Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  Sully went behind the counter and put on an apron, nodding at Roof, the cook. “Looks like you and me, Rufus,” he said.

  Roof flipped two eggs onto a platter with his long spatula by way of reply. The platter already contained hash browns and toast triangles at the edges. Two more smooth movements and three more platters were complete, and all four checks came down from the circular spindle. “Ding dong,” he said. “Order up.”

  “You’re not even going to let me drink my coffee, are you,” Sully said, grabbing a platter in each hand. Cass could balance them up and down her arm, but Sully didn’t think he’d try. Roof was even-tempered until you dropped his eggs.

  Working behind the counter, Sully forgot all about Clive Jr., who remained in the car with Hattie until her daughter came flying out the back to fetch her. Then he gave Cass a hand as far as the door, for which Clive Jr. was rewarded by a torrent of abuse from the old woman, who thought he was Sully and who called him, among other things, a fart blossom. Then he went back to the car and waited, glancing at his watch every thirty seconds or so with increasing irritation. He didn’t mind being pressed into service, but it was just like Sully to disappear, to leave him sitting next to the foul-smelling Dumpster in the alley behind Hattie’s Lunch. Also, he’d discovered the use to which his cashmere sweater had been put.

  Now that he had the leisure to consider it, he was also miffed at his mother, who had instinctively summoned Sully when she saw the old woman in distress, as if Clive Jr. himself were not to be trusted with so delicate a task. Secretly, he doubted he would have performed as well as Sully. He had little experience in trying to talk ninety-year-old runaways into returning home, and he probably would have messed everything up. In his mind’s eye he could see himself struggling with the old woman in the middle of the street like a mugger or purse snatcher, being clawed and cursed at until he finally gave up. What annoyed him was that his mother apparently had imagined a similar outcome and had turned to Sully, a man who would know what to do.

  Was it his mother’s implied opinion of him or Sully’s ability to assume command that made a boy of Clive Jr. again? He couldn’t be sure, but as he sat in the car, obediently following Sully’s instructions, the irony of the situation did not escape him. After all, he, Clive Jr., was arguably the most important man in Bath, and once when they broke ground on The Ultimate Escape, there’d be no arguing the issue. Then everyone would be forced to admit that Bath’s renaissance was attributable to Clive Jr., who’d made it happen by bringing in the big boys from downstate, from as far away as Texas, making them see the area’s potential through Clive Jr.’s own eyes, making them all believers.

  Well, almost all. For Clive Jr. had come to realize that there would always be at least two skeptics in Bath, at least as long as his mother and Sully were on the scene. The two of them seemed not to notice that it was a new Clive Jr. who’d returned to Bath to rescue the savings and loan and give the town a future. They seemed to see the boy he had once been, not the man he’d made of himself. How odd that these two skeptics lived in the same house, his house, the house of his childhood on Upper Main. His own mother and Sully, who’d been an intruder in that house for almost as long as Clive Jr. could remember. Living there together in the house that Clive Jr. had come to think of as his opponents’ campaign headquarters.

  Clive Jr. knew he was lucky to have two such opponents, neither of whom would act against him, both of whom would be surprised to discover he considered them in this role. Especially his mother, whom he’d work so hard to convert. He’d done everything he could think of to earn her trust. He’d borrowed large sums of money he didn’t need and paid her back when he said he would, even offering interest. He’d given her excellent investment advice that would have made her money, advice that to his knowledge she had never, not one single time, followed. Any more than she had even once in the last twenty years asked his advice on any subject. Most of the time he was able to console himself that his mother just happened to be the most independent, free-thinking woman in all of Schuyler County. Maybe she didn’t require his counsel, but then she didn’t require anyone else’s either. She jokingly claimed to get all the advice she needed from Clive Sr., long dead, and, even more spookily, from the African spirit mask hanging on the living room wall. Which would have been tolerable, except for those rare occasions like this morning, when she discovered there were limits to her self-sufficiency and then turned not to Clive Jr., but rather to Sully, arguably the least trustworthy man in Bath. And even that, which would have been bad enough, wasn’t the worst of it. No sooner did his mother turn to Sully than Sully enlisted Clive Jr. in a subordinate role. It was worse than ridiculous. The most important man in Bath taking orders from the least important man in Bath, Donald Sullivan, a man essentially forgotten while he was still breathing, a man who’d peaked at age eighteen and who’d been sliding toward a just oblivion ever since.

