Nobody's Fool (56 page)

"There've been times I wished you were less like your mother, but that's a different issue." Peter's smirk was less contemptuous now.

"Terrific," he said.

"She's afraid I'll end up like you, you're afraid I'll end up like her." When they arrived. Sully pointed out the Miles Anderson property.

"This is it."

"What's the inside like?" Peter wondered.

"I don't know," Sully said.

"I'll see it tomorrow.

Apparently it needs a lot of work. Which is good, because I do too.

Assuming my knee can stand it. " Peter nodded, studying the house thoughtfully.

"What would you say to my helping you out for a month?"

he said, surprising Sully completely.

"You mean it?"

"My last class is December thirteenth. I don't go back until mid January

"I don't know how much I could pay you," Sully said.

"Minimum wage?"

"Maybe a little better than that," Sully said, calculating. Unless he let Rub go, which he couldn't, he wasn't sure he'd have enough for three men, not if it was going to last.

"It'd all be under the table, though."

"Okay," Peter agreed.

"You're not just doing this to piss your mother off, are you?"

"No, I need the money."

"Because it's sure to, "Sully said.

"Too bad," Peter said, as if it weren't.

Again Sully felt what must surely be an irrational urge to defend his sex-wife, a woman for whom he had little use and, he thought, less affection. Instead he said, "You can stay with me if you like.

I've got room. " Peter grinned. " Now that would piss her off. " Sully turned up the collar of his coat against the wind, which was tunneling up Main the way it always did in winter, the way it had when Sully himself was a boy and had to trek uptown to school. " Bring Will with you," he suggested.

Peter grinned. " Not Wacker? " Sully shrugged, not wanting to express a clear preference for one of his grandsons, though clear preference was what he felt. " He told me yesterday that you and Charlotte were going to split up. " This clearly surprised Peter.

"Will did?"

"He must have overheard a conversation," Sully suggested.

He recalled himself and his brother, Patrick, listening in the dark of their small bedroom to his parents, waiting for the sound of fist or open hand on flesh. At first it had scared them both, but Sully had noticed a gradual change in his brother, whom he sometimes caught smiling darkly at the sounds of violence. Sully hoped his grandsons hadn't had to listen to anything like that.

"I doubt it," Peter said.

"Talk is one of the things Charlotte and I almost never do. If one of us walks into the room, the other generally gets up and leaves." Sully tried to imagine this and couldn't. The only two women he'd ever had much to do with--Vera and Ruth--were both fighters. Their styles differed:

Vera always jabbing, nicking you, two steps forward, one step back, relentless, tap-tap-tapping, right between the eyes; Ruth lunging at you, bullying, enjoying the clinches, not above throwing low blows. He guessed he preferred either to silence.

"She blames you for everything, you know?"

Sully found this hard to believe. He'd always been under the impression that Charlotte liked him.

"Charlotte docs?"

"No, Mom."

"Oh," Sully said, relieved.

He thrust his hands deeper into his coat pockets, one of which, he noticed, had a hole. Rooting around in the lining and feeling something foreign there, he extracted the rubber alligator he had bought from Mrs. HCarld and then forgotten about. Peter studied the alligator without surprise or interest. Strangenesswise, the evening had already been too rich. Why shouldn't his father have an alligator in his pocket? Sully sniffed the alligator, which reeked powerfully of the same foul stench that had been pursuing him all night.

"I think this son of a bitch shit in my pocket," he said. Peter wrinkled his nose and stepped back. Sully returned the alligator to his pocket.

"I

don't hate your mother," he said for the record.

"That's good of you," said Peter. They drove back to Vera's house, parked at the curb right where Sully had fallen asleep. Neither man made a quick move to get out of the car.

"You want to hear a good one," Peter finally said.

Sully wasn't sure, but he said yes.

"I had fun tonight," Peter told him, adding, "Poor Mom. It's her worst fear. That your life has been fun."

"Tell her not to worry." The garage door opened then and Ralph emerged slowly, peering into the street at the strange car. Peter rolled down the window and called to him quietly, "It's just me. Pop."

"That your dad with you?" Ralph wondered. Sully got out, waved.

Ralph sauntered down the drive to where they were parked.

"What's that?" he wanted to know, pointing at the snow blower in back of the El Camino. Having successfully swiped it back from Carl Roebuck, Sully had all but forgotten the snow blower Which fit in with one of his theories about life, that you missed what you didn't have far more than you appreciated what you did have. It was for this reason he'd always felt that owning things was overrated. All you were doing was alleviating the disappointment of not owning them.

"It's the snow blower I promised you," Sully said.

"Come have a look." Ralph approached dubiously.

"It's a beauty," he said when he'd had a chance to examine it under the street lamp.

"I can't afford it, though, Sully."

"Sure, you can," Sully told him.

"I got it for nothing."

"It's true," Peter said, surprising Sully, who hadn't expected such easy complicity. He'd half expected Vera's stern moral training to reassert itself, for Peter to confess to Ralph that the snow blower was stolen.

Instead, there he was, grinning mischievously beneath the halo of lamplight.

"I might want to borrow it sometimes," Sully warned.

"Like every time it snows real hard."

"Sure," Ralph said. Together the three men unloaded the snow blower put it safely into Ralph's garage, where, unless Carl Roebuck conducted a house-to-house search, it would be safe for a while. The three men stood in the dark garage, staring at the stolen snow blower

"Awful good of you.

Sully," Ralph said.

"I'm sure Vera'd want me to thank you for her too."

"If you're sure." Sully grinned.

"Tell her she's welcome."

"Where is she?"

Peter said, his voice confidential, as if a normal tone of voice might possess the power to conjure her into their midst.

