Nobody's Fool (32 page)

By flooding the bathroom, he'd even lost the protection of Grandma Vera, who, he suspected, had been on his side. She alone had seemed to understand that Wacker was cruel and unnatural. Now even she would be on Wacker's side. The way Will saw it, he had two options. One was to stay locked in Grandma Vera's bathroom for the rest of his life, the other to make a break for it. Maybe Grandpa Sully would take him. He recalled with fondness Grandpa Sully's fearlessness yesterday, and remembered how his grandfather had winked at him as they drove off, a wink that had conveyed an understanding. When the bathroom door rattled and his father's angry voice ordered him to unlock the door.

Will was already half dressed and fully resolved.

Thankfully, he'd piled his clothes on top of the bathroom sink, and they were dry, whereas Wacker's were a soggy lump on the floor. His sneakers were a little wet, but he didn't care.

By standing on the commode he was able to reach the lock on the small bathroom window. The screen was loose, the air outside cold, the ground a long way down, but Will's decision was made. He would find a new life. The confusion reigning in his sex-wife's house reminded Sully of the confusion of war, the principal difference being that at Vera's it seemed no terribly dishonorable thing to slip out the back, which was what he did when the others converged on the bathroom door to cajole Will into opening it. Peter was the only one who'd noticed him go, and Sully had thought he saw his son smirk. Was it that knowing smirk or the chaos of Vera's family that he was fleeing? he wondered, turning his key in the ignition. Whichever. When he pulled away from the curb, he stomped the gas pedal hard and the truck roared up the quiet street at unsafe speed, taking the corner as if he feared pursuit. Only when he turned onto Main and stopped at the traffic light in front of the OTB did he feel relatively safe. At The Horse, in the company of relatively sane men, he'd feel even safer, and since this could not be brought about soon enough, he considered just driving on through the long red light he was sitting beneath. His was the only moving vehicle on the whole dark deserted street, which made obedience to the traffic signal seem even more ridiculous than usual, so he revved the engine, inched forward, did a quick scan of the street and checked the rearview for cops. What he saw in the mirror so startled him that his foot slipped off the clutch, causing the truck to lurch forward and die beneath the traffic light. There in the mirror, for just a moment, like an ancient accusation, were the frightened eyes of his son. Not Peter the adult, whom he'd left at Vera's talking to the bathroom door, twisting the doorknob back and forth, but the boy he'd been so long ago. The plea in those eyes in the mirror had been so urgent, so real that Sully thought for a second that this must be another dream, like the sauna one, that he'd again fallen asleep in the truck. The light turned green, but Sully sat, stalled, the need to flee suddenly gone out of him.

And then the eyes were there again, along with the apologetic smile of a stowaway.

"Hi, Grandpa," Will said when Sully got out of the truck, his voice as thin with fear as a voice could be.

171 Sully searched for his grandson's name, locating it finally.

"You okay?"

Sully said, lifting the boy out of the pickup's bed. He'd hidden beneath an old swatch of burlap, daring to come out from under it only when the truck stopped at the traffic light. Then when it lurched, he'd lost his balance and hit his forehead against the cab.

Will seemed not to hear his grandfather's question. What had captured his attention was the lump magically growing on his forehead, just below the hairline. The lump didn't hurt, at least not like the hurts his brother inflicted, but it made him feel woozy and he was impressed by the way the lump had sprung magically into being, how it was still growing. He could tell it was growing as he fingered it.

"I'm not going back," he finally told his grandfather.

"Ever." Sully nodded.

"Who arc you going to live with?" Will sighed.

"You, I guess." It seemed the only sensible thing, and he tried to conceal from his grandfather that he'd have preferred some other arrangement. A car pulled up behind them at the traffic light, which had turned green for the second time.

"Okay, get in then," Sully suggested, picking the boy up again, placing him inside the cab.

