Nobody's Fool

  Not that Miss Beryl had found a convert in Sully. In fact, the two argued all the time, and Miss Beryl gently chided Sully in much the same way she chided Clive Sr. Nor did Sully ever take Miss Beryl’s side in discussions that involved Clive Sr. In fact, Sully seemed unaware that there was a conflict, a tug-of-war for his attention. He seemed unaware of Clive Sr.’s mounting irritation at how his subjects kept getting derailed in favor of hers. He hadn’t invited Sully to their table to talk about poetry. He’d brought him there to talk about football. He’d hoped to convince Sully that football was poetry.

  Clive Jr. had watched his father’s frustration grow, and he waited until he sensed the right time. It came one night when Sully volunteered to help Miss Beryl with the dishes—imagine, Clive Sr.’s all-conference halfback/linebacker doing dishes—and Clive Sr., unable to watch, had retreated to the living room to listen to the radio, or pretend to. Clive Jr. had followed him in there and sat frowning in a chair across the room until their eyes met, and then Clive Jr. had spoken. “I liked it better,” he told his father, “when it was just us. When it was just our own family.” His father had started to say something, then stopped, his dark gaze finding the kitchen door and the sound of raised, argumentative, joyful voices. “And that’s the way it’s going to be again,” his father had said, his voice never more purposeful, even on the football field.

  After dinner the next evening, when Sully had left to go out somewhere with his friends, Clives Sr. and Jr. had taken a walk up Main in the direction of the Sans Souci. It was early November, but the weather had already turned bitter and the elms were bare overhead, a network of black branches, impossibly high and distant. At the corner of Main and Bowdon, they had turned left, as Clive Jr. had known they would. At the tiny Sullivan house, they had knocked and waited for a long time until Sully’s mother, dressed in a robe, had finally answered the door. She seemed to know why they’d come, though she’d waited patiently in their shabby living room for Clive Sr. to express his sympathy for the loss of their eldest son, to explain how proud he was of Donald (he used his wife’s nomenclature in this instance), how he was the backbone of the team, how the team was really a family in the larger context and how the season had only another week to go before that family split up. They’d enjoyed having Sully over at their house so much during the season, and he hoped Mrs. Sullivan hadn’t thought they were trying to steal him away from them and her home, from his own mother and father. Clive Jr. had watched as the meaning trailing his father’s words gradually came clear to the woman.

  “I’ll keep him home,” she promised when Clive Sr.’s voice finally dropped.

  The two Clives got to their feet then, and Clive Sr. said again that Sully was a fine young man, that he’d be a fine citizen, that if sports taught anything, they taught citizenship. This last point elicited a peal of unexpected, thunderous laughter from Big Jim Sullivan, who’d appeared in the doorway behind them noiselessly, filling that doorway really, dwarfing Clive Sr., himself a sizable man. “You all got tired of him is what you’re saying,” he snorted.

  Before Clive Sr. could protest, Big Jim had turned his back on them, and when he spoke again, it was over his massive shoulder. “You just send him on home, coach,” he said. “I’ll straighten him right out.”

  He kept his word, too. Sully had not appeared at their table again.

  Had it been wrong, what he and his father had done? The twinge of guilt Clive Jr. felt when he recalled the episode was suggestive, though not conclusive. When he thought it through objectively, Clive Jr. didn’t see what was so wrong about a young boy wanting to keep his own family intact. Yet he and his father made no mention of their visit to Miss Beryl. It remained their unspoken secret, and yet instead of drawing father and son closer together, it had driven a further wedge between them. Clive Sr. seemed to enjoy his son’s company even less after their visit to the Sullivans’, and in truth Clive Jr. was never able to look at his father in exactly the same way.

