Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  “Peter doesn’t tell me shit, Vera,” Sully assured her.

  “He will,” she told him. “You’re soul mates. I’m the one he despises.”

  “You’re crazy, too.”

  Silence again. More theater, probably. Though perhaps something else. “You know when you’ve lost somebody, Sully. At least I do. Practice makes perfect. When something means the world to me, I know it’s only a matter of time.”

  “You haven’t lost Peter,” he told her. “And I certainly haven’t won him. I haven’t even tried to win him.”

  “That’s what attracts him,” she said, sniffling now. “I’ve loved him until my heart broke right in two. You could care less, so you’re the one he wants.”

  “Listen, Vera—”

  “You should have heard the filth that little tramp said to me,” she said. “It was like a terrible smell coming out of the phone, polluting my home.”

  “I wasn’t there, Vera,” Sully reminded her. “I didn’t hear it.”

  “like a foul stench,” she went on. “I’ve made a clean home, Sully.”

  “You sure have.”

  “And this is what he trails into it,” she said. “What’s the use?”

  “I don’t know, Vera,” he conceded, tired of the conversation. “I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Right,” she said. “Run away.”

  “Screw yourself, Vera.”

  “Be thankful you can run away,” she said. “Be thankful you’re not the one with no place to go.”

  Back at the bar Rub and Peter were right where he’d left them, and before them a pretty amazing pile of chicken bones. Peter met Sully’s eye, and his expression was that of a man who’d intuited at least portions of Sully’s conversation with his mother. Just as mysterious and annoying, Rub, for some reason, was crying.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “They’re spicy,” Rub explained. He had the orange sauce all over him. His hands were orange to the wrist, as were his cheeks and the tip of his nose. There was orange in his crew cut.

  “Messy, too, looks like,” Sully observed. Even Peter, a fastidious eater, Vera’s boy, had orange hands.

  Rub examined his own as if for the first time, then began licking his fingers.

  “I bet they were good,” Sully said. “You know how I can tell?”

  Rub looked genuinely curious, as he usually was concerning all forms of mental telepathy.

  “Because you didn’t save me a single one.”

  Rub looked down at the pile of bones in front of him, as if in search of any that had not been picked completely clean. Not finding any, his expression darkened. “He ate as many as me,” he said, indicating Peter. “How come you never get mad at him?”

  “I’m not mad at anybody, Rub,” Sully said. “I was just making a simple observation. I noticed you ate all the wings.”

  “Him too,” Rub insisted.

  Sully couldn’t help grinning at Rub’s wonderful ability to restore other people’s spirits at the cost of his own. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad you had a good lunch. You might have saved me one wing, but if you were hungry, I’m glad you ate them all.”

  Rub’s head hung even lower now. For such a short man, he had a large head, and when it was full of shame, he was unable to hold it erect. Peter, who’d been toweling off with napkins and was apparently disinclined to share Rub’s burden of shame, leaned over and stage-whispered, “If he wants to talk about sharing, you might remind him that the six hundred Carl Roebuck paid us went right into his pocket and never came out again.”

  Since this was true, Sully gave them each two hundred. Rub folded his bills carefully with orange fingers and put them in his shirt pocket. “How come you’re looking at me?” Rub said, since everybody seemed to be.

  “What do you say we go back to work?”

  “Okay,” Rub said, sliding off his stool.

  “Wait outside a minute,” Sully told him. “I need to talk to my son.”

  Rub’s face clouded over again.

  “Next time save me a wing and I’ll talk to you too,” Sully said.

  When he was gone, Peter said, “Jesus, you’re mean to him.”

  “He knows I don’t mean anything.”

  “You’re sure?” Peter said skeptically.

  “Pretty sure.”

  Peter didn’t say anything.

  “You better take a few minutes and go see your mother,” Sully told him. “She’s all upset.”

  Peter sighed, shook his head. “About Will?”

  “About you.”

  “Me? What about me?”

  “Who the hell knows? I never pretended to understand your mother. She did say you’d gotten a phone call from some woman in West Virginia.”

