Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  “What dog?”

  “The one that’s barking. Carl’s,” Rub explained. That had been the second thing he’d been trying to tell Sully when he’d gone out to the car and been sent away for his trouble. There’d been a third thing too, but now Rub couldn’t remember what it was.

  Sully opened the front door and stepped inside. From the doorway he could see Rasputin slumped against the kitchen cabinet Carl Roebuck had chained him to. The reason the dog’s bark had a strangling quality to it was that the dog was apparently strangling. Carl had run the animal’s chain through one of the upper kitchen cabinets, which was fine as long as the dog was standing up, because the chain was just long enough. But either the dog had lost his balance and slumped against the cabinets or had tried to lie down of his own volition, only to discover that the chain did not allow this. Spying Sully and Rub in the doorway, the dog tried valiantly to get to its feet, but the linoleum floor did not provide much traction and the stroke-deadened side of its body did not work in concert with the good side, and so the dog quickly gave up and slumped against the cabinets again, his head and neck suspended mere inches from the floor.

  “Careful,” Rub warned, and Sully at first thought he meant the dog before noticing that there was no floor between where they stood and the kitchen, just the lengthwise-running foundation beams and the darkness of the deep cellar below. To Sully’s surprise, he felt vaguely embarrassed to see the house he’d grown up in flayed back for inspection, like a terminally ill patient, its pipes and wires and wood exposed. Certainly the sight was not as satisfying as he’d hoped.

  Rub slid a sheet of plywood he’d apparently been using to stand on into position in front of them, stepped onto it, then danced nimbly onto a double floor beam and into the kitchen.

  “Right,” Sully said, stepping onto the plywood and recollecting as he did so that he’d just been encouraging his grandson to go on into a house with no floor. Also Otis’s observation that there was danger everywhere Sully was.

  Rub held out his hand. “I’ll grab you,” he said. “Get away,” Sully said. “You’ll just make me bang my knee, is all you’ll do.”

  Rub frowned, his feelings hurt yet again, but stepped back as he was told. Sully tested the double beam with his good leg, pushed off, and strode forward across the dark gap, landing on the kitchen’s linoleum. He felt his bad knee start to give under the full weight, but he caught the door frame for support and quickly shifted his weight.

  “You should have just gone around,” Rub said.

  “It’s just like you to give me good advice after I’ve killed myself,” Sully told him, wiping the cold sweat from his brow with his sleeve.

  When the Doberman again tried to stand, Sully noticed there was an envelope taped to the animal’s collar. Since the crowbar he’d used the day before to get into the house was still sitting on the counter, Sully picked it up and showed it to the dog. “If you bite me, I’m going to beat you to death right here in the kitchen,” he said.

  The dog seemed to understand this threat and quit growling and lay still while Sully removed the small envelope, which was addressed in Carl Roebuck’s graceful, almost feminine, hand to Don Sullivan, Jack-Off, All Trades. The note inside said simply: YOU BROKE HIM. HE’S YOURS.

  As if to confirm this, the dog strained forward as far as he could and licked Sully’s knuckles.

  When Peter and the boy arrived a minute later, having gone around back, Sully showed his son the note. Peter read it and chuckled unpleasantly. Will, who’d hesitated on the back porch, took a deep breath, engaged his stopwatch, eyed the dog warily and stepped inside.

  “Did you feel light-headed at the time, Mrs. Peoples?” the young doctor wanted to know. He was pumping air into the black blood pressure sleeve, which tightened relentlessly around her upper arm. The unpleasant sensation seemed a natural extension of recent events. Since that first morning before Thanksgiving when she’d looked up into the trees and concluded that this might be her year, she’d suffered the sensation of things closing in. Deciding not to travel had aggravated it, no doubt. Clive Jr. had been right about that. She should have gone as planned. On the other hand, he’d been wrong about Sully, who had proven himself this morning to be the trustworthy soul she’d always known him to be. It was not Sully who was lowering the boom, but God Himself, the sneaky booger, and this doctor was going to explain how, and so Miss Beryl prepared herself to accept reality.

