Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“You say Roy hurt her pretty bad?”

“Yeah,” Sully admitted. “Pretty bad.”

“She gonna die, Sully? Because—”

“I don’t know. But prepare yourself. You’re not going to recognize her. She’s all…” He couldn’t find the words for what she was or possibly imagine how Zack might prepare himself.

He was now looking over at the shed. Watching him process information in real time gave Sully a window in Ruth’s frustrations with him — she, so preternaturally quick and perpetually waiting for her husband to catch up. Anybody else would have been halfway to the hospital by now, running stop signs, honking at drivers in front of him to pull over. If the world were populated by people like him, there’d be no need for stop signs, speed limits or, probably, laws of any sort.

“Her and me…,” he began, then paused, his eyes suddenly full. “You see that up there?”

Sully’d been so intent on the task at hand that he hadn’t noticed the slender shard of metal, a good seven or eight feet in length, that was standing straight up, like a weather vane minus its horizontal arms, on the peak of the shed. At its base, where the lightning had struck, was an enormous scorch mark, which meant they’d been fortunate. Sully’d heard stories of outbuildings that weren’t properly grounded exploding when directly hit by lightning. Many of those were barns filled with hay, but still.

“Last night, what her and me saw up there?” Zack was saying, his voice full of wonder even now. “You couldn’t hardly believe it. This big ball of light. Fuzzy, like those frosted lightbulbs, but really bright. It sat right there at the tip, balanced, like it might fall off. Like something in a dream that don’t make sense, but there it is anyhow. Something come to visit. Trying to tell us something.”

Sully didn’t need to follow the sight line from the roof of the shed to Zack’s bedroom window. If he and Ruth both witnessed the glowing orb, they were both standing at the same window. Her bedroom was on the other side of the house. He recalled what Ruth told him yesterday about how strangely Zack had been behaving of late, as if he was really taking her in for the first time in years. Was the miracle Zack was trying so hard to describe the glowing, unnatural orb atop the shed or the fact that he and Ruth had witnessed it together in the middle of the night in a room she had led Sully to believe she never visited?

“You think maybe it was warning us about what was going to happen? That Roy was going to—”

“I think you need to go to the hospital.”

Zack swallowed hard. “What if I’m too late?”

“I don’t think you will be.”

“Okay,” he finally agreed, patting his trousers for his keys and shaking his head. When he started for the house, it occurred to Sully to ask, “Roy hasn’t been by here this morning, has he?”

Zack paused, thoughtfully. “No, I haven’t seen him since—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sully told him, turning the key in the ignition.

“I heard he’d shacked up with some woman named Cora at the Morrison Arms.”

“I heard the same thing.”

Incredibly, he’d stalled again. “Could you ever do something like that? Like he done to Ruth?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Me neither,” he said, but he seemed to have something else on his mind, so Sully waited, his foot on the brake. “I always knew about you and her,” Zack said finally.

“I figured you did,” Sully said, feeling another wave of the heaviness descend upon him.

“Okay if I showed you something?”

“Yeah, but—”

From the back pocket of his jeans he took out a bankbook and handed it to Sully. His expression was one of pride, like a man sharing photos of his grandchildren. “That number there,” he said, pointing to what appeared to be the balance. It was well north of three hundred thousand dollars.

“Ruth knows about this?”

He shook his head, pride morphing to shame.

“That’s a lot of money, Zack. Where’d it come from?” Not that it was any of his business.

“Buy something for fifty cents, sell it for a dollar.”

“I understand the principle,” Sully said. “But you’d have to do it over half-a-million times.”

“Then I must’ve.”

“Why not tell her?”

He shook his head. “I kept wanting the number to be even bigger, I guess. She never thought the business was worth anything. Didn’t even think it was a business. She never really thought I was working, at least not like she was, all those years she waitressed, then at Hattie’s. I guess I wanted her to know I was working, too. The bigger the number I could show her—”

“Well…”

“But that wasn’t it, really,” he continued. “The real reason I didn’t tell her is I promised Ma.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Ruth was right. I know that now. Ma was always trying to drive that wedge between us.”

“What did you promise?”

“That I wouldn’t tell Ruth about all this money until she told me about her and you. And now I’ve waited too long. If she dies, I’ll never get to tell her.”

“Then go,” Sully said. “Hurry.”

He took a deep breath. “Okay.”

But when he turned and headed toward the house, Sully called after him, “You know it’s over, right?”

“Yeah?”

Sully nodded. “You don’t mind that we’re old friends, do you?”

“No,” Zack told him. “That’s all right. I’d prefer you didn’t start up again, though.”

“We won’t,” Sully promised. “It’s been over for a long while. I’m sorry it ever happened.”

That was one thing that hadn’t changed, Sully thought when Zack disappeared inside. The worst part of his affair with Ruth had always been the lies, both told and implied. And it still was. Because Sully wasn’t sorry for having loved Ruth. For loving her still. Not even a little.

—

YELLOW CRIME-SCENE TAPE still stretched across all three entrances to the Morrison Arms when Sully pulled into the lot and parked next to two animal-control vans. He reached under the seat for the tire iron he kept there, felt its reassuring heft, then placed it on the passenger seat so it would be handy. A couple dozen people, residents of the Arms by the look of them, had gathered in the lot, apparently awaiting permission to return to their apartments, though Roy Purdy, no surprise, was not among them. Nor was there any sign of the girlfriend’s half-purple, half-yellow car. Sully had seen the beater around town, and he remembered its driver, too, a morbidly obese woman in her midthirties who usually wore a Mets cap to conceal her balding head. For some reason, he was pretty sure he’d seen both it and her this morning, but where? In the hospital parking lot? Possibly, but somehow that didn’t seem right. Had he passed it going over to Ruth and Zack’s? No, it had to have been earlier. Outside Hattie’s, then, as Ruth was being loaded onto the ambulance? How could the vehicle have registered on him then, in the midst of all that commotion? And yet that was the possibility that felt most right.

Old Mr. Hynes was there, as usual. Seeing Sully approach, he said, “Donald E. Sullivan, Esquire,” his standard greeting. Sully had no idea where he’d come up with the middle initial, but it wasn’t his. “You don’t look so hot.”

“I don’t feel so hot,” Sully admitted.

“How come? Young fella like yourself.”

“Call it chickens coming home to roost,” Sully told him. “You look all right, though.”

“ ’Cause I am all right,” the old man cackled. “Don’t no chickens roost on me if I can he’p it.”

“They’re still looking for that snake, I see.”