Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” Sully told him.

  Wirf studied him a moment. “You look like you’re about to cash in.”

  “I just took a pill,” Sully told him. “As soon as it kicks in, I’ll be fine.”

  Wirf slid off his stool. “I gotta pee. Order me a club soda with a squeeze of lime,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “And when it arrives, pay for it.” “Okay.”

  “And an egg. I haven’t eaten today. I see the loyal opposition’s here,” Wirf observed, indicating the large table in the corner, a party of eight that included Satch Henry and Ollie Quinn.

  Sully had barely noticed.

  “I haven’t been invited to join them,” Sully said.

  “Me, either,” Wirf conceded. “I bet they’re afraid we’d snub them.”

  Sully nodded. “One of us might.”

  “Look who else is back,” Wirf said, indicating Jeff, who was tending bar again.

  Sully nodded. “He’s already bought my first beer.”

  “I’ll hurry back,” Wirf said.

  On the way to the men’s room Wirf passed Carl Roebuck, who was on the way in. On Carl’s arm was a young woman who looked to be in her late twenties. Beautywise, she wasn’t in Toby Roebuck’s league, but she wasn’t Texas league either. She wore her hair long, and when Carl Roebuck offered to hang her coat on the rack near the door with the others, she said no, she was cold. Something about the way she hugged the coat to her chest suggested to Sully that she might have nothing on underneath. Or maybe it was just that she was with Carl Roebuck.

  “Here’s somebody you’ll want to steer clear of,” Carl told her when they joined Sully at the end of the bar. “Didi, meet Sully. Sully, the lovely Deirdre.”

  The girl looked Sully over with what seemed to him genuine interest. “I’ve heard all about you,” she said, which seemed to surprise Carl Roebuck until he thought about it. “Oh, right,” he said.

  Jocko’s pill was kicking in, Sully concluded. The conversation seemed just beyond his grasp.

  Still examining Sully, the girl nuzzled into Carl’s shoulder, whispering something sweet into his ear.

  “Right by where we came in,” Carl directed her.

  “Come with?”

  Carl snorted and returned her nuzzling. He was drunk, Sully realized. “You want me to come with you to the girl’s room?”

  “Women’s room, you pig,” she said without a trace of seriousness. “You might enjoy yourself.”

  “I need to talk to this man,” Carl told her. “He’s my confessor.”

  “Okay,” she said, little-girl voice, then to Sully, “He’s got a lot to confess.”

  They watched her head in the direction of the rest rooms. When she disappeared into the one labeled “Setters,” Carl Roebuck swung on his bar stool to face Sully. “You know that I have some experience in these matters,” he confided, bleary-eyed.

  “What matters?”

  “Sexual matters,” Carl explained. “You might say I have considerable experience.”

  “You might,” Sully agreed.

  “And that I’m not prone to hyperbole,” Carl continued.

  “I might say that if I knew what hyperbole meant,” Sully said.

  “Exaggeration,” Carl explained. “Overstatement. Didn’t you ever go to school?”

  “Blow me,” Sully suggested.

  Carl rapped the bar enthusiastically. “That’s my point!” he said gleefully. “This girl gives the best head on the East Coast. She could suck the cork out of a champagne bottle. She could suck the lug nuts off a tractor. She could probably bring you to climax, Sully.”

  Sully ignored the insult. “You want to know what I find hard to believe?”

  “What? Tell me. Ask me any fucking thing. I’m the answer man.”

  “Okay,” Sully said. “We’ll start with an easy one. Why are you drunk at”—he consulted the clock on the wall—“one o’clock in the afternoon?”

  “Because I’m in pain,” Carl said, apparently serious. “You’re right. That was easy. Next question.”

  Sully shook his head. “You’re in pain?”

  “I’m … in … pain,” Carl repeated. “What? You think you’ve got a lock on pain? You think you’ve got the pain market cornered in this burg?”

  Sully took out his vial of pills and set them on the bar between them. “Eat one of these,” he suggested. In fact, the throbbing in his own knee had begun to level off, though he could not be sure that this was because of the pill or because the distraction he’d hoped for had arrived.

