Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“Hey, that’s a good one,” Roy said. “You make that up on the spot or you been thinkin’ about it all morning, waitin’ for me to come in here so you could say it?”

Sully ignored both this and Ruth, who was glaring daggers at him as well. “Yeah, but here’s what I don’t understand,” he told Roy. “Carl Roebuck was just talking about needing somebody to clean up that ruptured sewer line. How come you didn’t speak up? Let him know you were looking for work?”

Roy rose from his stool. He’d removed a toothpick from its scarlet cellophane and was chewing on it thoughtfully. “How come you don’t like me, Sully?” he said. “I never done nothin’ to you.”

“Hold on, here’s another,” Sully said, as the other man moved toward the door. “Wanted. Experienced petty thief. Night shift. Ex-con preferred.”

“I guess you don’t think people can change, then,” Roy said, his hand on the doorknob, the bell above tinkling in anticipation.

“They do, sometimes,” Sully conceded, refolding the paper carefully, so his landlady was faceup again. Was it his imagination, or had her expression changed? Become ever so slightly more disapproving? “Mostly they get worse, though, is the problem.”

“Maybe I’ll surprise you,” he said. “I been meanin’ to ask, though. How you like livin’ in my trailer?”

Sully snorted, though he knew what Roy was getting at. “ Your trailer?” Because it had once been Roy’s, or rather his and Janey’s, a gift from Ruth and her husband when Janey was pregnant and she and Roy were newly married and without a place to stay. They’d parked it out back of Ruth’s and lived there until Roy got arrested out at the Sans Souci with a truckload of stolen TVs and furniture. Later, after Roy was sent downstate that first time, Ruth bought the trailer back so Janey would have enough money to move to Albany and begin a new, improved Roy-free life. She’d been beyond incredulous when Sully offered to take it off her hands. “What do you mean you’re going to live in it?” she wanted to know. “You’ve got a nice big house on the prettiest street in Bath.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t want it back,” Roy assured him. “They say them things is firetraps. I been reading up. Fall asleep with a lit cigarette some night and up in smoke you’ll go.”

Sully met his stare and held it for a full beat before saying, “Is that for true?”

A muscle twitched on Roy’s cheek, and for a moment Sully thought Roy might barrel down the counter, but he stayed where he was. “That’s for true,” he repeated, smiling. “You know what I got up here, Sully?” Roy continued, pointing at his right temple.

“Well,” Sully replied, “thanks for teeing it up for me.”

Roy ignored this, the look on his face causing Sully to wonder what it must be like to go through life never getting the joke, to smile only when nothing was funny.

“A ledger,” Roy informed him seriously. “On one side’s all the people I owe. Other side’s the ones that owe me. This morning, right here, I added one piece of cherry pie and a cup of coffee on the side I owe. Some people forget their debts, but not me.”

Sully nodded. “I’m curious. Who’s on the side that owes you?”

“One day it’ll be you,” he said confidently. “When I make things right? On that day you’ll owe me an apology, and I mean to collect it. I’ll come by some night. I know right where you park my trailer. I’ll bring us a six-pack. We’ll drink a beer or two, you and me, and you can admit how you had me all wrong. If I was you I’d start practicing, ’cause it’s gonna happen.”

“Well, I’ve got just the one good leg, Roy, so I don’t think I’ll stand around on it waiting for that blessed day.”

“Oh, it’ll come, all right. Some night there’ll be a knock on your door and it’ll be me. And that’s for true, too.”

“Unless I fall asleep with that lit cigarette first.”

“Hey, there you go!” Roy said, pointing his index finger at Sully like he’d just guessed right in a game of charades. “That sure could happen, too.”

“I BELIEVE,” Reverend Tunic warbled, a hint of Martin Luther King Jr. in his cadence now, “that by our fair city Judge Barton Flatt meant for us to understand that this place we call home is not just comely but fair as in ‘just,’ that our community is a model of rectitude, an exemplar of…”

Here he looked heavenward, as if for an elusive word or abstract concept, apparently finding it in a jet’s vapor trail at thirty thousand feet.

“Of righteousness,” he concluded.

Raymer, looking up as well, felt both dizzy and nauseated, his knees suddenly liquid in the heat. How nice being on that plane would be. In his mind’s eye he could see himself disembarking at its unknown destination, magically dressed for some other line of work. Something he’d be good at. Some new life undreamed of by Becka and Judge Flatt, even by Miss Beryl. Or, for that matter, by himself.

“How, then, we may ask,” Reverend Tunic continued, his gaze still fixed on the heavens, “do we make the great man’s dream a reality? How do we ensure that our fair city is the celestial one of his profound conviction?”

What in the world had possessed him to become a policeman in the first place? Had the attraction been law enforcement’s emphasis on rules? As a boy he’d always found rules comforting. They implied that life was governed by basic principles of fair play, guaranteeing him his turn at bat. And that was important, because he’d already witnessed among his peers too many kids who refused to play fair unless compelled to do so by adults. The rules he’d appreciated most were simple and unambiguous. Do this. Don’t do that. People appreciate clarity, don’t they? Being a policeman, then, would be about order, about implementing the will of the people, about the common good. Right. In actuality, the job had taught him that, far from being comforted by rules, most people were irritated by them. They insisted that even the most sensible, self-explanatory regulations be justified. They demanded exceptions in their own unexceptional cases. They were forever trying to convince him that the rules they’d run afoul of were either stupid or arbitrary, and Raymer had to admit that some of them truly were. Worse, all manner of citizens suspected that laws were enacted expressly to disadvantage them. Poor people concluded that the deck was stacked against them, rich ones that a reshuffle would ruin both them and civilization. Becka, when in the right mood, would argue that marriage was an institution designed to enslave an entire gender, and at times her rhetoric got so personal that you’d have thought Raymer himself had been a member of the original matrimonial planning committee. Back at the Academy the rule of law had made a kind of sense, at least in its broad strokes. Anymore, Raymer wasn’t so sure. So go, he thought. Just get on a plane and leave. Because after Becka’s death something had happened to him. His faith in his profession had eroded, and in light of this, what was keeping him here?

On the other side of the judge’s open grave stood a girl of about twelve — one of His Honor’s nieces or grandchildren? — who was staring intently, brow knit, at Raymer’s midsection. She couldn’t know about the garage-door opener in his pocket, of course, but she seemed to have drawn an erroneous inference about what his hand was up to in there. When he removed it, their eyes met, and a sly, knowing smile spread across her otherwise innocent features. Raymer, feeling himself flush, clasped his hands in front of his crotch and looked past her into the distance, his eye once again drawn to that vapor trail. If he went somewhere new, who would he know? Who would know him? What would he do for a living?