  Peter rolled his eyes. “Oh, Christ. Okay.”

  “Your mother thought you might want to tell me about it.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I told her you wouldn’t.”

  “You were right.”

  “Fine. Keep all the secrets. Keep every fucking one. I’ll tell you one thing though. I don’t think I’m going to eat too much more of your sullen shit,” Sully told him. “I know you think I’ve got it coming, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to take it.”

  Peter seemed to be on the verge of saying something further, but whatever it was, he let it slide.

  “Go make sure your mother’s okay. We’ll start on the floors.”

  “Start upstairs on the boards that are already ruined,” Peter advised. “It takes a while before you get the hang of not splintering them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “This will be the third hardwood floor I’ve laid for a professor,” Peter explained. “One when I was a graduate student, for my dissertation director. Another in West Virginia two summers ago. I should have been working on my book, but I needed the money. So I laid this full professor’s floor, and three months later he voted no on my promotion and tenure committee. He said I didn’t seem to have my priorities straight. But at least I’ve got a talent to fall back on, right?”

  “You mean laying floors or feeling sorry for yourself?” Sully said, again letting the words escape, trailing regret.

  “Thanks,” Peter said. “I knew you’d understand.”

  When he was gone, Sully drained the rest of his draft beer. “Birdie,” he said, since she was right there. “I don’t know.”

  “That makes two of us,” she commiserated. “And that’s not the worst of it.”

  Sully frowned at her suspiciously. “What’s the worst of it?”

  “Somebody owes me for three orders of wings.”

  Sully looked around the bar, which had pretty much cleared out, all of Main Street’s businessmen having returned to their afternoon’s labors. Carl Roebuck, unfortunately, was also gone.

  “I guess,” Sully admitted, “that’d be me.”

  On their way back to the house on Bowdon, Sully and Rub were greeted by a strange sight. As they drove up Main, Rub, still stung at having been sent outside so Sully could talk to Peter privately, was staring morosely out the passenger side window when he noticed a car parked crazily in the middle of the Anderson lawn. Nearby, on the porch steps, sat a well-dressed middle-aged woman who appeared to be sobbing. It was a sight odd enough to cause Rub to forget his grievance. “Look over there,” he said when Sully stopped at the intersection of Main and Bowdon. What really puzzled Rub wasn’t so much the car sitting on the lawn or the strange, weeping woman on the steps as it was that something was missing. Ever since they’d taken on the job of fixing up the Anderson property, Rub had been dreading the day they’d have to attack the tree stump in the middle of the front lawn. “Somebody took the stump,” he told Sully hopefully.

  Sully backed from the intersection to the curb, parked and got out. The woman looked like the one who’d been with Clive Jr. at The Horse. She was talking to herself, apparently, in between sobs. She looked up at the sound of their doors closing and w
as apparently further chagrined to discover that they were not who she hoped they’d be. The look on her face suggested that Sully’s and Rub’s sudden appearance on the scene represented for her the final indignity of her situation, whatever her situation was.

  “Ask her who took the stump,” Rub suggested. Sully looked at him, shook his head. “Nobody took the stump, dummy. It’s under the car.”

  Rub squatted and looked. Sully was right, the stump was under the car. In fact, the car was on the stump, accounting for its crazy angle.

  Sully saw Clive Jr. emerge from Alice Gruber’s house down the street and head toward them on foot, looking small and incongruous beneath the rows of giant black elms. When he saw who was waiting for him, his gait altered imperceptibly, as if registering that a bad thing had just gotten worse. Which it had.

  “Hi, dolly,” Sully called to the woman. In point of fact, she looked a lot older than the women Sully usually called “dolly,” but she also looked like she could use some cheering up.

  “Are you the tow truck?” the woman asked so miserably that Sully sensed melodrama.

  “Am I a tow truck? No. Do I look like one?”

  “My fiancée called … a tow truck,” she explained, her voice quavering.

  Rub glared at her as he might have a mythical beast.

  “Could you make that horrid man go away?” the woman begged, indicating Rub.

