Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  The next morning, the bright morning sun streaming in the bedroom window, Sully saw that his father was right. Swiping a slender, gold-plated letter opener from a dead priest was something a person could do. But you couldn’t steal the whole world.

  They finished late that afternoon, just about the time Peter returned. Rub didn’t look too happy to see Peter until he saw the six-pack of Genesee. “Howdy, Sancho,” Peter said, extending the beer. Rub frowned at the nickname but expertly twisted a can free of its plastic ring.

  Sully took one too, opened the passenger side door and sat down, flexing his knee, flinching as he did so. “Your timing’s getting better,” he observed, taking a swig of beer. “We only finished up about thirty seconds ago.”

  “I know,” Peter said, setting the other three beers on the hood of the El Camino. “I drove by and you weren’t done yet, so I drove around the block.”

  Rub looked like he believed this.

  “Besides,” Peter said. “I already earned my money this morning.”

  “When?” Rub wanted to know. He remembered the morning clearly, and what he remembered was that he’d worked alone in the cold while Peter went off without permission and spent the morning in Miles Anderson’s house, where it was warm. All he’d done over there was talk, too. He hadn’t done any work at all.

  “You’ll have to tell me all about it,” Sully said. “I take it we haven’t been fired?”

  “I assured him the house was getting our full attention. Not an easy point to demonstrate in your absence. I told him I’d see the job through to conclusion myself. He likes the idea of employing junior faculty.”

  Sully crushed his beer can, tossed it onto the floor of the truck. “You think we’ll be done by the middle of January?”

  Peter crushed his own, tossed it onto the floor of the El Camino. “I’ve pretty much made up my mind to stick around.”

  Sully nodded. “I’d heard a rumor you might. You told your mother yet?”

  “Last night.”

  “Which is why she’s all upset today?”

  “Among other reasons.”

  “She get around to blaming me yet?”

  Peter was grinning now. “She got around to it right away.”

  “Good. Maybe that’ll give you some breathing room.” When Peter had no response, Sully decided to ask, “Is she all right?”

  “Who?” Peter frowned.

  “Your mother. The person we’re talking about.”

  Peter thought about it. “Well …” he said.

  “Fine,” Sully told him. “Be that way.”

  “All right,” Peter agreed, maddeningly.

  “I tell you what,” Sully said to Peter, grateful, in truth, not to know more than Peter wanted to tell him. “You help me run this load of hardwood out to Carl’s camp and I’ll introduce you to the prettiest girl in Bath.”

  Rub perked up, recognizing the allusion to Toby Roebuck. “Can I go?”

  “No,” Sully said. “You’re married. It wouldn’t be good for you.”

  “He’s married too,” Rub pointed out, indicating Peter.

  “Not happily though, like you,” Sully pointed out.

  Rub frowned. “I never said I was happy.”

  “I know,” Sully conceded. “It was Bootsie who told me you were. You better had be, was what she actually said.”

  “If she looked like ole Toby, I’d be happy,” he said.

  “Well,” Sully said. “Go on home before Bootsie notices you aren’t there and blames me. I’ve got too many women mad at me already.”

  Rub balked at being dismissed in this fashion. The last thing he wanted to do was go home to Bootsie, especially when seeing her meant missing Carl’s wife. Even more important, three Genesee’s were still sitting on the hood of the El Camino. Rub had been doing the math in his head, and according to his calculations, one of the three remaining cans of beer would find its way into his hand if he could just keep from being sent away until either Peter or Sully reached for a second beer. It’d been a good afternoon with Sully, just the two of them again, like old times, before he had to start sharing his best friend. And now here he was, already having to share all over again. The unfairness of it was just about bearable if he didn’t get cheated out of the can of beer too. “Could I have one more of those?” he said.

  “What’re you asking me for?” Sully said.

  Because Rub didn’t want to ask Peter, was the answer, of course, though he saw Peter pull a can from the plastic ring. “You’re the one that’s the boss, not him,” Rub said, his purpose, as always, a simple indication of loyalty to Sully, which he would have liked, just once, to be returned.

  “But I didn’t buy the beer,” Sully said. “And besides, you never do as I say anyhow. You won’t even go home when I tell you.”

  “Here, Sancho,” Peter said, tossing Rub the can of beer.

  Rub caught the can at the same instant he caught the nickname he hated, and in that instant the unfairness and terrible disappointment of life was in his throat and making it so full that he couldn’t imagine drinking the very beer he’d not wanted to be cheated out of just a few seconds before. Catching the can of beer cleanly with one hand, he turned and heaved it at Sully’s house, where it found a second story window, which exploded upon impact. Inside, Rasputin barked, then was still. “I quit,” Rub said, and those two words were all that he could have gotten out. If ole Toby Roebuck had been there and offered to sit on his face in return for a few words of elaboration, he’d have been unable to deliver. Not if she was naked and offering handfuls of hundred-dollar bills. The two words he’d gotten out—“I quit”—contained his soul, and having said them he turned his back on all that he’d quit and started for home, on foot.

