Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Sully, who had been eight at the time, couldn’t stop shivering, even when they were finally allowed to jump into the pool. The water felt cold, and he was one of the youngest boys there. All the rules frightened him, and he was afraid he’d violate one unintentionally and be expelled while his brother, four years older, was allowed to stay. The building’s subterranean corridors were confusing, and Sully wasn’t sure he could find his locker again, much less his father. Also permitted to join the boys’ free swim were two old men who lived at the Y, and they swam without bathing suits, which also frightened Sully, even after his brother explained that it was okay since they were all men and there weren’t any girls around to see your equipment. Sully’s own equipment had withdrawn almost into his body cavity. He tried to have a good time, but his lips were blue and he couldn’t stop shivering. One of the lifeguards noticed and ordered him back into the showers until he warmed up.

In the tiled shower room he’d stood beneath the powerful spray, the hot water beating down on him until it began to cool, whereupon he moved to another on the opposite side of the room. Every time the hot water ran out, he moved. Soon the room was thick and comfortable with steam, and Sully had allowed himself to drift into its moist warmth, mindless of the passage of time, coming out of his reverie only when the hot water ran cool, necessitating another change. He spent the entire two-hour free swim in the showers, listening to the distant shrieks of the other boys in the pool, not wanting to get out of the steam, or to return to the cold pool water, or to venture back into the locker room on the cold concrete floor to search for the locker where he and his brother had put their clothes.

“See if I ever take you again,” his father said later, his breath boozy in the front seat of the car he had borrowed to make the trip, when Patrick told on him. Sully was shivering in the backseat of the car as they returned to Bath. He was sick the entire week that followed. “Just see if I do.”

It didn’t take nearly as long to run out of hot water in Sully’s flat, and when he stepped out of the shower, he wondered if he was going to be sick, if that was why he’d suddenly remembered the YMCA episode after so many years in the limbo of his memory. He doubted it could be that he needed another reason to bear a grudge against his father, whose ghost, for some reason, seemed to be visiting him more often and vividly of late, starting right around the time he’d fallen from the ladder.

The good news was that his knee didn’t feel too bad, and Sully considered for the umpteenth time the illogic of his own body. Immediately after hard work, the knee felt pretty good. Tomorrow morning, he knew from experience, he would pay.

Which meant that he would have to go see Jocko first thing. He was almost out of Tylenol 3s, or whatever it was he was taking. Jocko did not always dispense his relief in labeled bottles. At least not to Sully. When Sully needed something for pain, Jocko didn’t stand on formalities like a physician’s prescription. When he got samples he thought Sully might be interested in, he slipped a bright plastic tube full of pills into Sully’s coat pocket and whispered verbal instructions for their use: “Here. Eat these.”

Downstairs, Miss Beryl was waiting for him in the hall, dressed in her robe and slippers. She always looked tinier and even more gnomelike when she stood in the large doorway to her flat. She was holding a fistful of mail, most of it, Sully could tell at a glance, junk. He often went weeks at a time without checking his mailbox and then, after a cursory glance, tossed whatever had accumulated there in the trash. People who wanted to contact him left messages for him at The Horse. People who didn’t know him well enough to do that were probably people he didn’t want to hear from anyway. Sully had no credit cards, and since his utilities were included in the rent he paid Miss Beryl, he didn’t have to worry about bills. To his way of thinking, he had no real relationship with the postal service. He didn’t even have his name on the mailbox, refused to put it there, in fact, not wanting to encourage the mailman. Now and then Miss Beryl would gather what collected there and thrust it at him, as she was doing now, with communications she judged to be of possible importance on top. The envelope on top of this particular fistful of mail looked to be a tax document from the Town of North Bath, no doubt reminding him of his obligations on the property his father left him when he died. Sully did not bother to open it to be sure. He leafed through the rest to make sure his disability check was not in the stash. He’d already thrown that away once in his rush to dispose of all the junk.

“You got a pen handy, Mrs. Peoples?” he asked, knowing full well she kept half a dozen in a glass by the door. In fact, she had anticipated his need and was holding a pen out to him disapprovingly. On the tax envelope he wrote in bold letters RETURN TO SENDER and deposited the junk mail in the small decorative trash can just inside his landlady’s door.

“You’re the most incurious man in the universe,” Miss Beryl remarked, as she often did on these occasions. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that inquiring minds want to know?”

“Maybe you just have better luck with the post office than I’ve had,” he suggested. “So for the mail has brought me my draft notice, my divorce papers, jury duty, half a dozen different threats that I can think of. And not a single piece of good news I didn’t already know about because somebody told me.”

Miss Beryl shook her head, studied her tenant. “You look better, anyhow,” she said.

“Than what?”

“Than you did when you came in,” said Miss Beryl, who had been watching at the window.

“Long day, Beryl,” Sully admitted.

“They get longer,” she warned. “I read about five books a week to pass the time. Of course, I read only half of some of them. I always stop when I realize I’ve read a book before.”

“Who said ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp’?” Sully suddenly remembered Carl’s quotation.

“I did,” she said. “All through eighth grade. Before me, it was Robert Browning. He said it only once, but he had a better audience.”

“What grade did he teach?” Sully grinned.

“I bet you can’t finish the quotation, smarty.”

“I thought it was finished,” Sully said truthfully.

“You had visitors this afternoon,” Miss Beryl said.

“Really?” Sully said. He had few visitors. People who knew him knew they had a better chance of running into him at Hattie’s or The Horse or the OTB.

“A young woman with a huge bosom and a tiny little girl.”

Sully was about to say he had no idea who this could be when it occurred to him. “Did the little girl have a bad eye?”

“Yes, poor little soul,” Miss Beryl confirmed. “The mother was all mouth and chest.”

This did not strike Sully as a fair assessment of Ruth’s daughter, Jane, though it was an accurate enough first impression.

“I must be losing patience with my fellow humans,” Miss Beryl went on. “Anymore I’m all for executing people who are mean to children. I used to favor just cutting off their feet. Now I want to rid the world of them completely. If this keeps up I’ll be voting Republican soon.”

“You’re definitely getting mean in your old age, Mrs. Peoples,” Sully said, trying to match her joking tone, though he could sense that the encounter had upset her. “She didn’t say what she wanted?” he asked, half fearfully, though he doubted Ruth’s daughter would have revealed much to Miss Beryl.

“I think she was just as glad you weren’t here,” Miss Beryl told him. “I got the impression she was on the lam from a no-good husband.”