Nobody's Fool (79 page)

Miss Beryl knew just how the woman felt.

"I wisht these nails wouldn't all bend," Rub said when another one did.

The flooring nails used to fasten the thin hardwood boards to the studs beneath were soft and triangular, and they bent easily when pounded from the bottom. Pulling them out of the wood, as Peter predicted, had turned into a time-consuming and frustrating job. They'd set up two sawhorses on plywood sheets in the middle of the living room, creating an island surrounded by holes large enough for a careless man to fall through all the way to the cellar floor, a dangerous situation given the fact that these were two of the more careless men in Bath. Below, in the darkness, they occasionally heard scurrying sounds. Sully had no intention of going down into the cellar to investigate. He'd heard earlier in the year that the men restoring the Sans Souci complained that there were rats everywhere in the lower reaches of the rambling structure and elsewhere on the grounds, stirred into restless activity, no doubt, by all the heavy machinery. Exterminators had apparently been hired, though for all Sully knew they could have hired 408 a piper to lead the entire rat population of the Sans Souci into the small cellar of what had once been his home.

"I wisht you hadn't told me those were rats," Rub said, listening to the sounds like rustling paper below.

Anyone overhearing Rub's conversation during the long afternoon would have taken him for a malcontent, but Sully knew better.

Despite the wish parade. Rub was the most content he'd been in two weeks, since Peter's return, to be precise. After lunch, Ralph had unexpectedly showed up and spoken to Peter in private, after which Peter had left with his stepfather without explanation. Something was clearly going on, but it apparently wasn't anything either man felt compelled to share with Sully, who suspected it was some sort of crisis with Vera. All afternoon, he hadn't been able to get the image of his ex-wife, caught shoplifting in Jocko's Rexall, out of his mind. He wondered if Peter knew. If Ralph knew. Anyway, Rub was not sorry to see Peter depart, which meant he had Sully right where he wanted him.

With the two sawhorses set up in the middle of the living room and surrounded by a mine field of dangerous holes in the flooring, they faced each other throughout the long afternoon, wrenching reluctant nails from boards so the hardwood could be reused. When they finished with the ones they'd piled along the west wall. Rub fetched the ones they'd piled out on the porch, hopping nimbly from stud to stud, his arms weighted down with lumber, while Sully remained on the more stable island of plywood, swearing at the soft nails. All afternoon they'd faced each other in that charmed circle, close enough to touch, though Rub wouldn't have done that. He had a deep and abiding adolescent fear of being thought "queer," a fear that was always coming into conflict with his equally powerful need to keep his best friend in the whole world as close by as possible, so he could share with Sully his deepest wishes and needs, as they occurred to him, every single one. Rub's wishes didn't travel well. They came out best when he didn't have to raise his voice, when he was in a ditch, for instance, and Sully was there in the same ditch a few feet away and ready to receive them. He didn't like to expel wishes forcefully but rather to release them gently, allow them to locate Sully of their own impetus, on their own struggling wings. Like recently hatched birds, Rub's wishes were too new to the world and too clumsy to sustain extended flight. They liked the nest. So far this afternoon Rub had wished that Peter would quit calling him Sancho, because he hated that name; that they could turn on the heat here in the house, which was almost as cold indoors as out, so they NOBODY'S FOOL 409 wouldn't have to wear gloves, which made the delicate task of pounding out the nails that much more difficult; that his wife, Bootsie, would quit stealing so much from the Woolworth's where she worked before she got caught and they both got sent to jail; that the Sans Souci, one wing of which was visible through the northeast window beyond the grove of naked trees, would hire him and Sully to be handymen at about twenty dollars an hour when the spa opened in the summer. That he could be invisible for a day, so he could sneak in and watch ole Toby Roebuck in the shower.

Sully only half listened.