  This was the second time in half an hour she’d had her blood pressure taken. The first time, the nurse had done it. During his examination of her, Miss Beryl had been studying the young doctor almost as closely as he’d been studying her, though without the benefit of intrusive, cold, probing instruments. The gene pool again, she told herself, though this was Schuyler Springs, not Bath, and she could easily be mistaken. The chances that she’d taught this particular young physician when he was in the eighth grade were only so-so, though he did look vaguely familiar, an older version of somebody—some Ur-eighth-grader, probably. One of the unfortunate side effects of teaching for forty years was that the task was so monumental, even in recollection, that it sometimes seemed you’d tried to teach everyone on the planet. What Miss Beryl looked for in each adult face was the evidence of some failed lesson in some distant yesterday that might predict incompetence today. In this young doctor, Miss Beryl was looking to justify in advance her decision not to follow any advice she didn’t like. One surely was not required to follow the advice of one’s own “C” students, if they could be identified.

  “I did,” she admitted, in answer to his prescient question about the light-headedness that had preceded her gusher. “Now that it’s all over, I feel lighthearted,” she added.

  The young man surrendered a tolerant, professional half smile, “lighthearted? Do you mean reinvigorated?”

  Miss Beryl made a face. Like most young professionals of Miss Beryl’s recent acquaintance, this young man had no sense of play about him, no love of language, probably no imagination. As a boy Clive Jr. had been the same way. Every time she’d tried to play with him, he’d just frowned at her, puzzled. This young doctor was too bright to have been a “C” student, probably, but she could see herself putting a B-minus at the top of one of his adolescent compositions twenty years ago and waiting for him to complain. What’s wrong with it? he’d have wanted to know. Where had she taken off points? Where had he lost credit?

  But, yes, reinvigorated was precisely how she’d felt after the nosebleed. And so she raised his grade to a B-plus now, just as she probably had then, after a stern lecture that life wasn’t a matter of simply avoiding mistakes, of losing credit, but rather of earning. She decided to confide in him. “I kept thinking it was snowing,” she said, feeling a little foolish. “I could see it snowing.”

  The doctor nodded, apparently not at all surprised by what struck Miss Beryl as the most bizarre of her symptoms. He let the air out of the sleeve all at once then and pulled apart the Velcro seam. When she rubbed her flesh, he said, “Did that cause discomfort?”

  “It hurt, if that’s what you mean. Are we finished?”

  “Just about. I think it would be wise to order some blood work done, though,” he said.

  Miss Beryl flapped her sore arm like a wing. “Am I correct in assuming you’ll want to use my blood?”

  Another trace of a smile. “Well, we could use mine, but then we’d know about me.”

  Miss Beryl stood, then sat back down again when the doctor, who was sitting across from her, did not get to his feet. “You fellows are like the police. You’re never around when you’re needed. If you’d been at my house at six o’clock this morning you could have had the blood you wanted, and you wouldn’t have required a syringe to get it either. You could have used a salad bowl. Now you want more.”

  “Just a little,” he assured her. “You aren’t afraid of the needle, are you? It won’t hurt.”

  “Will I feel any discomfort?”

  “Maybe a smidgen,”
he conceded seriously, tossing the blood pressure sleeve carelessly onto the desk and crossing one knee over the other. He opened his mouth to speak, hesitated and closed it again.

  “This is the part where we converse meaningfully, ain’t it,” Miss Beryl said.

  “It is,” he said. “You have a family physician in Bath?”

  Miss Beryl said she did.

  “Yet you didn’t go to him about this?”

  “He’s a snitch,” Miss Beryl explained. “Reports directly to my son. The only reason I’m here is that I promised Donald.”

  “Donald?”

  “Sullivan,” she said. “You probably don’t know him.” Indeed, she had promised Sully she’d go to the doctor. It had been the only way she could get him out of her flat so she could clean up the bloody mess she’d made. In fact, Sully had insisted on driving her to the doctor over the noon hour, had promised to drop by and pick her up. Probably he’d forget, but the way her luck was going this would be the time he’d remember, so she made an appointment at the clinic in Schuyler, called Mrs. Gruber for company, explaining that she’d been referred to the clinic for her annual checkup, and left Sully a note on the door, explaining that she’d gone to the doctor without mentioning which one or where, confident that Sully seldom required more information than people gave him. What she’d had in mind, though, was a doctor like her own in Bath, an older man, understanding but not too swift, but a stranger, someone who wouldn’t snitch. She hadn’t been prepared for this mere boy.

