“Damn, Otis,” Carl Roebuck said. “Quit that.”
“I can’t help it,” Otis blubbered.
“Hey, buck up,” Sully said, putting his arm around Otis’s shoulder and giving him a comforting pat. Only Jocko seemed to notice through his thick glasses that when Sully took his arm away he slipped the rubber alligator he’d bought at Harold’s Automotive World into Otis’s overcoat pocket.
“You’re such a bad man, Sully,” Jocko said as they took their positions alongside Hattie’s casket.
“Okay, everybody,” Carl Roebuck said as they grabbed hold of the silver handles. “On three.”
From the kitchen window Janey saw her father emerge from the trailer, breathing steam through his nostrils like a bull. Built as he was, low and wide, with the big head sitting on his narrow shoulders without the benefit of a neck, he looked rather like a bull in other respects as well. And about as smart, Janey thought. No, that wasn’t true. Further, it was unkind. Zack was smarter than your average bull, which was so dumb it imagined it could win against that great crowd of people, one of which, in addition to the red cape, was holding a sword. Your average bull saw the red and nothing more. Her father was more like that cartoon bull that was always smelling flowers. What was his name? Ferdinand.
Halfway along the frozen path that led from the trailer to the big garage, Zack saw his daughter at the window of the trailer, stopped and gave a tentative wave, which caused him to lose his balance on the ice, regaining it again at the expense of his dignity, both arms whirling, windmill fashion, in the air. To return his greeting, Janey made her own frantic windmill motion at the kitchen window.
Ruth, who was seated with her granddaughter on the sofa in the living room where they were examining pictures in magazines, looked up when she saw Janey’s flurry in her peripheral vision and studied her daughter with relief. At last Janey was beginning to recover, Ruth thought. For the longest time—her entire stay at the hospital—Janey had been unlike herself, and Ruth had worried that maybe her injuries were more than physical, more than a concussion and a multiply fractured jaw. It wasn’t until her jaw was unwired that Ruth realized how much of her daughter’s personality resided in her smile, which the wiring had prevented or rather modified to look sad. A world-weary smile had not been in Janey’s normal repertoire of expressions.
Like Ruth herself, Janey most naturally reflected emotional extremes. Their faces eagerly registered anger and joy, and these emotions often lingered in their facial expressions long after they ceased to be felt. Sully was always accusing Ruth of getting mad at him without warning, an accusation that always made her madder, but she realized that even though she’d been getting angry at him for the last hour, her face was still registering joy at something he’d done earlier that delighted her. With Zack it was even worse. To be around Zack was to be angry, at least as far as Ruth was concerned, and the more-or-less constant residual anger she felt in response to her husband remained etched on her face even during those rare moments when by mistake he’d do something that pleased her. In this way, after thirty years of marriage, Zack still had no idea when he’d done something right so he could do it again. Now Janey had inherited Ruth’s lack of subtlety with regard to expressing her emotions, residual joy and anger lingering deceptively, dangerously, on her features when inside her emotional tide had turned.
“Don’t encourage your father,” Ruth said, taking in at a glance what was happening at the kitchen window.
Janey wrung out her dishtowel in the sudsy water thoughtfully. “I can’t help it,” she said as her father disappeared into the garage. “He looks so lost.”
“Of course he looks lost,” Ruth said, turning a page in the magazine angrily, causing Tina to turn it back again. One of the many things Ruth didn’t quite comprehend about her granddaughter was precisely what she was examining so closely when they looked at pictures, one of the little girl’s favorite pastimes. Every other kid Ruth had ever known wanted to go fast. Janey, as a little girl, couldn’t wait for her mother to finish the text of her storybooks so the page could be turned. She had waited impatiently for Ruth to catch up, her own imagination and curiosity racing forward need-fully, so that sometimes pages got torn when Ruth was holding them down with a thumb and Janey was tugging with her little fingers. With Tina, you couldn’t go slowly enough. The child seemed not to look at pictures so much as absorb them, and Ruth wondered, as she so often did, whether Tina was slow or deep. Slow seemed to be the conventional wisdom, though the jury was still out and probably would be for a while, but Ruth noticed that Tina was observant and retained most of what she saw. Two Christmases ago Ruth had bought her a book called Find the Bunny, which asked the child to locate a variety of animals concealed in busy, complicated drawings. Sometimes the animal was a minute detail hidden, for instance, in the high, dense branches of a tree; other times the animal was made up of a series of disparate objects which seen together formed the outline of the animal in question. Tina had located each animal so swiftly—long before Ruth was able to—that Ruth had concluded that she must have seen the book before and was working not from observation but from memory, but Janey swore this was not the case. Roy, she said, hadn’t gone over it with her either, doubted in fact that Roy could find the bunny himself.
