Richard Russo: Nobody's Fool

To Ruth’s way of thinking, Sully’s unwillingness to forgive was the source of his own stubborn failures, and in the past she’d been capable of being very persuasive on this subject, would in fact have persuaded just about anyone but Sully. Her failure to convince him was probably the best single explanation for why things never worked out between them. She made it clear that he could not have them both — herself and his stubborn, fixed determination. For a while he’d allowed her to undermine it in subtle ways. Once they’d even visited Big Jim in his nursing home. But Sully could only surrender so much, and he understood that if he and Ruth married, she’d eventually have him visiting Big Jim’s grave with fresh flowers. She’d go with him and make sure he left them. And where was the justice in that? It would mean that in the end Big Jim had fooled them all and beat the rap, walked out of court on some flimsy Christian loophole called forgiveness. No. Fuck him. Eternally.

“Fuck you,” Sully said out loud at the front door to the house on Bowdon Street, pushing it open angrily as the second of Jocko’s screaming yellow zonkers finally ripped wide open the portal to the past, setting his brain, his heart, his soul churning. “Fuck you, old man,” the words he’d wanted to say as a boy, words that sounded fine, even now, in the empty house.

Big Jim Sullivan, at the base of the stairs and about to head up with fists clenched, turned drunkenly to face Sully in the doorway, nothing but darkness between them. His face was bloody and unnatural, its skin pulled tightly in conflicting directions by the clumsy stitches of old wounds. His nose, broken half a dozen times in brawls, was no longer plumb, his respiration audible. He grinned at his son across what separated them, the same grin Sully remembered from the day he missed the next rung of the ladder and fell off. That day, a tall chain-link fence had separated them. Now, nothing.

“It’s about time you decided to stand up and testify,” Big Jim said.

“I’m right here, old man,” Sully assured him, feeling solid for the first time in days. If this was destiny, so be it. “Let’s go a few rounds, you and me. We’ll see who quits first.”

His father’s grin broadened. “Come take your medicine,” he said.

Still sensing ambush, Sully let the door swing shut behind him so there could be no retreat. Unless his father had made friends in Hell, it was just the two of them.

At two o’clock Miss Beryl was awakened by what sounded like someone dragging a heavy chain across some distant floor. “We wear the chains we forge in life,” she thought, half expecting Clive Jr., gotten up as a ghost in Dickensian garb, to appear at her bedroom door. She wondered if what all this meant was that she was about to have another gusher. She sat up in bed and swung her feet over the side in search of her slippers. Before standing up, she wiggled her toes and flexed her fingers questioningly. In the past her spells had been preceded by a tingling at the extremities, though she felt no such sensation now. Nor, when she stood, did she feel woozy or distant.

Maybe it was just that the long day — so lacking in pity — was still not finished with her. She found her robe and made her way into the kitchen, where she turned on the bright overhead, confident that if there was a chain-rattling ghost on the premises, it wouldn’t possess the temerity to pursue her into this cheerful, bright, hundred-watt realm. Tea, at this hour, was probably not a good idea, but she put the kettle on anyway and stood watching it, half expecting the phone in the next room to ring.

It had been ringing when she returned from Schuyler Springs, and she took several calls before unplugging the phone. There’d been two more from reporters, who were now referring to Clive Jr.’s unavailability for comment as his disappearance. There had also been another call from the woman at the savings and loan, who sounded suspicious when Miss Beryl insisted that, no, Clive Jr. had not contacted her, had not left her any instructions, no hint of a destination or intentions.

In her mailbox when she returned from Schuyler Springs there’d been the manila envelope she’d given to Abraham Wirfly the day before. Its contents, for which she should have been relieved and grateful, had done little to cheer her up. Inside, she found a handwritten note: “Unable to reach you, I’ve taken the rather large liberty of rescuing the enclosed from the county clerk’s office, where it had not been fully processed. We can, of course, refile any time you wish, but given recent events I must strongly advise you against transferring any property to your son at this time. The second matter we discussed has been dealt with as per your instructions.”

This, then, was what had come of her poor compromise, her attempt to do right, to separate the conflicting dictates of head and heart, to assuage conscience, which was, as Mark Twain had shrewdly observed, “no better than an old yeller dog.” For fairness and loyalty, however important to the head, were issues that could seldom be squared in the human heart, at the deepest depths of which lay the mystery of affection, of love, which you either felt or you didn’t, pure as instinct, which seized you, not the other way around, making a mockery of words like “should” and “ought.” The human heart, where compromise could not be struck, not ever. Where transgressions exacted a terrible price. Where tangled black limbs fell. Where the boom got lowered.

When Miss Beryl again heard the sound of a distant chain being dragged across a floor, she went to investigate, turning on lights as she moved from one room to the next. She traced the sound to the hallway she shared with Sully, and she contemplated the wisdom of opening her door to see what manner of thing was on the other side. Still, God hates a coward, she thought, and opened the door a crack.

The hall light was on, and there, just outside her door by the stairway that led up to Sully’s flat, stood a Doberman with a lopsided grin. One end of the chain she’d been hearing was attached to the dog’s rhinestone collar. The other end was attached to nothing at all. As far as she could tell, the dog was the only occupant of the hallway, though she was unwilling to open the door any wider to be sure. “Who are you?” she asked the Doberman, which started at the sound of her voice, suffered some kind of spasm and slumped against the banister as if shot. Before Miss Beryl could process this, the outside door opened and Sully materialized, screwdriver in hand.

“I tightened that railing back down for you,” he told Miss Beryl when she opened the door to survey the strange scene in full. Sully seemed not to be surprised by the fact that there was a Doberman slumped against the stairs, which might or might not have meant that the dog was with him. Neither did Sully seem surprised that his landlady was awake at two in the morning.

In fact, her tenant looked to Miss Beryl like a man for whom there were no more surprises. He was paler and thinner and more ghostlike than ever, though not exactly Dickensian. “You mind if I come in and take my boots off, Mrs. Peoples?”

“Of course not, Donald,” she said, stepping back from the door.

At this the dog let out a huge sigh and slumped all the way to the floor. Both Sully and Miss Beryl studied the animal. Sully shook his head. “What’s your policy on pets?”

“Does he bark?” Miss Beryl wondered.

“He did a few minutes ago,” Sully told her, his voice, for some reason, shaky. “Just in time, too. I was about to step into thin air.”

Miss Beryl waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. So pale and thin, Sully looked like air might well be his natural element.

“I can only stay a minute,” he told her, collapsing into the newly repaired Queen Anne, which protested audibly but held together. Mr. Blue had been right. It was fixed.