Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Sully looked down at his shoes and bare ankles. “It’s our next stop,” he promised.

“Well, I should think so,” she said. “I’ll thank you to remember that when you leave this house, you reflect upon me as well as yourself. There are times, I suspect,” she added significantly, “when you forget this.”

This, Sully realized, was his lecture. “I’m sorry if I do, Mrs. Peoples,” he said, because he genuinely was sorry. “I never mean to shame you.”

“It’s true,” Wirf put in. “Most of the time he’s content to shame himself.”

“Well, no man is an island,” Miss Beryl reminded them both. “Do you recall who said that?”

Sully nodded. “You did,” he said, his standard response when his landlady began lobbing quotations at him. “All through eighth grade.”

Miss Beryl turned to Wirf. “It frightens me to think, Abraham, that I helped to shape this life. What will God say?”

“Be just like Him to blame you,” Sully agreed. In his experience, people usually got blamed for the very things they were most innocent of. It happened to himself so frequently that he’d come to think of the phenomenon as a facet of divine Providence. Its corollary was that the things a person really was guilty of were mostly ignored. His father, for instance. Big Jim had never even been charged in the matter of the boy who’d been impaled on the spike. The lifelong drunken cruelty he’d inflicted on his family had gone unpunished. He’d died well fed, untroubled by conscience, happily playing grab-ass with nurses who considered him full of spunk. As near as Sully could figure it, there was something in human nature that sought to ignore or absolve obvious guilt on the one hand even as it sought to establish connections and therefore responsibility in the most unrelated things.

Of course, these principles applied to himself as well as others. He’d made his share of mistakes, and there was plenty of legitimate blame that might be laid on his doorstep, but his sense of things was that other people mistook what they were. He had not been the best husband to Vera, who had legitimate gripes. But she had been uncanny in her ability to select, as the focus of her fury, something he hadn’t done. Ruth was the same way, trying to make him feel responsible for Janey. For his worst blunders, on the other hand, he’d been consistently rewarded. After burning down Kenny Roebuck’s house, he’d been thanked profusely. The result of ignoring his son was that Vera and Ralph had managed to make an educated man out of him. He was beginning to sense in all of this perversity the way his current situation would eventually shake down. Somehow, although he’d assaulted a police officer in front of witnesses, he was going to walk. He could feel it. In return for which it would generally be conceded that he was responsible for Hattie’s death.

No, the world, in Sully’s view, did little to inspire belief in justice. The conventional Christian wisdom seemed to be that all of this world’s inequities would be rectified in the next, but Sully had his doubts. Wasn’t the perversity of the world he knew more likely a true reflection of its source? What if Big Jim Sullivan was grinning down at him from heaven, seated comfortably at the right hand of the Father? That would surprise a lot of people, though not Sully.

“Listen. Tell The Bank I’ll get out upstairs as soon as I can. My lawyer says I could get out as soon as tomorrow, though he’s been known to be mistaken.”

“I’ll handle Clive,” she said, then to Wirf, “Just don’t let him punch the judge.”

“You want to ride with us?”

“No, I’m going with Mrs. Gruber,” Miss Beryl told him.

“Alice knew Hattie?”

“Not to my knowledge,” she admitted. “She just hates to miss anything.”

Outside on the porch, Sully noticed the corner of the envelope Miss Beryl had given him sticking out of the pocket of Wirf’s overcoat. “She finally signing the house over to Clive?” he asked.

“None of your business,” Wirf said, not unexpectedly, pushing the envelope out of sight.

“You sure are a secretive prick, you know that?”

Wirf shrugged. “You ever hear of confidentiality?”

“Here I’ve known you all these years and today I find out your name is Abraham.”

“You didn’t know that?” Wirf said. “It’s on the door of my office.”

“You have an office?”

“Sully, Sully, Sully.”

Wirf put his gloves on and grabbed the porch railing, which wobbled at the base where Carl Roebuck, the rat, had removed the screws. Sully made a mental note to fix it as soon as he got out of jail, lest Miss Beryl kill herself and he find himself responsible for the death of two old women.

Organ music, vaguely religious, was being played throughout the funeral home at a volume designed, it seemed to Sully, to get just under the skin. It was slightly louder in the tiny bathroom he’d been shown to so he could change his pants and put on the socks he’d bought at the men’s store. The cramped room was about the size of a closet, containing a commode, a tiny sink, a warped mirror. Above, in one corner, was a small speaker from which the organ music leaked. When Sully sat on the commode, his knees nearly touched the door he’d closed behind him when he entered. His knee, defying logic as usual, seemed to have gotten worse in jail, and changing his pants and putting on the new socks proved a slow, awkward, painful task. He’d worked up a full sweat when the door he’d forgotten to lock opened, catching him sitting on the commode in his undershorts, one sock on, one sock off.

“Jesus Christ,” Jocko said, going scarlet and quickly closing the door again. Then, just his voice through the door, “Didn’t anybody ever tell you that you don’t have to take your pants completely off to relieve yourself?”

“Don’t go away,” Sully said to the door. “I want to talk to you.”

Sully pulled on the second sock, then the suit pants that matched his jacket. The dry cleaner, one of two in Bath, was located right next door to the men’s store where he’d bought his socks, so he had talked Wirf into stopping in on the off chance. “That’s them, right there,” Sully’d pointed when the pants came by, recognizing them among the first batch of items that creaked past them on the overhead chain.

“Unbelievable,” Wirf had muttered.

The girl blinked when she read the date on the ticket. “Nineteen eighty-two?” she read. “You brought these in two years ago?”

“Don’t tell me they’re not done yet, either,” Sully warned her. “I need them right now.”

Jocko was still standing guard outside when Sully finally emerged, zipping his fly for emphasis. “I thought you were in jail,” Jocko said.

“I was,” Sully admitted. “I’ve been given a three-hour furlough. Since I’m a bearer.”

Jocko snorted at this. “God, I love small towns,” he said. “You even been arraigned?”

“Tomorrow,” Sully told him.

“Didn’t I tell you to watch out for that cop?” Jocko said.

“I don’t know, did you?”

Jocko made a gurgling sound in his throat. “How are you going to plead?”

“Temporary insanity,” Sully told him. “We’re going to contend that those pills of yours made me crazy.”

All the blood drained out of Jocko’s face.

“Speaking of which”—Sully grinned at him—“I’m almost out again.”

“You’re a bad man, Sully.”

“So people say,” Sully conceded. “I don’t really believe it, though.”

“I looked all over for you yesterday,” Jocko recollected. “I didn’t know you were in jail.”

“Then you were the only one who didn’t,” Sully said. His assault of Officer Raymer had achieved wide notoriety even before a detailed account had appeared in the North Bath Weekly Journal , accompanied by a strong editorial that decried what the writer perceived to be a new spirit of lawlessness threatening not just their community but the very foundations of civilization. Coming, as this most recent episode had, on the very heels of the last, when a crazed deer hunter, not content to precipitate carnage in nearby forests, had come into town and begun shooting out windows along Upper Main Street. The editorial suggested that a trend was emerging and warned against the temptation to discount the earlier incident because the perpetrator resided in Schuyler Springs, a community with many undesirables, where such atrocities might be expected. No, there was in reality a series of subtle connections linking these two events if anyone cared to look for them. Indeed, there were families right in their own communities that had a documented history of violent behavior (the Sullivans, father and two sons, were not named), perhaps even, it was hinted, a genetic predisposition toward violence. The editorial ended on this ominous scientific note.