Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Was it his mother’s implied opinion of him or Sully’s ability to assume command that made a boy of Clive Jr. again? He couldn’t be sure, but as he sat in the car, obediently following Sully’s instructions, the irony of the situation did not escape him. After all, he, Clive Jr., was arguably the most important man in Bath, and once when they broke ground on The Ultimate Escape, there’d be no arguing the issue. Then everyone would be forced to admit that Bath’s renaissance was attributable to Clive Jr., who’d made it happen by bringing in the big boys from downstate, from as far away as Texas, making them see the area’s potential through Clive Jr.’s own eyes, making them all believers.

Well, almost all. For Clive Jr. had come to realize that there would always be at least two skeptics in Bath, at least as long as his mother and Sully were on the scene. The two of them seemed not to notice that it was a new Clive Jr. who’d returned to Bath to rescue the savings and loan and give the town a future. They seemed to see the boy he had once been, not the man he’d made of himself. How odd that these two skeptics lived in the same house, his house, the house of his childhood on Upper Main. His own mother and Sully, who’d been an intruder in that house for almost as long as Clive Jr. could remember. Living there together in the house that Clive Jr. had come to think of as his opponents’ campaign headquarters.

Clive Jr. knew he was lucky to have two such opponents, neither of whom would act against him, both of whom would be surprised to discover he considered them in this role. Especially his mother, whom he’d work so hard to convert. He’d done everything he could think of to earn her trust. He’d borrowed large sums of money he didn’t need and paid her back when he said he would, even offering interest. He’d given her excellent investment advice that would have made her money, advice that to his knowledge she had never, not one single time, followed. Any more than she had even once in the last twenty years asked his advice on any subject. Most of the time he was able to console himself that his mother just happened to be the most independent, free-thinking woman in all of Schuyler County. Maybe she didn’t require his counsel, but then she didn’t require anyone else’s either. She jokingly claimed to get all the advice she needed from Clive Sr., long dead, and, even more spookily, from the African spirit mask hanging on the living room wall. Which would have been tolerable, except for those rare occasions like this morning, when she discovered there were limits to her self-sufficiency and then turned not to Clive Jr., but rather to Sully, arguably the least trustworthy man in Bath. And even that, which would have been bad enough, wasn’t the worst of it. No sooner did his mother turn to Sully than Sully enlisted Clive Jr. in a subordinate role. It was worse than ridiculous. The most important man in Bath taking orders from the least important man in Bath, Donald Sullivan, a man essentially forgotten while he was still breathing, a man who’d peaked at age eighteen and who’d been sliding toward a just oblivion ever since.

Sully and Clive Jr. went way back. In fact, though it would have surprised Sully to know it, Clive Jr. considered Sully an integral part of his prolonged and painful adolescence. As a boy Clive Jr. had feared for his masculinity. In feet, he’d pretty much concluded he was destined to be a homosexual — a homo, as they were called in Bath back then. Oh, he got hard-ons, like other boys his age, looking at pictures of naked girls in the magazines he stole from the drugstore and stashed in the upper reaches of his closet, where his tiny mother wasn’t likely to run across them by accident. But Clive Jr. had discounted these erections as irrelevant, certain that the day would come (next year? next month? tomorrow?) when he would wake up and the naked women would no longer stir him. There were a few that didn’t stir him already, and he stole more magazines in the hopes that a variety of new naked women would forestall his inevitable homodom.

The cause of Clive Jr.’s fear was that he seemed to harbor deeper, more intense feelings for boys than for girls, in much the same fashion he craved the affection and love of his father far more urgently than that of his mother, whose diminutive stature had always seemed to Clive Jr. emblematic of her insignificance. He couldn’t imagine what had possessed his father to marry her or what had attracted him to her in the first place. No teacher in the entire junior high school was the butt of more cruel jokes than Beryl Peoples, whose round-shouldered, gnomelike appearance and correct speech were mimicked to devastating effect, especially in Clive Jr.’s presence. He hated to think what his life would have been like had his father not been the football coach.

Clive Jr. had loved his father, and as a boy he’d loved all the boys his father loved. He himself had never excelled in sports. He’d inherited his father’s size (he’d nearly killed Miss Beryl in being born) but was blessed with neither speed nor balance nor eye-hand coordination. Clive Sr. was too kind a man to express his disappointment in his son’s inability to catch, throw or dribble a ball of any size or description, but Clive Jr. sensed it, in part, from his father’s enthusiasm for the boys he coached. At dinner Clive Sr. was often unable to restrain himself from recounting tales of their athletic prowess. The coach himself had been an indifferent athlete, but he possessed a pure love of sport and had gone into coaching because he believed that sport was the truest and best metaphor for life. He remained unshakable in this conviction, despite Miss Beryl’s gentle ridicule of the cliches that lay imbedded so deeply in his soul.

And of all the boys he had coached, Clive Sr. had seemed fondest of Sully, and it was Sully’s praises that were sung the loudest at the dinner table. He was a varsity starter as a sophomore, and it was Clive Sr.’s contention that if he had a dozen Sullys he could take his team to state every year, this despite the fact that Sully himself was gifted with neither extraordinary size nor speed. Nor was he coachable. He was lazy in practice, resentful of constructive criticism, and he could not be made to understand the concept of team play. At times he seemed not to care whether the team won or lost. He refused to quit smoking, even when threatened with suspension, and he provided about the worst possible example to the other players, most of whom naturally gravitated to bad example.

But come game day, Sully was a wrecker. He chased down boys who were faster than he was and ran through others twice his size. He sometimes cost the team by not being where he was supposed to be, but just as often where he was turned out to be even better. After Sully botched a play, Clive Sr., livid, would call him over to the sideline to read him the riot act. Sometimes Sully came, sometimes he didn’t. Often, before Clive Sr. could substitute for him, Sully’d recover a fumble or intercept a pass, and he’d bring the ball with him so the coach could see the wisdom of doing things his way. “If I only had a dozen more just like him,” Clive Sr. would shake his head. “What a team I’d have.” He was wrong about that, of course. A dozen more like Sully, and he wouldn’t have had a team at all.

Clive Jr., as the son of the coach, was always allowed to hover around the bench as long as he didn’t get in the way. And it was there along the sideline that he’d fallen in some kind of love with Sully and began to doubt his masculinity. Sully, even as a sophomore, was everything Clive Jr., an eighth-grader, aspired to be — reckless, imaginative, contemptuous of authority and, above all, indifferent to pain. Sully, it seemed, scarcely got interested in the contest until someone on the other team landed a good shot or offered an insult, after which something changed in Sully’s eyes. If Sully couldn’t win the game, he’d start a fight and win that. If he couldn’t win the fight he’d started, he’d continue to hurl himself at whatever he couldn’t beat with increased fury, as if the knowledge that the battle was unwinnable heightened its importance. What Sully did better than anybody else was pick himself up off the ground, and when he returned to the huddle, bruised, nose-bloodied, limping, he’d still be hurling insults over his shoulder at whoever had put him on the ground. Seeing this, Clive Jr. had filled with terrible admiration and longing.