"Asleep, finally," Ralph said, as if he shared his stepson's fear.

"Some day, huh?"

Sully said. They all agreed it had been a humdinger.

"Charlotte didn't call, did she?" Peter said. Ralph shook his head.

"I still can't believe she went off and left you here." Clearly, he'd never heard of a woman doing anything like this to her husband before, and even after a lifetime of women doing things that surprised him, he'd been unprepared for this one.

"Dad's going to give me a lift to Albany in the morning, so you can stay here with Mom," Peter told him.

304RICHARD R U S S 0

Ralph didn't look like he was one hundred percent behind this plan.

"What if Charlotte comes back for you?"

"Dad," Peter said with exaggerated kindness, as if to cushion a blow.

"She's gone. When they leave like that, they don't come back and say they're sorry." Ralph sighed and looked like he might cry.

"I can take him to Albany if you can't," he told Sully.

"I can," Sully said.

"It's the first favor I've asked him in about twenty years," Peter said, his edgy resentment surfacing again, though clothed in humor this time. Which gave Sully an idea.

"Come back to my place a minute," he suggested.

"Now?"

Peter said, exhausted. He'd had his wife leave him and he'd stolen a snow blower and he'd nearly been killed by a Dobcnnan. It was already a full day.

"Just for a minute," Sully insisted. Then, to Ralph, "I'll bring him right back." ; A minute later they pulled up in front of his own flat, and Sully took the El Camino's keys out of the ignition and handed them to Peter.

"Take this," he said.

"You'll be coming back in three weeks, right?"

"Yeah, but" -- "Take it." Sully dropped the keys in his son's lap.

"First you want me to take your house, now your car.

Next you'll be offering me your woman. "

" I don't have one of those.

Actually, I don't have a car. This one belongs to the same guy we stole the snow blower from. He'll understand. "

" He'll understand," Peter repeated.

"Right. I'll make him."

"What'll you drive?"

"I'm getting a new truck tomorrow," Sully assured him.

"This was just a loaner. Normally, it just sits in the yard," he lied.

Peter picked up the keys and studied them dubiously.

"I'm going to get arrested before I cross the state line, aren't I," he sighed.

"Not if you leave tonight," Sully told him.

"He might be mad for a day or two.

That's all."

"I wasn't going to leave until morning," Peter reminded him.

Sully read his son's mind.

"Go now. Ralph will take care of your mother.

You'll just make things worse. That's one way you are like me." Peter studied him for a moment before putting his key into the ignition.

"I

think Mom's right," he said.

"You rfohave fun. You've enjoyed your life."

"When I could," Sully admitted. In fact, giving his son a car he didn't own had buoyed his spirits considerably. For much of the evening he had considered that in his son's hour of need Sully had nothing to give him, and it was good to realize now that he hadn't been thinking clearly. They shook hands on it more or less successfully, since irony and resentment were difficult to convey through the medium of palms. When Peter swung the El Camino around and headed back down Main, the sweep of its headlights caught something on the terrace next door that stopped Sully, causing him to squint into the darkness. His first thought was that a cat was crouching low to the ground, that its eyes had been caught in the indirect light and glowed momentarily. But when he got closer Sully saw that it was no cat but rather a deer lying perfectly motionless in the snow. The very deer Wirfhad told him about, apparently, which meant that the story had been true. Even stranger than finding a dead deer on the terrace was the fact that this one was tangled in a veritable web of rope, as if the man who'd shot it had tied the animal up first. Either that or he'd tied a dead deer up to protect against the possibility of reanimation. Whoscver job it was to remove the animal, assuming that had been determined, had apparently felt it could wait until morning. A tag fluttered from the animal's rack, and since there was writing scrawled on it. Sully bent down to see. don't remove this dear, it said, and down in the corner, police dept. The note had been scrawled in pen, and someone had inserted, in pencil, a comma between the words "this" and "dear." Sully considered the various riddles presented by both the dead animal and the note for about thirty seconds before giving up, glad that there were some riddles in this always strange life that had nothing to do with himself, a conclusion that was probably valid in general, if not in this instance. Upstairs, he tossed his winter coat onto the arm of the sofa and collapsed there, exhausted but feeling better, he knew, than he had a strict right to feel. The situation he would awaken to in the morning was dramatically and demonstrably worse than it had been in recent memory. His magnanimous gifts to Ralph and Peter represented not solutions but the deepening of his personal dilemma. Still, he felt an unreasonable surge of sleepy confidence that he would figure something out. There were solutions.

Some you discovered, some you made, some you willed, some you forced.

Of life's mysteries, the one Sully fell asleep, sitting up on the sofa, trying to solve, was the smell that had been following him around all night. Carl Roebuck had noticed it first near the front door of The Horse, but when Sully'd left the bar the stench had followed him. In the car, on the way out to the IGA, Peter had noticed it, remarked that the smell reminded him of the place near Boca Raton where he and Charlotte had honeymooned. Later, the odor had been so powerful in the El Camino that Sully'd had to roll down a window despite the cold. He slept only a few minutes before awakening violently from a dream in which the smell was his leg rotting off.

Oddly, he awoke with the answer. Picking up his overcoat, he fished around in the pocket until he located the tear in the lining, then finally the putrefying cherrystone clam, which had opened and trailed slime all the way to the other pocket, where it had come to rest beneath the wad of Sully's gloves. The clam, as Wirfhad observed, was a small thing, but Sully was unable to restrain his jubilation at having found a solution. Downstairs in her dark bedroom, Miss Beryl could hear her tenant laughing. In fact, she'd heard the car pull up outside and considered getting up and meeting him at the door, but decided not to. Morning was a few short hours away, plenty of time for bad news.