  Which was a shame, because time had vindicated them. After all, the intruder had not been expelled. After Clive Sr.’s death, while Clive Jr. was away, Sully had again taken up residence in his mother’s home and in her heart, it seemed to Clive Jr., and now he could be budged from neither her house nor her affection. His mother could not be made to see that he was dangerous, and her stubbornness had put Clive Jr. into the unfortunate position of having to finish, as an adult, the job that he and his father had begun when he was a teenager. Expelling Sully, once and for all, seemed the sort of task that the most important man in Bath ought to be able to accomplish, and it galled Clive Jr. to be so impotent in this regard. A man governed more by the commonsense laws of commerce than by emotion, Clive Jr. was unable to explain, even to himself, why his own sense of well-being was increasingly tied to the imperative of Sully’s banishment, but there it was. Even the validity of his most compelling public reason—to remove the very real threat of danger to his mother that a careless man like Sully represented—could not expel or diminish his more private and personal motives.

  It was irrational, Clive Jr. had to admit, as he sat beside the Dumpster in back of Hattie’s, studying his visible breath, to feel that Sully would have to go before Clive Jr. would be able to accomplish his other goals. And surely it was irrational to feel, to know, that as long as that coalition on Upper Main existed, he would always see himself as the boy he’d been and not the man he’d become. Unless he could rid himself of Sully, he’d always be right where he was now, out in the cold, in a dark, narrow alley, the odor of the town’s refuse assailing his nostrils. It was intolerable, was what it was. And so Clive Jr. got out of the car.

  “Hello, Clive,” Sully said, clearly surprised to see Clive Jr. when he materialized before the register, looking homicidal. “You want some breakfast?”

  Since he’d been left in charge, Sully was conducting the diner’s business his way. For one thing, it was easier to leave the register’s drawer open. He wasn’t ringing anything up, either. He rounded off the checks, too, sometimes in the customer’s favor, sometimes to the advantage of the establishment, making change from the open drawer. Today, the dollar-forty-nine special cost a buck and a half, screw the tax. For the two-seventy-nine breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast and hash browns, Sully was getting three dollars. So far everyone had paid up cheerfully, understanding the unusual dynamics of the situation and Sully’s adamant refusal to deal with legal tender smaller than quarters. Clive Jr. pointed at his watch. “You know where I’ve been?” he asked Sully.

  “No clue,” Sully said.

  “Sitting out back, waiting for you.”

  “I’ve been a little busy,” Sully pointed out with a sweeping gesture that took in the whole diner. It wasn’t as busy now as it had been when he’d gone behind the counter, but the point was still valid. “I figured you’d know enough to go home.”

  Clive Jr. bristled. “You’re the one who said to wait.”

  “I didn’t mean forever,” Sully said.

  Clive Jr. thought he heard someone snicker. This was not the place to confront Sully, it occurred to him.

  “Have a cup of coffee,” Sully suggested, pouring him one. “Tell me about your Thanksgiving. You had a pleasant one, I hope?”

  “Actually, I had dinner with my fiancée,” Clive Jr. informed him. He was about to hint that his fiancée was someone of Sully’s acquaintance when he was interrupted.

  “Yeah?” Sully said, apparently uninterested in Clive Jr.’s matrimonial plans. “What else did you do?”

  Clive Jr. narrowed his eyes, guessing now where this conversation was heading. Yesterday, while they were waiting for his mother’s return from her Thanksgiving, he and Joyce had gone upstairs to Sully’s flat to see how much damage Sully’d done since the last time he’d checked. “Nothing much,” he said weakly.

  “Nothing much,” Sully repeated. “I thought maybe you went someplace you weren’t supposed to go.”

  Clive Jr. could feel the other men at
the counter tuning in, with undisguised interest, to this conversation. He could also feel whose side they were on. Not his.

  “We’ve been through this before,” Clive Jr. ventured. “A landlord has the right—”

  “You aren’t my landlord,” Sully interrupted.

  “My mother—”

  “Is the only reason I don’t kick your ass,” Sully finished for him. “Next time you go in my apartment without my permission even she won’t save you.”