As always, he was amazed by the modesty of Rub's fantasies. How like him it was to bestow upon himself the gift of invisibility and then imagine it would be his for only a single day. Often there was a curious wisdom about Rub's imaginings, as if he'd learned about life that nothing ever comes to you clean but instead with caveats and provisos that could render the gifts worthless or leave you hungry for more. It was as if somewhere in the back of Rub's mind he knew that he was better off without whatever it was he wished for. Which was certainly true in the case of invisibility. In most social situations.

Rub was closer to invisibility than he knew, and to disappear completely would not be in his best interest. Though he only half listened. Sully was grateful for Rub's litany, if only to keep the Bowdon Street ghosts at arm's length. His father, full to the throat with cheap beer and moral indignation, the stench of both on his breath, seemed as if he might reel noisily through the front door once again, its frame barely wide enough to contain him in this condition.

There too in the shadows Sully's mother quietly awaited him, just as she had for years awaited the religious miracle the priest kept assuring her would come if only her faith were strong enough, his advice deepening her despair even as it gave her strength to face one more homecoming. A large, content man this priest had been, almost as large as Big Jim, in fact. Large enough.

Sully had thought at the time, to perhaps prevent his father's behavior if he chose to, but even more self-satisfied and inert than large.

Even though Sully had been just a boy, he had understood that the priest would not help, that he was content that people's lives should be studies in hurt and fear.

He seemed not in the least surprised by anything Sully's mother told him about her marriage, about what life was like in their home. The priest took none of it personally, nor did he seem at all discouraged by any sordidness.

He himself had found a line of work he enjoyed, and offering spiritual counsel to the wretched was part of his job. And he seemed to understand that to wish people less wretched would be to put himself out of a job.

"It's a sin, Isobel," Sully recalled the priest telling his mother in hushed, holy tones. She had not wanted to bring Sully with her to the church, but he'd been too small to leave alone in the house. She'd placed him in a pew midway up the center aisle, then gone to meet the priest near the altar rail and the confessional. He had wanted her to enter the confessional, to make a confession, but his mother had refused, claiming she was not sorry, that she was not asking for forgiveness. She made regular confessions, but this time she was adamant. What she had to say to the priest was not for Sully to hear, but their voices had carried in the cool, dark church, empty except for themselves.

"It's a black sin to imagine that God hasn't the power to do good in His own world," the priest told her.

"To God all things are possible. It is only to us that things seem difficult. Blacker sinners than your husband have been brought to Him in a moment.

Remember St. Paul, struck from his horse on the road to Damascus, the road to faith. "

" It's what I pray for," his mother, one eye swollen shut, had wept, and the priest had smiled down at her until she continued. " I pray that he'll be struck down," she explained. " Struck down so that he'll never get up again. "

" Shush, Isobel," the priest told her. " When such terrible things leave your tongue, they fly directly to God's ear. " She had stood then and turned, peering into the darkness of the church for Sully, who had sunk down into his pew.

"What difference?" she said.

"God isn't listening." His mother had never spoken to the priest again. Nor did she attend his funeral later that year.

Not that her absence was missed. People came from all over the state to both the viewing and the Requiem Mass. Sully's father had gone and taken his sons with him. Sully could still remember how they'd dressed up for the occasion, his father and brother in dark, ill-fitting suits, himself in a white shirt that was too small for him, the collar so tight at the neck that his cheeks and forehead pulsed with warmth. The viewing was held not in a funeral home but rather at the rectory, and the line of the faithful come to pay respects extended down the steps and around the corner and up the street all the way to the church. The priest had choked to death on a bone. Had anyone been with him, he might have been saved, but he dined alone in the huge rectory dining room which three days later held his coffin. By the time his housekeeper, in the next room, had heard him thrashing in his chair it was too late. By the time she came to his aid, his eyes had already bugged out in stark terror, as if he'd been forced to bear witness to something so ugly that his reason had come unhinged and he had stopped breathing.

