Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

“Dad’s going to give me a lift to Albany in the morning, so you can stay here with Mom,” Peter told him.

  Ralph didn’t look like he was one hundred percent behind this plan. “What if Charlotte comes back for you?”

  “Dad,” Peter said with exaggerated kindness, as if to cushion a blow. “She’s gone. When they leave like that, they don’t come back and say they’re sorry.”

  Ralph sighed and looked like he might cry. “I can take him to Albany if you can’t,” he told Sully.

  “I can,” Sully said.

  “It’s the first favor I’ve asked him in about twenty years,” Peter said, his edgy resentment surfacing again, though clothed in humor this time.

  Which gave Sully an idea. “Come back to my place a minute,” he suggested.

  “Now?” Peter said, exhausted. He’d had his wife leave him and he’d stolen a snowblower and he’d nearly been killed by a Doberman. It was already a full day.

  “Just for a minute,” Sully insisted. Then, to Ralph, “I’ll bring him right back.”

  A minute later they pulled up in front of his own flat, and Sully took the El Camino’s keys out of the ignition and handed them to Peter. “Take this,” he said. “You’ll be coming back in three weeks, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Take it.” Sully dropped the keys in his son’s lap.

  “First you want me to take your house, now your car. Next you’ll be offering me your woman.”

  “I don’t have one of those. Actually, I don’t have a car. This one belongs to the same guy we stole the snowblower from. He’ll understand.”

  “He’ll understand,” Peter repeated.

  “Right. I’ll make him.”

  “What’ll you drive?”

  “I’m getting a new truck tomorrow,” Sully assured him. “This was just a loaner. Normally, it just sits in the yard,” he lied.

  Peter picked up the keys and studied them dubiously. “I’m going to get arrested before I cross the state line, aren’t I,” he sighed.

  “Not if you leave tonight,” Sully told him. “He might be mad for a day or two. That’s all.”

  “I wasn’t going to leave until morning,” Peter reminded him.

  Sully read his son’s mind. “Go now. Ralph will take care of your mother. You’ll just make things worse. That’s one way you are like me.”

  Peter studied him for a moment before putting his key into the ignition. “I think Mom’s right,” he said. “You do have fun. You’ve enjoyed your life.”

  “When I could,” Sully admitted. In fact, giving his son a car he didn’t own had buoyed his spirits considerably. For much of the evening he had considered that in his son’s hour of need Sully had nothing to give him, and it was good to realize now that he hadn’t been thinking clearly.

  They shook hands on it more or less successfully, since irony and resentment were difficult to convey through the medium of palms.

  When Peter swung the £1 Camino around and headed back down Main, the sweep of its headlights caught something on the terrace next door that stopped Sully, causing him to squint into the darkness. His first thought was that a cat was crouching low to the ground, that its eyes had been caught in the indirect light and glowed momentarily. But when he got closer Sully saw that it was no cat but rather a deer lying perfectly motionless in the snow. The very deer Wirf had told him about, apparently, which meant that the story had been true. Even stranger than finding a dead deer on the terrace was the fact that this one was tangled in a veritable web of rope, as if the man who’d shot it had tied the animal up first. Either that or he’d tied a dead deer up to protect against the possibility of reanimation. Whosever job it was to remove the animal, assuming that had been determined, had apparently felt it could wait until morning. A tag fluttered from the animal’s rack, and since there was writing scrawled on it, Sully bent down to see. DON’T REMOVE THIS DEAR, it said, and down in the corner, POLICE DEPT. The note had been scrawled in pen, and someone had inserted, in pencil, a comma between the words “this” and “dear.” Sully considered the various riddles presented by both the dead animal and the note for about thirty seconds before giving up, glad that there were some riddles in this always strange life that had nothing to do with himself, a conclusion that was probably valid in general, if not in this instance.

  Upstairs, he tossed his winter coat onto the arm of the sofa and collapsed there, exhausted but feeling better, he knew, than he had a strict right to feel. The situation he would awaken to in the morning was dramatically and demonstrably worse than it had been in recent memory. His magnanimous gifts to Ralph and Peter represented not solutions but the deepening of his personal dilemma. Still, he felt an unreasonable surge of sleepy confidence that he would figure something out. There were solutions. Some you discovered, some you made, some you willed, some you forced.

