Richard Russo: Everybody's Fool

“What a sweetie,” Becka enthused later, strapping herself into the RAV, the seat belt causing her dress to gap and one lovely breast to be fully exposed. Had Flatt been treated to this heartwarming spectacle over the ginger-carrot soup, Raymer wondered. “He couldn’t have been nicer. Why’d you warn me about him?”

“Well, he did call me a moron,” he reminded her. He’d told Becka about the gun incident early in their relationship, feeling it was probably best that she hear about it from him rather than the Bath grapevine where the story — like so many others where he was the butt of the joke — still had considerable currency. “In front of my boss. In front of the man I’d arrested.”

“Well,” his wife began, pausing long enough for him to wonder where this was going. ( That was ages ago?…I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it?…Can you blame him? ) What he hoped she’d say was Actually, he spoke very highly of you, but of course she didn’t. Instead: “I know how much you were dreading the evening, but I had a good time.”

In her considered opinion Raymer was far too self-conscious. “Not everything’s about you,” she liked to say, making him sound narcissistic. She was right, though. He did have a bad habit of internalizing things. Take, for instance, the judge’s two dramatic resignations. Could it be coincidence that he’d tendered the first of these the very day Raymer was elected police chief? And that his second came exactly four years later when he was reelected? Yes, Becka assured him; it not only could be a coincidence, it most assuredly was. Over the last two decades, the poor man had battled three separate cancers, first a tumor on his lung, then some particularly aggressive cells in the prostate and finally a small but malevolent nodule attached to his brain stem, a malignancy that for a time seemed merely to focus his ferocious intellect, to sharpen his wit and tongue, neither of which in Raymer’s view had required further honing. In fact, he had just about concluded that cancer wasn’t the lethal killer it was cracked up to be when word came that the old man had lapsed into a coma and then, a few days later, that he was finally gone.

About which Raymer was surprised to have mixed feelings. On one hand, he’d never again be fixed by that scrotum-shrinking judicial gaze of disapproval. Nor, except in memory, would he be called names by this figure whose opinion carried such weight. But if the spirit lived on, as many people believed, didn’t that mean Judge Flatt would consider Raymer an idiot for all eternity? How fair was that? Was he really so ungifted? True, he’d never made stellar grades in school. Though he’d been orderly and never caused trouble, his teachers all seemed relieved at the end of the school year when he moved up a grade with his peers and became someone else’s burden. Only Miss Beryl, who kept drawing her triangles and asking him who he was in the margins of his compositions, had seemed to feel something like affection for him, though even here Raymer couldn’t be sure. The old woman was forever shoving books at him, and while another boy might have considered these gifts encouragement, he had wondered if they might instead be punishment for some misdeed he hadn’t noticed.

The cover of one book, he recalled, pictured a bunch of people hanging out of a hot-air balloon. To him the illustration had looked all wrong. The colors of the balloon were too bright, and the humans in its tiny dangling basket looked happy to be trapped there when common sense suggested they’d be scared shitless. Another book seemed to be about a group of explorers who’d entered the bowels of the earth through a volcano. What the hell was she trying to tell him? That he should consider going someplace far away? That up or down really didn’t matter so long as he just went?

He’d thanked her for each book, of course, but at home he’d hidden them all on the top shelf of his closet where his tiny mother, unless she stood on a chair, couldn’t spot them and brood about where they’d come from. Throughout his childhood she’d harbored a deep-seated fear that he’d end up a thief, like her own father, and whenever he came into possession of anything she herself hadn’t given him, she immediately demanded to know where he got it. If his explanation struck her as suspicious or implausible there would be trouble — the same screaming and crying and crazy hair tearing that had finally driven his father away. The whole hair-pulling thing particularly frightened Raymer, because hers was already so thin you could see her pale scalp, and he didn’t want to be the only kid in town with a bald mother.

“They’re going to come and take you away,” she warned him over and over, her eyes swollen and red rimmed and wild. “That’s what they do with thieves, you know.”

Then she’d fix him with that look of hers, waiting for him to absorb the truth she was telling him, after which she’d sigh mightily and stare into the distance, into memory, at the central event of her own childhood. “They took my father. Came right up on the porch and knocked on our door. I begged Mama not to open it, but she did and they came inside and just took him.” She’d relive the awful moment for a long beat, then return to her son and the present for the inevitable postscript. “How he cried! How he begged them not to take him!” The clear implication was that, when the time came, Raymer would likewise blubber and beg the policemen not to cart him off to jail. Though he’d never stolen anything and had no desire to, he hadn’t been able to entirely discount the possibility of what she foresaw so clearly. His plan, if you could call it that, was to keep from wanting anything bad enough for stealing it to become a serious temptation.

Many of the books Miss Beryl had given him were old and musty smelling, their pages dog-eared, the sort of books you wanted to give away, but others were in better condition, a few brand-new. Often the name Clive Peoples Jr. was inscribed on the flyleaf. When he asked Miss Beryl about these inscriptions, she told him this was her son, but he was all grown up now, a banker. Something about how she said this suggested that either Clive the boy or Clive the man had disappointed her. Had he, too, failed to master the rhetorical triangle? Raymer’s heart went out to the kid. Imagine having her for a mother, your whole life a giant margin for her to ask her impossible questions in.

Still, he felt bad about only pretending to read the books she’d given him, and he wished he could’ve figured out how to get her to stop. He also wished she’d quit asking him about the ones he claimed to have read. Why couldn’t she be more like his other teachers, who looked at him blankly the following fall when he said hello to them outside Woolworths, having in a matter of months forgotten his existence entirely? Old Lady Peoples, he feared, forgot exactly nothing, and she had no intention of forgetting him.

Like so many of his anxieties, this one proved well founded. Throughout high school, Miss Beryl persisted in tormenting him. “What are you reading, Douglas?” she asked whenever their paths crossed, and when he couldn’t come up with a single title, she’d tell him to stop by her house because “I have several books I think will interest you.” Each time he promised he would, though of course he never did. She’d retired from teaching by then, and it was possible she was just lonely, her husband, the high school’s driver’s ed teacher, having been killed in the line of duty a decade earlier, launched through the windshield by a nervous beginner. He was sorry if she was lonely, but that was no fault of his, and he sensed her firm intention to keep posting her queries in the margins of his psyche forever.