Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  More to the point, Sully wasn’t sure his pride would allow Peter—the son whose existence he’d often allowed himself to forget for many months at a stretch—to be his savior. It might have been different, maybe, if he were more fond of the man his son had become. There were times when he thought he could learn to be fond of him, and other times when it seemed he already did love his son. But it wasn’t the kind of constant affection he felt for Wirf and Ruth and Miss Beryl and even Rub. It wasn’t even as powerful as the affection mixed with aggravation that he felt toward Carl Roebuck. Strangely, it was closer to his feeling for Carl’s wife, Toby, a feeling he couldn’t articulate that resided in the pit of his stomach and made him feel foolish, warning him away—perhaps for the same reason, the deep-down knowledge that these were things he couldn’t have, that would not be granted him, a beautiful young woman he had no right to expect, a son he didn’t deserve. It didn’t bother him much that Peter seemed unable to surrender his grudges. Grudges were understandable enough. Sully had no intention of surrendering his far more numerous grudges against his own father, and so he didn’t expect Peter to forgive. What did he expect, then?

  Possibly, he just wished Peter were a little more like himself. True, he was a hard worker, and, Sully had to admit, a more talented worker as well, slower to become impatient, quicker to understand, more steady of temperament. What negated so many of these qualities was his son’s apparent expectation that hard work would be rewarded, a childish attitude that Vera had instilled in him. Because he’d worked hard in school and made good grades, he expected a good job and good pay and security. Because he’d been a competent teacher, he apparently expected promotions and respect. When these hadn’t followed, he’d felt self-pity, another of his mother’s gifts. Moral outrage and self-pity had always been Vera’s strong suits.

  As contemptuous as Sully felt toward his own father, at least the two had always conceded, though the concession was unspoken, that Sully was Big Jim’s son, that the apple hadn’t fallen so very far from the tree. The old man understood and accepted his son’s contempt, realizing too its measure of self-loathing. During the last twenty years of Big Jim’s life, Sully hadn’t even seen him more than half a dozen times, but on each of those occasions something had taken place between them that Sully couldn’t deny. He’d catch the old man looking at him as if to say, “I know you, buddy boy, know you better than you know your own self.” And Sully would always have to look away from the smirk that followed, away from the truth it contained. Maybe that’s what Sully wanted from Peter, a firmer sense that the boy was his son, that the apple hadn’t fallen so far from the tree. Except for rare moments, like the night he’d gone to jail and he and Peter and Wirf had spent the evening drinking at The Horse, it seemed to him that the apple had rolled all the way down the hill and into the next county, which made it hard for Sully to feel much more affection for Peter than he did for the ex-wife, who’d made him, single-handedly.

  From where Sully was seated on the radiator, he could hear Peter talking quietly to Will in one of the two bedrooms, their voices echoing in the hollowness, the words not quite audible. It was one of the things that irritated Sully most, he realized, that his son always spoke to Will in whispers, as if Sully were not to be trusted with the contents of even the most casual conversations, or as if he hadn’t earned the right to share them. Wirf was also listening to the low murmur of voices and seemed to understand some of what Sully was feeling. “Black thoughts,” he grinned. “You’re full of black thoughts today.”

  There didn’t seem to be any point in denying this, so Sully didn’t.

  “Well,” Peter said, when he and the boy rejoined them. “You going to take it?”

  “My lawyer thinks I should,” Sully said.

  “Which means he won’t,” Wirf said. “He’s never taken my advice yet.”

  “If you don’t take it, I will,” Peter offered.

  Sully took this in, part of him pleased. “Good,” he said, wondering if this gesture would ease his need to give his son something. “Take it. It’d work better for you anyhow.”

  “Okay,” Peter agreed. “Thanks.”

  “I guess this means you’re going to stick around awhile,” Sully ventured.

  Peter nodded. “I picked up a couple night courses at Schuyler CC,” he said.

  “Good,” Sully said, impressed that his son could go out to the college and come back home with work. “It’s not such a bad place.”

  “That’s what the chair of the department said. ‘Not as bad as you might imagine’ were his exact words.”

  “You have to start somewhere.” Sully shrugged, hoping to cheer his son up.

  “I started at a university,” Peter said. “This is where I’m ending, not starting.”

  Sully decided to give up. “You got enough money for first and last months’ rent?” he wondered, trying to think how much he could contribute.

  Peter nodded, surprising him.

  “I could let you have a hundred or two if you need it,” Sully offered.

  “I don’t,” Peter said. “But thanks.”

  Sully nodded, winking at Wirf. “I’m glad somebody in my family’s got money.”

  “You’ve got more than you know,” Peter said, taking out his wallet and handing Sully a parimutuel racing ticket. A 1-2-3 trifecta, to be exact. Sully checked the date. Two days previous.

  “You were on this?”

  “No,” Peter said. “You were. You don’t even remember, do you?”

