Nobody's Fool Read online

  Sully grinned at her. “Not to my knowledge, Mrs. Peoples. These days I try to be good. I’m not a young man anymore.”

  “Well,” she said, “you were a bad boy far longer than most.”

  “I know it,” he said, taking another drag on his cigarette and noticing for the first time how hazardously long the gray ash had become. “You going out for Thanksgiving, at least?”

  Miss Beryl took the cigarette from him, put it into the ashtray, and then put the ashtray on the side table. With Sully, you didn’t just set the ashtray down nearby and expect him to recognize its function. “Mrs. Gruber and I are going to the Northwoods Motor Inn. They’re having a buffet. All the turkey and trimmings you can eat for ten dollars.”

  Sully exhaled smoke through his nose. “Sounds like a hell of a good deal for the Northwoods. You and Alice couldn’t eat ten dollars’ worth of turkey if they gave you the whole weekend.”

  Miss Beryl had to admit this was true. “Mrs. Gruber likes it there. It’s all old fogies like us, and they don’t play loud music. They have a big salad bar, and Mrs. Gruber likes to try everything on it. Snails even.”

  “Snails are good, actually,” Sully said, surprising her.

  “When did you ever eat a snail?”

  Sully scratched his unshaven chin thoughtfully at the recollection. “I liberated France, if you recall. I wish snails were the worst thing I ate between Normandy and Berlin, too.”

  “It must be true what they say, then,” Miss Beryl observed. “War is heck. If you ate anything worse than a snail, don’t tell me about it.”

  “Okay,” Sully said agreeably.

  “I just eat a couple of those carrot curls and save myself for the dinner. Otherwise, I get full, and if I eat too much I get gas.”

  Sully stubbed out his cigarette. “Well, in that case, go slow,” he said, laboring to his feet again. “Remember, you got somebody living above you. It’s too cold to open all the windows.”

  Miss Beryl followed him out into the hall, his untied shoelaces clicking along the floor.

  “I’ll shovel you out after I’ve had my coffee,” he said, noticing the shovel she’d leaned against the wall. “You got anywhere to go right away?”

  Miss Beryl admitted she didn’t.

  Until he hurt his knee, Sully had been much envied as a tenant by the other widows along Upper Main. Many of them tried to work out reduced rent arrangements with single men, who then shoveled the sidewalk, mowed the lawn and raked leaves in return. But finding the right single man was not easy. The younger ones were forgetful and threw parties and brought young women home with them. The older men were given to illnesses and complications of the lower back. Single, able-bodied men between the ages of forty-five and sixty were so scarce in Bath that Miss Beryl had been envied Sully for over a decade, and she suspected some of her neighbors were privately rejoicing now that Sully was hobbled. Soon he would be useless, and Miss Beryl would be paid back for years of good fortune by having to carry a renter who couldn’t perform. Indeed, it seemed to Miss Beryl, who saw Sully every day, that he had failed considerably since his accident, and she feared that some morning he wasn’t going to stick his head in to find out if she was dead and the reason was going to be that he was dead. Miss Beryl had already outlived a lot of people she hadn’t planned to outlive, and Sully, tough and stubborn though he was, had a ghostly look about him lately.

  “Just don’t forget me,” she told him, recollecting that she would need to go to the market later that morning.

  “Do I ever?”

  “Yes,” she said, though he didn’t often.

  “Well, I won’t today,” he assured her. “How come you aren’t going out to dinner with The Bank?”

  Miss Beryl smiled, as she always did when Sully referred to Clive Jr. this way, and it occurred to her, not for the first time, that those who thought of stupid people as literal were dead wrong. Some of the least gifted of her eighth-graders had always had a gift for colorful metaphor. It was literal truth they couldn’t grasp, and so it was with Sully. He had been among the first students she’d ever taught in North Bath, and his IQ tests had revealed a host of aptitudes that the boy himself appeared bent on contradicting. Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully—people still remarked—was nobody’s fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application—that at sixty, he was divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man’s, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable—all of which he stubbornly confused with independence.

