“How’d you like to deal with this for about a week?” the young woman asked Miss Beryl angrily. “How about for a day? After twenty-four hours you wouldn’t know whether to eat shit, chase rabbits or bark at the moon.”
“I’ll get scissors,” Miss Beryl offered weakly.
“Yeah. And stab me with them, would you? Put me out of my misery.” Then she addressed the little girl again. “How the hell am I gonna be able to go back to work with you like this? Tell me that. How can I waitress at the Denny’s with you? I’m gonna carry you up and down the goddamn restaurant all day so you can feel my ear? I can just explain it to the customers, right? Here’s your eggs. This here’s my daughter. She’s five years old but she goes ape-shit if she can’t feel my earlobe every minute of the goddamn day. I’m sure everybody’ll understand that, right?”
If the little girl heard or comprehended a word of this, she gave no sign. To Miss Beryl, she appeared oblivious to the sound of her mother’s voice. She was simply waiting for the next signal she understood. If her mother moved away from her, she’d follow. If not, she looked prepared to stand right where she was for all eternity.
Oddly, having shouted at the little girl, her mother’s anger seemed to have leaked away. Or perhaps she was just resigned. “Just what the hell we gonna do, Birdbrain? That’s what I’d like to know, and I’ll listen to any advice on the subject. You got the answer rattling around inside that head of yours? If so, let me in on it, okay?”
The little girl stood.
“All right, come on over here,” her mother finally gave in. “We’ll call Grandpa together. That suit you? We’ll call Grandpa and see if your daddy’s been and gone. Then we’ll leave this poor old lady alone before she calls the cops and reports us crazy.”
The little girl still had not moved, and she didn’t until her mother got down on her knees and extended her arms. Then she went to her mother slowly, almost cautiously, and they hugged there in the middle of Miss Beryl’s living room, an embrace that lasted almost long enough to break an old woman’s fragile heart. The hug ended with a loud slap and the little girl’s hand shooting down to her side.
“Don’t start with the goddamn ear again,” her mother said, getting back to her feet. “I need the ear for the telephone. Jesus.”
Then she took her daughter by the hand she’d slapped and led her across the room to the phone, picking up the receiver and staring at the phone critically. “I bet you’ve had this since Christ was a corporal,” she hollered to Miss Beryl, who had gone into the kitchen to look for the scissors because she could think of nothing else to do.
If there was anything more obscene than Rub eating a cream-filled donut, it was Wirf eating one of The Horse’s pickled eggs. To Sully, just the sight of the eggs floating in their salty brine was unsettling enough. He always positioned himself in such a way that he didn’t have to look at them or at Wirf eating them.
Wirf was on his third and, sensing Sully’s discomfort, was taking his time, sucking off the brine from both ends of the soft egg before puncturing its flesh with his front teeth. The sound Wirf made eating an egg was not unlike the sound of a tennis shoe being extracted from mud. “Want one?” Wirf grinned. “I’ll buy.”
Sully was green and sweating. “You should hire yourself out to people who want to lose weight. After watching you, my appetite’s always gone for about a week.”
Or what was left of his appetite. Anymore Sully had to be reminded. Left to himself, he’d eat no more than a single meal a day. The only reason he ate more regularly was Rub, who was always hungry and served as a reminder to eat, even as his personal aroma ruined Sully’s appetite.
“You’ve got the stomach of a thirteen-year-old girl,” Wirf said. “How the hell did you survive the army?”
“I never stepped on anything that exploded, was one way,” Sully told him, deflecting the conversation. For reasons Sully had never understood, he’d eaten with more genuine appetite when he was in the army than at any other time in his life, this despite the fact that he’d never eaten worse-tasting food. The other times in his life he’d eaten with genuine appetite were few. In high school he’d eaten pizza ravenously with his teammates after football games. But it was true what Wirf said. He’d always been a nervous, fastidious eater, and getting older had only made him worse. He’d get the occasional craving, as for the chicken-fried steak he’d eaten to celebrate Thanksgiving, but these were infrequent. One reason was probably that he had never entirely disassociated food from fear.
