Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

Sully nodded. When the cops finally arrived at the restaurant, he’d led them back to the apartment only to discover that Roy Purdy had regained consciousness while they were out front with the EMTs and skedaddled. The regulars were milling around by the entrance by the time Sully finished talking to the cops, but they seemed to get the picture when he shook his head and pointed at the CLOSED sign. It was then that he sensed he wasn’t alone inside and found the girl curled up in the fetal position in the far booth. “People forget all about you, don’t they?” he said, sliding in across from her. When she didn’t respond, he said, “I need to do a few things here. Then we’ll go to the hospital, okay?”

She nodded, but that was all.

The first thing to do was turn off the grill and toss out all the bacon and sausage, now reduced to cinders. Out back he found a cardboard box and tore it down, took a Magic Marker and some tape near the register and made another CLOSED sign for the deliverymen who would come to the back. Under the sign on the front door he taped a second: UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. By now Tina was sitting up in the booth. “Can you think of anything else?” he said, but she gave no indication of having heard him. “Let’s go out this way,” he suggested, pointing. The front door was locked; the back would lock behind them.

In the truck she cocked her head at the brown cyclone Carl had made on the inside of the window. As he drove to the hospital she kept staring at it, and by the time they arrived she’d drifted into the space she now occupied. Unable to rouse her, Sully’d flagged a nurse to help get her out of the truck and into the emergency room. “What’s wrong with her?” the woman wanted to know, and he told her she’d just witnessed an attack on her grandmother. That explanation didn’t seem to satisfy her, and she looked Sully over suspiciously, but he didn’t know what else to say. When she was little Tina had been tested for autism, and Ruth had said that in times of stress — especially when her parents were fighting — she occasionally entered these fugue states, but he’d been under the impression she’d outgrown them. Wrong again.

“Is she going to be okay?” Sully now whispered to Janey, nodding at the girl. He admired how Janey had just talked to her, a side to Ruth’s daughter he’d never witnessed.

“Eventually,” she said. “It’s her defense mechanism. When things get too bad, she just checks out. I wish I could do the same thing.”

“One of the nurses said she was sending in a doctor to examine her.”

“God,” she said, turning back to look at her daughter. “She saw the whole thing, didn’t she?”

“She was standing in the doorway when I got there, so yeah, probably. You don’t remember?”

“It’s all murky,” Janey admitted. “I remember screaming for him to stop. His fist hitting Ma over and over. Then you coming in. That look on your face. But it’s like it’s all happening underwater.”

“You’re lucky,” said Sully, whose own recollection was all too vivid, as if playing on a color video in his brain: Ruth’s battered, bloody, ruined face almost unrecognizable, her eyes meeting his for just that split second before rolling back in her head. “Are they saying anything, the doctors?”

“They’re not using the word ‘coma,’ but she’s still unconscious, so…”

“They don’t come much tougher, though,” Sully said. “She’ll fight.”

“I know, but, Jesus, Sully, he knocked out half her teeth. Broke her nose, fractured both cheekbones…”

She allowed him to draw her into his arms then, and he held her until she sobbed herself out. At one point he glanced over at the doorway, half expecting to see Zack come in. Their embrace was innocent enough, but Sully couldn’t help wondering if that’s how it would appear to her father. He recalled Carl’s observation about the world still turning no matter how fucked up things got. No matter how we fuck them up was what he’d meant because, face it, things didn’t fuck themselves up. Sully’s chest, he realized, felt heavy, though what it was heavy with — sorrow, fear, rage — wasn’t immediately clear.

“I keep remembering what I said to her yesterday,” Janey said, finally stepping back. “About how it’s always my jaw that gets broke. Like it was her turn, or something. And that’s what happened.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t cause it,” he said. “It wasn’t you that beat her unconscious.”

“No”—her eyes hardening—“but I fucked the man who did. And then I just watched. I screamed for him to stop, but I didn’t do anything. I let her take my beating.”

“She wanted to. Why do you think she came between you?”

“I’m gonna find that son of a bitch and kill him. I swear to God.”

“No, you’re going to take care of your daughter. Leave Roy to me.”

“You have no idea where he is, even.”

“I’ll find him,” he said, glancing at the girl again and hoping she was still checked out. “Your dad still doesn’t know what’s happened?”

“I left a message on the machine at home in case he’s still on his rounds. He’s probably out in the shed.”

“I’ll swing by the house.”

“Would you?”

“Right now, in fact.”

He was halfway out of the room when he heard her say, “When you find Roy?”

“Yeah?”

She came over to where he stood and whispered directly into his ear, “Hurt him. Promise me you’ll hurt him bad.”

—

ZACK MUST’VE HEARD Sully’s truck turn in to the drive, because by the time he shifted it into park he was standing in the shed’s open doorway, wiping his hands on a rag. He had on greasy jeans and a threadbare plaid shirt, his gut hanging out over his belt, his cowlick in full bloom. If the word “doofus” didn’t already exist, Sully often thought, you’d have to invent it to properly describe him. When he didn’t get out of the truck, Zack came over, looking worried. “You okay?”

Sully held up his hand, and the other man waited patiently for him to regain his breath. “There,” he finally said, though that one word used up all the air in his lungs. The heaviness he’d felt in his chest back at the hospital was even more intense now. The pressure came in waves, making it difficult to inhale. The last one washed over him as he turned in to the drive, a real doozy, but it was almost past now. “Just let me sit a minute.”

“Sit all day,” Zack said, good-natured as always, this man whom Sully had wronged for so long. He’d stayed away these last couple weeks, afraid that Zack would have a two-man job he’d been putting off, some sleeper-sofa that needed to be lugged out of the shed and into the bed of the truck, work Sully simply wasn’t up to in his present condition. “I got no place to be.”

“You do, actually,” Sully told him, and again was out of breath. “Ruth,” he finally managed.

Zack cocked his head. “She all right?”

Sully held his hand up again, waiting for the last wave to draw back down the beach. “She’s in the emergency room.”

Hearing this, Zack looked more perplexed than anything, like maybe he suspected Sully was playing a trick on him. “You sure?”

“She’s in pretty bad shape. Roy beat her up.”

“Ruth,” Zack repeated, scratching his chin now. “Not Janey.”

“Janey’s there with her. And Tina.”

“They okay?” he said.

“Janey is.”

“Tina go into one of her trances?”

Sully nodded.

“I can usually get her to come out of them things,” he said, not bragging exactly, but clearly proud of his knack.

“Well, they can probably use your help, then,” Sully said, because, really, what did it take to light a fire under this guy?