  “Hey,” Sully called after him, half ashamed and half astonished that his customary ragging had produced these unexpected results. “Don’t be that way.”

  Rub continued walking, a study in dejected defiance. At that moment, to Sully at least, he looked oddly like a little boy. The picture couldn’t have been more complete had he been dragging a baseball bat behind him.

  “Rub,” Sully called. “Hey.”

  Peter crushed his empty beer can and tossed it into the El Camino’s front seat.

  “Shit,” Sully said, finally glancing at his son and finding in Peter’s expression the disapproval he might have predicted. “Now you’re mad at me too, right?”

  “Why do you have to be so mean to him?”

  In fact, Sully didn’t know. He wasn’t even sure he had been mean. It had always been his impression that Rub enjoyed getting ragged. It had always been Sully’s position that people who hung around with him knew they were going to get ragged.

  “You stand about two feet away from him and listen to him talk nonstop for about five hours, we’ll see if you feel mean or not,” Sully said, aware, even as he offered this justification, that it was invalid. For one thing, Peter did stand next to and work with Rub every morning while Sully was at Hattie’s. For another, Rub’s chatter had nothing to do with what had just taken place. In truth, Sully’d always found Rub’s chatter soothing, like a radio station playing the sort of music you didn’t feel obliged to listen to. “Shit,” he said again. “Give me one of those.”

  When Peter handed him one of the last two beers, Sully heaved it at the house also. Instead of finding the window he’d aimed at, Sully’s beer can hit the eave and dropped noiselessly to the frozen ground below, where it ruptured and sprayed foam into the air like a lawn sprinkler.

  Sully and Peter watched the can until it stopped. “See if I buy another six-pack of beer,” Peter said.

  They caught up to Rub at the Main Street intersection, in front of Miles Anderson’s house. Rub was aware that they were creeping along behind him—he could hear hardwood bouncing in the bed of the truck, the sound of the tires on the pavement mere inches behind him—but he refused to look back or even to hurry across the intersection. They could run over him if they wanted
to. Finish him off. He wisht they would, in fact. What he feared worse than death beneath the pickup’s wheels was that Sully was going to get up real close and blow the horn.

  When Rub got to the curb, he was relieved, assuming he’d be safe on the sidewalk, but right behind him he heard the truck bump up over the curb, still inching along at the pace he himself was setting. He didn’t dare look around, afraid of what he’d find if he did and unwilling to surrender the last remnants of his dignity by exhibiting curiosity or alarm. Also, to turn and face the vehicle, it would be necessary for Rub to reveal, to both Sully and Peter, that he was crying, crying like the baby that Sully would surely accuse him of being. Either that or he’d ask Rub if he couldn’t take a joke, and that would make him feel even worse, because maybe he wasn’t sure exactly what he was feeling or why he was feeling it, but Rub was sure it was no joke.

  And so the widows who lived along the two-block residential stretch of Upper Main Street and who happened to be looking out their front windows this late afternoon were treated to a strange sight. Mrs. Gruber, for instance, who spent a good deal of her lonely time gazing into the comforting, familiar street from between half-closed blinds, blinked twice to make sure she wasn’t asleep or hallucinating. Across the street a pickup truck was driving on the sidewalk, two of its wheels on the concrete, the other two on her neighbors’ terraces. A few short paces in front of the truck, a short, almost dwarflike man, looking maniacally determined, bent forward into the teeth of the wind which had been making the ancient elms moan all afternoon. Because he was leaning forward into this wind and appeared to take no notice of the pickup truck that was inching along behind him on the sidewalk, Mrs. Gruber concluded at first that the dwarflike man must be yoked to the truck with some sort of invisible tether, for he appeared to be pulling the truck up the street. Mrs. Gruber considered the logic of this and decided she must be mistaken. The truck could not be on the sidewalk. After all, why would a man pull a truck over a bumpy sidewalk when he could just pull it up the smooth blacktop street? The truck, therefore, was not on the sidewalk but merely appeared to be. Mrs. Gruber blinked again and prepared to see something truer to reality. But the truck was on the sidewalk. She could tell by the fact that it passed behind, not in front of, the elms. So did the dwarflike man who was towing it. Since the telephone was right there, she picked it up and dialed Miss Beryl. In a minute both man and truck would pass directly in front of her friend’s house, and Miss Beryl would have a better view.

  “Dad,” said Peter in the front seat of the truck. “Dad.”

  Sully paid him no attention. He was hunched forward over the steering wheel, concentrating on the delicate task of keeping the truck right behind Rub while at the same time avoiding obstacles. In places where hedges grew close to the sidewalk it was a very slender passage, and the truck brushed the hedges noisily on the left even as it climbed up and over the huge, spreading roots of the elms on the right. “Look at him,” Sully said, indicating Rub, who still refused to acknowledge their presence. “Have you ever seen anybody that stubborn?”

  “Yes,” Peter said. “I have.”

  Sully ignored this. “Look at him,” he repeated, his voice full of wonder. He tooted the horn. Rub jumped but did not turn around. “Amazing,” Sully said.

