Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  “Listen,” Sully said. “I heard you had some work for me.”

  “That depends,” Carl said, sitting back down and putting his feet up again. “You still own that piece of shit property on Bowdon?”

  “Beats me.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t care,” Sully told him, though this response was more force of habit than literal truth. In the last few weeks he’d found himself thinking about the house almost every day. He’d even wandered down from the Anderson place and contemplated it one afternoon, wondered again if the property could be worth more than the taxes owed on it and, if so, how much more. Enough more to be a possible solution to his deepening financial woes, for instance. Or enough more to make a difference to Peter. His son’s return to Bath had caused the resurgence of Sully’s unaccountable desire to give him something. When Peter was a boy, Sully’d sent him presents for Christmas and, when he remembered, on his birthday, but he couldn’t remember a single specific gift, which felt a lot to Sully like he hadn’t given anything. Maybe if he gave Peter the house, or the money from selling the house, it’d be something.

  “You remember if it had hardwood floors?”

  Sully said it had. He could picture his mother cleaning them on her knees.

  Carl picked up the phone and dialed it. “Hi,” he said, not bothering to identify himself. “Do me a. favor. Call City Hall and find out the status of Sully’s place on Bowdon. He doesn’t seem to know if it’s his. Give little Rodrigo a kiss for me.”

  Before Sully could attempt to make sense of this conversation, Carl hung up and said, “You want to run by there and take a look?”

  “We could,” Sully said, feigning indifference. In fact, the idea of getting Carl’s opinion of the place appealed to him. He’d even considered asking him for that opinion more than once and had been prevented only by the fact that by asking Carl’s opinion he might appear to be wavering from his public view that Carl Roebuck’s advice on any subject was not worth having.

  “Let’s,” Carl suggested without getting up or even taking his feet off the desk. Will, taking their apparent agreement literally, stood up, then, seeing that neither man had moved, sat down again, confused.

  Sully studied Carl carefully. Something about his attitude was different, and he recalled Toby Roebuck’s remark that her husband was a changed man. “You’re looking especially smug today,” Sully observed, leaning forward and pulling a small end table covered with magazines around in front of the sofa so he could put his own feet up. To Sully’s way of thinking, if there were two men in a room and one of them had his feet up on something, that man had a distinct advantage. Especially if the man was Carl Roebuck. Whenever possible, Sully liked to put his feet up around Carl, even if the maneuver hurt, and he did so now, especially pleased with the fact that his work shoes were wet and that a slushy puddle began immediately to form on the cover of the top magazine.

  “It’s true,” Carl said. “I’m in such a good mood that even a visit from you hasn’t dampened my spirits.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Sully told him. “I’m glad to know that people like you are happy. Of course, I’d be happy too if I’d inherited a fortune, married the prettiest girl in the county and got to bang all the others besides.”

  Carl grinned and leaned even farther back in his swivel chair, hooking his fingers behind his neck. “You’re right,” he admitted, sadly it seemed to Sully. “She is the prettiest girl in the county.”

  “I’ve been telling you that for years, if you recall.”

  “Okay, you told me so, smart-ass,” Carl conceded. “In which case you’ll be pleased to know I’ve turned over a new leaf.”

  “That’s what she just told me,” Sully told him. “I didn’t have the heart to remind her who she was talking about.”

  “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,” Carl said. Whatever it was that Carl was feeling so smug about, he was dying to tell somebody about it. Which meant that the only thing for Sully to do was feign absolute indifference.

  “Mock on who?”

  Carl ignored this. “You saw Toby over at the office?”

  “I did indeed,” Sully told him. And if he hadn’t been taken by surprise, he’d have really seen what he saw. With Carl Roebuck sitting there looking so smug, Sully actually considered for a brief moment telling Carl about what had happened, just to see if maybe that good mood couldn’t be ruined after all. What prevented him was the possibility, however remote, that Toby Roebuck’s flashing him had been some sort of invitation to return when he didn’t have his grandson with him. He’d been flirting with the woman for years, after all. She’d be foolish to take him seriously, but a woman capable of taking Carl Roebuck seriously just might.

  “She didn’t say anything to you?” Carl was still grinning maniacally. “Well, never mind,” he continued. “She’s probably only telling people she likes.”

  Suddenly Sully figured it out. “What?” he said. “Don’t tell me she’s pregnant?”

