Nobody's Fool (97 page)

"There she goes again," he said when she resumed ripping out the pages.

"Vera," Sully said, stepping forward.

Peter said something and hung up the phone.

"Dad," he warned, "you'll only make it worse."

"Like hell," Sully said. The only way he could see to make things worse was to let them continue.

"Vera," he said again. Hisex-wife continued to struggle with the pages.

"Vera, you're either going to stop this shit and go home or I'm going to knock you right on your ass," he said, adding, "You know I will." Vera's problem appeared to be that she had a hold of a swatch of pages too thick to tear clean, though she refused to give up and tugged at them furiously, her face bloodred with effort. Sully made good on his promise then, slapping her harder than he meant to, so hard that the partial plate he didn't know she wore shot from her mouth like a boxer's mouthpiece and skittered under a chair. He stepped back then, as if he was the one who'd been hit, stunned at the sight of his ex-wife without her upper teeth. For her part, Vera seemed not to notice their absence.

Everything else about her situation seemed to come home to her in that moment, however, and she sank to her knees and began to sob so hard her shoulders shook.

"Ook ut ey've done, 'ully," she wept, looking up at him from where she knelt on the floor. Peter, looking pale and shaken, moved the chair and located his mother's partial plate. Ralph, Sully noticed, had turned away.

"Jesus Christ," said the fat man on the sofa, "you didn't have to knock her teeth out." When Sully held his hand out to Peter, he handed over her plate, and Sully went down on his good knee, the bad one throbbing so horribly that he thought he might faint. Vera, still on her own knees, had buried her face in her hands now, and so he had to say her name twice before she'd look at him.

"Here," he said, handing his sex-wife her teeth. She took them, puzzled for a moment, then slipped them into her mouth.

"We're going to stand up now," he told her, and when she seemed incapable, he helped her and she allowed Sully to draw her to him. She buried her head in his shoulder and sobbed.

"I hate you so much. Sully," she told him.

"I

know, darling'," he assured her, steering her toward the door. Peter moved to meet them there, and Sully turned her over to him and Ralph.

Outside, the siren, which had been getting ever closer. Sully now realized, burped once and was silent. Sully peered out the window and saw that it was an ambulance, and right behind it was a police cruiser.

Sully decided to stay where he was for a minute lest the cops see him and jump to the wrong conclusion. He was pretty sure that the two young fellows who jumped out of the ambulance were the same two who'd come to Vera's house on Thanksgiving when they'd all thought he was dead. So he stayed inside for the moment in the fat man's living room. The man still hadn't moved from the sofa, still looked stupefied. Sully found a twenty-dollar bill in his pocket and handed it to the man.

"For your magazines," he said.

The man studied the twenty unhappily.

"She tore up the Vanna White one," he said.

"That's a collector's item."

"Who's Vanna White?" Sully said.

"Wheel of Fortuney the man explained.

Sully placed her now. It was the show that came on after The People's Court at The Horse.

"Sorry," he said.

"They didn't show that much," the fat man conceded.

"No snatch." To Sully's surprise, he felt some of Vera's own righteous anger welling up. And he was glad she wasn't there to hear such a word uttered in her father's house.

"I wouldn't press charges if I were you," he said.

"Okay," the man agreed.

"We don't want no trouble with the neighbors." Sully went to the window and peeked outside. Vera was being helped into the ambulance like an invalid. The crowd was beginning to scatter. After a few minutes he went outside. Ralph was seated on the top step of the porch, holding on to the railing for support. When Sully sat down next to him, Ralph showed him his free hand, which was shaking uncontrollably.

"I ain't nothing but nerves anymore. Sully," he said.

"Look at that."

"Well," Sully said, "it's all over now."

"I don't see why people can't get along," Ralph said sadly, returning to his familiar refrain.

"That's what I can't understand." Sully couldn't help smiling.

"Her father did keep this house nice," Ralph said, examining the rotting wood of the porch floor.

"I guess it breaks her heart to see it let go like this."

"I know," Sully said, though his own experience had been different. Watching his own father's house decay and fall apart had been deeply satisfying. He was willing to concede that neither Vera's view nor his own was particularly healthy.

"You done the right thing," Ralph said, probably in reference to Sully's having slapped her. Sully was happy to hear it, having come to the opposite conclusion himself.

"You want to go out to the hospital," he said.

"I'll give you a lift."

"Peter's with her. I'd just be in the way," Ralph said, studying his jittery hands.

"I'm no good like this." Sully fished in his pocket for the most recent vial of Jocko's pills, taking out two of them.

"Take one of these."

"What is it?"

"No clue," Sully admitted.

"Guaranteed to calm you down, though." Ralph put it into his shirt pocket while Sully swallowed his dry.

"How do you do that?" Ralph said.

"I don't know," Sully said.

"I just do."

"I better get back to the house," Ralph said, struggling to his feet with the help of the railing.

"Will's probably staring at that stopwatch you gave him and wondering if we all abandoned him." In the commotion. Sully had forgotten about the boy. He thought about him alone in the house, trying not to panic. Maybe he'd already panicked.

Sully felt a small measure of the boy's fear in his own stomach and considered the implications of the fact that he'd forgotten his grandson again. It was one of the things that Vera and Ruth both held against him, his ability to lose sight of important things.

"How can you do that?"

they'd both asked him at various times during their relationship.

"How can you just forget people?" It was a rhetorical question, he understood, and so he'd never answered. Had he been required to answer, he'd have given the same response he'd just given Ralph when he'd wondered how Sully could swallow a pill dry. He didn't know how.

