Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  The problem was that Will knew he didn’t dare let his grandfather get out of sight either, sensing that if this happened he’d lose his grandfather’s protection in a hostile environment. He knew Grandpa Sully was forgetful, entirely capable of forgetting Will altogether. In fact, he’d done it once already. One day last week they’d gone to the lumberyard outside of town, and when they got inside, Grandpa Sully had stationed Will near the front door and told him to wait right there. Then he’d gone over and talked to the man behind the counter. After a few minutes the two men went out the side door and into the big yard where mountains of boards were stacked. Through the window Will had watched his grandfather and the man load a dozen or so boards onto the back of Grandpa Sully’s truck and tie them in place with the rope. To the end of the boards the man had attached a red flag, which blew in the breeze. Will made a mental note to ask his grandfather what the flag was for. The two men outside shook hands then, and Grandpa Sully got back into the truck and drove off, the red flag waving good-bye around the corner. Will then watched the hands of the big clock inch around the dial, forever it had seemed, until Grandpa Sully returned, going, it seemed to Will, dangerously fast, even in the parking lot.

  The truck came to a skidding halt, pebbles rattling against the window through which Will stood peering, his eyes liquid. He was not actually crying, though, and he was proud of that. In fact, since returning to North Bath with his father he hadn’t cried once, having resolved not to. He’d decided now that Wacker was gone that he’d try to be brave. When Grandpa Sully got out of the truck and headed inside, he was moving faster than Will had ever seen him go. He looked scared too, which made Will feel better, knowing that a man as fierce as Grandpa Sully could worry.

  “I bet you thought Grandpa’d forgotten all about you,” he said.

  Will nodded. That was exactly the conclusion he’d come to, there was no denying it.

  “Only for a minute,” Grandpa Sully had explained. Clearly, forgetting for such a short period of time didn’t really count as forgetting to his grandfather, who was used to forgetting things, Will guessed, for a lot longer. “Don’t tell your grandmother,” he warned when they were back in the truck and barreling down the road. “And if your mother calls, don’t tell her either.”

  Will had promised he wouldn’t.

  “In fact,” Sully had continued upon further reflection, “don’t even tell your father.”

  The boards loaded onto the back of Grandpa Sully’s truck had come loose then and started tumbling off and bouncing along the blacktop, and Grandpa Sully had skidded over onto the shoulder and gotten out to retrieve them. Most of them fit onto the truck better now. From inside the cab, Will could hear his grandfather swearing at the boards and also at the drivers of the other cars on the road who had to swerve around both the lumber and Grandpa Sully. But by the time his grandfather had collected the last of the boards and dropped them into the bed of the truck, he had calmed down some, and after he took a deep breath and got back into the truck, he’d looked over at Will and continued the instructions he’d been giving before all the boards fell out of the truck. “In fact,” he said “don’t tell anybody.”

  Will had kept his promise and not told a soul, but this present circumstance already reminded him of what had happened at the lumberyard, and Will sensed that this would be the beginning of something else that Grandpa Sully’d be instructing him not to tell anyone about. His grandfather was mad again and banging things and cursing, and the old house he was kicking looked like it would fall down for sure if he didn’t stop. Or maybe it would wait until they were all inside and then fall down on them. Or maybe they’d all go inside and he’d be told to wait someplace and Grandpa Sully and the other man would forget about him and drive off, and then it would fall down.

  Sully, who hadn’t, as far as he knew, a key, was trying to force the rear door with a crowbar. The gray wood, its paint long ago stripped away, had grown soft and porous, which meant the crowbar wasn’t working very well. So far, Sully had managed only to mutilate the door, which held fast.

  “Who but Don Sullivan would use a crowbar to enter his own house?” Carl wondered out loud, stamping his feet in the cold.

  “Stand back a second,” Sully said, putting his weight against the bar. Like everything else about the house, the door hung crooked, and Sully had managed to create a space between the door and its frame, a space large enough to insert the flat end of the crowbar. When he levered himself against the bar, however, the steel simply sank deeper into the rotten wood.