  “You live alone?” asked the mere boy.

  Miss Beryl said she did, adding that she had done so, pretty much without incident, since her husband’s death nearly thirty years before.

  “And you fear losing your independence?”

  Miss Beryl raised his grade from a B-plus to an A-minus. “Such as it is,” she admitted.

  “Do you drive?”

  “Seldom. To the store and back. I’m thinking of giving it up altogether. Frankly, I’ve never understood this nation’s obsession with cars. It means something, and I hate to think what. I also hate to think I might do something foolish and harm someone. My husband, Clive—star of my firmament—was killed in a car, and my son’s fiancée, who is a wrecker even when afoot, nearly killed him in one yesterday.”

  The young man was nodding at her, clearly pretending comprehension.

  “I only use the Ford for grocery shopping,” Miss Beryl repeated. “And when there’s a grand opening in some store between here and Albany I get roped into taking Mrs. Gruber, my neighbor. She’s a snitch too.” In fact, Mrs. Gruber was waiting for her in the lobby of the clinic, happily contemplating lunch in the new hospital cafeteria she’d read about in the North Bath Weekly Journal and had long hoped to visit. Miss Beryl had told her friend nothing of the gusher, fearing that the information would find its way back to Clive Jr. “So you see I wouldn’t miss driving. My independence is my routine, my way of doing things, which is not the way others do them. I eat what I want and when I want. I read and talk to myself and look out my window and contemplate the verities. I know my neighbors and I like them, but I wouldn’t want them any closer, and I certainly wouldn’t want to share living quarters with the best of them. I have a boarder upstairs, and the best thing about him is that he’s seldom home. He drops in in the morning to find out if I’m still alive and then he leaves, doesn’t come home until the bars close. He’s a free spirit. Donald Sullivan. I may have mentioned him. Clive says I’d be happier if I had companionship. He doesn’t count his father and Ed.”

  The young man frowned. “I thought you said your husband was killed in a car accident.”

  “He was,” Miss Beryl said, delighted to discover that her listener had been paying attention.

  “And yet …”

  “I keep his photograph on the television, and we continue many of the discussions we had when he was alive. We never reached conclusions then, and we still don’t.”

  “Which leaves … Ed?”

  “Ed’s a Zamble.”

  “A which?”

  “An African spirit mask. Part human, part animal, part bird. Like the rest of us.”

  The young man smiled. “I think I see what you mean about talking to yourself. Do you find yourself entertaining?”

  “Mildly,” Miss Beryl told him. “Compared to television. Clive thinks I should get cable. That’s what he means when he says I should have more companionship.”

  The doctor was squinting now.

  “Clive Jr.,” Miss Beryl decided to help the young man out, since he was trying. “Clive Sr. is dead. His son survives.”

  “His son?”

  “Our son,” Miss Beryl conceded. “There. I’ve admitted it. I hope you’re happy.”

  “You and your son don’t see eye to eye, I take it?”

  “He’s a banker,” Miss Beryl explained.

  The doctor appeared to be waiting for her to continue.

  “You don’t think that’s sufficient reason, I gather.”

  More confusion. “For what?”

  “He’s the one responsible for that new theme park they’re going to build. He thinks Bath is the Gold Coast. He says money is creeping up the interstate.”

  “Hmmm,” the young doctor said.

  “Let’s discuss something you may know about,” Miss Beryl suggested. “What’s wrong with me? In addition to my being eighty years old.”

  When the young physician opened his mouth to speak, Miss Beryl interrupted him.

  “Don’t pussyfoot. Pretend you’re telling Clive.”

  “Which Clive?”

  “Junior. This is just pretend. You won’t actually tell him anything. Ever.”

  “Well, Mrs. Peoples—”

  “This isn’t going to be very convincing,” she interrupted again, “if you call Clive by his mother’s name.”

