Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

The light finally changed and she made the turn, heading back toward town. Roy let her think he was considering the offer for a minute, then said, “Till death do us part. We said the words, her and me both. You was there.”

“She’s moved on, Roy. That’s what you need to do. If you stay here in Bath, this doesn’t end well.”

“You can see the future?”

“Enough to know she’s not coming back to you, Roy. Not ever.”

“She might.”

“No.”

“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”

“No. We don’t have to wait. It’s not like a roulette wheel. We don’t have to wait for it to stop spinning. You keep hurting her, Roy. Started out, you gave her a fat lip, then a shiner. Next you knocked out a tooth, then you broke her jaw. Last time you slammed her head into a concrete wall. You don’t need a crystal ball to see where this is headed. It ends when you kill her.”

“Me? Kill Janey?”

“Oh, you won’t mean to. You never mean to hurt her. But that doesn’t stop you from doing it. To hear you tell it, it’s more her fault than yours. She provokes you. Tells you to fuck off or calls you a name or something.”

“Girl’s got a mouth on, and that’s for true,” Roy conceded. “Maybe she’s the one you should be talking to. Tell her to shut it.”

“It’s you I’m talking to, Roy,” she said. “If I let you stay, I end up with a dead daughter, and you go back to prison for good. You understand what I’m saying? No winners.”

“If you let me stay.”

“Whatever you’re planning?” she said. “I can’t allow it. I won’t.”

They were in town now, and as his mother-in-law pulled into the Morrison Arms, Roy caught a glimpse of something shiny and red in the parking lot behind Gert’s. The old nigger who always sat in the lawn chair was waving his flag at them. Ruth waved back, then pulled into a parking space. Roy was curious to know what she thought his plan was. Women always claimed to know what he was thinking. Janey maintained she could watch thoughts scrolling across his forehead, which was bullshit. If she could do that, she’d know when to duck, and she never did. Ruth was different, though. She did often seem to know what was on his mind, more or less, and she never believed any of his bullshit. That was fine. Roy never expected her to. He mostly said things just to see how people would react. When it came to being taken seriously, he had low expectations. One of the paradoxes Roy had long ago stopped worrying about was that even though he didn’t expect people to believe anything he said, it stoked his rage when they didn’t. When he told them he was a changed man, why didn’t they pause, even for a second, to wonder if that might be true? Okay, sure, it wasn’t, but it could’ve been, right? To people like Sully and Ruth, he was just the one thing, when, for all they knew, he might’ve been something else, too. How could they be so damn sure?

“So, what kind of money we talkin’ about here?” he asked, keen to hear what she imagined it would take to buy him off. Also, how desperately she wanted to be rid of him. Which she would never be. His mind was made up on that score. That nasty chuckle she’d let escape on the phone guaranteed he was going nowhere.

“I could probably come up with three thousand,” she told him.

He put on what he hoped was a poker face. “Not much of a fresh start, is it?” he said. “That kind of money, you could start and be all done the same day.”

“It’s not a fortune,” Ruth allowed, “but it’s all I can offer you, and it’s free. I thought that might appeal to a man who hates honest work as much as you do. Somebody who never seems to have the price of a cup of coffee.”

“Five would be more interesting than three,” he said, though it wasn’t true. Five was just a bigger number, not a more interesting one. The only interesting part was how she’d react.

“I don’t have five to give you.”

“You could borrow it. You and Sully are still tight. He come into the old lady’s money…”

“I’m not asking Sully.”

He shook his head. “Just trying to help you get to five.”

“You should think about it, Roy.”

“The five or the three?”

“The three. I’ll look into the five, but it’s three I can offer you.”

“Suppose I was to take the three,” he said, enjoying himself now. “I’m not saying I will. But just suppose. I take the three and go someplace for that fresh start. Suppose I spend your three and find out I don’t like it there and come back.”

“The deal is you don’t come back.”

“Yeah, okay, but we’re just supposing, right? So suppose I get to thinking how much I preferred my stale ole life to my new fresh one. What’s to keep me from coming back?”

“We’re going to shake on it. You and I.”

“So it’s like my…word of honor.”

“Call it whatever you like, so long as you stay gone.”

“Something in this deal of yours kinda goes against human nature,” he said. “That’s what I’m getting at. Say you give me the three. Free money, like you say. But if I break my word and come back, maybe you’ll give me another three? Or this time maybe the five? Where’s my…what’s the word I’m looking for?”

“Incentive?”

“That’s it. That’s the word. My incentive to stay gone. I’m not saying I’d come back after we shook hands on it. But then again, I might.”

“Put it this way, Roy. It’s not really your word of honor I’d be putting my faith in. If you were ever dumb enough to come back here—”

But before she could give voice to what Roy was reasonably certain would be some sort of threat, one of the exterior doors to the Morrison Arms flew open, and a fat, balding man dressed in nothing but a pair of threadbare briefs that sagged revealingly in the crotch bolted from the building as if pursued by the devil. The gravel parking lot was littered with shards of broken beer and whiskey bottles. Nobody in his right mind would traverse it in bare feet, but clearly that didn’t include this lunatic. He chugged past Roy and his mother-in-law with the kind of grim determination that suggested he’d weighed the dangers of what lay before him against those that lay behind and was unimpressed by the former. There was no sign of pursuit, so once he reached the sidewalk Roy expected him to stop or slow down, but he just kept churning until he disappeared around the corner onto Limerock.

Roy was first to recover. “People like you think they can read the future,” he said, “but they can’t. Not unless you want to tell me you seen that comin’.”

“No,” she admitted, “but if you told me I’d see a naked man run out of an apartment building in Bath, New York, I think I could’ve predicted which one it’d be.”

Since Roy was pretty sure they weren’t going to agree about predicting the future, he opened the door and with great care — because he really did ache all over — got out of the car. From inside the Arms came a shriek, then another. Cora, the woman he was living with, raced outside with surprising speed and agility for somebody her size. Then two more women, one holding an infant, came out squealing. Ruth had started to pull away but stopped and rolled down her window. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“There’s a damn snake in there,” Cora said. “Big one.”

Roy was interested in the possibility that what she was saying might be true, despite its unlikelihood. He knew there were timber rattlers out in the woods, but what would one of those be doing in town, inside the Morrison Arms? He supposed the smart move was to find something with a long handle — a broom or a rake, maybe — and go in and find out, but there was something else he needed to do first, something he’d told himself to remember and then forgot all about it.