Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  “Did I hear your son’s back in town?” Harold said.

  Sully nodded, feeling strange. Not many people remembered he had a son, and not many of those who did would have thought of Peter as Sully’s. Having Harold refer to him this way also reminded him of Vera’s contention that Peter was his now, that he’d won their son. “He’s helping me out for a week or two,” he explained, almost adding, until he goes back to teaching at the college. That, it occurred to him, would have been an unkind thing to say to a man whose own son lay buried a mile outside of town. It also would have been a boast. My son the professor. A boast Sully didn’t feel he had any right to.

  Harold nodded in the direction of Clive Jr., who had finally coaxed his weeping fiancée off the porch steps and was leading her over to the car, which still sat in the middle of the lawn. He had her by the elbow and was leading her like a blind woman. “When I was a kid, I had an Irish setter like her. All nerves.”

  They watched Clive put the woman in the car on the passenger side, then go around and get in behind the wheel. The car started right up, and Clive drove off the lawn and gently over the curb. “He should get that axle checked,” Harold said. “But I bet he won’t.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Sully said. “Bad things don’t happen to bankers.” Though he thought about Carl Roebuck’s misgivings concerning The Ultimate Escape and wondered if Clive Jr. might be in for trouble. For Miss Beryl’s sake, he hoped not.

  “I don’t think I’d give any more driving lessons if I was him. That’s how his old man got killed, wasn’t it?”

  “Some people never learn,” he said. “Tell Esmerelda hello.”

  When the tow truck pulled away from the curb, Sully noticed that Rub was looking glum. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I wisht you’d took it,” Rub said.

  “Took what?”

  “He had a twenty-dollar bill out.”

  “Who?” Sully said.

  “The bank guy,” Rub said. “I could’ve used that twenty dollars.”

  “Ten, you mean.”

  “It was a twenty,” Rub insisted. “I saw it.”

  “But only half would have been yours, right?”

  Rub shrugged.

  “Or did you want the whole twenty for yourself and leave me with nothing?”

  “I didn’t get either half,” Rub pointed out. “Nothing was what I got.”

  “Well, that’s what I got too,” Sully said.

  Rub sighed. This had all the earmarks of another argument with Sully that he wasn’t going to win.

  “Here comes Peter,” Rub observed sadly when the El Camino came into view. “You probably would have shared it with him, and he wasn’t even there.”

  “How’s work?” Wirf wanted to know that evening when Sully came into The Horse and slid onto the stool next to him. Something about the lawyer’s tone of voice suggested to Sully that this was not a casual question.

  “Hard,” Sully told him. “Dirty. Unrewarding.” He nodded at the sweating bottle of beer in front of Wirf. Lately Wirf had been cutting back by drinking soda water until Sully joined him sometime after dinner. “I see you’re zigging already.”

  “I’ve been contemplating,” Wirf said. “Zigging helps me to contemplate. Would you like to know what I’ve been contemplating?”

  “No,” Sully told him.

  “Stupidity,” Wirf said.

  Sully studied him, trying to gauge Wirf’s level of intoxication, never an easy task. “You aren’t in a very good mood, Wirf. I can tell.”

  Birdie came over, gave Sully the beer she knew he’d order. “He wouldn’t even bet on The People’s Court,” she said sadly.

  “I think I’ll have one more, Birdie,” Wirf said, “now that the subject of all my contemplation has arrived.”

  When Birdie bent over to fish a bottle of beer from the cooler, Sully made a theatrical point of standing up on the rungs of his bar stool and craning forward to look down her shirt. “What kind of bra is that?”

  “A two-seater,” she informed him. Then she set the beer in front of Wirf and made a face at the lawyer. “On the subject of stupidity.”

  “I’m not stupid,” Wirf said. “Merely self-destructive.”

  “Where’s Jeff?” Sully wondered out loud, noticing it was well past Birdie’s usual time to go home.

  “Tiny let him go,” she said.

  “How come?”

  “You shouldn’t steal when business is slow,” Birdie said significantly before heading back down the bar to take care of Jocko, who had just come in, leaving Sully and Wirf alone in their corner.

  “That was one of the original Ten Commandments, you’ll recall,” Wirf said. “Thou Shalt Not Steal When Business Is Slow. It came right after Thou Shalt Stay in School. Which was preceded by Thou Shalt Not Get Caught Working When Thou Art Collecting Disability from the State.”