“Why shouldn’t your father look lost?” Ruth continued. “He’s been lost every day of his life.”
“Yeah, I know,” Janey said sadly, “but he’s always had you, so it didn’t matter. You should at least let him come visit us.”
With Janey’s husband in jail, Ruth had insisted they repossess the trailer their daughter and son-in-law had been living in. They’d hauled it from Schuyler back to Bath, setting it up in the yard alongside the garage, right where it had been before. They themselves had inherited it furnished when Zack’s brother drove his four-wheeler out onto a frozen lake during a thaw. Their first thought had been to sell it until they discovered how little the trailer would bring, with its rusted skirting and brown snow marks halfway up the sides. Inside, the trailer was drafty, and Ruth suspected the utility bill was going to be obscene. But if ever there was a man who deserved to live in a dilapidated trailer, that man was her husband.
“You’re just unhappy ’cause you lost Sully, and now you’re taking it out on Daddy,” Janey suggested without turning around.
“I didn’t lose anybody,” Ruth corrected her daughter. She’d seen Sully this morning at the funeral, and he’d looked so needy that she’d suffered a moment’s misgiving before redoubling her resolve. “I quit the both of them. Life can’t be that much worse without men in it. At least the men I seem to attract.”
“If it wasn’t for bad taste you wouldn’t have any at all,” Janey cheerfully admitted.
“I liked you better with your mouth wired shut,” Ruth said, adding, “and you’re a fine one to talk about taste in men.”
“Yeah, well …” Janey said in that irritating manner she had of not letting her voice drop. What it was supposed to mean, Ruth had discovered, was that in Janey’s considered opinion, whoever was talking was full of shit.
“Don’t ‘Yeah, well’ me,” Ruth said. “You know how I hate that.” “Yeah, well …”
“And I don’t want you taking food over to your father, either,” Ruth said, voicing another of her suspicions.
“I haven’t taken him anything,” Janey insisted. As she spoke, Zack emerged from the garage and made his slippery way back to the trailer. Under one arm he was carrying a package the size and shape of a football wrapped in aluminum foil. This time he didn’t wave or even glance in the direction of the house. “What’s that disease you get if you don’t eat any vegetables?”
Ruth thought for a minute. “Rickets,” she said, remembering.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Janey said. “You want to see Daddy with rickets?”
“I’d like to see him with boils,” Ruth replied. She knew what her daughter was talking about. Since Ruth had banished her husband to the tra
iler nearly two weeks before, Zack had been subsisting, exclusively she suspected, on fried venison steaks.
In truth, it was the deer that had caused her to give him the boot. Even before the deer she’d been furious with her husband, of course. Zack had stubbornly refused to admit that he was the one who’d sent Roy over to Sully’s to look for Janey, but he’d looked guilty as hell and it was just the sort of gutless thing he’d do, especially if Roy had threatened him.
But when he’d claimed the deer that Roy had shot and left lying with its tongue lolling out on Upper Main Street, that was too much. She could just see Zack arguing for the deer, explaining how he’d cart it off for free, how it was by rights his daughter’s anyhow since her husband, who’d shot the deer, would be going off to jail. He’d probably explained how he had a freezer out in the garage, how he’d have the animal butchered and stored there. How it had been killed legally. Otherwise, what? It’d be a crime to waste two hundred pounds of meat. This last was the argument he’d used with Ruth: “It’d be a crime to waste it.” He’d shrugged his narrow shoulders, the dumbest and most pitiful gesture Zack had in his impressive arsenal of dumb, pitiful gestures.
