Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  “I think I can guarantee my client’s behavior,” Wirf said, shooting Sully a warning glance.

  The judge regarded Wirf as he might a naughty child. “Don’t insult my intelligence, Mr. Wirfly. I know you and I know your client, and I know you can guarantee no such thing.”

  Wirf, chastened, conceded that this was true.

  “How about it, Mr. Sullivan?” the judge wanted to know. “You aren’t feeling tired, are you? like you were when you thought it might be a good idea to sucker-punch a police officer? You think you can behave like an adult for about ten minutes?”

  “I’ll try, your Honor,” Sully promised.

  “Don’t try,” the judge advised. “Just do it. And how about you, Officer?”

  Officer Raymer’s brow had clouded. He wasn’t sure, but it was his impression that the judge had called him a fool a moment before, and in his opinion that was uncalled for. “I’d just like to say what’s this country coming to, that’s all I’d like to know. I can’t believe this whole thing, and I just want to say that for the record.”

  “Well, you can’t,” Judge Flatt told him. “Go out in the hall and sit and think about it for a while and it’ll come to you why you can’t say anything for the record, because I’ve already explained it once.”

  Both Satch Henry and the chief of police were trying to suppress grins now, and Officer Raymer, noticing this and intuiting that his support was eroding, bolted angrily from the room. Sully followed at a more leisurely pace, still arriving at the door to the judge’s chambers in time to prevent it from slamming and to see Officer Raymer disappear into the men’s room across the hall. From inside the rest room came the sound of a trash canister being kicked hard.

  There was a lounge at the far end of the hall, so Sully made for this in the hope that there might be a coffee machine. He had a pocketful of change from the nickel-dime-quarter poker game he’d gotten into the night before when Wirf and Carl Roebuck stopped by to see him. Carl seemed to be monumentally pissed off at him, but he refused to say why in jail. During the course of the evening, Carl Roebuck had called him every name he could think of. He smoked and drank all night long, and didn’t seem to want to be reminded of his recent resolutions. Sully had attributed his mood to the reported collapse of the Ultimate Escape deal. When the game grew too large for his cell, they’d had to move it down to the conference room next door to Booking. Sully had won all night long, with the result that he now had enough change in his pocket to set off a metal detector.

  His luck from the night before seemed to be holding today, because there was indeed a coffee machine, and when he fed it two quarters and got in return a half cup of tar-black coffee, he still could not shake the overall feeling of good fortune, his sense that perhaps he had played out his stupid streak, that things just might conceivably work out after all. He was sitting with his leg up on a plastic chair and contemplating the still long odds when Officer Raymer entered, his fly at half staff. When he saw Sully, he considered turning on his heel and leaving again, Sully could tell.

  Sully pushed a plastic chair out from underneath the table. “Sit down,” he suggested. “Take a load off.”

  “No thanks,” Officer Raymer said, staring at Sully from behind his dark glasses. “You know, there’s no such fucking thing as justice. That’s what gripes me.”

  “Of course there isn’t,” Sully conceded. “How old are you?”

  “Well, it sucks,” Officer Raymer said.

  Sully nodded. “It absolutely does. How about a cup of coffee? I’ll buy.”

  “I can buy my own coffee,” the policeman said, fishing in his pocket as he headed for the coffee machine.

  From where he was seated, Sully could see that Officer Raymer was mistaken. The coins in his palm appeared to total about forty-five cents. A few machines down the wall was a dollar-bill changer with a handwritten OUT OF ORDER sign affixed to it. Officer Raymer did not observe this until after he’d inserted a dollar bill and had it rejected. Sully grabbed a handful of change and spread it out on the plastic tabletop. The policeman, seething, made change and tossed the dollar bill on top of the pile of Sully’s coins. When, for fifty cents, Officer Raymer received the same half cup of muddy liquid Sully’d received, Sully, who had a lifetime of experience with what the policeman was feeling, saw what was coming and said, “Hold on a minute” and moved to another table. When he judged himself safe from ricochet, he said, “Okay, go ahead,” and Officer Raymer, who had grabbed the machine with his hands, began to heave and rock it until the top of the machine slammed against the wall and rebounded, only to be slammed again and again. This the policeman continued to do until something ruptured inside the machine and coffee gushed out onto the floor. Officer Raymer stepped back then and watched, with unalloyed satisfaction, as the puddle became a lake. “There,” he said.

