Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“She chewed on it for about half an hour and then spit it into her napkin,” Miss Beryl told the child. “She’s a real corker about keeping her front steps clean. If it keeps snowing, she’ll probably sweep them two or three more times tonight before she goes to bed, and then she’ll do it again in the morning.”

Without trying, Miss Beryl had listened to most of the Donnelly girl’s telephone conversation. She’d tried to take the old phone she’d insulted out into the hall, but the cord wasn’t long enough, so she’d set it down in the doorway and stretched the cord out as far as it would go so she could sit on the stairs that led up to Sully’s flat. She wasn’t able to manage all that and still close the door, so Miss Beryl overheard most of the one-sided conversation. Apparently, things had not gone well right from the start. Miss Beryl gathered that the young woman was calling her father to ascertain whether it was safe for her and the little girl to come out of hiding. Instead, it was her husband, a man named Roy, who had answered the phone.

“Put Daddy on the phone, Roy,” Miss Beryl heard the young woman say. “Because I don’t want to talk to you, is why. If I’d wanted to talk to you, I’d have called you.”

Silence, a minute, from the hall.

“Well, I’m tickled you got your buck, Roy,” the young woman said when it was her turn again. “I hope you’ll be content with it, ’cause there’s no way I’m coming home. You can cart him back home and eat the son of a bitch all by yourself. I got a job all lined up and an apartment too.… Don’t tell me you’ll find me, Roy. Get you out of Schuyler and turn you around once and you couldn’t find south. You couldn’t find Albany with a map, much less me in it. I’m amazed you found Bath without me to tell you where to turn. You only been here a couple dozen times.… Don’t threaten me, Roy, you’re all done threatening me. You’re just going to have to find yourself another dumb teenage girl to bully, is all. Be a whole lot easier than you trying to find me once I’m gone.… Yeah, well, you let me worry about Tina, okay? And don’t tell me you’re going to change. You don’t change your underwear but once a week, and you haven’t changed your mind once since we been married. Change is a subject you should steer clear of.… Yeah, well, Daddy doesn’t even know where the hell I am, which means he can’t tell you. And you aren’t either smart or tough enough to get it out of Mom.… Yeah, well, don’t go threatening, Roy. Remember what the judge told you. Next person you go and beat the shit out of and you go to jail.… Yeah, well, go ahead and risk it, then. I wouldn’t mind seeing you in jail. Anyhow, I’m going to hang up on you now. This is the longest conversation we’ve had in about a year. The part I like best is I can end it without getting punched.… Just go on home, Roy. Go home and eat your deer. Start at the end with the asshole and just keep going.… No, you don’t know where I am, either. If you did, you’d be over here making everybody’s life misery. You don’t have no idea where I am, and you can just file that with all the other things you don’t know. There’s probably room for one more.… Bye, Roy.… Yeah, yeah, yeah.… I’ll look forward to it, okay?… Go on back to Schuyler, Roy. Go on back and eat your deer.”

Hang up the phone, Miss Beryl thought, but the conversation went on in this manner for another five minutes, escalating without moving, and when it did finally end and the young woman came back in and set the phone back on the end table, Miss Beryl had the strong impression that it was her husband who had finally hung up.

“I better go move the car,” she said, her facial expression a curious mix of annoyance and misgiving. “He’s just dumb enough to find me by pure luck. When I get back, me and Birdbrain’ll go upstairs and wait. You don’t want to get in the middle of this.”

Outside Miss Beryl’s front window the street lamps made halos of the falling snow. Up the street Mrs. Gruber had finished her sweeping and was vigorously banging her broom against her porch pillar to get the snow off. She broke two or three brooms this way each winter and complained bitterly about how brooms weren’t built to last.

Miss Beryl heard the low, throaty throb of a car engine coming up the street from the other direction. It belonged to a huge, rusted-out old Cadillac the color of dirty snow. Miss Beryl simply could not believe what was riding on the car’s hood. She was unable to convince herself, in fact, until the big car lurched over to the curb directly beneath the street lamp, coming to a rocking rest in the spot where the Donnelly girl’s car had been until she moved it.

The deer was secured by ropes that snaked under the car’s hood and through the grille and front windows in a pattern that could only have been improvised on the spot. The animal’s head swayed on its slender neck, tongue lolling out, its entire body sliding dangerously. A large man wearing an orange plaid jacket and cap with earflaps got out of the car then, and when he slammed the door the deer slid further among the straining web of rope. The man seemed to be surveying not Miss Beryl’s house but that of her next-door neighbor.

“Daddy,” the little girl said, her voice, so unexpected, startling Miss Beryl, who had momentarily forgotten she was there despite the fact that she had both hands on the child’s shoulders. When she tried to draw the little girl back from the window, she discovered, as the young woman had predicted, that Tina would not budge. Since that was the case, Miss Beryl drew the sheer that she pulled back each morning to let light into her front room, and she turned off the nearby floor lamp as well. Through the sheer’s gauzy material, she and the child were still able to make out the man’s movements, saw him open the Cadillac’s rear door and take out a rifle. When he slammed this door also, the deer slid again, its antlers forming a tripod on the snowy curb. The man with the rifle came around the car then, looked at the animal, shook his head, turned back to the house, shouldered the rifle and fired. The explosion of the gun was immediately mixed with the sound of shattering glass.

Miss Beryl did not wait for a second shot. Before that came, she had dialed the phone for the police. Her conversation with the officer at the desk was punctuated by further explosions as the Donnelly girl’s husband systematically shot out every window on the second floor of both the front and side of Miss Beryl’s neighbor’s house, shouting, indistinctly, in between volleys, for his wife to get her ass outside and not make him go up after her.

“I’ll be damned,” said the policeman on the telephone. “That does sound like somebody shooting. You sure it’s not the television?”

By the time Miss Beryl got back to the window, the man had stopped shooting, and Miss Beryl saw why. The Donnelly girl was standing there with him beneath the street lamp, apparently furious and unafraid. He wasn’t holding the rifle at his shoulder anymore, but rather across his body with both hands, one on the stock, the other on the barrel. He appeared to be listening intently to his wife and trying to comprehend, among other things, that he was shooting out the windows of the wrong house. He must also have been listening to his wife’s low opinion of him.

In the distance Miss Beryl heard a siren. The patrol car pulled up just as the man with the rifle had apparently heard enough. Miss Beryl saw the butt of the rifle come up and the Donnelly girl’s head snap back. As she crumpled to the sidewalk, Miss Beryl cried out and reached down to cover the little girl’s eyes, only to discover that the child was no longer there. In fact, when Miss Beryl turned to look, she discovered that the little girl was no longer in the room. Both the door to Miss Beryl’s flat and the outer door stood open.