Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Tiny was on his way back with Wirf’s change. When he got there, he slammed Wirf’s tab down on the bar faceup in front of Sully. “Read it and weep, asshole,” he said, pointing at the last entry. “One egg I charged him for.” Then he pointed at the floor. “There’s your dinner.”

Sully studied the tab closely to make sure nothing had been erased. Then he gathered the money and stuffed it into Wirf’s shirt pocket. “The perfect end to a perfect day,” he said.

Wirf was shaking his head. “How come you never see anything headed your way until it runs over you?”

“I’d have bet everything he charged you for both eggs,” Sully admitted.

“You did bet everything,” Wirf pointed out.

All three men slid off their stools then, and Sully went over and picked up the egg off the floor. “Hey,” he said to Tiny, who was grinning now. “I knew if I came in this place long enough I’d get something for free, you cheap prick.” Then he ate the egg, washing it down with the last swallow of his beer.

“Go to jail, Sully,” Tiny said. “It’s where you belong.”

Outside, the wind had died down, leaving the night sky full of stars. The three intersections of downtown Bath were strung with holiday lights.

“It doesn’t feel like Christmas, somehow,” Sully said.

Wirf looked at him a little cross-eyed and, finding Sully serious, exploded into laughter. Peter was chuckling too. When Birdie came out, Wirf made him repeat what he’d said, and when Sully did, Wirf laughed so hard again that he had to sit down on the curb. “It’s for moments like these that I zig with you,” he said.

Sully, who didn’t see anything that funny about what he’d said, turned to Birdie. “You know it’s customary to give a condemned man one last request. My truck’s out back. What do you say we go get naked and see what happens.”

Birdie thought about it. “Okay,” she said without visible enthusiasm.

“Don’t you have any pride at all?” Sully said, taken aback.

“All talk,” she said. “Just as I suspected.”

When they got Wirf onto his feet again and headed, under Birdie’s guidance, toward his car, Sully and Peter ambled up the street toward the police station. When they got to the alley alongside Woolworth’s, Sully said, “Wait here a minute,” and disappeared into the darkness, from which Peter heard him retching. After a minute Sully returned, looking pale and unsteady. “You all set on tomorrow?”

“All set,” Peter said, holding up a thumb to show he meant it. For the last two hours, Peter’s mood had been strangely agreeable, his customary sarcasm and wry distance absent. Not at all his usual tight-assed self, in Sully’s opinion. Maybe his son just needed to drink more. Or perhaps he was still under the spell of the prettiest girl in Bath.

They walked, slowly.

“Tiny was right about one thing,” Sully said. “Your grandfather was some asshole.”

“I don’t really remember him,” Peter admitted.

“Good,” Sully told him. “I know you think I’m an asshole too, but I’m nothing compared to him. Not really.”

“No, you’re not,” Peter agreed. “Not really.”

“What’re you planning to tell Will?” Sully asked, since that was what he’d been thinking about all night. Of all the regrets he refused to indulge, this was the biggest.

Peter was clearly surprised by the question. “What do you want me to tell him?”

In truth, Sully didn’t know. “Tell him his grandfather’s an asshole, I guess. Tell him it runs in the family.”

“Thanks.”

“I wasn’t thinking about you,” Sully said truthfully. He’d been thinking about his brother and how much like Big Jim Patrick had become before he’d been killed in the head-on collision.

“Thanks again,” Peter said.

“You really planning on staying around here after the first of the year?”

“I don’t know,” Peter said. “I thought I might.”

“Every day won’t be like today,” Sully promised.

“No?”

“Your mother’s right, though. You’d be better off to go back to your college.” When Peter didn’t say anything to this, Sully said, “You want to hear something funny? I liked college,” he confessed, for the first time, to anyone.

Peter studied him, surprised. “You quit, though.”

Sully shrugged. “I didn’t say I belonged there. I just said I liked it.”

“Where do you belong, Dad?”

They’d arrived at City Hall, and Sully pointed up the stone steps at the lighted police department door. “Right here, I guess,” he said. “For tonight, at least.”

“I’ll look after things the best I can,” Peter promised seriously.

“Okay,” Sully said. “Good.”

“You want me to come in with you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Good,” Peter said.

To their mutual surprise, they shook hands then at the foot of the steps. “I’ll see you before you know it,” Sully said. “Pray for snow.”

They both looked up at the cloudless sky, then Sully limped up the Town Hall steps. When Sully got to the top he went inside and let the door swing shut behind him, then came back out again. “Don’t forget to feed the dog,” he called.

Peter had forgotten all about Rasputin, who was presumably still chained to the kitchen cabinet in the Bowdon Street house. “It’s not going to be easy being you, is it?” he called back.

Sully raised his hands out to his sides, shoulder level, as if he were about to burst into song. “Don’t expect too much of yourself in the beginning,” he advised. “I couldn’t do everything at first either.”

Downtown Bath, first light. Both traffic signals blinking yellow. Caution.

Clive Jr., sitting in his Lincoln outside the North Bath Savings and Loan, three large suitcases safely stowed in the trunk, was in a contemplative mood. The way the parking space angled toward the curb, he was able to see both blinking yellows in the small rectangle of his rearview. Caution. And then again, in case anyone missed the first, caution. Funny how over a lifetime meanings changed. Caution was what he’d been taught in school, but experience had taught him other meanings and the blinking yellow had come to mean You Don’t Have to Stop Here, or Do Not Accelerate. For years now he had gone through blinking yellows with his foot poised midway between brake and gas, vaguely thankful that these indulgent yellows were not reds. And every time he rolled beneath the signal, You Do Not Have to Stop Here fired somewhere in the back of his brain, where the deepest truths of human understanding lie untroubled, unquestioned. Mistaken.

The yellow traffic signals continued to blink caution relentlessly in Clive Jr.’s rearview, their original meaning fully restored now. Too late, naturally. The more he thought about it, life’s truest meanings were all childhood meanings, childhood understandings of how things worked, what they were . Do we ever know as deeply as we know in childhood? Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and our world? Well, yes, perhaps, Clive Jr. conceded. No point getting carried away, epistemologywise. It did no good to lament the loss of innocence or to suspect that the child might indeed be father to the man. He was no longer the little boy he’d once been when he and his father had visited the Capitol and Clive Sr. had interpreted traffic signals for him as they waited to cross at a busy intersection. He was now the chief executive officer of the financial institution before him, an institution whose edifice, at least, was constructed of solid granite, stone strong enough to withstand ill winds, like the ones again tunneling up Main and making the deserted street feel lonesome and ghostly. And if he himself was not made of stone, well, neither was he made of paper to be blown about like a hamburger wrapper from the Dairy Queen on Lower Main.