  Clive Jr. could feel himself begin to shake with rage. And, as always happened in moments of high drama, he found himself outside his own person, one step back, a critical observer of his own weak performance. From this vantage point he saw himself stand with badly feigned dignity, take a dollar out of his wallet, put it wordlessly onto the counter, saw himself pivot like a comic German soldier on television, march ludicrously to the door past the row of silent men at the lunch counter. Maybe they weren’t silent. Maybe silence was what happened when the separation occurred and he found himself outside his own person. Be that as it may, the only thing Clive Jr. heard as he strode out of Hattie’s was the sound of his own voice telling his mother, that very morning, “I can handle Sully.”

  And, as always, it took him a while to reintegrate. The next thing he was aware of was sitting at his oak desk in the savings and loan, which meant that he’d either walked or driven there and let himself in by the side door. Also, he must have drawn back the front curtain that opened onto the street. Through the dark, tinted glass he could see all the way up Main to Hattie’s, where the door of the diner opened and two laughing men emerged. How many times over the years had he looked out this window just in time to see Sully coming up the street, looking for all the world like a man limping away from an accident, too dazed and stupid to assess the extent of his own injuries? Sully’s only design was to keep going, in defiance of reason.

  To Clive Jr. he sometimes seemed immortal, indestructible. He’d sensed Sully’s immortality forty years ago, late that spring afternoon of Sully’s senior year when he’d returned to their house one last time to tell Miss Beryl he was going to enlist in the army. Miss Beryl, to Clive Jr.’s great embarrassment, had tried to talk him out of it. When she was unsuccessful, she had pleaded with Clive Sr. to talk with him. But Clive Sr., as the football coach and a man with a moral duty to the community, took a dim view of draft dodging and applauded Sully’s patriotism. “You fool,” Miss Beryl had said, shocking Clive Jr., who could not recall her ever being contemptuous of his father’s views, though she often made gentle fun of them. “It has nothing to do with patriotism,” she told her husband, who looked a little frightened by her vehemence. “That boy is already at war. He’s just like his brother was. He’s looking for a car to hit head on.”

  Clive Jr., young though he was at the time, had known his mother was wrong. Not in her analysis of Sully’s motives, which, he supposed, might be true. What she was mistaken about was Sully’s ability to wreck himself in a collision. It was the guys in the oncoming vehicle who were not long for this world, in Clive Jr.’s view. Sully might even manage to kill everybody else, but it would be his own personal destiny to be thrown clear of one head-on collision after another, always the worse for the experience but never dead of it.

  And his prediction had come true. It was not Sully who had died going ninety miles an hour but rather Clive Sr., going all of twenty.

  Still, Sully wasn’t immortal, Clive Jr. knew. He was just a man. A dinosaur of a man, marking time patiently toward extinction. Quite possibly he was dead already and was just too dumb to know it. Clive Jr. would have liked to explain this to Sully, and he imagined an exchange he hadn’t quite the courage to make real. “You know how the dinosaurs figured out they were extinct?” he’d have liked to ask. And Sully would have to admit he didn’t have a clue. “They never did,” Clive Jr. would tell him. “They just were.”

  By the time Cass returned with Hattie on her arm and deposited the old woman, bathed and warmly dressed, in her booth, Sully’s generous impulse had about run its course. He was a man capable of sporadic generous impulses, which he enjoyed while they lasted without regretting their absence once they played themselves out.

  “Next time let her go,” Cass said when she joined Sully behind the counter. Sully had already taken off his apron.

  “What gets into her?” he said, sliding onto the stool that had been occupied until recently by Clive Peoples.

  “She was still mad from yesterday,” Cass told him, her voice low and confidential. “She wanted me to open on Thanksgiving so she could sit in her booth. I told her she could go out and sit in it if she wanted to, and I’ll be damned if she didn’t. Sat right there for three hours and then came back and told me I was ruining the business.”

  “She does seem happy in that booth,” Sully admitted. The old woman was smiling broadly now, her misguided flight forgotten.

