Nobody's Fool (33 page)

"Don't tell your mother," he warned. Even after his divorce from Vera, Sully had remained convinced that he'd been a better father to Peter than Big Jim had been to him, though this, he had to admit, was not a lofty goal. It saddened him to realize he'd accomplished this intention by such a slender margin.

Instead of abusing Peter, he'd ignored the boy, forgotten him for months at a stretch, a simple truth he now found difficult to credit though impossible to deny. The years had simply flown by, and Vera, with Ralph's help, had seemed more than competent in the business of providing whatever it was their son might need. Without ever saying so, Vera had often managed to convey to Sully that they were doing fine without him, which indeed they seemed to be.

Ralph, she assured him, was a natural father, even if he wasn't the natural father, and Peter didn't lack for love or anything else. They were a family, she told him in a way that suggested to Sully that if he were to intrude upon them with his presence he would be endangering that family. And so he had found the excuse he needed to stay away, grateful, truth be told, for his freedom. It had been Ralph, not Vera, who'd sought him out occasionally, told him he should stop by some time, see the boy, see how big he'd gotten since the last time, so big Sully'd hardly recognize him. Which was not true. Sully always recognized Peter by the odd, worried expression he had about the eyes, an expression he'd passed on to Will, who wore it. Sully thought, with more grace than Peter ever had. His few outings with his son had always been strained affairs, since Sully couldn't imagine what to say to a kid with a perpetual frown who always watched the speedometer and reported back to his mother how fast Sully had driven. They usually went somewhere where there'd be a crowd--a movie or an amusement park--so they'd seem less alone. And, it was true, Sully was a menace as a parent. He never saw that it was a bad idea to feed the kid a corn dog and then take him on the Tilt-a-Whirl until the corn dog came back up and Sully was faced with the necessity of cleaning the boy up so he could be brought home. Sooner or later on each of their outings they ended up in some grungy men's room with Sully, wet paper towels in hand, trying to sponge the boy's sour vomit off the front of his shin and pants and listening to himself say, in Big Jim Sullivan's voice, "Don't tell your mother, okay, sport?" Then they'd get back into the car and Sully would roll down all the windows and drive like hell in the hope that the wind would dry Peter's clothes by the time they got home.

Sometimes Peter had fallen asleep against him on the way home, and when they arrived back at Vera's, Sully would carry his son up the walk.

The little boy's hair always smelled sweet and clean, the way Will's smelled now. It smelled. Sully had realized, like a good home, like cleanliness and decency and safety. Like the things Vera and Ralph had provided for Peter.

And it was the reason he never went back to Vera's until the next time Ralph came looking for him. At a twenty-four-hour restaurant just off the interstate ramp Sully ordered Will a dish of ice cream with a cherry on top.

His own stomach was rumbling ominously, so he ordered just coffee for himself.

"Extra caffeine," he told the waitress. The girl who took the order was apparently too unhappy to be working on Thanksgiving to respond to humor. When the ice cream came, Sully used the pay phone at the front of the restaurant. Vera answered on the first ring.

"Hi," he said.

"You missing anybody?"

"I knew it," his sex-wife said.

"Where are you?"

"None of your business," he said.

"And you couldn't have known it, because I just found out myself. He hid in the back of the truck."

From where he was standing in the phone booth, he could see his grandson fidgeting nervously. Finally, he got up on his knees so he could see over the back of the booth. When Sully waved, the boy smiled, clearly relieved to have located his grandfather.

"They're all out combing the neighborhood.

Sully," she said, her voice still rich with accusation.

"Well, now they can stop," he said.

"I'll have him home in half an hour." The line was quiet for so long that Sully wondered if Vera had hung up and he'd missed the click.

"You still there?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know if you're there?"

177 "Haven't you ever felt like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like you don't even exist?" This was not the kind of conversation Sully wanted to be having with his sex-wife, whose capacity for self-pity was without limitation, in Sully's view.

"Never," he said.

"Not even once." He said this because it was true and because he wanted to make his lack of sympathy for her posit ion clear.

"Lucky you," Vera told him and hung up. When Will finished his ice cream.

Sully showed him the cherrystone clam he'd discovered was still in his pocket while he was on the phone.

"It's a seashell," Will said, touching the clam where it lay in the center of the table.

"Right," Sully said.

"Except there's something inside." Will drew back his hand, reevaluated the clam.

Sully tapped it with the butt of his knife. The clam made a fizzing sound.

"Can it get out?"

"It's attached to the inside of the shell," Sully explained.

"It doesn't want to get out."

"I would," Will said.

"Not if you were a clam. It's safe in there," Sully said.

"You and your brother fight all the time?" Will wasn't sure how to answer this question.

In fact, they never fought, unless Wacker's terrorist attacks on himself constituted fighting. If those attacks were what Grandpa Sully meant by fighting, then they fought all the time. Will decided to split the difference.

"Sometimes," he said.

"I used to fight with my brother, too," Sully told him.

"Not anymore?"

"He died in a car accident," Sully told him. This information startled Will, who had stopped just short of wishing his brother dead for fear that it might come true and somebody would later find out about the wish.

"I'm going to live with Dad," Will blurted out his own wish and surprised himself in the process. What a strange day it had been. So far he'd retaliated against Wacker and driven a car, and now he'd told his grandfather a whopper.

