Nobody's Fool (85 page)

"You know it's customary to give a condemned man one last request. My truck's out back. What do you say we go get naked and see what happens." Birdie thought about it.

"Okay," she said without visible enthusiasm.

"Don't you have any pride at all?"

Sully said, taken aback.

"All talk," she said.

"Just as I suspected."

When they got Wirf onto his feet again and headed, under Birdie's guidance, toward his ear. Sully and Peter ambled up the street toward the police station. When they got to the alley alongside Woolworth's, Sully said, "Wait here a minute," and disappeared into the darkness, from which Peter heard him retching. After a minute Sully returned, looking pale and unsteady.

"You all set on tomorrow?"

"All set," Peter said, holding up a thumb to show he meant it. For the last two hours, Peter's mood had been strangely agreeable, his customary sarcasm and wry distance absent. Not at all his usual tight-assed self, in Sully's opinion. Maybe his son just needed to drink more. Or perhaps he was still under the spell of the prettiest girl in Bath. They walked, slowly.

"Tiny was right about one thing," Sully said.

"Your grandfather was some asshole."

"I don't really remember him," Peter admitted.

"Good," Sully told him.

"I know you think I'm an asshole too, but I'm nothing compared to him.

Not really."

"No, you're not," Peter agreed.

"Not really."

"What're you planning to tell Will?" Sully asked, since that was what he'd been thinking about all night. Of all the regrets he refused to indulge, this was the biggest. Peter was clearly surprised by the question.

"What do you want me to tell him?" In truth. Sully didn't know.

"Tell him his grandfather's an asshole, I guess. Tell him it runs in the family."

"Thanks."

"I wasn't thinking about you," Sully said truthfully. He'd been thinking about his brother and how much like Big Jim Patrick had become before he'd been killed in the head-on collision.

"Thanks again," Peter said.

"You really planning on staying around here after the first of the year?"

"I don't know," Peter said.

"I thought I might."

"Every day won't be like today," Sully promised.

"No?"

"Your mother's right, though. You'd be better off to go back to your college." When Peter didn't say anything to this. Sully said, "You want to hear something funny? I liked college," he confessed, for the first time, to anyone. Peter studied him, surprised.

"You quit, though."

Sully shrugged.

"I didn't say I belonged there. I just said I liked it."

"Where do you belong. Dad?"

They'd arrived at City Hall, and Sully pointed up the stone steps at the lighted police department door.

"Right here, I guess," he said.

"For tonight, at least."

"I'll look after things the best I can," Peter promised seriously.

"Okay," Sully said.

"Good."

"You want me to come in with you?"

"No, I don't."

"Good," Peter said.

To their mutual surprise, they shook hands then at the foot of the steps.

"I'll see you before you know it," Sully said.

"Pray for snow." They both looked up at the cloudless sky, then Sully limped up the Town Hall steps.

When Sully got to the top he went inside and let the door swing shut behind him, then came back out again.

"Don't forget to feed the dog," he called.

Peter had forgotten all about Rasputin, who was presumably still chained to the kitchen cabinet in the Bowdon Street house.

"It's not going to be easy being you, is it?" he called back. Sully raised his hands out to his sides, shoulder level, as if he were about to burst into song.

"Don't expect too much of yourself in the beginning," he advised.

"I couldn't do everything at first either."

THREE

-^5T^

THURSDAY -AT^ Downtown Bath, first light. Both traffic signals blinking yellow.

Caution. Clive Jr. " sitting in his Lincoln outside the North Bath Savings and Loan, three large suitcases safely stowed in the trunk, was in a contemplative mood. The way the parking space angled toward the curb, he was able to see both blinking yellows in the small rectangle of his rearview.

Caution. And then again, in case anyone missed the first, caution.

