Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Peter grabbed the chain-link fence and tested it by shaking.

“Climb,” his father said. “We’re getting old.”

It was not easy climbing the fence. The bottoms of Peter’s tennis shoes were wet from standing in the slush, and they kept slipping. Also, he hadn’t climbed anything since he was a kid, and his clumsiness embarrassed him mightily. When he finally got the side of one foot planted on top of the fence, wedged in between two twists of the chain link, he discovered he hadn’t the necessary strength to hoist himself over.

“What’s the matter?” his father wanted to know. A fair question.

“Nothing,” Peter lied, his arms trembling. “I’m just catching my breath.”

“Don’t get stuck.”

Don’t get stuck. Words to live by.

Then suddenly Peter was over and standing on the other side, facing Sully, who was barely visible in the dark, though only a foot away, separated by just the chain-link fence. Feeling his hand burn, Peter examined his palm and discovered he’d raked it along the top of the fence. His father aimed the flashlight beam on the injury. It was only a scratch, but small beads of blood were forming along its length. Peter felt an odd exhilaration at the wound and the sight of his own blood, drawn in the dubious service of a dangerous man. Who happened to be his father.

“Here’s the hacksaw,” Sully said, slipping the blade under the fence. “It’s just a padlock.”

Peter took the blade and followed along the fence a few feet until he felt the gate. Sure enough, there was a padlock dangling on the inside. Sully illuminated it with the flashlight as best he could. “Try not to saw your thumb off,” he advised.

Peter gripped the hacksaw’s handle, which was smooth and fit perfectly over the fresh scratch on his palm. For some reason it was satisfying to return his father’s saw with his own blood on the smooth grip. Sully, Peter knew, was suspicious of intellectuals and therefore suspicious of himself and his education, especially the private schools he had attended until the money had run out. According to his mother, when Peter had been sent off to prep school, Sully had accused her of trying to raise him above his station. Vera had replied that this was not true, that she was just trying to raise their son above Sully’s station. It was one of his mother’s favorite anecdotes, though Peter suspected the conversation had probably not gone that way.

“You want a glove?” his father offered.

Peter declined the offer and began to saw. In the night’s stillness, the rasping sound was louder than he’d expected, and Peter imagined it waking his mother back in town, imagined her understanding intuitively that it was the sound of her thirty-five-year-old son, the college professor, helping his father, whose influence she had long warned him against, to burglarize Tip Top Construction. It was a pleasant feeling, this father-son complicity against a long-suffering woman, and its thirty-five-year absence welled up in Peter powerfully. With it came the less pleasant possibility that he was not so different from his natural father as he’d always liked to think. True, he wasn’t the sort of man who’d leave his wife and family. Rather, he was the kind who’d drive that wife and family away, so it’d be their decision, not his.

As Peter worked at the padlock and considered all of this, he became gradually aware of a silent, motionless presence in the darkness on his side of the fence. Peter did not immediately look, conditioned as he was not to look by his son Will, who had a habit of coming noiselessly into Peter’s study, the utility room, actually. Peter always left the door open for air, which allowed Will to come up behind him and stand silently at his father’s elbow, where he quietly watched Peter work and patiently waited for him to look up and discover him there so he could tell his father about Wacker’s latest atrocity. Peter often became aware of his son’s presence gradually, and he was aware that the boy, through some intuited adult sympathy, was allowing Peter to complete the paragraph he was reading or the thought he was committing to a note card. This kindness was a small gift that Peter always accepted solemnly before swiveling slowly in his desk chair so as not to startle Will, the jumpiest of little boys, and taking him onto his lap.

This was the sort of presence Peter now felt at his elbow, a presence so still and considerate that it might have been nothing at all, or a small boy awaiting permission to speak, and so Peter did not turn to investigate until he’d succeeded in cutting through the first prong of the padlock. Irrationally or not, he half expected to see Will standing there in the dark at his elbow.

It was not Will, but rather Rasputin.

The Doberman stood there, perfectly motionless, even when Peter jumped and backed into the fence in terror. The beam of Sully’s flashlight, which had been angled sideways to fix the padlock, did not immediately locate the dog, but when it did, Peter nearly passed out from fright. The Doberman appeared to be grinning, its teeth bared, lips pulled back from the gums hideously. The perfect absence of sound — of even the low growl that Peter expected from an animal prepared to pounce — made the sight that much more terrifying. The dog’s hind legs were planted wide apart.

And so Peter, before he could even begin to decide whether he was a man like or unlike his natural father, prepared to die. There was no question of climbing the fence. The dog would be on him as soon as he moved. No question of anyone coming to his rescue. The fence separated him from his father, and Sully lacked a weapon anyway. To judge from the fact that the beam of the flashlight stayed fixed on Rasputin’s face, Sully was frozen too, in surprise if not fear. At least, Peter thought, it would be over in a second. When the dog leapt, it would tear out his throat quickly and, he prayed, painlessly, as it had no doubt been trained to do. It was his father who would have to watch in horror as the dreadful scene played itself out, helpless on the other side of the fence. Peter didn’t envy his father or mourn the loss of his own life. In a way it would free him. Of Charlotte, of whom he’d long wished to be free. Of hothouse Didi and her shared peaches. Of the profession he had failed at and that had failed him. Of his mother’s merciless, unrelenting expectation. All of it gone, mercifully, in a moment. And then blessed oblivion.

If only the dog would just spring and tear out his throat and be done with it. Rasputin continued to grin, but that was all, at least at first. As the eternal microseconds elapsed, Peter noted a subtle tremor in the Doberman’s front legs, like a cold shiver. Gradually the trembling became more violent until the dog’s front legs gave way and he collapsed, snout in a puddle, haunches still in the air. The dog remained that way, balanced for a moment, then either sighed or farted, Peter couldn’t tell which, and tipped over onto a patch of brown snow.

Peter nearly followed the dog’s example, saved from collapse by the sound of his father’s voice at his ear. “That third pill was the winner,” Sully said in that maddening way he had of congratulating himself on his own sound judgment in situations that were hardly conducive. “Hurry and finish before he wakes up.”

Unfortunately, Peter was now shaking too badly to make much of a job of it. The blade didn’t want to stay in the track he was cutting, and his father’s hand on the flashlight didn’t seem as steady now. Peter had nearly cut through three separate places on the remaining prong when the hacksaw blade broke.

“Never mind,” his father said, getting into the El Camino.

“What do you mean, never mind?” Peter wanted to know.