Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

The Horse remained lively until close to midnight, when the last of the storms headed north and word started to circulate that the power was back on in town. People began to drift out into the (finally!) cool night, leaving behind Birdie and Sully and Jocko and the Rubs. When Janey finished her shift Sully offered to buy her a drink, but she just looked at him like he was insane. What the fuck was this? Like maybe he was hoping to take up with her, now that her mother wasn’t interested anymore? Nothing could have been further from Sully’s mind, but her instinct was probably right. How would it have looked if she accepted his offer of a drink and settled onto the stool next to him? Besides, Rub wasn’t done with his litany of wishes yet. Having spent his afternoon in a tree, he seemed even needier than usual, if that was possible, so Sully let him get it all out of his system.

Half an hour before last call Carl Roebuck strolled in with a very drunk young woman roughly Janey’s age on his arm. She was exactly the sort Carl always seemed to attract: dim-witted or pretending to be, large breasted, oversexed. “Let’s play poker,” he suggested, taking out his wallet and counting the bills therein. “Ninety-eight dollars,” he said, slapping them on the bar. “And not just any ninety-eight dollars. My last ninety-eight dollars in the world.”

“Show of hands,” Sully said. “Who here feels sorry for Carl?”

“Let this be a lesson to you,” Carl told his companion, when she alone raised her hand. “This is the wrong fucking place to come if you’re looking for sympathy.”

“On the other hand,” Birdie said, handing him his usual Maker’s, “if you’re looking for alcohol…”

Apparently in response to the poker game idea, the young woman stood on tiptoe to whisper into his ear, all too audibly, “I thought you said you were going to take me home and fuck me.”

Birdie snorted at this. “You must be from out of town,” she said.

“Later,” Carl whispered back. Then, to Birdie, “Say hello to Jennifer, who’d like a Cuba libre, that is, if you can stop making fun of other people’s tribulations long enough to make her one. As you deduced, Jennifer here hails from Lake George and is not fully cognizant of certain extremely personal matters. ”

Jennifer scrunched her shoulders. “I love the way he talks,” she said.

“Yeah, me too,” Birdie said, pouring rum over ice.

Rub, as he always did with Carl’s girlfriends, commenced staring at Jennifer’s chest, his expression identical to the one he always wore when contemplating big ole bacon cheeseburgers. Seeing she had his undivided attention, Jennifer extended her hand in greeting. “Hi!” she said. “What’s your name?”

Rub normally didn’t have much trouble with his R ’s, but he did now. Embarrassed by his stammer, Jennifer quickly turned her attention to the other Rub. “Oh, look!” she squealed. “A puppy! Isn’t he cute?”

“Would you like to have him?” Sully said.

Jennifer seemed to regard this as a joke. “What’s his name?”

“Rub,” Sully said, causing her to blink at the man she’d just met. Had there been some misunderstanding? He and the dog had the same name? If she asked the name of the tall man in the pharmacist’s smock, would it, too, be Rub? What kind of place was this?

When Rub, excited to hear his name, stood up and wagged his whole hind end, Jennifer took a quick step back, visibly alarmed by his bloody erection. “What’s wrong with Rub’s penis?” she wanted to know, causing the other Rub to blush deeply.

“He chews on it,” Sully explained.

“Doesn’t that hurt?”

“You’re asking me?”

“Nights like this,” said Jocko as they filed into the back room, “I feel the need of a one-legged lawyer.” Sully had been thinking the same thing, and together they raised their glasses in the direction of Wirf’s prosthesis, which since his death had occupied the place of honor on the mantel. They took their seats around the poker table, Rub careful as always to sit next to Sully. Jocko located the chips and assumed the role of banker, Carl being too dishonest, Sully too careless. The dog circled around several times, sighed, curled up at the base of his master’s chair and returned to gnawing.

“How would you like to own half a construction company?” Carl asked Sully.

“That would depend on who owns the other half.”

“Assume it’s your best friend in the world.”

Sully elbowed Rub, who’d gone back to staring at Jennifer’s boobs. “Hey, Dummy. Do you own a construction company?”