  Suddenly he did. Sometime during that drunken night before he’d gone to jail, among all the other instructions he’d had for Peter—what to do first at the Miles Anderson house, how to cook eggs at Hattie’s, how to get Rub to help him lay the floor at the Roebuck camp, to look in on Miss Beryl when he thought about it, to feed Rasputin—somewhere among these myriad instructions he vaguely remembered instructing Peter to bet his triple, explaining that it would be just his luck for the son of a bitch to run while he was in jail, further evidence of the evil deity whose existence Sully had long suspected, the god who was probably listening to the whispered instructions of Sully’s own father, whose life on earth would have earned him a place in such a deity’s inner circle, a chosen advisor, confidant, secretary of war. Miraculously, through drunken inspiration, Sully had apparently thwarted divine intention.

  “I would have given it to you at the funeral,” Peter said, “but I didn’t know there’d been a winner until you told me, and you didn’t know which day. I forgot to bet it a couple days.”

  Before Sully could fully absorb the fact that the ticket in his hand was worth over three thousand dollars, he was assailed by a doubt. “Did I give you the money?”

  “What money?”

  “To bet the triple.”

  “Who knows?” Peter said. “Who cares?”

  Sully could tell he hadn’t given his son the money. “Because if you bet your money, then what you won is yours. That’s the way it works.”

  “I wouldn’t even have gone into the OTB except on your instructions,” Peter pointed out.

  “That’s not the issue.”

  “This’ll be rich,” Wirf broke in. “I always love it when your father explains the moral significance of things. Follow the logic and win a prize.”

  “How did you get into this conversation?” Sully wondered.

  “I don’t know,” Wirf admitted. “I think I’ll go downstairs and stand in the cold.”

  “Good,” Sully said. “Go.”

  Father, son and grandson listened to him lumber down the stairs. Sully studied his son and felt even more powerfully than before that he couldn’t let Peter be his deliverer.

  “listen, you take this,” he said. “You got Will, and you got Wacker’s doctor bills now. You’re going to need it.”

  “Not as bad as you,” Peter said. “I don’t owe anybody.”

  Sully considered these words. For most of his life he’d been able to say the same thing. Now, suddenly, he
was awash in debt. “I tell you what,” Sully said, arriving at a compromise. “Why don’t we call it a loan?”

  From the back stairs came a peal of laughter from Wirf, who had stopped to wait on the landing, still in listening range. “That’s your old man,” he called up to Peter. “He’d rather owe it to you than cheat you out of it.”

  They left it that Sully and Peter would meet back at the flat in an hour to unload Peter’s things, which were still sitting in a small U-Haul trailer in the driveway at Ralph and Vera’s house. Peter would pack the rest of his and Will’s clothes into their suitcases, leave Will with Ralph while Peter and Sully effected the move. Vera, blessedly, would not be there, having driven to Schuyler Springs VA hospital, to which Robert Halsey had been admitted during the night. Sully would use the hour to locate Rub, whose assistance they would need to cart the furniture up the narrow stairs to the flat. “Good luck,” said Peter, who was convinced that Rub would have nothing more to do with them.

  “He’ll do what I ask him,” Sully assured his son, though he himself was far from certain. In fact, he was not looking forward to what was almost certain to be a humbling experience. Sully wasn’t the sort of man to offer direct apology, and he had a feeling that the indirect ones he usually used on Rub—offering to buy him a big ole cheeseburger at The Horse, for instance—might not work this time. He might actually have to say he was sorry for the way he’d acted. Which he was. It wasn’t that he denied that he owed Rub an apology. He just hated to establish an ugly precedent of public apology, which could conceivably open the floodgates to other forms of regret.

  A good place to start looking for Rub, he decided, was the OTB. Not because Rub would be there so much as that he could cash his triple and bet another. This was no time to come off 1-2-3. In a perverse world it was liable to pop twice in the same week, especially if he wasn’t on it.

  The windbreaker men had all left, but Jocko was there, peering at the racing form through his thick glasses. When Sully’s shadow fell across it, he peered up over the top of his glasses, which had slid down his nose. “Free at lass, free at lass,” he said. “Thank God a’mighty.” “It’s a great country,” Sully agreed.

  “Somebody said you’d walked,” Jocko folded his racing form and slipped it under his arm. “I found that difficult to credit.”

  “It’s true, though,” Sully said. “I punched out the right cop, as it turned out.”

  “How did Barton look?”

  “The judge? Half dead. At least half.”

  “You’re lucky. He used to be a terror. He must be preparing to meet his maker.”

  “You haven’t seen Rub around?” Sully inquired.

  “Not once since you went in. Is his wife’s name Elizabeth?”

  Sully shook his head. “Bootsie,” though now that he thought about it, Bootsie could conceivably derive from Elizabeth.

  “Big fat girl? Worked at the dime store?”

  “Right.”

  “She was arrested this morning.”

  “Good God,” Sully said. “What for?”

  “Theft. She had half the dime store out at their house.”

  Sully nodded. “She did have a habit of taking a little something home with her every day.”

  “Turns out they been watching her do it for about a month.”

  “I hope they have bigger jail cells than the one I was in. Bootsie wouldn’t be able to turn around in that one,” Sully said, then showed Jocko his ticket. “By the way. Turns out I was on this after all.”

  Buoyed by the security of his windfall, Sully decided now might be the best time to stop into the diner. It was after one o’clock, and the small lunch crowd would be gone.

