Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“No clue,” Sully said.

“Sitting out back, waiting for you.”

“I’ve been a little busy,” Sully pointed out with a sweeping gesture that took in the whole diner. It wasn’t as busy now as it had been when he’d gone behind the counter, but the point was still valid. “I figured you’d know enough to go home.”

Clive Jr. bristled. “You’re the one who said to wait.”

“I didn’t mean forever,” Sully said.

Clive Jr. thought he heard someone snicker. This was not the place to confront Sully, it occurred to him.

“Have a cup of coffee,” Sully suggested, pouring him one. “Tell me about your Thanksgiving. You had a pleasant one, I hope?”

“Actually, I had dinner with my fiancée,” Clive Jr. informed him. He was about to hint that his fiancée was someone of Sully’s acquaintance when he was interrupted.

“Yeah?” Sully said, apparently uninterested in Clive Jr.’s matrimonial plans. “What else did you do?”

Clive Jr. narrowed his eyes, guessing now where this conversation was heading. Yesterday, while they were waiting for his mother’s return from her Thanksgiving, he and Joyce had gone upstairs to Sully’s flat to see how much damage Sully’d done since the last time he’d checked. “Nothing much,” he said weakly.

“Nothing much,” Sully repeated. “I thought maybe you went someplace you weren’t supposed to go.”

Clive Jr. could feel the other men at the counter tuning in, with undisguised interest, to this conversation. He could also feel whose side they were on. Not his.

“We’ve been through this before,” Clive Jr. ventured. “A landlord has the right—”

“You aren’t my landlord,” Sully interrupted.

“My mother—”

“Is the only reason I don’t kick your ass,” Sully finished for him. “Next time you go in my apartment without my permission even she won’t save you.”

Clive Jr. could feel himself begin to shake with rage. And, as always happened in moments of high drama, he found himself outside his own person, one step back, a critical observer of his own weak performance. From this vantage point he saw himself stand with badly feigned dignity, take a dollar out of his wallet, put it wordlessly onto the counter, saw himself pivot like a comic German soldier on television, march ludicrously to the door past the row of silent men at the lunch counter. Maybe they weren’t silent. Maybe silence was what happened when the separation occurred and he found himself outside his own person. Be that as it may, the only thing Clive Jr. heard as he strode out of Hattie’s was the sound of his own voice telling his mother, that very morning, “I can handle Sully.”

And, as always, it took him a while to reintegrate. The next thing he was aware of was sitting at his oak desk in the savings and loan, which meant that he’d either walked or driven there and let himself in by the side door. Also, he must have drawn back the front curtain that opened onto the street. Through the dark, tinted glass he could see all the way up Main to Hattie’s, where the door of the diner opened and two laughing men emerged. How many times over the years had he looked out this window just in time to see Sully coming up the street, looking for all the world like a man limping away from an accident, too dazed and stupid to assess the extent of his own injuries? Sully’s only design was to keep going, in defiance of reason.

To Clive Jr. he sometimes seemed immortal, indestructible. He’d sensed Sully’s immortality forty years ago, late that spring afternoon of Sully’s senior year when he’d returned to their house one last time to tell Miss Beryl he was going to enlist in the army. Miss Beryl, to Clive Jr.’s great embarrassment, had tried to talk him out of it. When she was unsuccessful, she had pleaded with Clive Sr. to talk with him. But Clive Sr., as the football coach and a man with a moral duty to the community, took a dim view of draft dodging and applauded Sully’s patriotism. “You fool,” Miss Beryl had said, shocking Clive Jr., who could not recall her ever being contemptuous of his father’s views, though she often made gentle fun of them. “It has nothing to do with patriotism,” she told her husband, who looked a little frightened by her vehemence. “That boy is already at war. He’s just like his brother was. He’s looking for a car to hit head on.”

Clive Jr., young though he was at the time, had known his mother was wrong. Not in her analysis of Sully’s motives, which, he supposed, might be true. What she was mistaken about was Sully’s ability to wreck himself in a collision. It was the guys in the oncoming vehicle who were not long for this world, in Clive Jr.’s view. Sully might even manage to kill everybody else, but it would be his own personal destiny to be thrown clear of one head-on collision after another, always the worse for the experience but never dead of it.

And his prediction had come true. It was not Sully who had died going ninety miles an hour but rather Clive Sr., going all of twenty.

Still, Sully wasn’t immortal, Clive Jr. knew. He was just a man. A dinosaur of a man, marking time patiently toward extinction. Quite possibly he was dead already and was just too dumb to know it. Clive Jr. would have liked to explain this to Sully, and he imagined an exchange he hadn’t quite the courage to make real. “You know how the dinosaurs figured out they were extinct?” he’d have liked to ask. And Sully would have to admit he didn’t have a clue. “They never did,” Clive Jr. would tell him. “They just were.”

By the time Cass returned with Hattie on her arm and deposited the old woman, bathed and warmly dressed, in her booth, Sully’s generous impulse had about run its course. He was a man capable of sporadic generous impulses, which he enjoyed while they lasted without regretting their absence once they played themselves out.

“Next time let her go,” Cass said when she joined Sully behind the counter. Sully had already taken off his apron.

“What gets into her?” he said, sliding onto the stool that had been occupied until recently by Clive Peoples.

“She was still mad from yesterday,” Cass told him, her voice low and confidential. “She wanted me to open on Thanksgiving so she could sit in her booth. I told her she could go out and sit in it if she wanted to, and I’ll be damned if she didn’t. Sat right there for three hours and then came back and told me I was ruining the business.”

“She does seem happy in that booth,” Sully admitted. The old woman was smiling broadly now, her misguided flight forgotten.

“No ‘seem’ about it. If I kept the place open twenty-four hours a day and let her sit there the whole time, she’d be the happiest woman alive.”

“So let her sit,” Sully suggested. “What’s it hurt?”

“Right.” Cass glared at him. “Why should I have a life?”

Sully shrugged. “Then put her in a nursing home. Who’s going to blame you?”

“Everyone, including you,” Cass said with conviction. “Including me.” She looked past Sully at her mother. “They’d strap her in a wheelchair and forget all about her, Sully,” she said, her voice even quieter now.

Sully was spared from having to comment by the arrival of Rub, who trotted up outside, put his face to the window and peered in with a worried expression.

“Somebody told me you were working here now,” he said, as if the rumor were too terrible to contemplate.

“Who, me?” Sully said.

Cass brought Rub a coffee.

“I never should have believed it,” he said seriously.

“Why not?” Sully wondered, always curious about Rub’s logic.

“Because it wasn’t true,” Rub explained.

“There you go.” Cass nodded at Sully, as if in perfect comprehension.