  “Why I should be surprised is another question,” Carl continued. “Your grandfather is a crowbar kind of guy, Will. He’d use a crowbar to remove the back of his wristwatch.”

  “I don’t own a wristwatch,” Sully reminded him. “And if you don’t shut up, I’m going to use this crowbar to remove you entirely.”

  Carl leaned up against the porch railing, ignoring this threat like he did all of Sully’s threats. “What worries me is that just about the time you succeed in breaking in, the cops are going to arrive, charge us with burglary and throw our asses in jail.”

  “Me, maybe,” Sully stood upright for a moment to catch his breath. “I’m the one breaking and entering. As usual, you haven’t done shit.”

  Carl lit a cigarette, peeked in the kitchen window. “Hey,” he said. “I just had a hell of an idea. You could move in here.” He inhaled deeply, then remembered he’d quit smoking and flicked the cigarette over the porch railing.

  Sully was grinning at him. “You aren’t going to make it, are you?”

  “You want these?” Carl said, offering Sully the pack of cigarettes. “Take ’em.”

  Sully took them, put the pack into his pocket.

  Carl looked surprised. Clearly, he’d intended the gesture to be symbolic and wouldn’t have offered the cigarettes to Sully had he thought Sully might actually take them. It wasn’t this actual pack of smokes he’d intended to give up but some future pack. He already missed this particular pack. “Those aren’t even your brand,” he pointed out.

  “I’ll smoke them anyhow,” Sully said. “I’ve gotten something for nothing from you about twice in the twenty years I’ve known you.”

  “That’s better than the nothing for something I always get when I hire you,” Carl said. “Why don’t you just break one of those small windowpanes and reach inside and unlock the door?”

  “Because then I’d have to replace the glass,” Sully said, stepping back and eyeing the door savagely. “Here.”

  Carl caught the crowbar. “Can this be?” he said in mock astonishment. “Has Don Sullivan, Jack-Off, All Trades conceded that his trusty crowbar is not the precise tool for the task at hand?”

  Sully grinned at him, measured his distance to the door. “You’re right for once in your life,” he admitted. “And here’s the precise tool I need.”

  Planting on his bad leg, he kicked the door as hard as he could with his good, just above the knob, to gunshot effect. The door held, but all four panes of glass came free and shattered at Sully’s feet. “You prick,” he said, addressing the door.

  Carl, shaking his head, handed the crowbar back to Sully. “Allow me,” he said, reaching inside and unlocking the door. Glass crackled underfoot.

  At this point Sully remembered Will and was astonished to discover that the boy was crying. Sully went to his grandson then and sat down at the bottom of the steps so he’d be eye level. “Hey,” he said. Finally Will looked at him. “What’s up?”

  Will looked away.

  “Did Grandpa scare you?” Sully guessed.

  The boy snuffed his nose.

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  Will looked at him again, his eyes red.

  “We can go in now,” Sully told him. “Don’t you want to see the house where Grandpa grew up?”

  “Grandpa Ralph?”

  “No. Grandpa Me.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of, you know,” Sully told him.


  Will snuffed his nose, continued to cry softly. It was always Grandpa Sully’s kindness that made him want to cry the worst. It was as if his grandfather truly needed him to be brave, and that made being brave even harder.

  “Grandpa wouldn’t let anything happen to you,” he said, and when Will looked at the ground, he added, “Hey … look at me a minute.”

  Will did.

  “Quit that,” Sully told him.

  Will stifled a sob.

  “Good boy,” his grandfather told him. “Now. You decide. We can go inside for a minute and you can see where Grandpa grew up, or we can go over to the other house and see Dad.”

  “Okay,” Will croaked.

  “Okay which?”

  “Go see Dad,” Will managed, just as certain that this was the wrong answer as he was that it was the only answer he could give.

  “Christ,” his grandfather muttered. “Jesus H.”