Funny how over a lifetime meanings changed. Caution was what he'd been taught in school, but experience had taught him other meanings and the blinking yellow had come to mean You Don't Have to Stop Here, or Do Not Accelerate. For years now he had gone through blinking yellows with his foot poised midway between brake and gas, vaguely thankful that these indulgent yellows were not reds. And every time he rolled beneath the signal. You Do Not Have to Stop Here fired somewhere in the back of his brain, where the deepest truths of human understanding lie untroubled, unquestioned. Mistaken. The yellow traffic signals continued to blink caution relentlessly in Clive Jr." s rearview, their original meaning fully restored now. Too late, naturally.

The more he thought about it, life's truest meanings were all childhood meanings, childhood understandings of how things worked, what they were. Do we ever know as deeply as we know in childhood?

Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and our world? Well, yes, perhaps, Clive Jr. conceded. No point getting carried away, epistemology wise It did no good to lament the loss of innocence or to suspect that the child might indeed be father to the man. He was no longer the little boy he'd once been when he and his father had visited the Capitol and Clive Sr. had interpreted traffic signals for him as they waited to cross at a busy intersection. He was now the chief executive officer of the financial institution before him, an institution whose edifice, at least, was constructed of solid granite, stone strong enough to withstand ill winds, like the ones again tunneling up Main and making the deserted street feel lonesome and ghostly. And if he himself was not made of stone, well, neither was he made of paper to be blown about like a hamburger wrapper from the Dairy Queen on Lower Main. Speaking of ill winds. The van that carried huge bales of the Schuyler Springs Sentinel pulled up behind him, did a three-point turn in the empty street and backed up to the curb in front of the Rexall. The driver got out then, opened the rear hatch and dropped a bale of Sentinels into the darkened, recessed doorway. Clive Jr. already had a copy of the Sentinel on the front seat next to him, having driven from his golf course town home into Schuyler Springs at four-thirty in the morning to buy one. Not that anything in the paper was news to him. He'd gotten a call from Florida late yesterday afternoon, so he knew, of course, that Escape Enterprises was now, at the last minute, pulling out, refusing to exercise its option, having chosen instead to build their amusement park near Portland, Maine. The Sentinel had reported the reasons they'd given for this most recent decision. The tract of land between North Bath and the interstate that had seemed so huge to residents of the region had seemed to the developers only marginally adequate, and adequate only if they could content themselves not to expand at a later date. The fact that the land itself was swampy had not been the impediment, as many had feared.

What was Disney World but a reclaimed swamp? But you couldn't invent more swamp to fill later on if you wanted to double the size of your park, and expansion was the name of the game. Plus the tax structure and regulations in Maine were more conducive to development, and given the fact that this resort was going to be basically a summer operation, the Maine demographics and climate also made more sense. There were other reasons for people to go to Maine, which had the ocean and L. L. Bean, whereas if they built in Bath they'd have to be the reason. The Sentinel had run an editorial right on the front page attacking this stated rationale for the developer's eleventh-hour about-face.

Normally, the Schuyler Sentinel wouldn't have sympathized with the plight of its smaller neighbor, but this was different. The Ultimate Escape was to have been a boon for the entire region, not just Bath, and in a magnanimous gesture the editors of the newspaper had apparently decided that the whole region had been slighted, not just their neighbors. And for no good reason.

The proposed site, they pointed out, had not become suddenly smaller than when negotiations began, nor had the tax structure and inadequate incentives the developers now complained of been raised as issues before. The location hadn't changed, and neither had the climate.

There was a resort town just up the road with a racetrack and baths and a summer concert series. What were the real reasons for the pullout?

the Sentinel editorial had asked significantly, even hinting that the state of Maine might have greased a few palms. It also suggested that the decision had nothing to do with the cemetery controversy the Schuyler paper had done so much to publicize. No, it had to be something else. Clive Jr. knew the real reason, because he'd asked the same question of D. C. Collins of Escape Enterprises, who'd called him personally from Texas yesterday afternoon to apologize for the decision.

