Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“What?”

“What’s the matter with you anyway? You been acting weird all night.”

Rub began to cry.

Sully sighed, having known better than to ask. “You upset because I told about you getting stuck up in the tree?”

Rub stifled a sob. “Everybody laughed.”

“Well, it was funny. You laughed, too.”

“I know.”

“Well then?”

“I’m nuh-nuh—”

“Never gonna hear the end of it? That’s probably true.”

Rub wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I just wisht—”

“What?”

Rub sighed. Where to begin?

“That I’d be nicer to you?”

He shrugged again, but this was the gist of it, Sully could tell.

“I wish I would, too,” he said, and for some reason this seemed to cheer Rub up. He always liked it when they agreed, and it didn’t seem to trouble him that with a little effort Sully could probably make both their wishes come true. “And I’m not the only one who could be nicer, you know.”

Rub looked at him blankly.

“When I was here earlier, your wife was crying.”

“Buh-buh-Bootsie?” He looked genuinely terrified now.

“How many wives you got?”

“Why?”

“How the hell should I know? She’s your wife.” Because of course this was an invitation to think about Vera, his own wife, or ex-wife, out at the county home, muttering obscenities under her breath whenever she thought of him. Until recently he’d pretty much banished her from memory, but this was the third time he’d thought about her today. What the hell was that about?

“Wuh-wuh-what should I do?”

Sully shrugged. “Who knows? Take her out to dinner or something.”

He took out the money Sully’d just given him and counted it dubiously.

“Jesus,” said Sully, handing him another twenty. “Rub!”

“What?”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

Rub, who’d been riding in the back, leaped out of the truck bed and up into the seat his namesake had just vacated.

“I wisht he had some other name,” Rub said.

“And so does he about you,” Sully told him, putting the vehicle in reverse.

WHEN RAYMER FINALLY RETURNED to his senses, he was still on his knees at the foot of Becka’s grave, the storm having passed. He had the distinct impression that he’d actually vacated his body for a time, left it to fend for itself, but for how long? A few minutes? Half an hour? The rumbling thunder was now miles to the north, and the rain had stopped, so probably closer to the latter. Taking inventory, he discovered his right hand was cramped painfully into a claw. He shook the damned thing vigorously, trying to restore circulation, but it remained frozen, numb. Had he suffered a stroke? Struggling to his feet, he became aware of an odd, tingling sensation in his extremities — toes, ears and, for some reason, the tip of his tongue. Had he been struck by lightning? Wouldn’t a direct hit have killed him? Reduced him to cinders, in fact? What about an indirect hit? What if lightning struck a tree over in nearby Hill, say, then traveled along the ground in search of somebody dumb enough to be kneeling in the soaking wet in Dale and delivered enough of a jolt to short out a circuit or two but not enough to fry them all?

“Hello?” he said, trying out his tingly tongue, the word echoing in his skull like it would in an empty drum. Why did he half expect an answer?

Then he remembered: reaching out for the florist’s card as the sky lit up like broad daylight, the pile-driving peal of thunder as he closed his fist around it, the howl escaping his throat subsumed simultaneously by the thunderclap. And finally the nauseating sense of having been split in two, of a malignant new presence filling up every cell of his body. Dougie, he remembered naming it. “Hello?” he said again, louder this time, akin to a man shaking a shoe and listening for the pebble trapped in its toe. “Dougie?”

Silence.

Thank God. Because one Douglas Raymer, he thought, was all the Douglas Raymer anyone would ever need, including himself. Evidently the second entity, whose rogue electrical impulse he’d detected, hadn’t survived the drier, fresher, cooler air that trailed in the wake of the storm. Good riddance.

And yet it had been, he had to admit, a very close call. He’d come dangerously close to losing his mind. Hard to believe, but as the storm raged overhead, he’d actually believed that his dead wife, somehow in control of nature itself, was trying to kill him, hurling lightning bolts at him like a vengeful Fury, as if he’d been the one cheating on her instead of vice versa. Insane. He’d nearly killed himself for the sake of a card from a florist, for God’s sake.

Soaking wet and shivering uncontrollably, Raymer made his zombielike return through the slop, arriving back at the parking lot just as the three-quarter moon scudded out from behind the clouds, so blinding it was a miracle it didn’t dampen all the stars in the sky. The last of the fast-moving storms seemed to have finally broken the back of the heat wave, the temperature plummeting a good twenty degrees. That morning, standing beneath a broiling sun, Raymer had prayed for just such blessed relief, and now that prayer’s answer was delivered, like those of so many prayers, like retribution itself. Unlocking the Jetta, he slid behind the wheel and studied his right claw under the dome light, marveling at its rigor-mortis determination to remain clenched. Using the thumb and forefinger of his good hand, he was able to straighten his frozen pinkie, but every time he let go of it to work on its neighbor, it snapped back into the claw again, and he finally gave up, grateful that no one was around to witness his futile struggles against himself.

It was going on one, so the sensible thing would be to find someplace to crash, but where? Charice’s? No, not a chance in hell. Even under normal circumstances he would’ve been reluctant to show up on the doorstep of fastidious Jerome, whose upscale Schuyler condo was the ’Stang’s glove compartment writ large. About the only person he could think of who might welcome him at this hour was old Mr. Hynes, but since Raymer had his own apartment at the Morrison Arms that made no sense at all. Besides, after all he’d been through, what he really needed was to be alone for a while, in a hotel room’s bathtub where he could soak his freaky paw in warm water and wait for the tingling in his extremities to subside. By morning, if the hand still hadn’t relaxed, he’d have to haul it into the ER. Follow the biblical injunction and have the fucking thing amputated if it continued to offend him.

Unable to grip the ignition key, he awkwardly inserted it with his left hand, finally managing to turn it in the ignition. When the engine turned over, the windshield wipers leaped unexpectedly to life, startling the hell out of him, and once he switched them off the radio blared on, loud. He cut the volume and checked the dial, which was tuned, inexplicably, to a country station. Raymer seldom listened to the radio at all, much less to this hillbilly shit. Had someone been playing around in his car? When he snapped the radio off, he noticed an ambient buzzing in his ears that hadn’t been there before. He shook his head vigorously, even more convinced that he’d somehow absorbed some sort of electrical shock back at Becka’s grave. “Hello?” he said again, his voice causing the buzzing to get even louder.

Then, a moment later, it stopped altogether, and a gravelly voice said, Hello, fuckwad.

—

AT THE CEMETERY’S MAIN GATE, instead of turning right onto the highway, Raymer turned left onto the gravel road that separated Hill from Dale, at the other end of which was the rarely used Spring Street entrance. That would lead directly out to the interstate, where he just might, against all odds, find a vacancy at one of the chain motels.