  Of life’s mysteries, the one Sully fell asleep, sitting up on the sofa, trying to solve, was the smell that had been following him around all night. Carl Roebuck had noticed it first near the front door of The Horse, but when Sully’d left the bar the stench had followed him. In the car, on the way out to the IGA, Peter had noticed it, remarked that the smell reminded him of the place near Boca Raton where he and Charlotte had honeymooned. Later, the odor had been so powerful in the El Camino that Sully’d had to roll down a window despite the cold.

  He slept only a few minutes before awakening violently from a dream in which the smell was his leg rotting off. Oddly, he awoke with the answer. Picking up his overcoat, he fished around in the pocket until he located the tear in the lining, then finally the putrefying cherrystone clam, which had opened and trailed slime all the way to the other pocket, where it had come to rest beneath the wad of Sully’s gloves. The clam, as Wirf had observed, was a small thing, but Sully was unable to restrain his jubilation at having found a solution.

  Downstairs in her dark bedroom, Miss Beryl could hear her tenant laughing. In fact, she’d heard the car pull up outside and considered getting up and meeting him at the door, but decided not to. Morning was a few short hours away, plenty of time for bad news. In truth, she did not want to see Sully tonight or be charmed by him or be reminded of the boy she and Clive Sr. had been so fond of so long ago. Nor would she listen to Driver Ed anymore. If she’d been able to, she’d have turned a deaf ear to the sound of Sully’s defiant laughter filtering down through the ceiling, as if to lift her deadened spirits, as if, after the events that had taken place outside her front window, anything were capable of lifting them. Still, what a fine sound that laughter was compared to Clive Jr.’s humorless, professionally modulated banker’s voice, his “Haven’t I been warning you all along” that she’d been forced to listen to tonight. He had come by with the dreadful Joyce woman, claiming to have seen the police cars, but Miss Beryl suspected her friend Mrs. Gruber had called him. And at the time she was still badly shaken by everything that had happened and not unhappy to see Clive Jr., who was, after all, her son, who bore the name of the man who’d loved her, who’d been the star of her firmament. No, she was grateful to see Clive Jr., who’d spoken to the policemen outside with the calm assurance of a man who paid their salaries, and they had nodded at him in perfect agreement. Later, she had told him her fear that this was the year God intended to lower the boom, and then she’d let him convince her that Sully, as he had so long warned her, was the symbolic branch poised to fall upon her from above. How disappointing to have to admit that her son was right, to see the sense of accomplishment in his face when he realized that at last she intended to follow his advice. What a shame to lose Sully as an ally after so many years. How dreadful to see clearly, finally, what she had no choice but to do.

  TUESDAY

  Outside Hattie’s in the dark mid-December gray of first light, a new banner was being strung, and Cass, behind the lunch counter, paused to see what this new one would say. Recent banners had not brought much luck. Bath had not trounced Schuyler Springs. They had not beaten Schuyler Spri
ngs. Indeed, Bath had not been in the game, and the Schuyler Springs Sentinel had again run an editorial suggesting that Bath be dropped from the Schuyler schedule on humanitarian grounds. People were none too sure things were looking ↑ in Bath, either. A rumor had recently begun to circulate that the Sans Souci would not reopen in the summer as planned, and there was new trouble with The Ultimate Escape. Opposition had arisen in the form of a group concerned that the new Bath cemetery on the outskirts of town would be uprooted, the eternal rest of its inhabitants disturbed. So far the group consisted of no more than a handful of residents whose attempts to draw attention to its cause had been unsuccessful in their own community. The North Bath Weekly Journal had failed to cover their maiden protest in front of the demonic clown billboard. Predictably, the Schuyler Sentinel, ever alert to the possibility of humiliating its onetime rival and current straw opponent, had covered the protest in a small article in the back section of the weekend edition and since then had run three more articles on the ensuing “controversy,” each longer than the previous, each inching closer to section A. The interest raised by the Sentinel articles had forced the North Bath Weekly Journal to run a stern editorial suggesting that Schuyler Springs, which had its racetrack and its baths and its summer theater and concert series, should stay out of its less fortunate sister city’s affairs, quit trying to torpedo its long-awaited and much-deserved good fortune. The living residents of Bath needed this economic shot in the arm, the Journal said, so let the dead bury the dead. More important, the land designated for the new cemetery had never been suitable for a burial site, the ground being far too boggy. Last spring, after several days of heavy rain, a plot had been backhoed only to discover that the ground beneath already contained an occupant. The casket had migrated several feet from where it was supposed to be located and was no longer precisely beneath the gravestone that marked it, though another casket was. It was feared that the entire regiment of caskets planted since the new cemetery opened ten years earlier, row upon row of them, was slowly marching toward the freeway at the rate of an inch or two a month. Face it, the editorial said, all these dead people were already on the move. Better to dig them up now while they were still more or less where they were supposed to be, before they reached the sea. The Journal urged the establishment of a commission to find another cemetery site.