  Carl waved the pills off. “Do they cure heartache?”

  “Do blow jobs?”

  “For their duration, they do indeed,” Carl said. “That was another easy question. Ask me a hard one.”

  “Okay,” Sully said. “What became of all that happy horseshit you were feeding everybody last week? About how you were turning over a new leaf? About how you weren’t even horny any more now that you were going to be a father?”

  Carl Roebuck was grinning at him now and pretending astonishment, index fingers of both hands pointing at his temples, as if he were receiving telepathic messages. “I knew you were going to ask that!” he exclaimed. “In fact, that’s the question you were thinking when I walked in here with the queen of the headers. Admit it. That’s your idea of a tough question, isn’t it?”

  Sully took an apprehensive swig of beer. He’d seen Carl Roebuck behave like this before. It meant he was about to drop some sort of bombshell. Or what he considered to be a bombshell. Sully studied Carl warily before answering. “Well, I don’t know how hard the question is,” he said, “but I notice you haven’t answered it.”

  “Then I will,” Carl said. “All that happy horseshit? You want to know where all the happy horseshit went? I’ll tell you. All that happy horseshit was before somebody named Sullivan managed to fuck up my marriage, before somebody named Sullivan started fucking up my life.”

  Sully blinked at him, speechless, feeling vaguely guilty. True, he’d had a crush on Toby Roebuck for a long time and probably would have fucked up their marriage if he had the opportunity. But he hadn’t had the opportunity. Was somebody spreading rumors? “You know what?” Sully said, when he located his voice.

  “No, what?” Carl said, still grinning.

  “There are too many people saying things like that to me today. My ex-wife just got done telling me I’m to blame for everything wrong in her life. I expect to hear that shit from her, because she’s nuts. But not you. If you think I’ve fucked up your life, then you’re even crazier than she is.”

  “Sully,” Jeff called from down the bar. He made a motion with his hand for Sully to keep his voice down. Several people at the table of eight that contained Ollie Quinn and Satch Henry were looking in his direction.

  “Sully, Sully, Sully,” Carl Roebuck shook his head sadly. “Who said anything about you?”

  Again Sully had the feeling that he was on the fringes of the conversation. “You did. About two seconds ago.”

  “No I didn’t, schmucko,” Carl held up one finger, as if to call a point of order. “Scroll back. What did Carl say?”

  “You said I fucked up your marriage and your life,” Sully said, getting more and more exasperated.

  Carl Roebuck made a loud honking noise. “Wrong-o! That was Beulah the buzzer, and you don’t win a prize. Tell schmucko here what Carl said, Don Pardo!” Then, in a TV game show announcer’s voice, he continued, “What Mr. Roebuck actually said was that somebody named Sullivan had fucked up his life and marriage. Those were his exact words.”

  The young woman named Didi returned then, sliding onto the stool next to Carl’s and running her hand along the inside of his thigh.

  “Watch this,” Carl told her excitedly, pointing at Sully. “This is always exciting. He’s about to grasp something. There! See it? Truth is beginning to dawn! By Jove, I think he’s got it! We’ve struck brain!”

  Both of them
were grinning at him now, the girl rather lewdly, Sully thought, Carl Roebuck maddeningly, and then suddenly Carl was on his back on the floor, the bar stool across his legs. Wirf, who had that moment returned, helped Carl to his feet and stood the bar stool back upright. “I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?” Wirf said, wedging his big, soft body in between Sully’s and Carl Roebuck’s stools.

  Carl Roebuck, feeling the back of his head where he had landed, climbed tentatively back onto his bar stool. “You’ve hurt me, Sully,” he said. “I’m wounded. You’ve busted my lip, and you’ve hurt my feelings. I try to be your friend, and what do I get? Heartache.”

  “I didn’t bust your lip,” Sully said. “I hit you in the jaw. You bit your own lip.”

  Carl tasted the blood with his tongue. “Oh,” he said. “Then I guess it’s my own fault.”