  Ollie Quinn burst in just as Officer Raymer pulled up a chair at Sully’s table. “Jesus,” the chief said, surveying the damage. “I thought it was gunfire.” Then he disappeared again.

  Officer Raymer took a sip of his coffee and allowed the color to drain from his cheeks. He’d gone from enraged to sheepish in the time it took to destroy a coffee machine, and Sully understood this too. The policeman sighed. “It all just gets to you sometimes, don’t it?” he said.

  Sully was about to share with Officer Raymer that this was precisely the feeling that had caused Sully to punch him, that it hadn’t been anything personal, when he looked up and noticed Peter and his grandson standing in the entryway just vacated by the chief of police. Peter took in the scene with that detached, ironic expression that had so annoyed Cass, as if to suggest that other people’s lunacy was to be expected. Sully doubted the little boy, on the other hand, would ever master such detachment. As always, Will looked strangely adult in the way he approached his grandfather, climbed onto his good leg, gave him a hug around the neck. Another kid would have run. Another kid would have forgotten which leg was the bad one. Another kid would have forgotten that there was a bad one.

  “What do you say, sport?”

  “Wacker’s in the hospital,” he reported.

  Peter pulled up a chair, nodding a greeting at the morose policeman. If he was surprised to find Officer Raymer and his father sitting peacefully together at the same table, he didn’t say so.

  “You met my son?” Sully asked.

  Officer Raymer frowned. “You were in the truck, right?” Peter acknowledged that this was true as they shook hands. “What’s this about Wacker?” Sully asked. “Had his tonsils out,” Peter said. “Everything go okay?”

  Peter shrugged. “So I’m told. The only reason I was notified was so I could expect the hospital bill.”

  Sully nodded. “I didn’t figure you’d be back so soon,” he said. Peter had taken the truck after the funeral and driven to Morgantown to settle his remaining business there—gather his things from the house he and Charlotte had been renting, close their bank accounts, gather his books from his office at the university, see about extending his insurance benefits since Sullivan Enterprises did not offer Blue Cross-Blue Shield.

  “I just got back,” Peter said.

  “You must have driven all night.”

  “There wasn’t much to do,” Peter explained. “Charlotte took most of it. I had more stuff at the office than the house.”

  “What’d they think about you leaving at the college?” Sully wondered.

  Peter smiled his infuriating, self-pitying smile. “They weren’t nearly as sad to see me go as my landlord, who expressed his disappointment by refusing to refund our security deposit.”

  Sully nodded. “I’d buy you a cup of coffee,” Sully offered, “but our friend here just totaled the machine.”

  Officer Raymer, who had lapsed back into morose contemplation of his now empty cup, looked up at this reference to himself. “Piece of shit was already broke,” he said angrily.

  “How about a soda?” Sully suggested to Will.

  “Okay.” />
  Sully indicated the pile of coins, and Will fished for the ones he’d need.

  “Great,” Peter said when his son made a wide loop around the coffee lake on the way to the soda machine. “Get him drinking soda at eleven o’clock in the morning.”

  Sully hadn’t even thought about the time. “Sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to get him something.”

  “I know,” Peter said, with some kindness, perhaps to suggest that whatever his father had to offer was never the right thing.

  “How much you want to bet they make me pay for it anyhow?” Officer Raymer said.

  “Anybody see you break it?” Sully said.

  “You.”

  “Not me,” Sully said. “It was like that when I came in.”

  Will came back with a small plastic glass half full of soda. “They don’t give you very much,” he said apologetically. He had two coins, a dime and a nickel left over, and he returned them to Sully’s pile.

  “Tell this guy,” Sully indicated the policeman. “He’ll fix it. He works here.”

