Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  Since he had company, Sully washed his hands, then dried them on a paper towel.

  “Should be plenty of work for you if you want it,” Jocko offered mysteriously.

  “How’s that?”

  “I know a guy right now who’d pay you a couple grand to torch his store.”

  Sully let this offer sink in a moment, studying his longtime acquaintance, who seemed less embarrassed by what he’d just proposed than by the fact that he couldn’t seem to squeeze even a drop from his dick.

  “Where’d this guy get the idea I’m in the arson business?” Sully finally said.

  “Well,” Jocko said, giving up the pretense and zipping himself back into his pants.

  “No, really,” Sully insisted.

  Jocko shrugged, met Sully’s eyes for a moment before looking away. “He must have heard it somewhere.”

  “Must’ve,” Sully agreed. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint him.”

  “He’ll get over it,” Jocko said quietly. “He’ll be sorry he misjudged you, probably.”

  “Let’s find a new place to drink,” Sully said, sliding onto the stool next to Wirf, who was chatting pleasantly with Tiny at the end of the bar. There was a full bottle of beer in front of the stool where Jocko had been sitting. Wirf, Sully noticed, had switched from club soda to beer.

  “What’s wrong with this one?” Wirf said. Tiny had stiffened when Sully approached. In fact, he was glowering at Sully and not bothering to conceal the fact that personally he liked his bar better when Sully wasn’t in it.

  Sully, still unsettled by his conversation with Jocko, studied Tiny before responding. “Nothing,” he said finally. “This place is perfect. It’s so friendly, is what I like best.”

  “How about one of these?” Wirf said, tinking his beer bottle, their regular brand, with his glass.

  “Are they good?”

  “I like them.”

  “Will they make this day end peacefully?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  “Let’s.”

  Tiny went to the other end of the bar where the cooler was and returned with a beer. “You want a glass, Sully?”

  “Am I entitled to one?”

  Tiny gave him a glass. Also a piece of mail. Sully said thanks and swallowed a second of Jocko’s pills, chasing it with a swig of beer from the bottle. The second pill was probably not a good idea, but he figured he was close to home. The mail bore the logo of Schuyler Springs Community College. The address Sully had given at registration had been care of the White Horse Tavern, just to piss Tiny off. The envelope contained his grades for the fall semester. F’s except in philosophy, for which his young professor had awarded him an incomplete. “Good news,” Sully said, wadding up the letter and tossing it in the direction of the garbage bucket Tiny kept behind the bar. “I made the dean’s list.”

  Wirf was still eyeing the unused glass, anxious as always to head off hostilities. “You hear Tiny’s hired a band for tomorrow night?”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “New Year’s Eve,” Tiny said, coming back over to pick up the wad of paper from the floor. “Some people like to go out and celebrate that night.”

  In truth, Sully had lost track of what day it was. “Will I need reservations?”

  “A free buffet, too,” Wirf interrupted. “For all the regular customers.”

  “Seventy-five pounds of chicken wings I ordered,” Tiny grumbled proudly.

  “Those fucking things,” Sully said. “The whole town will be shitting razor blades sideways for a week.”

  “Then don’t eat them,” Tiny said, instantly angry, as Sully had hoped. “Who cares what you want, Sully?”

  “Nobody,” Sully admitted. “For twenty years I’ve wanted somebody to open another bar on Main Street and put your ugly ass out of business.”

  “Twenty years?” Tiny said. “Try forty. Forty years I been right here. There were four bars right on Main Street back when your old man was around being the same kind of asshole you are now. Now I’m the only one left.”

  “The only asshole?” Sully said.

  “The only bar.”

  “Survival of the dumbest,” Sully offered, by way of explanation.

  “Twenty minutes to closing,” Tiny said, heading off down the bar toward the bar stool he kept on his side.

  “There,” Sully grinned at Wirf. “Thank God he’s gone.”

  Going through his pockets, he put all the money he was carrying on the bar in front of them and started to make sense of the random denominations. It made an impressive sight, though Sully knew it wasn’t nearly enough to square his debts. When the money was arranged, he counted out five hundred dollars and slid the money in front of Wirf.

