Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“Here comes Peter,” Rub observed sadly when the El Camino came into view. “You probably would have shared it with him, and he wasn’t even there.”

“How’s work?” Wirf wanted to know that evening when Sully came into The Horse and slid onto the stool next to him. Something about the lawyer’s tone of voice suggested to Sully that this was not a casual question.

“Hard,” Sully told him. “Dirty. Unrewarding.” He nodded at the sweating bottle of beer in front of Wirf. Lately Wirf had been cutting back by drinking soda water until Sully joined him sometime after dinner. “I see you’re zigging already.”

“I’ve been contemplating,” Wirf said. “Zigging helps me to contemplate. Would you like to know what I’ve been contemplating?”

“No,” Sully told him.

“Stupidity,” Wirf said.

Sully studied him, trying to gauge Wirf’s level of intoxication, never an easy task. “You aren’t in a very good mood, Wirf. I can tell.”

Birdie came over, gave Sully the beer she knew he’d order. “He wouldn’t even bet on The People’s Court, ” she said sadly.

“I think I’ll have one more, Birdie,” Wirf said, “now that the subject of all my contemplation has arrived.”

When Birdie bent over to fish a bottle of beer from the cooler, Sully made a theatrical point of standing up on the rungs of his bar stool and craning forward to look down her shirt. “What kind of bra is that?”

“A two-seater,” she informed him. Then she set the beer in front of Wirf and made a face at the lawyer. “On the subject of stupidity.”

“I’m not stupid,” Wirf said. “Merely self-destructive.”

“Where’s Jeff?” Sully wondered out loud, noticing it was well past Birdie’s usual time to go home.

“Tiny let him go,” she said.

“How come?”

“You shouldn’t steal when business is slow,” Birdie said significantly before heading back down the bar to take care of Jocko, who had just come in, leaving Sully and Wirf alone in their corner.

“That was one of the original Ten Commandments, you’ll recall,” Wirf said. “Thou Shalt Not Steal When Business Is Slow. It came right after Thou Shalt Stay in School. Which was preceded by Thou Shalt Not Get Caught Working When Thou Art Collecting Disability from the State.”

“Look,” Sully said. “I have no idea what bug crawled up your ass tonight, but I happen to be in a good mood for once. I don’t know how long it’ll be before the next one rolls around, so I’m not going to let you ruin this one, if that’s all right with you.”

Wirf suddenly looked sober and determined. “I bet I can ruin it for you.”

“I bet you can’t,” Sully said, sliding off his stool and taking his beer with him. Since he arrived at the other end of the bar at the same moment as Jocko’s drink, and since Jocko’s last vial of mystery pills had been a great improvement over the ones that had put him to sleep and given Carl Roebuck’s Doberman a stroke, Sully paid for it.

“Don’t tell me one-two-three ran today,” Jocko said, peering over the tops of his thick glasses, “because I know it didn’t.”

“I just wanted to say thanks,” Sully said, his voice low. “Those little blue jobs are the best yet.”

Jocko nodded. “I thought you might like them. They’re new. I wouldn’t necessarily mix them with alcohol.”

“I wouldn’t either,” Sully agreed, taking a swig of beer. “I take mine in the morning with my prune juice.”

“I’ve got something for that, too,” Jocko said.

Birdie was there again, this time with a note for Sully, written in Wirf’s hand on a bar napkin. It said: “And then there’s: Thou Shalt Not Be Videotaped Loading Concrete Blocks Onto a Truck When Thou Art Suing for Total Disability.” Wirf was grinning at him. Sully could see that much all the way from the opposite end of the bar.

“I doubt it’s the pills, actually,” Jocko explained. “They say arthritis is better when you exercise. Which is not to say I recommend your working on that knee.”

“I’m not hurting quite as much, for some reason,” Sully said, wadding up Wirf’s note into a ball and tossing it. The guy in the dark sedan, no doubt, Sully thought. The one he’d thought might be an investigator hired to document Carl Roebuck’s myriad infidelities.