  “Wacker gets to eat nothing but ice cream and soda for two days,” Will said, half expecting some reply. Instead, his father, grandfather and the man who worked there fixing the machines all just looked at him, making him feel strange and nervous, the way it always did when adults acknowledged his existence too directly. He stared at his soda until they quit, then took a sip, paying special attention to the way the cold felt along the back of his throat, and he thought of his little brother in the hospital, surrounded by doctors, one of whom had reached into Wacker’s throat with scissors, and he imagined his brother plotting complicated revenge against them.

  Down the hall, small-town justice was done.

  The apartment Wirf had located was off South Main in a neighborhood of large, shabby houses and sidewalks that were cracked and weed-infested roller coasters bordering lawns that were patchworks of brown grass and browner bare earth. There were houses on only one side of the street, and these faced the rear parking lot and Dumpsters of the IGA, whose sign now read CLOSING JAN 15. When Wirf pulled up at the curb and all four—Wirf and Sully in front, Peter and Will in back—got out, they were greeted by a chorus of barking dogs, one of which strained against a leash anchored to the railing of the porch next door. Which reminded Sully of two things—that he still needed to fix Miss Beryl’s railing and that he still owned a dog. According to Peter, Rasputin was still canine-in-residence at the house on Bowdon, sleeping in the kitchen at night, enjoying the run of the back porch during the day.

  “Second floor?” Sully said, staring up at the dark vacant windows.

  Wirf admitted it was.

  “Good thing it doesn’t have four floors, or you’d want me to live on the fourth,” Sully said.

  “Ever the ingrate,” Wirf said as they made their way up the front porch steps.

  The flat had its own entrance, which had been left unlocked so they could inspect the premises. The landlord was at work. The stairs were steep and narrow, and Sully noticed Will regarding them warily. “Take Grandpa’s hand,” Sully suggested. “You still got your stopwatch?”

  Will took it out of his pocket, showed his grandfather.

  The apartment was a good deal smaller than Sully’s current flat, though the kitchen was bigger. There would be room for his dinette and chairs and enough room left over for him to get by without constantly banging into them. The appliances and fixtures were old, which was okay too, since he wouldn’t be using them. The living room had a fireplace complete with a charred log and two years’ worth of gray ash. The fireplace was surrounded by built-in bookcases. “What the hell am I going to do with that?” Sully said.

  “God, you’re a pain in the ass,” Wirf said. “Go back to jail, why don’t you?”

  Will’s eyes widened at this apparently serious suggestion.

  The embarrassing truth was that Sully did not need a lot more space than he had in his cell. He needed a place to go to sleep at night. A place to shower. A commode. A closet for his clothes. His real homes were The Horse, Hattie’s, the OTB, Carl Roebuck’s office. And this flat was at the wrong end of Main Street, a lot farther from these homes than his place above Miss Beryl. Thinking of Hattie’s reminded him of another duty he had today. Hattie’s wasn’t really Hattie’s anymore, it was Ruth’s, and today was the Grand Reopening. He’d driven by that morning and saw the banner out front, then driven to the donut shop for his coffee. Sooner or later, though, he’d have to go in, find out where he stood with Ruth, whom he’d seen in the congregation at Hattie’s funeral yesterday, find out whether Hattie’s, perhaps the most comfortable place in Bath, was still a place he’d be comfortable in.

  “It’s more than I need, Wirf,” he confided when Peter disappeared into one of the two bedrooms, taking Will with him. “Also more than I can afford.”

  “Where are you going to find anything for less than two-fifty a month?” Wirf said. “You want to live in a trailer?”

  “I’m only paying two hundred a month now,” Sully pointed out.

  “That’s because your landlady’s carrying you,” Wirf said. “She could get four hundred a month for that flat, easy.”

  Sully shrugged. “Okay, if you think I should take it, I’ll take it.”

  Wirf threw up his hands.

  “What?” Sully said. “What do you want from me?”

  “Why do I bother?”

  “No clue,” Sully admitted.

  Wirf waved him away with both hands. They were grinning at each other now. “What’d Barton want with you?”

