Richard Russo: Nobody's Fool

“He’s in love with my wife too,” Carl said. “Everybody loves Toby. Nobody loves me.”

Wirf appeared in the doorway, using an inverted push broom as a crutch, his empty pant leg dangling. “You’d keep my leg, wouldn’t you?” he said to Sully.

“You don’t need a leg,” Carl Roebuck turned and studied him. “You need a parrot.”

“Should we give him back his leg?” Sully asked Will.

Will nodded eagerly.

Sully slid Wirf’s prosthesis in front of the boy. “Go ahead.”

The boy’s eyes got wide, and he shook his head, leaning away from it.

“It’s not alive,” Sully said, rapping it. “See?”

“He don’t want to, Sully,” said Ralph, who looked like he didn’t want to either.

“You could tell your brother,” Sully said. “You think he’d believe you?”

Will stared at the limb with fear and longing. The idea clearly appealed to him. The limb clearly did not.

“Sully—” Ralph began, but Sully held up his hand, and after a long moment the boy reached out and took Wirf’s leg with both hands, as if he suspected that it contained the man’s liquid life and the spilling of a drop would mean less of him. They all watched the boy as he carried the limb to Wirf where he leaned against the door frame. When Didi snuffed her nose, Sully looked and saw that she was crying, tears rolling silently down her cheeks.

Wirf drew up a chair and accepted the prosthesis from Sully’s grandson. “Thanks,” he said, pulling up his pant cuff. No one, not even Will, looked away as he fastened his leg. “Your rotten grandfather would have kept it. Now I’m a whole man again.”

For a moment, as Sully watched, it wasn’t Will standing there but Peter, the Peter he remembered as a boy. Or maybe even himself, the boy he remembered himself to have been so long ago, the boy who had a heart capable of being broken.

“Jesus Christ,” Carl Roebuck said softly. “What a day.”

By the time Sully arrived at the flat the U-Haul was nearly unloaded. The only things left inside were an oak desk and a tall file cabinet. Peter had backed the trailer up over the curb to the base of the front porch and laid a ramp that angled from the inside of the U-Haul to the top of the steps. Sully was inside tugging the desk from the rear of the U-Haul toward the front when Peter appeared on the porch. “Grab the other end,” Sully suggested. Thankfully, Peter had taken the drawers out.

Peter moved past him to the other end of the desk but declined to lift just yet. “Where’s Rub?”

“Home,” Sully said. “I thought I’d give him the night off.” Actually, he’d thought about fetching Rub, but it was late and Rub was probably still sick. Also, he’d heard that Bootsie had been released, and Sully couldn’t face Rub’s wife, not after the kind of day this had been. “You going to pick up that end, or what?”

“You’re drunk,” Peter guessed. Either that or he could smell the beer in the confined space of the U-Haul trailer.

“A little,” Sully admitted.

“This is heavy,” Peter said.

“I can lift my end,” Sully assured him. “Just worry about your own.”

Peter studied him a moment. “I get this feeling we’re fighting over a woman again.”

“I get the feeling you expect this desk to walk upstairs on its own if you wait long enough,” Sully said. “Come on.”

“Fine,” Peter said. “Kill yourself.”

When they got up the ramp and onto the porch, Peter set his end down. “Let me back up, at least,” he suggested.

“No.”

“Fine.”

They lifted then and moved through the door to the foot of the stairs, Sully backing, Peter inching forward.

“Slow now,” Sully said, feeling the first step at his heel. The problem, he knew, was how to use the bad leg — to step with it or plant with it. Plant, he decided, since the good leg would bend at the knee and he’d have to thrust off it. They began going up the stairs a step at a time. He lifted from a ridge underneath the rim, and after each step he allowed the legs of the desk to rest a moment on the step below. They’d only gone four or five steps before he could see, even through his beery fog, that this was foolishness. Peter and Rub could walk the bastard of a desk right up in the morning. It would take them thirty seconds, and they wouldn’t have to stop once, much less at every step. A year ago Sully himself would not have had to stop. Worse, their slow progress was making the job twice as hard on Peter, who had to bear the weight of the desk between lifts. Sully could see his son sweating profusely in the frigid air. “You enjoying yourself?” Peter wanted to know when they were about halfway.

“Yes, I am,” Sully said, hoisting another step.

“Have you decided what it is you’re trying to prove?”

“We’re arguing over a woman, I thought.”

“That’s right.”

Sully heaved again, and they went up another step. “Well, pray for me then,” he suggested. “Because if I lose my end of this desk, we won’t have a dick between us.”

The living room that had seemed so spacious that morning was now crowded with boxes that Peter had stacked in rows in front of the fireplace and the built-in bookshelves and along the walls. The two men guided the desk between them and to the far corner, where Peter had reserved a space for it.

“I thought you said Charlotte took everything,” Sully said, looking around the room at all the cardboard boxes.

“She did,” Peter said. “These are mostly my books.”

Sully tried to take this in. There had to be seventy boxes. In the next room, the shower thunked off. Sully hadn’t been aware of the sound, or its significance, until it stopped. He studied Peter, who leaned against the desk. “Didi says hi,” he told his son.

If Peter was surprised, he didn’t show it. “I was afraid she’d turn up. She jump you yet?”

“No. She jumped Carl, though.”

“She will,” he said, adding, “Just to get at me.”

“I should probably let her,” Sully said. “Just to get at you.”

More sounds from the next room. “I better say you’re here.”

They heard the bathroom door open then, and Sully purposely turned away. He was tempted to leave, and when Peter followed Toby Roebuck into the bedroom, he nearly did. Behind the door he could hear urgent, confidential voices. From the front window he saw the big IGA sign across the street flicker and go dark, but just before it did he caught a flicker of shiny red metal in the street below.

Sitting on the big oak desk, he leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes for a second, enjoying the dark, even though the solitude turned up the volume on the song his knee was singing. That afternoon and evening, once Jocko’s pill took effect and he’d found a few decent distractions (beer, bourbon, poker, a pretty half-naked young woman), he’d almost been able to forget about Vera and his knee, its singing reduced to background vocals, the orchestration to soft violins. Now the marching band was back again, but just tuning up, not stomping to the rhythm of the bass drums. For which he was thankful, being far too worn out to march.

And indeed there were other things to be thankful for. His luck had finally turned. He still had his triple winnings and another five hundred or so from the afternoon’s poker game. He wasn’t out of the woods, but tomorrow he’d be able to go see Harold Proxmire and give him fifteen hundred on the truck, which would hold him for another couple months. And he’d have his first and last months’ rent on the new apartment he hadn’t found yet. If his luck held, Miles Anderson wouldn’t return for a while and see how far behind he was on the house. It shouldn’t take more than a couple weeks to get more or less caught up now that Rub was back in the fold. Peter had managed to convince Anderson that everything would get done. Probably the smart thing would be to turn the whole Anderson project over to Peter. If it snowed, he could afford to do that. Maybe he could afford to anyway. Sully felt the big wad of bills bulging comfortably in his pants pocket. He hadn’t even counted it yet. Maybe he was even better off than he knew.