  “Nope,” Sully admitted. “I’ve never been able to. You’re welcome to try your luck, though.”

  She looked away, up the street, hopelessly, in the direction of the Sans Souci.

  “Hi, Clive,” Sully grinned when Clive Jr. arrived on the scene.

  “Sully,” Clive Jr. acknowledged. The woman on the steps had gotten to her feet when she saw Clive Jr., but she stayed where she was by the porch.

  “I don’t want to say anything,” Sully told Clive Jr., “but you appear to be up a stump.”

  Clive Jr. looked at the deep tire tracks that began at the curb and stopped where the car perched. He sighed. “It was an accident,” he said.

  “I figured you didn’t park there on purpose,” Sully said.

  “It wasn’t me,” Clive Jr. said. “I was giving Joyce a driving lesson.” Something like a sly smile played across Clive Jr.’s mouth. “I bet you were surprised to see her again.”

  “Who?” Sully wondered.

  All three men turned to look at the grieving woman.

  “Joyce,” Clive Jr. explained.

  “Joyce who?” Sully wanted to know.

  The smile, if it had been a smile, was gone now. “My fiancée. You used to date her.”

  Sully took another, closer look at the woman on the porch steps. “I’ve never seen her before in my life,” he assured Clive Jr. “She doesn’t know me, either. She thought I was a tow truck, in fact.”

  “You went out with her in high school,” Clive Jr. said.

  Sully was delighted to see that Clive Jr. was angry. “Never,” he said. “Not a chance.”

  “Her name was Joyce Freeman.”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “How come she keeps crying?” Rub wondered.

  Clive Jr. glared at Rub homicidally until Rub stared at his shoes and nudged Sully in an attempt at confidentiality. “How come she keeps crying?” he asked Sully.

  “She’s probably thinking about her future,” Sully told him. “She’s marrying Junior here. Lighten up, Clive. That was a joke.”

  Clive Jr. looked grateful to hear it and to Sully’s surprise did lighten up a little, reluctantly explaining how the whole thing had come about. According to Clive Jr., Joyce had never learned to drive. For the last few weeks he had been instructing her. Today, they’d been parallel parking along Upper Main, where there was plenty of room and almost no traffic. Joyce was not a natural. Despite his patient instruction, she kept cutting the wheel too much and hitting the curb when she backed in. When Clive Jr. saw that she was about to do the same thing again, he told her to start over again. She apparently had forgotten she was in reverse and was surprised when she let up on the brake and the car went backwards. She immediately leapt to the wrong conclusion, that she was rolling, and the solution that occurred to her at that moment was more gas. “I told her there was nothing wrong with her logic,” Clive Jr. explained, “but she’s inconsolable.”

  “You want me to try?” Sully offered. “Since she used to be my girlfriend?”

  Clive Jr.’s eyes narrowed. “You were a senior. She was a junior.”

  “Whatever you say, Clive. You want us to lift you off that stump?” Sully offered.

  “I told you,” Clive Jr. said. “The tow truck’s on its way.”

  “I don’t think they’ll be able to just pull you off,” Sully said. “Look where the rear axle is.”

  “They’ll know what to do,” Clive Jr. maintained stubbornly, his face a storm cloud again. Sully’s solemn refusal to recognize his fiancée was the reason, Sully could tell. “Don’t feel you have to hang around.”

  At that moment the tow truck arrived, Harold Proxmire of Harold’s Automotive World at the wheel, his red-haired teenager, Dwayne, seated beside him in the cab. Since Dwayne could not always be trusted to tow the correct vehicle, Harold was apparently along to supervise.

  Harold, dressed in gray and looking gray as usual, parked the tow truck on the other side of the street and climbed out wearily, shaking his head when he saw Sully. “I might have known you’d be involved in this,” he said, taking in the situation. “That a tree stump you’re sitting on, Mr. Peoples?”

  Clive Jr. admitted it was, explained again how events had come to pass. In Harold Proxmire, Clive. Jr. found a more sympathetic listener than he’d had in Sully. Harold nodded soberly and when Clive Jr. was finished said, “Bad luck the stump had to be right there.”