He just could. Another fifteen minutes found Sully seated by himself at the end of the bar at The Horse, halfway through the first of what would almost certainly be many bottles of beer, waiting for Jocko's pill to kick in and considering a second pill just to make sure (one strategy) and a shot of Jack Daniel's to jump start the first pill (another strategy) and relying on faith (a third) that he had positioned himself correctly at the end of the bar to encounter a distraction or two. The sight of his sex-wife gone over the edge, her heartfelt expression of contempt for himself, seeing her packed into an ambulance and taken to the hospital to be sedated, had penetrated Sully's durable, time-tested defenses, and the blood that was now pounding in his knee hammered so incessantly that the pain was threatening to reach some new crescendo of rhythmic musical agony, the whole orchestra strumming and thrumming and blowing and whacking away at their instruments, awaiting only the crash of cymbals that would. Sully felt sure, allow him to pass out. He could feel the son of a bitch of a cymbal player getting to his feet in the back row, cymbal in each hand, grinning, ready to unload. It was his father, naturally, that one-note musician, percussive and vengeful, who had a cymbal in each hand and was grinning at him, get ready you bastard, 'cause here it comes. Big Jim raised them high above his head for maximum torque. You call this music?

That's what Sully would like to ask him.

"Do I call what music?" Wirf said, sliding onto the bar stool next to him.

"I wasn't talking to you," Sully told him. Wirf studied him a moment.

"You look like you're about to cash in."

"I just took a pill," Sully told him.

"As soon as it kicks in, I'll be fine." Wirf slid off his stool.

"I gotta pee. Order me a club soda with a squeeze of lime," he said.

"Okay."

"And when it arrives, pay for it."

"Okay."

"And an egg. I haven't eaten today. I see the loyal opposition's here," Wirf observed, indicating the large table in the corner, a party of eight that included Satch Henry and OUie Quinn.

Sully had barely noticed.

"I haven't been invited to join them," Sully said.

"Me, either," Wirf conceded.

"I bet they're afraid we'd snub them." Sully nodded.

"One of us might."

"Look who else is back," Wirf said, indicating Jeff, who was tending bar again. Sully nodded.

"He's already bought my first beer."

"I'll hurry back," Wirf said. On the way to the men's room Wirf passed Carl Roebuck, who was on the way in. On CCarl's arm was a young woman who looked to be in her late twenties. Beautywisc, she wasn't in Toby Roebuck's league, but she wasn't Texas league either.

She wore her hair long, and when Cari Roebuck offered to hang her coat on the rack near the door with the others, she said no, she was cold.

Something about the way she hugged the coat to her chest suggested to Sully that she might have nothing on underneath. Or maybe it was just that she was with Carl Roebuck.

"Here's somebody you'll want to steer dear of," Cari told her when they joined Sully at the end of the bar.

"Didi, meet Sully. Sully, the lovely Deirdre."

The girl looked Sully over with what seemed to him genuine interest.

"I've heard all about you," she said, which seemed to surprise Carl Roebuck until he thought about it.

"Oh, right," he said. Jocko's pill was kicking in. Sully concluded. The conversation seemed just beyond his grasp. Still examining Sully, the girl nuzzled into CCarl's shoulder, whispering something sweet into his ear.

"Right by where we came in," Carl directed her.

"Come with?" Carl snorted and returned her nuzzling. He was drunk. Sully realized.

"You want me to come with you to the girl's room?"

"Women's room, you pig," she said without a trace of seriousness.

"You might enjoy yourself."

"I need to talk to this man," Carl told her.

"He's my confessor."

"Okay," she said, little-girl voice, then to Sully, "He's got a lot to confess."

They watched her head in the direction of the rest rooms. When she disappeared into the one labeled "Setters," Carl Roebuck swung on his bar stool to face Sully.

"You know that I have some experience in these matters," he confided, bleary-eyed.

"What matters?"

"Sexual matters," Carl explained.

"You might say I have considerable experience."

"You might," Sully agreed.

"And that I'm not prone to hyperbole," Carl continued.

"I might say that if I knew what hyperbole meant," Sully said.

"Exaggeration," Carl explained.

"Overstatement.

Didn't you ever go to school? "

" Blow me," Sully suggested. Carl rapped the bar enthusiastically. " That's my poinlV he said gleefully.

"This girl gives the best head on the East Coast. She could suck the cork out of a champagne bottle. She could suck the lug nuts off a tractor. She could probably bring you to climax. Sully." Sully ignored the insult.

"You want to know what I find hard to believe?"

"What? Tell me. Ask me any fucking thing. I'm the answer man."

"Okay," Sully said.

"We'll start with an easy one. Why are you drunk at" --he consulted his watch"--one o'clock in the afternoon?"

"Because I'm in pain," Carl said, apparently serious.

"You're right.

That was easy. Next question."

Sully shook his head.

"You're in pain?"

"I'm ... in ... pain," Carl repeated.

"What? You think you've got a lock on pain? You think you've got the pain market cornered in this burg?"

Sully took out his vial of pills and set them on the bar between them.

"Eat one of these," he suggested. In fact, the throbbing in his own knee had begun to level off, though he could not be sure that this was because of the pill or because the distraction he'd hoped for had arrived. Carl waved the pills off.

"Do they cure heartache?"

"Do blow jobs?"

"For their duration, they do indeed," Carl said.