Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  He was glad the sofa he bought was huge because it at least displaced some air in the cavernous living room. He set it and the tippy, three-legged coffee table against the long wall facing the television he planned to get as soon as he could afford one. He made a mental note that the television had better be a good-size one if he was going to be able to see it from all the way across the room. He made another mental note to do something about the floral pink wallpaper. And he’d need a rug or two to cut down on the constant reminders of his own presence as he tapped across the hardwood floors. He still had a hundred dollars of Kenny Roebuck’s money, so he went out in search of bargain rugs.

  As luck would have it, he found Kenny Roebuck instead, and Kenny was on his way to the track. He forced Sully into accompanying him there by asking him if he wanted to. On the way back Sully decided he hadn’t needed the rugs anyway. They stopped at Ray’s corner market for a six-pack of beer and from there went to the new flat so Kenny could see how Sully was making out. Sully took the six-pack and put it in the refrigerator while Kenny Roebuck laughed. In fact, Kenny stood in the middle of the living room and howled. He couldn’t stop. He went from room to room, each room striking him as funnier than the last. In the two empty, closed-off rooms he laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. Finally he joined Sully in the tiny kitchen and collapsed into one of the plastic dinette chairs, his face beet red with exertion. “How long do you figure before you’ll fill it up?”

  Sully took two beers out of the refrigerator. He felt the metal shelf before handing one to Kenny Roebuck. “I’m not sure the refrigerator works too well,” he said, which started Kenny in all over again.

  It didn’t seem possible to Sully that Kenny Roebuck had been dead for most of the dozen years since he got that first look at Sully’s new flat. One thing was certain. If Kenny were there now he’d get just as good a laugh. Except for a throw rug and a big white-cabineted television with a small screen, the flat looked pretty much as it had the day he moved in. What he’d decided to do about the floral wallpaper was to let it peel off.

  Tonight, like most nights, he was too tired to care. Regulating the water as hot as he could stand it, Sully stripped, climbed into the shower and let the water beat down on his shoulders and lower back. In a few minutes the rising steam brought with it a childhood memory he’d not thought of in forty years. It was a Saturday afternoon, and his father had taken Sully and his older brother, Patrick, to the new YMCA in Schuyler Springs for the free swim, a monthly event intended to drum up membership. Sully’s father had no intention of letting his sons join, but as long as it was free, well.… Also, he’d discovered there was a Saturday afternoon poker game in back. When Sully and his brother were buzzed downstairs, his father remained above to play cards. The locker room was cold and uncarpeted, and the pool lifeguards had made all the boys shower and then stand, shivering, at the side of the pool while each boy was inspected for head lice and read the rules about no running, no pushing, no diving in the shallow end. Several boys were found to be dirty and required to go take another shower. The clean ones, including Sully and his brother, had to wait for them.

  Sully, who had been eight at the time, couldn’t stop shivering, even when they were finally allowed to jump into the pool. The water felt cold, and he was one of the youngest boys there. All the rules frightened him, and he was afraid he’d violate one unintentionally and be expelled while his brother, four years older, was allowed to stay. The building’s subterranean corridors were confusing, and Sully wasn’t sure he could find his locker again, much less his father. Also permitted to join the boys’ free swim were two old men who lived at the Y, and they swam without bathing suits, which also frightened Sully, even after his brother explained that it was okay since they were all men and there weren’t any girls around to see your equipment. Sully’s own equipment had withdrawn almost into his body cavity. He tried to have a good time, but his lips were blue and he couldn’t stop shivering. One of the lifeguards noticed and ordered him back into the showers until he warmed up.

  In the tiled shower room he’d stood beneath the powerful spray, the hot water beating down on him until it began to cool, whereupon he moved to another on the opposite side of the room. Every time the hot water ran out, he moved. Soon the room was thick and comfortable with steam, and Sully had allowed himself to drift into its moist warmth, mindless of the passage of time, coming out of his reverie only when the hot water ran cool, necessitating another change. He spent the entire two-hour free swim in the showers, listening to the distant shrieks of the other boys in the pool, not wanting to get out of the steam, or to return to the cold pool water, or to venture back into the locker room on the cold concrete floor to search for the locker where he and his brother had put their clothes.