  At the front door of the diner, after letting himself in, Sully stared at the new banner, trying to draw the words into focus, NEW ENGLAND HOLY DAYS, it seemed to say.

  “Holy Days?”

  Sully looked again. “Holly Days,” he corrected.

  “Neither one makes much sense, does it,” Cass said, “since this isn’t New England.”

  “Well, we’re only thirty miles from Vermont,” Sully reminded her, closing the door behind him and locking it again.

  “Seems like more, doesn’t it,” she said. “How come their towns look like postcards?”

  “Want me to get the old girl?” Sully said, seeing that Hattie was not in her booth.

  When Cass did not answer, Sully took this for a yes. It was becoming clear to him that gathering the old woman from the apartment in the rear of the diner and getting her settled in her booth for the long morning was one of his duties. Otherwise, Cass was perversely content to let her mother pound on the apartment door with her bony fists. Hattie had been instructed not to try to come into the diner by herself because the passageway between the apartment and the diner had a step and she needed help to negotiate this, but if the old woman felt that she was being left alone too long in the apartment she felt no compunction about bellowing at the top of her voice and banging on the door until her arthritic hands swelled grotesquely. Then she sat in her booth and chewed Anacin tablets all morning for the pain. “Let her bang,” Cass always advised, but Sully knew it was better to fetch the old woman, make her happy and comfortable in her booth. He also suspected that Cass appreciated his accomplishing this task, that it was a small vacation from the larger burden of her constant responsibility. Cass also enjoyed the few minutes she had in the dark diner by herself before her early morning customers arrived when she opened at six-thirty.

  Old Hattie, who couldn’t hear much of anything else, always heard Sully when he came to get her. Either that or she felt the vibration of his heavy footfalls in the passageway, because when Sully poked his head into the dark living room of the apartment, the old woman was always in the process of struggling to her feet. “Hello, old woman,” he said this morning. “I see you’re still kickin’.”

  “Still kickin’.” Hattie grinned fiercely, righting herself with the aid of the sofa arm and extending a bony elbow to him.

  “Ready for another hard day’s work?” He took her arm and steadied himself for her added weight. Hattie couldn’t weigh more than eighty-five pounds, but he’d learned quickly that eighty-five pounds was enough to cause him to lose his own balance, especially this early, before his knee loosened up.

  “Hard day’s work!” Hattie echoed, latching onto him with her claws.

  “Wait a second,” Sully said, trying to unfasten her talons. “Get on my good side. Every morning we go through this. Pay attention, will you?”

  “Attention!” Hattie bellowed.

  It took a minute, but he finally got her situated and they headed for the door. “I know you love to bang my bad knee, but I’m not going to let you do it today, all right?”

  “Right!”

  “Here comes the step.”

  “Up?”

  “Down, dumbbell, same as yesterday. You think somebody built a new step going the other way just to confuse you?”

  “Down,” Hattie said, and together they took the step.

  “There,” Sully said. “We made it again.”

  “Made it!”

  “Now,” he said. “When you go back tonight, which way will the step be?”

  “Down!”

