Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

The distinct possibility that they were on a fool’s errand with him the fool seemed finally to be dawning on Raymer, who went at the moist earth with the rake like a man possessed, but after a few minutes it was clear even to him that there was no such device in the hole. Carl took the rake from him and handed it back up to Sully. “I don’t understand,” Raymer said. “This makes no sense.”

“Here’s an idea,” Carl said. “We could dig up these other people. See if it’s under their caskets.”

Raymer regarded him blankly, as if this suggestion had been made in earnest.

“Are we done here?” Carl said, reaching a hand up to Sully, who grabbed it and pulled him out.

When Raymer made no move to follow suit, Sully said, “You just gonna stay down there?”

“I might as well,” he said miserably. “In fact, I might better. You should just cover me over. Put me out of my misery.”

“Raymer,” Sully said quietly. “Enough of this.”

He said something that Sully didn’t catch.

“Say again?”

“I said …now I’ll never know.”

When Sully glanced at Carl, he was surprised that his expression was closer to pity than exasperation.

“Go sit down,” Sully told Raymer, after he and Carl managed to haul him up and out. “You don’t look so hot.”

Taking a seat on the pile of excavated dirt, he put his head in his hands.

Sully and Carl returned their attention to the upright casket.

“Just tip him back down?” Carl said. “Or walk him?”

“If we tip him back he’ll be upside down for eternity.”

“You think that matters if you’re dead?” Carl said.

“It would to me.”

“Yeah,” Carl snorted. “Like you’ve ever known which end is up.”

Together they corner-walked the casket to the other end of the hole, then slowly lowered it as far as they could reach, after which they had no choice but to let the elevated end drop the last few feet. The resulting thud caused all three men to cringe.

“This is a terrible thing we’ve done,” Raymer said in his own voice now. He’d picked up the silver casket handle and was turning it over in his hands. “We violated a man’s grave. And for what?”

Sully understood how he felt. To this point his spirits had been relatively high, and if the remote had been there it might’ve justified, sort of, the madness of the entire endeavor. By the time they’d recounted the story at the Horse a few times, its lunacy would seem inspired. Whereas now…

Only Carl seemed unchastened. “Raymer,” he said. “His Honor didn’t mind. He was dead. Do you know what ‘dead’ means?”

“And in the meantime,” Sully said, climbing back aboard the backhoe, which he would now return to the shed, “we’re not done here. I’d rake that dirt,” he suggested to Carl, indicating the mound of earth Raymer was sitting on, “just in case it got scooped up somehow.”

Raymer shook his head. “It would’ve been under the casket.”

“You’d think,” Sully admitted. “Let me see that thing a minute,” he said, pointing at the silver casket handle Raymer was fondling.

He looked puzzled by the request but got to his feet and handed it up to Sully, who promptly tossed it into the hole, where it rattled off the casket. “Hey,” he said, pointing at the eastern sky. “New day.”

Raymer looked where Sully was pointing, but his blank expression suggested he was looking for something that just wasn’t there.

—

HE PULLED UP in front of Miss Beryl’s again just as the first rays of sunlight winked through the trees in Sans Souci Park. Carl, who’d removed his ruined loafers and muddy socks, seemed in no hurry to get out, so Sully turned the engine off and the two men sat there, confusing the hell out of Rub, who was doing frantic laps around the truck bed, loosing short bursts of urine all the while. Where did it all come from? Sully marveled. Wadding his socks up into a ball, Carl wiped away at the inside of the windshield, ostensibly to remove the streaks of dried dog piss, but in reality making an opaque brown hurricane pattern on the glass. “Look,” he said, clearly pleased with his effort, “a perfect shitstorm.”

“Thanks,” Sully said.

“Don’t mention it,” he replied, tossing his socks out the window, followed by his shoes. “Why don’t you firebomb this thing and get yourself a decent rig?”

Two years, but probably closer to one. What would Sully want with a vehicle that was in better shape than he was?

“You know,” Carl went on, “until tonight it never occurred to me that you and Raymer are actually brothers under the skin. Surely the chief of police can afford a better car than that beater of a Jetta he drives.”

“Maybe he likes it,” Sully said. “Could be there are a few things about you that he doesn’t understand, either. Did you ever think of that?”

“I know one thing. That man is seriously off the fucking rails.”

They’d parted company back at the cemetery, with Raymer promising to go home and get some sleep. Sully wasn’t sure he’d do any such thing. Carl was right. There was something manic and untethered about him. He’d seen men with that same look who, after prolonged battle, continued to function, sometimes at a high level, but in a more profound respect had simply abdicated. Lost men, not at all sure they even wanted to be found.

“And there’s no radio in that car,” Carl added. “I looked.”

“Yeah?” Sully said.

“Yeah.”

Sunlight streaked through the trees just then, its sudden glare making Sully squint. Leaning forward to peer at it from around his shitstorm, Carl said, “Amazing, isn’t it, when you think about it, how the world keeps on turning, no matter how fucked up things get?”

In Sully’s opinion it’d be more amazing if it stopped, but he understood his friend’s sentiment. Because it was something the way things kept grinding with no apparent reason or need, indifferent to life and death and all else, too. He thought about that stopwatch Will had now returned to him; its second hand just kept ticking away, seemingly content with its circular journey, forever in the same direction. That said, the mechanical world probably wasn’t so different from its living inhabitants, most of whom, Sully included, went about their lives, most days, taking it all for granted. His own happiness, such as it was, had always seemed rooted in his willingness to let each second, minute, hour and day predict the next, today no different from yesterday except in its particulars, which didn’t amount to much. Most mornings, he’d be rising about now, hauling himself out of bed, shaving and washing up, then heading downtown to help Ruth open the restaurant. Could something so fundamental, so ritualized, ever really be changed?

Maybe Ruth was right and the reason he showed up at Hattie’s every morning was that he didn’t know what else to do, where else to go. Naturally he would have liked to tell her that wasn’t true, that of course he still felt the old affection for her. Wasn’t the fact that there was no other woman in his life proof of that? He couldn’t imagine there ever would be, not at this late juncture. Surely that had to mean something. But then he thought of Raymer, wild eyed, out at Hilldale, repeating “It’s got to be here” over and over again, an expression of personal need that the world simply refused to validate.

So maybe it was time to try something different. Maybe his mornings at Hattie’s were, under the guise of being helpful, just selfish. If Ruth’s husband, for reasons known only to him, suddenly wanted her back, and if his wife was disposed to feel more tenderly about him than she had in the past, who was he to come between them? If Janey was sick of waking up every morning to the sound of Sully’s voice, no doubt a constant reminder of the damage his affair with her mother had done to their family, could he blame her? And though he would have liked to deny it, he had done damage. Ruth’s son Gregory, Janey’s brother, had left town right after high school, and he’d almost surely known what was going on. So if he was going to Hattie’s out of some old habit, wasn’t it his responsibility to break it? After all, Hattie’s wasn’t the only place in town where a man could order a plate of eggs and shoot the shit.