Nobody's Fool

  “You want some more hot chocolate?” Ralph said.

  Will shook his head.

  “You want a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?” Sully offered.

  “You don’t have a stick,” Will pointed out.

  “You going to let your two grandpas visit you in your new apartment?”

  “And Grandma Vera.”

  “Right,” Sully said.

  Peter and Rub came back through then. “Just the top mattress, and we’re set,” Peter said. “Step down, Sancho,” he reminded Rub.

  “I know it,” Rub responded, though he sounded content to be warned. Sully could almost see Rub’s slow brain working, adjusting to this new reality that Sully had taught him—that Peter was Sully’s son, Rub his best friend. It’d take him a while to master the intricacies. Sully understood how Rub felt.

  Ralph was cocking his head and listening. “Uh-oh,” he said.

  “What?”

  Ralph got up and went to the window. “I was afraid of this.”

  “You want me to talk to her?” Sully offered.

  Ralph gave careful thought to what he clearly considered to be a brave and generous offer, but he finally shook his head. “No, you fellows best go on. Will and I’ll be fine, won’t we, Wilier?”

  “Okay.” Sully got to his feet and peered out the kitchen window. “I think they’re all loaded anyhow.”

  In fact, Peter and Rub were tugging at the U-Haul, trying to get the hitch to slip back onto the ball joint on Sully’s rear bumper.

  At first Sully thought his ex-wife was going to simply walk past all of it as if nothing taking place in her driveway were real. She looked like she hadn’t the slightest intention of acknowledging her son. Her face was set in stony denial until she caught a glimpse of Rub in her peripheral vision, but she stopped dead then, turning and staring at him. She wore at that moment the expression of a woman who has just picked the cold-blooded murderer of her own parents out of a police lineup.

  “Uh-oh,” Ralph said again. Sully had already started for the door, skipping on his good leg, the bad one refusing to bear so much weight so soon after he’d been sitting down.

  By the time he got outside, Peter had come around the U-Haul and taken ahold of his mother, who was straining against him like a dog on a leash. “Get him away!” she howled. “Get him away!”

  “Mom,” Peter said, trying to get her attention by getting his face up close to hers so she couldn’t see past him. She’d broken one arm free and was pointing at Rub, as if there might be some confusion about whose presence she objected to.

  “Get that foul thing away!” she screamed, still pointing. Every time Peter grabbed ahold of her arm and forced it to her side, she yanked the other one free and pointed again. “Why is he still standing there?” she cried. “Get him away! Get him off my property!”

  Indeed, Rub was too stunned and confused by this turn of events to move. There could be no doubt who she was pointing at, but he couldn’t shake the notion that it must be somebody else. He couldn’t ever remember seeing the woman before. And to his way of thinking he’d been invited here. Perhaps not by this crazy woman herself, but by other people who apparently lived there. True, he’d been wrong before about other places where he’d assumed he’d been welcome, and there were times he’d been asked to leave. But this was different. This woman looked like she wanted to exterminate him. He hadn’t said a word to her, even, and here she was furious at him, pointing and screaming. A woman he’d never seen before.

  Vera never saw Sully until he too came between herself and Rub Squeers. “Vera,” he said calmly. “Quit this. Right now.”

  “You’re responsible for this,” she sobbed. “You brought this to my home. Why must you”—here she searched for the right word—“contaminate everything? Why can’t you leave us alone?”

  “Dad,” Peter pleaded, “go. I’ll take care of this.”

  “Okay,” Sully said, having witnessed enough. “You’re nuts, Vera,” he said by way of good-bye. “You always were, and now you really are.”

  Ralph was there now too, extending, ineffectually, his hand to his wife, who slapped it away. “Don’t touch me!” she wailed. “Don’t any of you touch me!”

  “I never done nothing to her,” Rub said when Sully yanked the El Camino away from the curb. Rub was staring back over his shoulder at the scene still unfolding in the driveway as Peter and Ralph tried to get Sully’s ex-wife to go inside. Several neighbors had come outside to watch. “I never even seen her before.”

  “Forget it,” Sully told him. “None of that had anything to do with you.”

  Rub was glad to hear it, glad to have Sully to tell him what to remember, what to forget. “She looked like she wanted to kill me,” he said.

  “It’s me she wants to kill,” Sully assured him, “not you.”

  Rub frowned. “I wisht she’d yell at you, then. I never done nothing to her. I never even seen her before.”

  “I know that, Rub, goddamn it,” Sully said. “I told you to forget about it. Don’t tell me you can’t forget things, because I know better.”

  “I don’t feel too good,” Rub said, leaning his head against the cool pane of glass.

