Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“Careful,” Rub warned, and Sully at first thought he meant the dog before noticing that there was no floor between where they stood and the kitchen, just the lengthwise-running foundation beams and the darkness of the deep cellar below. To Sully’s surprise, he felt vaguely embarrassed to see the house he’d grown up in flayed back for inspection, like a terminally ill patient, its pipes and wires and wood exposed. Certainly the sight was not as satisfying as he’d hoped.

Rub slid a sheet of plywood he’d apparently been using to stand on into position in front of them, stepped onto it, then danced nimbly onto a double floor beam and into the kitchen.

“Right,” Sully said, stepping onto the plywood and recollecting as he did so that he’d just been encouraging his grandson to go on into a house with no floor. Also Otis’s observation that there was danger everywhere Sully was.

Rub held out his hand. “I’ll grab you,” he said. “Get away,” Sully said. “You’ll just make me bang my knee, is all you’ll do.”

Rub frowned, his feelings hurt yet again, but stepped back as he was told. Sully tested the double beam with his good leg, pushed off, and strode forward across the dark gap, landing on the kitchen’s linoleum. He felt his bad knee start to give under the full weight, but he caught the door frame for support and quickly shifted his weight.

“You should have just gone around,” Rub said.

“It’s just like you to give me good advice after I’ve killed myself,” Sully told him, wiping the cold sweat from his brow with his sleeve.

When the Doberman again tried to stand, Sully noticed there was an envelope taped to the animal’s collar. Since the crowbar he’d used the day before to get into the house was still sitting on the counter, Sully picked it up and showed it to the dog. “If you bite me, I’m going to beat you to death right here in the kitchen,” he said.

The dog seemed to understand this threat and quit growling and lay still while Sully removed the small envelope, which was addressed in Carl Roebuck’s graceful, almost feminine, hand to Don Sullivan, Jack-Off, All Trades. The note inside said simply: YOU BROKE HIM. HE’S YOURS.

As if to confirm this, the dog strained forward as far as he could and licked Sully’s knuckles.

When Peter and the boy arrived a minute later, having gone around back, Sully showed his son the note. Peter read it and chuckled unpleasantly. Will, who’d hesitated on the back porch, took a deep breath, engaged his stopwatch, eyed the dog warily and stepped inside.

“Did you feel light-headed at the time, Mrs. Peoples?” the young doctor wanted to know. He was pumping air into the black blood pressure sleeve, which tightened relentlessly around her upper arm. The unpleasant sensation seemed a natural extension of recent events. Since that first morning before Thanksgiving when she’d looked up into the trees and concluded that this might be her year, she’d suffered the sensation of things closing in. Deciding not to travel had aggravated it, no doubt. Clive Jr. had been right about that. She should have gone as planned. On the other hand, he’d been wrong about Sully, who had proven himself this morning to be the trustworthy soul she’d always known him to be. It was not Sully who was lowering the boom, but God Himself, the sneaky booger, and this doctor was going to explain how, and so Miss Beryl prepared herself to accept reality.

This was the second time in half an hour she’d had her blood pressure taken. The first time, the nurse had done it. During his examination of her, Miss Beryl had been studying the young doctor almost as closely as he’d been studying her, though without the benefit of intrusive, cold, probing instruments. The gene pool again, she told herself, though this was Schuyler Springs, not Bath, and she could easily be mistaken. The chances that she’d taught this particular young physician when he was in the eighth grade were only so-so, though he did look vaguely familiar, an older version of somebody — some Ur-eighth-grader, probably. One of the unfortunate side effects of teaching for forty years was that the task was so monumental, even in recollection, that it sometimes seemed you’d tried to teach everyone on the planet. What Miss Beryl looked for in each adult face was the evidence of some failed lesson in some distant yesterday that might predict incompetence today. In this young doctor, Miss Beryl was looking to justify in advance her decision not to follow any advice she didn’t like. One surely was not required to follow the advice of one’s own “C” students, if they could be identified.

“I did,” she admitted, in answer to his prescient question about the light-headedness that had preceded her gusher. “Now that it’s all over, I feel lighthearted,” she added.

The young man surrendered a tolerant, professional half smile, “lighthearted? Do you mean reinvigorated?”

Miss Beryl made a face. Like most young professionals of Miss Beryl’s recent acquaintance, this young man had no sense of play about him, no love of language, probably no imagination. As a boy Clive Jr. had been the same way. Every time she’d tried to play with him, he’d just frowned at her, puzzled. This young doctor was too bright to have been a “C” student, probably, but she could see herself putting a B-minus at the top of one of his adolescent compositions twenty years ago and waiting for him to complain. What’s wrong with it? he’d have wanted to know. Where had she taken off points? Where had he lost credit?

But, yes, reinvigorated was precisely how she’d felt after the nosebleed. And so she raised his grade to a B-plus now, just as she probably had then, after a stern lecture that life wasn’t a matter of simply avoiding mistakes, of losing credit, but rather of earning. She decided to confide in him. “I kept thinking it was snowing,” she said, feeling a little foolish. “I could see it snowing.”

The doctor nodded, apparently not at all surprised by what struck Miss Beryl as the most bizarre of her symptoms. He let the air out of the sleeve all at once then and pulled apart the Velcro seam. When she rubbed her flesh, he said, “Did that cause discomfort?”

“It hurt, if that’s what you mean. Are we finished?”

“Just about. I think it would be wise to order some blood work done, though,” he said.

Miss Beryl flapped her sore arm like a wing. “Am I correct in assuming you’ll want to use my blood?”

Another trace of a smile. “Well, we could use mine, but then we’d know about me.”

Miss Beryl stood, then sat back down again when the doctor, who was sitting across from her, did not get to his feet. “You fellows are like the police. You’re never around when you’re needed. If you’d been at my house at six o’clock this morning you could have had the blood you wanted, and you wouldn’t have required a syringe to get it either. You could have used a salad bowl. Now you want more.”

“Just a little,” he assured her. “You aren’t afraid of the needle, are you? It won’t hurt.”

“Will I feel any discomfort?”

“Maybe a smidgen,” he conceded seriously, tossing the blood pressure sleeve carelessly onto the desk and crossing one knee over the other. He opened his mouth to speak, hesitated and closed it again.

“This is the part where we converse meaningfully, ain’t it,” Miss Beryl said.

“It is,” he said. “You have a family physician in Bath?”

Miss Beryl said she did.

“Yet you didn’t go to him about this?”

“He’s a snitch,” Miss Beryl explained. “Reports directly to my son. The only reason I’m here is that I promised Donald.”