Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

He sighed. In the two decades he’d been drinking at the Horse, his order had never varied even once. Why couldn’t she just bring him what she knew he wanted?

“A buh-buh-buh—”

“Beer,” Sully translated.

“What kind?”

“Buh-buh—”

“Budweiser,” Sully said.

“Anything else?”

Rub looked at Sully, who’d sometimes spring for a burger, sometimes not. “Go ahead,” he told him. “You’ve had a hard day.” Which meant it wouldn’t be long before he launched into the story he’d promised driving over not to tell.

“A buh-buh-buh—”

“Burger,” Sully said.

“Anything on it?”

“Buh—”

“Bacon.”

Jocko’s shoulders were shaking now. “Jesus, you people are cruel,” he said.

“And cheese,” Rub added, since he liked cheese and the word was easy to say.

Birdie turned to Sully. “You?”

“Just a draft.”

“You should eat something. You look terrible.”

“No appetite,” he confessed, which was strange, because he’d been hungry earlier. Probably Bootsie and her syringe. Otherwise, he was actually feeling better, his chest less heavy, his breathing easier than it had been all day. “What’s got your knickers all in a twist?”

Birdie shot him a don’t-get-me-started look and then got started. “Buddy called in drunk again, an hour before his shift, so I had to scramble to find a cook.”

A waitress emerged from the kitchen just then, a silver tray balanced on her shoulder, and before the door swung shut behind her Sully caught a glimpse of Janey working the grill.

“Then I broke a glass in the ice and did this cleaning it up.” She held up her left hand, swaddled with half-a-dozen overlapping Band-Aids between thumb and forefinger.

“I wondered why my pinot grigio was pink,” Jocko said, holding his glass up to the light.

“Yeah, sure,” Sully said, “but what kind of man drinks that to begin with?”

“A confident man? A man with no need to demonstrate his masculinity?”

Sully rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that must be it.”

“Then Bridget lets a table of eight skip out on steak dinners and five bottles of wine.”

The guilty waitress just then happened by on her way to the kitchen. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “I’ve got twice the number of tables I should, and you know it.”

Birdie ignored her. “It’s still two full weeks before my summer staff shows up, half of which probably found other jobs and never bothered to tell me.”

Rub, who disliked standing when everybody else had a seat, was eyeing a four-top booth that two couples were getting ready to vacate. He’d been hoping to find the Horse deserted, so he could have Sully all to himself. If he could convince him to move to the booth, he could tell him about Raymer fainting in the heat and falling headfirst into the judge’s grave. The story would appeal to Sully, who’d probably commandeer it as his own immediately. By this time tomorrow night he’d have told half the town. But he was an inspired storyteller, so Rub wouldn’t mind the theft. In fact, he enjoyed watching one of his stories evolve in Sully’s hands until he himself, its source, had disappeared completely. These days his own storytelling was undermined by his stammer, as well as by his conviction that a story had to be true. Sully was hampered by neither Rub’s condition nor his strictness. He shamelessly embellished, invented, reshaped and tailored every narrative, emphasizing with each new version the elements that provoked the most laughs or stunned disbelief in previous tellings, eliminating other elements that unexpectedly fell flat. At first he might credit Rub as his source, but as he grew more confident, he’d relate the story as if he himself had been the sole eyewitness. With Sully’s best efforts, Rub sometimes wished he’d been there to enjoy the events his friend was describing, until he remembered he actually had been.

Tonight, of course, he had a vested interest in Sully taking up the story of the police chief keeling over into that grave, because if Sully wasn’t regaling everybody in the Horse with the police chief’s idiocy, he’d be reporting Rub’s humiliating afternoon in the tree. His only hope was to replace the story he didn’t want told with a better one. “There’s a buh-buh-booth over there,” he said, pointing to it.

“Hang on,” Sully told him, his voice lowered. “I think a barstool’s gonna open up here in a minute.”

Because on the other side of Jocko sat none other than Spinmatics Joe, who’d been Sully’s least favorite person in all of Bath until Roy Purdy made his triumphant return. Joe usually drank at Gert’s, where a beer and a bump was a buck cheaper and only stumbling distance from the Morrison Arms. What’s more, a man could freely express the most dim-witted opinions there without fear of ridicule. The Horse, not exactly highbrow itself, was generally tolerant of stupidity, but on any given night it was possible to cross an invisible line and find yourself an object of scorn and derision when you’d been counting on, if not approval, a little forbearance.

“Oh, Jesus Lord, Birdie,” Jocko said, having overheard what Sully whispered to Rub. “Here we go again.”

She shrugged. “I can’t run him, Sully, not until he actually does something.”

“You could eighty-six him on general principle.”

Jocko snorted at this. “If that rubric were indiscriminately applied, who would remain?”

“Only people who use words like ‘rubric,’ ” Sully conceded, “and drink pinot grigio.”

“If he misbehaves,” Birdie assured him, “it’ll be my pleasure.”

“He’s about to,” Sully assured her.

“Ah, fuck,” said Jocko under his breath.

“That you, Joe?” Sully said, leaning forward for a direct line of sight. Jocko leaned back obligingly.

“You know it is, Sully,” replied the man in question, nodding at him in the mirror that ran along the backbar. “You don’t gotta ask.”

“I thought it was you,” Sully went on, nodding genially. “I left my glasses at home and haven’t seen you for a while. I thought you might be your brother.”

“I don’t have no goddamn brother.”

“Well, your parents probably thought you were enough. So, how are things down at the Arms these days?”

“It’s a fuckin’ shithole,” Joe said. “Course I didn’t have no crazy old woman kick off and leave me millions so I could live someplace nice.”

Sully ignored him. “Well, at least none of those people you don’t like are living there, right?”

“Ah, shit,” Jocko grunted, knowing full well where this seemingly innocuous conversation was bound. He hadn’t been present the night Joe got his nickname, but everyone in town knew the story. Angered by something he’d seen on the TV hung above the bar, he’d launched into a diatribe about how the fuckin’ Spinmatics were taking over the whole fuckin’ country. How, he wanted to know, could a white man get ahead when all the jobs went to the fuckin’ Spinmatics. “They already took over Amsterdam,” he said, when somebody asked what manner of redneck bullshit he was spouting now. “Y’all better wake the fuck up. They’ll be over here next.” At some point somebody had guessed what he was going on about: Hispanics. The man was talking about Hispanics. So far as Sully knew, Joe had not returned to the Horse once since getting his nickname.

“I always forget,” Sully was saying. “Who are those folks you don’t like?”

“Niggers?”

“Joe,” Birdie warned.

“No, not them,” Sully said. “The other ones.”

“Fuck you, Sully,” Joe said.

From underneath Sully’s stool came a growl.