  Wirf studied it. “You sure?” he said. “I know you’ve got other problems.”

  “Take it,” Tiny advised from down the bar. “When’s he going to have that kind of money again?”

  “I wish somebody would offer me a hundred to shoot you in the head,” Sully returned. “In fact, I’d do it for free if I thought it would kill you.”

  “You hear the weather forecast for tomorrow?” Wirf said.

  Sully admitted he hadn’t.

  “Supposed to snow like hell.”

  Sully sighed, ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Hell, I thought that would cheer you up. You’ve been pissing and moaning about no snow for a month.”

  This was true, and yet Sully couldn’t help thinking of all the other things he had to do tomorrow. Going out to Harold’s and getting the plow rigged onto his pickup was one more thing. On the other hand, he was going to have to go see Harold tomorrow anyway and give him some of the money he was carrying around before it leaked away.

  “He was in here earlier,” Wirf said at the mention of Harold’s name.

  “He must have heard about my triple,” Sully surmised. He’d never seen Harold at The Horse or any other bar.

  Wirf shook his head. “He sat right where you’re sitting, drank a Jack Daniel’s.”

  “Next you’ll be telling me his wife was with him drinking Singapore Slings.”

  “You know that kid Dwayne they hired? Red hair? Always picking his nose?”

  Sully said he knew Dwayne.

  “He emptied the cash register on them and took off,” Wirf said. “Harold was supposed to be out looking for him, but he didn’t have the heart.”

  “This is about the fifth time it’s happened,” Sully observed.

  Wirf nodded. “Have you ever noticed how people do the same things over and over?”

  “You don’t mean us?”

  “No. I was referring to other people,” Wirf explained. “Hell, we’re full of surprises.”

  In fact, the conclusion Sully’d come to today was that just about everybody was full of surprises. A month ago he’d have agreed with Wirf that both people and events were predictable to the point of boredom. But since getting out of jail this morning, Sully had been pursued by the strange sensation that everything had changed, that the rules of existence had been subverted somehow while he was away. Even the fact that his luck had changed contributed to this somewhat otherworldly feeling, as if he’d returned to a place he no longer knew. It looked the same, but it felt deep down different. How else to explain the fact that he’d gotten lost going to Bootsie and Rub’s flat? How else to explain the strange conversation he’d just had with Jocko, who’d not even returned to the bar but rather slunk out the door? Exhausted as he was, the only reason he’d come into The Horse at all was in the hopes of ending the day with some degree of normalcy, some zigging with Wirf and quarreling with Tiny to restore his equilibrium, dispel the sense of disorientation that had him reeling.

  And now here was Wirf, for all his bleary-eyed normality, the most predictable of humans, studying him with an odd seriousness, Sully’s five hundred dollars still sitting in front of him. Wirf looked for all the world like a man about to zag in the face of a man who’d joined him in
the hopes of zigging.

  “What?” Sully said finally. “You’re not going to start in on me, are you?”

  “No,” Wirf promised. “But I am going to ask you a favor.”

  “Okay,” Sully said. “As long as you don’t want me to do it tonight.”

  Wirf consulted his watch. “It probably won’t be tonight,” he said seriously. “But whenever it is, I want you to do it.”

  “Ask, then,” Sully said. “How can I do it or not do it if you won’t tell me what it is?”

  “I just want you to know I’m serious,” Wirf went on. “I know you think I wouldn’t say shit if I had a mouthful, and that’s true most of the time, but right now I want you to promise me this, and if you don’t, we’re through.”

  Sully studied his friend warily. “I’m not quitting work,” he said. “And I’m not going back to college, not even for you. My son’s going to start teaching out there next term, and with my luck they’ll make me take his course.”

  Wirf grinned broadly at the idea. “That’s not the favor. The favor is your landlady.”

  Sully was enormously relieved to hear it. After all the buildup, maybe this would be easy after all. “Anything I can do for Beryl, I’ll do. I’ll be more than happy to, in fact.”

  Wirf was looking at him with the same almost cross-eyed seriousness. “She feels the same way about you. Which is why she did something for you, with my help.”

