Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“That would fit,” Sully admitted, recalling now that back in the summer, when Jane had run away from her husband the first time, Sully had told Ruth to send her and the little girl over to his flat if they needed a place her husband wasn’t likely to look. “She married some stiff from Schuyler Springs who’s in and out of jail.”

“Well,” Miss Beryl said. “I’m relieved that’s the explanation. I thought at first you’d gone and got that young thing pregnant.”

“The young ones won’t have me anymore, Beryl,” Sully told her, Toby Roebuck flashing into his consciousness unbidden, as she’d been doing all afternoon. “I wish one or two would.”

“You’re a cur, sir,” Miss Beryl told him. “I’ve always wanted to say that to a man.”

Sully nodded, accepted the indictment. “I thought you were a Republican,” he said.

“No,” Miss Beryl told him. “Clive Jr. is. His father was too. Clive Sr. was a hardheaded man in many respects.”

“Not a bad one, though,” Sully remembered.

“No,” Miss Beryl admitted thoughtfully. “I miss arguing with him. It would have taken a lifetime to win him over to my way of thinking. There are times I think he died so he wouldn’t have to admit I was right.”

When Sully was gone, Miss Beryl returned to her chair in the front room where she had been reading. The chair was placed directly in front of the television she seldom turned on. On top of it were Clives Jr. and Sr., stars present and past of her firmament. “You were hardheaded,” she informed her husband. Never an articulate man, Clive Sr. had lost every argument he ever got into with Miss Beryl, who possessed sufficient intellect and verbal dexterity to corner and dispatch him, and so he learned early on in their marriage not to detail his logic to a woman who was not above explaining where it was flawed. “I have my reasons,” he’d learned to say, and to accompany this statement with an expression he deemed enigmatic.

He died wearing that very expression, and he was still wearing it when Miss Beryl arrived at the scene of the accident. After young Audrey Peach had braked him into the windshield, Clive Sr. had rocked back into the car’s bucket seat, his head angled oddly because of his broken neck. He appeared to be thinking. I have my reasons, he seemed to say, and for the past twenty-five years he’d left her alone to ponder them.

“And you …” she told her son, but she let the sentence trail off.

Miss Beryl was still holding the letter that Sully had marked RETURN TO SENDER. She did not need to open it to know what was inside. In the metal box in her bedroom she had an entire manila folder marked “Sully,” and she would add this letter to the others when she retired for the night. “I’m doing the right thing,” she said aloud to the two Clives. “So just pipe down.”

One of the things Sully appreciated about the White Horse Tavern was that it had a window out front with a Black Label Beer sign that hadn’t worked in years. That allowed Sully to peek in and see who was inside before committing himself. There were nights — and this was one of them — when he didn’t want to get involved. What he wanted was supper and bed. One beer might not be bad, but one had a way of leading directly to half a case. Tonight, a quick glance inside was enough to convince Sully. Wirf, predictably, was there, no doubt preparing his lecture about why Sully should stay in school, about how his going back to work would fuck everything up. Carl Roebuck, less predictably, was anchoring the near corner of the bar, a bad sign. Carl usually did his drinking and carousing in Schuyler Springs and came into The Horse only when he was looking for somebody. Usually Sully. And Sully knew that if Carl was trying to find him, he’d just as soon stay lost. True, Carl owed him for the other half of his day’s work, but that couldn’t be why he was there. Kenny, Carl’s father, had been the kind of man who went looking for people he owed, but Carl just looked for people who owed him. Maybe he was just there because he was locked out of his house, but Sully decided not to take a chance.

When Carl slid off his stool and headed for the men’s room, Sully ducked back from the window, peering in again in time to see Carl disappear into the head. Though Sully’d never noticed it before, it occurred to him now how much Carl reminded him of his father, even though he was about half Kenny’s size and Kenny had been far too homely to be much of a ladies’ man. Sully found himself wishing it was Kenny, not his son, who was peeing in the men’s room trough. Had it been Kenny, Sully wouldn’t have minded getting involved. There was much to be said for a man who wouldn’t hold it against you when you burned down his house.

The only other place that might be open at this time of night was Jerry’s Pizza a few doors down, where all the kids hung out. Normally a greasy burger at The Horse would have been preferable, but there weren’t any kids hanging around Jerry’s entrance, so Sully decided to take a chance. It was Thanksgiving Eve, after all, and maybe the kids were all home and the jukebox that blared heavy metal would be silent for once. Besides, Ruth would be working, and he was going to have to face her eventually anyway. Maybe he’d find her in a holiday mood. Maybe if he saw her he’d quit thinking about Toby Roebuck. It could happen. And it might be a good idea to find out why Jane had come over to the flat that afternoon.

Blessedly, the place was empty. Sully selected a booth out of sight from the street and far from the jukebox which, though silent, glowed red and angry, as if gathering energy and venom from the unaccustomed quiet. “Sully!” a voice boomed from the kitchen. “Thank God we stayed open!”

The voice belonged to Vince, who owned Jerry’s. Jerry, Vince’s brother, ran another pizza place just like it, called Vince’s, in Schuyler Springs. The Schuyler Springs restaurant did a better business, and whoever won the wager on the Bath-Schuyler basketball game got to run the Schuyler Springs place for the following year. By betting on his alma mater, Bath, Vince had lost the better business the last ten years in a row. Jerry always gave his brother points, but never enough of them. Both brothers were huge, burly men with more hair on their chests than their heads. They looked so much alike that over the years people had begun to confuse them, thanks to their physical resemblance and the fact that for the last ten years each had been managing the other’s restaurant. Vince minded losing his identity a lot more than losing his restaurant to basketball wagers, and so, sensing this, Sully had taken to calling him by his brother’s name.

“How about a little service?” Sully called, rapping the back of the booth with his pepper shaker.

The door to the kitchen swung open and Ruth appeared. She did not look to be in a holiday mood. It took her a minute to locate Sully at the far end of the room. “I don’t know what good it does to send a man to college who can’t even read,” she said, in reference to the THIS SECTION CLOSED sign in the center of the floor.

In fact, Sully had not noticed it. He’d just found a spot where nobody would notice him from the street and feel compelled to keep him company. “Sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to get as far from the jukebox as I could. Besides,” he added when Ruth came over, “I don’t go to college any more.”

“So I heard,” Ruth said. “Wirf was in looking for you earlier.” She was making rather a point of just standing there over him instead of slipping into the booth like she would have done if they were still friends. Eventually, Sully knew, they would quarrel over his going back to work, but not now. That was one of the things Sully’d always liked about Ruth. She knew when not to say what she was thinking. What he didn’t like about her was her ability to make clear what she was thinking without saying anything. Right now, for instance, she was thinking his going back to work was not smart, which it probably wasn’t. You’ll be sorry, she was thinking, which he probably would.