  After the judge and Wirf and the county prosecutor and the police chief had hammered out their settlement, Judge Flatt had sent for Sully. Wirf, afraid Sully would do something stupid to queer the deal, had wanted to stay, but Flatt had sternly banished him to the corridor outside. To Sully’s astonishment, what the judge wanted to ask him about was what had really happened all those years ago when the boy had been impaled on the spiked fence. The judge, himself a young man then, had been one of those who’d gathered on the sidewalk to await the ambulance. Like Sully, he’d apparently never forgotten the scene. Sully explained that he hadn’t been there to see it happen, hadn’t witnessed any more than the other gawkers. And he thought about telling the judge what his brother had told him, that the reason the boy had been impaled was that his father had shaken the iron fence, shaken it in a paroxysm of rage until the boy fell. That was what the boy had later said happened, but it had been his word against Sully’s father’s, and anyway, the boy had been where he wasn’t supposed to be. Sully had started to tell the judge what he knew, then, without knowing why, decided not to.

  “Nothing important,” Sully told Wirf now, feeling the same odd reticence. He’d never made any attempt to conceal his contempt for his father, but he’d never shared with anyone what his brother had told him that day.

  “Okay, fine,” Wirf said. “Don’t confide in your own lawyer. See if I care.”

  “Okay,” Sully agreed.

  “Goddamn you.”

  “What?” Sully said.

  “You’ve hurt my feelings.”

  “You just said ‘See if I care.’ ”

  “I’m your lawyer. We zig together. And this is the thanks I get.” Wirf pouted. “Piss on you.”

  Sully sat on one of the radiators and flexed his knee.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you today?” Wirf wanted to know. “I get you out of jail, and you act like somebody died.”

  It was true. An hour or so ago, sitting alone in the drab coffee room at City Hall, before he even knew for sure that he was going to be released, that the assault charges would be dropped, he’d felt his spirits soar. There were indications that his stupid streak had run its tortured course, that luck was back on his side. He still felt this to be true. Why then the sudden sense that this shift of fortune wouldn’t mean much? That all the luck in the world might not be enough? Probably he was just feeling a little overwhelmed. Jail had been an odd
, unexpected release from anxiety and expectation. If he wasn’t making any progress toward resolving his various financial and personal headaches, neither was he making them worse, and nobody could justifiably expect much of him, at least until he got out again. Now that he was a free man, he saw that he had a mountain to move. There was the truck to pay for and Miles Anderson’s house to transform. He owed Harold Proxmire and Wirf, and in order to pay them he was going to have to work, and in order to work he was going to have to make things up with Rub. Most of this, with effort, could be done. There was still the outside possibility of selling the Bowdon Street property, though he knew he was very near the end of the so-called redemption period.

  Even more disturbing was that Sully could trace his plummeting spirits to the precise moment when he looked up and saw his son and grandson standing in the doorway of the lounge area of City Hall moments after Officer Raymer’s demolition of the coffee machine. Every time he laid eyes on Peter he felt in the pit of his stomach the vague, monstrous debt a man owes, a debt more difficult to make good on than money you don’t have. A grandson simply extended the debt, let you know that you still owed it, that the interest is compounded. The more he thought about what he owed Peter, the more he despaired of identifying the debt, even as the need to give his son something became more real and urgent. His having thoughtlessly bought his grandson a Coke at eleven in the morning had stayed with him, as had Peter’s observation that whatever Sully had to give, you could be sure that this was not what was needed at the moment.

  To make matters worse, Peter seemed intent on enlarging the debt. He’d turned out to be a first-rate worker, managing to keep Sully’s various irons in their various fires while Sully himself was out of commission. True, every job Peter did he managed to convey, without exactly saying so, that he was doing it under protest, but he did get things done and he did them more quickly and efficiently than Sully could have managed. Peter, Sully had to admit, was part of the reason his luck had changed. If he was able to climb out of the hole he was in, it would be largely due to his son, while Sully seemed largely incompetent to help Peter with his own myriad difficulties—a suddenly disintegrating marriage, the loss of not only his job but his profession, his hopes for a solvent future. And by allowing Peter to help him out, he was putting himself at odds with Vera, who was counseling their son to look for a new job teaching college, steer clear of that wreck waiting to happen that was Don Sullivan. And who could blame her?