Yes, it had been the deer that Ruth had been unable to face. They’d eaten another deer one winter several years before, and she’d made up her mind then that she’d never eat another. This earlier deer Zack had bagged himself with his Dodge pickup, knocking the animal right back into the woods from which it had darted in front of him, as inescapable as rare good fortune. Even before he’d skidded to a stop, Zack had concluded that they were going to need a freezer, and he knew a guy who had a good used one for sale. He bought it on the way home, put it into the bed of the truck with the dead deer. Then he’d driven over to the IGA, parked in the lot and gone to fetch Ruth from her cash register. “Free meat for the winter,” he said. Ruth had examined first the dead deer and then her live husband. It was the pleased look on Zack’s face that got to her. Clearly, he couldn’t have been more proud of his deer had he shot it with a bow and arrow at a distance of a hundred and fifty yards. “Hell, I can pound that out,” he said when she went around to examine the stove-in, bloody grille of the Dodge. But she’d already turned and headed back into the IGA and her register, preferring to say nothing than to give voice to the clearest sentiment she was at that moment feeling—that she’d married a man whose idea of luck was a road kill. They’d eaten venison that entire winter, and with every forkful she’d had to swallow his reminder that the meat was free.
When Zack claimed this second deer, something in Ruth that had been stretched thin and taut for a long time had snapped. She was married to a hyena. Their house was full of junk he scavenged from the dump, trash he’d brought home and insisted she inspect. Often the things he brought home were not even complete things but rather the insides of things—copper coils and rotors and sections of fiberglass and electromagnets, all of which he insisted were “perfectly good,” by which he meant perfectly free. There were a great many mysteries in Zack’s life, but the one he kept returning to, the one that caused him to scratch his furrowed brow in slack-jawed disbelief, was that so many people just up and threw away things that were “perfectly good”—tires with enough tread to be recapped, appliances with motors and pumps that still worked, heavy hunks of metal that could be sold for scrap. It was amazing how much of it there was out there, and Zack brought it all home. What he couldn’t seem to grasp was that his wife’s objection was to his practice of scavenging, not his selections. He kept thinking that once he explained an item’s value, she’d understand. He didn’t grasp that the only thing she hated worse than being married to a scavenger was having to listen to the reasoning of one. Her idea of hell was having to listen to Zack explain, throughout eternity, all the things that people thought were worthless that you could actually get two cents a pound for if you knew where to go.
Janey was drying her hands now, and Ruth studied her daughter, fighting back unexpected tears as she did so. How different Janey’s life would have been, Ruth thought, if she had been pretty. With that body, had Janey been pretty, the boys would have been scared and given her room. It wasn’t that Janey was ugly, just plain, like Ruth herself, and it was that plainness that always gave boys courage. And of course they couldn’t keep their hands off her. At thirteen she’d had the bust development of a twenty-year-old, and at fourteen Ruth had come home late one afternoon to find a boy groping her on the living room sofa, both hands caught underneath Janey’s bra by Ruth’s sudden appearance. To Ruth, her daughter was still that vulnerable teenager whose body was well out ahead of her brain. She wasn’t innocent, exactly. Janey enjoyed the groping, had been enjoying it even that afternoon when Ruth had interrupted. Her problem was that she couldn’t seem to put the groping into perspective. Ruth sympathized. Her daughter came by her limitations rightly.
“I don’t suppose I could get you to watch Birdbrain while I go out for a couple hours?” Janey said from the doorway.
“Out where?” Ruth inquired before she could stop herself.
“Out of here,” Janey explained. “Don’t be nosy. I’m grown up.”
“You just got out of the hospital.”
“And you’re afraid I might have some fun. You decide to swear off men, so I’m supposed to do the same thing.”
There was enough truth to this to bring Ruth up short. Having decided to try celibacy, she’d have preferred company. Lots of it. Rather than admit this, she reminded her daughter, “I’ve got an early morning tomorrow. I could use some help.”
“I thought Cass was going to be there.”
“She is,” Ruth admitted. Cass had promised to guide her through the rest of the week to ease the transition with customers and deliverymen, both of who seemed anxious for the diner, which had been closed for almost a week since Hattie’s death, to open again.
“Then you won’t need me,” Janey said, throwing on her coat.
“You think you’ll take my old job?”
“Hard to say,” Janey responded, as if this too were an unwarranted intrusion into her private affairs.
“Vince will need to hire somebody. He won’t hold it open for you forever.”
“Yes, he will.” Janey grinned. “He’s got the world’s fattest crush on me.”
Ruth considered this. It might, she decided, be true. “You could do worse. Vince is a sweet man. He’d be good to you.”
“He’s an old man, Mama.”
“He’s younger than I am.”
