Richard Russo: Nobody's Fool

“What if they find out?”

He grinned at her. “You aren’t going to squeal on me, are you?”

“I should,” she said. “There’s probably a reward for turning people like you in. I could use the money.”

Sully studied her, nodding. “Good thing Coach kicked off before he found out how mean you’d get in your old age.”

Miss Beryl sighed. “I can’t suppose it would do any good to point out the obvious.”

Sully shook his head. “Probably not. What’s the obvious?”

“That you’re going to hurt yourself. They’ll stop paying for your schooling, and you’ll be even worse off.”

Sully shrugged. “You could be right, Beryl, but I think I’ll try. Anymore my leg hurts just as bad when I sit around as when I stand, so I might as well stand. I’ve pretty much decided I don’t want to fix air conditioners for the rest of my life.”

He stomped his boot a couple times to make sure his foot was all the way in, rattling the knickknacks. “I swear to Christ, though. If you could learn to put this shoe on for me mornings, I’d marry you and learn to drink tea.”

When Sully collapsed, exhausted, back into the Queen Anne and took out his cigarettes, Miss Beryl headed for the kitchen, where she kept her lone ashtray. Sully was the only person she allowed to smoke in her house, this exception granted on the grounds that he honestly couldn’t remember that she didn’t want him to. He never took note of the fact that there were no ashtrays. Indeed, it never occurred to him even to look for one until the long gray ash at the end of his cigarette was ready to fall. Even then Sully was not the sort of man to panic. He simply held the cigarette upright, as if its vertical position removed the threat of gravity. When the ash eventually fell anyway, he was sometimes quick enough to catch it in his lap, where the ash would stay until, having forgotten about it again, he stood up.

By the time Miss Beryl arrived back with the crystal ashtray she’d bought in London five years before, Sully already had a pretty impressive ash working. “So,” Sully said, “you decide where you’re going this year?”

Every winter for the past twenty, Miss Beryl had sallied forth, as she called it, around the first of the year, returning sometime in March when winter’s back was broken. Her flat was crowded with the souvenirs from these excursions — her walls adorned with an Egyptian spear, a Roman breastplate, a bronze dragon, tiki torches, her flat table surfaces crowded with Wedgwood, an Etruscan spirit boat, a two-headed Foo dog, the floor with wicker elephants, terra-cotta pots, a wooden sea chest. In the months preceding her safaris, she read travel books on her destination. This year she’d checked out books on Africa, where she hoped to find a companion for Driver Ed, who had been purchased in Vermont, actually, and might or might not have been authentic Zamble. Vermont had been about as far as she’d ever been able to convince Clive Sr. to sally forth. He didn’t like to go anywhere people wouldn’t recognize him as the North Bath football coach, which put them on a pretty short leash.

“I’m staying put this winter,” she told Sully, surprised to discover that she’d come to this decision just a few minutes before while looking up into the trees.

“That must mean you’ve been everywhere,” Sully said.

“The early snow convinced me that this is our winter. God’s going to lower the boom. One of those limbs is going to come crashing down on us.”

“Sounds like a good reason to head for the Congo,” Sully offered.

“There’s no such place as the Congo anymore.”

“No?”

“No. And besides,” Miss Beryl reminded him, “God finds Jonah even in the belly of a whale.”

Sully nodded. “God and the cops. That’s how come I stay close to home. So they know where to find me. Maybe that way they’ll go easy.”

Miss Beryl frowned at him. “You’re not in Dutch with the police again, are you, Donald?” Her tenant did wind up in jail occasionally, usually for public intoxication, though when he was younger he’d been a brawler.

Sully grinned at her. “Not to my knowledge, Mrs. Peoples. These days I try to be good. I’m not a young man anymore.”

“Well,” she said, “you were a bad boy far longer than most.”

“I know it,” he said, taking another drag on his cigarette and noticing for the first time how hazardously long the gray ash had become. “You going out for Thanksgiving, at least?”

Miss Beryl took the cigarette from him, put it into the ashtray, and then put the ashtray on the side table. With Sully, you didn’t just set the ashtray down nearby and expect him to recognize its function. “Mrs. Gruber and I are going to the Northwoods Motor Inn. They’re having a buffet. All the turkey and trimmings you can eat for ten dollars.”

Sully exhaled smoke through his nose. “Sounds like a hell of a good deal for the Northwoods. You and Alice couldn’t eat ten dollars’ worth of turkey if they gave you the whole weekend.”

Miss Beryl had to admit this was true. “Mrs. Gruber likes it there. It’s all old fogies like us, and they don’t play loud music. They have a big salad bar, and Mrs. Gruber likes to try everything on it. Snails even.”

“Snails are good, actually,” Sully said, surprising her.

“When did you ever eat a snail?”

Sully scratched his unshaven chin thoughtfully at the recollection. “I liberated France, if you recall. I wish snails were the worst thing I ate between Normandy and Berlin, too.”

“It must be true what they say, then,” Miss Beryl observed. “War is heck. If you ate anything worse than a snail, don’t tell me about it.”

“Okay,” Sully said agreeably.

“I just eat a couple of those carrot curls and save myself for the dinner. Otherwise, I get full, and if I eat too much I get gas.”

Sully stubbed out his cigarette. “Well, in that case, go slow,” he said, laboring to his feet again. “Remember, you got somebody living above you. It’s too cold to open all the windows.”

Miss Beryl followed him out into the hall, his untied shoelaces clicking along the floor.

“I’ll shovel you out after I’ve had my coffee,” he said, noticing the shovel she’d leaned against the wall. “You got anywhere to go right away?”

Miss Beryl admitted she didn’t.

Until he hurt his knee, Sully had been much envied as a tenant by the other widows along Upper Main. Many of them tried to work out reduced rent arrangements with single men, who then shoveled the sidewalk, mowed the lawn and raked leaves in return. But finding the right single man was not easy. The younger ones were forgetful and threw parties and brought young women home with them. The older men were given to illnesses and complications of the lower back. Single, able-bodied men between the ages of forty-five and sixty were so scarce in Bath that Miss Beryl had been envied Sully for over a decade, and she suspected some of her neighbors were privately rejoicing now that Sully was hobbled. Soon he would be useless, and Miss Beryl would be paid back for years of good fortune by having to carry a renter who couldn’t perform. Indeed, it seemed to Miss Beryl, who saw Sully every day, that he had failed considerably since his accident, and she feared that some morning he wasn’t going to stick his head in to find out if she was dead and the reason was going to be that he was dead. Miss Beryl had already outlived a lot of people she hadn’t planned to outlive, and Sully, tough and stubborn though he was, had a ghostly look about him lately.

“Just don’t forget me,” she told him, recollecting that she would need to go to the market later that morning.

“Do I ever?”