Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“What are you doing out here?” Peter wanted to know. He adjusted his rearview mirror so he could see Sully in the backseat.

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Sully said, not anxious to explain.

“We’ve been summoned to Thanksgiving dinner,” Charlotte said. “And of course we dare not offend royalty.”

This was clearly a reference to Vera, who would run things if allowed to. In the end she had failed to run Sully, but not for lack of effort. Her second husband she’d chosen more carefully. “I don’t think I’ve seen Vera since the last time you were here,” Sully said, taking a neutral position on the subject of Vera. “How long ago was that?” he wondered, realizing as he gave this question voice that it was not a simple one. Often when his son and family visited Vera and Ralph they snuck into and out of town without seeing him.

“How can you live in a town the size of Bath and not see everybody all the time?” Charlotte wondered.

“Well, dolly, Vera and I don’t travel in the same circles,” Sully explained. “In fact, Vera doesn’t travel in circles at all. She goes pretty much straight forward.”

“Does she ever,” Charlotte agreed unpleasantly.

“ Somebody had to,” Peter offered.

Sully glanced at the rearview mirror, but Peter’s eyes were straight ahead on the road. Out the passenger side window, Sully noticed that they’d just passed the cemetery where Big Jim Sullivan lay buried, and Sully resisted the urge to give his father the finger, a gesture he would then have had to explain to his grandsons. He wondered if, when Peter saw him alongside the road, there’d been a moment when the boy considered rolling down the window, tooting, and flipping Sully the bird. Speaking of karma.

“I’d let you hold your grandson,” Charlotte said, “except he’s busy pooping at the moment.” Andy was on her shoulder, staring at Sully over the back of the seat. The child’s face was intense, but focused on a vacant spot between the end of his nose and his grandfather. A gaze full of rectal purpose.

“Thanks,” Sully said. “I’d hate like hell to get it all over my good clothes.”

This remark startled Will, who stopped fingering his nose and looked over at Sully, clearly wondering if these could be his grandfather’s good clothes. His eyes widened with fear and sympathy.

“Hello, Mordecai,” Sully said to Wacker, who had not stopped staring at him even for a second, though he did not seem to share his older brother’s fear that these might be Sully’s good clothes.

“My name’s not Mordecai!” the boy said angrily. “It’s Wacker!”

“How come they call you Wacker?” Sully said, winking across Wacker at Will.

Wacker’s face brightened instantly, and before Sully could prevent it, the little boy located a long hardback Dr. Seuss and brought it down with a crash on Sully’s knee, resulting in an explosion of sincere expletives that Sully hadn’t had the least intention of using in the company of his son’s family. Will, who had bravely held back the tears occasioned by Wacker’s attack on himself, now burst into tears of genuine terror and sympathy.

As soon as Sully could catch his breath, he told his son to pull over, which Peter did reluctantly, into the parking lot of the IGA supermarket. Once out of the Gremlin, Sully headed straight across the lot toward the abandoned photo shack some hundred yards away. For some reason, the faster he limped, the less the knee hurt. In about fifty yards, Peter caught up to him.

“Jesus, Dad,” he said, his face a study in annoyance, pretty much devoid of concern, it seemed to Sully, who was surprised to discover that a little concern from his son might have been a comfort. “What’d the little bastard do?”

Sully slowed, the waves of pain and nausea subsiding a little. He took a deep breath and said, “Wow.”

“He’s just a kid, for heaven’s sake,” Peter said. Apparently this was intended to be a comment on Wacker’s strength, his inability to inflict significant pain. What he wanted to know was why his father, lifelong tough guy, was carrying on like this.

Since it was the simplest way to explain, Sully pulled up his pant leg to show him. When he saw his father’s knee, Peter’s eyes went so round with fear that he looked like Will. “Wacker did that?” he said, incredulous. “With Dr. Seuss?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Sully told him, satisfied with his son’s reaction. “I fell off a ladder. A year ago.”

Peter looked greatly relieved to learn this. “Jesus,” he repeated. “You should see a doctor.”

Sully snorted. “I’ve seen about twenty so far.”

When he lowered his pant leg, Peter still stared at the spot, as if he could see the grotesque, purple swelling right through the fabric. They turned back toward the Gremlin. “What do they say?” Peter wanted to know.

“Twenty different things,” Sully said, though this was not precisely true. “They wanted to give me a new knee, back when it happened. I should have let them, too.”

At the time, it hadn’t seemed like a good idea. After the injury, the pain had been intense but manageable, and Sully had thought that given time the pain would gradually ebb, the way hurt always did. Had he agreed to the operation, he’d have been out of commission even longer, and he told himself he couldn’t afford that, which was pretty close to true. But the real reason he hadn’t let them operate was that the whole idea of a new knee had seemed foolish. In fact, Sully had laughed when the doctor first suggested it, thinking he was joking. The idea of getting a new anything ran contrary to Sully’s upbringing. “Don’t come crying to me and wanting a new one if you can’t take care of the one you got,” his father had been fond of saying. In his father’s house, if you spilled your milk at the supper table, you didn’t drink milk that night. If your ball got stuck up on the roof, too bad. You shouldn’t have thrown it up there. If you took your watch off and left it someplace and you wanted to know the time, you could always walk downtown and see what it said on the First National Bank clock. They put that there, according to Sully’s father, specifically for people too dumb to hang on to their watches.

As a boy Sully had hated his father’s intolerance of human error, especially since that intolerance was chiefly reserved for others. But the attitude took, and Sully, as an adult, had come to think of making do without things you’d broken as the price you paid for having your own way.

“Why not let them do the operation now?” Peter wanted to know.

“Listen,” Sully said, “don’t worry about it.” He’d wanted Peter to know about the injury, but he had little desire to go into details or offer explanations. In the year since he’d Men, the knee had become arthritic, which according to the insurance company physicians was the reason the pain was getting worse. It was their contention that Sully had fucked up by not letting them operate when they wanted to. This was Wirf’s paraphrase of their position, actually.

“The swelling’s mostly fluid,” Sully told him. “I should probably get it drained again. Except it’s expensive and hurts like hell and it doesn’t feel that much better when they’re done.”

Slowly, they made their way back to the car. Andy, Sully noticed, had been returned to his car seat. Will had stopped crying and was now studying his grandfather fearfully through the side window. Wacker was examining Dr. Seuss with what looked to Sully like newfound respect for the written word. Charlotte, who had not gotten out, was staring straight ahead, massaging her temples.

“I haven’t done something to offend your wife, have I?” it occurred to Sully to ask. He often did offend women without meaning to or even knowing how he’d managed. Maybe she didn’t want someone as filthy as he was in her car. Maybe he’d been wrong before. Perhaps it was Peter who’d insisted on pulling over, Charlotte who hadn’t wanted to.