing anything. Take your shoes off, Birdbrain. We’re going in here for a minute, I guess.”

  The child was wearing cheap blue canvas tennis shoes, and Miss Beryl could tell that they were wet, as were the child’s socks.

  “Don’t touch nothing in here,” the young woman warned the child. “These aren’t our things, and Mommy doesn’t have money to pay for what you bust.”

  Miss Beryl showed the young woman where the telephone was in the front room. The young woman picked up the receiver and looked at Miss Beryl. “Thanks,” she said. “Been awhile since I’ve seen one of these,” she added in reference to its rotary dial. In fact, the phone did go back about thirty years. “Regular museum you got in here,” she said, looking around the room.

  Before Miss Beryl could respond to this observation, the young woman was talking into the phone. “Ma. He there yet?” A brief pause. “No, I’m at the old lady’s downstairs. I don’t think she’s too thrilled about us going up there.”

  Miss Beryl could hear the tinny voice of whoever she was talking to, but not clearly enough to make out any words. She still couldn’t take her eyes off the child, who stood patiently at her mother’s side, facing Miss Beryl. The child’s good eye was taking her in, Miss Beryl decided.

  “The more I think about it, the more I doubt he’s even coming, Ma. He’s just pulling your chain. How the hell should I know? He probably guessed. He’s probably threatening everybody. That’s the way he does things. Threaten everybody. That way you’re sure. You want to know how I know? Because if he was coming here like he said, he’d have to give up a day of deer hunting. No, he won’t. You don’t know him like I do. Besides, if he was coming, he wouldn’t call to warn us, he’d just be here.” Another pause. “No, you’re wrong. He’s out in the woods, is where he is. He’s out there laughing at you for believing him. Believe me, he’s out in the middle of the woods. Maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll get lost and freeze to death out there. That’d be a break, huh?”

  To Miss Beryl’s way of thinking, the most objectionable thing about this objectionable conversation was the fact that the child was listening to it. Since the little girl was still staring at her, Miss Beryl picked up her red, two-headed Foo dog from the coffee table and showed it to the little girl. The dog had the same grinning head on both ends of its body.

  “See my Foo dog?” she said, offering the stuffed animal to the child, who made no move to take it. Miss Beryl rotated the dog so that the child could see its two heads, that it was the same at both ends. If the little girl noticed this unusual feature, she gave no sign, though she studied the animal dully.

  “You know what a Foo dog says?” Miss Beryl asked.

  The child’s good eye found her again.

  “Foo on you,” Miss Beryl said, hoping for a smile.

  The little girl’s eye again found the animal, again studied it seriously, as if to determine whether the dog in question would say such a thing.

  “I call him Sully,” Miss Beryl said, “because he doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.”

  This time when she offered the animal, the child took it, without enthusiasm, almost as if she were doing Miss Beryl a favor.

  “Yeah … yeah … yeah,” the child’s mother was saying. “Okay, I’ll go upstairs if I can talk her into letting me. Call me up there in half an hour. You should see the phone I’m talking into. It must’ve been made during the Civil War.… Okay.… Go back to work.… Yeah, okay.”

  When she hung up the phone, the young woman picked the little girl up and rubbed noses with her. “False alarm, Birdbrain. Daddy pulled a fast one on Grandma. He’s probably real proud of himself too. Daddy doesn’t get to outsmart people very often.” Then, to Miss Beryl, “You gonna let us go upstairs, or what?”

  “I guess if you know Mr. Sullivan, he won’t mind,” Miss Beryl said.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know him,” said the young woman on her way to the door. “He’s been balling my mother for about twenty years, though. She’s the one who knows him.”

  Once again, Miss Beryl was speechless. She watched her visitors go, watched the door close behind them, watched it open again. “Here’s your dog back,” the young woman said, setting the Foo dog back on the table. “And thanks again for the phone.” She cast a half-amused, half-contemptuous glance around Miss Beryl’s f
lat. “You’re missing the boat. You should charge admission to see this place.”

  When she was gone again and the child’s and the mother’s footsteps had climbed the stairs and entered the room above, Miss Beryl found her voice again. “Well,” she said to Clive Sr. “What do you think of that?”

