Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Their first stop was the IGA, where Sully bought the smallest package of ground beef he could find.

“How about buns?” Peter said, abstractedly, picking up a package. It was one of the things Sully liked least about his son, the fact that he seldom seemed to focus. No matter where he was, he was half somewhere else. Right at the moment he had an excuse, though. Yesterday, when Ralph went to pick Will up at the restaurant where Sully had taken him for ice cream, and while Vera and Peter were returning Robert Halsey to the VA home in Schuyler, Charlotte had packed Wacker and Andy into the Gremlin, along with their clothes and toys, and left. She had warned Peter of her intention to leave, even offered him the opportunity to come with her. He could go pick up Will, and when they returned, they’d be off. They could return to Morgantown, at least, as a family. But Peter had refused, telling her to calm down, they’d discuss everything when he and Vera returned from Schuyler Springs. Charlotte had warned him again that there’d be nobody to discuss anything with, but he had not taken this threat seriously. He knew that she was furious and that she had reason to be. He just couldn’t imagine her doing it. Packing everything up and driving back to West Virginia by herself, at night.

Vera, at the end of her short rope, had precipitated this confrontation by blaming Charlotte for her ruined bathroom. She’d insisted that it was ruined, that the overflow from the boys’ tub had gotten beneath the tiles, which would now have to be torn up, which would cost thousands of dollars. This seemed to Charlotte demonstrably untrue. After all, they were standing in an inch of water, which meant it wasn’t beneath the tiles but rather on top of them. The bathroom floor wasn’t ruined, it was wet. The floor needed to be mopped up, not pulled up, and she made the mistake of saying so, of refusing her mother-in-law the gravity she felt the situation deserved. Which allowed Vera the opportunity to tell Charlotte about all the other things her daughter-in-law was responsible for. It was Charlotte’s fault that Peter had been denied the tenure he’d earned, Vera said. Maybe that wasn’t the reason the university gave, but everyone knew that men were often held back in their careers because of their wives’ deficiencies. Charlotte was also to blame not only for the fact that their children didn’t know how to behave but for the dreadful state of their unhappy marriage. “Tott’re what’s wrong with my son,” Vera had hissed at Charlotte before dropping tragically to her knees on the wet tiles and starting to mop up the flooded bathroom floor with her brand-new bath towels, which now, she sobbed, would have to be replaced, along with the floor. Everything, just everything, was ruined.

Charlotte had been struck dumb by her mother-in-law’s litany of accusation, but the sheer outrageousness of it finally allowed her to locate her voice, and she had just expressed her heartfelt belief that Vera was full of more shit than the Thanksgiving turkey when Robert Halsey, looking pale and feeble, appeared behind them in the bathroom doorway, gasping for breath from his journey from the living room. “Would someone …” he said in his thin, high voice, “be so kind … as to take … me … home.”

Vera gasped, struggled to her feet. “Now look what you’ve done,” she sobbed, glaring not only at Charlotte, but at Peter, who had been trying ineffectually to calm his mother down. “Look at him!” she demanded. “You’re all trying to kill him!”

Peter confided very few of the details of these events to his father, telling Sully only that Charlotte had left with the two boys, that her leaving was the immediate result of hostilities with Vera that had been brewing for a long time and finally boiled over. And he hinted again that there were other causes which had nothing to do with his mother.

Sully was surprised that his son was confiding even this much. After all, it wasn’t likely Sully would find out on his own. And, as was usually the case with confidences, the knowledge did not sit well. Something about the way Peter chose to relate what had transpired, or the broad outlines of what had transpired, suggested that he was not fully committed to or engaged by these events, even in the telling. He was indeed the sort of man to express outrage in a car without ever being motivated to get out with a clenched fist. He’d told Sully about Charlotte’s leaving matter-of-factly, almost abstractly, staring into the meat case, as if what it all meant might be explained on the labels of packaged hamburger. He’d actually picked up several packages to inspect them.

“Dogs don’t cat buns,” Sully assured him in answer to Peter’s question about whether they’d need any.

“You’re buying ground beef for your dog?” Peter said absently, without real curiosity.

Sully decided not to explain until Peter showed some genuine interest. “I don’t own a dog,” he said. “This is for someone else’s.”

When they got to the checkout, Sully paid the girl and grabbed the hamburger before she could bag it. “This is fine as it is, dolly,” he assured her.

“Want your receipt?” she called to him urgently.

“What for?” Sully said.

Outside, he tossed Peter the keys to the El Camino. “You drive,” he said.

“What’s wrong with Alpo?” Peter wondered as he backed the El Camino out of the parking space and headed for the street.

“I want to be sure,” Sully said, tearing the cellophane off the package. “This particular dog might not like Alpo.”

Following Sully’s instructions, Peter headed out of town. Sully found the vial of Jocko’s pills in his pants pocket. From the plastic tube he extracted two capsules and buried them in the mound of hamburger. “That oughta do it,” he said, “don’t you think?”

Peter looked at the meat blankly.

Sully couldn’t help grinning. There was something about educated people that made it impossible for them to admit when they didn’t understand something. His young philosophy professor at the college was that way, pretending he understood the sports talk that was always under way when he entered the classroom. “Maybe you’re right,” Sully said, extracting a third pill. Two had done the trick for him, but he wanted to be safe. He added the third pill to the hamburger. “Pull in here,” he said, pointing to the yard where Carl Roebuck kept his heavy equipment. “Go around by the back gate.”

Peter did as he was told, still not comprehending.

“Stay here,” Sully said, and he got out.

Rasputin, Carl Roebuck’s Doberman, was already snarling and leaping at the fence. Sully checked along the bottom, looking for a gap big enough to slide the hamburger through, while Rasputin, foaming at the mouth, lunged at the fence with undiminished fury. Finding a space, Sully set the package down and pushed it under with a stick. Rasputin stopped barking for about two seconds, long enough to inhale the package of hamburger in one impressive gulp, then resumed his attack on the fence.

“I hope you have better dreams than I did,” Sully said, recalling the one Peter had awakened him from the day before.

“I can’t believe it,” Peter said when Sully climbed back into the El Camino. “I just helped you poison a dog, didn’t I?”

“Nope,” Sully said. “For one thing, it wasn’t poison. For another, you were no help. Your part comes later. We got time for one beer though.”

“Why not?” Peter said, with the air of a man whose day couldn’t get much worse.

“You had dinner?”

Peter admitted he hadn’t.

“Good,” Sully said, suddenly feeling hungry. “I’ll buy you a hamburger.”

“I’m not sure I want to eat one of your hamburgers,” Peter said, pulling back onto the blacktop.