Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  There were two naked people sitting at the table, though it took Sully’s grandson Will a moment to realize this because, in the center of the table, in addition to a pile of crumpled money, was a mound of clothing and a revolver and, most startling to Will, the lower half of a leg, standing up straight. The leg wore a shoe, a brown wing tip, and a sock, argyle, and above the sock the leg was pink, the color of Will’s own skin when his mother or Grandma Vera drew his bathwater too hot and he’d stayed in it too long. Near the top of the limb was what looked like some sort of complex harness. Because he was busy trying to account for this leg, he didn’t immediately notice the two naked people.

  “Oh, look!” squealed the girl, who was wearing a green visor and no shirt. “A little boy!” It was then that Will noticed her nakedness and was embarrassed. Her chest looked unnatural, limp, as if some invisible bone had been broken. Will had seen his mother bare-chested before and remembered feeling the same way at that sight, as if these breasts that women had were the result of some terrible injury, a bad fall perhaps. He stayed where he was when the girl in the green visor beckoned to him, her arms extended. “Isn’t he handsome?”

  “You stay away from my grandson,” Sully, mildly drunk, advised her, rotating in his chair to acknowledge Ralph, who, when he saw a bare-chested woman seated at the poker table, had also taken an involuntary step backward, followed by several more voluntary ones, so that he was now almost back out through the door and into the bar again. “We’re almost done here,” Sully said, gathering his grandson to him. “This is the last hand. These people have already lost their shirts.”

  “How about closing that door?” Carl Roebuck said, indicating the one Ralph and the boy had just entered through. “I’m feeling a little naked here.”

  “This is the asshole that stole your snowblower,” Sully explained by way of introducing Carl Roebuck, whose jaw had swollen monstrously in the hours since Sully had punched him off his bar stool.

  Carl, as it became apparent when he stood, was not only feeling a little naked, he was literally naked except for his socks. When he stood and went over to shake Ralph’s hand, the latter looked for a moment like he might bolt. “I’ll give it back to you,” Carl promised, “as soon as your son returns my wife.”

  “He’s my son,” Sully reminded Carl when he returned to the table. “No son of Ralph’s would do such a thing, would he, Ralph?”

  Ralph did not understand any of this. Not the naked people. Not the pile of clothes in the center of the table. Not the revolver. Not the prosthetic limb. Certainly not the apparent reference to Peter. It was as if he’d stumbled into a poetry reading. He’d been on the lookout for poetry readings since Peter had described the way they worked, and he half expected someone to start reciting a rhyme or two now. Either all of this was crazy or all these people were drunk or that pill that Sully had given him during the noon hour, which had made him feel like a visitor from another planet, was releasing another spurt of medication.

  “Don’t worry about the snowblower,” Sully said, returning his attention to his hole cards. “I’ve got a pretty good idea where he’s hid it.”

  Ollie Quinn, who’d been sleeping with his head back and mouth open, snorted awake when Carl sat back down at the table. The chief of police rubbed his eyes. “How come she’s naked?” he said, noticing the girl. Sully had tossed her Carl Roebuck’s shirt when Ralph and his grandson entered, and she was slipping it on over her head.

  “What do you mean, how come she’s naked?” Carl Roebuck said.

  Ollie started. “Jesus,” he said. “So are you.”

  “Why the hell not?” Carl said. “Why not let this be the day I lose everything, right down to my shorts?”

  This was in reference to the Ultimate Escape deal having gone south, as Carl had known it would, and to Clive Jr., the putz, the man everybody in Bath wanted answers from, having gone off on vacation to the Bahamas. Some people were whispering that he hadn’t gone to the Bahamas, he’d just gone.

  “You fell asleep during my horse story,” Carl told the police chief. “Now that you’re awake again, I can finish it.”

  “Go back to sleep,” Sully suggested to Ollie Quinn. “Nobody wants to hear him tell hard luck stories.”

  “Ten lengths,” Carl Roebuck said, starting in where he’d left off. “He had a lead of ten fucking lengths coming into the far turn.”

  Ollie Quinn seemed immediately engrossed in the story.

  “Guess what happened,” Carl insisted.

  “He was shot by a sniper in the grandstand,” Sully guessed.

  Carl, who had been about to continue, glared at Sully.

