Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

His father rolled down the window and leaned out. “Step back from that gate a minute.”

Peter did as he was told. As things got crazier, he was actually getting the hang of coexisting with his father. Following orders was pretty much essential, far more important than understanding them. Different rules entirely from those that governed his life as an educator. Out on the blacktop the El Camino did a three-point turn and backed into the drive, right up to the gate. “How am I lined up?” his father called.

“For what?”

“Never mind,” Sully said. Then he backed the car into the gate, which strained inward until the padlock stood straight out for a split second, then popped clean, the gate swinging slowly open, stopping only when it came into contact with the inert Rasputin, who didn’t so much as twitch.

The rest of the job took them no more than five minutes. Two minutes to locate the snowblower where Carl Roebuck had hidden it under a tarp, three more to load it into the El Camino. When Sully drove through the gate, Peter started to swing it shut until his father stopped him. “What now?” Peter asked. To his way of thinking, he’d been more than patient.

As usual his father offered no explanation. He was rooting around in the big toolbox in the bed of the truck until his fingers located what they were searching out. Another padlock, as it turned out, which Sully tossed to Peter. “We better lock up. Somebody might come by and steal something.”

At the traffic light by the IGA, Sully switched on the dome light. “Let’s see that hand.”

Peter showed him, proudly, the long, jagged scratch on his palm. It had bled considerably and dried brown and crusty.

Sully nodded and turned off the dome light. “Good,” he said, pulling into the intersection, the light having turned green. “I was afraid you’d gone and hurt yourself.”

Peter stared at the tilting structure. “You’re going to turn this into a bed-and-breakfast?”

Sully couldn’t help smiling. He’d told Peter about the job he’d been hired to do and, when Peter surprised him by exhibiting interest, offered to show Peter the house in question. But then instead of stopping at Miles Anderson’s place, he’d gotten another idea and turned the corner onto Bowdon, parking at the curb in front of Big Jim’s house. “Let’s get out for a minute,” he suggested.

Peter did as he was told, a bit reluctantly, it seemed to Sully, who couldn’t blame him. When they stopped at the black iron fence that surrounded the property, indeed most of the perimeter of the Sans Souci, Peter gave the fence a dubious shake, sending a chill through his father. “You aren’t going to ask me to climb this, are you?”

“Not unless you want to,” Sully said. “In fact, there’s an opening farther down.” He pointed to where the earth mover had passed magically through the fence the day before.

In fact, the last thing Sully wanted was for Peter to climb this fence, even though the spikes that had once run along its top had long since been removed. Half an hour ago, though, out at the Tip Top Construction yard, when Peter had looked like he might lose his balance atop the chain-link fence and impale himself there, the symmetry between this imagined event and the one fifty years ago when Big Jim Sullivan had shook the fence and impaled the boy perched on top was so powerful that in the moment Sully recognized the parallel he had known that the second awful event was fated to happen. It suddenly seemed perfectly natural that he should cause what his father had caused, only more terribly. Afterward, he’d probably act the same way his father did, and during the few seconds that Peter was stalled atop the fence, Sully had imagined not only that his son would be impaled but his own attempt to explain to Vera what had happened to their son, the son she had tried to protect by steering him clear of his father, the son he’d tried to protect by helping her do it, only to be his destroyer in the end. This was what he had caught a whiff of at the door of the White Horse Tavern.

“You got any idea what this place is?” he asked Peter now.

Peter examined the structure in the faint glow of the distant street lamp. “Should I?”

Sully shrugged. “I guess not. I thought maybe your mother might have pointed it out to you. It belonged to your grandfather. It’s the house I grew up in.”

The significance of this, if indeed there were any, seemed lost on Peter, who kept looking at the scratch on his palm, a gesture that caused Sully to realize how different, as father and son, they were, how much Sully had surrendered by allowing Peter to be raised by his mother. He couldn’t very well start lecturing the boy now. There was every reason to believe that the first thirty-five years of Peter’s life had been the formative ones. Still, it was tempting to tell him to quit looking at the scratch. It hadn’t changed or gotten worse since the last time he’d examined it. The thing to do with wounds was ignore them, like your hole cards in a game of stud poker, which also never changed, no matter how many times you looked at them. Like Sully’s knee, which he allowed himself to examine once, first thing in the morning, and which he then ignored the rest of the day. Like all the mistakes a man made in his life, which could be worried and picked at like scabs but were better left alone. It would have been good to say all this to his son, but age thirty-five was an awkward time to begin parental advice.

“I don’t suppose you could make any use of this property?” Sully suggested.

Peter looked at his father, then at the sagging house, then back at his father. Sully knew what his son must be thinking. It was hard to see where the worth might be. Intellectually he knew Ruth was right, that the land the house was sitting on was probably worth something, especially the way it abutted the property of the Sans Souci, but looking at the graying, weathered structure, you had a hard time imagining anybody being interested enough for money to change hands.

“Sure,” Peter said. “We could use it as a summer home.”

“I know,” Sully admitted. “It doesn’t look like it’s worth much, but I apparently own it, and I’d just as soon somebody else did.”

Peter was still looking at the house. “I don’t blame you,” he said.

Sully didn’t want to be angry with Peter, but he could feel his exasperation growing. What he especially hated was being reduced to using someone else’s logic, which was what he knew he’d have to do now. He’d have to say what Ruth would say if she were here. “You’re looking at the wrong thing,” he told his son without much conviction. “If you owned it, the first thing you’d probably want to do is knock the house down, sell it for scrap. It’s the ground that might be worth a few thousand. You’d pay the back taxes, sell it, put the profit in your pocket.”

“You could do the same thing,” Peter pointed out, not unreasonably.

Sully decided not to go into the real reason, his refusal to have anything to do with Big Jim Sullivan, alive or dead, which had never convinced anybody yet and wouldn’t convince Peter either. In fact, it occurred to Sully that Peter could well have made just such an oath at some point in his own life. Perhaps it was still in force. “I might, if I had the back taxes, but I don’t.”

“Well,” Peter said. “Neither do I. In fact, I’m not sure I can afford to rent a car in Albany tomorrow. If they don’t take my credit card, I’m going to have to ask you for a loan.”

Sully thought about this, about where he might be able to get the money. “I thought you were doing okay,” he frowned. “You’re a college professor, right?”

Peter chuckled unpleasantly, as if to suggest unworldliness in his father. “You have any idea what an assistant professor makes, Dad?”