Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“Only for a minute,” Grandpa Sully had explained. Clearly, forgetting for such a short period of time didn’t really count as forgetting to his grandfather, who was used to forgetting things, Will guessed, for a lot longer. “Don’t tell your grandmother,” he warned when they were back in the truck and barreling down the road. “And if your mother calls, don’t tell her either.”

Will had promised he wouldn’t.

“In fact,” Sully had continued upon further reflection, “don’t even tell your father.”

The boards loaded onto the back of Grandpa Sully’s truck had come loose then and started tumbling off and bouncing along the blacktop, and Grandpa Sully had skidded over onto the shoulder and gotten out to retrieve them. Most of them fit onto the truck better now. From inside the cab, Will could hear his grandfather swearing at the boards and also at the drivers of the other cars on the road who had to swerve around both the lumber and Grandpa Sully. But by the time his grandfather had collected the last of the boards and dropped them into the bed of the truck, he had calmed down some, and after he took a deep breath and got back into the truck, he’d looked over at Will and continued the instructions he’d been giving before all the boards fell out of the truck. “In fact,” he said “don’t tell anybody.”

Will had kept his promise and not told a soul, but this present circumstance already reminded him of what had happened at the lumberyard, and Will sensed that this would be the beginning of something else that Grandpa Sully’d be instructing him not to tell anyone about. His grandfather was mad again and banging things and cursing, and the old house he was kicking looked like it would fall down for sure if he didn’t stop. Or maybe it would wait until they were all inside and then fall down on them. Or maybe they’d all go inside and he’d be told to wait someplace and Grandpa Sully and the other man would forget about him and drive off, and then it would fall down.

Sully, who hadn’t, as far as he knew, a key, was trying to force the rear door with a crowbar. The gray wood, its paint long ago stripped away, had grown soft and porous, which meant the crowbar wasn’t working very well. So far, Sully had managed only to mutilate the door, which held fast.

“Who but Don Sullivan would use a crowbar to enter his own house?” Carl wondered out loud, stamping his feet in the cold.

“Stand back a second,” Sully said, putting his weight against the bar. Like everything else about the house, the door hung crooked, and Sully had managed to create a space between the door and its frame, a space large enough to insert the flat end of the crowbar. When he levered himself against the bar, however, the steel simply sank deeper into the rotten wood.

“Why I should be surprised is another question,” Carl continued. “Your grandfather is a crowbar kind of guy, Will. He’d use a crowbar to remove the back of his wristwatch.”

“I don’t own a wristwatch,” Sully reminded him. “And if you don’t shut up, I’m going to use this crowbar to remove you entirely.”

Carl leaned up against the porch railing, ignoring this threat like he did all of Sully’s threats. “What worries me is that just about the time you succeed in breaking in, the cops are going to arrive, charge us with burglary and throw our asses in jail.”

“Me, maybe,” Sully stood upright for a moment to catch his breath. “I’m the one breaking and entering. As usual, you haven’t done shit.”

Carl lit a cigarette, peeked in the kitchen window. “Hey,” he said. “I just had a hell of an idea. You could move in here.” He inhaled deeply, then remembered he’d quit smoking and flicked the cigarette over the porch railing.

Sully was grinning at him. “You aren’t going to make it, are you?”

“You want these?” Carl said, offering Sully the pack of cigarettes. “Take ’em.”

Sully took them, put the pack into his pocket.

Carl looked surprised. Clearly, he’d intended the gesture to be symbolic and wouldn’t have offered the cigarettes to Sully had he thought Sully might actually take them. It wasn’t this actual pack of smokes he’d intended to give up but some future pack. He already missed this particular pack. “Those aren’t even your brand,” he pointed out.

“I’ll smoke them anyhow,” Sully said. “I’ve gotten something for nothing from you about twice in the twenty years I’ve known you.”

“That’s better than the nothing for something I always get when I hire you,” Carl said. “Why don’t you just break one of those small windowpanes and reach inside and unlock the door?”

“Because then I’d have to replace the glass,” Sully said, stepping back and eyeing the door savagely. “Here.”

Carl caught the crowbar. “Can this be?” he said in mock astonishment. “Has Don Sullivan, Jack-Off, All Trades conceded that his trusty crowbar is not the precise tool for the task at hand?”

Sully grinned at him, measured his distance to the door. “You’re right for once in your life,” he admitted. “And here’s the precise tool I need.”

Planting on his bad leg, he kicked the door as hard as he could with his good, just above the knob, to gunshot effect. The door held, but all four panes of glass came free and shattered at Sully’s feet. “You prick,” he said, addressing the door.

Carl, shaking his head, handed the crowbar back to Sully. “Allow me,” he said, reaching inside and unlocking the door. Glass crackled underfoot.

At this point Sully remembered Will and was astonished to discover that the boy was crying. Sully went to his grandson then and sat down at the bottom of the steps so he’d be eye level. “Hey,” he said. Finally Will looked at him. “What’s up?”

Will looked away.

“Did Grandpa scare you?” Sully guessed.

The boy snuffed his nose.

“I didn’t mean to.”

Will looked at him again, his eyes red.

“We can go in now,” Sully told him. “Don’t you want to see the house where Grandpa grew up?”

“Grandpa Ralph?”

“No. Grandpa Me.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of, you know,” Sully told him.

Will snuffed his nose, continued to cry softly. It was always Grandpa Sully’s kindness that made him want to cry the worst. It was as if his grandfather truly needed him to be brave, and that made being brave even harder.

“Grandpa wouldn’t let anything happen to you,” he said, and when Will looked at the ground, he added, “Hey … look at me a minute.”

Will did.

“Quit that,” Sully told him.

Will stifled a sob.

“Good boy,” his grandfather told him. “Now. You decide. We can go inside for a minute and you can see where Grandpa grew up, or we can go over to the other house and see Dad.”

“Okay,” Will croaked.

“Okay which?”

“Go see Dad,” Will managed, just as certain that this was the wrong answer as he was that it was the only answer he could give.

“Christ,” his grandfather muttered. “Jesus H.”

When Sully drove up, Rub and Peter were on a break, Rub seated on the steps of Miles Anderson’s front porch, Peter sitting a few feet away, his back up against the front door. Whether they’d been sitting that way for five minutes or an hour was anybody’s guess. Since it was anybody’s, Sully guessed an hour. Also, it had probably been that long since either had spoken to the other. Rub continued to be resentful of Peter’s presence, just as he resented all the other people — Miss Beryl, Wirf, Ruth, Carl Roebuck — who seemed to him competitors for his best friend’s affection. The difference was that these other people didn’t horn in on their workday and subtract from Rub’s quality time. Peter had made a few halfhearted friendly overtures but apparently felt no great urgency about winning over Rub.