Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“Joe,” Birdie warned again.

“You know the ones I’m talking about,” Sully said, as if he weren’t really listening. To judge by his tone, anyone would’ve sworn the two men were on the friendliest of terms and that Sully was merely trying to jog his pal’s memory. “Help me out here. It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

There was considerable tittering up and down the bar now, and Joe stiffened at the sound. “You really are a cunt,” he said to Sully’s reflection in the mirror, sending most heads swiveling to look at Birdie. Now here was a word you never heard at the Horse, certainly not when she was tending bar. Rub got to his feet, walked in a tight circle and growled a little louder, his ears stiff.

“Rub,” Sully snapped.

“What,” said his friend, still standing patiently behind him.

As his pet lay down again, Sully said, “Oh, I remember,” as if he just that second had. “The Spinmatics.”

“And a cocksucker, too,” Joe added, draining off half his beer.

“Drink up,” Birdie told him. “You’re out of here.”

“It’s a shame you don’t like them better,” Sully said. “Otherwise, you could get together with three or four and cut some records. Joey and the Spinmatics.”

Joe apparently suffered from a limited range of invective, because instead of trying out any other names, he took a different tack, raising his glass high in the air, and slowly poured the beer onto the bar. Just as he’d feared, Jocko got the worst of the splatter.

“You still gotta pay for that,” Birdie said, once this performance was over.

“Nah, I got it,” Sully said, pushing one of the twenties at her.

“The whole tab?” She clearly disapproved of this largesse.

“Why not?” he told her. “Joe and I go way back, don’t we, Spin? No need for hard feelings.”

Joe, having slid off his stool, stood stock-still, deeply and visibly conflicted. Did they go way back, he and Sully? Was this asshole actually apologizing?

“Though the truth is,” Sully continued, “I do prefer his brother.”

At this Joe’s face became a thundercloud, and he balled his right hand into a fist. Rub was on his feet again, and from somewhere deep within his rib cage came a low, guttural rumble that made Joe take note of him for the first time. Though Rub wasn’t a large animal, he appeared fully committed. Joe was anything but, so he relaxed his fist.

“Rub,” Sully said.

“Wh-wh-which?” said his impatient friend.

“Sit!” Sully told him.

The dog did as instructed.

“That’s what I’ve been wanting to do,” said his namesake.

When the door closed behind Joe, Sully turned to face Rub and indicated the now-vacant stool. “Well? What’re you waiting for?”

Rub wasn’t sure. He had wanted a stool, except this one was next to Jocko, who wasn’t his friend, instead of Sully, who was. He’d go from standing alone to sitting alone. As with most of what he felt deeply, he couldn’t begin to express it, so he just pointed at the puddle on the bar. “It’s all wet.”

“True,” Sully said, “but Birdie’ll wipe it up.”

“How about if I move over one?” Jocko suggested, sliding down simultaneously.

This, of course, was exactly what Rub had been hoping for. Yet as he stood regarding it, all he could do was reflect bitterly, as he had occasion to do each and every day, on the terrible disappointment of getting what you thought you wanted, only to discover it wasn’t, that you’d been cheated out of something you couldn’t even name.

“Everything all right now?” Sully said when he climbed aboard.

Rub shrugged. Everything was not all right, though he would’ve been hard-pressed to explain exactly what was wrong. Part of it was his terrible, almost visceral need for Sully. It was this, together with the knowledge that yet again his friend had forgotten him, that had driven him up into the tree that afternoon, half hoping he’d have an accident with the chain saw. If instead of the tree’s limb he managed to prune one of his own, Sully would blame himself, wouldn’t he? If he was the one to find Rub’s severed leg at the base of the tree? Surely then he’d realize it was all his fault. Eager to atone, he’d toss Carl Roebuck out of the old lady’s house and move Rub in, so he could be sure his friend had everything he needed. They’d eat meals and watch TV together. Over time Bootsie would come to regret how mean she’d been to him, and she, too, would want to move in, but Sully would draw the line at that. It would be just the two of them. Their days would be full of long hours, plenty of time for Rub to tell Sully whatever he wanted, and Sully, chastened, would be devoted to getting him back on his feet. Well…foot. Okay, Rub wasn’t crazy about the idea of losing a leg, but if that was the price of friendship, what choice did he have but to pay it? Sully’s pal Wirf had gotten along fine on one leg, and if he could be happy on just the one, then Rub supposed he could, too.

But unfortunately there’d been no accident. The tree surgery had gone off without a hitch, unless you counted Rub’s being stranded in the tree for hours, thirty feet off the ground with no hope of getting down, as a hitch. At some point, though, certain facts, as hard and uncomfortable as the severed nub of tree limb he was sitting on, began to intrude on his pleasant dismemberment fantasy. For instance, if Rub had managed to sever his own limb, he’d likely have bled out long before Sully showed up and discovered his leg at the base of the tree. In fact, the leg probably would’ve disappeared. That close to the dump there were plenty of feral animals around, and one of them would likely have dragged this prized discovery off into the woods. In all probability what Sully would find at the base of the tree was Rub himself, because when he passed out, from pain or loss of blood, he’d almost certainly tumble from his perch onto the hard ground below, and if he wasn’t dead already, the fall would kill him. In the wake of such real-world considerations came equally cruel psychological realities. When, for instance, had he ever known Sully to blame himself for anything? If Rub had maimed himself, Sully would place the blame squarely on him for being an idiot. Nor would he kick Carl Roebuck out of the old lady’s house. It wouldn’t be Sully who nursed Rub back to health but a resentful Bootsie, who’d probably grow tired of her duties after a few days and smother him with a pillow so she could go back to reading her romance novels. And even if he somehow avoided this fate and recovered, he’d be chasing Sully all over Bath on one leg instead of two.

“Well?” Sully was saying. “You good now, or do you need some other fucking thing to make you happy?”

Rub sighed. “I just wisht they’d hurry up with my burger.”

Sully nudged him, like he always did when attempting to improve Rub’s mood.

“What?” said Rub, who didn’t necessarily want his mood improved until he improved it himself.

“You said ‘burger.’ ”

“So?”

“Usually, you say ‘buh-buh-burger.’ ”

Rub didn’t want to, but he could feel himself giving in, and when Sully nudged him a second time he smiled sheepishly. Because it was good to have a barstool, and not just any stool but the one he’d been coveting. And he had said “burger,” without stumbling. There was no word that gave him more trouble, probably because he loved burgers and would’ve been content to eat nothing else for the remainder of his days. For some reason he recalled his father’s question all those years ago: Why don’t you just give up? That, he realized, was what he’d been feeling up in the tree that afternoon. That maybe he should just give up.