Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“Try waking up before noon, then,” Ruth suggested.

Janey pointed at the clock, which said 11:29. “It is before noon. And I closed the Bee last night, so how about cutting me a little slack?”

They faced off for a long beat until her mother relented. “Sorry about the bathroom,” she said, “but Carl had an accident.” She emphasized the name ever so slightly. Remember? she seemed to be saying. What I told you about Carl?

“Oh, right.” Janey shrugged. “I guess that makes it okay.”

“That was my thought,” Ruth said. “I’m glad you agree.”

Janey rolled her eyes to show that she most certainly did not agree but wasn’t going to go to the mat over it, either. “Was that my idiot ex-husband’s voice I heard earlier?” Ruth apparently took this to be a rhetorical question, because she didn’t bother answering. “He’s taking that restraining order real serious.” Turning to Sully, “What’d she give him this time?”

“Nothing,” Ruth told her, but immediately looked guilty. “A cup of coffee and slice of day-old pie.”

“Think of him as a dog, Ma. If you feed him, he’s gonna keep coming back.”

“He hasn’t caused any trouble so far, or even tried to,” Ruth said, glancing at Sully. “Unlike some people.”

“That’s the thing about Roy,” Janey said, putting her now-empty mug into a plastic busing tub. “He won’t, until he does. But when he does, it’ll be my jaw that gets broke, like always.”

“He breaks your jaw because you’re always mouthing off.”

“No, he breaks it because he enjoys breaking it.”

“Like you enjoy mouthing off,” Ruth said as Janey brushed past her.

“Well, jeez,” Janey mused, pausing in the doorway to her apartment. “Let’s think a minute. Where the fuck do I get that from?”

Once she was gone, Ruth turned back to Sully. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said.

As he’d feared, she was all too willing to pick up their dispute right where they left off. “What don’t you want to hear?”

“What you’re thinking.”

Actually, Sully was more than happy to hold his tongue. Through none of his own doing, he was pretty sure the tide had just turned in his favor. Nothing was more likely to return him to Ruth’s good graces than a skirmish with her obstinate daughter, and he seriously doubted, despite being dead game, that Ruth wanted to wage battles on two separate fronts. Apparently he was right, because after he let her win the staredown, her posture relaxed. “Thank you,” she said, like she meant it.

“You’re welcome,” he told her. “I might’ve had something nice to say, though. Now you’ll never know.”

She shot him a look that said she was content to take her chances, poured herself some coffee, then pulled up a stool across from him, brushing his cheek with the back of her fingers, more intimacy than they’d shared in months, the gesture powerful enough to dispel what remained of his earlier disorientation. Such as it was, this was his life, not a movie of it.

“What is wrong with you?” Ruth said. It was the same question she’d asked before, when she was angry, though her tone was totally different now. Then, she’d been referring to how he’d goaded Roy Purdy, but now he wasn’t so sure.

“He’s dangerous, Ruth.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

He wasn’t sure, once he thought about it. Did she?

“I know you think you’re helping, but you’re not. If he snaps, he’ll put you in the hospital. Or Hilldale.”

“I might surprise you,” he said, borrowing Roy’s line, though it sounded just as lame coming from him.

“He’s got forty years on you, Sully. And he won’t fight fair.”

“I understand that,” said Sully, whose imagined strategies for offing Roy Purdy hadn’t exactly been models of fair play either. “But if he assaults me, he goes back to jail and you’re rid of him.”

“Yeah, but if he kills you I’m rid of you. ”

Two years. But probably closer to one. Was that what his goading had really been about, some sort of subconscious exit strategy, an attempt to leave life on his own terms instead of waiting for the fatal hiccup of a deteriorating heart? You heard about people committing suicide by speeding on a dark road and locating a convenient tree or swerving into oncoming traffic. So how did Roy Purdy fit into that scenario? Suicide by moron?

The problem with this theory was that it presupposed Sully wanted to die, which he was pretty sure wasn’t true. Earlier, when Carl was explaining the job he meant to offer Rub, work that nobody in his right mind would want, Sully had actually felt a twinge of jealousy that he was at a loss to explain, even to himself. If the source of the vile gunk bubbling up through the floor of the mill was from the rendering plant, mucking it out would be beyond disgusting. No one, including Sully, could possibly enjoy such labor. Nor was he so full of self-loathing as to believe, consciously or not, so far as he knew, that he deserved such an appalling job. What appealed to him, as near as he could tell, was its necessity. That was the thing about the work he and Rub used to do: nasty as it was, it all needed to be done. And once completed, it provided satisfaction, and even pleasure, in inverse proportion to the hardship endured. Sheetrocking in weather so cold you couldn’t feel your fingers until you misjudged where they were and hit them with a hammer was hardly fun, but it felt good when you finally came in out of the cold. The long shower afterward, hot as you could stand it, felt better still, and sliding onto a barstool at the Horse an hour later? Perfection. The day’s labors, safely sequestered in the past, somehow made the beer colder, and if the beer was cold enough you didn’t mind that it was cheap or that cheap beer was your lot in life. And come Friday, hunting Carl Roebuck down and forcing him to go deep into his trouser pocket for that fat roll of twenties and fifties, watching while the son of a bitch grudgingly peeled them off one after the other until you were finally all square, until he paid you what you’d damn well earned, well, what could be more satisfying than that? Until fairly recently that had been Sully’s life and, no, he wasn’t tired of it, just of being forced by age and infirmity to the sidelines, which, face it, happened to everyone. It was simply his turn.

And yet. Once again he studied his landlady and she him. Be honest, she seemed to be saying. In response, Sully assumed, to the old question about regret for not having done more with the life God had given him. Which was another way of asking whether he wished it had amounted to more than throwing up drywall in the bitter cold and digging trenches under the blazing sun, more than sliding onto an endless succession of barstools and getting into beer-fueled arguments about whether or not there was such a thing as sex addiction. Was it the dubious worth of such an existence that had caused him to momentarily doubt its reality earlier? How would killing Roy Purdy, or inviting Roy to kill him, render his existence any less pointless?

“Listen,” he told Ruth. “I’ll lay off him, if that’s what you want.”

“Want? What I want is for something heavy to fall out of the sky on his pointed head. How come God never lowers the boom on the Roy Purdys of the world?”

Since there was no chance this could be a serious question, he offered no opinion. “Anyway,” he said, “don’t worry about me. I’m just in a funk.”

“Funks have causes, too,” she said. “When does Peter get back?”

Ah, so she had an angle. Good. This meant she’d be less likely to ferret out the truth. “Tuesday, I think. Why?”