"Slide over," he said when it became clear that the boy wouldn't do it unless specifically instructed. Peter had been the same way, an almost comatose kid, it had seemed to Sully. If you didn't tell him to open a door, he'd just stand in front of it. At the time it had not occurred to Sully that the reason might be fear. The fear of doing the wrong thing. It seemed obvious now. When his grandson had made room. Sully climbed in after him, banging the door shut behind him, causing the boy to jump.

How did he get to be such a bundle of nerves? Sully wondered.

"So," Sully said.

"You got back at your brother, huh?" Will shrugged, again reminding Sully of Peter, who as a boy had been almost impossible to engage in conversation. When the driver behind Sully made the mistake of tooting.

Sully got out of the truck and stared at him until the man shrugged sheepishly, backed up and pulled around, giving Sully wide berth.

"Two cars in the whole street, and you've got to toot at me," Sully called as the man slid by into the intersection. Will was studying him nervously when Sully got back in.

"Dad does that too," he observed sadly, as if he'd discovered a genetic flaw.

"Does what?"

"Gets mad at people in cars," Will explained.

"He doesn't get out, though."

Sully nodded. That sounded about right. His son seemed exactly this son of man. Angry enough to yell, not angry enough to get out. At a pretty nearly complete loss about what to do with his grandson, he said, "How about some ice cream?"

"We had dessert already," Will said.

Sully sighed. Vera did raise good citizens. Another boy who could not tell a lie. It was discouraging.

"You had ice cream?"

"Pumpkin pie."

"With ice cream?"

"No."

"Then you can have the ice cream now. We'll pretend it was on top of the pie." Will thought about this. He'd been warned about Grandpa Sully, who was irresponsible. Still, if he was going to live with his grandfather, he was going to have to get used to such things.

He sighed.

"Okay."

"Good," Sully said, turning the key in the ignition. Thank God, in fact. They headed out of town. Will silently fingering the lump on his forehead. Almost as interesting as the lump was the fact that his grandfather's truck had a hole the size of a basketball in the floor beneath the passenger's seat.

"Don't fall through," Sully warned when he saw his grandson peering down through the hole at the racing pavement below. When they got to the new spur and had it pretty much to themselves, Sully said, "You want to drive?"

Will looked at him fearfully.

"Slide over," Sully said, adding, "be careful of my bum knee." Will settled carefully onto Sully's right leg, allowing his own small legs to dangle in the direction of the gas pedal and brake, careful not to let them bump his grandfather's left knee. Together they held the steering wheel.

"It's jiggling," Will observed, clearly unsure whether this vibration was natural.

"Trucks do," Sully explained.

"Especially broken-down old trucks like Grandpa's."

"It's a nice truck," Will said, his voice vibrating from holding the wheel.

"I'm glad you like it," Sully said, taken aback by the little boy's compliment, and without planning to, he kissed his grandson on the top of his head.

"Now you've driven a car. I bet you didn't know you could," he said, adding, "don't tell your mother."

173 Some phrases were truly magical in their ability to dredge up the past from the bottom of life's lake, and for Sully, like all errant fathers, "Don't tell your mother" was such a phrase. He hadn't used it in about thirty years. But the words were right there, anxious to be spoken again after so long, a holy incantation. It was the phrase he'd been born to speak, having learned the words from his own father, who, if they hadn't already existed, would have had to invent them.

"We'll stop in here for just a minute," Big Jim had been fond of saying outside his favorite tavern, and Sully and his brother, Patrick, would wait a beat or two until his father pulled the heavy door toward them and pushed them gently into the cool darkness, warning as he did so, "Don't tell your mother." Inside, Sully and his brother were always bribed with nickels to play shuffleboard and pinball while Big Jim located a spot at the bar and ordered the first of many boilermakers, paid for with money he withheld from Sully's mother, whom he kept on a strict allowance, money Big Jim now kept in a careless pile on the bar to ensure his welcome.

Sometimes, when Sully got tired of pinball (he had to stand on a wooden stool and even then couldn't reach the buttons comfortably) or ran out of nickels and joined his father at the bar, he'd stare at the pile of bills, aware that this was the same money his mother talked about so bitterly when his father wasn't around, money she'd have spent on food and clothes if she had it, so they could have decent things, she said.