  “Knocked up like a cheerleader,” Carl said. His grin had taken over his face so completely now that Sully himself couldn’t help grinning through the disappointment.

  Neither man said anything for a long moment.

  “So,” Carl Roebuck said finally. “Now I suppose you’ll want to be the godfather.”

  “I can’t be both the father and the godfather,” Sully said. “You’re going to have to contribute some goddamn thing.”

  “Anyhow. No more messing around for the studmeister. I realize now,” he explained, pulling on his heavy coat, gloves, tweed hat, “that I just wanted to be a father. Isn’t it something the way the mind works?”

  “It sure is,” Sully agreed. “You had the rest of us fooled completely. We figured you were just a jerk. How long you figure you can keep this up?”

  Carl took a deep breath. “Except for Toby I’ve been a monk for three days, and I’m not even horny. I’ve never felt better, in fact. You should have told me it was okay to have a limp dick. I’m giving up gambling and drinking and smoking and all of it. Everything but bad companions, which is why I’m still talking to you.”

  Outside, in front of the trailer, Carl let out a Tarzan yell, pounded his chest. “White hunter make baby!” he crowed. “Let’s take two cars. I’ll meet you there.”

  Sully said that was fine with him. He’d taken several steps toward the gate when he realized Will was not at his side. The boy was still on the trailer step, casting about nervously in search of Rasputin, who was not in evidence. “Where is he?” the boy said.

  “Come here,” Sully said. “Hold my hand.”

  Will did, warily. “There he is,” he said, spying the dog.

  Rasputin was leaning, cross-legged, against the chain-link fence near the gate, as if he were resting. Had he been a human being, his posture would have suggested that he was about to light a cigarette and take a relaxing five minutes to smoke it.

  “Isn’t this a pitiful fucking sight,” Carl said, going over to his once faithful watchdog. Rasputin lurched feebly, unable to right himself. Clearly, he’d lost his equilibrium again and slumped against the fence, which was holding him up.

  Carl went around behind the dog, lifted him off the fence, set him down again gently. “You know what he reminds me of?” he said. Before Sully could say no, Carl told him. “You,” he said.

  Sully nodded. “He is pretty well hung at that,” he admitted. “I never noticed it before.”

  Noon found Miss Beryl in the kitchen, staring up into her cupboard and contemplating a bowl of soup as a solution not to hunger so much as to the duty to eat something. Normally possessed of an excellent appetite for a woman her age, she’d been off her feed for the last two weeks. The worst of it was that she knew why, and it wasn’t, as Mrs. Gruber insisted, simple discombobulation, the residual effect of having a crazy man shoot up the neighborhood. Nor was it, as Clive Jr. had suggested, that she was feeling adrift as a result of not traveling this year. Late
December was usually such a busy time, preparing for the holidays and for her travels to whatever foreign place she planned to sally forth. Clive Jr. still thought she should go. This year, the plan had been Africa, where Miss Beryl had hoped to find a mate for Driver Ed. If Ed were more content, maybe he’d quit whispering subversion into her ear. For a mate, she had in mind some tolerant she-mask whose demeanor suggested she wouldn’t mind sharing a wall with a dour old shape shifter like Ed, who had grown more dour of late, now that she’d started listening to Clive Jr.’s advice.

  Her decision not to travel this year meant, among other things, that Ed would have to remain without a mate. Over the weekend Miss Beryl, realizing that she was going to have time on her hands during the long Bath winter, had sallied forth with Mrs. Gruber to purchase the most difficult jigsaw puzzle she could find. They went to an overpriced hobby shop in Schuyler Springs, where Miss Beryl bought a puzzle and Mrs. Gruber purchased a Slinky, claiming never to have seen such a thing before. “It’s alive almost,” Mrs. Gruber kept saying when the Slinky, apparently of its own volition, descended the stairs set up for it.