  When Sully drove up, Rub and Peter were on a break, Rub seated on the steps of Miles Anderson’s front porch, Peter sitting a few feet away, his back up against the front door. Whether they’d been sitting that way for five minutes or an hour was anybody’s guess. Since it was anybody’s, Sully guessed an hour. Also, it had probably been that long since either had spoken to the other. Rub continued to be resentful of Peter’s presence, just as he resented all the other people—Miss Beryl, Wirf, Ruth, Carl Roebuck—who seemed to him competitors for his best friend’s affection. The difference was that these other people didn’t horn in on their workday and subtract from Rub’s quality time. Peter had made a few halfhearted friendly overtures but apparently felt no great urgency about winning over Rub.

  They’d gotten some work done, at least. The bare forsythia had been trimmed back and a huge pile of sticks and branches raked onto the terrace. Sully’s ax stood upright, its blade embedded in the center of the tree trunk on the front lawn. A few wood chips littered the immediate vicinity of the stump, but otherwise there was little evidence they’d made much of an impression on it. Rub was right. Elm tree roots went halfway to China. It was okay with Sully that they hadn’t gotten very far. Getting the elm stump out of the lawn was going to be a ballbuster of a job, but it was one he could do himself, come spring, when the ground softened. He could do it with an ax and a shovel, a chain saw if he felt like borrowing one, and he could do it standing more or less straight up. It was the kind of work he specialized in, that he’d spent his life doing, the kind of work that required no special skills beyond dogged determination and the belief that he’d still be there when the stump was gone. The kind of job it would have probably been better to do another way, with the right equipment, quicker and with less effort. It had always been Ruth’s position that if Sully had put his bullheadedness to some constructive purpose when he was younger he could have been president.

  Will scampered up the walk past Sully and joined his father, who studied the boy’s face knowledgeably. The boy wasn’t crying anymore, but Peter probably had enough of a father’s eye to guess that he had been. Sully himself had always been dumbstruck by grief, even his own, and considered it one of life’s wonders that other people had the ability to see grief coming from a long way off or to detect when it had recently passed. One of the things every woman he’d ever been associated with had held against him was his inability to see when they were grief-stricken. Even his own son seemed to possess this ability so conspicuously lacking in himself.

  “I thought you said you was coming by after Hattie’s,” Rub said, sounding not a little like a child suffering a broken promise.

  “And here I am,” Sully pointed out.

  “It’s almost lunchtime,” Rub observed. “You probably aren’t even going to let us eat lunch today, are you?”

  “Go ahead,” Sully suggested. “If you’re going to sit around all day, you might as well go eat.”

  “We was just waiting for the truck,” Rub explained. “We’d have to make about ten trips in the Canimo.”

  “Camino,” Sully corrected him. Rub was unable to pronounce this word. “El Camino.”

  “We needed the truck,” Rub stated, too wise to try the word again, knowing the price of failure around Sully.

  Sully handed him the keys. “Try not to wreck it,” he suggested. “At least not until I make the first payment.”

  “I’ve never wrecked a single truck of yours,” Rub pointed out.

  “It’s the reason we’re still friends,” Sully assured him.

  Rub shrugged. “You’re more his friend now,” he remarked sadly, his voice lowered so Peter wouldn’t hear.

  “Peter’s my son, Rub,” Sully told him. “I’m sorry if you object, but I’m allowed to be friends with my son if I want to.”

  “He doesn’t even like you,” Rub said.

  “True,” Sully admitted, not minding if his voice was audible to Peter. “But I’m growing on him. He just needs a little more time to get over the fact that I ignored him for about thirty years. He hasn’t quite figured out yet that I did it for his own good.”

  Rub’s brow furrowed deeper. “How come he always calls me Sancho? It’s like he thinks I’m stupid.”

  “Well,” Sully said.

  Rub surrendered a half grin. “How come I don’t mind when you say I’m stupid?” he asked with genuine curiosity.