  “Look,” Sully said. “I have no idea what bug crawled up your ass tonight, but I happen to be in a good mood for once. I don’t know how long it’ll be before the next one rolls around, so I’m not going to let you ruin this one, if that’s all right with you.”

  Wirf suddenly looked sober and determined. “I bet I can ruin it for you.”

  “I bet you can’t,” Sully said, sliding off his stool and taking his beer with him. Since he arrived at the other end of the bar at the same moment as Jocko’s drink, and since Jocko’s last vial of mystery pills had been a great improvement over the ones that had put him to sleep and given Carl Roebuck’s Doberman a stroke, Sully paid for it.

  “Don’t tell me one-two-three ran today,” Jocko said, peering over the tops of his thick glasses, “because I know it didn’t.”

  “I just wanted to say thanks,” Sully said, his voice low. “Those little blue jobs are the best yet.”

  Jocko nodded. “I thought you might like them. They’re new. I wouldn’t necessarily mix them with alcohol.”

  “I wouldn’t either,” Sully agreed, taking a swig of beer. “I take mine in the morning with my prune juice.”

  “I’ve got something for that, too,” Jocko said.

  Birdie was there again, this time with a note for Sully, written in Wirf’s hand on a bar napkin. It said: “And then there’s: Thou Shalt Not Be Videotaped Loading Concrete Blocks Onto a Truck When Thou Art Suing for Total Disability.” Wirf was grinning at him. Sully could see that much all the way from the opposite end of the bar.

  “I doubt it’s the pills, actually,” Jocko explained. “They say arthritis is better when you exercise. Which is not to say I recommend your working on that knee.”

  “I’m not hurting quite as much, for some reason,” Sully said, wadding up Wirf’s note into a ball and tossing it. The guy in the dark sedan, no doubt, Sully thought. The one he’d thought might be an investigator hired to document Carl Roebuck’s myriad infidelities.

  Wirf was scribbling on another napkin.

  “Is our legal friend composing briefs?” Jocko wondered.

  “I’d be surprised if he was even wearing briefs,” Sully said.

  Birdie brought the new note. “For Verily I Say unto Thee. If Thou Art Caught Working Whilst on Disability, Thou Art Truly and Forever Fucked in the Eyes of the State.”

  Sully wadded this one up too and strolled back down the bar. “Videotaped?”

  “Verily.”

  “Hmmm,” Sully said, running his fingers through his hair. “So that’s who that guy was. I figured he was somebody’s husband planning to assassinate Carl Roebuck. I thought he had binoculars.”

  “A video camera.”

  “No shit.”

  “Verily.”

  “So what can they do?”

  “I don’t know,” Wirf admitted. “Depends on how nasty they want to get. They could sue to recover the partial disability payments. And the education benefit.”

  “Will they?”

  “Probably not. I’d make them enter the tape into evidence, and my guess is a tape showing you at work would d
o us as much good as them. They’d be going to a lot of trouble for nothing. See, we got one of the original Ten Commandments on our side.”

  “Only one?”

  “Thou Canst Not Get Blood from a Turnip.”

  Sully shrugged. “Then what are we worried about?”

  Wirf was grinning at him now, as Sully slid back onto the bar stool. “Sully, Sully, Sully,” he said, and together they settled pleasantly into what remained of the evening.

  WEDNESDAY

  Snow.

  A snow not quite like any Miss Beryl could ever remember, and she watched it fall through the open blinds of her front room hypnotically. She’d awakened feeling woozy, as if she’d gotten out of bed too quickly, except that she’d gotten up slowly and then stood by the side of her bed wondering if she might need to sit back down. Flu, she thought, dern it. Miss Beryl hadn’t had the flu in a long time, almost a decade, and so her recollection of how you were supposed to feel was vague. What she did feel, in addition to the wooziness, was an odd sensation of distance from her extremities, her feet and fingers miles away, as if they belonged to someone else, and to account for this, the word “flu” entered her consciousness whole, like a loaf of something fresh from the oven, warm and full of leavening explanation.

