Nobody's Fool (103 page)

It made him weak in the knees, and he'd had to go out on the porch for air. When Ralph's urine finally came, hot and painfully slow, Ralph studied both the stream and the darkening pool in the commode for the blood he still feared, despite the oncologist's assurances. But there was none.

With Vera in the hospital overnight and Peter over at his new flat, Ralph had full responsibility for his grandson, and so, when he left the bathroom, he checked on Will one more time. He liked to think of the boy as his grandson, even though he knew he really wasn't. One of the things that had come home to him today was that he'd have to share this boy with his real grandfather.

It wouldn't be like Peter, whom Sully hadn't been interested in. No, Ralph had seen the love in Sully's eyes when the boy climbed onto his lap at the White Horse Tavern. But Ralph also knew that Sully would share, that he wouldn't be greedy. And of course Ralph also continued to believe that people could get along. The boy was sleeping, peacefully for a change, the stopwatch Sully had given him ticking reassuringly a few inches away on the bed stand. Ralph had more than once heard the boy whimper fearfully in his sleep, but Will's respiration was rhythmic now, unlabored. Ralph could smell his grandson's sweet breath in the air above the bed, and he felt his throat constrict with only love. All evening, since returning home from the bar downtown. Will had talked of nothing but the leg, and Ralph knew that touching it, bringing the limb to the crippled lawyer, was the bravest thing his grandson had ever done and that the boy was full of pride. In the awful white flesh of Mr. Wirfly's stump. Will had found--what?--comfort. How could this be? Ralph wondered. In his own room, the room he had shared with Vera for so many years, Ralph undressed unselfconsciously for once and resisted the impulse to check himself one last time before turning in. Vera had always been, and was now, a difficult woman, but he couldn't imagine life without her, couldn't imagine the big bed to himself, couldn't imagine Sully's life, his having chosen it. Ralph made up his mind to go to the hospital first thing in the morning and bring his wife back to their home.

He would try even harder to make her happy. She was not a bad woman.

Sully pointed the El Camino up Main toward Bowdon and the house where he'd spent so many long nights as a child, waiting for his father, part-time caretaker and full-time barroom brawler, to come home with a snootful, limping, face swollen, tossed forcefully from the society of tough men and left with no alternative but to return, still full of rage, to the bosom of his family, to a wife who didn't know enough to run, or perhaps did not know where, or even how; to an older son who was biding his time, dreaming of cars and motorcycles, anything with wheels that would roll and roll and carry him away to freedom; to a younger son who was not old enough yet to dream of escape but old enough to make a solemn oath, and who made that oath and reaffirmed it every night, a single binding oath forged in the depths of that boy's blood: never forgive. This was the oath Sully had faithfully kept, and when he parked the El Camino at the curb and limped up the walk toward what could be only, in this too quiet night, an ambush, he felt the oath strengthen under the influence of beer and pain and painkillers and fear, and though he understood it was probably unwise to be so faithful to any oath, yet as always he was unwilling to indulge regret.

According to Ruth, it was wrong of him not to forgive, but in truth the only time he'd even been tempted was at his brother's funeral. There, in church, his parents had both surprised him. His mother, dry-eyed and dressed in somber black, had borne a look closer to triumph than to grief. This is his doing, she seemed to be saying of the big man who stood, hunched over the wooden pew, sobbing next to her. Big Jim had worn an ill-fitting suit of mismatched plaid so outrageously inappropriate for a funeral that Sully, himself dressed in his brother's old sport coat, a dark color at least, had noticed and felt terrible shame on top of his sorrow. Still, his father's wracking sobs in the front pew of the church seemed so genuine that Sully had wavered in his oath until he remembered the way his father had behaved at the funeral home, the way he'd greeted each visitor to his son's casket in a voice clear and rich with whiskey, "Come look what they've done to my boy," as if he himself were the victim of this accident, as if Patrick were just a prop, a visible proof of Big Jim's loss. It was the same way he'd behaved the day he impaled the boy on the fence. Before the boy even could be taken down. Big Jim had convinced the crowd to feel sorry for himself. And self, in the end, was the source of Big Jim's sorrow at the loss of his eldest son, Sully realized. For months, maybe years' Sully had watched his brother's transformation, watched Patrick become more and more like his father--more cruel, more careless, more angry, more of a bully. Though only seventeen, he was often drunk, and he'd been drunk when he hit the other driver head on.