“Yeah, well …” she came over to the sofa and lifted Tina, rubbed noses with the little girl. “Mommy’s going out for a while, Birdbrain. Be a good girl for Grandma.”
“She’ll be fine,” Ruth said. “You be a good girl for Grandma.”
“Grandma was never a good girl,” Janey pointed out. “I don’t know why I should be.”
“So you won’t end up like Grandma?” Ruth offered.
Janey grew suddenly serious, though the glow of anticipated groping lingered on her features maddeningly. “I don’t know what I’d do without Grandma.”
When her daughter was gone, Ruth let the tears come. She wept quietly so Tina wouldn’t know. The little girl, who was studying a picture in the magazine intently, as if she expected to be tested on its contents later in the day, hadn’t even looked up when her mother left. When she finally allowed Ruth to turn the page, Tina broke into a big grin, and her small hand reached up and found her grandmother’s earlobe.
Pointing to the picture, she said, “Snail.”
The clock in the Lincoln said three-thirty A.M., and Clive Jr. couldn’t remember the last time he was awake at such an hour. And not just awake. Wide awake. Full of wakefulness. Alert down to his pores. Trees were flying by, big ones, raked by his headlights. He imagined his brights as laser beams slicing through bark and wood effortlessly, imagined the giant trees, severed, crashing into the road behind him, cutting off pursuit.
Not that there would be any actual pursuit for a while
. Maybe never, in the conventional sense. Perhaps his trail of credit card purchases might be tracked through a computer, but not Clive Jr. himself and not the Lincoln. Still, he was enjoying the sensation of flight and pursuit. As a boy he had run from bullies, but then he’d been humiliated and it had never occurred to him that running could be fun, exhilarating, a challenge—that flight needn’t be blind panic but rather liberating, like knowledge, like the taste of one’s own blood. Clive Jr. ran his tongue over his busted lip and smiled. Who could have guessed that the taste of blood could dispel fear? This was what Sully must have known even as a teenager. It was what had given him the courage to pick himself up off the turf, his nose bloodied, and go right back into battle. Perhaps it was even what Clive Jr.’s own father had been trying to teach him—that blood and pain were manageable things.
When the right front wheel of the Lincoln located the soft shoulder, Clive Jr. yanked the big car back into the center of the two-lane blacktop, where he straddled the solid yellow line, noting again the strange absence of fear that had accompanied his departure almost from the beginning. He was now in the twenty-first hour of his flight, which had begun that morning where the spur intersected the interstate, where he’d been faced with a choice he hadn’t anticipated. North lay Schuyler Springs and Lake George, where Joyce, suitcases packed, awaited him and their planned long weekend in the Bahamas. Instead he had headed south and punched the accelerator, sensing immediately the power of his decision just to leave her behind with the rest of it. Something about meeting the Squeers boys that morning had allowed him to see everything in a new light, and one of the things he saw differently was Joyce, who, it occurred to him for the first time, was neurotic, self-centered, used up. Marrying her, he saw with stunning clarity, would guarantee a life of misery.
He was somewhere in western Pennsylvania, he wasn’t sure where. Half an hour ago he’d flown by a sign that said Pittsburgh was seventy-five miles, but he’d come upon two forks in the road since then and he was now seeing signs for places he’d never heard of. In the glove compartment he had three speeding tickets, one from New York, the other two from here in Pennsylvania, both issued by the same patrolman. In New York he’d been clocked at eighty-five, the two Pennsylvania citations had him doing exactly ninety. This was not a coincidence, since Clive Jr. had set the cruise control for this speed. He’d accepted the first Pennsylvania ticket and put it into the glove compartment without a word, refusing the young cop the satisfaction of visible regret. Another liberating experience. All his life, Clive Jr. had sweet-talked cops. Caught speeding, he always started off by admitting his guilt. (“I guess I was lead-footing it a little, right, Officer?”) Admitting guilt took away a trooper’s opening questions (“Do you know the speed limit here, Mr. Peoples? Do you know how fast you were going?”) and forced him to script the rest of the conversation on the spot. A fair number of cops, faced with this dilemma, concluded it was easier to let this one off with a warning. And Clive Jr. had sensed that this young trooper might have been susceptible to just such a tactic, but one of the things he had sworn off when he headed south out of Bath instead of north toward Lake George and his fiancée, was genuflecting for cops.
Nobody's Fool Page 61
