Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“So,” Sully said. “What’re you going to do?”

Peter stared into his beer, bubbles rising from nowhere in the bottom of the glass, ascending into foam.

“Head back tomorrow, I guess,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’d be able to give me a lift to Albany? I can rent a car there.”

“Sure,” Sully said. “I could have taken you today. I wish you’d come around, in fact. You could have saved me some money.”

“I wish I could have gotten away sooner,” Peter said.

Sully nodded, understanding, he thought. “Your mother?”

“She’s getting worse,” Peter said, surprising Sully, who couldn’t remember ever having confided in Peter his strong conviction that Vera was nuts.

“She seemed about the same to me,” he said, though he’d been surprised when he saw his ex-wife. Vera had aged a good deal since he’d seen her last. She seemed smaller, too, than he remembered her. Or more tightly wound. Or something.

“I think she’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and she’s liable to give Ralph one too.”

“Ralph didn’t look too good,” Sully admitted. “What was he in the hospital about?”

“Prostate,” Peter said. “Colon.”

Sully nodded . “What’d they say?”

“They’re saying he’s going to be okay,” Peter said. “I don’t think he believes them. They want to do radiation. He doesn’t understand why, if they got the cancer like they said.”

“He should do what they say, though,” Sully said, even though he reserved the right to arrive at the opposite conclusion if the situation were ever his own. “That’s why she’s all bent out of shape?”

“I wish it were,” Peter said. “That would make sense.”

Sully discovered he didn’t care for Peter’s tone that much. Maybe it was true that Sully considered Vera nuts, but it didn’t seem right for his son to share such a low opinion of his own mother. “Don’t be too hard on her,” he advised. “Most of what she does is for you.”

Peter smiled at that. “You think so?”

“You don’t?”

He seemed to think about it. “I think most of what she does, she does for herself,” Peter said. “Especially her suffering.”

“You think she likes to suffer?”

“That’s what I think.”

“I think you’re wrong,” Sully said, though he didn’t, at least not exactly.

“You should have seen the look on her face tonight when I told her I was coming to see you. As if I’d killed her. I think it was the happiest moment of her life.”

Sully studied his son, aware that his momentary pride in Peter’s accomplishments had leaked away into serious misgivings about his character. It was Peter who seemed to be enjoying the recollection of his mother’s suffering.

When their hamburgers came, Sully, feeling his stomach shrink as it frequently did at the sight of food, cut his in half, placed the larger half and some fries on a napkin. “Give this to Long John Silver,” he instructed Jeff. Wirf, down the bar, had smelled the food, then seen it and was now watching Peter eat with his customary longing.

Peter devoured his burger with excellent appetite, the result, no doubt, of having escaped the atmosphere of Vera’s air fresheners. He regarded his father half humorously as Sully struggled with the last of his half hamburger before giving up. “Speaking of doctors,” Peter said, “when was the last time you saw one?”

“A couple months?”

“For your knee.”

“Right,” Sully said.

“I meant for a checkup. You’ve lost weight.”

Sully knew that this was true, though it didn’t concern him. “You look like you’ve gained a little, if you don’t mind my saying so,” he observed, having noticed that his son, for all his good looks, had the beginning of a paunch, rather like Carl Roebuck’s.

“The sedentary life,” Peter explained, adding, when Sully didn’t reply, “Sitting on your ass.”

“I know what it means,” Sully said. “You forget I was a college student until a couple days ago. It was the sitting on my ass that I objected to most.”

Peter was grinning. “It’s hard to imagine you in class,” he said.

“It’s hard to imagine you climbing a fence.” Sully stood up, flexed. “But we’re going to find out if you can.” He threw a ten-dollar bill onto the bar to cover the burgers and beer. His last ten dollars, it occurred to him vaguely. “Let’s go see if that mutt’s asleep.”

“Where you going this time?” Wirf wondered when they headed for the door. “Drink one beer with me.”

Sully noticed that Wirf had picked the cheese off his burger. “What’s the matter with the cheese?” he said.

“Makes me constipated,” Wirf confessed. “Next time ask them to hold the cheese on my half.”

“Next time I’ll eat the whole thing myself.”

“Sit down. Drink a beer with me.”

Sully shook his head sadly, looked at his son. “You ever meet a man with only one speed before?”

“Yes,” Peter said. “You.”

Wirf clearly enjoyed this rejoinder. “I like him,” he told Sully.

“That’s understandable,” Sully said. “I helped make him.”

“That’s not the part I like, though,” Wirf said.

At the door, as Sully struggled into his coat, he again noticed the strange odor that lingered there, a smell he’d been aware of off and on all day, except it was stronger now.

“Do I want to know why I’m going to have to climb that fence?” Peter said.

“Easy.” Sully opened the door so Peter could precede him. “You’re going to steal me a snowblower.”

“I don’t know about this,” Peter said for the third time. His father was running a stick along the chain-link fence, making a hell of a racket, calling to the dog. The big yard on the other side of the fence was dark, full of heavy machinery. The dog could be anywhere. “He could be waiting to pounce,” Peter said.

Sully looked at him. “Remember when we drove up the last time? He wasn’t waiting to pounce. He was pouncing.”

This was true. The dog had been foaming at the mouth and lunging at the fence before his father had been able to get out of the car. Still, the dog’s absence seemed significant. And scary. Had they found him, drugged and dreaming peacefully up against the chain-link fence as they’d expected, Peter wouldn’t have hesitated. But there was no sign of Rasputin. Even the styrofoam packaging for the ground beef had disappeared. “Where’s the styrofoam package?” Peter wondered out loud.

Again Sully directed the beam of the flashlight along the ground inside the fence. No package. “He probably ate it,” Sully said. “This isn’t the world’s smartest dog we’re talking about here. Just the world’s meanest.”

“That’s the part that worries me,” Peter admitted. “The way the last few days have gone, it’d follow that I’d end up getting my throat ripped out by a junkyard dog.”

“Are you going to climb over or what?” Sully said. “I should have asked Wirf. Even a one-legged drunk could have climbed this fence by now.”

“Tell me again how this is your own snowblower we’re stealing,” Peter said. Sully had explained to him on the way that “in a sense” the snowblower was really his, because the man who owned it also owed Sully some money and wouldn’t pay. Sully’d already stolen the snowblower once, and this Carl Roebuck guy had stolen it back. This was kind of a game, apparently. Still, the whole thing gave Peter pause. What they were up to resembled burglary so closely that the law might not be able to tell the difference.

“I had a feeling your mother was raising you this way,” Sully said, a more potent criticism than he could have guessed.