Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

If there was anything more obscene than Rub eating a cream-filled donut, it was Wirf eating one of The Horse’s pickled eggs. To Sully, just the sight of the eggs floating in their salty brine was unsettling enough. He always positioned himself in such a way that he didn’t have to look at them or at Wirf eating them.

Wirf was on his third and, sensing Sully’s discomfort, was taking his time, sucking off the brine from both ends of the soft egg before puncturing its flesh with his front teeth. The sound Wirf made eating an egg was not unlike the sound of a tennis shoe being extracted from mud. “Want one?” Wirf grinned. “I’ll buy.”

Sully was green and sweating. “You should hire yourself out to people who want to lose weight. After watching you, my appetite’s always gone for about a week.”

Or what was left of his appetite. Anymore Sully had to be reminded. Left to himself, he’d eat no more than a single meal a day. The only reason he ate more regularly was Rub, who was always hungry and served as a reminder to eat, even as his personal aroma ruined Sully’s appetite.

“You’ve got the stomach of a thirteen-year-old girl,” Wirf said. “How the hell did you survive the army?”

“I never stepped on anything that exploded, was one way,” Sully told him, deflecting the conversation. For reasons Sully had never understood, he’d eaten with more genuine appetite when he was in the army than at any other time in his life, this despite the fact that he’d never eaten worse-tasting food. The other times in his life he’d eaten with genuine appetite were few. In high school he’d eaten pizza ravenously with his teammates after football games. But it was true what Wirf said. He’d always been a nervous, fastidious eater, and getting older had only made him worse. He’d get the occasional craving, as for the chicken-fried steak he’d eaten to celebrate Thanksgiving, but these were infrequent. One reason was probably that he had never entirely disassociated food from fear.

As a boy, at his father’s table, Sully had frequently, though unintentionally, enraged his father, a man of prodigious appetites who had known hunger and viewed Sully’s fastidiousness as an affront both to the food and to its provider. On such occasions the dinner table became a battleground. Big Jim could not comprehend that certain foods Sully found offensive were capable of inducing the gag reflex, which the boy had learned to control by taking very small bites and chewing until there was virtually nothing left, at which point it became possible, with great effort of will, for him to swallow. But this process took forever, and as he chewed and chewed the odd morsel, his father’s rage smoldered. Sully always sensed this without having to look up from his plate, and the knowledge that his father was about to combust did not make the job of chewing any easier. He would try to hurry the reluctant piece of mutton gristle along, swallowing before it was possible to do so, and then the piece of meat would get caught there in the back of his throat until Sully gagged and coughed it up into his napkin. Whereupon his father would take the napkin, open it, and force Sully to examine what had refused to go down. Seen in the harsh yellow light of the kitchen, Sully had always been surprised to see how tiny the morsel was as it sat there in his napkin in a puddle of mucus. It had felt ten times that size in his throat. “ This is what you’re telling me you can’t swallow?” his father would say, his hands shaking with anger. He’d show it to Sully’s mother then, and sometimes her refusal to look would transfer some of his rage to herself, for which Sully was always grateful.

There had always been something about his father — and Sully had intuited this even as a boy — that made him do things wrong. “Leave him alone,” Sully’s mother always counseled wisely. “You only make things worse by scaring him.”

“Scaring him!” Big Jim always bellowed. “Jesus Christ, everything scares him. A piece of goddamn carrot scares him. What happens when he runs up against something really scary? What then?”

“All I’m saying,” his mother said quietly, knowing better than to raise her voice when her husband was in such a state, “is that he does better when you leave him alone. Yelling at him guarantees he won’t eat. You know that.”

“I’ll tell you what I know,” his father said, turning to Sully. “He’s going to eat this stew. Every bite. If we have to sit here till Tuesday, it’s going down. If he throws up, he gets another bowl, and that one’ll have more stew in it. Every time he throws up, he gets more stew, until it stays down.”

And so they’d sat there in the tiny kitchen, always the hottest room in the house, all the other dishes cleared away from the table except for Sully’s small bowl of mutton stew, Sully choking back tears and choking down stew for what seemed to him like hours, his mother and brother exiled to the porch by his father’s order. It was just the two of them, alone with their thoughts and the food, which disappeared a grain at a time, Sully swallowing sobs of fear with every mouthful. He paused when he felt his stomach rise until he was sure it would accept his next mouthful, all under his father’s unwavering gaze. He believed his father’s threat to keep feeding him more stew, and so he did not dare throw up what he’d already forced down. He’d have died rather than start over.

“There,” his father said when Sully had swallowed the last of it, and Sully hung his head, which was pounding now with his effort. When it was over, he felt exhausted, as if he could have slept right there, sitting upright in the kitchen chair, for days. Depositing the bowl in the sink, Big Jim returned to Sully. “You ate it, didn’t you,” he said, and Sully realized that his father was still furious, his rage undiminished by Sully’s accomplishment. He even suspected that his father was secretly disappointed that the ordeal was over. He’d expected the food to rise in his son’s throat and had looked forward to making good on his threat to force-feed Sully another bowl. This realization, harder to swallow than the mutton had been, almost brought it all back up, but somehow Sully had willed the food to stay where it was.

“You learn anything tonight?” his father wanted to know. What he was getting at, Sully guessed, was who the boss was at 12 Bowdon Street.

Sully nodded.

“Because we can do this every night until you do learn who the boss is around here.” His father stood then, glaring down at Sully. “You can fight me all you want, but you aren’t going to win.”

As it turned out, though, his father was wrong. The very next night, Sully, in a state of even greater nervous excitement and fear, had to be led to the table by his mother when his father refused to accept the boy’s claim of being sick. He’d have been wiser to accept it. Sully took one bite of his mother’s steaming hot macaroni casserole, which she had made precisely because everything in it was soft and did not require chewing, and Sully tossed his school lunch the length of the table. For some reason this had not angered his father as much as the previous night’s chewing, the boy’s inability to swallow. And Sully realized, to both his surprise and relief, that his father had been bluffing the night before. He had no intention of engaging in lengthy combat every night. That night, for instance, his father felt a particularly strong urge to leave their house in favor of the corner tavern, and so when he saw the mess Sully had made of the dinner table, he calmly stood, shot his wife a look of contempt and strode out the door. He didn’t return home until late, after the tavern closed, and then he’d taken it out on Sully’s mother, not him. Sully, who’d been unable to fall asleep, heard it all, first his father shouting at her, then the slap that resounded throughout the house, his mother’s cry of surprise, then silence. Sully remembered smiling to himself in the dark. He’d won after all.