Big Jim was, in a sense, mourning his own death, and Sully decided not to, not then when Patrick died, not many years later when Big Jim himself finally died peacefully in his untroubled sleep.

Halfway up the walk. Sully paused, stared at the house of his childhood, listening in the stillness to what sounded like freeway traffic, though it could not be. The interstate was miles away, and Sully couldn't remember ever hearing the sound of it, even on the stillest nights. For the umpteenth time today Sully felt disoriented, as if the geography of his life were suddenly subject to new rules, as if his young philosophy professor had gone right on disproving things during the long weeks since Sully dropped out of school and as if now, as things disappeared, the spaces between them were shrinking.

Somebody had apparently disproved The Ultimate Escape, and maybe the huge tract of marshland the park was to sit on had disappeared along with Cari Roebuck's housing development. Perhaps the disappearance of all these things had drawn the once distant interstate closer, everything shrinking to fill up the void occasioned by rampant philosophy. That would explain the traffic sounds, which grew louder as Sully halted on the top step, listening to them. To Ruth's way of thinking, Sully's unwillingness to forgive was the source of his own stubborn failures, and in the past she'd been capable of being very persuasive on this subject, would in fact have persuaded just about anyone but Sully. Her failure to convince him was probably the best single explanation for why things never worked out between them. She made it clear that he could not have them both--herself and his stubborn, fixed determination. For a while he'd allowed her to undermine it in subtle ways.

Once they'd even visited Big Jim in his nursing home. But Sully could only surrender so much, and he understood that if he and Ruth married, she'd eventually have him visiting Big Jim's grave with fresh flowers.

She'd go with him and make sure he left them. And where was the justice in that? It would mean that in the end Big Jim had fooled them all and beat the rap, walked out of court on some flimsy Christian loophole called forgiveness.

No. Fuck him. Eternally.

"Fuck you," Sully said out loud at the front door to the house on Bowdon Street, pushing it open angrily as the second of Jocko's screaming yellow zonkers finally ripped wide open the portal to the past, setting his brain, his heart, his soul churning.

"Fuck you, old man," the words he'd wanted to say as a boy, words that sounded fine, even now, in the empty house. Big Jim Sullivan, at the base of the stairs and about to head up with fists clenched, turned drunkenly to face Sully in the doorway, nothing but darkness between them.

His face was bloody and unnatural, its skin pulled tightly in conflicting directions by the clumsy stitches of old wounds. His nose, broken half a dozen times in brawls, was no longer plumb, his respiration audible. He grinned at his son across what separated them, the same grin Sully remembered from the day he missed the next rung of the ladder and fell off. That day, a tall chain-link fence had separated them. Now, nothing.

"It's about time you decided to stand up and testify," Big Jim said.

"I'm right here, old man," Sully assured him, feeling solid for the first time in days. If this was destiny, so be it.

"Let's go a few rounds, you and me. We'll see who quits first." His father's grin broadened.

"Come take your medicine," he said. Still sensing ambush. Sully let the door swing shut behind him so there could be no retreat. Unless his father had made friends in Hell, it was just the two of them. At two o'clock Miss Beryl was awakened by what sounded like someone dragging a heavy chain across some distant floor.

"We wear the chains we forge in life," she thought, half expecting Clive Jr. " gotten up as a ghost in Dickensian garb, to appear at her bedroom door. She wondered if what all this meant was that she was about to have another gusher. She sat up in bed and swung her feet over the side in search of her slippers. Before standing up, she wiggled her toes and flexed her fingers questioningly.