  Ollie Quinn came up to the bar with a fistful of bills to pay for lunch. From the register he studied the knot of people at the end of the bar—Carl Roebuck fingering his lip, the girl Didi examining Carl’s scalp, Wirf standing, Sully still seated, just as he had been when he delivered the blow, flexing his right hand incriminatingly. “You’re still pretty quick for an old fart, Sully,” Ollie Quinn offered. He took a toothpick from the shot glass next to the register, lodged it between his front teeth with his tongue and made a sucking noise. “You should’ve seen his old man, though. Now there was a brawler.”

  “A legend,” Satch Henry agreed from across the room. “Quick hands,” he remembered. “Smarter too. He would’ve waited till the chief of police left the room.”

  “Don’t say a fuckin’ word,” Wirf advised under his breath.

  “You want to press charges, Mr. Roebuck?” Ollie Quinn said.

  “I sure do,” Carl said. “But not against him.”

  The chief of police nodded at Sully. “This is your lucky day,” he said.

  At noon Miss Beryl fired up the Ford, backed out of the garage, pointed the car in the direction of Schuyler Springs and drove up Main Street past Mrs. Gruber’s house, where her heartbroken friend stood at the window, waving at her pathetically. This was the first time in recent memory that Miss Beryl had gone anywhere in the Ford and not taken Mrs. Gruber, who never cared where they were going as long as they went. And so Miss Beryl was not surprised when her friend was unable to understand this act of treachery. She wouldn’t have called Mrs. Gruber in the first place except she was afraid her friend would spy the Ford backing out of the driveway and bolt from her house and hurt herself when Miss Beryl drove by.

  “I’m all ready,” Mrs. Gruber had pleaded. “I’ll just throw on my coat and kerchief.”

  But Miss Beryl had said no. “I’m not fit for human companionship today,” she’d explained as patiently as she could, hoping that under the circumstances this explanation would suffice and knowing it wouldn’t.

  “You’re fit for me,” Mrs. Gruber had assured her stubbornly.

  “If I’m not back by five, send out a search party,” Miss Beryl told her friend, half wondering if this might indeed prove necessary if she became lost again or, worse, if she had one of her spells in the car.

  “You’re all discombobulated,” Mrs. Gruber said. “I can tell.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Miss Beryl assured her, adding cruelly, “And if I’m not fine, that’s fine too.”

  Which was the way she felt. The phone had been ringing off the hook all morning, people wanting to know where Clive Jr. might be. Actually, the phone calls had begun yesterday, a series of them from the dreadful Joyce woman who’d been waiting, her suitcases packed, for Clive Jr. to pick her up for their long-planned weekend in the Bahamas. The calls had gone from anxious (“I wonder where he could be? Something awful must have happened!”) to vengeful (“He may think he can get away with this, but he can’t. He’s made promises!”). Vengeful was the result of Miss Beryl, who had taken pity on the woman and told her the most likely scenario—that Clive Jr. had simply run away. A story had appeared that morning in the Schuyler Springs Sentinel hinting at the possibility of an investigation into the North Bath Savings and Loan, particularly its connection to several other savings institutions in Florida and Texas. The story also suggested that some of the Bath institution’s considerable assets might have been inflated through a scheme of buying and selling tracts of land and other properties, transactions that existed on paper without any actual money ever changing hands. This story had prompted a call from a reporter in Albany and even an inquiry from the often inebriated, always scooped editor of the North Bath Weekly Journal, a longtime acquaintance of Miss Beryl’s who’d started to ask her the same questions as his colleagues, then said to hell with it, apologized for intruding and advised her, “Don’t give the bloodsuckers so much as a syllable.” In addition to calls from the newspapers, there’d also been several agitated calls from the junior vice president of the savings and loan, wanting to know if Clive Jr. had been in touch with her. He had not taken his flight to the Bahamas, the woman said. He was not at home. She wanted to impress upon Miss Beryl that she needed to speak to Clive Jr. immediately, as in yesterday, if not before. “ASAP,” the woman said. Miss Beryl, who understood none of this, nevertheless had a pretty good idea of what it all added up to. Her son was a ruined man.

  Miss Beryl had been about to take the phone off the hook when Mr. Blue called to tell her that the Queen Anne had been repaired and was ready to be picked up. “I’d deliver it myself,” he explained, “except I had an accident and broke my ankle.”

