Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“Jerome’s right,” Charice insisted, still on the subject of Raymer’s yearlong funk. Her brother had nearly as many opinions about what was wrong with Raymer as she herself did. “Ever since Becka died, you been punishing yourself. Like it was your fault, like it was you steppin’ out on her. That’s what all this is about — you punishing your own self.”

“When I find out who the guy was,” Raymer assured her, holding up the remote, “it’s not me that’s going to get punished.”

“Right. You find out who it was — who you think it was, because his garage door goes up — and you shoot him and go to prison. You tell me who’s the big loser in that scenario.”

Well, Raymer thought, she did have a point, though it was hard to see how a man shot dead could be construed as the winner. Anyway, that wasn’t how this thing would go down. Before there could be any thought of punishment, there’d be an extensive investigation, the painstaking gathering of evidence. The remote would be just one link in a sturdy chain of it, the last link being, he hoped, a confession. Then and only then would he decide on whose ashes would get hauled. He’d tried to explain all this to Charice, but of course she was having none of it. In the three years they’d worked together, he’d never won an argument with the woman and was unlikely to win this one, either.

On the other hand, maybe she was right. Feeling unsteady in the withering heat, with Becka’s grave no more than fifty yards away, he could feel his purpose waver. It was true. Since losing Becka, he had come unmoored. Somewhere along the line he’d lost not only his wife but his faith in justice, in both this world and the next. Nor was it really about punishment. All he wanted was to know who the guy was. Who Becka had preferred to himself. And even he had to admit that this part was crazy, because the list of men Becka preferred over her husband was probably comprehensive. Charice was probably right about the Moribund Arms, where everything from the puke-green shag carpet to the rust-stained ceiling smelled of stale cooking oil and mold and backed-up plumbing. Poor Charice. She was afraid that if he wasn’t careful he was going to become totally lost and completely befucked. Apparently she couldn’t see that he already was.

ON THE DIRT SHOULDER of the road that separated Hill from Dale, Rub Squeers sat in the shadow of the backhoe he’d used to dig the old judge’s grave earlier that morning. Left to himself, Rub would’ve let the machine sit right there, but his boss, Mr. Delacroix, said mourners didn’t like to see it beside a freshly dug grave, much less to reflect on the fact that the hole had been dug by such an ugly, unfeeling contraption, and they certainly didn’t like to see someone like Rub Squeers sitting on it, looking impatient for the deceased to get planted so he could finish his work for the day. So Rub, who happened that day to actually be impatient, had driven the backhoe a good hundred yards away and taken a seat in the shade it cast.

“You know what I w-wisht?” he said out loud. As a boy he’d been afflicted by a terrible stammer. After puberty it had disappeared, but now, for some reason, it was back. Perhaps because the stammer wasn’t quite so pronounced when there was no one around to hear it, he’d recently begun talking to himself or, rather, pretending to talk to his friend Sully.

What? What the hell do you w-wish now? Which was, he knew, exactly what Sully would’ve said if he’d actually been here. Rub would’ve changed very few things about his best friend — okay, his only friend — but sometimes he wished Sully wouldn’t kid him quite so much. Especially about his stammer. Rub understood that kidding was just how Sully dealt with everybody, that he didn’t mean anything by it. Still, he was tired of it.

“I w-wisht that guy would stop talking.” The man in the flowing white robe had been jawing for a long time, more than half an hour, Rub was pretty sure. Fridays were half days, and Mr. Delacroix had told him that as soon as he was finished with the judge and returned the backhoe to the shed and locked it, he could leave. “Then everyone would go home and we could finish up.” As if it would be the two of them — him and Sully — pushing the mound of dirt on top of the casket, making short work of it like in the good old days.

Again Sully’s voice was in his head. Don’t wish your life away, Dummy.

Rub didn’t mind Sully calling him Dummy, recognizing it as a sign of affection. He called most men Dummy and most women, despite their age, Dolly.

“You know what I really wisht?” Rub continued, ignoring Sully’s advice.

Wish in one hand and shit in the other. Let me know which fills up first.

“I wisht you weren’t so forgetful,” Rub said, because lately Sully couldn’t seem to remember twice around, and he wasn’t sure he could bear the disappointment of being forgotten today.

I won’t forget. I already put the ladder in the back of the truck.

He’d agreed to give Rub a hand with the tall tree that grew alongside his and his wife’s house, one particular limb scratching at her bedroom window every time the wind blew and driving Bootsie crazy.

What do you mean, her window?

They’d been married for less than a year when Rub tired of the marital bed. To escape its rigors, he told Bootsie she snored — she didn’t — and this allowed him to take up residence in the small, dusty, unheated spare room down the hall. There he slept on an old army cot, too narrow and rickety to support a woman of Bootsie’s majestic girth. Rub had explained all this on numerous occasions, but Sully still liked to rib him about it. At any rate, with her husband in the spare room, Bootsie had quickly replaced him with lurid romance novels, one right after another, and it was these from which she was cruelly distracted whenever the wind blew. To her, the scraping of the tree branch on glass sounded like a child — the one she’d once hoped for and was never going to have? — trying to get in.

What would a child be doing thirty feet off the ground in a tree outside her bedroom window? Sully objected. Rub had wondered the same thing but knew better than to ask. It probably wouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes to prune the offending limb, but these days Rub didn’t see as much of Sully as he used to, and he hoped to parlay it into the entire afternoon, assuming Sully remembered in the first place.

“You know w-what else I wisht?” Rub said.

What?

“I wisht things would go back to like they were.” This was a pipe dream, of course. Rub knew it was pointless to wish any such thing, but he couldn’t help himself.

That’s not how it works, Dummy. Things don’t go backwards just because you want them to. If they did, we’d all be getting younger.

Which was true, naturally. Like it or not, Sully’s luck had changed. He didn’t have to work anymore, and it had been work, or economic necessity, more than friendship that had made them inseparable for so long. Rub could wish and want and even desperately need until the cows came home, but it didn’t matter. Anyway, don’t be an idiot. You got a good job right here. Why would you want to go back to working for Carl Roebuck?

He didn’t, not really. Carl had always saved the coldest, wettest, foulest, most dangerous jobs for him and Sully. He’d paid them under the table, too, so they couldn’t really complain. Bad as the work was, though, Rub had loved every minute of it. Standing for long hours knee deep in sewage, so cold he couldn’t feel his fingers, he’d been happy because Sully was right there with him, showing him how things were supposed to go, how to endure and even, at times, prevail. There’d been comfort in the fact that whatever happened to Rub was also happening to Sully. It was like they were on a journey, and his friend knew the best route. If Rub himself was cold and hungry and discouraged and lost, so what? Sully was there to tell him what to do, to listen to his many misgivings, his dreams about how much better everything would be if life was different and cheeseburgers were free.