For about the last month. Will had begun to imagine a new and better life. His parents would divorce and he would live with his father. At first the idea had frightened him. He knew divorce was a terrible thing to hope for, but it wasn't as bad as wishing Wacker dead, which he was U S S 0 afraid he might do if he couldn't think of an alternative. So he'd settled on the divorce. He hated to lose his mother in the bargain, but there was no help for it. She had to go.

The best part of the divorce idea was that Will felt sure that with Wacker out of the picture he'd be able to demonstrate to his father that he was really a good boy, a boy worthy of great love, a boy who would never--or seldom--cause trouble. And once the family separated, his mother would soon realize that it had been Wacker who'd caused all the adversity all along. At present she seemed pretty confused. No matter what happened or who was to blame, she meted out equal punishment. She yelled at both boys, spanked both boys, sent both boys to their room. After the divorce, when Will was gone and trouble persisted, she'd call his father and the two would compare notes.

She'd tell his father what a bad boy Wacker had been all week, and his father would say, "That's too bad. Will's been just perfect." Then it would dawn on them both. Eventually they would get back together, Will always thought happily.

Except everything would be different. They'd get a house, not an apartment.

Each boy would have his own room, and his parents would take Will's advice and lock Wacker in his and slide all his meals under the door.

They wouldn't let him out until Will was grown up and moved away. He'd make his parents promise not to tell Wacker where he lived. This was important, because when Wacker finally got out of that locked room he was going to be mad. Will told Sully all of this. Once he started, it all came out, and the new fantasy life seemed even more real for having been voiced. If his grandfather saw any flaw in the plan, he didn't say so. Grandpa Sully just listened, for which Will was grateful. In his entire life no adult had ever just listened to him without offering all sorts of objections, all sorts of reasons why things weren't the way Will thought they were or thought they could be. As Will talked, uninterrupted, he gathered confidence and momentum. He described the house he and his father would live in, as well as the terrible punishments Wacker would have to endure once the jig was up. His grandfather's stunned silence was just the sort of validation he'd been hoping for. He'd never been happier.

Ice cream had never tasted better. Usually, Will didn't care for the taste of food. Fear made it rise, sour, in his throat. But this ice cream tasted so good he licked the dish.

"You could come visit whenever you want," he told Sully, as if Wacker might be the reason his grandfather had, until now, stayed away.

"I will, too," Sully assured him, consulting his watch. The boy had NOBODY'S FOOL 179 been talking for half an hour, which made them overdue back at the house.

"We better head back. don't you think?"

Will's face fell.

"I'd rather live with you."

"If you lived with me, then I couldn't come visit," Sully pointed out.

"Besides, if I stole you away from Mommy and Daddy, they'd put me in jail.

Grandma Vera would see to it." Will knew this was true. He didn't want to head back, but he didn't want Grandpa Sully to go to jail, either. Somehow, just talking with Grandpa Sully had made him feel braver. He wasn't quite so afraid of Wacker anymore. True, Wacker would get back at him for the toilet seat, but when it happened, Will would just think of all those years his brother would have to spend locked in his room. At the register.

Sully paid for the coffee and his grandson's ice cream. In the nearest booth somebody was eating a chicken-fried steak, which looked and smelled good. Sully's stomach had settled a little and he remembered he hadn't eaten all day. On the way out of the restaurant he considered calling Vera and telling them they were on their way, then decided not to. In ten minutes they'd be there in person. And they would have been, too, if there'd been any gas in Sully's truck.

There'd been over a quarter of a tank this morning, but most of that had idled away at the curb outside his sex-wife's house, and now the truck was bone dry, which Sully would have seen if he'd thought to look at the gas gauge on the way to the restaurant. Fortunately, this time it was Ralph who answered the phone when Sully called, and fifteen minutes later when the Buick pulled into the restaurant parking lot, it was Ralph at the wheel.

"Grandpa to the rescue," he chortled when Will ran to him. Ralph flushed then, realizing.

"I kinda think of myself as their grandpa," he admitted to Sully.

"That's okay," Sully said.

"It's the way I think of you, too."

"You better get in the car," Ralph told the boy.

"You don't have no coat on." This was true, though Sully hadn't noticed it. Will scrambled into the front seat and behind the wheel of Ralph's Buick.

Ralph handed Sully the five-gallon gas can he was carrying.

"How'd he get the bump on his head?" he asked somewhat conspiratorially, as if he knew he'd be required to explain when he got home. Sully explained guiltily. Vera had always maintained that he was a dangerous man, and he knew what she'd say when the boy came home damaged. Ralph, on the other hand, seemed to understand that these things could happen.

"Hell," he said.

"We didn't even know he was gone there for a while. Then we thought he'd run clean away. I was glad to hear he was with you."

"Vera wasn't."

"Well, you know her."

"Yes, I do. She's still convinced nobody loves her, I gather."

"She's having a rough day. Her dad being so sick and having all the company.

She gets all twisted up inside."

"I should've known better than to come over," Sully said, affected by Ralph's generosity.

"I did know better."

"Don't feel that way," Ralph said, genuinely hurt.

"You're always welcome."

"Well, I sure appreciate your coming out," Sully said.

"I must have idled away five gallons right outside your house." Sully unscrewed the gas cap and inserted the can's retractable spout.

"Go ahead and put it all in," Ralph suggested.

"I won't be mowing no more lawns for a while."

"You don't have a snow blower Ralph shook his head sadly.

"I gotta get one, though. I can't shovel since my colon. Damn near killed me this morning, and I waited until half of it melted. It's hell getting old, ain't it?"

When Sully was sure he'd put in enough gas to get back to town, he removed the spout and screwed the gas cap back on.