As a boy, at his father’s table, Sully had frequently, though unintentionally, enraged his father, a man of prodigious appetites who had known hunger and viewed Sully’s fastidiousness as an affront both to the food and to its provider. On such occasions the dinner table became a battleground. Big Jim could not comprehend that certain foods Sully found offensive were capable of inducing the gag reflex, which the boy had learned to control by taking very small bites and chewing until there was virtually nothing left, at which point it became possible, with great effort of will, for him to swallow. But this process took forever, and as he chewed and chewed the odd morsel, his father’s rage smoldered. Sully always sensed this without having to look up from his plate, and the knowledge that his father was about to combust did not make the job of chewing any easier. He would try to hurry the reluctant piece of mutton gristle along, swallowing before it was possible to do so, and then the piece of meat would get caught there in the back of his throat until Sully gagged and coughed it up into his napkin. Whereupon his father would take the napkin, open it, and force Sully to examine what had refused to go down. Seen in the harsh yellow light of the kitchen, Sully had always been surprised to see how tiny the morsel was as it sat there in his napkin in a puddle of mucus. It had felt ten times that size in his throat. “This is what you’re telling me you can’t swallow?” his father would say, his hands shaking with anger. He’d show it to Sully’s mother then, and sometimes her refusal to look would transfer some of his rage to herself, for which Sully was always grateful.
There had always been something about his father—and Sully had intuited this even as a boy—that made him do things wrong. “Leave him alone,” Sully’s mother always counseled wisely. “You only make things worse by scaring him.”
“Scaring him!” Big Jim always bellowed. “Jesus Christ, everything scares him. A piece of goddamn carrot scares him. What happens when he runs up against something really scary? What then?”
“All I’m saying,” his mother said quietly, knowing better than to raise her voice when her husband was in such a state, “is that he does better when you leave him alone. Yelling at him guarantees he won’t eat. You know that.”
“I’ll tell you what I know,” his father said, turning to Sully. “He’s going to eat this stew. Every bite. If we have to sit here till Tuesday, it’s going down. If he throws up, he gets another bowl, and that one’ll have more stew in it. Every time he throws up, he gets more stew, until it stays down.”
And so they’d sat there in the tiny kitchen, always the hottest room in the house, all the other dishes cleared away from the table except for Sully’s small bowl of mutton stew, Sully choking back tears and choking down stew for what seemed to him like hours, his mother and brother exiled to the porch by his father’s order. It was just the two of them, alone with their thoughts and the food, which disappeared a grain at a time, Sully swallowing sobs of fear with every mouthful. He paused when he felt his stomach rise until he was sure it would accept his next mouthful, all under his father’s unwavering gaze. He believed his father’s threat to keep feeding him more stew, and so he did not dare throw up what he’d already forced down. He’d have died rather than start over.
“There,” his father said when Sully had swallowed the last of it, and Sully hung his head, which was pounding now with his effort. When it was over, he felt exhausted, as if he could have slept right there, sitting upright in the kitchen chair, for days. Depositing the bowl in the sink, B
ig Jim returned to Sully. “You ate it, didn’t you,” he said, and Sully realized that his father was still furious, his rage undiminished by Sully’s accomplishment. He even suspected that his father was secretly disappointed that the ordeal was over. He’d expected the food to rise in his son’s throat and had looked forward to making good on his threat to force-feed Sully another bowl. This realization, harder to swallow than the mutton had been, almost brought it all back up, but somehow Sully had willed the food to stay where it was.
“You learn anything tonight?” his father wanted to know. What he was getting at, Sully guessed, was who the boss was at 12 Bowdon Street.
Sully nodded.
“Because we can do this every night until you do learn who the boss is around here.” His father stood then, glaring down at Sully. “You can fight me all you want, but you aren’t going to win.”