  “See if I ever take you again,” his father said later, his breath boozy in the front seat of the car he had borrowed to make the trip, when Patrick told on him. Sully was shivering in the backseat of the car as they returned to Bath. He was sick the entire week that followed. “Just see if I do.”

  It didn’t take nearly as long to run out of hot water in Sully’s flat, and when he stepped out of the shower, he wondered if he was going to be sick, if that was why he’d suddenly remembered the YMCA episode after so many years in the limbo of his memory. He doubted it could be that he needed another reason to bear a grudge against his father, whose ghost, for some reason, seemed to be visiting him more often and vividly of late, starting right around the time he’d fallen from the ladder.

  The good news was that his knee didn’t feel too bad, and Sully considered for the umpteenth time the illogic of his own body. Immediately after hard work, the knee felt pretty good. Tomorrow morning, he knew from experience, he would pay.

  Which meant that he would have to go see Jocko first thing. He was almost out of Tylenol 3s, or whatever it was he was taking. Jocko did not always dispense his relief in labeled bottles. At least not to Sully. When Sully needed something for pain, Jocko didn’t stand on formalities like a physician’s prescription. When he got samples he thought Sully might be interested in, he slipped a bright plastic tube full of pills into Sully’s coat pocket and whispered verbal instructions for their use: “Here. Eat these.”

  Downstairs, Miss Beryl was waiting for him in the hall, dressed in her robe and slippers. She always looked tinier and even more gnomelike when she stood in the large doorway to her flat. She was holding a fistful of mail, most of it, Sully could tell at a glance, junk. He often went weeks at a time without checking his mailbox and then, after a cursory glance, tossed whatever had accumulated there in the trash. People who wanted to contact him left messages for him at The Horse. People who didn’t know him well enough to do that were probably people he didn’t want to hear from anyway. Sully had no credit cards, and since his utilities were included in the rent he paid Miss Beryl, he didn’t have to worry about bills. To his way of thinking, he had no real relationship with the postal service. He didn’t even have his name on the mailbox, refused to put it there, in fact, not wanting to encourage the mailman. Now and then Miss Beryl would gather what collected there and thrust it at him, as she was doing now, with communications she judged to be of possible importance on top. The envelope on top of this particular fistful of mail looked to be a tax document from the Town of North Bath, no doubt reminding him of his obligations on the property his father left him when he died. Sully did not bother to open it to be sure. He leafed through the rest to make sure his disability check was not in the stash. He’d already thrown that away once in his rush to dispose of all the junk.

  “You got a pen handy, Mrs. Peoples?” he asked, knowing full well she kept half a dozen in a glass by the door. In fact, she had anticipated his need and was holding a pen out to him disapprovingly. On the tax envelope he wrote in bold letters RETURN TO SENDER and deposited the junk mail in the small decorative trash can just inside his landlady’s door.

  “You’re the most incurious man in the universe,
” Miss Beryl remarked, as she often did on these occasions. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that inquiring minds want to know?”

  “Maybe you just have better luck with the post office than I’ve had,” he suggested. “So for the mail has brought me my draft notice, my divorce papers, jury duty, half a dozen different threats that I can think of. And not a single piece of good news I didn’t already know about because somebody told me.”

  Miss Beryl shook her head, studied her tenant. “You look better, anyhow,” she said.

  “Than what?”

  “Than you did when you came in,” said Miss Beryl, who had been watching at the window.

  “Long day, Beryl,” Sully admitted.

  “They get longer,” she warned. “I read about five books a week to pass the time. Of course, I read only half of some of them. I always stop when I realize I’ve read a book before.”

  “Who said ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp’?” Sully suddenly remembered Carl’s quotation.

  “I did,” she said. “All through eighth grade. Before me, it was Robert Browning. He said it only once, but he had a better audience.”

  “What grade did he teach?” Sully grinned.

  “I bet you can’t finish the quotation, smarty.”

  “I thought it was finished,” Sully said truthfully.