Carl ignored this while Rub beamed. “Assume this best friend isn’t going to be able to make payroll next week. Assume that wall collapsing this afternoon was the last fucking nail in his coffin. Assume he’s about to be sued by everyone from the mill’s investors to the town of Bath to the asshole ex-con who happened to be driving by at the exact wrong moment.”

Carl of course was always claiming imminent financial ruin, but could it possibly be true this time, Sully wondered. “Let’s assume instead,” he suggested, “that everybody but you saw this day coming for a long time. Assume the friend you now want to be your partner has been warning you about it for the last fucking decade.”

“Assume,” Carl replied, “that this friend’s an asshole for picking this particular moment to say I told you so.”

“Assume this same friend’s a fucking prince for not bringing up the fact that you’re six months behind on your rent.”

Jennifer was taking all this in with growing alarm. “Are you two having a fight?”

“Not really,” Sully told her. “I am going to take his last hundred bucks, though.”

“He would, too, if I’d let him,” Carl agreed.

“High card deals,” said Jocko, setting the deck down in the middle of the table.

“That would be me,” Sully said, leaning forward to turn over the ace of spades.

Carl sighed. “Fuck me,” he said.

And Sully, feeling as you sometimes do when the world aligns in your favor, proceeded to do just that.

RAYMER STARTED UP the Jetta and, just in case Miller was watching in his rearview, put the car in reverse so his taillights would pulse. When the cruiser pulled out onto the two-lane blacktop and headed back toward town, he put his car back in park and turned the engine off. Rummaging around in the glove box, he located the flashlight he kept there, but naturally the batteries were dead. A sign, if ever there was one, to cease and desist, to put a merciful end to this bloody, god-awful day. Tomorrow would arrive soon enough and with it numerous opportunities for further lunacy. Hadn’t he already crammed a good hundred pounds’ worth of shit into today’s fifty-pound sack? Go home, he told himself.

Except what did that even mean? Home, at least until he could make other arrangements, was still the Morrison Arms and officially off-limits. If he ignored his own yellow tape and climbed into his own bed, his sleep would likely be haunted by phantoms of the escaped cobra. His other alternatives were nearly as unattractive. He could return to the couch in his office, but he’d be discovered there bright and early by Charice, and given the evening’s events he couldn’t really face that. Like the other residents of the Arms, he had a voucher for a motel room, but so late, with this a holiday weekend, he’d surely be greeted by a NO VACANCY sign.

As Raymer made his way into Dale on foot, there was renewed rumbling to the south, the low clouds reflecting distant lightning strikes. The air was again full of electricity, the hair on his forearms standing up, just as it had on Charice’s porch (before he destroyed it). With nothing but sporadic lightning to navigate by, he stuck to the path as best he could but managed to stray anyway. The Dale grave markers, set flat to the ground, jutted up just enough to trip him, and twice he went down, the second time hard. Rising slick with mud, he was grateful for the dark. Between the charcoal ash from the Weber and the fresh coat of mud, he could easily imagine what he must look like. It put him in mind of that book Miss Beryl had assigned in eighth grade, the one where a boy comes upon an escaped convict on the marsh. The old woman had made a special point of telling him he would identify with the boy in the story, but after reading that first chapter he’d put the book away and refused to pick it up again. When he failed the test, Miss Beryl, puzzled, had asked him if he’d found the book too difficult. He lied and said yes, because the truth was even more embarrassing. He’d quit because the scene on the marsh had terrified him, and even though the chapter ended with the convict being led away in chains, Raymer had been afraid he would return. It was a long book, one that would take weeks to read, and he knew he’d spend the whole time worried sick. For some reason he related this story as a lighthearted anecdote to Becka on their honeymoon, though she’d appeared genuinely stricken. “Don’t you see?” she explained. “You cheated yourself.” And maybe she was right, but really, was that such a terrible thing? Didn’t people cheat themselves all the time, over more important things than eighth-grade reading assignments? “Was I right?” he asked her, because clearly she knew the book in question. “Did the convict come back?”