As it turned out, though, his father was wrong. The very next night, Sully, in a state of even greater nervous excitement and fear, had to be led to the table by his mother when his father refused to accept the boy’s claim of being sick. He’d have been wiser to accept it. Sully took one bite of his mother’s steaming hot macaroni casserole, which she had made precisely because everything in it was soft and did not require chewing, and Sully tossed his school lunch the length of the table. For some reason this had not angered his father as much as the previous night’s chewing, the boy’s inability to swallow. And Sully realized, to both his surprise and relief, that his father had been bluffing the night before. He had no intention of engaging in lengthy combat every night. That night, for instance, his father felt a particularly strong urge to leave their house in favor of the corner tavern, and so when he saw the mess Sully had made of the dinner table, he calmly stood, shot his wife a look of contempt and strode out the door. He didn’t return home until late, after the tavern closed, and then he’d taken it out on Sully’s mother, not him. Sully, who’d been unable to fall asleep, heard it all, first his father shouting at her, then the slap that resounded throughout the house, his mother’s cry of surprise, then silence. Sully remembered smiling to himself in the dark. He’d won after all.
“You can look now,” Wirf grinned. “I’m all done.”
Sully had been feigning interest in the college football game above the bar and wondering what the reason might be for all these recent visitations from his father. Now he looked Wirf over, shaking his head. Since there was no one close enough to overhear, he decided what the hell, he’d ask. “What’s this I hear about you being sick?”
“Who, me?” Wirf said, not very convincingly. It occurred to Sully, now that he looked Wirf over, that Birdie was right. Wirf didn’t look so hot. His skin looked yellow, something Sully probably hadn’t noticed because he so seldom saw Wirf in natural light.
“No, the pope.”
“The pope’s sick?”
“Have it your way,” Sully said. “It’s none of my business.”
“Sure it is.” Wirf grinned. “Anything happens to me and you don’t get your disability.”
Sully nodded. “Same result if you live to be a hundred, though.”
Wirf contemplated his beer. “Apparently I’m not going to live to be a hundred,” he conceded.
“Is this a medical opinion or just you guessing?”
“This is a medical opinion with which I happen to concur,” Wirf said, then added, “It’s also just between us.”
“Okay,” Sully said.
Neither of them said anything for a moment then.
“They tell me I eat too many pickled eggs,” Wirf finally continued. “The stuff they pickle the eggs with is dangerous. Eats away at your liver.”
Sully nodded. “Especially if you wash each one down with about a gallon of beer.”
“Especially,” Wirf said.
“Well,” Sully said. “You could cut back on your pickled eggs.”
Wirf shrugged, then shook his head sadly. “The time to cut down on the pickled eggs was about five years ago. Ten, maybe. They tell me that my liver is irreversibly pickled. They don’t like to say it right out, but I gather that it doesn’t make much difference anymore whether I zig or zag.”
Sully shook his head, feeling much of the same frustration he’d felt two days ago listening to Cass, who’d explained to him her lack of options with regard to her mother. Here was Wirf telling him the same thing, that he was damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. Maybe Sully’s young philosophy professor at the college had been right. Maybe free will was just something you thought you had. Maybe Sully’s sitting there trying to figure out what he should do next was silly. Maybe there was no way out of this latest fix he’d gotten himself into. Maybe even the trump card he’d been saving, or imagined he was saving, wasn’t in his hand at all. Maybe his father’s house already belonged to the town of Bath or the state of New York. Maybe Carl Roebuck had bought it at auction for back taxes.
There was a certain symmetry to this possibility. Maybe Carl had used the money he refused to pay him and Rub as the down payment. Who knew? Maybe even Carl Roebuck didn’t have any choices. Maybe it just wasn’t in him to be thankful for having money and a big house and the prettiest woman in town for his very own. Maybe he was just programmed to wander around with a perpetual hard-on, oozing charm and winning lotteries. Maybe. Still, Sully felt the theory to be wrong. It made everything slack. He’d never considered life to be as tight as some people (Vera came to mind for one, Mrs. Harold for another) made it out to be, but it wasn’t that loose either.
“So what’s your plan?” he asked Wirf.
