Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

These screams had a strange sense of reality to them, perhaps because they were real. The first scream was not Rub’s. It belonged to Peter, Sully’s son, who was peering into the pickup’s window at his father. The second scream was Sully’s, starting awake. He was parked at the curb, in front of his ex-wife’s house, where he’d fallen asleep. It had been his intention merely to close his eyes for a minute, to gather himself and take a deep breath before going up the walk and knocking at the door of the house, where he expected a mixed reception. It was not immediately apparent how long he’d actually slept, but he suspected the sauna might have been only the last of a series of dreams. Also, it appeared that dusk was falling.

“Jesus Christ, Dad,” Peter kept saying. He was now walking up and down alongside the pickup, shaking his head, holding one hand over his heart. “You realize you sleep with your eyes open?”

Sully understood this to be true, though it was a fairly recent phenomenon. Ruth had witnessed and reported it with considerable irritation. It couldn’t have been the case when he was married to Vera, because his wife had kept a careful, detailed list of the things he did of which she disapproved, and she was not the sort of woman to hold anything back. She surely would have mentioned it if he’d slept with his eyes open.

Sully tried to shake off some of the deep grogginess. “I must have dozed off,” he said.

“With the motor running and door locked?”

The motor was running. Sully turned it off. The door was not locked, but it was tricky. From the outside you had to pull up and out at the same time. Sully demonstrated for his son’s benefit. Way off he heard a siren, and, as he always did when he heard a siren, he tried to remember if he’d left a cigarette burning somewhere.

Both men listened to the approach of the ambulance. “I knocked on the window, but I couldn’t get you to wake up,” Peter explained guiltily.

Sully tried to make all this add up, but he still was too groggy from Jocko’s pills and the truck’s heater, and from breathing the pickup’s gasoline fumes. When the ambulance turned down their street and Peter flagged it, Sully looked at his ex-wife’s house and said, “Is somebody sick?”

“You,” Peter explained, looking embarrassed now. “We thought you were dead.”

Sully just sat with the door open and let the cold air bring him back while Peter explained as best he could to the ambulance crew, who were reluctant to believe that this could be an honest mistake. They kept looking over at Sully suspiciously, as if the verdict was still out on whether or not he’d died, as originally reported. In their expression they reminded him of the people who’d been told he died in the fire he’d started twenty years ago. This was twice now he’d cheated people out of a tragedy, and even his own son looked conflicted on the point of his continued existence, though this was probably due to the fact that his not being dead after all made Peter, who’d called for the ambulance, look like a fool.

When Ralph came out, Sully was delighted to see him. “You ain’t dead after all,” Ralph said, beaming at him. Sully and Vera’s second husband had always gotten on fine and would have gotten along even better had they not both understood that Vera considered their inclination to like each other a betrayal. It seemed not to bother Ralph in the least that his wife had been intimate with Sully, had borne him a son. Worse, it seemed not to bother Sully that what had once been his now belonged to another man. It was as if they’d agreed she wasn’t worth fighting over. Indeed, it was more like they considered themselves fellow sufferers.

“No, not yet, Ralph,” Sully said. “You wouldn’t mind too much if I threw up here in your gutter, would you?”

Ralph shrugged. “I’d offer you the bathroom, except the boys are in there to take a bath.”

“I wouldn’t make it anyhow,” Sully said, feeling the vomit rise in his throat. “Besides, I may not have learned much married to Vera, but I know better than to throw up in her bathroom. Unless she’s changed, she doesn’t even like people to shit in it.”

“She hasn’t changed,” Ralph admitted sadly. “She’s got about a dozen air fresheners opened up all over the house. We couldn’t even smell the turkey.”

Just hearing about the smell of air fresheners did the trick, and Sully leaned forward and threw up into the street. Ralph looked away. Not having eaten all day, there wasn’t much, and Sully, who had been sweating in anticipation, immediately felt better. He thought he recognized the decomposed remains of the second of Jocko’s yellow pills.

Seeing what he’d done, the two men from the ambulance, who’d given a form to Peter to sign, came over to where he sat. “You all right, pal?” the smaller man wanted to know. “You want us to take you back to the hospital?”

“Nope, I sure don’t,” Sully told them. “I feel much better.”

The man glanced at the vomit and looked away.

“Sorry you had to come out here,” Sully said. “My son can’t tell dead people from sleeping ones. I guess that’s why they made him a doctor of history and not medicine.”

Peter had come over in time to hear this.

“If you’d breathed much more exhaust, you might be dead,” the ambulance driver said. “You should get checked out.”

Sully stood to show that he was okay. “I’m fine,” he said. “I promise.”

“Okay,” the man said, handing Sully a form. “Sign this. It proves we were here.”

When Sully signed, the two men got back into the ambulance, burped their siren once and drove off. Sully, Peter and Ralph watched them go, and when the ambulance disappeared around the corner, all three men turned reluctantly to face house and home and family and explanation.

“Well, son,” Sully addressed Peter, though it was Ralph he winked at. “Let’s go inside before our courage fails completely.”

If it was women these three grown men feared — and it was — they needn’t have worried, because when they entered, the kitchen was empty, not a woman in sight, though this struck all three as perhaps even more ominous. The sink was still piled high with scraped dinner plates and casserole dishes plus assorted pots and pans, including the roasting pan in which Vera had made the gravy. In the sink she’d drawn a yellow tubful of water that wore a round hat of suds. The house was preternaturally still except for the sound of the television on low in the living room. From where they stood, Sully could see Vera’s father asleep in his chair two rooms away. “Where’d your mother go?” Ralph wondered, surprised by her sudden disappearance.

Peter was not. “I’d be careful in here today,” he warned Sully. “Mom’s all upset.”

“What about?” Ralph said, since this was news to him.

“Let me guess,” Sully said. “Nobody loves her.”

“Close,” Peter admitted. “Nobody loves her enough.”

“I’ll go talk to her,” Ralph said like a man volunteering for hazardous duty.

“How long have you and Vera been married?” Sully said significantly.

Ralph thought. “Thirty years. More.”

“And you still don’t know any better than that?”

“She probably still thinks you’re dead,” Ralph said.

“Then don’t disappoint her,” Sully advised.

From the direction of the bathroom came the sound of running water and Will’s whining voice. “Wacker. Quit.”

Peter rolled his eyes. “I’ll be right back.”

Since no one had told him not to, Sully sauntered into the living room, where Robert Halsey slept fitfully, hooked up to his oxygen, green plastic tubing forming a childish mustache on his upper lip. A plastic mask dangled from the portable oxygen rig. The football game was on, and Sully sat down at the end of the sofa just in time to see somebody kick a field goal and the score come up across the bottom of the screen before going to a commercial.