  Instead of returning to the new apartment, Sully drove back to Rub’s, depositing him there at the curb. “Take a nap,” he said. “I’ll come back for you later.”

  “When?”

  “Later.” He saw Rub’s doubt, though. “I promise.”

  Then, against orders and his own better judgment, Sully drove back to Silver Street.

  He had no intention of actually making another appearance. Peter was right. Things had a better chance of quieting down without Sully in the picture. His plan was just to drive by and make sure that Peter and Ralph had succeeded in getting her inside and off the street. Somehow he wasn’t sure they’d be able to. He’d always considered Vera to be mildly crazy, but this was a new madness he’d seen in her eyes, and it had frightened him. He fully expected to see police cars and a crowd when he turned the corner onto Silver.

  But there were no police cars, and all was quiet in front of his ex-wife’s house. The U-Haul still sat in the driveway, still unhitched, which meant Peter might need help getting the trailer’s hitch up onto the ball. He pulled over to the curb to consider this but did not get out. If Peter emerged in the next few minutes, Sully’d offer a hand. Otherwise, he’d head back to the flat, out of harm’s way.

  Farther up the street Sully noticed that a small crowd had gathered. Something was going on, and Sully was thankful that whatever it was, it had nothing to do with him. At least he was thankful until he remembered that Robert Halsey’s house, where Vera’d grown up, had been on that block, right about where everybody was gathered. He was trying to muddle his way through what this might mean when he noticed that his grandson Will was standing shyly at the front door of Vera’s house, between the outer glass door and the inner one, which stood open behind him. When Sully waved, the boy pointed up the street.

  Sully had not been by Robert Halsey’s old property in—what?—thirty years? He almost didn’t recognize it. Once one of the most meticulous houses on the street, it was now the most neglected. Its weathered gray wood showed through to such an extent that it was impossible to tell what color it had last been painted, and its rotting porch sloped hazardously. Sully remembered its having had a side porch at one time, but somebody had apparently wrenched it away, and the back door now opened onto thin air. The place was in just slightly better condition than his own father’s house on Bowdon Street.

  When he got out of the El Camino, he was immediately recognized by a man who was a regular at Hattie’s. “What’s going on, Buster?” Sully said, trying to maintain rhetorical distance from what promised to be an ugly circumstance.

  “It’s your wife, Sully,” Buster said, apparently unwilling to grant him distance, rhetorical or other.

  “Can’t be,” Sully said, moving past the man. “I’m not married.”

&
nbsp; “Sully to the rescue!” somebody called as he climbed the slanting front porch steps with the aid of a wobbly railing. “Go, Sully,” called somebody else, and then a chant started up, “Go, go, go, go.” In the distance, a siren.

  Ralph stood just inside the doorway, looking plain scared. Vera stood in the center of the room, still wild-eyed, frantically tearing pages from a glossy magazine. Peter, his back to this scene, was on the telephone. “No,” he was saying. “No one’s been hurt.”

  “Let’s go home, Vera,” Ralph said, extending his hand to her as he’d done back in their driveway. Vera ignored him, continued tearing out pages, flinging them at a stupefied fat man seated on a ratty sofa. “She don’t have no right to tear up my Playboys” the man said to Sully, though his statement contained an implied question (“Does she?”), as if to suggest that perhaps this berserk woman had a moral right but not a legal one.

  Vera flung another fistful of pages at him. “Filth!” she raged. “You brought filth into my father’s house. You’re filth.”

  At this moment a woman with two frightened children appeared from the back of the house. They were all bundled up in winter coats and hats and gloves, apparently prepared to vacate the premises, though clearly under protest. She steered the children around Vera, keeping them as far away as she could. Sully waited until they were out the front door, then said, “Vera.”

  His ex-wife refused to acknowledge his presence, but Peter did, turning around with the telephone still cradled to his ear, apparently on hold. The look on his face said, terrific, what else could go wrong?

  “Vera,” Sully said again, and this time she looked up.

  “This is all your fault,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know it,” he said agreeably. “We’re going to have to leave now, though, old girl. The cops are coming, and you don’t want to get arrested.”

  She seemed actually to consider the wisdom of this for a moment, until she noticed the Playboy in her hands and commenced tearing again. When she finished that issue, she grabbed another. Either this was one of the fat man’s favorites or he’d simply drawn the line, because he lunged for the magazine and there was a brief tug-of-war, which Vera won, causing the man to throw up his hands. “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.

  His ex-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 ahold 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 ex-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, darlin’,” 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 Fortune?” 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 prob
ably 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 ex-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.