  “You had visitors this afternoon,” Miss Beryl said.

  “Really?” Sully said. He had few visitors. People who knew him knew they had a better chance of running into him at Hattie’s or The Horse or the OTB.

  “A young woman with a huge bosom and a tiny little girl.”

  Sully was about to say he had no idea who this could be when it occurred to him. “Did the little girl have a bad eye?”

  “Yes, poor little soul,” Miss Beryl confirmed. “The mother was all mouth and chest.”

  This did not strike Sully as a fair assessment of Ruth’s daughter, Jane, though it was an accurate enough first impression.

  “I must be losing patience with my fellow humans,” Miss Beryl went on. “Anymore I’m all for executing people who are mean to children. I used to favor just cutting off their feet. Now I want to rid the world of them completely. If this keeps up I’ll be voting Republican soon.”

  “You’re definitely getting mean in your old age, Mrs. Peoples,” Sully said, trying to match her joking tone, though he could sense that the encounter had upset her. “She didn’t say what she wanted?” he asked, half fearfully, though he doubted Ruth’s daughter would have revealed much to Miss Beryl.

  “I think she was just as glad you weren’t here,” Miss Beryl told him. “I got the impression she was on the lam from a no-good husband.”

  “That would fit,” Sully admitted, recalling now that back in the summer, when Jane had run away from her husband the first time, Sully had told Ruth to send her and the little girl over to his flat if they needed a place her husband wasn’t likely to look. “She married some stiff from Schuyler Springs who’s in and out of jail.”

  “Well,” Miss Beryl said. “I’m relieved that’s the explanation. I thought at first you’d gone and got that young thing pregnant.”

  “The young ones won’t have me anymore, Beryl,” Sully told her, Toby Roebuck flashing into his consciousness unbidden, as she’d been doing all afternoon. “I wish one or two would.”

  “You’re a cur, sir,” Miss Beryl told him. “I’ve always wanted to say that to a man.”

  Sully nodded, accepted the indictment. “I thought you were a Republican,” he said.

  “No,” Miss Beryl told him. “Clive Jr. is. His father was too. Clive Sr. was a hardheaded man in many respects.”

  “Not a bad one, though,” Sully remembered.

  “No,” Miss Beryl admitted thoughtfully. “I miss arguing with him. It would have taken a lifetime to win him over to my way of thinking. There are times I think he died so he wouldn’t have to admit I was right.”

  When Sully was gone, Miss Beryl returned to her chair in the front room where she had been reading. The chair was placed directly in front of the television she seldom turned on. On top of it were Clives Jr. and Sr., stars present and past of her firmament. “You were hardheaded,” she informed her husband. Never an articulate man, Clive Sr. had lost every argument he ever got into with Miss Beryl, who possessed sufficient intellect and verbal dexterity to corner and dispatch him, and so he learned early on in their marriage not to detail his logic to a woman who was not above explaining where it was flawed. “I have my reasons,” he’d learned to say, and to accompany this statement with an expression he deemed enigmatic.

  He died wearing that very expression, and he was still wearing it when Miss Beryl arrived at the scene of the accident. After young Audrey Peach had braked him into the windshield, Clive Sr. had rocked back into the car’s bucket seat, his head angled oddly because of his broken neck. He appeared to be thinking. I have my reasons, he seemed to say, and for the past twenty-five years he’d left her alone to ponder them.

  “And you …” she told her son, but she let the sentence trail off.

  Miss Beryl was still holding the letter that Sully had marked RETURN TO SENDER. She did not need to open it to know what was inside. In the metal box in her bedroom she had an entire manila folder marked “Sully,” and she would add this letter to the others when she retired for the night. “I’m doing the right thing,” she said aloud to the two Clives. “So just pipe down.”

