Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“ Any more,” he said. “You won’t be my friend any more.”

“There you go again. Making fun of how I talk. I’ma add that to my list.” Charice claimed to be compiling a list of all the workplace shit he gave her. It had several distinct, if, to Raymer’s mind, overlapping categories of abuse: illegal, immoral, actionable, insulting, bigoted and just plain wrong. She hadn’t showed him the list but claimed it was growing and pretty comprehensive.

“Do you have any idea how bad my head hurts right now, Charice?”

“That’s why they took you to the hospital. To get yourself checked out. Stay there, why don’t you. Jerome can handle things.”

“Miller, you mean. Miller can handle things. It’s Miller on our payroll, not Jerome.”

“Chief, we both know Miller can’t handle anything. Don’t matter whose payroll he’s on.”

“I don’t care,” Raymer said. “Send some body out to get me. Anybody but your brother, okay? And make sure whoever it is brings that big bottle of extra-strength Tylenol I keep in my desk. And a Diet Coke. Come yourself if you have to.”

“Oh, I get it. This is a test, right? Last week you chew my ass out for leaving the switchboard to pee, and now you want to see if I learned my lesson.”

“Goodbye, Charice. In five minutes I’m going to be on that bench outside the hospital. Main entrance, not emergency. Somebody better be there.”

Head throbbing at a good beat now, he slid off the examination table and wobbled over to his clothes on the air conditioner. His jockeys, no surprise, were not only still soaked with sweat, but also very, very cold. Imagine —he could almost hear Charice say— what it’d feel like to pull those on. Like a wet bathing suit, all nasty and cold…up there in your private place. He closed his eyes and pulled them on and Charice was right, that was exactly how it felt.

—

HE’D NO SOONER PARKED himself on the bench outside the hospital’s main entrance than Jerome’s cherry-red Mustang convertible pulled up and stopped on a dime, tires screeching, chassis rocking. Jerome himself was at the wheel, of course. Nobody else was allowed to drive the ’Stang, not even Charice, who didn’t even want to, but hated on general principle being told she couldn’t. Her brother’s explanation — that this was the car made famous in Goldfinger, the one the blonde chick drove before Oddjob decapitated her with his magic bowler — only pissed her off even more, because it wasn’t really an explanation so much as a description, the kind of thing you’d say if you wanted to make certain you were both talking about the same vehicle. Raymer wasn’t sure he understood Jerome’s reasoning either. Part of it was that he didn’t want to risk wrecking his ’Stang, but Raymer suspected that what he really hated was the idea of somebody readjusting the seat. He was tall — six foot six — and had very long legs. Another driver would have to move the seat forward in order to reach the pedals, which meant he’d have to readjust it later, and what if he couldn’t find that exact comfortable position again, the one where his knees were ever so slightly flexed, his arms perfectly straight and the perfect distance from the wheel? He was similarly fussy about a lot of things. He really didn’t want people to visit his apartment, either. It wasn’t the company he objected to. Indeed, he seemed to enjoy it, but people were forever picking things up and then setting them down in the wrong place. And he particularly hated for people to use his bathroom. “I can’t help it,” he explained. “I don’t like other people defecating where I do.” “Obsessive-compulsive” was the term Charice used to describe his fastidiousness, claiming he’d been like that even as a child.

When it came to the ’Stang, though, he was beyond any diagnosis. Raymer could tell he didn’t even like having anybody in the passenger seat, but he was willing to make exceptions for good-looking women. And since Raymer hardly fell into that category, he had to wonder if Charice hadn’t had to twist her brother’s arm to get him to fetch him at the hospital. He hoped so, because if Jerome had volunteered his services it would confirm what he’d lately been sensing — that he was behaving more and more strangely.

Rolling down the window, he said, as he always did, absolutely deadpan, “The name is Bond. Jerome Bond.” Part of the joke was that his and Charice’s last name was actually Bond. “Are you bleeding?” he wanted to know. “Because these are genuine-leather seats.”

Raymer made no move to rise from the bench.

“You gonna get in?”

“I’m still thinking.”

“There’s your problem right there,” Jerome said. Like his sister, he spent far too much time diagnosing Raymer’s problems. “Best nip that habit right in the bud, bud. Man starts thinking this late in life, no previous experience or proper guidance, there’s no telling where it could lead.”

“I told Charice I’d shoot you on sight if you showed up here, so what do you do?”

“Yeah, but see? I already got the drop on you.” Jerome’s left hand, on which he wore a special fingerless driving glove, gripped the wheel. When he raised his right, it held his revolver. Raymer sighed. It was a joke, sure, but to Raymer’s way of thinking Jerome unholstered his weapon way too often. He never pointed it at anyone, of course, preferring to strike the classic James Bond pose, with the barrel pointed straight up, but he seemed to enjoy reminding people he was armed and that as a cop, black or not, he was allowed to be. “Come on and get in, before any blood gets shed.”

Raymer rose, went around the car and opened the door, pleased to see that Jerome’s revolver had disappeared back into its holster, or at least so he assumed. Still, he hesitated before getting in, because there was nothing Jerome liked more than peeling out the split second Raymer’s ass hit the seat, the passenger door still open. “See that sign? QUIET? HOSPITAL ZONE? MAXIMUM SPEED FIFTEEN MILES PER HOUR?”

“You worry entirely too much.”

“Yeah?” Raymer said, cautiously climbing in. “Well, I have my—” Reasons was how he meant to finish his sentence, but Jerome hit the gas, tires squealing, violently thrusting him back into the bucket seat, conking his skull on the headrest with the explosion of a million bright shards.

“You should only worry about things you have control over,” Jerome was saying as the ’Stang fishtailed out of the parking lot. “The other shit you have to just let go. Otherwise it’s like…a sickness…a cancer that’ll eat away at your guts until one day—”

“Goddamn, Jerome,” Raymer said. “Please, please shut the fuck up.”

Then his radio barked. “Chief? Your ride show up?” Unless he was mistaken he heard a chortle.

“You and I are going to have to have a long talk, Charice,” Raymer told her.

“Oh, goodie.” And the radio went dead again.

He regarded Jerome for a moment, then closed his eyes. “Tell me you brought the Tylenol.”

“Glove compartment.”

Inside, like a chalice in a tabernacle, sat his big plastic bottle of five hundred Tylenol capsules. The only other thing in the glove box was, incredibly, the owner’s manual. Badly as he needed the painkillers, Raymer couldn’t help himself. Dumbfounded, he took out the manual, which was encased in plastic like a library book. “Who has the owner’s manual to a ’sixty-four Mustang?”

Jerome looked away, embarrassed, as a normal man might when his secret stash of Penthouse s was discovered. “Those things are collectors’ items, man. Hundreds of dollars. I had to special order it.”