  “What?” Sully said, though he had an idea.

  “You own the house on Bowdon again,” Wirf said.

  “She paid the back taxes?”

  “Just over ten grand.”

  “And you let her.”

  “I encouraged her,” Wirf said emphatically.

  “Knowing I wanted no fucking part of the place, knowing that it wasn’t worth selling for scrap, you let her.”

  “It’s worth twenty thousand at least, maybe more,” Wirf said.

  “You’re full of shit.”

  Wirf shook his head. “I already have an offer of twenty from the people who own the Sans Souci. They’ll go higher, too.”

  “Why?”

  “To avoid litigation. That dirt road they carved runs right across the corner of your property. I checked. And they don’t have an easement. We could sue their asses. They might give twice what they’ve offered so far. Three times.” He stopped, let Sully digest this. “At the very least, at twenty thousand, you could pay her back, square away your truck, start new.”

  Sully thought about it. Starting new was an attractive concept. Why didn’t he believe in it? Big Jim Sullivan again, no doubt. This would be his father’s money, a windfall from the one direction he couldn’t accept it.

  “That’s the favor,” Wirf said. “When she tells you, be grateful. Thanks to that son of hers, she’s going to have a rough time for a while. Make her feel good.”

  “It’s not that—” Sully started to explain.

  “I don’t give a shit what it is, Sully,” Wirf said. “You’re going to do this, or we’re through.”

  Neither man said anything for a moment. Sully could feel Jocko’s second pill kicking in, could feel himself going fuzzy about the edges. There was no place on the planet where he felt more comfortable than The Horse, than this particular stool, next to this particular man, and yet how strange it all seemed right then. The Christmas lights strung along the back wall, half of them flickering or dead out, Tiny seated on his invisible stool at the other end of the bar, magically supported on a cushion of air, even Wirf glaring at him so seriously. Even The Horse had taken on the quality of strangeness, and he felt the same panic that had come over him half an hour earlier when he’d gotten lost on a street he knew. He heard himself say okay, but it was almost another person speaking, someone far away. Then, just as suddenly, he was back again.

  “Good,” Wirf said, apparently satisfied. “Now tell me. What’d Barton want with you this morning?”

  Sully snorted. “He wanted to know about the day my old man spiked that kid on the fence.”

  Wirf nodded thoughtfully. “He must be preparing to die,” he said finally, as if he knew. “Tying up loose ends. What’d you tell him?”

  “Nothing,” Sully said. “That it was an accident.”

  Wirf nodded.

  “Which was a lie. He shook the fence until the kid lost his grip and fell.”

  “You saw him?”

  “My brother did,” Sully grinned. “All I saw was the kid hanging there by his jaw with the spike sticking out his mouth.”

  Wirf took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It’s a wonder we aren’t all insane,” he said.

  “We are,” Sully said, getting up from his stool. His conviction surprised him. “I believe that.”

  Sully glanced at the clock above the bar. In less than five hours he was going to have to meet Rub at the house on Bowdon. Which reminded him. “I’m going to feed my dog and then go home.”

  “When did you get a dog?”

  “I don’t know,” Sully said. “But I’m told I have one. By the way, did you know about my son and Carl’s wife?”

  “Sure,” Wirf said.

  “How come you never said anything?”

  “Because I’m the only one in this town who doesn’t repeat gossip. Actually, I was surprised. I’d been hearing she had a girlfriend in Schuyler.”

  “I guess I’m the last to know about that too,” he said. “You think Carl is going to be okay?” Sully wondered, not even sure exactly what he meant by the question.

  “No, I don’t,” Wirf said.

  “He’s parked out front of Peter’s right now,” Sully said. “Toby’s up there with him.”

  “That girl with the tits still with Carl?”

  Sully said she was.

  “As long as she’s with him, he’ll be okay,” Wirf said.

  “That was my thought, too,” Sully told him. “I just don’t want to be wrong.”

  “It’s none of your business anyhow,” Wirf said.