  One of the things Sully appreciated about the White Horse Tavern was that it had a window out front with a Black Label Beer sign that hadn’t worked in years. That allowed Sully to peek in and see who was inside before committing himself. There were nights—and this was one of them—when he didn’t want to get involved. What he wanted was supper and bed. One beer might not be bad, but one had a way of leading directly to half a case. Tonight, a quick glance inside was enough to convince Sully. Wirf, predictably, was there, no doubt preparing his lecture about why Sully should stay in school, about how his going back to work would fuck everything up. Carl Roebuck, less predictably, was anchoring the near corner of the bar, a bad sign. Carl usually did his drinking and carousing in Schuyler Springs and came into The Horse only when he was looking for somebody. Usually Sully. And Sully knew that if Carl was trying to find him, he’d just as soon stay lost. True, Carl owed him for the other half of his day’s work, but that couldn’t be why he was there. Kenny, Carl’s father, had been the kind of man who went looking for people he owed, but Carl just looked for people who owed him. Maybe he was just there because he was locked out of his house, but Sully decided not to take a chance.

  When Carl slid off his stool and headed for the men’s room, Sully ducked back from the window, peering in again in time to see Carl disappear into the head. Though Sully’d never noticed it before, it occurred to him now how much Carl reminded him of his father, even though he was about half Kenny’s size and Kenny had been far too homely to be much of a ladies’ man. Sully found himself wishing it was Kenny, not his son, who was peeing in the men’s room trough. Had it been Kenny, Sully wouldn’t have minded getting involved. There was much to be said for a man who wouldn’t hold it against you when you burned down his house.

  The only other place that might be open at this time of night was Jerry’s Pizza a few doors down, where all the kids hung out. Normally a greasy burger at The Horse would have been preferable, but there weren’t any kids hanging around Jerry’s entrance, so Sully decided to take a chance. It was Thanksgiving Eve, after all, and maybe the kids were all home and the jukebox that blared heavy metal would be silent for once. Besides, Ruth would be working, and he was going to have to face her eventually anyway. Maybe he’d find her in a holiday mood. Maybe if he saw her he’d quit thinking about Toby Roebuck. It could happen. And it might be a good idea to find out why Jane had come over to the flat that afternoon.

  Blessedly, the place was empty. Sully selected a booth out of sight from the street and far from the jukebox which, th
ough silent, glowed red and angry, as if gathering energy and venom from the unaccustomed quiet. “Sully!” a voice boomed from the kitchen. “Thank God we stayed open!”

  The voice belonged to Vince, who owned Jerry’s. Jerry, Vince’s brother, ran another pizza place just like it, called Vince’s, in Schuyler Springs. The Schuyler Springs restaurant did a better business, and whoever won the wager on the Bath-Schuyler basketball game got to run the Schuyler Springs place for the following year. By betting on his alma mater, Bath, Vince had lost the better business the last ten years in a row. Jerry always gave his brother points, but never enough of them. Both brothers were huge, burly men with more hair on their chests than their heads. They looked so much alike that over the years people had begun to confuse them, thanks to their physical resemblance and the fact that for the last ten years each had been managing the other’s restaurant. Vince minded losing his identity a lot more than losing his restaurant to basketball wagers, and so, sensing this, Sully had taken to calling him by his brother’s name.

  “How about a little service?” Sully called, rapping the back of the booth with his pepper shaker.

  The door to the kitchen swung open and Ruth appeared. She did not look to be in a holiday mood. It took her a minute to locate Sully at the far end of the room. “I don’t know what good it does to send a man to college who can’t even read,” she said, in reference to the THIS SECTION CLOSED sign in the center of the floor.

  In fact, Sully had not noticed it. He’d just found a spot where nobody would notice him from the street and feel compelled to keep him company. “Sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to get as far from the jukebox as I could. Besides,” he added when Ruth came over, “I don’t go to college any more.”

  “So I heard,” Ruth said. “Wirf was in looking for you earlier.” She was making rather a point of just standing there over him instead of slipping into the booth like she would have done if they were still friends. Eventually, Sully knew, they would quarrel over his going back to work, but not now. That was one of the things Sully’d always liked about Ruth. She knew when not to say what she was thinking. What he didn’t like about her was her ability to make clear what she was thinking without saying anything. Right now, for instance, she was thinking his going back to work was not smart, which it probably wasn’t. You’ll be sorry, she was thinking, which he probably would.