“Guy must have thought it was his lucky day,” Wirf went on. “Spent all day out in the woods till he froze his nuts off, finally drove home, parked his car, took his gun out of the backseat and shot a deer dead on his own front lawn. Next year he’ll probably just sit by his front window and wait where it’s warm.”
“I take it you didn’t witness this shooting yourself,” Sully said. In Bath news traveled two ways. Fast and wrong.
“Nope,” Wirf said. “I sat right here. Heard all about it, though.”
“You have any doubts about the testimony?”
“A few,” Wirf admitted. “But I’m fond of the story. And the guy who told it swore he saw the deer.”
Sully grinned at him. “He was probably drunk, like you. Some guy ran over a dog and left it there. What do you want to bet?”
“What’d I tell you!” Jeff, the bartender, bellowed. The judge had just found for the plaintiff, as he’d predicted.
Birdie threw up her hands. “That does it,” she said. “I’m going home.”
“How about making us a couple hamburgers before you go?” Sully suggested.
“The kitchen closes at seven,” Birdie said, pointing at the beer sign clock on the wall, which said seven-fifteen.
“Okay,” Sully said. “I’ll go make them myself.”
Jeff shook his head. “Tiny doesn’t want you back there. You always leave the grill a mess.”
“What do you want on them?” Birdie sighed, sliding off her stool.
“A bun’d be nice,” Sully said, “and whatever else looks good.” These were pretty much the same instructions he’d given Rub at noon for the hamburger he never got.
“How about you, handsome?” Birdie said.
“Everything,” Peter said.
Sully noted with some interest that Peter seemed used to being called handsome. As a boy he’d been easy to embarrass, but no more.
“Thanks,” Peter added.
“Now there’s a word you never learned from your father,” Birdie said as she disappeared into the kitchen.
On television the judge was explaining the principle of shared culpability, which allowed him to assign percentages of blame. The explanation wasn’t as impressive as the ones Sully’s young philosophy professor came up with in class. By the time he got finished explaining something like free will it had disappeared without a trace, disproved. Dividing up things like responsibility, as this judge was doing, wasn’t a bad trick either, but it wasn’t as clean as philosophy. A good philosopher could just make the thing in question disappear. One minute it was there, the next that son of a bitch was gone and there wasn’t anything to divide up either.
“He ruled for the defendant?” Wirf said, surprised, glaring at the TV judge with the same perplexed expression he always wore at Sully’s disability hearings.
“Same as he did last week,” Sully said. “This is a rerun, you jerk.”
Wirf nodded. “I thought it looked familiar.”
“Every time we go to Albany it’s a rerun too,” Sully pointed out. “Which is why we’re about to quit.”
Wirf had taken a five-dollar bill out of his wallet. He’d been about to hand it over to Jeff, who’d narrowly won the week’s wager. “Had you seen that one before?”
Jeff had shifty eyes, and they shifted now. “Sully’s full of shit as usual. That wasn’t no rerun.”
“I thought I remembered it too,” Wirf said.
“Then you should pay double,” Jeff pointed out. “If you guess wrong on reruns.”
Wirf must have considered this a valid point, because he shoved the five across the bar. When Jeff drew two beers, Sully took them and headed down to the other end of the bar where he and Peter could talk.
“What?” Wirf said when he noticed Sully and Peter had moved down to the vacant end of the bar. “You don’t want to talk to me?”
“Not right this minute,” Sully admitted.
“I didn’t finish telling you about the guy that shot the deer.”
“There’s more?”
“They arrested that son of a bitch,” Jeff bellowed from down the bar. He was standing on a stool, switching stations to yet another holiday football game. When somebody wanted to know how come he was arrested, Jeff explained, “You can’t discharge a firearm inside the city. It’s against the law.”
Wirf sighed. “Everybody’s a lawyer.”
“Except you,” Sully agreed.
Wirf ignored this, turning his attention back to the television. “Are they playing this game now?” he asked Jeff suspiciously. A man who wasn’t above getting his friends to bet on reruns of The People’s Court wouldn’t balk at betting on tape-delayed sporting events he already knew the outcome of.