  Sully and Clive Jr. went way back. In fact, though it would have surprised Sully to know it, Clive Jr. considered Sully an integral part of his prolonged and painful adolescence. As a boy Clive Jr. had feared for his masculinity. In feet, he’d pretty much concluded he was destined to be a homosexual—a homo, as they were called in Bath back then. Oh, he got hard-ons, like other boys his age, looking at pictures of naked girls in the magazines he stole from the drugstore and stashed in the upper reaches of his closet, where his tiny mother wasn’t likely to run across them by accident. But Clive Jr. had discounted these erections as irrelevant, certain that the day would come (next year? next month? tomorrow?) when he would wake up and the naked women would no longer stir him. There were a few that didn’t stir him already, and he stole more magazines in the hopes that a variety of new naked women would forestall his inevitable homodom.

  The cause of Clive Jr.’s fear was that he seemed to harbor deeper, more intense feelings for boys than for girls, in much the same fashion he craved the affection and love of his father far more urgently than that of his mother, whose diminutive stature had always seemed to Clive Jr. emblematic of her insignificance. He couldn’t imagine what had possessed his father to marry her or what had attracted him to her in the first place. No teacher in the entire junior high school was the butt of more cruel jokes than Beryl Peoples, whose round-shouldered, gnomelike appearance and correct speech were mimicked to devastating effect, especially in Clive Jr.’s presence. He hated to think what his life would have been like had his father not been the football coach.

  Clive Jr. had loved his father, and as a boy he’d loved all the boys his father loved. He himself had never excelled in sports. He’d inherited his father’s size (he’d nearly killed Miss Beryl in being born) but was blessed with neither speed nor balance nor eye-hand coordination. Clive Sr. was too kind a man to express his disappointment in his son’s inability to catch, throw or dribble a ball of any size or description, but Clive Jr. sensed it, in part, from his father’s enthusiasm for the boys he coached. At dinner Clive Sr. was often unable to restrain himself from recounting tales of their athletic prowess. The coach himself had been an indifferent athlete, but he possessed a pure love of sport and had gone into coaching because he believed that sport was the truest and best metaphor for life. He remained unshakable in this conviction, despite Miss Beryl’s gentle ridicule of the cliches that lay imbedded so deeply in his soul.

  And of all the boys he had coached, Clive Sr. had seemed fondest of Sully, and it was Sully’s praises that were sung the loudest at the dinner table. He was a varsity starter as a sophomore, and it was Clive Sr.’s contention that if he had a dozen Sullys he could take his team to state every year, this despite the fact that Sully himself was gifted with neither extraordinary size nor speed. Nor was he coachable. He was lazy in practice, resentful of constructive criticism, and he could not be made to understand the concept of team play. At times he seemed not to care whether the team won or lost. He refused to quit smoking, even when threatened with suspension, and he provided about the worst pos
sible example to the other players, most of whom naturally gravitated to bad example.

  But come game day, Sully was a wrecker. He chased down boys who were faster than he was and ran through others twice his size. He sometimes cost the team by not being where he was supposed to be, but just as often where he was turned out to be even better. After Sully botched a play, Clive Sr., livid, would call him over to the sideline to read him the riot act. Sometimes Sully came, sometimes he didn’t. Often, before Clive Sr. could substitute for him, Sully’d recover a fumble or intercept a pass, and he’d bring the ball with him so the coach could see the wisdom of doing things his way. “If I only had a dozen more just like him,” Clive Sr. would shake his head. “What a team I’d have.” He was wrong about that, of course. A dozen more like Sully, and he wouldn’t have had a team at all.