  Flu. It explained her offishness of the past few days, even, perhaps, her persistent feelings of guilt about Sully. Miss Beryl was of the opinion that guilt grew like a culture in the atmosphere of illness and that an attack of guilt often augured the approach of a virus. This particular virus was probably a gift from the dreadful Joyce woman, Miss Beryl decided. Not that the Joyce woman had exhibited flu symptoms exactly. Rather, she had simply impressed Miss Beryl as someone who had a lot ailing her. (Miss Beryl had heard about yesterday’s episode with the car from Mrs. Gruber, who’d let Clive Jr. use her phone to call the tow truck in return for a full account. And that account confirmed Miss Beryl’s initial opinion, that the Joyce woman was a menace.) It certainly wouldn’t surprise her to learn that Clive Jr.’s fiancée was a carrier of flu viruses.

  Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryl’s health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom was an excellent place to snag whatever was in the air in the way of illness. Also depression, which, Miss Beryl believed, in conjunction with guilt, opened the door to illness. Miss Beryl didn’t know any teachers who weren’t habitually guilty and depressed—guilty they hadn’t accomplished more with their students, depressed that very little more was possible. Since retiring, Miss Beryl had far fewer occasions to indulge either guilt or depression. Except for reminding herself that she should feel more affection for Clive Jr., she had little to feel guilty about, and except for Friday afternoons when the North Bath Weekly Journal was published, she seldom felt depressed. So the portals to illness remained, for the most part, shut tight. No, Miss Beryl decided, it was the dreadful Joyce woman, wrecker of cars, destroyer of chairs, whose mouth was always open spewing noxious opinions and who knew what else into the atmosphere, who was the culprit. Miss Beryl felt a little better to have settled the issue to her own satisfaction. But not much.

  The source of her wooziness established, Miss Beryl decided that the best way to proceed was to treat the virus the way you’d treat the person it came from. That is, ignore it the best she could and hope it’d go away. Make your morning tea, old woman, she told herself, and put on a pair of good warm socks. So she did, and this too made her feel a little better, even though the strange feeling of distance from her extremities seemed to increase as she navigated her bright kitchen, making her tea. Now, she thought, bouncing her teabag in the steaming water. There. That’s done. You’ve made your tea, and you don’t feel any worse. Take the tea into the front room and check the street for wandering old women and fallen tree limbs. See if God has lowered the boom on anyone while you were asleep, the sneaky booger.

  It was when she got to the front window and opened the blinds that she noticed it was snowing and remarked the strange, glittery quality to the snow. It was as if it were snowing with the sun out, each flake igniting as it fell. The street was alive with dancing, firefly snowflakes, and Miss Beryl sat down to watch the performance with quiet wonder, perplexed too that the cup of hot tea in her hands did so little to warm her fingers. It seemed beyond her ability to wiggle her toes in her socks, and those toes seemed very far away. It made no sense. At scarcely five feet tall, Miss Beryl was not very far from her toes.

  And this was the way Sully found her when he came downstairs, poked his head in for the first time in a week, saw that his landlady was indeed up and dressed and seated with her back to him, staring out the front window into the street. “All right, ignore me,” he said when she didn’t respond to his usual observation that she wasn’t dead yet.

  But she didn’t respond to this either, and when he raised his voice to inquire if she was all right and Miss Beryl still did not respond, he went over to her and peered around at the old woman suspiciously, as he might have inspected a store mannequin he suspected of being a real person practicing mime.

  Miss Beryl, who had not heard him come in or speak, was delighted to discover her tenant’s face in her peripheral vision. It had been Sully, after all, who’d been praying for this snow, and Miss Beryl was pleased that his modest prayer had been answered. She just hoped that this strange snow, igniting as it did on its way to earth, would accumulate in sufficient quantity to require removal. She would have liked to tell Sully that she wished him well in this way, indeed in all ways, that having done him wrong, he retained a place in her affections, but her voice seemed as far off as her toes and fingers. “Look,” she finally managed, her voice sounding as if it belonged to someone else, Mrs. Gruber maybe, “at all the lovely snow.”

  Sully would have liked nothing better than to see snow, but in fact the street outside Miss Beryl’s front window was bathed in bright winter sunshine. His landlady’s chin, her neck, the front of her robe and nightgown were bathed in blood.

  “Which way?” Sully said.

