Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“Sure, Chief,” Miller said, clearly excited by this opportunity.

Raymer had no sooner gotten in than the heavens opened with astonishing fury. “Wow,” Miller said, impressed by how the wind-driven torrents of rain rattled on the roof of the squad car and streamed down the windshield in wavy sheets. From outside the car there came a hissing sound, followed instantly by a clap of thunder so loud that Miller hit his head on the roof of the car when he levitated. “That was close,” he said. They both tried to peer out the back window, but with the rain you couldn’t see much. Raymer agreed, though. The lightning strike had to have been very close.

Miller took his hands off the metal steering wheel and made no move to put the vehicle in gear. When the rain finally let up enough to be heard, he said, like a man pretending that a thought had just occurred to him when in reality it’d been troubling him for a while, “Hey, doesn’t Charice, you know, Officer Bond, live around here somewhere?”

“If you say so,” said Raymer, who was about as good as Miller was at pretending not to know something.

Miller nodded, then went back to staring at the water streaming down the windshield.

“Look,” Raymer said, relenting a little. “Officer Bond invited me over for dinner, okay?”

Unless Raymer was mistaken, it certainly wasn’t okay with Miller. “Isn’t that—”

“Against the rules? Probably. That’s all, though. We just had dinner out on her back porch.”

Miller was sniffing. “What’s that smell?”

Raymer was wondering the same thing. The nauseating odor was stronger in the car than it had been in the street. Different from the Great Bath Stench, but right up there on the unpleasantness meter.

“Chief?”

“What?”

“Are you on fire?”

“Why would I be—”

“Look that way a sec.”

When Raymer turned his head, Miller yelped, grabbed a rolled-up magazine from the dash and commenced swatting the back of his head and neck with it, hard. Finally recognizing the smell as his own burning hair, Raymer let the other man have at him, though the blows rained down with such surprising ferocity that he had to wonder if his officer wasn’t driven by more than one motive.

“Am I out?” Raymer inquired, when the hitting finally stopped.

“I think so,” Miller told him. He cracked the door open enough for the dome light to come on, then used the end of the magazine to investigate Raymer’s hair where it was longish and thick and curled up in the back. “Something might’ve gone down the back of your shirt, though.”

Raymer leaned back against the seat and immediately felt a burning sensation between his shoulder blades, as if somebody’d just stubbed out a cigarette there.

The odor of burning hair was still thick in the car. “Didn’t you feel it?” Miller wanted to know.

“No, I didn’t. A man who knows he’s on fire will take steps.”

Miller nodded thoughtfully. “So what’d you have?”

“I’m sorry?”

“For dinner. You and Officer Bond.”

“Lamb chops.”

“Wow. What else?”

“Asparagus.”

“Mmmmm. Just the two of you?”

“Just us two.”

“So, are you—”

“No.”

“You’re just good—”

“Not even.”

“Because you sounded like you were having a good time. You were both laughing and all.”

Raymer was glad to have Miller confirm that things had been going well until they went badly, but the comment begged a couple fairly obvious questions. “Miller?”

“Yeah, Chief?”

“Do you have a crush on Officer Bond?”

Miller looked away, guilty. Even with only the dome on, Raymer could see that he was glowing red with embarrassment. “Me?”

“If you heard us laughing out on the porch, then you were there, which means you already knew where she lived when you asked me just now. Also, it was only a minute or two between when I climbed down from that porch and you showed up. Which means you were already in the neighborhood when the call came in.”

Miller stared at the still-streaming windshield. “God, I hate myself,” he said miserably. “Sometimes I drive by. Just to make sure she’s okay, you know?”

“Does she know about this?”

He shook his head. “Please don’t tell her?”

“Why don’t you just ask her out sometime?”

“Scared, I guess.”

“Well, she is pretty terrifying,” Raymer agreed.

“Plus I don’t think she likes me.”

“Don’t you want to find out?”

“Only if she does,” he said. “And there’s the…other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“It’s not that I’m prejudiced. It’s just that…”

“She’s a Negro-type individual?”

Miller closed the car door, probably so the dome light would go out and Raymer wouldn’t see the tears spill over, which he did anyway. “Seeing the two of you together, laughing and having such a great time, it made me realize I didn’t care. That could’ve been me up there eating lamb chops if I wasn’t such a…”

He was so clearly in distress that Raymer couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. “Miller,” he began.

“So it doesn’t bother you? Her not being…like us?”

“Do you mean her being a woman or being black?”

“Yeah,” he said. Both. “But aren’t you afraid people will make jokes?”

“People make jokes about me already. I’m used to it.”

Miller nodded soberly.

“Anyway, it’s not like that between Officer Bond and me, so there’s nothing to make jokes about. Okay? Everything clear now?”

“Except the part about why you climbed down off her porch,” he said. “Was that some kind of…wager?”

“Yes,” Raymer told him, “it was.”

Miller looked uneasy about this explanation, though he himself had advanced it. “And why do you look like a Negro? Was that a wager, too?”

“No, this was an accident involving a Weber grill.” He started to explain further but decided against it. “And now I think you’ve investigated the incident fully. Good work.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.” The rain was finally letting up. “Can we go to the cemetery now?”

Miller put the car in gear, made a three-point turn and headed back up the street. In the distance, there were fire sirens. When they passed Charice’s, Raymer said, “Hold on a second.”

Miller stopped.

“Point your spotlight up there.”

Miller did as he was told, and Raymer couldn’t believe his eyes. In addition to the impressive damage he himself had caused, the porch was now scorched black and smoldering.

“Must be where that lightning hit,” Miller said. When his boss didn’t respond, he regarded him strangely. “Chief? You don’t look so good.”

In truth, he didn’t feel so good, either. His sense that Becka had visited him on that porch was still strong. He could still feel her fingers on his scalp, her whispering there was something she needed to tell him. If he hadn’t awakened when he did? And if he hadn’t climbed down from up there? He might be a toast-type individual.

—

BY THE TIME they arrived at Hilldale the rain had stopped, but there was more heat lightning to the south, and once again the rumble of distant thunder, another storm tracking in their direction. In the summer they sometimes bore down like this, relentless, one after the other, all night long.

The cemetery’s lot was a muddy lake, in the middle of which sat Raymer’s Jetta. When Miller pulled up next to it, he thanked him for the lift and instructed him to use the rest of his shift to stake out the Morrison Arms on the off chance that William Smith might return, though Raymer would’ve bet his life they’d seen the last of him.