  “Let me make this long story short,” Sully said. “Carl’s horse was outrun down the stretch, and he doesn’t think things like that should happen to him. They usually don’t either.”

  Carl turned back to Ollie Quinn with the air of a reporter who’s just learned he’s been scooped. “Ten lengths he gave up in the last two hundred yards,” he told the police chief.

  Ollie Quinn looked disappointed, like he was still waiting for the end of the story or as if he’d preferred Sully’s version with the sniper.

  “Wouldn’t you swear he’d never seen a horse race before,” Sully said. “He can’t stand it when his luck doesn’t hold, even for a minute.”

  “It’s not enough I’ve got to lose all my money,” Carl continued, going back to his cards now. “I have to lose the last of it to the dumbest man in Bath.”

  “I said this was Sully’s lucky day,” Ollie Quinn reminded them. He stared dully at the collection of items at the center of the table, including Wirf’s prosthesis. “Whose gun is that?”

  “Yours,” said Carl, who had disarmed the police chief in his sleep just before Ralph and the boy entered. “It’s your ante.”

  Ollie Quinn checked his empty holster and saw that this was true. “I should have busted this game two hours ago,” he observed.

  “If we could ever finish this fucking hand, there’d be no need,” Carl pointed out, then, to Sully, “Tell your lawyer to shit or get off the pot.”

  Wirf, who looked half asleep himself, tossed his cards into the center of the table. “I play better poker drunk,” he said, taking a sip of his club soda.

  “Not much better,” Sully told him, raising the bet.

  “We just come to tell you Peter’s over at the flat,” Ralph said. “He said he was going to start unloading.”

  “Okay, I’ll go over,” Sully said. “Hang around for a minute, why don’t you. I’ll be done here real quick.”

  “We’ll wait outside,” Ralph said, motioning for Will to join him. “Don’t take too long.”

  Out in the bar, Ralph, wishing he could escape with Will out into the street and its clean cold air, helped Will up onto a stool and ordered sodas. “Can’t let the boy sit at the bar,” the fat bartender told him. “Sorry. It’s the law.”

  “That’s okay,” Ralph said guiltily. Vera, who was staying the night in the hospital for further observation, would have wanted to know what was wrong with him for putting the boy on a bar stool to begin with, and he would have had to say he wasn’t thinking. He was glad that at least Vera had been spared the sight of the goings-on in the next room. She’d have had a week’s worth of opinions on such degradation, and she’d be right. Ralph made a mental note to warn the boy not to tell her what he’d seen. “You stand down there,” he told Will, “until the man brings us our sodas.”

  A roar went up in the next room and there was the sound of scraping chairs. Ollie Quinn, returning his revolver to his holster, was first to emerge from the room, then Sully, who had a wad of money in one hand and Wirf’s leg in the other. He planted the leg upright on the bar, stuffed the money into his front pants pockets and helped Will back up onto a bar stool just as Tiny returned with the sodas. “He can’t sit at the bar, Sully.”

  Sully frowned. “Why not?”

  “It’s against the law.”

  “Bullshit.�
��

  “It’s against the goddamn law, Sully.”

  “So’s poker,” Sully said. “You saying you didn’t know there was a poker game going on back there?”

  “Don’t start with me, Sully,” Tiny warned. “You’re on thin ice tonight. You’ve already punched one of my customers. Jeff should have run your ass then. This is thin fucking ice you’re skating on here.”

  Sully nodded at him, “Well,” he said to Ralph, who had already gotten off his stool and had the boy under the arms, “maybe we better go over there to one of those tables. Because if this is thin ice we’re on, we don’t want this fat fuck anywhere near us.”

  Carl Roebuck and the girl Didi, both fully clothed again, emerged from the room. “Let me take another one of those magic pills,” Carl Roebuck said. “I think you broke my jaw.”

  Sully handed him the vial of Jocko’s pills. “I hate to say it,” he said, studying Carl’s face. The jaw had gradually ballooned all afternoon until now it looked as though it had grown a tumor. “But you may be right.”

  Carl swallowed the pill with the last of his Jack Daniel’s and set the glass in the center of the table Sully and Ralph and the boy had selected. Then Carl collapsed into a chair, pulling the girl onto his knee. “What a day,” he said. In fact, he said it with such conviction that Sully was on the verge of feeling sorry for him, when he turned the girl toward him, buried his face between her breasts and commenced to make blubbering noises.

