Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

After jerking the truck back into the driveway, he switched off the ignition again and reached across Rub for the flashlight he kept in the glove box. Fearing the batteries might be dead, he tested it on the dog, who looked away, as if embarrassed by where all this was leading. “You already figured this out, didn’t you,” Sully said, and Rub didn’t deny it. “All right, then. Let’s go get him down.”

Eager as the dog had been to get out of the truck before, he seemed reluctant to now, but he obeyed his second command and scooted down off the seat and trotted over to the base of the tree, Sully following, his flashlight playing at the trunk, to which, he now saw, several scraps of wood had been nailed, a makeshift ladder. “Hey, Rub,” he said when the beam found his friend, sitting with his back to the trunk on what remained of the limb he’d sawed off, who knew how many hours ago. Even in the dark, Sully could see his friend’s eyes were swollen from crying. “What’re you doing up there?”

“Guh-guh-guh,” Rub began, but quickly gave up.

“Go away?” Sully guessed.

“Yeah, go away,” he said. For some reason Rub was always able to say whatever had just been stuck in the back of his throat once Sully himself said the words, as if he knew how to say it in German or French, just not English. If Sully guessed wrong, though, Rub’s struggle would continue.

“Okay,” Sully said, “but how long do you plan on staying up there?”

“Fuh-fuh-fuh—”

“Forever?”

“Yeah, forever.”

“That’s not a very good plan, Rub.”

The other Rub barked, evidently agreeing.

“In fact, it’s even dumber than climbing up there by yourself in the first place.”

Difficult though it was to credit, Sully could now see the whole skein of events. Rub, fed up with waiting, finally nailing those wood scraps to the trunk; then climbing up. No doubt he’d attached one end of the rope to his belt after tying the chain saw to the other end so he could hoist it up. Probably he’d hoped he could sit or stand on the branch below the one he meant to saw off, which from the ground might’ve looked possible. Once up in the tree, though, he would’ve realized it wasn’t. If he sat on the lower limb, he couldn’t quite reach the one above; and to stand on it he’d need three hands — the first to steady himself against the trunk and the other two to operate the chain saw. Up there, he’d have seen that his sole option was to sit on the branch he was going to saw off, with his back pressed against the trunk. (Even Rub wasn’t dumb enough to sit on the severed part that was about to fall off.) Only then, after the limb had dropped — okay, sure, Sully was hypothesizing here — and he lowered the chain saw down to the ground by means of the rope, did it occur to Rub that he was now stuck. With nothing to grab on to, he couldn’t rise from his sitting position. Without the branch now lying on the ground, he couldn’t lean forward and rotate around to face the trunk. Nor, with his back to it, could he lower himself down to the next branch and from there to the nearest rung of the makeshift ladder.

“Yeah?” Rub was saying. “Well, go fuh-fuh-fuh—”

“Fuck myself?”

“Yeah, fuck yourself.”

“Hey,” Sully said. “Don’t blame me. You did this to yourself.”

“You wuh-wuh-wuh—”

“I know. I was supposed to come help you, but I forgot. I’m sorry.”

The consequence of this apology, of course, Sully might’ve predicted. Rub began crying again, that same mewling sound he hadn’t recognized before as human sorrow. Not wanting to witness it, Sully turned off the flashlight. “Stay, Rub,” he told the dog, before heading back to the truck for the ladder.

Human Rub’s voice followed him from the tree. “Where the fuh-fuh-fuh-fuck am I gonna go?”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Sully told him.

“WHAT DO YOU mean no snake?” she wanted to know.

Raymer, groggy, was sitting in the middle of his office sofa, his hands tented over his boxers. He’d worn briefs his whole life until he disrobed in front of Becka that first time and she’d reacted to them with startled revulsion. “Well,” she said, “ that’s going to have to change.” Apparently, it was an iron-clad policy: she dated only men who wore boxers. His sleeveless undershirts had to go as well. He hadn’t really minded switching to boxers, though they took some getting used to, given how they bunched up and gapped at the fly, which was why he’d tented his hands over them now. What did it mean that he hadn’t gone back to briefs now that Becka was gone? The sad truth was that during their short tenure together he’d learned to defer to Becka in most matters. She’d switched him from Colgate to Crest, from Listerine to Scope, from Arrid to Right Guard. Free now to return to his own preferences, he discovered that they’d come to match. Maybe that was what marriage meant, except that in theirs it had been a one-way street. He couldn’t think of a single behavior of Becka’s that he had altered in the slightest. But perhaps that was because there was so little he’d wanted to change, whereas she’d evidently viewed him as a fixer-upper from the start, structurally sound, the sort of property you wouldn’t mind owning after you’d completed all the necessary renovations. First, though, you’d have to gut it, which was pretty much how Raymer felt by the end. As if the overhaul of his person was coming in over budget, and the person footing the bills was having serious second thoughts.

To judge by her expression, the woman standing over him in her off-duty attire — tight jeans and a halter top, in all rather provocative — agreed. It was as if by studying him she could envision all the improvements Becka had tried to make and was calculating how much work remained to be done, what it would cost to finish a job so poorly begun or whether it would make better sense to start over and just gut him again. How was it possible that two women with so little in common had come to share such an unflattering assessment?

“I mean, ” he told Charice, his embarrassment giving way to annoyance, “no…fucking…snake.”

He and Justin had gone through every apartment in the Morrison Arms, including Raymer’s, plus the common areas. No snake, no trace. Tomorrow, when electricity was restored, it would have to be done again, this time, blessedly, without Raymer’s assistance. Justin had called in additional animal-control personnel from Albany, but even so he wasn’t very hopeful. It was possible the cobra had slithered into a vent or behind a wall, though it wasn’t likely. Thanks to the heat wave, all the windows that didn’t have air conditioners in them had been flung open in hopes of capturing a stray breeze, and the two rear doors on opposite ends of the central corridor had been propped open as well. The snake was long gone, probably into the weedy lot out back. Once it was daylight it, too, would have to be searched. Until then there wasn’t much to be done. The Squeers brothers and the town’s two or three other private trash collectors had already been warned to be careful when upending garbage cans into their trucks. Meanwhile, until the authorities were certain there was no danger, the Arms was off-limits to residents, all of whom had been given vouchers for a night’s stay at one of the inexpensive motels out by the interstate, a significant upgrade as far as they were concerned.

Raymer himself had a voucher but for the time being had opted for his office sofa. Not wanting anyone to know he was there, he’d snuck into the station through the back door. Dead on his feet, he’d had just enough energy left to shed his sweat-soaked uniform before collapsing onto the couch, too exhausted to go over and make sure the door was locked. So Charice had found him there, enjoying a sleep so profound and dreamless that it bordered on oblivion, the kind of slumber only a very cruel person would interrupt. In fact, the kind of person who, if she was to be believed, had a butterfly tattooed on her rear end.