So, almost, had the housekeeper, so terrifying was the sight. One must assume that the mortician, a member of the parish, had done his best, but the results were shockingly inadequate, for despite all efforts the dead priest'sexpression retained much of the horror present when he was first discovered by the housekeeper. And so many of the faithful were given quite a turn when they saw the priest for the final time in his rich casket. The mortician had worked feverishly on the bugged eyes and contorted features and had managed to mute the expression of abject terror, but the priest still looked anything but confident about meeting his maker, and those who had for years followed his spiritual guidance did not stay long in his presence. The line past the casket moved swiftly, a bottleneck forming only once, when Sully's father held things up by kneeling to say a prayer, though something about his posture suggested he might be whispering advice to an old friend.

For the rest of the mourners, a single stunned glance was sufficient to send them packing into the next room. Only later, when those who had been at the front of the line compared nervous notes with those who had been nearer the rear, did it become clear that during the viewing, the dead man's mouth had gradually opened. At first his lips had been clamped tight, forming a white crease, but two hours later, when the last of the faithful had been led, like the blind, out of the dark rectory and into the afternoon sunlight, the mortician had had to go back to work, for the priest's mouth had opened wide and the last unnerved mourners recalled vividly that the dead man had appeared to be begging them to reach into his throat and remove the bone that had choked him to death two days before. But what Sully recollected more vividly than the appearance of the dead priest was his own father.

Even as a boy. Sully had understood about his father's ingratiating charm, even about the way it worked. His father was the sort of man people hated to see coming. If they noticed him before he saw them, they'd turn away and their heads would come together to plot escape.

Perhaps they'd seen him drunk and belligerent the night before, or maybe he'd actually been in a fight and been thrown out of a bar and they'd tried to help him off the sidewalk, and maybe he'd looked up at them then, bloody-chinned and bleary-eyed, and told them right where they could stuff it. Or maybe they'd just heard a grim story about him. Big Jim had a reputation as a hard man in his own home, this being the euphemism for wife beaters at the time. At any rate, it was frequently within the social "It's a sin, Isobel," Sully recalled the priest telling his mother in hushed, holy tones. She had not wanted to bring Sully with her to the church, but he'd been too small to leave alone in the house. She'd placed him in a pew midway up the center aisle, then gone to meet the priest near the altar rail and the confessional. He had wanted her to enter the confessional, to make a confession, but his mother had refused, claiming she was not sorry, that she was not asking for forgiveness. She made regular confessions, but this time she was adamant. What she had to say to the priest was not for Sully to hear, but their voices had carried in the cool, dark church, empty except for themselves.

"It's a black sin to imagine that God hasn't the power to do good in His own world," the priest told her.

"To God all things are possible. It is only to us that things seem difficult. Blacker sinners than your husband have been brought to Him in a moment.

Remember St. Paul, struck from his horse on the road to Damascus, the road to faith. "

" It's what I pray for," his mother, one eye swollen shut, had wept, and the priest had smiled down at her until she continued. " I pray that he'll be struck down," she explained. " Struck down so that he'll never get up again. "

" Shush, Isobel," the priest told her. " When such terrible things leave your tongue, they fly directly to God's ear. " She had stood then and turned, peering into the darkness of the church for Sully, who had sunk down into his pew.

"What difference?" she said.

"God isn't listening." His mother had never spoken to the priest again. Nor did she attend his funeral later that year.

Not that her absence was missed. People came from all over the state to both the viewing and the Requiem Mass. Sully's father had gone and taken his sons with him. Sully could still remember how they'd dressed up for the occasion, his father and brother in dark, ill-fitting suits, himself in a white shin that was too small for him, the collar so tight at the neck that his cheeks and forehead pulsed with warmth. The viewing was held not in a funeral home but rather at the rectory, and the line of the faithful come to pay respects extended down the steps and around the corner and up the street all the way to the church. The priest had choked to death on a bone. Had anyone been with him, he might have been saved, but he dined alone in the huge rectory dining room which three days later held his coffin. By the time his housekeeper, in the next room, had heard him thrashing in his chair it was too late. By the time she came to his aid, his eyes had already bugged out in stark terror, as if he'd been forced to bear witness to something so ugly that his reason had come unhinged and he had stopped breathing.