Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

Cora was studying him sadly now. “Janey’s never gonna take you back, Roy,” she said. Like this was what they’d just been talking about. Like she hadn’t pulled this brand-new subject right out of her ass.

“What’d I say to you about that?” Roy’d told her last week at Gert’s that he didn’t want to hear Janey’s name coming out of her mouth. In fact, it was when she brought Janey up that he’d decided the beer was Cora’s treat.

“I’m just sayin’.”

“Anyway, what the fuck do you know about it?”

Cora put the car in reverse and checked the rearview. “You should start being nice to me. I’m the one that likes you, not her.”

“Well, if she don’t like me, how come she fucked me?”

Cora hit the brake and looked at him, her eyes like little slits. “Fucked you when?”

“Last night.”

“You’re lyin’.”

“I’m gonna take a nap,” he told her. The painkillers were kicking in, giving things that gauzy feel. “Wake me up when we get to the lake.”

He closed his eyes and kept them closed while he counted to twenty. When he opened them again the vehicle was in motion, about to pull out of the CVS lot. Cora was crying, and that made him happy. He hadn’t been sure she’d believe him about Janey. Roy could hardly believe it himself, but clearly she did, which meant she’d try even harder now to please him. He doubted he’d have much further use for her, but you could never tell.

Drifting off, he thought again about Janey, how nice she’d fucked him. It was like she’d been in jail, too, just like him, and starved for it like he was. They’d always been good in bed, and she’d admitted as much. Okay, she hadn’t agreed to getting back together, but she hadn’t said they wouldn’t, neither, not till Mama Bitch started egging her on this morning. Anyway, she’d been his again, if only for a couple hours. Even if it was just because she was horny, like she said.

—

HE AWOKE when the wheels of Cora’s shit-bucket left the pavement. Sitting up, he saw they’d just pulled in to the campground’s dirt lot. It was still only nine in the morning but hot already, and even this early there were half-a-dozen other cars there. By noon the lot would be full, the beach full of brats in water wings screaming, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, look at me.” Or worse, “Mommy, look at that man’s ear!” Fuck that shit. The shoreline was dotted with camps, most of them unoccupied this early in the season, for as far as the eye could see. “Take that dirt road,” he told her, pointing.

“You can’t go in there,” Cora objected. “See the sign? Where it says PRIVATE?”

He could see it fine, not that he gave the tiniest little shit. “Private’s what we’re looking for,” he told her. “Someplace we can drink our beer in peace.” He’d only been asleep the fifteen minutes it took to drive here, but he was feeling better now, the pulsing pain in his ear and cheekbone more muted. He’d also awakened with the beginnings of a plan, and that always made him cautiously optimistic, even if his plans seldom panned out. No matter. He enjoyed making them anyway, thinking them through, admiring how they were going to work until something came along and fucked them all up.

Cora, he saw, had stopped crying. “It’s nice back in here,” she admitted, inching the car slowly along the rutted one-lane path. As Roy had foreseen, only every sixth or seventh camp looked occupied, with a car angled off in the trees, a motorboat bobbing at the end of a dock, wet bathing suits pinned to a clothesline strung between trees. With the windows rolled down it was cool among the tall pines, the air rich with the scent of their needles. Only once did they encounter cars coming from the opposite direction. Cora pulled over to the right as far as she could and tooted a hello at the other driver, smiling broadly as the two vehicles squeezed by each other.

“Don’t be drawin’ no attention,” Roy scolded her, though, really, when he thought about it, why the fuck not? They were in a half-purple, half-yellow car, after all. It wasn’t like they weren’t going to be noticed.

“How about right here,” Cora wanted to know when they came to a stretch where the camps were all dark and deserted looking. “We could sit out on that deck.”

“Keep goin’.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause I said so.”

They continued on, and when he looked over at her, damned if she wasn’t crying again.

“You ever wonder how come some people have all the luck?” she croaked.

To Roy that was like wondering why the sky was blue. It just was.

“How come Janey gets to look like she does and I got to look like me?”

“Try not eatin’ everything in sight,” Roy suggested.

“I don’t, Roy. And I’ve tried diets. They don’t work. I bet Janey doesn’t even have to diet.”

“I’m not gonna tell you again about not sayin’ her name.”

“But that’s what I mean, Roy. She gets to be her and be all lucky and I don’t even get to say her name. And I’m the one bein’ nice to you.”

“She was nice to me last night, and that’s for true.”

“One night.”

Roy shrugged.

“It’s not fair, is what I’m sayin’.”

“What ain’t?”

Sniffling, she wiped her eyes. “All of it,” she explained. “The way things are.”

Roy would have liked to agree with her, having come to the same conclusion on any number of other occasions, but you couldn’t go around agreeing with a bitch as dumb as this one without being dumb yourself.

“Take you,” she continued. “You only just got out of prison and now they’re gonna send you back. Other people do bad things. Politicians and them. They don’t go to jail.”

“Some do.”

“But mostly it’s us, Roy. People like you and me. We’re the ones get blamed. You know it’s true. Some rich lady? They don’t take her kid away. They take one look at me and say I’m unfit. They look at you and off you go to jail. Don’t that make you mad?”

Dumb-ass women make me mad, Roy thought. You in particular.

After a while she said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if one of these little places was ours?” He couldn’t tell if she’d shifted gears or was on the same subject. “We could live there and nobody’d bother us.”

“These places ain’t even insulated. You’d freeze your ass off, is what you’d do.”

“I bet some are.”

“They aren’t, I’m telling you. Try listenin’ when people tell you shit.”

“Yeah, but how do you know? You been in any?”

Actually, he had. He’d robbed close to a dozen camps on this very road one winter and would’ve hit a bunch more if he hadn’t run into bad luck. He’d parked his van on a paved driveway next to one place around nightfall, and while he was inside he came upon a bottle containing five, six fingers of top-shelf whiskey. Not enough to bring home, really, just too good to leave behind. It was mid-December, and with the power off the camp was freezing, but there was a big overstuffed chair with its own little ottoman thingy, and he had on long johns and a parka, so he put his feet up and finished the shit off, drinking it slow and right out of the bottle, feeling the heat of the amber booze spread from his chest to his extremities. He made a mental note not to fall asleep, even as he did so. He couldn’t have dozed for more than half an hour, then at some point it began sleeting, and by the time he meant to leave, the pavement was a sheet of ice. He hadn’t noticed the driveway’s gentle slope down toward the water. The van was rear-wheel drive, and when he put it in reverse the wheels just spun and spun. He wasn’t going anywhere unless he called for a tow, and he couldn’t very well do that. Another night he’d have probably just gone back inside and spent the night and tried again in the morning, but since it was supposed to snow like a bitch, his only choice was to hoof it out to the main road in the freezing rain. Good thing he did, too, because that night they got close to two feet, which meant his van full of stolen shit was going to stay right where it was for the foreseeable future.