  Before her dead husband could answer, the phone rang. “Now what?” Miss Beryl said.

  It was Mrs. Gruber, whom Miss Beryl had forgotten completely.

  “I’m coming,” Miss Beryl told her. “Keep your girdle on.”

  There were only half a dozen paved roads into and out of North Bath. In addition to Route 27A, the two-lane blacktop that became Main (Upper and Lower) within the city limits, there were five other narrow two-lanes linking Bath to its neighbors: Schuyler Springs to the north and smaller communities like Shaker Heights, Dollsville, Wapford, Glen. And there was the new four-lane spur that linked Bath to the interstate that ran between Albany and Montreal. The new spur was just three miles long, traversing the large tract of marshy land that separated Bath from the interstate, the future site, according to a large billboard planted just off the roadway, of the five-hundred-acre “Ultimate Escape Pun Park,” an “extravaganza of water slides, roller coasters, a Wild West town and a fantasy village where fairy-tale characters spring to life.” The majority of the huge billboard was a garish clown’s face, and there was something about this face, about its lewd grin perhaps, that suggested more malice than fun, and small children who had the sign pointed out to them by their mothers as they sped by had been known to burst into tears of fright. Adults were disconcerted also to notice that within sight of the billboard, just before you entered the village of North Bath, was the new cemetery, a stark, treeless place of, for the most part, horizontal gravestones. There was considerable speculation that the cemetery would have to be relocated once construction on the fun park got under way. Already the juxtaposition of the two “ultimate escapes” had become a dark local joke.

  This midmorning, thanks to the grand opening of the new supermarket at the interstate exit, there was more traffic than usual speeding down the spur toward the demonic clown billboard. For the most part, the motorists were housewives hurrying back toward town, the back of their vans and station wagons loaded down with groceries. They’d gotten carried away in the festive new store and bought twice as much as they normally would, purchasing items not available at the North Bath IGA. As they flew home, feet bearing down a little more heavily on the accelerator than was their custom, contemplating their greater-than-anticipated expenditure of time and money, they were greeted by an unsettling apparition in the form of a hitchhiker attempting to thumb a ride into town. These housewives, many of whom had small, fussy children with them, were not the sort to pick up even decent-looking hitchhikers, and so they were not even fleetingly tempted to stop for this one, who was so besotted with mud that the speeding housewives concluded, despite the fact that there was no prison within a hundred-mile radius, that the man must be an escaped convict, a murderer surely, who had spent the night in the marsh to escape the dogs. Either that or he was a premature burial from the nearby cemetery who had clawed his way out of his casket and up through the black earth and into the air. Where most hitchhikers at least attempted to look friendly or, failing that, pitiful, this one looked just plain dangerous. Something about the way he held out his thumb suggested that the fist attached to it might contain a live grenade. One young woman driving a station wagon full of groceries actually swerved into the left lane when she drew near him, as if she feared he might lunge at the car and grab the door handle as she hurtled by.

  Nothing could have been further from Sully’s intention. If he was dangerous, he certainly wasn’t dangerous in the way the young woman feared. His murderous expression was simply the result of spending the morning doing a thankless job on a bum knee, getting his truck stuck in the mud, spending half an hour of fruitless exertion trying to get unstuck, during which time it had occurred to him what Carl Roebuck, the man he’d sworn he’d never go back to work for, would say when he found out what Sully’d done. Carl Roebuck would say he’d been wrong—that the job had been one Sully could fuck up after all, a remark Sully did not want to hear uttered outside the precincts of his own thoughts. Every time Carl said it, even within those precincts, Sully threw him out the window. To make matters worse, he could hear his young philosophy professor snickering an I-told-you-so about free will.