  “Good luck, you mean,” Sully said. “If it hadn’t been for the stump, she’d have kept going right into the living room, probably.”

  “I told him he could leave anytime he wanted,” Clive Jr. told Harold, who had gotten down on his knees to peer under the car.

  “I’m glad he didn’t,” Harold said. “We’re going to have to lift you off.”

  “You could hitch up to the car and pull the stump out too,” Sully suggested. “Save us some work later.”

  “Quit picking your nose and go lift that car, Dwayne,” Harold suggested.

  The boy had been engaged in this surreptitious activity, and he blushed the color of his hair. He, Sully and Rub took up positions behind the car while Harold went around, opened the driver’s side door and took hold of the steering wheel.

  “Where do you want me?” Clive Jr. asked Harold, noticing he’d been ignored in the matter of his own car. Now there was no room at the rear bumper where Sully and Rub and the boy were preparing to lift.

  “How about over there next to her?” Sully suggested.

  “I think we got her covered, Mr. Peoples,” Harold said. He counted three and they lifted. The car rolled forward with surprising ease. The only casualty was Dwayne, who, stationed in the middle between Sully and Rub, stumbled over the tree stump as they went forward, fell and bloodied his lower lip.

  “There you go, Mr. Peoples,” Harold said, putting the car into park. “You’re a free man.”

  Clive Jr. did not look like a free man. He looked like a man wearing an invisible yoke, pulling something he alone was aware of. “What do I owe you?” he said.

  “Just for the service call, I guess. We didn’t have to hitch you up. If I was you I’d put it up on a rack someplace and let somebody have a good look. Make sure you didn’t crack that axle.”

  Clive Jr. gave Harold a twenty, then turned to Sully.

  “Don’t be silly, Clive,” Sully told him.

  They were still standing around the newly freed car. Five men, none of whom seemed to possess the authority to adjourn the meeting. “Dwayne and I better get on back before the boss gets suspicious,” Harold finally said. “Tell your lady frien
d these things happen, Mr. Peoples. She should see some of the fixes I pull people out of.”

  “And I’ll have that stump out of there pretty soon,” Sully said. “In case you want to start up your lessons again.”

  “I don’t suppose you found a new flat yet,” Clive Jr. said.

  “Not yet,” Sully grinned. “But thanks for asking.”

  Sully and Rub followed Harold and the boy over to where the tow truck was parked. Harold got in the passenger side, Dwayne the driver’s. “Take this before I do something foolish with it,” Sully said, handing Harold the two hundred dollars left from Carl Roebuck’s six.

  “You sure?” Harold said.

  Sully said he was sure.

  “You want a receipt?”

  “Nope,” Sully said. “I want it to snow, is what I want.”

  “Well,” Harold said. “Don’t worry about me. I’m not going to repossess you.”

  “I know you wouldn’t,” Sully said. “Esmerelda might, though.”

  “She is the meanest Christian woman in the county,” Harold admitted. “Isn’t she, Dwayne?”

  Dwayne apparently didn’t see much margin in responding to this query, because he just shrugged.

  “Was that her I saw on the tube one night last week?” Sully thought to ask. He’d been in The Horse and glanced up at the TV just in time to catch the last second or two of a piece on a group protesting The Ultimate Escape Fun Park.

  Harold sighed, nodded.

  “I thought so,” Sully said. “I was watching on a small screen, though, and it didn’t get all of her hair, so I couldn’t be sure.”

  Harold ignored this. “Our boy is in the cemetery out there,” he explained to Sully, who’d half forgotten that the Proxmires had had a son killed in Vietnam. “She don’t want to see him disturbed.”

  “I can understand that,” Sully admitted, sorry now that he’d joked about Mrs. Harold.

  “Funny time to protest,” Harold said, his eyes filling. “She wouldn’t during the war. Wouldn’t let me either.”

  “We did fight ourselves, if I recall,” Sully reminded Harold, who had also served.

  Harold nodded. “We did indeed. I thought we’d never stop.”

  Neither man said anything for a moment.