“So,” Sully said. “What’re you going to do?”
Peter stared into his beer, bubbles rising from nowhere in the bottom of the glass, ascending into foam.
“Head back tomorrow, I guess,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’d be able to give me a lift to Albany? I can rent a car there.”
“Sure,” Sully said. “I could have taken you today. I wish you’d come around, in fact. You could have saved me some money.”
“I wish I could have gotten away sooner,” Peter said.
Sully nodded, understanding, he thought. “Your mother?”
“She’s getting worse,” Peter said, surprising Sully, who couldn’t remember ever having confided in Peter his strong conviction that Vera was nuts.
“She seemed about the same to me,” he said, though he’d been surprised when he saw his ex-wife. Vera had aged a good deal since he’d seen her last. She seemed smaller, too, than he remembered her. Or more tightly wound. Or something.
“I think she’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and she’s liable to give Ralph one too.”
“Ralph didn’t look too good,” Sully admitted. “What was he in the hospital about?”
“Prostate,” Peter said. “Colon.”
Sully nodded. “What’d they say?”
“They’re saying he’s going to be okay,” Peter said. “I don’t think he believes them. They want to do radiation. He doesn’t understand why, if they got the cancer like they said.”
“He should do what they say, though,” Sully said, even though he reserved the right to arrive at the opposite conclusion if the situation were ever his own. “That’s why she’s all bent out of shape?”
“I wish it were,” Peter said. “That would make sense.”
Sully discovered he didn’t care for Peter’s tone that much. Maybe it was true that Sully considered Vera nuts, but it didn’t seem right for his son to share such a low opinion of his own mother. “Don’t be too hard on her,” he advised. “Most of what she does is for you.”
Peter smiled at that. “You think so?”
“You don’t?”
He seemed to think about it. “I think most of what she does, she does for herself,” Peter said. “Especially her suffering.”
“You think she likes to suffer?”
“That’s what I think.”
“I think you’re wrong,” Sully said, though he didn’t, at least not exactly.
“You should have seen the look on her face tonight when I told her I was coming to see you. As if I’d killed her. I think it was the happiest moment of her life.”
Sully studied his son, aware that his momentary pride in Peter’s accomplishments had leaked away into serious misgivings about his character. It was Peter who seemed to be enjoying the recollection of his mother’s suffering.
When their hamburgers came, Sully, feeling his stomach shrink as it frequently did at the sight of food, cut his in half, placed the larger half and some fries on a napkin. “Give this to Long John Silver,” he instructed Jeff. Wirf, down the bar, had smelled the food, then seen it and was now watching Peter eat with his customary longing.
Peter devoured his burger with excellent appetite, the result, no doubt, of having escaped the atmosphere of Vera’s air fresheners
. He regarded his father half humorously as Sully struggled with the last of his half hamburger before giving up. “Speaking of doctors,” Peter said, “when was the last time you saw one?”
“A couple months?”
“For your knee.”
“Right,” Sully said.
“I meant for a checkup. You’ve lost weight.”
Sully knew that this was true, though it didn’t concern him. “You look like you’ve gained a little, if you don’t mind my saying so,” he observed, having noticed that his son, for all his good looks, had the beginning of a paunch, rather like Carl Roebuck’s.
“The sedentary life,” Peter explained, adding, when Sully didn’t reply, “Sitting on your ass.”
“I know what it means,” Sully said. “You forget I was a college student until a couple days ago. It was the sitting on my ass that I objected to most.”
Peter was grinning. “It’s hard to imagine you in class,” he said.
“It’s hard to imagine you climbing a fence.” Sully stood up, flexed. “But we’re going to find out if you can.” He threw a ten-dollar bill onto the bar to cover the burgers and beer. His last ten dollars, it occurred to him vaguely. “Let’s go see if that mutt’s asleep.”
“Where you going this time?” Wirf wondered when they headed for the door. “Drink one beer with me.”
Sully noticed that Wirf had picked the cheese off his burger. “What’s the matter with the cheese?” he said.
