Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Will settled carefully onto Sully’s right leg, allowing his own small legs to dangle in the direction of the gas pedal and brake, careful not to let them bump his grandfather’s left knee. Together they held the steering wheel.

“It’s jiggling,” Will observed, clearly unsure whether this vibration was natural.

“Trucks do,” Sully explained. “Especially broken-down old trucks like Grandpa’s.”

“It’s a nice truck,” Will said, his voice vibrating from holding the wheel.

“I’m glad you like it,” Sully said, taken aback by the little boy’s compliment, and without planning to, he kissed his grandson on the top of his head. “Now you’ve driven a car. I bet you didn’t know you could,” he said, adding, “don’t tell your mother.”

Some phrases were truly magical in their ability to dredge up the past from the bottom of life’s lake, and for Sully, like all errant fathers, “Don’t tell your mother” was such a phrase. He hadn’t used it in about thirty years. But the words were right there, anxious to be spoken again after so long, a holy incantation. It was the phrase he’d been born to speak, having learned the words from his own father, who, if they hadn’t already existed, would have had to invent them. “We’ll stop in here for just a minute,” Big Jim had been fond of saying outside his favorite tavern, and Sully and his brother, Patrick, would wait a beat or two until his father pulled the heavy door toward them and pushed them gently into the cool darkness, warning as he did so, “Don’t tell your mother.” Inside, Sully and his brother were always bribed with nickels to play shuffleboard and pinball while Big Jim located a spot at the bar and ordered the first of many boilermakers, paid for with money he withheld from Sully’s mother, whom he kept on a strict allowance, money Big Jim now kept in a careless pile on the bar to ensure his welcome. Sometimes, when Sully got tired of pinball (he had to stand on a wooden stool and even then couldn’t reach the buttons comfortably) or ran out of nickels and joined his father at the bar, he’d stare at the pile of bills, aware that this was the same money his mother talked about so bitterly when his father wasn’t around, money she’d have spent on food and clothes if she had it, so they could have decent things, she said. His father, already on his third boilermaker and getting mean, would see Sully staring at the money and cuff him a good one to get his attention. “Don’t tell your mother,” he’d say. “She don’t have to have every last nickel I earn, does she?” And so Sully would promise, not wanting to get cuffed again because subsequent cuffs always got harder, not softer. Then Big Jim would order another boilermaker or toss a dollar off the top of the now diminishing pile at the bartender, who doubled as a bookie. “On his goddamn nose,” Big Jim always instructed, having decided on a horse. To him, place and show bets were cowardly and he wanted no part of their measly payoff. “You hear me? Right on his goddamn nose.”

Most of these afternoons had ended the same way, with Big Jim being told he’d have to leave, because the more he drank, the meaner he got, and it was only a matter of time before he’d start a fight. Sometimes one of the men in the bar would try to reason with him and head off hostilities. What did he want to go and behave like this for, in front of his boys? the man would ask. This tactic, which should have worked, was always a mistake. Big Jim Sullivan was not a man tortured by self-doubt, and of all the things he was certain of, he was most certain of his skill as a parent. When anyone offered even the slightest hint that he might be less than a model father, that person did well to duck, because Big Jim always defended himself in this matter with all of his pugilistic skills.

Unfortunately, after so many boilermakers, pugilistic skills were not Big Jim’s strong suit. A lifelong believer in getting in the first punch, he never hesitated to throw it, or at least he never meant to hesitate. The trouble was that the roundhouse he always had in mind got telegraphed so far in advance of its arrival that Big Jim’s adversary usually had ample opportunity to avoid the blow, and when the force of the big man’s swing spun him around Big Jim usually found himself in a full Nelson and heading for the door someone was usually holding open for him. Finding himself seated outside, he always picked himself up with great dignity, got his bearings and lurched in the direction of home, having forgotten entirely that his sons had been with him when he entered the tavern.

One afternoon, still vivid in Sully’s recollection, his father had tried to start a fight with a man who was not a regular and did not know the drill, that Sully’s father was to be ejected without being injured. Perhaps, not being a regular, the man didn’t know that Big Jim, drunk, wasn’t nearly as dangerous as he looked, unless you happened to be married to him or were one of his children. Big Jim had focused on the man for some reason and had been insulting him for about half an hour, and when the man finally had enough and said so and Big Jim had taken his inevitable wild swing, the man had slipped the punch gracefully. As Big Jim stumbled forward under the impetus of his miss, instead of letting him go down, the man had caught him with a short, compact uppercut that not only broke Big Jim’s nose but repositioned it on the side of his face. The force of the blow had the effect of righting Sully’s father, restoring his magical drunk’s equilibrium, and he didn’t lose that equilibrium again until the man had hit him half a dozen more times, each blow more savage than the last. No one, not even the men who had been merciful to Sully’s father in the past, intervened. Perhaps they too had had enough.

Finally, his face a mask of blood, Sully’s father, reeling from the last of the blows that had been rained upon him, had simply let the last punch spin him toward the door and he stumbled on outside, as if he’d been meaning to leave for some time. He waited until the door closed behind him before going to his knees, vomiting onto the sidewalk and passing out. He lay where he fell for about ten minutes, time enough for a small crowd to gather and for someone to send for a doctor. Despite his brother’s assurances that Big Jim was simply unconscious, Sully had thought his father was dead, didn’t see how he could be anything but dead the way his one eye was swollen shut and his nose no longer occupied the center of his face. But before the doctor arrived, Big Jim snorted awake and got to his feet, to all appearances refreshed by his nap. And when he lurched in the direction of home, nobody tried to stop him. Sully and his brother, Patrick, had followed at what they considered a safe distance, but when they were a block from home Big Jim had sensed their presence, turned and grabbed his sons roughly by the collar and drew them up close to his ruined face, so close Sully could smell his father’s blood and vomit. “Don’t tell your mother,” he warned.

Even after his divorce from Vera, Sully had remained convinced that he’d been a better father to Peter than Big Jim had been to him, though this, he had to admit, was not a lofty goal. It saddened him to realize he’d accomplished this intention by such a slender margin. Instead of abusing Peter, he’d ignored the boy, forgotten him for months at a stretch, a simple truth he now found difficult to credit though impossible to deny. The years had simply flown by, and Vera, with Ralph’s help, had seemed more than competent in the business of providing whatever it was their son might need. Without ever saying so, Vera had often managed to convey to Sully that they were doing fine without him, which indeed they seemed to be. Ralph, she assured him, was a natural father, even if he wasn’t the natural father, and Peter didn’t lack for love or anything else. They were a family, she told him in a way that suggested to Sully that if he were to intrude upon them with his presence he would be endangering that family. And so he had found the excuse he needed to stay away, grateful, truth be told, for his freedom.