Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

The mayor started tapping Raymer’s radio with his index finger. “That would probably work better if you turned it on.”

Which was true. He’d turned the radio off when the service began, not wanting the damn thing to bark at him during the homily. He turned it back on, and Charice immediately said, “Chief?”

“I’m here,” he said, though this didn’t actually feel true. His extremities were tingling, as if whatever made the ground shudder had entered through his toes and was trying to get out through his fingertips and ears. He turned away from the cacophony of voices so he could hear better.

“You better come on back to town,” she was saying. “You aren’t going to believe what just happened.”

“Was it a meteor?” he ventured, in motion now, though his legs felt as heavy and rooted as tree trunks.

“What?” Charice said.

“Doug?” the mayor called to him, but Raymer held up his hand. Couldn’t the man see he was busy?

“Was it a meteor?” he repeated.

“Doug!” Despite its urgency, the mayor’s voice seemed miles away now, though Raymer had moved only a few feet.

“You okay, Chief?” Charice wanted to know.

In fact, Raymer’s field of vision seemed inexplicably to be shrinking. In the foreground was the radio he was speaking into, and in the blurry distance the gleaming backhoe. Everything else was shrouded in gauze.

Then, with his next step, the ground simply wasn’t there, and even before he could account for its absence it was back again with a bang, the noise, impossibly loud, somehow inside his head. Had he managed to discharge his weapon again, as he had that day with Sully? Where, he wondered, might this bullet land?

You know my thoughts on arming morons, Judge Flatt chuckled from inside his nearby casket.

Then, nothing.

WHEN THE LITTLE BELL over the door stopped tinkling and Sully saw how Ruth was glaring at him, he almost wished Roy Purdy would return. Back when he and Ruth were more than just friends that same look would’ve meant that he could forget about sex for a while. These days his punishment was less certain and therefore more ominous. “Well,” she said finally, “you’re right about one thing.”

“Really? I didn’t mean to be.”

“People generally do get worse.” Clearly, it wasn’t Roy who’d prompted this observation. “What is wrong with you?”

Before he could answer, the men’s room door opened and Carl emerged, a dark stain spreading down the inseam of one pant leg. In the weeks following his surgery, he’d worn the recommended diaper but confided to Sully that doing so was humiliating, so he quit as soon as he began regaining control of his urinary function. The problem was that occasional incontinence persisted, mostly at night and first thing in the morning. Feeling like he had to go, he’d stand patiently in front of the commode waiting for water that wouldn’t come, at least until he pulled up his pants, which seemed to be the signal for his unruly urethra to cut loose. Which was evidently what had just happened.

“So, when you see Rub?” he said, oblivious. “Tell him I’m going to need both him and his backhoe.”

“That isn’t his, actually,” Sully reminded him. “It belongs to the town.”

“We could borrow it, is my thinking,” Carl said, and as he slid back onto his stool Sully caught an acrid whiff of fresh urine.

“What happened to your own backhoe?” he said.

“Out at the yard,” Carl said. “Temporarily disabled.”

There was a towel draped over the oven door, so Sully rose and moved around the counter, a risky maneuver with Ruth so pissed at him. He was grudgingly permitted to come around when he had business there and she was in a good mood, but not when he didn’t and she wasn’t. “I’m sure your pal the mayor would rent it to you.”

“Yeah, probably, but I’d prefer that no money changes hands.”

“Having worked for you, I know that preference all too well.”

“So,” he said, while Sully wiped up an imaginary spill on the counter between them, “you really don’t think about sex anymore?”

“Not often.”

“Good,” Carl said, to all appearances genuinely relieved. “I’d like to think that when I’m as old as you, all that will be over.”

“What makes you think you’ll ever get to be my age?” Then, lowering his voice, he said, “Here, you might need this.” And pushed the towel toward him meaningfully.

Carl gave him a what-the-hell look, then saw. “Jesus,” he said, spinning off his stool as if the soaking had occurred right that second, not two minutes earlier in another room entirely. Sully saw Ruth process the whole thing even faster than Carl, who now regarded Sully angrily, as if he suspected he’d been the one who peed on him. Sully, for his part, somehow felt as if he had.

“A towel’s no good,” Ruth said when Carl commenced vigorously buffing his chinos. “Come with me,” she said, motioning for him to follow her, which he reluctantly did, his face flushed beet red.

When the door into the apartment closed behind them, Sully was left alone in one of his favorite places in the world, in a silence so profound that he could hear the coffeepot’s metallic, clocklike ticking at the far end of the counter. Outside, the only visible movement was the oppressive heat rippling the window glass. As he waited for a car to pass, or someone to come out of the hardware store, or a dog to trot across the street, anything, he was visited by a profound disorientation, as if what he’d assumed to be real had just been revealed as a movie set where he was the only actor, the rest of the cast and even the crew having gone home. For the day? The weekend? Or had the movie wrapped and nobody bothered to tell him? When even the coffeepot stopped clicking, Sully felt his chest fill with something like panic. Had he just had the heart attack he’d been warned was coming? Was this what the cessation of life felt like, experienced from the inside? Everything stops, except consciousness continues merrily about its business, dutifully bearing witness.

“Hey,” said a voice he recognized as Ruth’s until he blinked and saw it was Janey, her daughter. Over the years, their voices had become so similar that anymore he had a hard time telling them apart. Her apartment door was now ajar, and from inside came the high-pitched whine of a small appliance. “Earth to Sully.”

“Hey yourself,” he said, embarrassed but grateful, too, because the sound of her voice had set everything back in motion. Across the street a man strode purposefully out of the hardware store, and up the block a car alarm went off. At the VA he’d been warned about the possibility of brief “narrative disruptions,” even hallucinations. Thanks to the arrhythmia, the brain sometimes got too much blood, at other times too little.

“You’re getting weirder every day, you know that?” Janey said, pouring herself some coffee. There were dark circles under her sleep-encrusted eyes, through which she regarded Sully with unfeigned disinterest. “And speaking of weird, how come Carl Roebuck’s in my bathroom using my hair dryer on his crotch?”

“Well,” Sully said, letting the word dangle because Janey was possibly the only woman in Bath who didn’t know about Carl’s predicament.

“Men,” Janey said, making Sully complicit in whatever lunacy this might be.

“Hey,” said Ruth, returning now and gazing at her daughter. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t come into the restaurant in your bathrobe.”

Janey, no surprise, didn’t seem to care about her mother’s preferences. “Yeah, and I’d prefer you didn’t bring men into my bathroom before I’m even awake and loan them my hair dryer without asking.”