  “I was invited by The Bank, but I prefer to pay my way,” Miss Beryl told him, a small lie. Clive Jr. had called last week to tell her he’d be out of town for the holiday, alluding to his planned absence cryptically, hoping, perhaps, to pique Miss Beryl’s curiosity, a tactic he might have known was doomed to failure. Miss Beryl had her share of natural curiosity, but she resented having it manipulated so transparently. The mere fact that Clive Jr. solicited her interest suggested to her the opposite response was called for. “It’s no fun eating with a financial institution,” she added.

  Sully grinned down at her. “We wear the chains we forge in life, old girl.”

  Miss Beryl blinked. “Who’d have thunk it? A literary allusion from the lips of Donald Sullivan. I don’t suppose you remember who said that.”

  “You did,” Sully reminded her. “All through eighth grade.”

  The first thing Sully saw when he stepped outside onto the large porch he shared with his landlady was Rub Squeers tramping up the street through the snow. At just over five feet tall, Rub was powerfully built, and at the moment he was staring at his feet as he walked, trying, Sully suspected, to pretend that this meeting was a coincidence. Sully had known Rub too long to believe in this particular coincidence. He could tell by the way the young man was carrying his large head, like a medicine ball precariously balanced on his thick shoulders, that he was coming to see Sully and that he wanted to borrow money. In fact, Sully could tell just by looking at him how much Rub wanted (twenty dollars), how much he’d settle for (ten), and how long it would take for them to arrive at this figure (thirty minutes).

  “Hello, dumbbell,” Sully called. “Don’t you own any boots?”

  Rub looked up and feigned surprise. “Somewheres,” he said, looking down at his ruined black shoes. “How was I supposed to know it’d snow the day before Thanksgiving?”

  “You’re supposed to be prepared,” Sully said, though he himself had led a life of studied unpreparedness. He put a work-booted foot up on the porch railing, tied its laces. “You’re just in time, actually,” he added. “Do this one for me.”

  Rub climbed the steps, kneeled in the snow, tied the laces on Sully’s left boot.

  “Leave some circulation,” Sully suggested. “My knee’s about the size of two already.”

  Rub untied the boot, started over. “You look like you’re dressed for work, not school,” he observed. “You going back to work?”

  “That’s the plan,” Sully said.

  “You gonna hire me again?”

  “Would you stop borrowing money if I did?”

  “Sure,” Rub said, though he looked disappointed to have the subject of borrowing come up so negatively. His knees now sported large wet patches. “I miss us working,” Rub said. “I wisht we’d just start up again like before.”

  “I’ll see if I can find us something,” Sully told him.

  Rub was frowning now. “Old Lady Peoples is spying on us again,” he said, having noticed the front room curtains twitch. Rub was normally even-tempered, but he harbored a deep animosity toward Miss Beryl as a result of her attempts to educate him back in the eighth grade, some dozen years ago, the year before she’d retired. Whenever Rub saw her, his eyes got small and hard, his voice edgy and scared, as if he imagined that Miss Beryl were still capable of wielding absolute power over him. She was still paying attention to him, and he didn’
t like people who paid attention. Rub himself seldom paid attention, and he considered inattention normal human behavior. Back in eighth grade Miss Beryl was always cracking her ruler on the edge of the desk in her English class, right after lunch when he was about to doze off, and barking, “Pay attention!” Sometimes she stared right at Rub and added, “You might learn something.” Rub still considered attentiveness hateful and exhausting and perverse. And since he knew no one in Bath more alert than Miss Beryl, there was no one he disliked more.

  Sully couldn’t help grinning. “Let’s go have a cup of coffee before she comes out and warns me against bad companions.”