  “Up!” Hattie thundered. They were standing at the edge of the single stair, the old woman clutching onto Sully’s arm for support and balance. She looked strangely like a child learning how to ice-skate, feet wide apart, knees almost touching. Her hands were swollen from pounding on the apartment door. Sully had been late getting to the diner, unwilling to leave Miss Beryl until he was sure she was all right. When she’d first spoken, the old woman had seemed to be in some kind of a trance, but then she’d snapped right out of it, maintaining that she’d simply had another “gusher” of a nosebleed. She insisted that he not worry about it and was particularly adamant that he not mention the matter to Clive Jr., which Sully had reluctantly agreed not to do. In fact, she did seem fine, scurrying between the kitchen and the front room, cleaning up the mess she’d made. He promised to look in on her midmorning when he finished at Hattie’s, and she had promised to get checked out by her doctor, but the sight of Miss Beryl, glistening with hemorrhaged blood, was still with him, especially with old Hattie teetering on him. If he lost her, she could end up in the same condition. How did the world get so full of old women, was what he wanted to know.

  “Yeah?” Sully said. “Well, the stair goes down, so that’s the direction we better go, unless you can fly.”

  “Down!” Hattie agreed, and together they took the step, teetering.

  “There,” Sully said when they had come to terms with down. “That’s the most dangerous thing I do all day,” he added as they made their way into the diner. “Someday you’re going to try to go up, and we’re both going to go down and stay down.”

  “Down is to hell,” the old woman observed.

  “I don’t plan to follow you that far,” Sully assured her.

  Hattie did not strictly comprehend this discourse, Sully knew. Since Thanksgiving her hearing had failed, and you could tell the old woman no longer had the capacity to follow conversations whole. She’d catch a wo
rd or two and make do, which was why he took her through their morning “up” and “down” ritual. He suspected that she enjoyed the sound of these two words in her own mouth and that she appreciated being engaged in dialogue, even a monosyllabic one. The words exploded from the old woman’s mouth with terrific energy and satisfaction.

  “Make ’em pay,” she muttered as they made their way between the lunch counter and the table along the wall. Cass, who had not given them so much as a glance as they made their slow way, now looked up at the old woman homicidally.

  “What’d she say?”

  Her daughter’s voice registered with the old woman, who turned to face it. “Make ’em PAY!” she bellowed.

  Cass looked like it might be her intention to vault the lunch counter and throttle the old woman. “Ma!” she shouted back. “Listen to me now. I’m not going to put up with that all day. You hear me? Not again today. If you don’t behave, you’re going back to your room. You’ll be locked in, do you understand?”

  Hattie turned away, resumed her course. “Make ’em pay,” she muttered again.

  “She’ll be all right,” Sully assured Cass, then said to Hattie, “Don’t you worry, old girl. We’ll make every one of ’em pay. We’ll make ’em pay twice. How’s that?”

  “Pay,” Hattie agreed.

  “There you go,” Sully said when he had the old woman situated in her booth. “Sit up straight, now. No slouching.”

  “No slouching,” Hattie repeated. “Make ’em pay.”

  Sully grabbed an apron and joined Cass behind the counter. Cass was still glaring at her mother with what appeared to be genuine menace. Yesterday had not been good. For months the diner’s monstrous cash register, which was nearly as old as Hattie herself and had been part of the establishment since the beginning, had been acting temperamental, its cash drawer often refusing to open. Finally it had fused shut and Cass had ordered a new register from a restaurant supplier in Schuyler Springs. Yesterday, it had been installed during the lull between the breakfast and lunch crowds.

  The problem was that the old register had been full of noisy clangs and bangs, sounds that over the years had become part of old Hattie’s world, increasingly so as her cataracts got worse. The loud, discordant music of the register penetrated her deafness, evidence that commerce was taking place. The new register offered no such reassuring sounds. If you happened to be standing next to it, you might detect some insectlike whispers, but the designers of the machine had apparently considered quiet a virtue. In the absence of the usual clanging and banging, Hattie watched the shapes and shadows of her customers file into and out of the diner and apparently concluded that her daughter was giving away free food, an idea that had enraged her completely. As the lunch customers continued to file past Hattie’s booth near the door, she’d begun to screech, “Make ’em pay! Make ’em pay!” The old woman’s fury had been comic at first, but the look on her face was so ferocious and her rage so consuming that even large men gave her wide berth on their way out, as they might a small, rabid dog on a thin leash.