Nobody's Fool (89 page)

" I hope you didn't sell too soon," Sully said. " What if the theme park opens and the place becomes a gold mine? "

" If the theme park opens, so will a dozen new restaurants.

Besides, did you see today's paper? " Sully nodded. " Still, who knows? "

" We both know," Cass said. " This town will never change.

" Sully would have been pleased to agree. Actually, what he'd been thinking was how many things had changed just during the week he'd been the guest of the county.

Losing Hattie and having Cass move away would be plenty big changes for a town like Bath. " Peter do a good job for you? " Sully decided to ask. " He was fine," Cass said, without, it seemed to Sully, much enthusiasm. Sully was oddly grateful on both counts. He'd wanted Peter to do a good job for Cass's sake, but he was beginning to wonder if Peter's joking claim that he could do anything better than Sully might be true. He and Cass both stole a glance at Peter, who'd taken a seat now on one of the folding chairs near the back of the room and appeared to be going through his wallet, probably seeing if he had enough money to make it to West Virginia and back. Sully made a mental note to offer him his poker winnings. " He did that job like he's doing this one," Cass commented. " He's tough that way," Sully conceded.

"Too much education, probably. Either that or too much of his mother."

"Or there's a zucchini up his tailpipe," Cass offered, surprising Sully. It hadn't occurred to him that she might actively dislike Peter, and he wondered why she would.

"I'm glad he's here this morning," Sully admitted, again reflecting that his son was the only able-bodied man among the bearers. But for him, the others might go down like so many bowling pins on the icy sidewalk.

"Don't get me wrong," Cass said.

"I was grateful to have an experienced short-order cook."

Sully frowned. Another surprise.

"I didn't know he had any experience."

"Hell, yes," Cass said.

"He can make an egg, even if he can't make conversation." Sully nodded.

"It's surprising how many things he can do."

Apparently he'd laid the hardwood floor at CCarl's camp all by himself.

Cass offered him a knowing grin.

"I didn't mean to suggest you shouldn't be a proud papa." Somewhere along the line she'd stopped crying, though her cheeks were dry-streaked now.

"He just doesn't have his old man's ability to make people feel better, that's all." Sully decided to take this compliment in the spirit it was offered, though he doubted making people feel good was much of a talent. More tellingly, he understood that the mechanism behind making people feel good was providing them with an object lesson that things could be worse. That was the principal benefit in having Rub around, for instance. Cass caught the attention of one of the anxious funeral home employees and indicated that they could come close the casket again, and together she and Sully turned away. They heard Carl Roebuck say to Wirf and the others, "Okay, girls, we're on," and Peter rose from his chair in the rear of the room.

"I can sec why all the women go for him, I guess," Cass admitted.

"He's handsome enough." All what women? Sully wondered.

"Just like his father," Sully offered.

"Right," Cass agreed.

"Only handsome, like I said." Sully joined the other men at the casket.

"Is the professor going to help, or what?"

Carl Roebuck wondered. Actually, Peter was making his way leisurely toward them. When he arrived, he took the place left for him at the head of Hattie's casket.

"Let's put the one-legged lawyer and Sullivan Senior in the middle so we don't lose them," Carl Roebuck suggested.

Otis was the only one who didn't crack a smile at this. In fact, as he was staring at old Hattie's closed casket his lip began to quiver and he began to squeak.

"Damn, Otis," Carl Roebuck said.

"Quit that."

"I can't help it," Otis blubbered.

"Hey, buck up," Sully said, putting his arm around Oris's shoulder and giving him a comforting pat. Only Jocko seemed to notice through his thick glasses that when Sully took his arm away he slipped the rubber alligator he'd bought at HCarld's Automotive World into Otis's overcoat pocket.

"You're such a bad man. Sully," Jocko said as they took their posit ions alongside Hattie's casket.

"Okay, everybody," Carl Roebuck said as they grabbed hold of the silver handles.

"On three." From the kitchen window Janey saw her father emerge from the trailer, breathing steam through his nostrils like a bull. Built as he was, low and wide, with the big head sitting on his narrow shoulders without the benefit of a neck, he looked rather like a bull in other respects as well. And about as smart, Janey thought. No, that wasn't true. Further, it was unkind. Zack was smarter than your average bull, which was so dumb it imagined it could win against that great crowd of people, one of which, in addition to the red cape, was holding a sword. Your average bull saw the red and nothing more. Her father was more like that cartoon bull that was always smelling flowers. What was his name?

Ferdinand.

Halfway along the frozen path that led from the trailer to the big garage, Zack saw his daughter at the window of the trailer, stopped and gave a tentative wave, which caused him to lose his balance on the ice, regaining it again at the expense of his dignity, both arms whirling, windmill fashion, in the air. To return his greeting, Janey made her own frantic windmill motion at the kitchen window. Ruth, who was seated with her granddaughter on the sofa in the living room where they were examining pictures in magazines, looked up when she saw Janey's flurry in her peripheral vision and studied her daughter with relief.

At last Janey was beginning to recover, Ruth thought. For the longest time--her entire stay at the hospital--Janey had been unlike herself, and Ruth had worried that maybe her injuries were more than physical, more than a concussion and a multiply fractured jaw. It wasn't until her jaw was unwired that Ruth realized how much of her daughter's personality resided in her smile, which the wiring had prevented or rather modified to look sad. A world-weary smile had not been in Janey's normal repertoire of expressions. Like Ruth herself, Janey most naturally reflected emotional extremes. Their faces eagerly registered anger and joy, and these emotions often lingered in their facial expressions long after they ceased to be felt. Sully was always accusing Ruth of getting mad at him without warning, an accusation that always made her madder, but she realized that even though she'd been ^jetting angry at him for the last hour, her face was still registering joy at something he'd done earlier that delighted her. With Zack it was even worse. To be around Zack was to be angry, at least as far as Ruth was concerned, and the more-or-less constant residual anger she felt in response to her husband remained etched on her face even during those rare moments when by mistake he'd do something that pleased her.