Wirf was scribbling on another napkin.

“Is our legal friend composing briefs?” Jocko wondered.

“I’d be surprised if he was even wearing briefs,” Sully said.

Birdie brought the new note. “For Verily I Say unto Thee. If Thou Art Caught Working Whilst on Disability, Thou Art Truly and Forever Fucked in the Eyes of the State.”

Sully wadded this one up too and strolled back down the bar. “Videotaped?”

“Verily.”

“Hmmm,” Sully said, running his fingers through his hair. “So that’s who that guy was. I figured he was somebody’s husband planning to assassinate Carl Roebuck. I thought he had binoculars.”

“A video camera.”

“No shit.”

“Verily.”

“So what can they do?”

“I don’t know,” Wirf admitted. “Depends on how nasty they want to get. They could sue to recover the partial disability payments. And the education benefit.”

“Will they?”

“Probably not. I’d make them enter the tape into evidence, and my guess is a tape showing you at work would do us as much good as them. They’d be going to a lot of trouble for nothing. See, we got one of the original Ten Commandments on our side.”

“Only one?”

“Thou Canst Not Get Blood from a Turnip.”

Sully shrugged. “Then what are we worried about?”

Wirf was grinning at him now, as Sully slid back onto the bar stool. “Sully, Sully, Sully,” he said, and together they settled pleasantly into what remained of the evening.

Snow.

A snow not quite like any Miss Beryl could ever remember, and she watched it fall through the open blinds of her front room hypnotically. She’d awakened feeling woozy, as if she’d gotten out of bed too quickly, except that she’d gotten up slowly and then stood by the side of her bed wondering if she might need to sit back down. Flu, she thought, dern it. Miss Beryl hadn’t had the flu in a long time, almost a decade, and so her recollection of how you were supposed to feel was vague. What she did feel, in addition to the wooziness, was an odd sensation of distance from her extremities, her feet and fingers miles away, as if they belonged to someone else, and to account for this, the word “flu” entered her consciousness whole, like a loaf of something fresh from the oven, warm and full of leavening explanation.

Flu. It explained her offishness of the past few days, even, perhaps, her persistent feelings of guilt about Sully. Miss Beryl was of the opinion that guilt grew like a culture in the atmosphere of illness and that an attack of guilt often augured the approach of a virus. This particular virus was probably a gift from the dreadful Joyce woman, Miss Beryl decided. Not that the Joyce woman had exhibited flu symptoms exactly. Rather, she had simply impressed Miss Beryl as someone who had a lot ailing her. (Miss Beryl had heard about yesterday’s episode with the car from Mrs. Gruber, who’d let Clive Jr. use her phone to call the tow truck in return for a full account. And that account confirmed Miss Beryl’s initial opinion, that the Joyce woman was a menace.) It certainly wouldn’t surprise her to learn that Clive Jr.’s fiancée was a carrier of flu viruses.

Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryl’s health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom was an excellent place to snag whatever was in the air in the way of illness. Also depression, which, Miss Beryl believed, in conjunction with guilt, opened the door to illness. Miss Beryl didn’t know any teachers who weren’t habitually guilty and depressed — guilty they hadn’t accomplished more with their students, depressed that very little more was possible. Since retiring, Miss Beryl had far fewer occasions to indulge either guilt or depression. Except for reminding herself that she should feel more affection for Clive Jr., she had little to feel guilty about, and except for Friday afternoons when the North Bath Weekly Journal was published, she seldom felt depressed. So the portals to illness remained, for the most part, shut tight. No, Miss Beryl decided, it was the dreadful Joyce woman, wrecker of cars, destroyer of chairs, whose mouth was always open spewing noxious opinions and who knew what else into the atmosphere, who was the culprit. Miss Beryl felt a little better to have settled the issue to her own satisfaction. But not much.