  The young man was grinning broadly now. “Well, Clive,” he went on, “the best I can do right now is give you an educated guess.”

  “Ma’s an educator,” she said, imitating her son’s voice. “She’ll understand.”

  Her listener grew sober. “I think—I’m reasonably certain—that your mother suffered a stroke this morning. Call it a ministroke if you like. They’re not at all uncommon among women of your mother’s advanced age. A momentary disruption of oxygen to the brain, causing a feeling of light-headedness, the illusion that it was snowing. Cause? A small blood clot, likely, though we may never know. The causes may have been building up for weeks.”

  Miss Beryl took this in, wondering whether the causes the young fellow alluded to were strictly physical or whether there might be spiritual causes as well. Could betrayals cause clots? Miss Beryl was inclined to believe they could. “Should she expect more?”

  The doctor hesitated, then nodded. “You—sorry—she might not have another for a year or longer. She could have another next month. The next one could be stronger or less strong. If she starts to have a series of them, they could presage a more damaging stroke down the road. If she has any more symptoms like she had today, she should see me immediately. You should impress that on her.”

  “Ma’s pretty stubborn,” Miss Beryl heard herself say in her son’s voice. It was startling how easy it was to do Clive Jr.’s voice. And not just the more irritating aspects of his speech, like his referring to her as “Ma,” but the more subtle tone and cadence of his words. It was as if she could call upon some complex genetic common denominator in their physical makeup (in the vocal cords themselves?) to reproduce Clive’s sound exactly. This was the first time she’d ever done her son’s voice for a stranger, and she felt the quick betrayal of it and wondered if she’d just formed another clot. “You could wallop her on the head with a stick, but you couldn’t get her to change her mind once it’s made up.”

  “That was my impression of her exactly,” the doctor responded, grinning at her now to show how much he was enjoying the game. “She’s a corker, in feet.”

  The doctor stepped out into
the corridor then and flagged a nurse. “When I’ve had a look at your blood work, I may write you a prescription for a blood thinner,” he said. “Until then, you take care, Mrs. Peoples … it is Mrs. Peoples I’m addressing?”

  The nurse who came in to take her blood was the same one who’d taken her blood pressure earlier, and she slapped the flesh on Miss Beryl’s arm with some annoyance, as if she’d have preferred it to assume some other shape. Miss Beryl knew just how the woman felt.

  “I wisht these nails wouldn’t all bend,” Rub said when another one did. The flooring nails used to fasten the thin hardwood boards to the studs beneath were soft and triangular, and they bent easily when pounded from the bottom. Pulling them out of the wood, as Peter predicted, had turned into a time-consuming and frustrating job. They’d set up two sawhorses on plywood sheets in the middle of the living room, creating an island surrounded by holes large enough for a careless man to fall through all the way to the cellar floor, a dangerous situation given the fact that these were two of the more careless men in Bath. Below, in the darkness, they occasionally heard scurrying sounds. Sully had no intention of going down into the cellar to investigate. He’d heard earlier in the year that the men restoring the Sans Souci complained that there were rats everywhere in the lower reaches of the rambling structure and elsewhere on the grounds, stirred into restless activity, no doubt, by all the heavy machinery. Exterminators had apparently been hired, though for all Sully knew they could have hired a piper to lead the entire rat population of the Sans Souci into the small cellar of what had once been his home.

  “I wisht you hadn’t told me those were rats,” Rub said, listening to the sounds like rustling paper below.

  Anyone overhearing Rub’s conversation during the long afternoon would have taken him for a malcontent, but Sully knew better. Despite the wish parade, Rub was the most content he’d been in two weeks, since Peter’s return, to be precise. After lunch, Ralph had unexpectedly showed up and spoken to Peter in private, after which Peter had left with his stepfather without explanation. Something was clearly going on, but it apparently wasn’t anything either man felt compelled to share with Sully, who suspected it was some sort of crisis with Vera. All afternoon, he hadn’t been able to get the image of his ex-wife, caught shoplifting in Jocko’s Rexall, out of his mind. He wondered if Peter knew. If Ralph knew.