Wirf shrugged. “I don’t know,” he admitted. To Sully’s surprise, Wirf didn’t sound all that discouraged. “Maybe I’ll just keep zigging til I can’t zig any more. I can’t even imagine zagging at this late date.”
Sully nodded. “How many more years of zigging do they figure?”
“Months,” Wirf said. “If I continue to zig. If I zag, I might get a year or two. A little more. We all end up in the Waldorf-Astoria, Sully. Zigging or zagging. I’m not that afraid. At least not yet,” he added. “In fact, I wasn’t afraid at all until we started this conversation.”
Sully stood, said he was sorry for bringing it up, which he was.
“That’s all right,” Wirf said. “I’ve been wondering when you’d say something.”
Sully suddenly felt awash in guilt for not having seen it earlier, for not paying attention, or the right kind of attention.
“Where you off to?” Wirf wanted to know.
“Home, for once,” Sully said. The idea of spending another long night at The Horse was suddenly insupportable. He’d been hoping to find someone to help him steal Carl Roebuck’s snowblower, but it was just himself and Wirf, and he didn’t see how enlisting another one-legged man would improve his chances. “See if I can plan my next move.”
“I hope this doesn’t mean you won’t be zigging with me anymore.”
Sully assured him this was not the case. “Maybe we should cut back, though,” he said. “Without giving it up entirely.”
“Hmmm.” Wirf nodded thoughtfully. “Zigging in moderation. An interesting concept. I like it as an alternative to cowardly zagging. Speaking of common sense, is this Miles Anderson going to let you work under the table?”
“I forgot to ask,” Sully said, heading for the door.
“Insist,” Wirf called to him. “Otherwise you’re in trouble.”
Given his present circumstances, the idea of future trouble struck Sully as pretty funny. At the coatrack he chortled, his knee throbbing to the beat. As he put on his overcoat, he realized that Carl Roebuck was right. Something by the front door did smell foul. Or were they both imagining the stench, each of them realizing, as they were about to step out into the world, the deep shit they were in?
This latter interpretation was one that his young philosophy professor at the community college would have favored. He liked screwball theories, the wackier the better, in fact. Sully was just the opposit
e, and he wrinkled his nose. Something stank, but it wasn’t destiny.
Opening the door, Sully nearly ran into his son coming in, and it took Sully a moment to realize who it was. Beyond Peter the street was white again and the snow was falling heavily in the fading late-afternoon light. For dramatic effect the street lamps kicked on.
“Son,” Sully said, offering Peter his hand. “What’s up?”
For some reason this question struck Peter as funny. “How long do you have?” he said, shaking his father’s hand with weary resignation.
“You’re just in time,” Sully told him, studying the snow. “I got a job for you.”
Miss Beryl pointed up the street in the direction of Mrs. Gruber’s house. It had begun snowing again. Mrs. Gruber, three houses up Main, had turned on her porch light and was attacking the fresh snow on her steps with a broom.
“That’s my buddy Mrs. Gruber,” Miss Beryl informed the little girl, Tina. “She ate a snail once, if you can believe it.”
The old woman and the little girl had been standing at Miss Beryl’s front window for about five minutes, ever since the Donnelly girl had gotten off the phone and said she’d better move the car just in case. “Just let Birdbrain see me out this window and she’ll stay right there till I get back. She won’t be no trouble unless you try to move her. She’ll just stand there.”
There didn’t seem to be much Miss Beryl could do but agree, though she made a mental note that all of this was what came of poking around upstairs in Sully’s flat, which she shouldn’t have done. The present situation was God’s punishment for following Clive Jr.’s advice.
When the Donnelly girl slipped out the front door, the child tried to follow, but when Miss Beryl said, “Here’s your Mommy,” Tina had returned to the window, watched her mother get into the car and drive off. She’d been standing there since, just as her mother had predicted. Miss Beryl had been afraid the little girl would start crying, but she didn’t. She just stood, watching the exact place she’d last seen her mother, apparently expecting her to materialize again in the same spot. She did, however, briefly follow Miss Beryl’s bony finger when she pointed out Mrs. Gruber.
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