Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

A hundred yards away, off to the side of the unpaved road that separated Hill from Dale, sat the bright yellow backhoe that had no doubt dug the judge’s grave earlier that morning. Raymer recognized Rub Squeers, Sully’s sidekick, sitting in the small patch of shade beside it. Something about his posture suggested that he was weeping. Could he be? Was he, too, remembering a loved one buried nearby? Was he, too, yearning for a new life, a new line of work? Maybe he’d like to swap jobs, Raymer thought, because digging graves, compared with law enforcement, would be both peaceful and rewarding. The dead were past being troubled by the world’s injustice. Nor did they resist order. You could lay them out on a grid by the thousands without a single complaint. Try that on the living and see where it got you. People professed to love straight lines, which provided them, after all, with the shortest distance between two points, but Raymer had come to believe that, deep down, humans preferred to meander. Possibly, he considered, absentmindedly, that’s all Becka had succumbed to — a perfectly natural urge to meander. Perhaps she hadn’t fallen out of love with him so much as she’d become disillusioned by the rigidity of matrimony’s rules: Love, honor, obey. Do this. Don’t do that. Maybe to her, as a policeman, he’d come to represent the straight line she could no longer abide. Was the impulse to meander so terrible? When you did, wasn’t there always the possibility that in the end you’d loop back to where you originally were? Given time, mightn’t Becka have found her way back to him? Maybe it was time, not love, they’d run out of. It was pretty to think so.

He’d been the one to find her. He’d come home early, something he almost never did, at least not lately, not since things had started to sour between them, gradually at first, then suddenly. They’d argued bitterly that morning before he left for work, what about he couldn’t even remember. Nothing. Everything. Lately, even his most benign observations summoned torrents of sarcasm, tears, anger and disdain. Almost overnight, it seemed, the range of his wife’s negative emotions had multiplied exponentially. To Raymer, though, something about her litany of grievance felt out of whack. That she no longer loved him was beyond question, yet something still didn’t ring true. It was almost as if she was doing scenes from all the plays she knew that featured marital discord. He kept looking for continuity, for what she was angry or bitter about on Monday to reappear on Thursday. But no. It was as if she meant to stampede him with a multitude of unrelated complaints that ranged from the fairly benign and specific — his forgetting to lower the toilet seat — to the more vague and global — his disrespect for her feelings — with every offense, large and small, equally weighted.

So when he pulled in to their driveway and saw those three suitcases sitting on the porch, he recognized what they meant or were supposed to — she was leaving him — but more than anything the sight struck him as theatrical, almost comic. The front door was half open. Had she forgotten something and gone back inside for it? He remembered crossing the lawn and thinking they’d probably run right into each other there. She’d be surprised for a moment, then determined. And what would he do? Let her go? Keep her by force, at least until he could get to the bottom of whatever was troubling her?

She was just inside the open door. She’d been hurrying, that much was clear. The rug at the top of the stairs — now in a heap, halfway down — was probably the culprit. Raymer himself had slipped on it more than once. Becka had tasked him with finding a mat to put beneath it, but he kept forgetting, and this, right here, was somehow the consequence. Her forehead was planted on the bottom step, her hair having fallen forward to cover her face, her knees two stairs up, arms behind her, rump in the air. She looked like she’d been swimming the breaststroke from the top of the stairs to the bottom and died before she could get there.

How long did he stand there, paralyzed? He hadn’t even checked to make sure she was dead, just stood there staring at her, unable to process what he was seeing. Even now, thirteen months later, he cringed to recall his breathtaking incompetence at the scene. What he couldn’t get out of his head was how staged the whole thing looked — Becka’s body impossibly balanced like that, no blood to speak of. To Raymer it resembled a museum diorama whose bizarre purpose was beyond his grasp. She was, after all, an actress, which made what he was witnessing a performance. She couldn’t hold that ridiculous pose forever. If he was just patient, she’d eventually get to her feet and say, Is this what you want to happen to me? Fix that fucking rug!

But no. It was no performance. Becka was dead. He found the tented note she’d left on the dining room table while he waited for the ambulance. I’m sorry, it said. I didn’t mean for this to happen. Try to be happy for us. It was signed with Becka’s usual capital B.

She didn’t mean for this to happen? It took him a moment to realize that by “this” she didn’t mean falling down the stairs, or dying, because of course she couldn’t have. No, what she hadn’t meant to do was fall in love. Falling out of love with him was something he could, in time, come to terms with. In point of fact, hadn’t he understood from the beginning that his luck in marrying Becka was too good to last? But falling in love with somebody new? Try to be happy for us ? How could that happen when he didn’t know who us was?

—

DURING THE LAST THIRTEEN MONTHS the images from that terrible afternoon — Becka dead, the EMTs and investigators trying to work around her on the stairs, her rigored body being maneuvered onto a gurney and then out the front door, the neighbors having gathered outside to watch — had mercifully begun to fade, like photographs left in the sun. Tom Bridger’s words, by contrast, had lost none of their force. Over a forty-year career, Tom had developed a medical examiner’s mordant humor. Arriving on the scene, he’d taken one look at Becka, her forehead seemingly stapled to the bottom step, her rear end in the air, and said, “What the hell did this woman do? Come down those stairs like a Slinky?” He hadn’t intended the remark to be cruel, not realizing the dead woman’s husband was in the next room to overhear it. What made it so awful was its truth. Because Becka had looked for all the world as if she’d done exactly that — Slinkied down the stairs. Which again put Raymer in mind of old Miss Beryl, who, back in eighth grade, famously maintained that the precise word, the carefully chosen phrase, the exact analogy, was worth a thousand pictures. Back then he and his classmates had been convinced she had it backward, but no more. When he remembered the horror of that afternoon’s events, the phrase “like a Slinky” still played on a loop in his brain, still made his stomach roil. The words actually had a taste: stomach acid on the back of his tongue. Their meaning had gradually evolved, morphing from horror into anger, then into despair and finally into…what? Lately, when the phrase “like a Slinky” scrolled uninvited across his consciousness, he found himself involuntarily grinning. Why? He certainly didn’t think there was anything funny about what had happened. Even if Becka had been planning to run off with another man, he wasn’t glad she was dead. At least he didn’t think he was. What had happened to her wasn’t justice, poetic or otherwise. Where, then, did the shameful impulse to grin come from? From some dark place in himself? Who, he wondered, as Miss Beryl had so often done, is this Douglas Raymer?