Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

But her most mysterious and baffling questions always had to do with the speaker. That side of Raymer’s triangle was always so tiny, and the other two so elongated, that the resulting geometric shape resembled a boat ramp. On each of his essays she wrote Who are you? as if Douglas Raymer weren’t printed clearly at the top of the first page. When questioned about this, her explanation was equally baffling. There was always, she claimed, an “implied writer” lurking behind the writing itself. Not you, the actual author — not the person you saw when you looked in the mirror — but rather the “you” that you became when you picked up a pen with the intention to communicate. Who is this Douglas Raymer? she liked to ask provocatively. ( Nobody, he wanted to tell her, perfectly willing to be a nonperson if it meant she’d leave him alone.)

Because it seemed so important to her, Raymer had tried his best to comprehend the old lady’s triangle, though it remained as deeply mysterious to him as the Holy Trinity’s Father, Son and Holy Ghost. At least that was billed as a profound mystery that you were meant to contemplate, even while knowing that it was beyond human comprehension — a great comfort to Raymer, since it was certainly beyond his. Whereas Miss Beryl’s rhetorical triangle was something he was supposed to understand.

Today, ironically, more than three decades later, Raymer finally grasped what she had been going on about: Reverend Tunic’s triangle was missing two whole sides. He’d clearly given no thought whatsoever to his audience or its suffering in the punishing heat. Nor did his subject really matter. Judge Flatt himself, of whom the man clearly knew nothing, amounted to little more than a rhetorical opportunity. Worse, to fill the resulting void, the speaker side of the triangle, the one that truly flummoxed Raymer as a kid, was the part Reverend Tunic had down cold. If asked, Who are you? the clergyman would have replied that he was somebody and, to boot, somebody really special. Raymer doubted Miss Beryl would have shared his conviction, but so what? The Reverend Tunics of this world didn’t care. Where did such breathtaking self-assurance come from? Though he loathed the man viscerally, Raymer couldn’t help envying his dead certainty. Untroubled by a single misgiving, this Reverend Tunic obviously considered himself the right man for this job, probably for any job, even before the job was explained to him. He had everything figured out, couldn’t wait to share and seemed to feel there was enough of him to go around.

By contrast, Raymer had always been tortured by self-doubt, allowing other people’s opinions about him to trump his own so thoroughly that he was never sure he actually had any. As a kid he’d been particularly susceptible to name-calling, which not only wounded him deeply but turned him imbecilic. Call him stupid, and he suddenly was stupid. Call him a scaredy-cat, and he became a coward. More depressing, adulthood hadn’t changed him much. Judge Flatt’s remark about arming morons had hurt his feelings precisely because he’d been sized up correctly. Because, face it, his judgment had failed that day. He’d allowed Donald Sullivan — another bane of his existence — to get under his skin. That was who’d been driving his pickup on the sidewalk in a residential neighborhood, and Raymer had had every right to arrest him. But he shouldn’t have unholstered his weapon, certainly shouldn’t have aimed it, even in warning, at an unarmed civilian, and he certainly had no business flicking the pistol’s safety off and thus compounding his first two errors. He couldn’t remember pulling the trigger but must’ve — a warning shot was how he’d immediately rationalized it, the thought traveling faster than the bullet. Not much faster, though. A split second later came the distant sound of tinkling glass from — miraculously, Raymer still thought — a tiny octagonal bathroom window a block and a half away, beneath which an elderly woman had been seated on her commode. Had she been quicker about her business or more spry in rising when it was finished, she would’ve caught the bullet in the back of her head.

The incident had made a pacifist of him. For a good month, until Ollie North noticed something untoward about his bearing and asked to see his weapon, Raymer never even loaded it. Nor would he have thought to wear it if the handbook hadn’t stated specifically that the uniform was incomplete without it. Ollie, even more mortified by Raymer’s unloaded gun than he’d been by the accidental discharge of his loaded one, had explained that if anything was more dangerous than a civilian with a loaded gun it was a cop with an unloaded one. “Do you have a death wish?” he wanted to know. Even as a young patrolman Raymer knew that the correct answer to that was no, but instead of saying that he’d just shrugged, leaving the question hanging.

What made him so vulnerable to the judgments of others, he’d always wondered, when others got off scot-free? Okay, maybe the dead judge would’ve had little use for this Reverend Tunic. Were he alive to hear his preposterous eulogy, he’d likely have remanded him into custody for character defamation. But to Raymer the two men were more alike than different: neither seemed to worry about being wrong, nor were they inclined to revise their thinking. ( Revise, revise, revise, Miss Beryl always recommended. Writing is thinking, and good, honest thinking involves revision. )

Not judging, though, apparently. Raymer had been summoned to Flatt’s courtroom on numerous occasions, and to his knowledge the man never, ever amended his original verdict. Most recently Raymer had given testimony against a man named George Spanos, who lived on the outskirts of our fair city with his wife and children and a dozen mangy dogs, all of which he beat savagely until they, too, became savages. When Raymer’d gone to arrest him, he’d been bitten three times, twice by dogs and once by a feral child. (The woman, blessedly, had been toothless.) The little boy’s bite wound had become infected, requiring antibiotics, and the dog’s had necessitated a tetanus shot, yet when Raymer limped to the witness stand, Flatt evinced not the slightest sympathy, even though, unlike the earlier incident, Raymer’d been clearly and unambiguously in the right. There, under the magistrate’s studied, theatrical gaze, Raymer couldn’t help feeling that somehow he and the accused had swapped stations. It was he, the chief of police, who was being asked to explain himself. It was understandable, the judge allowed, that he’d been bitten by the dogs. But how in the world, he begged Raymer to explain, had he contrived to get nipped by a child as well? During the entire proceeding Spanos sat next to his lawyer wearing an expression of aggrieved innocence so convincing that Raymer almost believed it. Whereas he himself — and he didn’t require any mirror to see the face he presented to the world — looked like he always looked: guilty as charged. Clearly, Judge Flatt considered him a fool, which left him no choice but to become one. It was appearances that mattered, and as usual they ran against him. Justice? How could there be any such thing when innocence looked like guilt and vice versa?

Even more galling than his repeated humiliations in that courtroom was the fact that the old goat had taken a shine to Becka. Not long after they married, she’d by chance been seated next to Flatt at a retirement dinner. The judge always had a keen eye for attractive young women, and after his own wife’s death he’d evidently seen no reason that, as a geezer, he shouldn’t indulge himself in the occasional flirtation with someone else’s. That evening Becka had been provocatively attired, at least by North Bath standards, in a black dress with a plunging neckline. Throughout the dinner she and the judge, who were seated at the far end of the banquet table, conspired like old cronies with a vast store of shared memories. At one point their heads came together, and Becka’s eyes briefly met Raymer’s before she burst out laughing. Naturally, he’d concluded that His Honor was recounting for her amusement the day her damn fool of a husband nearly shot an old lady off her toilet.