Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

Except, well, it was. Sure, there were the franchise joints out by the interstate exits, but their counters were full of people on their way somewhere else. Which was what Ruth seemed to be suggesting that Sully become. A person headed to Aruba. Why not? was what she wanted to know. He had the money. As he did for a better truck. So why the hell not? Because, he would’ve liked to explain, like the second hand of Will’s stopwatch, his center was fixed, his motion circumscribed by gears he couldn’t see, much less alter.

Rub, tired of being confined in the back of the pickup for no good reason, gave a sharp yip and leaped out onto the terrace, where he rolled like a well-drilled soldier, regained his feet and darted off toward the trailer. Both men watched him go, feeling, unless Sully was mistaken, something like envy. Was it possible to be jealous of a dog with a half-chewed-through dick? Well, again, why not? Rub was nothing if not an optimist, and optimism, the older you got, became harder to summon and, once summoned, even harder to hold on to.

“You ever see Toby?” said Carl out of the blue.

“Why would I see her?” Sully asked, though he’d had a pretty serious crush on Carl’s ex-wife at one point, a decade or so ago.

“You tell me,” said Carl, who’d been all too aware of the infatuation.

“Come to think of it, I did one day last fall. Around the holidays, I think.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, she just stopped by.”

Carl straightened up. “Stopped by,” he repeated. “To see you.”

“She thought I might want to list this place,” he said, nodding at Miss Beryl’s house. “She’s in real estate now.”

Carl relaxed again. “Yeah. I heard she was doing okay. How’d she look?”

“Terrific,” Sully said, enjoying himself now. “Never better. Sex on a stick.”

“Fuck you,” Carl said, then sighed. “I can’t believe I drove her into the arms of a hairy-legged lesbian.”

“She must have something you don’t.”

“No, she doesn’t have something I do, ” Carl corrected. “Or did, until recently.”

“Give it time.”

“I don’t know,” Carl mused. “What are men even good for anymore?”

Since that was precisely the sort of question Sully had studiously avoided asking for his entire life, he thought this might not be a bad time for a change of subject. So he decided to ask about what had been in the back of his mind since Raymer’s pitiful lament out at Hilldale, that without the garage-door opener he’d never know the identity of the supposed boyfriend. “Tell me it wasn’t you,” he said.

“ What wasn’t me?”

“With Raymer’s wife.” Because if the opportunity had presented itself, Carl wouldn’t have hesitated. Sully didn’t doubt that for a moment. Still, the dozen roses on the grave? The card inscribed Always ? For Carl Roebuck those gestures felt out of character, to say the least. On the other hand, you never knew.

“Fuck no,” he said.

“You’re sure?” Sully said, though it really wasn’t necessary to ask a second time. Carl might be full of more shit than a Christmas goose, but so far as he knew the man had never lied to him about anything important.

“What? You think I’m the only pussy hound in this town?”

“Good,” Sully said. Because maybe he and Raymer weren’t brothers under the skin, as Carl had just suggested, but his heart had gone out to the poor bastard.

Carl had spoken again, he realized. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I said it wasn’t me, but I know who it was.”

Carl was staring straight ahead, at the pee-streaked windshield, no doubt waiting for Sully to ask the obvious question. Which he had no intention of doing. Because, he told himself, it was none of his business, but that was a lie. He didn’t ask because he didn’t want to know the answer. Because he was afraid he already did.

READERS OF the North Bath Weekly Journal generally didn’t look to their hometown paper for real news about Bath. The odd, occasional news item, like this week’s story about the middle school being renamed in Beryl Peoples’s honor, occasionally crept in, but usually the Journal stuck to church socials and spaghetti suppers, weddings and funerals, Little League scores and who made the dean’s list at the community college. The Journal ’s real mission, though, was to report the more exciting goings-on in Schuyler Springs, where the harness track offered exotic wagering on trotters and pacers, and new restaurants were launched almost weekly, offering striking, unusual cuisines (Eritrean!) that used colorful, mysterious ingredients (nettles! squid ink!) and wine was served in “flights.” In Schuyler the local bookstore cosponsored famous-author events with the college’s English department, after which you could go next door and dance to a live, punk klezmer (?!) band or catch a movie at the new twelve-screen Cineplex.

No, if you wanted news about Bath, you had to subscribe to the Schuyler Springs Democrat, a daily that prided itself on hard-hitting investigative journalism, at least where its neighbors were concerned. For example, the Great Bath Stench, unreported in the Journal, had been the Democrat ’s front-page news all last summer, as were Hilldale’s ongoing problems (“Dead on the Move in Bath,” one headline read, as if a zombie movie were being reviewed). Considered newsworthy this year were the long delays and cost overruns out at the Old Mill Lofts, a project that grew sketchier by the day and to which Mayor Gus Moynihan, despite recent efforts to distance himself, was inextricably tied.

And of course all of these headaches were in addition to Gus’s wife, who was in yet another downward spiral. That evening Alice had gotten so agitated over dinner that he’d called the doctor, who agreed to Gus’s request and prescribed a sedative. Given her exhaustion and the strength of the drug, she was unlikely to awaken before noon.

There had always been an ebb and flow to Alice’s madness, whole weeks, even months, where she’d be, or at least seem, at peace. She’d read or paint or just stare out the window into the dark Sans Souci woods. Then, for no apparent reason, she’d be on the move again, manic, jittery, wandering from room to room in their big rambling house like somebody looking for a lost object. Gus had learned to read the signs: the nervous twitch at the corner of what had before been a perfectly placid smile; books she’d previously been engrossed in that suddenly no longer held her interest; the tiny, precise brushstrokes of her paintings becoming looser, more careless, less tied to the reality she’d been trying to capture, as if the link between brain and brush had been severed.

He knew Alice could feel the sea change as well, the poor woman, when her anxiety returned yet again. Small, familiar sounds, instead of soothing her, would startle the hell out of her. Whatever was in pursuit seemed always to be in her peripheral vision, vanishing the second she turned to face it. To Gus, it seemed like she was remembering, in stages, something best forgotten completely. When he asked if anything was troubling her, she usually offered him a blank look, as if he were speaking German. Once, when he inquired what she was looking for, she responded, “Me?” He couldn’t help wondering if she didn’t know what he was talking about or if she’d actually answered him: it was herself she was in search of. Eventually, when the house proved too confining, she’d fly the coop, and he’d start getting reports of her in town, seemingly everywhere at once, freaking everybody out with that damn phone.

Yesterday, she claimed to have seen someone who’d frightened her, but when he asked who it was, she again looked at him blankly, like he was supposed to know. “Kurt?” he asked. Because it was possible. The man had been gone for nearly a decade and had no reason that Gus could imagine to return. Alice shook her head. “Kurt went away,” she explained, as if this departure might be something that had escaped Gus’s attention. Who knew? Maybe it was Raymer she was alluding to. He was the one who’d found her in the park that morning and brought her home. Usually she recognized him as her friend Becka’s husband and understood that he represented no threat or danger, but men in uniform often scared her, and Raymer had been in his dress blues, so she might not’ve recognized him.