In the past her spells had been preceded by a tingling at the extremities, though she felt no such sensation now. Nor, when she stood, did she feel woozy or distant. Maybe it was just that the long day so lacking in pity was still not finished with her. She found her robe and made her way into the kitchen, where she turned on the bright overhead, confident that if there was a chain-rattling ghost on the premises, it wouldn't possess the temerity to pursue her into this cheerful, bright, hundred-watt realm. Tea, at this hour, was probably not a good idea, but she put the kettle on anyway and stood watching it, half expecting the phone in the next room to ring. It had been ringing when she returned from Schuyler Springs, and she took several calls before unplugging the phone. There'd been two more from reporters, who were now referring to Clive Jr. "s unavailability for comment as his disappearance. There had also been another call from the woman at the savings and loan, who sounded suspicious when Miss Beryl insisted that, no, Clive Jr. had not contacted her, had not left her any instructions, no hint of a destination or intentions. In her mailbox when she returned from Schuyler Springs there'd been the manila envelope she'd given to Abraham Wirfly the day before. Its contents, for which she should have been relieved and grateful, had done little to cheer her up. Inside, she found a handwritten note: " Unable to reach you, I've taken the rather large liberty of rescuing the enclosed from the county clerk's office, where it had not been fully processed.

We can, of course, refile any time you wish, but given recent events I must strongly advise you against transferring any property to your son at this time. The second matter we discussed has been dealt with as per your instructions. " This, then, was what had come other poor compromise, her attempt to do right, to separate the conflicting dictates of head and heart, to assuage conscience, which was, as Mark Twain had shrewdly observed, " no better than an old yeller dog. " For fairness and loyalty, however important to the head, were issues that could seldom be squared in the human heart, at the deepest depths of which lay the mystery of affection, of love, which you either felt or you didn't, pure as instinct, which seized you, not the other way around, making a mockery of words like " should" and " ought. " The human heart, where compromise could not be struck, not ever.

Where transgressions exacted a terrible price. Where tangled black limbs fell. Where the boom got lowered. When Miss Beryl again heard the sound of a distant chain being dragged across a floor, she went to investigate, turning on lights as she moved from one room to the next.

She traced the sound to the hallway she shared with Sully, and she contemplated the wisdom of opening her door to see what manner of thing was on the other side. Still, God hates a coward, she thought, and opened the door a crack. The hall light was on, and there, just outside her door by the stairway that led up to Sully's flat, stood a Doberman with a lopsided grin.

One end of the chain she'd been hearing was attached to the dog's rhinestone collar. The other end was attached to nothing at all. As far as she could tell, the dog was the only occupant of the hallway, though she was unwilling to open the door any wider to be sure.

"Who are you?" she asked the Doberman, which started at the sound other voice, suffered some kind of spasm and slumped against the banister as if shot. Before Miss Beryl could process this, the outside door opened and Sully materialized, screwdriver in hand.

"I tightened that railing back down for you," he told Miss Beryl when she opened the door to survey the strange scene in full. Sully seemed not to be surprised by the fact that there was a Doberman slumped against the stairs, which might or might not have meant that the dog was with him.

Neither did Sully seem surprised that his landlady was awake at two in the morning. In fact, her tenant looked to Miss Beryl like a man for whom there were no more surprises. He was paler and thinner and more ghostlike than ever, though not exactly Dickensian.

"You mind if I come in and take my boots off, Mrs. Peoples?"

"Of course not, Donald," she said, stepping back from the door. At this the dog let out a huge sigh and slumped all the way to the floor.

Both Sully and Miss Beryl studied the animal. Sully shook his head.

"What's your policy on pets?"

"Docs he bark?" Miss Beryl wondered.

"He did a few minutes ago," Sully told her, his voice, for some reason, shaky.

"Just in time, too. I was about to step into thin air." Miss Beryl waited for him to elaborate, but he didn't. So pale and thin.

Sully looked like air might well be his natural element.