  Miss Beryl, grateful for a legitimate reason to leave the house and the phone, had agreed to drive to Schuyler Springs.

  “My grandson’ll be here to help you put it in the car,” Mr. Blue told her, adding sadly, “I’d do it myself if I could.”

  He gave her directions to his shop, which was located on an avenue that intersected the main street of Schuyler’s business district. Without Mrs. Gruber’s incessant chatter to distract her, Miss Beryl found the shop without difficulty. In winter, Schuyler Springs looked nearly as unlucky and deserted as Bath, and there was a parking space right in front of the store. Mr. Blue, a man in his late sixties, awaited her on crutches in the doorway, his right ankle so heavily wrapped in a tan bandage that it reminded Miss Beryl of a wasp’s nest. “I feel awful making you come out here, Mrs. Peoples,” he said, ushering her into the shop where a boy with coffee-colored skin and kinky hair with reddish highlights sat on the counter next to the register, banging his heels and staring at both Miss Beryl and his grandfather contemptuously. He looked to be about twelve or thirteen, an age Miss Beryl knew well.

  “Down off there,” Mr. Blue told the boy, adding, “Stand up straight” when his grandson settled into a sullen slouch.

  “This is my grandson, Leon. He comes up here on vacations to help me out,” Mr. Blue told Miss Beryl. Something about the way he said it suggested a different truth entirely—that this was a troubled boy, sent away at every opportunity into a less volatile environment. The boy gave his grandfather the kind of look that said, who are you kidding?

  Mr. Blue had done a wonderful job on the Queen Anne. No one who didn’t know it had been demolished could tell by looking at it. “Don’t be afraid to sit in it,” he said, clearly proud of his work.

  “Really?”

  “It’s fixed,” he assured her. “People don’t believe things can be fixed anymore. They break something and throw it away first thing. That’s what I’m trying to teach the boy here. Things can be fixed. Better than new sometimes.”

  “New’s better,” the boy said stubbornly. “New’s new.”

  “Yeah?” his grandfather said. “Well put this old chair out in this fine lady’s old car, and do it careful.”

  “I ain’t broke nothin’ yet,” the boy reminded Mr. Blue.

  “Broke my heart is what he broke,” he said when his grandson was out the door. “Him and his mother and her nigger boyfriend.”

  Given this ugly sentiment, Miss Beryl couldn’t decide w
hether it was appropriate to sympathize with Mr. Blue, but she did anyway. An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.

  Outside, Miss Beryl found the boy standing next to the locked Ford, looking cosmically annoyed at having been assigned an impossible task. In another year or two, he’d view all tasks in this same light.

  “Let’s try putting it in the backseat,” she told him with as much good cheer as she could muster. Short as she was, getting anything heavy or awkward out of the Ford’s trunk was a struggle.

  When she opened the back door for Mr. Blue’s grandson, he surveyed the space, then the chair, then the gnomelike old woman who wanted him to put the chair where there wasn’t room. “Muthafucka ain’t gon’ fit,” he said.

  “Try,” Miss Beryl told him.

  The chair fit. Not by much, but it slid along the backseat with a slender inch to spare. Clearly, having been wrong had no effect on the boy, who looked no less put upon. He was at an emotional age where he was right by definition, because other people were stupid. There existed no proof to the contrary.

  Miss Beryl got in the Ford and sat for a moment, thinking about her son and wondering how far he would run. As a boy he’d shamed Clive Sr., who’d tried, without much success, to teach his son to defend himself. But even sparring with Clive Sr. had frightened the boy. His father had taught him how to keep his hands up, to protect his face, but as soon as Clive Sr. aimed a feather punch at the boy’s soft tummy, the hands came down, and when his father cuffed him lightly on the ear to illustrate his mistake, Clive Jr. flat quit. He hadn’t wanted any lessons in self-defense. He’d wanted his father to protect him, to be on his side, to follow the bullies home from school and beat them up.

  No doubt it was what he’d wanted from her too. To take his side in things. To see things his way. To trust him. To be the star of her firmament. Love, probably, was not too strong a word for what Clive Jr. wanted.