  Words to live by, Sully had to admit. But he kept hearing Peter’s mockery. Not really his dog. Not really his house. Not really his business. And there were other not reallys as well. There was Vera, who was not really his wife anymore, gone round the bend today. And Ruth, who had broken things off with him, for good this time, he knew, and was not really his lover anymore. And there was Big Jim Sullivan, who was long dead, deader than a doornail, deader than a mackerel, deader than Kelsey’s nuts, dead as dead could be. Except, somehow, not really. It was Big Jim Sullivan, full of rage and pain and fear, who had lashed out at Carl Roebuck earlier in the afternoon before Sully could control him, just as it had been Big Jim who’d wiped the smirk off Officer Raymer’s face.

  At the door, as Sully struggled into his heavy coat, he became aware that something stank, and this time it wasn’t either a clam or the proximity of the men’s room. What it smelled like was destiny.

  One-thirty A.M., New Year’s Eve morning.

  On Silver Street, Ralph stood before the toilet, awaiting his urine. He didn’t really have to go. He just didn’t want to retire without checking, as if what he feared would use the night and his negligence to do its work if he wasn’t vigilant. And the events of the day were still very much with him. Ralph was not a jealous man, but he couldn’t forget the way his wife had fallen into Sully’s arms today, whispering intimate expressions of profound contempt, promising to hate Sully always. How natural they had looked in their embrace, how well fitted to each other. It had made Ralph feel like an interloper in his own marriage. It made him weak in the knees, and he’d had to go out on the porch for air.

  When Ralph’s urine finally came, hot and painfully slow, Ralph studied both the stream and the darkening pool in the commode for the blood he still feared, despite the oncologist’s assurances. But there was none.

  With Vera in the hospital overnight and Peter over at his new flat, Ralph had full responsibility for his grandson, and so, when he left the bathroom, he checked on Will one
more time. He liked to think of the boy as his grandson, even though he knew he really wasn’t. One of the things that had come home to him today was that he’d have to share this boy with his real grandfather. It wouldn’t be like Peter, whom Sully hadn’t been interested in. No, Ralph had seen the love in Sully’s eyes when the boy climbed onto his lap at the White Horse Tavern. But Ralph also knew that Sully would share, that he wouldn’t be greedy. And of course Ralph also continued to believe that people could get along.

  The boy was sleeping, peacefully for a change, the stopwatch Sully had given him ticking reassuringly a few inches away on the bed stand. Ralph had more than once heard the boy whimper fearfully in his sleep, but Will’s respiration was rhythmic now, unlabored. Ralph could smell his grandson’s sweet breath in the air above the bed, and he felt his throat constrict with only love. All evening, since returning home from the bar downtown, Will had talked of nothing but the leg, and Ralph knew that touching it, bringing the limb to the crippled lawyer, was the bravest thing his grandson had ever done and that the boy was full of pride. In the awful white flesh of Mr. Wirfly’s stump, Will had found—what?—comfort. How could this be? Ralph wondered.

  In his own room, the room he had shared with Vera for so many years, Ralph undressed unself-consciously for once and resisted the impulse to check himself one last time before turning in. Vera had always been, and was now, a difficult woman, but he couldn’t imagine life without her, couldn’t imagine the big bed to himself, couldn’t imagine Sully’s life, his having chosen it. Ralph made up his mind to go to the hospital first thing in the morning and bring his wife back to their home. He would try even harder to make her happy. She was not a bad woman.

  Sully pointed the El Camino up Main toward Bowdon and the house where he’d spent so many long nights as a child, waiting for his father, part-time caretaker and full-time barroom brawler, to come home with a snootful, limping, face swollen, tossed forcefully from the society of tough men and left with no alternative but to return, still full of rage, to the bosom of his family, to a wife who didn’t know enough to run, or perhaps did not know where, or even how; to an older son who was biding his time, dreaming of cars and motorcycles, anything with wheels that would roll and roll and carry him away to freedom; to a younger son who was not old enough yet to dream of escape but old enough to make a solemn oath, and who made that oath and reaffirmed it every night, a single binding oath forged in the depths of that boy’s blood: never forgive.