Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“I think I can guarantee my client’s behavior,” Wirf said, shooting Sully a warning glance.

The judge regarded Wirf as he might a naughty child. “Don’t insult my intelligence, Mr. Wirfly. I know you and I know your client, and I know you can guarantee no such thing.”

Wirf, chastened, conceded that this was true.

“How about it, Mr. Sullivan?” the judge wanted to know. “You aren’t feeling tired, are you? like you were when you thought it might be a good idea to sucker-punch a police officer? You think you can behave like an adult for about ten minutes?”

“I’ll try, your Honor,” Sully promised.

“Don’t try,” the judge advised. “Just do it. And how about you, Officer?”

Officer Raymer’s brow had clouded. He wasn’t sure, but it was his impression that the judge had called him a fool a moment before, and in his opinion that was uncalled for. “I’d just like to say what’s this country coming to, that’s all I’d like to know. I can’t believe this whole thing, and I just want to say that for the record.”

“Well, you can’t,” Judge Flatt told him. “Go out in the hall and sit and think about it for a while and it’ll come to you why you can’t say anything for the record, because I’ve already explained it once.”

Both Satch Henry and the chief of police were trying to suppress grins now, and Officer Raymer, noticing this and intuiting that his support was eroding, bolted angrily from the room. Sully followed at a more leisurely pace, still arriving at the door to the judge’s chambers in time to prevent it from slamming and to see Officer Raymer disappear into the men’s room across the hall. From inside the rest room came the sound of a trash canister being kicked hard.

There was a lounge at the far end of the hall, so Sully made for this in the hope that there might be a coffee machine. He had a pocketful of change from the nickel-dime-quarter poker game he’d gotten into the night before when Wirf and Carl Roebuck stopped by to see him. Carl seemed to be monumentally pissed off at him, but he refused to say why in jail. During the course of the evening, Carl Roebuck had called him every name he could think of. He smoked and drank all night long, and didn’t seem to want to be reminded of his recent resolutions. Sully had attributed his mood to the reported collapse of the Ultimate Escape deal. When the game grew too large for his cell, they’d had to move it down to the conference room next door to Booking. Sully had won all night long, with the result that he now had enough change in his pocket to set off a metal detector.

His luck from the night before seemed to be holding today, because there was indeed a coffee machine, and when he fed it two quarters and got in return a half cup of tar-black coffee, he still could not shake the overall feeling of good fortune, his sense that perhaps he had played out his stupid streak, that things just might conceivably work out after all. He was sitting with his leg up on a plastic chair and contemplating the still long odds when Officer Raymer entered, his fly at half staff. When he saw Sully, he considered turning on his heel and leaving again, Sully could tell.

Sully pushed a plastic chair out from underneath the table. “Sit down,” he suggested. “Take a load off.”

“No thanks,” Officer Raymer said, staring at Sully from behind his dark glasses. “You know, there’s no such fucking thing as justice. That’s what gripes me.”

“Of course there isn’t,” Sully conceded. “How old are you?”

“Well, it sucks,” Officer Raymer said.

Sully nodded. “It absolutely does. How about a cup of coffee? I’ll buy.”

“I can buy my own coffee,” the policeman said, fishing in his pocket as he headed for the coffee machine.

From where he was seated, Sully could see that Officer Raymer was mistaken. The coins in his palm appeared to total about forty-five cents. A few machines down the wall was a dollar-bill changer with a handwritten OUT OF ORDER sign affixed to it. Officer Raymer did not observe this until after he’d inserted a dollar bill and had it rejected. Sully grabbed a handful of change and spread it out on the plastic tabletop. The policeman, seething, made change and tossed the dollar bill on top of the pile of Sully’s coins. When, for fifty cents, Officer Raymer received the same half cup of muddy liquid Sully’d received, Sully, who had a lifetime of experience with what the policeman was feeling, saw what was coming and said, “Hold on a minute” and moved to another table. When he judged himself safe from ricochet, he said, “Okay, go ahead,” and Officer Raymer, who had grabbed the machine with his hands, began to heave and rock it until the top of the machine slammed against the wall and rebounded, only to be slammed again and again. This the policeman continued to do until something ruptured inside the machine and coffee gushed out onto the floor. Officer Raymer stepped back then and watched, with unalloyed satisfaction, as the puddle became a lake. “There,” he said.

Ollie Quinn burst in just as Officer Raymer pulled up a chair at Sully’s table. “Jesus,” the chief said, surveying the damage. “I thought it was gunfire.” Then he disappeared again.

Officer Raymer took a sip of his coffee and allowed the color to drain from his cheeks. He’d gone from enraged to sheepish in the time it took to destroy a coffee machine, and Sully understood this too. The policeman sighed. “It all just gets to you sometimes, don’t it?” he said.

Sully was about to share with Officer Raymer that this was precisely the feeling that had caused Sully to punch him, that it hadn’t been anything personal, when he looked up and noticed Peter and his grandson standing in the entryway just vacated by the chief of police. Peter took in the scene with that detached, ironic expression that had so annoyed Cass, as if to suggest that other people’s lunacy was to be expected. Sully doubted the little boy, on the other hand, would ever master such detachment. As always, Will looked strangely adult in the way he approached his grandfather, climbed onto his good leg, gave him a hug around the neck. Another kid would have run. Another kid would have forgotten which leg was the bad one. Another kid would have forgotten that there was a bad one.

“What do you say, sport?”

“Wacker’s in the hospital,” he reported.

Peter pulled up a chair, nodding a greeting at the morose policeman. If he was surprised to find Officer Raymer and his father sitting peacefully together at the same table, he didn’t say so.

“You met my son?” Sully asked.

Officer Raymer frowned. “You were in the truck, right?” Peter acknowledged that this was true as they shook hands. “What’s this about Wacker?” Sully asked. “Had his tonsils out,” Peter said. “Everything go okay?”

Peter shrugged. “So I’m told. The only reason I was notified was so I could expect the hospital bill.”

Sully nodded. “I didn’t figure you’d be back so soon,” he said. Peter had taken the truck after the funeral and driven to Morgantown to settle his remaining business there — gather his things from the house he and Charlotte had been renting, close their bank accounts, gather his books from his office at the university, see about extending his insurance benefits since Sullivan Enterprises did not offer Blue Cross-Blue Shield.

“I just got back,” Peter said.

“You must have driven all night.”

“There wasn’t much to do,” Peter explained. “Charlotte took most of it. I had more stuff at the office than the house.”

“What’d they think about you leaving at the college?” Sully wondered.

Peter smiled his infuriating, self-pitying smile. “They weren’t nearly as sad to see me go as my landlord, who expressed his disappointment by refusing to refund our security deposit.”