  Sully was grinning too now. Nobody could cheer him up faster than Rub. “Because we’re friends, Rub. Friends can tell each other the truth.”

  “How come I don’t get to tell you you’re stupid?”

  “Because I’m smart,” Sully told him.

  Rub sighed. They’d had this conversation before, and it always came out the same way.

  Peter had been talking to Will in hushed tones, the boy seated on his lap. Peter listened, nodded knowingly, glanced at Sully, then said something to his son that Sully couldn’t quite make out. Then the boy scooted down the steps past them, down the walk and into the front seat of the El Camino, which was parked at the curb.

  “I guess I’ll take him back,” Peter said to no one in particular. “Mom should be getting home about now.”

  “Okay,” Sully said, meeting his son’s accusing eye.

  “You want to tell me what happened?”

  Sully shrugged. “I wish I knew,” he said truthfully. “I looked over and he was crying.”

  “He said you got angry.”

  “Not at him.”

  “Well, something sure scared him,” Peter insisted.

  “Just about everything seems to,” Sully said and was immediately sorry. “If I scared him, I sure didn’t mean to,” he added lamely.

  Peter snorted. “You forgot all about him, didn’t you? You forgot he was even there.”

  Which made Sully wonder if Will had told him about the lumberyard. He decided probably not. If Peter’d found out about that he’d have said something. Or he’d have said, “You forgot him again.”

  “I don’t remember you being there,” he said weakly. Nevertheless, Sully was stung by the accuracy of Peter’s intuition.

  “That’s my line,” Peter said by way of a parting shot. He fished in his pocket for the keys to the El Camino. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Sully and Rub watched him depart. Starting the El Camino up, Peter did a U-turn and whipped the car back down Main. Sully caught just a glimpse of his grandson’s white face in the front seat before it and the car disappeared, leaving Sully to contemplate the fact that his son had just echoed Ruth’s refrain—that he was never around when needed. It had been one of Vera’s principal complaints, too, Sully remembered, though it had gotten lost in all her other complaints. Other people also offered variations on this same theme. From his old football coach, Clive Peoples Sr., who’d become homicidal when Sully strayed from his assigned duties, to Carl Roebuck, who would send him someplace and come by later and find him gone, to Rub, who would have liked to know right where Sully was every minute. In fact, so many people seemed to agree that Sully was never where he was needed th
at he was greatly tempted to acknowledge the truth of the observation, except that this would in turn have led to the sort of specific regret that Sully was too wise to indulge.

  “Well.” Sully frowned at Rub. “You want to hear the good news?”

  “I guess so,” Rub said a little suspiciously. Sully’s good news sometimes meant they’d been hired to dig up somebody’s ruptured septic tank.

  “I got us another job,” Sully told him. “Working for your favorite person, too.”

  Rub’s eyes narrowed. “Carl?”

  Sully nodded. “He’s waiting for us. Impatiently, would be my guess.”

  “Waiting where?”

  “At the house,” Sully nodded in the direction of his father’s place.

  “I thought you said you didn’t want nothing to do with that place,” Rub remembered.

  It was one of the things about Rub that Sully couldn’t get used to. Occasionally, out of the blue Rub would remember something, sometimes a thing he’d been told only once, or overheard. Usually the things Rub recalled at moments like these were things Sully’d just as soon he forgot.

  “I guess I did say that, didn’t I,” Sully admitted. He wasn’t sure how to explain to Rub or anyone else the attraction of ripping up the floors of his father’s house, gutting the inside, furthering the house’s destruction.

  “You also said we weren’t ever going to work for Carl Roebuck again,” Rub added petulantly as they sauntered down the walk. When Rub started to get into the truck, Sully stopped him. “Let’s walk,” he suggested. “You can walk a whole block, can’t you?”

  Rub shut the door again. “I figured you’d want to drive.”

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause of your knee.”

  “It’s good of you to remember, Rub, but I’d rather walk.”

  “How come?”

  “Because of my knee.”