“Makes me constipated,” Wirf confessed. “Next time ask them to hold the cheese on my half.”
“Next time I’ll eat the whole thing myself.”
“Sit down. Drink a beer with me.”
Sully shook his head sadly, looked at his son. “You ever meet a man with only one speed before?”
“Yes,” Peter said. “You.”
Wirf clearly enjoyed this rejoinder. “I like him,” he told Sully.
“That’s understandable,” Sully said. “I helped make him.”
“That’s not the part I like, though,” Wirf said.
At the door, as Sully struggled into his coat, he again noticed the strange odor that lingered there, a smell he’d been aware of off and on all day, except it was stronger now.
“Do I want to know why I’m going to have to climb that fence?” Peter said.
“Easy.” Sully opened the door so Peter could precede him. “You’re going to steal me a snowblower.”
“I don’t know about this,” Peter said for the third time. His father was running a stick along the chain-link fence, making a hell of a racket, calling to the dog. The big yard on the other side of the fence was dark, full of heavy machinery. The dog could be anywhere. “He could be waiting to pounce,” Peter said.
Sully looked at him. “Remember when we drove up the last time? He wasn’t waiting to pounce. He was pouncing.”
This was true. The dog had been foaming at the mouth and lunging at the fence before his father had been able to get out of the car. Still, the dog’s absence seemed significant. And scary. Had they found him, drugged and dreaming peacefully up against the chain-link fence as they’d expected, Peter wouldn’t have hesitated. But there was no sign of Rasputin. Even the styrofoam packaging for the ground beef had disappeared. “Where’s the styrofoam package?” Peter wondered out loud.
Again Sully directed the beam of the flashlight along the ground inside the fence. No package. “He probably ate it,” Sully said. “This isn’t the world’s smartest dog we’re talking about here. Just the world’s meanest.”
“That’s the part that worries me,” Peter admitted. “The way the last few days have gone, it’d follow that I’d end up getting my throat ripped out by a junkyard dog.”
“Are you going to climb over or what?” Sully said. “I should have asked Wirf. Even a one-legged drunk could have climbed this fence by now.”
“Tell me again how this is your own snowblower we’re stealing,” Peter said. Sully had explained to him on the way that “in a sense” the snowblower was really his, because the man who owned it also owed Sully some money and wouldn’t pay. Sully’d already stolen the snowblower once, and this Carl Roebuck guy had stolen it back. This was kind of a game, apparently. Still, the whole thing gave Peter pause. What they were up to resembled burglary so closely that the law might not be able to tell the difference.
“I had a feeling your mother was raising you this way,” Sully said, a more potent criticism than he could have guessed.
Peter grabbed the chain-link fence and tested it by shaking.
“Climb,” his father said. “We’re getting old.”
It was not easy climbing the fence. The bottoms of Peter’s tennis shoes were wet from standing in the slush, and they kept slipping. Also, he hadn’t climbed anything since he was a kid, and his clumsiness embarrassed him mightily. When he finally got the side of one foot planted on top of the fence, wedged in between two twists of the chain link, he discovered he hadn’t the necessary strength to hoist himself over.
“What’s the matter?” his father wanted to know. A fair question.
“Nothing,” Peter lied, his arms trembling. “I’m just catching my breath.”
“Don’t get stuck.”
Don’t get stuck. Words to live by.
Then suddenly Peter was over and standing on the other side, facing Sully, who was barely visible in the dark, though only a foot away, separated by just the chain-link fence. Feeling his hand burn, Peter examined his palm and discovered he’d raked it along the top of the fence. His father aimed the flashlight beam on the injury. It was only a scratch, but small beads of blood were forming along its length. Peter felt an odd exhilaration at the wound and the sight of his own blood, drawn in the dubious service of a dangerous man. Who happened to be his father.
“Here’s the hacksaw,” Sully said, slipping the blade under the fence. “It’s just a padlock.”