In this way, after thirty years of marriage, Zack still had no idea when he'd done something right so he could do it again. Now Janey had inherited Ruth's lack of subtlety with regard to expressing her emotions, residual joy and anger lingering deceptively, dangerously, on her features when inside her emotional tide had turned.

"Don't encourage your father," Ruth said, taking in at a glance what was happening at the kitchen window. Janey wrung out her dishtowel in the sudsy water thoughtfully.

"I can't help it," she said as her father disappeared into the garage.

"He looks so lost."

"Of course he looks lost," Ruth said, turning a page in the magazine angrily, causing Tina to turn it back again. One of the many things Ruth didn't quite comprehend about her granddaughter was precisely what she was examining so closely when they looked at pictures, one of the little girl's favorite pastimes. Every other kid Ruth had ever known wanted to go fast.

Janey, as a little girl, couldn't wait for her mother to finish the text of her storybooks so the page could be turned. She had waited impatiently for Ruth to catch up, her own imagination and curiosity racing forward need fully so that sometimes pages got torn when Ruth was holding them down with a thumb and Janey was tugging with her little fingers. With Tina, you couldn't go slowly enough. The child seemed not to look at pictures so much as absorb them, and Ruth wondered, as she so often did, whether Tina was slow or deep.

Slow seemed to be the conventional wisdom, though the jury was still out and probably would be for a while, but Ruth noticed that Tina was observant and retained most of what she saw. Two Christmases ago Ruth had bought her a book called Find. the Bunny, which asked the child to locate a variety of animals concealed in busy, complicated drawings.

Sometimes the animal was a minute detail hidden, for instance, in the high, dense branches of a tree; other times the animal was made up of a series of disparate objects which seen together formed the outline of the animal in question. Tina had located each animal so swiftly--long before Ruth was able to--that Ruth had concluded that she must have seen the book before and was working not from observation but from memory, but Janey swore this was not the case. Roy, she said, hadn't gone over it with her either, doubted in fact that Roy could find the bunny himself.

"Why shouldn't your father look lost?" Ruth continued.

"He's been lost every day of his life."

"Yeah, I know," Janey said sadly, "but he's always had you, so it didn't matter. You should at least let him come visit us." With Janey's husband in jail, Ruth had insisted they repossess the trailer their daughter and son-in-law had been living in.

They'd hauled it from Schuyler back to Bath, setting it up in the yard alongside the garage, right where it had been before. They themselves had inherited it furnished when Zack's brother drove his four-wheeler out onto a frozen lake during a thaw. Their first thought had been to sell it until they discovered how little the trailer would bring, with its rusted skirting and brown snow marks halfway up the sides. Inside, the trailer was drafty, and Ruth suspected the utility bill was going to be obscene. But if ever there was a man who deserved to live in a dilapidated trailer, that man was her husband.

"You're just unhappy 'cause you lost Sully, and now you're taking it out on Daddy," Janey suggested without turning around.

"I didn't lose anybody," Ruth corrected her daughter. She'd seen Sully this morning at the funeral, and he'd looked so needy that she'd suffered a moment's misgiving before redoubling her resolve.

"I quit the both of them. Life can't be that much worse without men in it. At least the men I seem to attract."

"If it wasn't for bad taste you wouldn't have any at all," Janey cheerfully admitted.

"I liked you better with your mouth wired shut," Ruth said, adding, "and you're a fine one to talk about taste in men."

"Yeah, well.. ." Janey said in that irritating manner she had of not letting her voice drop. What it was supposed to mean, Ruth had discovered, was that in Janey's considered opinion, whoever was talking was full of shit.

"Don't "Yeah, well' me," Ruth said.

"You know how I hate that."

"Yeah, well ..."

"And I don't want you taking food over to your father, either," Ruth said, voicing another of her suspicions.

"I haven't taken him anything," Janey insisted. As she spoke, Zack emerged from the garage and made his slippery way back to the trailer.

Under one arm he was carrying a package the size and shape of a football wrapped in aluminum foil. This time he didn't wave or even glance in the direction of the house.

"What's that disease you get if you don't eat any vegetables?" Ruth thought for a minute.

"Rickets," she said, remembering.

"Yeah, that's it," Janey said.

"You want to see Daddy with rickets?"

"I'd like to see him with boils," Ruth replied. She knew what her daughter was talking about. Since Ruth had banished her husband to the trailer nearly two weeks before, Zack had been subsisting, exclusively she suspected, on fried venison steaks. In truth, it was the deer that had caused her to give him the boot. Even before the deer she'd been furious with her husband, of course. Zack had stubbornly refused to admit that he was the one who'd sent Roy over to Sully's to look for Janey, but he'd looked guilty as hell and it was just the son of gutless thing he'd do, especially if Roy had threatened him. But when he'd claimed the deer that Roy had shot and left lying with its tongue lolling out on Upper Main Street, that was too much. She could just see Zack arguing for the deer, explaining how he'd cart it off for free, how it was by rights his daughter's anyhow since her husband, who'd shot the deer, would be going off to jail. He'd probably explained how he had a freezer out in the garage, how he'd have the animal butchered and stored there. How it had been killed legally.

Otherwise, what? It'd be a crime to waste two hundred pounds of meat.

This last was the argument he'd used with Ruth: "It'd be a crime to waste it." He'd shrugged his narrow shoulders, the dumbest and most pitiful gesture Zack had in his impressive arsenal of dumb, pitiful gestures. Yes, it had been the deer that Ruth had been unable to face.