  Clive Jr., as the son of the coach, was always allowed to hover around the bench as long as he didn’t get in the way. And it was there along the sideline that he’d fallen in some kind of love with Sully and began to doubt his masculinity. Sully, even as a sophomore, was everything Clive Jr., an eighth-grader, aspired to be—reckless, imaginative, contemptuous of authority and, above all, indifferent to pain. Sully, it seemed, scarcely got interested in the contest until someone on the other team landed a good shot or offered an insult, after which something changed in Sully’s eyes. If Sully couldn’t win the game, he’d start a fight and win that. If he couldn’t win the fight he’d started, he’d continue to hurl himself at whatever he couldn’t beat with increased fury, as if the knowledge that the battle was unwinnable heightened its importance. What Sully did better than anybody else was pick himself up off the ground, and when he returned to the huddle, bruised, nose-bloodied, limping, he’d still be hurling insults over his shoulder at whoever had put him on the ground. Seeing this, Clive Jr. had filled with terrible admiration and longing.

  And awful as that was, it would have remained longing and admiration, except that in August of what would be Sully’s senior year, Sully’s older brother had gotten drunk and killed himself in a head-on collision late one Saturday night on the way home from Schuyler Springs. Clive Sr. had felt bad for Sully, who took it hard, and he also felt bad for his football team, which needed a focused Sully. Everyone knew what the boy’s home life was like, his father a drunken barroom brawler, his mother a cowed little mouse of a woman whose slender comfort derived from the Catholic church where she confessed her husband’s sins in the cool darkness of the confessional where you couldn’t see her black eyes. So Clive Sr. had invited Sully over to dinner one evening and later that night told him he was welcome anytime, an invitation Sully took literally. He became, for the rest of the football season, a fixture in their dining room. The first few nights Miss Beryl set an extra place for him when he arrived. Then, after a week, she decided it was easier to just set Sully’s place in the beginning. The boy clearly preferred the Peoples family, their table, their food, to that of his own now diminished family.

  Actually, it was Clive Jr.’s job to set the table, and in this way he was made an unwilling accomplice, forced to welcome the intruder into their home. By the time Sully was a senior, Clive Jr. was himself in high school and the ambiguous longing he’d felt when he looked at Sully two years before had mutated into an equally impossible longing to be more like Sully, who was dating the new object of his desire, Joyce Freeman, a junior who was far too good-looking and popular to talk to. And so Clive Jr. hadn’t the slightest desire for Sully to join their family, where Clive Jr.’s own light already shown dimly enough under the bushel of his parents’ disappointment in him. And so Clive Jr. did everything he could think of to suggest to Sully that he was not welcome. If there was a chipped plate, Clive Jr. set it where Sully would be seated. If there was a fork with a bent tine, Sully got that too, along with the glass that hadn’t come quite clean the night before. The inference should have been clear to anyone, but Sully seemed oblivious, incapable of registering any slight. If the bent tine of the fork jabbed him in the lip, he simply straightened the offending prong between his grubby thumb and forefinger, held it up to the light to make sure all the tines were lined up and said, “There, you little rat.” Since Clive Jr. had been the one who bent the tine dangerously to begin with, Sully, speaking to the fork, seemed to be speaking to him.

  Midway through football season Clive Sr. seemed to understand that he’d made a mistake inviting Sully into their home. He didn’t say anything, but Clive Jr. could tell his father knew he’d goofed. The idea had been to make Sully a better citizen, a better team player. Clive Sr. had seen an opportunity to take one of his pivotal players home with him and extend practice sessions over the dinner table, get the boy thinking straight, to understand he was part of something bigger than himself, that the team came first. That, Clive Sr. was confident, would also stand Sully in good stead in the larger context of life. “The larger context of life” was one of Clive Sr.’s favorite phrases. Everything that took place on a football field was applicable to The Larger Context of Life in Clive Sr.’s view, and this was what he wanted Sully to grasp.

  What Clive Sr. hadn’t anticipated was that Sully would find a natural subversive ally in Miss Beryl. True, his wife had always made gentle fun of Clive Sr.’s most serious themes, but he hadn’t imagined she’d thwart his design to educate Sully. If that’s what she was doing. Which Clive Sr. couldn’t be sure. It seemed to him that his wife must be up to something subversive, even though he couldn’t put his finger on any single thing she was doing that warranted specific reprimand. Mostly, it was little things, like calling Sully “Donald” instead of “Don” or “Sully,” the names—men’s names—that everyone else called him. Clive Sr. didn’t like his heaviest hitter thinking of himself as “Donald,” though he wasn’t sure he wanted to raise this issue with Miss Beryl because he could hear her snort in his mind and knew how he’d feel when he heard it for real in his ears. There were some things women just didn’t understand and you couldn’t teach them and were better off not trying.