Peter took the blade and followed along the fence a few feet until he felt the gate. Sure enough, there was a padlock dangling on the inside. Sully illuminated it with the flashlight as best he could. “Try not to saw your thumb off,” he advised.
Peter gripped the hacksaw’s handle, which was smooth and fit perfectly over the fresh scratch on his palm. For some reason it was satisfying to return his father’s saw with his own blood on the smooth grip. Sully, Peter knew, was suspicious of intellectuals and therefore suspicious of himself and his education, especially the private schools he had attended until the money had run out. According to his mother, when Peter had been sent off to prep school, Sully had accused her of trying to raise him above his station. Vera had replied that this was not true, that she was just trying to raise their son above Sully’s station. It was one of his mother’s favorite anecdotes, though Peter suspected the conversation had probably not gone that way.
“You want a glove?” his father offered.
Peter declined the offer and began to saw. In the night’s stillness, the rasping sound was louder than he’d expected, and Peter imagined it waking his mother back in town, imagined her understanding intuitively that it was the sound of her thirty-five-year-old son, the college professor, helping his father, whose influence she had long warned him against, to burglarize Tip Top Construction. It was a pleasant feeling, this father-son complicity against a long-suffering woman, and its thirty-five-year absence welled up in Peter powerfully. With it came the less pleasant possibility that he was not so different from his natural father as he’d always liked to think. True, he wasn’t the sort of man who’d leave his wife and family. Rather, he was the kind who’d drive that wife and family away, so it’d be their decision, not his.
As Peter worked at the padlock and considered all of this, he became gradually aware of a silent, motionless presence in the darkness on his side of the fence. Peter did not immediately look, conditioned as he was not to look by his son Will, who had a habit of coming noiselessly into Peter’s study, the utility room, actually. Peter always left the door op
en for air, which allowed Will to come up behind him and stand silently at his father’s elbow, where he quietly watched Peter work and patiently waited for him to look up and discover him there so he could tell his father about Wacker’s latest atrocity. Peter often became aware of his son’s presence gradually, and he was aware that the boy, through some intuited adult sympathy, was allowing Peter to complete the paragraph he was reading or the thought he was committing to a note card. This kindness was a small gift that Peter always accepted solemnly before swiveling slowly in his desk chair so as not to startle Will, the jumpiest of little boys, and taking him onto his lap.
This was the sort of presence Peter now felt at his elbow, a presence so still and considerate that it might have been nothing at all, or a small boy awaiting permission to speak, and so Peter did not turn to investigate until he’d succeeded in cutting through the first prong of the padlock. Irrationally or not, he half expected to see Will standing there in the dark at his elbow.
It was not Will, but rather Rasputin.
The Doberman stood there, perfectly motionless, even when Peter jumped and backed into the fence in terror. The beam of Sully’s flashlight, which had been angled sideways to fix the padlock, did not immediately locate the dog, but when it did, Peter nearly passed out from fright. The Doberman appeared to be grinning, its teeth bared, lips pulled back from the gums hideously. The perfect absence of sound—of even the low growl that Peter expected from an animal prepared to pounce—made the sight that much more terrifying. The dog’s hind legs were planted wide apart.
And so Peter, before he could even begin to decide whether he was a man like or unlike his natural father, prepared to die. There was no question of climbing the fence. The dog would be on him as soon as he moved. No question of anyone coming to his rescue. The fence separated him from his father, and Sully lacked a weapon anyway. To judge from the fact that the beam of the flashlight stayed fixed on Rasputin’s face, Sully was frozen too, in surprise if not fear. At least, Peter thought, it would be over in a second. When the dog leapt, it would tear out his throat quickly and, he prayed, painlessly, as it had no doubt been trained to do. It was his father who would have to watch in horror as the dreadful scene played itself out, helpless on the other side of the fence. Peter didn’t envy his father or mourn the loss of his own life. In a way it would free him. Of Charlotte, of whom he’d long wished to be free. Of hothouse Didi and her shared peaches. Of the profession he had failed at and that had failed him. Of his mother’s merciless, unrelenting expectation. All of it gone, mercifully, in a moment. And then blessed oblivion.