Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

The other problem with the new Bath, at least at the moment, was that it stank. Literally. In the Schuyler Springs Democrat —known in Bath as the Dumbocrat —it had been dubbed “the Great Bath Stench,” a phrase that had been picked up in the Albany Times Union. For the last two summers, whenever the thermometer hit eighty-five, a thick, putrid odor blanketed the town, everywhere at once, so you couldn’t even tell where it was coming from. Bath, visitors remarked, wrinkling their noses and quickly getting back in their cars, needed a long one itself. Some argued that the stench originated in the fetid wetlands adjacent to Hilldale Cemetery and was borne into town on summer breezes. Except that the odor was less powerful out there. One local fundamentalist minister thought the problem might be moral in nature. Nearby Schuyler Springs had a substantial and growing gay community, and he wondered from the pulpit if God wasn’t sending a message — an idea that failed to get much traction, begging as it did the fairly obvious question of why God wouldn’t visit olfactory retribution on the actual offenders and not their innocent neighbors. This summer, as if Carl Roebuck didn’t have enough problems, people who lived nearby claimed the stench was emanating from the old mill. But how could that be? The building had been boarded up for decades. There was nothing in it to stink.

Then yesterday, more bad news. After two straight days of drenching rain, the Tip Top crew discovered a foul, viscous, yellow goo oozing out of a crack in the basement’s concrete floor. Carl, true to form, was for sealing up the crack and forgetting about it, but a Bath selectman insisted on consulting a state inspector, who demanded that Carl jackhammer out a section of concrete and find out what the hell was down there. The town’s sewer line paralleled the front wall of the factory, and while the ooze didn’t look or smell like raw sewage — it in fact was far, far worse — the inspector speculated that maybe the pipe had been invaded at the seam by tree roots. Once inside and fed a steady diet of sewage, roots could grow like tumors and cause the pipe to rupture. At which point whatever was in the line had to go somewhere. Who knew? Maybe there was a reservoir of really awful shit under the mill. Only after the concrete was ripped up would they know what they were dealing with, and how much of it. And whatever was down there would have to be mucked out.

It was this necessity that caused Carl to think of Rub Squeers, whose sense of smell had been compromised, people said, by adolescent glue-sniffing, as a consequence of which he could stand hip deep in ripe manure without complaint. Rub lived on the outskirts of Bath with his harridan of a wife, Bootsie, but this time of day he was likely out at Hilldale, where he served as the cemetery’s caretaker. The person who would know was Donald Sullivan, Carl’s friend and, since losing his house, his landlord. Since busting Sully’s balls invariably improved Carl’s spirits, which happened just then to be at low ebb, he decided to pay him a visit.

—

SULLY WAS PERCHED on his usual stool at the end of Hattie’s lunch counter. He’d been there since six-thirty, as he was most mornings, helping Ruth through the breakfast rush, though today he’d been pretty much useless, his chest tight as a drum, his breathing shallow. Since then the place had emptied out. Come noon it would be busy again, but that was an hour away. On the counter next to Sully’s empty coffee mug was this week’s North Bath Weekly Journal, folded so that his former landlady’s photo smiled up at him knowingly. Legendary middle-school teacher Beryl Peoples, read the caption. To her many students, Miss Beryl. The “Miss” had hurt the old woman’s feelings, Sully knew. She might’ve been tiny and gnomelike, but she was also a married woman, whether or not her eighth graders could imagine her with a husband. Sully had mostly called her Mrs. Peoples, which she seemed to appreciate, and in return she’d called him Mr. Sullivan, which he didn’t know how to feel about. “Does it ever trouble you,” she once asked him, “that you haven’t done more with the life God gave you?” “Not often,” he replied at the time. “Now and then.” Something about her expression in this newspaper photo suggested that even today, nearly a decade after her death, she was still waiting for a more honest answer. Sorry, old girl, he thought.

He couldn’t help wondering what she’d think of the weekend’s festivities. She’d always taken a dim view of pomp and circumstance, and he suspected she’d be ambivalent at best about the middle school being renamed in her honor. Nobody’s fool, she would recognize the gesture as politically motivated, another of the new mayor’s dubious initiatives—“Unsung Heroes,” this one had been dubbed — calculated to instill pride in a community long accustomed to self-hatred. The idea was that each Memorial Day someone who’d made valuable contributions to the community would be celebrated. Apparently Miss Beryl had been a unanimous choice for this the inaugural award, which indicated to Sully — and he was confident his old landlady would agree — that the pickin’s were slim. Who would they tab next year?

It was entirely possible he’d never learn. Two years, the VA cardiologist had given him. Probably closer to one. He’d suspected something was wrong for a while. The shortness of breath, at first on steep stairs, then on any sort of incline, and lately whenever he tried to move even a little fast. Why had he waited so long, the doctors wanted to know. Because, well…admit it, he had no satisfactory answer. Because in the beginning the symptoms came and went? Because he’d be fine for weeks at a stretch, during which he could tell himself it was nothing? Sure, but deep down he’d known, and when the symptoms returned he wasn’t surprised. Even then he probably wouldn’t have gone in if Ruth hadn’t noticed him struggling and badgered him to get it checked out. After two minutes on the treadmill, they’d shut down the stress trial.

“So what’s the deal?” she’d asked the minute he got back.

“They think I should quit smoking,” he told her. Which was true, just not the whole truth and nothing but.

“Really?” she said. “Imagine that. Cigarettes aren’t good for you? Who knew?” She seemed satisfied with the explanation, though. Didn’t grill him like she usually did when she thought he was bullshitting her. Lately, though, he’d caught her staring at him quizzically, so maybe in the intervening two weeks she’d become suspicious.

The whole truth and nothing but the truth went more like this: A-Fib. Arrhythmia. A racing heart. Brought on by physical exertion. By stress. By nothing at all. Leading to: congestive heart failure. Solution: Open-heart surgery. Quadruple bypass. Not particularly recommended for men his age, whose condition was so far advanced and whose arteries were so obstructed from years of smoking. Any other possibility? A procedure to insert an internal defibrillator to tell the heart when to beat, when not to. Routine process, an hour tops. Small incision. A couple hours later you’re up walking around. The next day you go home. Cured? No. Most likely you’ll still die of congestive heart failure, just not so soon. The other possibility, given your age and physical condition, is that you die on the operating table. If you do nothing? Two years, but probably closer to one. “Your heart could fail at any time,” the cardiologist admitted. “You could die in your sleep.”

This scenario, Sully gathered, was supposed to scare him into the procedure, but it hadn’t. “Wake up dead?” he said. “That doesn’t sound so bad, actually.”