Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“I didn’t know where else to call,” he said, “and that’s for true.”

“What do you want?”

“I’m out to the hospital.”

Naturally, her first thought was Janey. He’d put her in there often enough before. What had happened this time? Had he waited out back of the restaurant? She always parked in the narrow space next to the Dumpster. Had he hidden behind it and surprised her there? Tried to sell her that line of happy horseshit about how he was a changed man, how the two of them belonged together, how their daughter, whom he’d never given a single, solitary thought to, deserved a father. Not that Janey was buying a word he said anymore, but she’d have to mouth off. And giving Roy lip was what always lit his short fuse. What had he done this time? Broken her jaw again? Or worse? Probably. So far, each act of violence was more awful than the last. Had he beaten her unconscious this time? Killed her? Was that what he was calling to tell her?

“If you’ve hurt her, Roy, I swear to God—”

“I’m the one that got hurt,” he said. “Busted collarbone. Left elbow’s all fucked up. Concussion.”

Good, she thought. When news arrived that Roy was about to be released, Zack had found an old hairline-fractured Louisville Slugger at the landfill and given it to Janey to protect herself, should the need arise. Apparently she’d given it to him good. “Well, you were warned to keep away from her,” she said.

There was a pause, then, “Wasn’t Janey. A goddamn building fell on me, is what happened.”

“That was you?” Jocko had come in for lunch and brought her up to speed on what happened out at the old mill, including the part about the passing motorist.

“My car got totaled. That’s how come I need a lift.”

“What about your girlfriend Cora? Call her.”

“I tried. Must not be home.”

Interesting, Ruth thought, that he didn’t deny she was his girlfriend this time, like he had only hours ago. “Hold on,” she told him. “I’ll find the number for a taxi.”

“Got no money for one of them.”

She was about to tell him that was too bad when she remembered what she said to Sully that morning, that she wished something would fall out of the sky on his pointed head. A prayer answered? Not exactly, she decided. Roy was still alive. “Okay,” she said, stifling as best she could a nasty chuckle. “Give me fifteen minutes.”

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that bad luck seems to follow you.”

“That’s for true,” he agreed.

“PULL UP BESIDE that old man for a minute,” Raymer said when Jerome made the turn into the Morrison Arms parking lot. Seated in a folding aluminum beach chair on the sidewalk out front, Mr. Hynes was waving a small American flag at passing motorists, some of whom tooted an acknowledgment. Despite the punishing heat he was dressed in his usual threadbare long-sleeved flannel shirt and a ratty wool sweater. “How you doin’, Mr. Hynes?”

“Fine, fine, fine,” was the reply Raymer had come to expect. To hear him tell it, he was never any other way.

“How many varieties you got today?” Raymer asked, their long-running joke.

“Fifty-seven,” Mr. Hynes said proudly, “same as always.”

“That’s a lot of varieties.”

“Don’t I know it. What you go and do to yourself?”

“I fell into a grave.”

“I believe it.”

“You do?”

But he was looking past Raymer at Jerome, at the wheel of the ’Stang. “That a brother in there, driving this pretty red car?”

“Say hi to Jerome,” Raymer told him, leaning back in his seat to afford the old man a better view.

“Whoo-wee! They ain’t gon come repo that, is they?”

“Over my dead body,” Jerome assured him. Raymer half expected him to unholster his pistol to demonstrate just how seriously he’d defend his rig. Fortunately, the weapon stayed out of sight.

“Whoo-weee!” Mr. Hynes hooted again.

“Power’s out at the Arms, then?” Raymer said.

The old man nodded. “Black as night in there. Black as me. Blacker.”

So much for the idea of a long afternoon nap, Raymer thought. His apartment, claustrophobic under the best of circumstances, would be a furnace without his small window-unit AC; even this exhausted, he doubted he’d be able to sleep in such stifling conditions. Across the street, though, the tippy martini glass in the window of Gert’s Tavern was illuminated, which meant that it either had power or a backup generator. Half of the regulars — mostly deadbeat dads, disability scam artists, derelicts and assorted dickheads — fell asleep with their heads on the bar. Maybe Raymer would be allowed to do the same.

“Aren’t you hot, Mr. Hynes,” Raymer inquired, “sitting here in the sun? It’s over ninety degrees out.”

“Yeah, but I’m over ninety my own self. Me and the heat, we cancels each other out.”

“Okay, but you gotta promise me you’ll go find some shade if you start feeling light-headed. Heat like this is dangerous for an elderly person like yourself.”

“You forget I come up from down south. Heat don’t mean nothin’ to me.” He was clearly more interested in the Mustang and its driver than Raymer’s advice. “What that set you back,” he asked, “that pretty red car?”

“You don’t want to know,” Jerome told him, easing off the brake.

“See, that’s where you wrong,” Mr. Hynes insisted. “I do want to know. That’s how come I ask.”

—

GERT’S WAS DARK and cool and smelled like it always did, of stale beer and overmatched urinal cakes. Not, for some reason, like the Great Bath Stench. Half-a-dozen solitary midafternoon drinkers were there when Raymer and Jerome walked in, but the sight of the police chief in the company of a tall black man with a bulge under his arm scattered them like oil on water. When the front door swung shut behind the last of them, Gert, an enormous man in his midseventies with a shaved head and a hairy chest, strolled over. He’d spent most of his youth in the joint, though for the last thirty years or so, since buying the tavern, he’d managed to stay out of trouble. Raymer had heard that he dispensed advice, along with rotgut whiskey and cheap beer, to the town’s petty criminals, who liked to run their nitwit schemes past him so Gert could point out their more obvious flaws.

“Well, well,” he said, “look at you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re killing me here,” he said, nodding almost imperceptibly in Jerome’s direction. “You know that, right?”

If Jerome registered the insult, he gave no sign. “Name’s Jerome,” he said, extending his hand across the bar; Gert looked surprised, but took it. “Are you the proprietor of this excellent establishment?”

“I own the joint, if that’s what you mean,” Gert said.

“Sir, you take my meaning perfectly.” He peered down the bar at the draft sticks. “Do you serve any microbrews?” Jerome’s usual watering hole was an upscale bar in Schuyler, whose screwball name for some reason eluded Raymer. Becka had dragged him there a couple times.

“What-oh-brews?” Gert said.

“All righty, then,” Jerome sighed, squinting at the sticks. “A Twelve Horse ale, if you would.”

Raymer said he’d have the same, and when Gert went off to draw their beers, he volunteered, much to his surprise, “I’m thinking about resigning.” He hadn’t planned to say anything of the sort. Certainly not to Jerome, who would rat him out to Charice. And certainly not in Gert’s, where such an announcement could circulate widely.

“You’re just having a bad day,” Jerome consoled him.