Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“I kind of checked myself out.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought you might need me?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Raymer said, annoyed to be talked to the way he’d just talked to Miller. “That’s what I came to find out.”

“It’s true I might want to borrow your sidearm,” Gus said. “I’m thinking about shooting Carl here. How you doin’, Jerome?”

“Mayor,” he said, and they shook hands. Surprised, Raymer wondered how they knew each other. Had he and Gus ever shaken hands?

“How come shit like this never happens in Schuyler?” was what Gus wanted Jerome to explain.

“There’s an ordinance against it,” Jerome said.

Carl rotated the schematic, considering it from a different angle, and offered it to the mayor. “Show me on this where there’s a power line.”

“Why would I show you on that when I can take you to the actual cable your guys just jacked the shit out of.”

“What I don’t get,” Jerome said, when Carl headed over to the NiMo crew, “is how a building can stand for a century and then one day tumble into the street.”

“Well,” Gus sighed, “several things have to happen. First, some imbecile has to sever the collar ties that secure the walls to the roof.”

“Why would anybody do that?”

“They were working on the penthouse units, is my understanding. They meant to retie them later.”

“Still,” Jerome said, “the floor joists—”

“Those were compromised a couple weeks ago in order to construct the interior stairwells.”

Jerome nodded seriously, apparently following all this.

How did normal people know shit like this? Raymer wondered. Or, to rephrase the question: How had he himself managed to live so long and learn so little? “Aren’t you curious?” Becka always said whenever he asked why she was reading this or that. “About the world and how it works? About people and what makes them tick?” He supposed she had a point. Curiosity was probably a good thing, not always a cat killer. Still, what made people tick was no great mystery, was it? Greed. Lust. Anger. Jealousy. You could almost let your voice fall right there. Love? Some people claimed it made the world go round, but he wasn’t so sure about that. Love mostly turned out to be one of those other emotions, or a mixture of them, in disguise. Even if it did exist, Raymer doubted its relevance to much of anything.

“Carl still might’ve got away with it,” Gus was saying, “if somebody down in the basement hadn’t lit a cigarette and tossed the match into a floor drain.”

“Gas pocket?” Jerome said, as far ahead of the game as Raymer was behind.

“Boom,” said Gus, puffing out his cheeks. “Maybe that’s the lesson. You can skate on the first idiocy, and maybe even the second, but the third brings down the wrath of God.” He regarded Raymer then as if he might be the physical embodiment of the principle he’d just articulated.

Suddenly the smell was just too much. “Excuse me a minute,” Raymer said, turning away. There was a convenient pile of rubble nearby and into this he vomited violently, hands on his knees, reluctant to straighten up until he was sure the worst of the nausea had passed. Everyone, even the NiMo guys, who’d been happily cutting Carl Roebuck a new asshole, stopped to watch him retch. Was he throwing up because of the heat and stench, Raymer wondered, or because he was concussed? It would’ve been good to know, but too much trouble to find out. Curiosity trumped yet again.

When he finally straightened up, Miller, having moved the spectators across the street, had returned to his previous post and was again pointlessly supervising the brick tossing.

Raymer went over and said, “Miller?”

“I did what you said, Chief,” he told him, gesturing at the people he’d moved out of harm’s way.

“Yes, you did,” Raymer agreed. “But look.” The spectators Miller had moved were mostly still there, but half-a-dozen newcomers were now standing right where they’d been.

“You want me to move them, too?”

Raymer nodded. “And this time?”

“Yeah?”

“Stay there. That’s where the job is. This here”—he indicated the men tossing bricks—“has got nothing to do with us.”

“He’s not what you’d call gifted, is he?” Jerome remarked when Raymer walked up.

“No,” he admitted, though for some unknown reason he felt an urge to come to the idiot’s defense. Probably because Miller seemed to have such a hard time grasping the same things that had eluded him as a young patrolman. No doubt he himself had exasperated his boss, Ollie North, as thoroughly as Miller was doing now. Police work, perhaps more than any other profession, attracted people for the wrong reasons — in Raymer’s case, the desire to be useful. You’d be given orders and you’d execute these to the best of your ability. It never occurred to him that part of the job was figuring out, without being told, exactly what the job was. Right from the start Ollie had encouraged him to act on his own initiative, to analyze the scene and figure out what needed to be done. Sure, there was plenty of mind-numbing repetition, but most days, especially in the beginning, you’d encounter something new, and there wasn’t always time for instructions. In their absence, though, young Officer Raymer had found himself assailed by not just the usual raft of self-doubts but also the old ambient feeling of futility that had been his more or less constant companion since he was a boy in a disorderly house that he’d wanted to put right, without having a clue where to begin. He knew nothing about Miller’s background but could recognize in him the same eagerness to please that so often went hand in hand with a reluctance to take chances. At every juncture, Miller had to be told what to do and then what to do next. Having been ordered to move people to safety, he’d done so. Since Raymer didn’t tell him to stay there and see the job through, he’d returned to his earlier post to await further orders. “I keep hoping he’ll grow into the job,” Raymer said weakly.

Jerome shrugged. “You put Charice out here, she’d have this whole deal organized in about two seconds flat.”

He was right, too. The station had been a nightmare of inefficiency until Charice arrived, everything in the wrong place. By the time you found what you were looking for, you’d forgotten why you needed it in the first place. Charice had made sense of it all, transforming the department into a well-oiled machine. For which she was universally resented. Not because her coworkers preferred chaos to order — they were cops, after all — but because she’d invaded their turf and changed things without asking for permission or even advice. She could be abrupt to the point of rudeness and clearly didn’t suffer fools gladly, perhaps not a particularly admirable quality when one is surrounded by a dozen of them. Out on the street, Raymer feared, she’d piss folks off even worse. People in Bath weren’t used to being ordered around by sharp-tongued black women. If she got sent out on a call to the Morrison Arms or Gert’s Tavern, she’d be lucky not to get beaten to death with her own baton, and if something like that ever happened, Raymer would have only himself to blame. “I need somebody with good judgment at the station,” he told Jerome, who just shrugged, as if to concede that the chief of police had every right to remain stupid.

Rejoining them, Gus put a hand on Raymer’s shoulder. “Go home before you pass out again,” he said. “This’ll all get worked out. You can die in the line of duty some other day.”

“All right,” Raymer agreed, too exhausted and dispirited to protest. Jerome wouldn’t mind dropping him off at the Arms before heading back to Schuyler. There he’d fall into bed and see what happened. Maybe all he needed was a nap. Or possibly he’d just sleep right on through to tomorrow. Or better yet die in his sleep. Maybe his fainting into the judge’s grave had been an omen — that his own end was near. If so, fine.