  “Here’s a driveway,” Peter pointed. “Get back on the street.”

  “Amazing,” Sully said again. “What would you do if you were him?”

  “Jesus,” Peter said. Sully had driven past the driveway, had clearly not even considered ending this insanity.

  “He can’t figure it out,” Sully marveled. “All he’s got to do is step behind one of those trees and we’re fucked.”

  “Oh, I’d have to say we’re fucked anyhow,” Peter observed. “You see what’s coming up the street?”

  “No, what?” Sully said, slowing down for another narrow passage. The right front wheel encountered the base of one of the street’s oldest elms, its giant roots twisted obscenely above ground. The truck strained to climb, got partway, then rolled back. “Shit,” Sully said, giving the engine a little more gas with his right foot, keeping the clutch engaged with his left, as he craned and peered past Peter. “I can’t see. Am I going to make it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Peter said, though he was not checking for clearance. What had his attention was the police cruiser he’d seen coming toward them.

  “I think I can,” Sully said calmly, as if the question were purely academic. He let up on the clutch and again the truck climbed and tilted. Gaining the top of the gnarled root, the truck slid quickly over, scraping its underbelly before Sully could prevent it.

  The police cruiser had pulled over to the curb, and Officer Raymer got out, looking confused and angry. “Hey!” he called. “You’re on the sidewalk!”

  Sully noticed the policeman for the first time and put his foot on the brake. “Roll your window down a second,” he told Peter. When Peter did as he was told, Sully leaned across him and called over to the policeman, “Fuck off!”

  Then he took his foot off the brake and the truck lurched forward again, its back wheel climbing the side of the elm and banging down again, its load of hardwood clattering fearfully.

  Being told to fuck off by Sully seemed to clarify Officer Raymer’s thinking, because he got back into the cruiser, did a screeching three-point turn, roared back in the direction he’d come and pulled into a driveway between Rub and the pickup. Sully saw this strategy too late to prevent it.

  Had the policeman stayed in the car, he’d have been fine. But he made the mistake of getting out again and grinning triumphantly at Sully, who, when he saw this, saw too that he was not through with his stupid streak. I’m about to fuck up, he thought clearly, and his next thought was, but I don’t have to. This was followed closely by a third thought, the last of this familiar sequence, which was, but I’m going to anyway. And, as always, this third thought was oddly liberating, though Sully knew from experience that the sensation, however pleasurable, would be short-lived. He was about to harm himself. There could be no doubt of this. But at such moments of liberation, the clear knowledge that he was about to do himself in coexisted with the exhilarating, if entirely false, sense that he was about to reshape, through the force of his own will, his reality. At this moment reality was a police cruiser in his way and a grinning cop with a grudge and the upper hand, but what Sully saw in his mind’s eye was the ability to remove these. He wasn’t sure he could remove the cruiser or the cop exactly, but he was certain he could remove the cop’s grin, and that was a beginning. It was more than a beginning, in fact, for the moment he’d seen that grin, thought became secondary to some deeper instinct. If Ruth had seen him, she’d have seen what she termed “the old Sully,” and in fact he half wished that Ruth were here to witness the old Sully’s triumphant return. He also thought of his father with uncharacteristic fondness, understanding that this was the precise moment his father always drank toward, the exquisite moment when both the obstacle and the means of its removal came into clear focus. In his mind’s eye Sully could see the exact spot where the pickup’s massive bumper would encounter the side of the parked police cruiser, saw it jolt and shudder, saw the side of the car crumple and finally cave in as the pickup pushed it down the sidewalk until it slid off to one side on the terrace.

  But first, it was only fair to issue a warning. Sully put the truck into park, rolled down the window and poked his head out. His voice, as always at such times, was calm. A smarter cop would have heard in it a warning, but there was no smarter cop around. “That’s not a good place to park,” Sully said. “I’d move if I were you.”

  “You get on out now, Sully,” Officer Raymer said. “Fun’s over. I’m going to have to put you under—”

  Sully, having rolled up the window again, didn’t hear the rest. “Wrong, asshole,” he said. “The fun’s just beginning.”

  “Dad—” Peter said. He, at least, had heard the warning.

  In fact, Sully
had nearly forgotten his son was present. “This is the point where people usually get out of the truck,” he told Peter.

  “Dad—” Peter began.

  “Okay,” Sully said, shifting back into drive. “Suit yourself.”

  When the policeman heard the truck go from park to drive and saw it grunt forward, his triumphant grin disappeared, just as Sully had seen it disappear in his mind’s eye. Now it was his turn to grin. “Yeah, you prick,” he said under his breath, nodding at the policeman through the windshield. “You just figured this out, didn’t you.”

  “Dad—” Peter said, pushing both legs straight out in front of him, as if onto an imaginary passenger side brake. “Jesus.”

  For he’d seen Officer Raymer take the revolver out of its holster and point it, two handed, in their direction. Sully saw it too, though he didn’t care. “He’ll never shoot,” he assured Peter, just a split second before the policeman fired.