  “Don’t let him drive, dolly,” Sully warned the girl. “The second one is really magic.”

  “I won’t,” she said, her eyes meeting Sully’s seriously and soberly, as they had done several times during the afternoon. She’d been drinking as heavily as the men, but she looked to be in a lot better condition for it. So this was the girl who had wrecked Peter’s marriage and talked dirty to Vera on the telephone, Sully thought. No wonder his ex-wife had gone into a tizzy. Vera was, and always had been, a close-your-eyes, missionary-position sort of woman. She probably hadn’t done much to prepare Peter for the likes of Didi. Apparently even Carl Roebuck hadn’t been prepared. “If you see Peter, tell him I said hi,” she said.

  “I will,” Sully promised.

  “You will not,” Carl Roebuck said, his voice muffled in the girl’s sweater. “He can’t have both these women.”

  “Carl’s used to having all the girls in Bath to himself,” Sully explained to her.

  Didi looked down at him. “His heart’s broken,” she said. “It’s kind of sweet, don’t you think?”

  “Kind of,” Sully said.

  “I bet no girl ever broke your heart,” she said, her eyes meeting his again.

  “He’s in love with my wife too,” Carl said. “Everybody loves Toby. Nobody loves me.”

  Wirf appeared in the doorway, using an inverted push broom as a crutch, his empty pant leg dangling. “You’d keep my leg, wouldn’t you?” he said to Sully.

  “You don’t need a leg,” Carl Roebuck turned and studied him. “You need a parrot.”

  “Should we give him back his leg?” Sully asked Will.

  Will nodded eagerly.

  Sully slid Wirf’s prosthesis in front of the boy. “Go ahead.”

  The boy’s eyes got wide, and he shook his head, leaning away from it.

  “It’s not alive,” Sully said, rapping it. “See?”

  “He don’t want to, Sully,” said Ralph, who looked like he didn’t want to either.

  “You could tell your brother,” Sully said. “You think he’d believe you?”

  Will stared at the limb with fear and longing. The idea clearly appealed to him. The limb clearly did not.

  “Sully—” Ralph began, but Sully held up his hand, and after a long moment the boy reached out and took Wirf’s leg with both hands, as if he suspected that it contained the man’s liquid life and the spilling of a drop would mean less of him. They all watched the boy as he carried the limb to Wirf where he leaned against the door frame. When Didi snuffed her nose, Sully looked and saw that she was crying, tears rolling silently down her cheeks.

  Wirf drew up a chair and accepted the prosthesis from Sully’s grandson. “Thanks,” he said, pulling up his pant cuff. No one, not even Will, looked away as he fastened his leg. “Your rotten grandfather would have kept it. Now I’m a whole man again.”

  For a moment, as Sully watched, it wasn’t Will standing there but Peter, the Peter he remembered as a boy. Or maybe even himself, the boy he remembered himself to have been so long ago, the boy who had a heart capable of being broken.

  “Jesus Christ,” Carl Roebuck said softly. “What a day.”

  By the time Sully arrived at the flat the U-Haul was nearly unloaded. The only things left inside were an oak desk and a tall file cabinet. Peter had backed the trailer up over the curb to the base of the front porch and laid a ramp that angled from the inside of the U-Haul to the top of the steps. Sully was inside tugging the desk from the rear of the U-Haul toward the front when Peter appeared on the porch. “Grab the other end,” Sully suggested. Thankfully, Peter had taken the drawers out.

  Peter moved past him to the other end of the desk but declined to lift just yet. “Where’s Rub?”

  “Home,” Sully said. “I thought I’d give him the night off.” Actually, he’d thought about fetching Rub, but it was late and Rub was probably still sick. Also, he’d heard that Bootsie had been released, and Sully couldn’t face Rub’s wife, not after the kind of day this had been. “You going to pick up that end, or what?”

  “You’re drunk,” Peter guessed. Either that or he could smell the beer in the confined space of the U-Haul trailer.

  “A little,” Sully admitted.

  “This is heavy,” Peter said.

  “I can lift my end,” Sully assured him. “Just worry about your own.”