  Indeed, when he arrived the diner was empty except for Cass, who was sponging down the lunch counter and, to Sully’s surprise, Roof, who’d been gone for a month. Ruth was not in evidence, and the combination of her absence and Roofs unexplained presence was disorienting. It was as if Sully’d stepped back in time, and he checked Hattie’s booth to make sure she wasn’t there, that he hadn’t dreamed the events of the last several days. That he’d dreamed the last month of his life seemed a distinct possibility, given the fact that the dream ended with his winning a triple. But Roof was there, all right, wordlessly scrubbing the grill two-handed with the charcoal brick, and Sully selected a stool nearby, in case he needed an ally.

  “You’re back, Rufus,” he ventured.

  Roof did not turn around. Nor did he ever. When the diner was busy and the door opened, everyone up and down the lunch counter leaned forward or backward to see who it was, except Roof, who preferred to face his work than the cause of it. “Town this size need a colored man,” he observed.

  “We realized that when you left,” Sully said, grinning at Cass, who’d watched him come in with knowing amusement and had as yet made no move in his direction. “Can I get a cup of coffee, or are you on strike?”

  “I should be on strike where you’re concerned,” she told him, grabbing the pot. “Anybody ever tell you that funerals aren’t the place for practical jokes?”

  Yesterday, halfway through the service, Otis had discovered the rubber alligator in his pocket and let out a bleat that had caused everyone in the church but Hattie to jump.

  “He was supposed to find it when he got home,” Sully admitted.

  There was enough thick coffee in the bottom of the pot to give Sully about three quarters of a cup. “There,” Cass told him. “That’s all you get, and more than you deserve.”

  “Don’t make another pot,” Sully told her.

  “I won’t,” she assured him. “Starting next week, other people make the coffee.”

  “Speaking of other people …”

  “She’s out back, taking a delivery,” Cass explained. “We had a bet. She said you wouldn’t have the nerve to come in today. Nerve is my word, not hers.”

  “I wish people would quit wagering on my behavior,” Sully admitted, recalling that someone (who?) had won a pool when he dropped out of the college.

  “You make things up with Rub yet?” Cass said.

  “I’m on my way over there as soon as I leave here,” Sully told her.

  “Good,” Cass said. “You two were a popular quinella.”

  They were grinning at each other now, two old friends. “You going to stay around awhile, or what?”

  She shook her head. “The movers come Monday. Wirf’s going to mail me a check when the sale goes through.”

  “Mail it where?”

  “Boulder, Colorado.”

  “Why, for Christ sake?”

  “Why not?”

  Sully shrugged. “All right, be that way.”

  “I will.”

  Her certainty made Sully nervous.

  “Roof came back, didn’t you, Rufus,” Sully observed. “You didn’t like North Carolina?”

  Finished, Roof tossed his brick aside. “Full of lazy kids,” he said with surprising vehemence. “My grandkids. They think you stupid if you work. Make damn near as much not working. Do a little scammin’ on the side. They say, what the matter with yo’ brain? Workin’ like a nigger. I told ’em, I don’t know what you are, but I’m a nigger. A workin’ nigger.”

  Sully looked at Cass, who was also stunned. This was more than Roof had said in twenty years. It sounded like twenty years of need might be behind it.

  “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with work but the pay,” he said, pouring vinegar on the grill, causing a toxic cloud.

  Sully leaned back from the powerful fumes. “That and the conditions.”

  “And the time wasted,” Cass added.

  “And the aches and pains,” Sully said.

  “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with work,” Roof repeated. Perhaps a man who’s waited twenty years to say something is not easily joked out of it. Finished with the grill, he filled his water glass, drained it, then ambled out from behind the counter, tossing his apron into the linen hamper. “Y’all be good in Colorado,” he told Cass without look
ing at her. And then, setting his empty glass on the counter, he left.

  “You don’t suppose Rufus has flipped, do you?” Sully said when the door swung shut behind him.

  “No, I don’t,” Cass told him.

  From the back room, Sully heard Ruth’s voice and turned on his stool, expecting to see her come in. “Who’s going to live in the apartment out back?” it occurred to him to ask.

  “Probably Ruth,” she said.

  Sully frowned at this intelligence.

  “She’s thinking about putting the house on the market.”

  “What about Zack?”

  “At the moment he’s living in the trailer out back.”

  This was the first Sully had heard of any of these arrangements. They increased his feeling of disorientation. “What trailer?”

  “The one the daughter had been living in. You should talk her into renting the apartment to you,” she suggested.

  “I don’t think so.” Sully grinned, though the possibility had momentarily crossed his mind. “I’d be better off going to Colorado with you. Safer.”

  “You’ll be plenty safe right here,” Cass said significantly.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning Ruth’s through with you. Meaning you’ve finally managed to lose one of the few women in this town worth wanting.”

  “Who are the others?”

  “Good.” Cass threw up her hands. “Make a joke.”

  “You think Ruth would have been better off if she’d divorced Zack and married me?”

  Ruth came in from out back right then, saving Cass from having to answer. Ruth studied Sully a moment, then consulted her watch.