  On the way home Miss Beryl, who had driven to Schuyler Springs a thousand times, had somehow taken a wrong turn, realizing her mistake only when they passed beneath the interstate and heard the roar of semis on their way to Canada. Mrs. Gruber, who never observed anything out a car window, remained innocent of her friend’s error, allowing Miss Beryl to seek a solution. She didn’t want just to stop and make a three-point turn in the middle of the country road, a maneuver that might alert even Mrs. Gruber to her mistake. So she kept on going for another mile or two, turned right at a rural intersection and headed, she hoped, south, and then right again at the first opportunity, theoretically west, toward Bath. Which indeed it was. The road took them back beneath the interstate past the new supermarket and onto the four-lane spur. When they passed the demonic clown advertising the future site of The Ultimate Escape, Mrs. Gruber, who’d been by it half a dozen times before without noticing, exclaimed, “Oh look, dear! It’s Clive Jr.!”

  The jigsaw puzzle Miss Beryl purchased at the hobby shop in Schuyler Springs was a snowy winter scene that reminded her of the Robert Frost poem she taught to eighth-graders for so many years. The puzzle’s woods were dark and deep, a tangle of black branches. “Why that one?” Mrs. Gruber had wanted to know. “It’d make me all nerves.”

  Miss Beryl now wished she had listened. Robert Frost aside, the puzzle had not been a good choice. The color of the snow was almost identical to that of the sky, and once Miss Beryl got the puzzle’s edge constructed, she found the rest mighty slow going. The maze of blacks and whites (not to mention grays) made it difficult to know whether any given piece might belong to the background or the foreground of the scene, the left or right side of the puzzle. Miss Beryl averaged a piece or two an hour and even these successes were often due to blind luck. She found she was able to stare at the puzzle for only so long before she had to take a break, and she learned quickly not to go over to her front window, as was her habit, and stare up into the trees, for it invariably dawned on her when she did this that the scene outside her window was virtually the same as the puzzle. Better to go into her bright yellow kitchen.

  But today, as Miss Beryl stared up into her soup cupboard, anxious to blame her offishness, her discombobulation, on puzzles and wrong turns and strangers with guns, she had to admit that these were not to blame. No, it was because she had done a bad thing, and her stomach had not been right since she did it.

  She would not soon forget the look on Sully’s face the morning he’d told her Clive Jr. was right, it would probably be best if he moved out come the first of the year. He’d stopped in on his way to work the second day after the terrible events outside her house and said, as he always did, “Well, I see you’re still alive,” the old joke taking on an extra dimension—even Sully seemed to realize this—when strangers started shooting rifles at the house next door, meaning, in fact, to shoot at your house. Sully was carrying his work boots and looking around for the Queen Anne to sit in. “What’d you do with my chair?”

  “My son’s fiancée sat in it and broke it,” Miss Beryl told him. She’d taken the pieces to a man in Schuyler Springs named Mr. Blue, who’d claimed over the phone that he could repair anything.

  Miss Beryl was still miffed with the Joyce woman, whose personality had not improved upon further acquaintance. She’d accompanied Clive Jr. the evening of the shooting incident, about which she voiced a great many entirely irrelevant opinions. In fact, the woman had opened her mouth and not shut it again for half an hour. The entire culture, she explained, was in rapid decline. The evidence was everywhere. Why, she herself could barely stand to watch the local news. There used to be a thing called neighborhoods, but not anymore. Why, even in her own neighborhood in Lake George things were happening that you associated with New York City or New Jersey. Animals, these people were, and nothing but. On and on she went, a juggernaut of personal opinion. By way of revenge Miss Beryl had gone into the kitchen and served the woman an extra-strong cup of “decaf.”

  Oddly enough, Sully, who was famous for refusing to assume the mantle of even the lightest responsibility, acknowledged this one. “The chair was probably my fault,” he admitted sadly. “I noticed it felt wobbly the last couple times I sat in it. I should have said something.”

  He was still standing there in the middle of the room, work boots in hand, looking to Miss Beryl even more like a ghost than usual, his brows knit thoughtfully. “In fact,” he added, “I should have fixed it. I meant to, actually.”

  Miss Beryl had almost interrupted him, told him forget it, as if that were necessary with Sully, but he seemed so deep in uncharacteristic thought that Miss Beryl had said nothing.

  “Anyhow, listen,” he said, snapping out of it. “If I left at the end of the month, do you think you could find another renter?”

  “Where would you go?” Miss Beryl had wondered out loud, realizing even as she spoke that her question had contained an unintended insult by suggesting that there was no place else in the wide world prepared to welcome him.