His father, already on his third boilermaker and getting mean, would see Sully staring at the money and cuff him a good one to get his attention.

"Don't tell your mother," he'd say.

"She don't have to have every last nickel I cam, does she?" And so Sully would promise, not wanting to get cuffed again because subsequent cuffs always got harder, not softer. Then Big Jim would order another boilermaker or toss a dollar off the top of the now diminishing pile at the bartender, who doubled as a bookie.

"On his goddamn nose," Big Jim always instructed, having decided on a horse. To him, place and show bets were cowardly and he wanted no part of their measly payoff.

"You hear me? Right on his goddamn nose." Most of these afternoons had ended the same way, with Big Jim being told he'd have to leave, because the more he drank, the meaner he got, and it was only a matter of time before he'd start a fight. Sometimes one of the men in the bar would try to reason with him and head off hostilities. What did he want to go and behave like this for, in front of his boys? the man would ask.

This tactic, which should have worked, was always a mistake. Big Jim Sullivan was not a man tortured by self-doubt, and of all the things he was certain of, he was most certain of his skill as a parent. When anyone offered even the slightest hint that he might be less than a model father, that person did well to duck, because Big Jim always defended himself in this matter with all of his pugilistic skills.

Unfortunately, after so many boilermakers, pugilistic skills were not Big Jim's strong suit. A lifelong believer in getting in the first punch, he never hesitated to throw it, or at least he never meant to hesitate. The trouble was that the roundhouse he always had in mind got telegraphed so far in advance of its arrival that Big Jim's adversary usually had ample opportunity to avoid the blow, and when the force of the big man's swing spun him around Big Jim usually found himself in a full Nelson and heading for the door someone was usually holding open for him. Finding himself seated outside, he always picked himself up with great dignity, got his bearings and lurched in the direction of home, having forgotten entirely that his sons had been with him when he entered the tavern. One afternoon, still vivid in Sully's recollection, his father had tried to start a fight with a man who was not a regular and did not know the drill, that Sully's father was to be ejected without being injured. Perhaps, not being a regular, the man didn't know that Big Jim, drunk, wasn't nearly as dangerous as he looked, unless you happened to be married to him or were one of his children. Big Jim had focused on the man for some reason and had been insulting him for about half an hour, and when the man finally had enough and said so and Big Jim had taken his inevitable wild swing, the man had slipped the punch gracefully.

As Big Jim stumbled forward under the impetus of his miss, instead of letting him go down, the man had caught him with a short, compact uppercut that not only broke Big Jim's nose but repositioned it on the side of his face. The force of the blow had the effect of righting Sully's father, restoring his magical drunk's equilibrium, and he didn't lose that equilibrium again until the man had hit him half a dozen more times, each blow more savage than the last. No one, not even the men who had been merciful to Sully's father in the past, intervened. Perhaps they too had had enough. Finally, his face a mask of blood, Sully's father, reeling from the last of the blows that had been rained upon him, had simply let the last punch spin him toward the door and he stumbled on outside, as if he'd been meaning to leave for some time.

He waited until the door closed behind him before going to his knees, vomiting onto the sidewalk and passing out. He lay where he fell for about ten minutes, time enough for a small crowd to gather and for someone to send for a doctor. Despite his brother's assurances that Big Jim was simply unconscious. Sully had thought his father was dead, didn't see how he could be anything but dead the way his NOBODY'S FOOL 175 one eye was swollen shut and his nose no longer occupied the center of his face. But before the doctor arrived. Big Jim snorted awake and got to his feet to all appearances refreshed by his nap. And when he lurched in the direction of home, nobody tried to stop him. Sully and his brother, Patrick, had followed at what they considered a safe distance, but when they were a block from home Big Jim had sensed their presence, turned and grabbed his sons roughly by the collar and drew them up close to his ruined face, so close Sully could smell his father's blood and vomit.