Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“You won’t win it, is what I think,” she told him, the picture of confidence, and her sly, put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is grin annoyed him sufficiently that he peeled two fives from his money clip. “Easy pickin’s,” she said, slipping the bills into the juice glass and setting it on the windowsill behind the teetering pyramid of dishes in the sink. “I know who I’m betting with. I just wish there was something else for us to bet on.”

“In that case I’ll get out of your hair before you think of it,” he told her, heading for the door. “If Dummy shows up, tell him I’m sorry I stood him up. I’ll be down at the Horse for a bit.”

He hadn’t made it as far as the living room when she said, “I got a question for you.” When he turned to face her, he saw that her eyes, dry a second ago, were now full — indeed spilling over.

Jesus, he thought. Not this. Yet again he’d allowed himself to be bushwhacked by a woman’s unhappiness. For this to happen, over and over, he had to be some kind of stupid. It had been going on his whole life, starting with his mother, the poor woman. Being married to Big Jim Sullivan, she came by her despair honestly, God knew. Though Sully wasn’t its cause, he’d nevertheless taken her grief to heart, thereby learning at an early age that responsibility for feminine heartbreak would somehow attach itself to the male closest to hand. That said, he would end up far from blameless in this respect. It wasn’t long after his mother was in the ground that Sully started disappointing women in his own right. One after another, actually, no stopping that runaway train once it got pointed downhill. Sometimes he was the sole source of disenchantment (as with Vera, his ex-wife), other times just a contributing factor (as with Ruth). The thing to do, once you saw it coming, was make tracks, but too often you didn’t. They had a way of sneaking up on you, these disappointed women, dry eyed one minute, leaking prodigiously the next. And frozen in place, like Sully was now, you waited patiently for them to explain your part in their sorrow.

“What?” he said, because he had to say something and was, like always, curious as to what he’d done wrong this time.

“How come you never invite me out?”

He cocked his head at her. “You’re a married woman, Dolly.”

“The two of you, I mean. You and him. You’re down there most nights, drinking beer. How come you never invite me to come along?”

“I had no idea you wanted to,” he said. A lame response, but he was still stuck on you and him. When, exactly, had his best friend’s wife become their shared responsibility?

“I don’t,” she said, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her muumuu. “That place is depressing.”

“Well?”

“A girl likes to be asked occasionally, is what I’m saying.”

Huh, Sully thought. A girl, unsure why he should be so surprised that this was how Bootsie thought of herself. Because she wasn’t one anymore? Because she was too overweight and unattractive? What bearing did mere facts have when it came to how you saw yourself? If Sully never thought of himself as seventy, even on days like today when he felt eighty, why shouldn’t a lonely married woman who read romance novels every night think of herself as a girl?

“Okay,” he said. “Maybe next time, if you feel like—”

“I just said I didn’t want to, all right?”

They faced each other for a long moment until Rub began barking outside. Good dog!

Sully coughed. “I’m sorry—”

“Go,” Bootsie told him, making one hand into a whisk broom and brushing him toward the door. “Forget I said anything, okay? It must be the heat…”

“It is brutal,” Sully allowed.

At the front door she turned on the porch light and followed him out onto the steps. To Sully’s amazement, Rub was still in the truck, but Sully’s reappearance drove him into a frenzy of improbable laps inside the cab, as if he were sharing the small space with a vicious ferret. One moment he appeared on the dash, the next he was gone completely, the whole truck quivering from his idiotic exertions.

“Jesus,” Bootsie said, shaking her head. “Look at that crazy little fucker.”

“Rub!” Sully called to him. “Knock it off!” The dog whined once and went still.

Sully strongly suspected that something further was expected of him where Bootsie was concerned, some act of kindness or understanding of which he was incapable, but before he could think of some other lame thing she said, “Pizza. I just decided that’s what I’m hungry for.”

“They deliver out here in the boonies?”

“You have to order at least a large.”

“All right, then,” Sully said, everything settled now. A minute ago they’d been faced with a thorny existential dilemma, possibly spiritual in nature, only to have it unexpectedly redefined as an urge that only a delivery pizza could satisfy.

As Sully made his way over to the truck, though, the screen door slammed, and a moment later there was a loud crash. His first thought was that Bootsie had tripped and fallen, but then he realized that the pyramids of dishes in the kitchen must’ve collapsed. He heard Bootsie say, “Fine. Terrific. You think I fucking care?” It took him a moment to realize it was the mess she was talking to. At some point she’d have to separate what was broken from what was merely gross, toss the shards of glass and ceramic into the trash and return whatever could be used another time into the sink. But not tonight. That was what she was announcing to the cosmos. Sully thought about going back inside and offering to help clean up, then reconsidered. Granted permission to flee, you’d be a fool not to.

When he opened the truck’s door and the dome light came on, the scene that presented itself shouldn’t have surprised him but still did. Rub, having backed up against the passenger-side door as far as he could, now stood quaking with fear, his canine knees knocking together like a cartoon dog’s. A small drop of urine glistened at the tip of his bright red penis, presumably the very last drop in the entire dog. The seat was soaked, as were the dash and steering wheel and even the windshield. Sully turned on the wipers to confirm that the moisture was on the inside, and it was. “Rub,” he said quietly, in case he was wrong about the dog being empty. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Then there it was again, nearby, that same goddamn mewling. He thought about going back to the house to alert Bootsie that something sick or injured, probably a raccoon, had crawled under the house. Maybe Rub had seen or sensed it there and that’s what had driven him batshit in the truck. But then the porch light went out and the mewling stopped, so Sully decided to let it go. The other Rub was probably at the Horse already, waiting for him to show up, and he’d mention it to him then. Tomorrow, after they’d taken care of the tree branch, they could shine a flashlight under the porch and see what had taken up residence there. From where he sat, his keys dangling in the ignition, Sully could just make out the shape of the branch where it lay on the ground. Odd that Rub hadn’t sectioned the fallen limb, a five-minute job, tops. Had the chain saw fritzed? Was that why he left it sitting out in the open for someone to steal? Rub wasn’t normally careless with tools.

On the other hand, life was full of mysteries, none more perplexing than human nature itself. His conversation with Bootsie, on top of the earlier one with Ruth, had left him feeling both exhausted and useless. Maybe Ruth was right and he should find a beach somewhere. He’d always wanted to, at least back when he couldn’t afford it. Why not go someplace now, when he could? Tonight, he wasn’t even sure he wanted to drive out to the Horse, though he knew he would. Turning the key, he put the truck in reverse and backed out. When the headlights swept over the felled branch, Sully imagined, for some reason, that Rub was lying dead beneath it, which would account not only for his absence but also the fact that he hadn’t finished the job. This morbid scenario dovetailed nicely with Sully’s growing conviction that ever since his luck turned, it was his friends who were paying the price. All that bad karma had to go somewhere. Except, no. Of course Rub wasn’t lying beneath the branch. He would’ve been holding the chain saw when the limb fell, not standing beneath it. Sully turned on his high beams though, just to be sure, before backing on out. When the headlights caught the base of the tree, the length of rope attached to the handle of the chain saw registered in Sully’s brain, but he was out in the road and shifting the vehicle into drive before the fragmentary visual and auditory evidence cohered. Even so, he had to sit there, engine idling, for a good minute until he could make himself believe it.