  Fortunately, Sully neither heard the insult nor shared her doubt. “I’ll find a spot,” he shrugged. “This town’s always about half empty. I could use a smaller place anyhow. In fact, I could probably get away with a room and a bath. I never use the kitchen. I just don’t want to leave you in the lurch, is all.”

  “I don’t need a renter, Donald,” she assured him. “I’ve enjoyed your company.” Realizing that this was a foolish observation since he was there only to sleep and bathe, she added, “knowing you were around.”

  “I haven’t been around that much,” he admitted. “And I wasn’t around Friday when I should have been …”

  “He’d have just shot you dead,” Miss Beryl told him. “Your presence would have just made things worse.”

  “Well, thanks for saying so, Mrs. Peoples.” Sully grinned wryly. “But I have this idea my leaving will make things quieter. That’s what your son thinks, and he could be right for once. Nobody can be wrong all the while. Not even The Bank.”

  This, in fact, had been Miss Beryl’s own reasoning on the subject, so she didn’t disagree. “If you change your mind, Donald—”

  “I won’t,” Sully said. “Not once it’s made up. Besides,” he added, looking around, “you don’t even have a place for me to sit down anymore.”

  All that had been two weeks ago, and in the interim Miss Beryl had not been herself. Since giving notice, Sully was even less in evidence than before. Part of it was that he’d started working mornings at Hattie’s, and this required him to get up half an hour earlier. Instead of waiting outside for Hattie’s to open, he now helped open it, which meant that he had to set the alarm that never woke him up half an hour earlier. Its buzzing in the bedroom above her own woke Miss Beryl, who now kept the broom she used to thump her ceiling right beside her bed. From the moment she heard Sully’s heavy feet hit the floo
r, it was usually less than five minutes before he stumbled out the door and into the gray street. He put his work boots on at the foot of the stairs now and was quickly gone. Sometimes Miss Beryl saw him late in the afternoon when he came home from work to bathe before going out again, but she missed their morning repartee. She was thinking just how much she missed it, and was going to miss Sully when he was gone, when her doorbell rang.

  Miss Beryl’s first thought, fear really, was that it must be Mrs. Gruber, who’d called midmorning to find out whether Miss Beryl might want to sally forth for lunch and who had been greatly distressed to learn that, no, her friend was still not feeling any better. Winters were difficult for Mrs. Gruber, who liked to take walks but was forced to quit them after Thanksgiving when the weather got bitter and she feared she would catch her death. She did not dare resume them until the tulips bloomed along the side of her house in April. And so, except when she was able to talk Miss Beryl into driving them someplace in the Ford, she was housebound. Thus she had a vested interest in Miss Beryl’s health. At first thrilled to learn that her friend would not be traveling this winter, Mrs. Gruber now realized—and how her spirits plummeted in this sad knowledge—that Miss Beryl not only intended to eschew international travel but also entertained no plans to sally forth locally. Convinced that Miss Beryl suffered more from simple discombobulation than anything else, Mrs. Gruber gave every indication of having formulated an ambitious plan to nurse her friend back to physical and emotional health and to nurse Miss Beryl’s Ford back onto the interstate in time to take advantage of postholiday sales. Which was why Miss Beryl feared that it would be Mrs. Gruber at the door with a steaming pot of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, made the way Mrs. Gruber always made it, with too much water. On the way to answer the door Miss Beryl peeped through her lace curtain to see if she was right.

  She was not. The woman waiting patiently on Miss Beryl’s porch was a tall, lanky middle-aged woman dressed in cheap slacks and a man’s canvas jacket and no hat. Miss Beryl recognized her in stages. The first of these stages was abstract. “I know you,” she murmured to herself, studying the woman. Then, “How about it, Ed? Where do I know her from?” Ed could not be induced to contribute. The problem with having taught school in a small town for so long was that she “knew” just about everyone, or rather recognized in their adult visages some distant eighth-grader. It was Miss Beryl’s theory that the idea of reincarnation had probably been invented by a small-town public school teacher gone slightly batty, the victim of a constant, vague impression that she’d known everyone she met on the street in some previous life. But it was this tall woman’s adult self that she seemed to recognize, which deepened the mystery, since Miss Beryl’s circle of acquaintance had had, this last decade, an ever shrinking radius. She appealed this time to her husband. “Don’t just sit there, Clive,” she said. “Help me out here.” Why in her mind’s eye did she see this woman in uniform?