  But it wasn’t just the business of calling Sully “Donald.” What he’d had in mind was a dinner table at which two sportsmen—himself and Sully—would talk strategy about their next opponent in such a way that his own son, who would never be an athlete, might become more educated and aware of, albeit vicariously, the sporting life and the lessons of sport. What he had not anticipated was that every night Sully would become involved in conversations not with himself, but rather with Miss Beryl, conversations about books and politics and the war America wasn’t going to be able to stay out of much longer, subjects that somehow diminished football and therefore its lessons about The Larger Context of life.

  It was as if his wife were bent on undermining every lesson in citizenship that Clive Sr. was trying to impart. Gertrude Wynoski had been a case in point. For many years the junior high school social studies teacher, Mrs. Wynoski was, to Miss Beryl’s mind, a crackpot. Her particular area of interest was local history, and until her forced retirement she’d drawn for every seventh-grade student at Bath Junior High a parallel between Schuyler Springs and Babylon, claiming that the latter’s prosperity was built on a precarious foundation of moral corruption. After her retirement, feeling the loss of her captive audience, she commenced to share her views with the citizens of Bath in a series of jeremiads published in the Letters to the Editor section of the North Bath Weekly Journal, reminding all and sundry that Schuyler Springs’ good fortune had its roots in immorality. That community had always condoned every form of gambling, legal and illegal, from horseraces to cockfights to savage prizefights and for decades had even tolerated the existence of a particularly infamous whorehouse. “House of ill repute” was actually the term she used, much to the confusion of her seventh-graders, for whom the phrase remained opaque, Mrs. Wynoski demurring exegesis. Her readers at the North Bath Weekly Journal followed her drift, and she concluded all of her epistles with strong hints that it was only a matter of time before Schuyler Spri
ngs was visited by some form of retribution, possibly biblical in nature.

  Clive Sr., who loved Bath and felt out of place in Schuyler Springs, especially during the tourist season, privately inclined toward Mrs. Wynoski’s view. As football coach, he felt an obligation to take the moral view, and he wanted badly to believe in a moral world. What he wished for more than anything was that the comeuppance Mrs. Wynoski predicted for Schuyler Springs would come, if God willed, at the hands of his football team. The Schuyler team was always rumored to have players who did not actually reside in the city, and Clive Sr. didn’t mind sharing these rumors with his student athletes in the hope of spurring them to moral outrage. They were cheaters, he said, and cheaters never prospered. This was the point he’d been trying to make one night at the dinner table, the subject of cheating having been raised by the publication of another Wynoski letter. He’d hoped Miss Beryl might champion this view.

  “Cheaters always prosper, you mean,” his wife had corrected him before his voice had even dropped. Moreover, she continued, if Schuyler Springs was built on a foundation of gambling and sin, there was no reason to expect the edifice to crumble anytime soon. There was nothing in the least shaky about such foundations, she said. If anything was shaky, it was Gert Wynoski’s intellectual dexterity. Finally, there was no reason to wait for God to speak on the subject of Schuyler Springs. The evidence rather suggested he had already spoken, and it was Bath’s springs that had run dry.

  How, in such an atmosphere, Clive Sr. despaired, could you teach football, much less The Larger Context of Life? He would have liked to put his foot down, but every time he tried, Miss Beryl made short work of him. Had she been mean-spirited in demolishing the moral positions he’d staked out so carefully, he might have known how to proceed, but she was always so gentle and loving when she crushed his arguments that anger seemed unbecoming. But as his arguments were systematically ground to dust he became increasingly exasperated, as if civilization were crumbling as well, which at times he suspected it was. Miss Beryl, with Clive Sr.’s star athlete for an audience, seemed actually to be arguing that government, law, even God’s own church were not always worthy of respect. In Clive Sr.’s view, if these were seriously questioned, how long would it be before football coaches came under attack as well?