Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“Why shouldn’t your father look lost?” Ruth continued. “He’s been lost every day of his life.”

“Yeah, I know,” Janey said sadly, “but he’s always had you, so it didn’t matter. You should at least let him come visit us.”

With Janey’s husband in jail, Ruth had insisted they repossess the trailer their daughter and son-in-law had been living in. They’d hauled it from Schuyler back to Bath, setting it up in the yard alongside the garage, right where it had been before. They themselves had inherited it furnished when Zack’s brother drove his four-wheeler out onto a frozen lake during a thaw. Their first thought had been to sell it until they discovered how little the trailer would bring, with its rusted skirting and brown snow marks halfway up the sides. Inside, the trailer was drafty, and Ruth suspected the utility bill was going to be obscene. But if ever there was a man who deserved to live in a dilapidated trailer, that man was her husband.

“You’re just unhappy ’cause you lost Sully, and now you’re taking it out on Daddy,” Janey suggested without turning around.

“I didn’t lose anybody,” Ruth corrected her daughter. She’d seen Sully this morning at the funeral, and he’d looked so needy that she’d suffered a moment’s misgiving before redoubling her resolve. “I quit the both of them. Life can’t be that much worse without men in it. At least the men I seem to attract.”

“If it wasn’t for bad taste you wouldn’t have any at all,” Janey cheerfully admitted.

“I liked you better with your mouth wired shut,” Ruth said, adding, “and you’re a fine one to talk about taste in men.”

“Yeah, well …” Janey said in that irritating manner she had of not letting her voice drop. What it was supposed to mean, Ruth had discovered, was that in Janey’s considered opinion, whoever was talking was full of shit.

“Don’t ‘Yeah, well’ me,” Ruth said. “You know how I hate that.” “Yeah, well …”

“And I don’t want you taking food over to your father, either,” Ruth said, voicing another of her suspicions.

“I haven’t taken him anything,” Janey insisted. As she spoke, Zack emerged from the garage and made his slippery way back to the trailer. Under one arm he was carrying a package the size and shape of a football wrapped in aluminum foil. This time he didn’t wave or even glance in the direction of the house. “What’s that disease you get if you don’t eat any vegetables?”

Ruth thought for a minute. “Rickets,” she said, remembering.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Janey said. “You want to see Daddy with rickets?”

“I’d like to see him with boils,” Ruth replied. She knew what her daughter was talking about. Since Ruth had banished her husband to the trailer nearly two weeks before, Zack had been subsisting, exclusively she suspected, on fried venison steaks.

In truth, it was the deer that had caused her to give him the boot. Even before the deer she’d been furious with her husband, of course. Zack had stubbornly refused to admit that he was the one who’d sent Roy over to Sully’s to look for Janey, but he’d looked guilty as hell and it was just the sort of gutless thing he’d do, especially if Roy had threatened him.

But when he’d claimed the deer that Roy had shot and left lying with its tongue lolling out on Upper Main Street, that was too much. She could just see Zack arguing for the deer, explaining how he’d cart it off for free, how it was by rights his daughter’s anyhow since her husband, who’d shot the deer, would be going off to jail. He’d probably explained how he had a freezer out in the garage, how he’d have the animal butchered and stored there. How it had been killed legally. Otherwise, what? It’d be a crime to waste two hundred pounds of meat. This last was the argument he’d used with Ruth: “It’d be a crime to waste it.” He’d shrugged his narrow shoulders, the dumbest and most pitiful gesture Zack had in his impressive arsenal of dumb, pitiful gestures.

Yes, it had been the deer that Ruth had been unable to face. They’d eaten another deer one winter several years before, and she’d made up her mind then that she’d never eat another. This earlier deer Zack had bagged himself with his Dodge pickup, knocking the animal right back into the woods from which it had darted in front of him, as inescapable as rare good fortune. Even before he’d skidded to a stop, Zack had concluded that they were going to need a freezer, and he knew a guy who had a good used one for sale. He bought it on the way home, put it into the bed of the truck with the dead deer. Then he’d driven over to the IGA, parked in the lot and gone to fetch Ruth from her cash register. “Free meat for the winter,” he said. Ruth had examined first the dead deer and then her live husband. It was the pleased look on Zack’s face that got to her. Clearly, he couldn’t have been more proud of his deer had he shot it with a bow and arrow at a distance of a hundred and fifty yards. “Hell, I can pound that out,” he said when she went around to examine the stove-in, bloody grille of the Dodge. But she’d already turned and headed back into the IGA and her register, preferring to say nothing than to give voice to the clearest sentiment she was at that moment feeling — that she’d married a man whose idea of luck was a road kill. They’d eaten venison that entire winter, and with every forkful she’d had to swallow his reminder that the meat was free.

When Zack claimed this second deer, something in Ruth that had been stretched thin and taut for a long time had snapped. She was married to a hyena. Their house was full of junk he scavenged from the dump, trash he’d brought home and insisted she inspect. Often the things he brought home were not even complete things but rather the insides of things — copper coils and rotors and sections of fiberglass and electromagnets, all of which he insisted were “perfectly good,” by which he meant perfectly free. There were a great many mysteries in Zack’s life, but the one he kept returning to, the one that caused him to scratch his furrowed brow in slack-jawed disbelief, was that so many people just up and threw away things that were “perfectly good”—tires with enough tread to be recapped, appliances with motors and pumps that still worked, heavy hunks of metal that could be sold for scrap. It was amazing how much of it there was out there, and Zack brought it all home. What he couldn’t seem to grasp was that his wife’s objection was to his practice of scavenging, not his selections. He kept thinking that once he explained an item’s value, she’d understand. He didn’t grasp that the only thing she hated worse than being married to a scavenger was having to listen to the reasoning of one. Her idea of hell was having to listen to Zack explain, throughout eternity, all the things that people thought were worthless that you could actually get two cents a pound for if you knew where to go.

Janey was drying her hands now, and Ruth studied her daughter, fighting back unexpected tears as she did so. How different Janey’s life would have been, Ruth thought, if she had been pretty. With that body, had Janey been pretty, the boys would have been scared and given her room. It wasn’t that Janey was ugly, just plain, like Ruth herself, and it was that plainness that always gave boys courage. And of course they couldn’t keep their hands off her. At thirteen she’d had the bust development of a twenty-year-old, and at fourteen Ruth had come home late one afternoon to find a boy groping her on the living room sofa, both hands caught underneath Janey’s bra by Ruth’s sudden appearance. To Ruth, her daughter was still that vulnerable teenager whose body was well out ahead of her brain. She wasn’t innocent, exactly. Janey enjoyed the groping, had been enjoying it even that afternoon when Ruth had interrupted. Her problem was that she couldn’t seem to put the groping into perspective. Ruth sympathized. Her daughter came by her limitations rightly.