  Peter studied him a moment. “I get this feeling we’re fighting over a woman again.”

  “I get the feeling you expect this desk to walk upstairs on its own if you wait long enough,” Sully said. “Come on.”

  “Fine,” Peter said. “Kill yourself.”

  When they got up the ramp and onto the porch, Peter set his end down. “Let me back up, at least,” he suggested.

  “No.”

  “Fine.”

  They lifted then and moved through the door to the foot of the stairs, Sully backing, Peter inching forward.

  “Slow now,” Sully said, feeling the first step at his heel. The problem, he knew, was how to use the bad leg—to step with it or plant with it. Plant, he decided, since the good leg would bend at the knee and he’d have to thrust off it. They began going up the stairs a step at a time. He lifted from a ridge underneath the rim, and after each step he allowed the legs of the desk to rest a moment on the step below. They’d only gone four or five steps before he could see, even through his beery fog, that this was foolishness. Peter and Rub could walk the bastard of a desk right up in the morning. It would take them thirty seconds, and they wouldn’t have to stop once, much less at every step. A year ago Sully himself would not have had to stop. Worse, their slow progress was making the job twice as hard on Peter, who had to bear the weight of the desk between lifts. Sully could see his son sweating profusely in the frigid air. “You enjoying yourself?” Peter wanted to know when they were about halfway.

  “Yes, I am,” Sully said, hoisting another step.

  “Have you decided what it is you’re trying to prove?”

  “We’re arguing over a woman, I thought.”

  “That’s right.”

  Sully heaved again, and they went up another step. “Well, pray for me then,” he suggested. “Because if I lose my end of this desk, we won’t have a dick between us.”

  The living room that had seemed so spacious that morning was now crowded with boxes that Peter had stacked in rows in front of the fireplace and the built-in bookshelves and along the walls. The two men guided the desk between them and to the far corner, where Peter had reserved a space for i
t.

  “I thought you said Charlotte took everything,” Sully said, looking around the room at all the cardboard boxes.

  “She did,” Peter said. “These are mostly my books.”

  Sully tried to take this in. There had to be seventy boxes. In the next room, the shower thunked off. Sully hadn’t been aware of the sound, or its significance, until it stopped. He studied Peter, who leaned against the desk. “Didi says hi,” he told his son.

  If Peter was surprised, he didn’t show it. “I was afraid she’d turn up. She jump you yet?”

  “No. She jumped Carl, though.”

  “She will,” he said, adding, “Just to get at me.”

  “I should probably let her,” Sully said. “Just to get at you.”

  More sounds from the next room. “I better say you’re here.”

  They heard the bathroom door open then, and Sully purposely turned away. He was tempted to leave, and when Peter followed Toby Roebuck into the bedroom, he nearly did. Behind the door he could hear urgent, confidential voices. From the front window he saw the big IGA sign across the street flicker and go dark, but just before it did he caught a flicker of shiny red metal in the street below.

  Sitting on the big oak desk, he leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes for a second, enjoying the dark, even though the solitude turned up the volume on the song his knee was singing. That afternoon and evening, once Jocko’s pill took effect and he’d found a few decent distractions (beer, bourbon, poker, a pretty half-naked young woman), he’d almost been able to forget about Vera and his knee, its singing reduced to background vocals, the orchestration to soft violins. Now the marching band was back again, but just tuning up, not stomping to the rhythm of the bass drums. For which he was thankful, being far too worn out to march.

  And indeed there were other things to be thankful for. His luck had finally turned. He still had his triple winnings and another five hundred or so from the afternoon’s poker game. He wasn’t out of the woods, but tomorrow he’d be able to go see Harold Proxmire and give him fifteen hundred on the truck, which would hold him for another couple months. And he’d have his first and last months’ rent on the new apartment he hadn’t found yet. If his luck held, Miles Anderson wouldn’t return for a while and see how far behind he was on the house. It shouldn’t take more than a couple weeks to get more or less caught up now that Rub was back in the fold. Peter had managed to convince Anderson that everything would get done. Probably the smart thing would be to turn the whole Anderson project over to Peter. If it snowed, he could afford to do that. Maybe he could afford to anyway. Sully felt the big wad of bills bulging comfortably in his pants pocket. He hadn’t even counted it yet. Maybe he was even better off than he knew.