  As they crossed the street where the snow had already begun to turn to slush and headed toward Hattie’s Lunch, Sully was surprised by an unexpected feeling of well-being he could find no rational justification for. The feeling was far too strong to ignore, though, so he decided to be grateful and enjoy it and not be troubled by the fact that throughout his life, such sudden sensations of well-being were often harbingers of impending catastrophe. They were, in fact, leading indicators of the approach of a condition that Sully had come to think of as a stupid streak, where everything he did would turn out wrong, where each wrong turn would be compounded by the next, where even smart moves would prove dumb in the particular circumstance, where thoughtlessness and careful consideration were guaranteed to arrive at the same end—disaster.

  He generally suffered through about one stupid streak a year and was under the impression that this year’s was already in the books. But then again, maybe not. Or maybe this year he’d be awarded two. Maybe going back to work on an injured knee was the beginning of the granddaddy of all stupid streaks. He already knew that one of the things he had to look forward to today was everybody telling him he was stupid, he’d be better off to stay in school, collect his partial disability, let his knee heal completely and, since it wasn’t likely to heal completely, let Wirf, his lawyer, work on getting him his full disability. What kind of sense could it possibly make for him to go back to work on a busted, arthritic knee?

  Some sort of sense, obviously, Sully concluded, or he wouldn’t be feeling so good about doing it. Of course, he might feel differently later, after a day’s hard work, but right this minute, as he limped down Upper Main in the direction of Hattie’s and coffee, half listening to Rub complain about Miss Beryl, going back to work made more sense to him than driving over to the community college north of Schuyler Springs, where he had, for the last few months, been taking classes with teenagers and feeling foolish. The only class he enjoyed was philosophy, the course he’d been forced to sign up for when one of the classes he needed was full, and the philosophy class, ironically, was the one that made him feel the most foolish. It was taught by a young professor with a small body and a massive head who would have looked like Rub except for a crop of unruly black hair. The young professor seemed bent on disproving everything in the world, one thing at a time. First he disproved things like chairs and trees that fell in the forest, and then he moved on to concepts like cause and effect and, most recently, free will. Sully’d gotten a kick out of it, watching everything disappear but the bad grades he got along with all the other students. If going back to work turned out okay, philosophy was the only class he’d miss. In fact, he already felt bad about quitting with only three weeks left in the term and a few things left, like God and love, to be disproved. He wasn’t sure how the young professor meant to make these disappear with the rest, but Sully was sure he’d find a way.

  What was disappearing even faster than trees in his philosophy class was Sully’s small reserve of money, and besides, he was curious to know if work was something he could still do. The fact that he could barely get his shoes on did not bode well. But lately the knee hurt worse when he sat there in the classroom than when he walked around on it. The classroom desks were anchored to the floor and placed too close together, and he couldn’t seem to get comfortable. If he straightened the leg out in the aisle, he ran the risk of somebody bumping it. If he tucked it beneath him, out of harm’s way, it throbbed mercilessly to the drone of his professors’ voices.

  Fuck it. He was better off going back to work and turning the kind of slender profit that was his life. If he was careful he’d be okay, for a while anyhow. Right now, a while seemed enough. It was enough to be sauntering down the Main Street of his life toward the warmth of Hattie’s, where there’d be people he knew and knew how to talk to.

  “I couldn’t live with fuckin’ Old Lady Peoples spying on me,” Rub was saying, still angry. “You couldn’t even have a good piece of ass.”

  Sully shook his head in wonderment, as he often did around Rub, who couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse wearing a thousand-dollar bill for a rubber. Rub had once confessed to Sully that even his wife, Bootsie, had stopped extending him conjugal privileges. “Well, Rub,” Sully told him, “I don’t get laid that much any more anyhow. I wish Beryl Peoples was the reason, too.”

  Rub apparently accepted this and calmed down a little. “You got Ruth, anyways,” he observed before thinking.

  Sully considered how to answer this. Ruth was one of the people he was going to have to explain himself to today. Maybe if he was lucky he’d run into all the people who were going to tell him how stupid he was today and be done with it. “Ruth is another man’s wife, actually. He’s the one that’s got Ruth, not me.”

  Rub took this in slowly, perhaps even believing it, which, if true, would have made him and Ruth’s husband the only believers in Bath, though not many people knew for sure. “It’s just that people keep saying—” Rub explained.

