Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

Raymer regarded him. “You special ordered a Mustang owner’s manual.”

Jerome shrugged.

“And I have problems?” He tossed the manual back into the glove box for the pleasure of seeing Jerome wince. Later, once he got rid of Raymer, he’d probably pop the compartment open and lovingly recenter the booklet.

“Okay,” he said when they came to the T-intersection at the end of the long hospital road. The traffic light was red, so he put his left-turn blinker on, toward town, then turned to watch Raymer struggle with the childproof plastic cap on the Tylenol bottle. “So this guy goes to the doctor and says, ‘I’m all stopped up. Haven’t defecated in a week.’ ”

“Defecated,” Raymer repeated, marveling as he often did at how completely Jerome had excised North Carolina from his diction. Charice had as well, though unlike her brother, she enjoyed the vernacular and slid into and out of both dialects with ease. This Raymer found profoundly disorienting, like dealing with a split personality.

“Shit,” Jerome clarified.

“I know what it means. In a joke the guy’d say shit or maybe take a crap. ”

“Maybe he’s refined,” Jerome suggested. “Not everybody’s like you. Anyhow, it’s been a week since he defecated, so the doctor writes him a prescription for suppositories.”

Suddenly, Charice was on the radio again. “Oh, and another thing? When the wall fell down?”

“Yeah?” Raymer said, both thumbs clawing under the lip of the cap, his face purple with fruitless exertion, the plastic having somehow fused at the molecular level with the bottle itself.

“You gotta line up the little arrows,” Jerome offered helpfully.

The problem was Raymer couldn’t really see the damn things, not without his glasses, and he wasn’t about to put them on now. The arrows sort of felt more or less aligned, but maybe not. He tried adjusting them a smidge, but no fucking luck.

Jerome held out his hand. “You want me to—”

“No.”

“You still there, Chief?” Charice wanted to know.

“I’m here all right.”

“It fell on a car,” she informed him.

“A parked car?”

“Uh-uh. Moving. Apparently that wall came down just as it was passing by. What are the odds, right?”

Next she’d want him to calculate them.

“The good news is the vehicle in question was a beater.”

“Is this a joke, Charice?” Because her twin brother and tag-team partner was sitting right next to him, also telling him a joke, and to Raymer, his head throbbing, it seemed possible the two jokes might be related by something other than the tellers’ desire to torment him. “Are you going to tell me the bad news is that the driver was killed?”

Exasperated, Jerome grabbed the pill bottle, deftly lined up the arrows, popped the cap, shook out two capsules and handed them to Raymer, who swallowed them without benefit of liquid.

“Where’s the cotton ball?” Jerome now demanded.

Raymer just looked at him.

“You know, the little cotton ball they always put in the mouth of the bottle?”

“Like any sensible person, I threw that away two seconds after I opened it.”

“They put that there for a purpose, Doug.”

“Right,” he agreed. “To make it harder to get the pills out.”

“No, to keep them fresh.”

“Explain to me how that would work, Jerome.”

He would’ve put the cap back on if Raymer hadn’t held the bottle tight, shook free a third pill and gulped it down.

“From a liability standpoint it’s lucky the car was a beater, is what I’m saying,” Charice explained. “It could’ve been a new Lexus or a BMW. The driver might’ve come straight from the showroom. Whereas—”

“ Charice. Was anyone injured?”

“The driver got a broken arm. Possibly other injuries, according to Miller.”

“Miller,” Raymer repeated. “So basically we have no idea. The guy could be dead.”

“No, he’s at the hospital. You didn’t see him there?”

“Do me a favor, Charice? Call the city engineer and see if the traffic light at the hospital intersection’s working properly. We’ve been sitting here for like ten minutes.”

No response. She could go mute when asked to perform tasks that fell outside her normal purview.

“So a couple days later the guy runs into the doctor on the street,” Jerome continued, apparently having concluded from his sister’s silence that she was off doing as instructed. “He’s limping along…can barely move. That’s how long it’s been since he defecated. The doctor can’t believe it. He says, ‘What’s the matter? Those pills didn’t work?’ ”

“You want to hear the strange part?” Charice interrupted.

Raymer closed his eyes and rested his head against the seat back, trying to gauge how much longer the painkillers would take to kick in. “Stranger than the part where the factory wall falls on a passing motorist for no reason?”

“Oh, I’m sure there’s a reason, Chief,” Charice assured him. “Things don’t just happen for no reason. We just don’t know what it is yet.” No question, she and Jerome were twins. They both believed in a world where cotton balls had a purpose.

“There’s a competing theory, Charice. There are people — smart people — who believe that everything happens for no reason.”

“Yeah, okay, but guess who was driving that car?”

“Charice.”

“It’s going to make you very happy.”

“Well, it can’t be Jerome, because he’s sitting right next to me.”

“Get serious. Take a guess.”

“Okay, Donald Sullivan.”

“That’s not very nice,” Charice said, clearly taken aback.

Raymer had to admit she was probably right. It wasn’t nice. But Barton Flatt was already dead, and he honestly couldn’t think of anybody else he wanted to be the victim of a freak accident.

“Roy Purdy,” she blurted, apparently unable to keep the good news to herself any longer.

“Why would I be happy about that?”

“Because he’s an asshole.”

Okay, maybe he was a little happy. He’d run into Roy at the Morrison Arms the day after his release. The creep had moved in with a sad, overweight woman named Cora, who’d apparently fallen for him, and he couldn’t have been more smarmy and obsequious. In jail Roy had found religion, or so he claimed. Before, he’d apparently used his time behind bars to hone his criminal skills, but in this stint his Bible-study and psychology classes had allowed him to emerge as a wholly new and improved man. The old Roy, he’d assured Raymer, was dead and gone. All he could hope was that people wouldn’t hold that Roy against him. He was anxious that Raymer in particular didn’t harbor any ill will about when they were kids and Roy used to bully him relentlessly. None of that had been personal, he explained. He’d just been looking for somebody to take out his anger on. This last spell, with the help of an older con, he’d learned to let go of all that anger. It was rage that had stolen his whole damn life, and with the help of his newly acquired anger-management skills he meant to steal it right back. Perhaps not the best metaphor for a career thief, Raymer remembered thinking. Still, he supposed it was possible the man had truly been reformed. What undermined this likelihood was the note of pride in his voice when he recalled those middle-school days when he’d been the endless scourge of timid boys like Raymer.

“You’d rather have a wall fall on a harmless old coot like Sully,” Charice said, “than on a true lowlife like Roy Purdy. That’s just sick.”

Truth be told, Raymer had no idea why Sullivan had occurred to him first. He’d resented the man for so long it’d become a habit, he supposed. “Well,” he said in his own defense, “it’s Sully that stole our three wheel boots, remember.”