"I know how hard you folks worked," Collins admitted.

"You did everything we asked." Beyond which he hadn't wanted to explain, and he wouldn't have done so either if Clive Jr. hadn't pleaded with the man so abjectly, not even bothering to conceal his personal frustration.

"Well, okay," Collins had finally agreed, "if you really want to know why, I'll tell you. This is between you and me, though, and I'll deny it later if I have to. But here's the deal. Straight scoop. I'm the one made this decision, and I'll tell you why. We're looking to invest, what, about ninety million dollars. That's a fair piece of change, Clive.

It's more than that.

It's an investment of time and material, and it doesn't stop there.

When we finally get the son of a bitch built, we're going to hire a lot of people in the area. We have to do that, because we can't afford ill will.

We need a supportive environment. Now this is where I don't want you to get me wrong. I know your people have all been cooperative. What I'm talking now has more to "do with .. . what's the word? .. .

ambience.

Here's the deal. A lot of the people up in your neck of the woods behave funny. Hell, Clive, no offense, but they look funny." Collins had paused to let this sink in.

"You got yourself some real beautiful country up there, and I mean that. Nice trees especially. But you also got yourself some people who look like they live in trees, and that's the cruel goddamn truth.

We need a different ambience entirely. We need people who look more like people look in southern Maine. Massachusetts, really." This is what it had come down to. People in Bath looked funny. At that moment a noisy garbage truck marked squeeks waste removal roared around the corner onto Main from Division Street, having apparently interpreted the traffic signal, in conjunction with the time of day, as meaning You Do Not Have to Stop Here.

Three small, powerfully built men in filthy jeans, navy blue hooded sweatshirts and heavy orange plaid outer coats clung to the sides of the truck like flies. One of these men, whom Clive Jr. recognized as the same fellow who frequently tagged along with Sully, lost his footing on the side of the truck (the other two men seemed to occupy safer posit ions along the rear bumper, which provided a wide, flat surface to stand on) and had to hang on with both hands to a metal loop, his booted feet frantically searching the side of the truck for a foothold. Before they were able to locate one, the truck skidded to an abrupt halt behind Clive Jr. "s Continental, and the morose-looking Rub Squeers let go and leapt to the pavement, where he hit an icy patch and ended up on his behind. His two companions dismounted more gracefully, grinning at each other as they did so. One signaled a thumbs-up to the driver, who was grinning into his big passenger side-view mirror. Rub picked himself up without comment, ignoring his companions, who wanted to know if he was okay, and went to fetch the metal garbage can that sat in the doorway of the Rexall next to the stack of newspapers. The other two men lumbered off in the direction of other cans. Clive Jr. watched them, especially Sully's friend Rub.

Well, he conceded, people in his " neck of the woods" were funny-looking. These garbage men, these Squeers, taken together, looked like some railed genetic experiment--round-shouldered, waist less neck less almost kneelcss, to judge from the way they lumbered.

When one of the two Squeers who had been riding on the back of the truck returned with a garbage can and paused to remove his cloth hood and scratch his dome, Clive Jr. noticed that the hair on top of his skull was exactly the same length as the stubble on his chin, and suddenly Clive Jr. was certain that D. C. Collins, who had twice visited Bath, had witnessed this same scene. Clive Jr. had tried to control what Collins saw during his visits to the region, introducing him to Bath's better-educated and more successful business people, then hustling him out of town and to dinner at one of Schuyler Springs' finer restaurants, using that city's proximity, as he always did, as a recruiting tool. But on one or two occasions Collins had been slippery, and one morning when Clive Jr. had gone to Collins' Schuyler Springs hotel, he'd learned that the man had headed into Bath in his rental car. Clive Jr. had found him at Hattie's, of all places. He now imagined Collins getting out of his rental car just in time to see the Squeers garbage truck careen around the corner, various and assorted stubbly Squeers clinging stubbornly to its sides like cockroaches.