  “Down?” Sully said. “You just went down. They can’t all be down. Sooner or later you got to go up, don’t you?”

  “Up!”

  “Here you are, old girl,” Sully said when they’d traveled the length of the diner under Cass’s watchful eye. “You want anything?”

  The old woman slid in, smoothed her hands over the cool formica tabletop as if there might be a message for her there in Braille. “Who are you?” she said finally. “You sound like that darn Sully.”

  “She’s losing ground,” Sully said when he joined Cass behind the counter and tied on an apron.

  Cass looked at him over the tops of her glasses. “Don’t try to cheer me up,” she said.

  Sully had been working at Hattie’s for over two weeks now, since Roof quit and went back home to North Carolina, leaving the village of Bath temporarily without a black man and thus a convenient external referent for the word “nigger.” It was not a much-used word anyway, and the residents of Bath, at least those who frequented Hattie’s, discovered that its rare use was now tied to muscle memory. For years whenever they’d used the word they’d looked around to locate Roof and make sure he hadn’t overheard them or to apologize if he had. Now that he was gone they still looked around and felt a little foolish when they remembered he was gone. For a day or two the regulars at Hattie’s had joked that a delegation would have to be sent over to Schuyler Springs, which had plenty of blacks, as evidenced by their football and basketball teams, and borrow a nigger until a permanent replacement for Roof could be found. When Sully decided to help Cass in the mornings, he’d had to take a lot of ribbing from those (it was Carl Roebuck’s line) who said they were relieved to discover how easy it was to find another nigger when you lost one.

  Helping Cass out was Sully’s official reason for doing the breakfast shift, but there were other reasons, all of them money. Since borrowing a small down payment from Wirf and getting Harold Proxmire to let him make payments on the truck and borrow the snowplow blade when it snowed, it hadn’t snowed once, which meant that Sully wouldn’t be able to make his first payment
next week. Harold wouldn’t be expecting it, given the fact that it hadn’t snowed, but the continued blue skies made Sully nervous. Last winter there’d been virtually no snow, and if this winter was another one like it, he’d be going into spring buried under the kind of debt he’d have had a hard time paying off even on two good legs. His knee didn’t seem to be any worse since going back to work, but it wasn’t any better either, and he dreaded another accident on it, knowing that would finish him for good.

  Working behind the lunch counter at Hattie’s had its advantages. Standing next to the warm grill gradually loosened his knee, which always felt its worst early in the morning. The two or three steps he had to take between the grill and the fridge was just the right amount of exercise for the first three hours of his day, between six-thirty and nine-thirty, after which he’d be limber enough to join Rub and Peter out at the Anderson house or go out on a job for Carl Roebuck if Carl happened to have one of those small, scum-sucking, nasty jobs he delighted in giving to Sully. He preferred to work for Carl when he could, because there wasn’t really enough work at the house to keep three men busy for an entire winter, even when one was a cripple, another a born sandbagger and the third a moonlighting college professor. Actually, Sully had been surprised when Peter appeared in the El Camino two weeks after returning to West Virginia. That period of time had been nearly sufficient for Sully to forget the offer of work he had extended to his son, work he’d since come to think of as his own and Rub’s. Which meant that he’d either have to let Rub go back to work for his cousins or find additional work. So he told Cass not to worry about finding a breakfast fry cook, at least for the rest of the winter. That decision was easy once he made his mind up. More difficult was coaxing work out of Carl Roebuck, who was constantly bellyaching that Tip Top Construction was slowly going under and claiming it would go under fast if Clive Peoples fucked up and let the Ultimate Escape deal go south. Sully doubted whether this was any more than bellyaching, and while he was confident of Clive Jr.’s ability to fuck anything up, he doubted it would happen in this instance, because that could just conceivably ruin Carl Roebuck, whose good fortune, Sully believed, was one of the few constants in an otherwise mutable life. It was true enough that Carl never had much at this time of year. Worse, he was a wizard at sensing Sully’s need and was not above paying him less than Sully would have accepted if his need hadn’t been so great and then telling him he was a lot more likable when he was humble, to which Sully always responded that this was one of the differences between them—that Carl was never likable.