  “I don’t care what people say,” Sully interrupted. “I just know what I’m telling you.”

  “Even Bootsie says—” Rub began, then stopped, sensing he was about to get cuffed. “I just wisht you could get a piece of ass without Old Lady Peoples spying on you,” he insisted.

  “Good. I thought that’s all you meant,” Sully said, adding, “Ruth is going to be kind of upset when she hears you called her a piece of ass, though.”

  That Ruth might somehow hear of this clearly frightened Rub, who was scared of women in general and Ruth in particular. His wife, Bootsie, was a genuine horror, but Ruth struck him as even scarier, and he admired Sully for having the courage to involve himself with a woman like Ruth who had such a tongue on her and wasn’t afraid to use it on anybody. “I never called her that,” he said quickly.

  “Oh,” Sully said, “I thought I just heard you.”

  Rub frowned, tried to scroll back through the conversation, finally gave up. “I never meant to,” he said weakly, hoping this explanation might suffice. It did with Sully sometimes, even if it never had with Old Lady Peoples, not even once.

  Hattie’s Lunch, one of North Bath’s oldest businesses, was now run by Hattie’s daughter, Cassandra, who saw the business as operating strictly according to the law of diminishing returns. She planned to sell it and move out west as soon as her mother died, which the old woman, now pushing ninety pretty hard, was bound to do eventually, despite her clear intention to live forever. Cass had thought her mother’s stroke would be the beginning of the end, but that was nearly five years ago, and the old woman had recovered miraculously. “Miraculously” was the doctor’s term, and not one Cass herself would have thought to apply to her mother’s recovery, however surprising. The physicians had been astonished to see a woman of Hattie’s years rebound so fiercely, and they were full of admiration for her tenacious grip on life, her stern refusal to surrender it. Testimony to the human spirit, they’d called it.

  Cass called it bullheadedness. She loved her mother but was less effusive on the subject of her longevity than the old woman’s physicians. “Basically she’s just used to having her own way,” she told them. But except for her old friend Sully, to whom she could tell things, confident he’d forget them before he walked out the door, Cass kept her resentment to herself, knowing that it would be neither understood nor tolerated. Hattie was an
institution in Bath, and besides, everybody romanticized old people, seeing in them their own lost parents and grandparents, most of whom had bequeathed to their children the usual legacy of guilt, along with the gift of selective recollection. Most fathers and mothers did their children the great favor of dying before they began fouling themselves, before their children learned to equate them with urine-soaked undergarments and other grim realities of age and infirmity. Cass knew better than to expect understanding, and she understood how profound was the human need to see old people as innocent, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Some days, like today, she would have liked to tell everybody in the diner a few things about both her mother and herself. Mostly herself. She’d have liked to tell somebody that every time she changed Old Hattie’s stockings, she felt her own life slipping away, that when the old woman made one unreasonable demand after another her hand actually itched to slap her mother into reality. Or Cass might confess her fear that her mother’s death might just coincide with her own need of assistance, since she didn’t share her mother’s ferocious will to keep breathing at all costs. Indeed, she was grimly pleased that she was childless, which meant that when her own time came there’d be no one upon whom she’d be an unwanted burden. Whoever got the job would be paid for doing it.

  This morning Hattie’s was busy as usual. Between 6:30 and 9:30 on weekdays, Roof, the black cook, could not fry eggs fast enough to fill all the Hattie’s Specials—two eggs, toast, home fries and coffee for a dollar forty-nine. When Sully and Rub arrived, there was no place for them to sit, either at the short, six-stool counter or among the dozen square formica booths, though a foursome of construction workers was stirring in the farthest. Old Hattie herself occupied the tiny booth, half the size of the others, nearest the door, and Sully, to Rub’s dismay, slid gingerly into the booth across from the old lady, leaving Rub in the crowded doorway. “How are you, old woman?” Sully said. Hattie’s milky eyes located him by sound. “Still keeping an eye on business, I see.”