  Also his father, who lay buried in the cemetery another half mile up the highway, a man with whom Sully had not yet made peace. In fact, on the way out to Carl Roebuck’s development, he’d done what he always did when he drove by the cemetery. He’d rolled down the window, cold be damned, and given Big Jim Sullivan the finger as he flew by. Unlike most of the residents of Bath, Sully didn’t care much whether The Ultimate Escape Fun Park got built or not, except that if it did, they’d probably relocate the cemetery, which meant they’d have to disturb his father’s eternal rest. Sully hated to think of his father at rest, and had there been a way, and if Sully’d had the money, he’d have left instructions to have Big Jim dug up every decade or so, just to make sure he didn’t get comfortable. And so, right now, he was hoping to get a lift past the cemetery so his father wouldn’t have a chance to get a close-up look at him in his present condition. Whenever he was on a stupid streak he was conscious of the faraway sound of his father’s laughter. His next-to-last stupid streak, a little over a year ago, had begun when he fell off a ladder and injured his knee. Anybody could fall off a ladder, of course. That hadn’t been the stupid part. The stupid part had been the reason he’d fallen. Halfway up the ladder, he’d heard a man laughing raucously, and off across the job site, on the other side of the chain-link fence, Sully’d spotted a big man who, from a distance, was a dead ringer for his father. Dead ringer he would indeed have been, since Big Jim had himself been dead for several years. Whoever the man with the horselaugh was, Sully was paying attention to him and not to his footing. He’d fallen twenty feet and then listened to the distant sound of his father’s laughter all the way to the hospital. Right now, so close to the cemetery, the sound of laughter was nearer, was ringing, in fact, in Sully’s ears.

  When he saw the expression on the face of the young woman who swerved, Sully made a conscious effort to look less like a serial killer. After a while he gave up, both the hitching and the trying to look harmless. It was only a mile back to town, and he’d already walked nearly that far backward. He even began to look on the bright side. As long as the truck was buried in the mud, he couldn’t capsize the load. The other good thing was that Rub, whose assistance he would now seek, was blessedly devoid of a sense of humor and therefore never derived much benefit from other people’s stupidity. If Rub himself had backed a truck into a mud hole and then loaded on a ton of concrete blocks and couldn’t drive out again, his stupidity would have been the first thing Sully noticed. But other people’s stupidity elicited only sympathy in Rub, who identified so strongly and immediately with dumbness that he lost all advantage. All Rub would want to know, Sully realized, was how come Sully hadn’t come to get him in the first place, since this was obviously a job for two men, a job that even two men would be hard pressed to finish by dark, now that the morning had been wasted.

  Lost in the soothing contemplation of Rub’s intellectual limitations and having given up on the idea of anybody stopping, Sully did not immediately notice when a small olive green Gremlin pulled over to the shoulder of the road some fifty yards ahead, its turn signal blinking. That it had stopped for him occurred to Sully only when it tooted. The Gremlin was old and banged up, and he half recognized the car as belonging to someone he knew, but couldn’t think who. Sully didn’t know anybody in Bath who drove a Gremlin, which deepened the mystery, because he didn’t know that many people outside of Bath. When the Gremlin tooted a second time, Sully realized that he had stopped walking, that he was stalled right there along the shoulder, as if solving the riddle of who own
ed the Gremlin were prerequisite to accepting a ride in it. Somebody had rolled down the passenger side window and was waving impatiently. Sully started walking.

  The Gremlin had an out-of-state license, though it was too dirty for Sully to guess which state. The little car’s slanting rear window was piled high with clothes and blankets and toys, making it impossible to see inside, and Sully approached the car with serious misgivings, which only increased when a familiar-looking young woman poked her head out the passenger side window and glared at him. Her expression bespoke considerable irritation, as if one look at Sully had reminded her of half a dozen unpleasant things she’d forgotten about him. Without knowing exactly why, Sully felt a sudden urge to flee, as if the woman hailed from some amnesiac past and had returned bent on slapping him with a patrimony suit.

  “Hi, dolly,” he said when he was close enough to be heard, having decided to brazen it out. In his sixty years he’d forgotten enough people to know that the best way to handle such situations was to pretend you knew who they were until they gave you a clue. Whoever this unpleasant-looking young woman was, he’d remember eventually. All his adult life he’d called young women “dolly,” so if this one knew him, she wouldn’t be surprised. When he got alongside the car, he saw there were three children crowded into the cramped backseat among pillows and stuffed animals, slightly older versions of children he knew from somewhere. The young woman got out and pulled one of the bucket seats forward so Sully could crawl in back, and as he leaned forward and caught a glimpse of the driver it dawned on him who the hell these people were.