  “No ‘seem’ about it. If I kept the place open twenty-four hours a day and let her sit there the whole time, she’d be the happiest woman alive.”

  “So let her sit,” Sully suggested. “What’s it hurt?”

  “Right.” Cass glared at him. “Why should I have a life?”

  Sully shrugged. “Then put her in a nursing home. Who’s going to blame you?”

  “Everyone, including you,” Cass said with conviction. “Including me.” She looked past Sully at her mother. “They’d strap her in a wheelchair and forget all about her, Sully,” she said, her voice even quieter now.

  Sully was spared from having to comment by the arrival of Rub, who trotted up outside, put his face to the window and peered in with a worried expression.

  “Somebody told me you were working here now,” he said, as if the rumor were too terrible to contemplate.

  “Who, me?” Sully said.

  Cass brought Rub a coffee.

  “I never should have believed it,” he said seriously.

  “Why not?” Sully wondered, always curious about Rub’s logic.

  “Because it wasn’t true,” Rub explained.

  “There you go.” Cass nodded at Sully, as if in perfect comprehension.

  “Could I borrow a dollar?” Rub said.

  Sully gave him a dollar. Rub put it into his pocket.

  Sully stared at him, shook his head.

  “What?” Rub said.

  “Nothing,” Sully told him.

  “Then how come you’re looking at me?”

  Sully didn’t answer.

  “You’re both looking at me,” Rub observed, since Cass was also watching the two of them with her usual quiet astonishment.

  “You’re a good-looking man, Rub,” Sully told him. “Handsome.”

  Rub looked at Cass, hoping for a clue as to how to take this remark.

  “Am not,” Rub said.

  “Sure you are,” Sully said. Pushing his empty coffee cup away, he stood and planted a kiss on Rub’s bristly cranium.

  Rub flushed bright red. “You’re going to make people think I’m queer,” he said sadly.

  “That ship has sailed, Rub,” Sully said. “Let’s go to work.”

  Rub stood, gulped his coffee down. “I didn’t know we had work.”

  “There’s always work,” Sully told him. “Today some of it’s ours.”

  Cass wouldn’t take money for the coffees. “Thanks,” she said to Sully. “I’m grateful, even if I don’t act like it.”

  “So long, old girl,” Sully said loudly to Hattie on their way out.

  “Who is it?” the old woman grinned maniacally. “It sounds like that darn Sully.”

  Perfect silence. This in response to Sully’s key being turned in the ignition of the pickup. It was as if the ignition were connected to nothing but the cold November air on the other side of the dash. Sully tried it several more times, trying to elicit some sort of sound, even a bad one. A bad sound—a grating, a straining, a scraping—might have suggested some diagnosis, and a diagnosis might have had some tentative pri
ce tag affixed to it. Sully wasn’t sure what the sound of perfect silence meant, pricewise. What it suggested was finality, a vehicle beyond resuscitation. Sully leaned back, left the key in the ignition, ran his fingers through his hair. Rub stared at his knees, afraid. This was a hell of a time to be seated next to Sully, who was not above flying into rages at inanimate objects. In such a confined space there was the danger of ricochet.

  Rub didn’t want to be the first to speak, but the unbroken silence took a greater toll on him than on Sully, who looked to Rub like he might sit there all winter. When he couldn’t stand it anymore, Rub said, “Won’t it start?”

  Sully just looked at him. Ricochet was the least of his worries, Rub realized.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Sully suggested, getting out.

  Rub got out too. “Don’t you want to take your keys?” he said. “What for?”

  “Somebody might steal your truck,” Rub said.

  “Think about it,” Sully advised.

  Rub thought about it. “Somebody might steal your keys.”

  “There’s only three on the ring,” Sully said. “One’s for the truck. I don’t remember what the other two are for, even.”

  “Old Lady Peoples is spying on us again,” Rub noticed, grateful for the change of subject. The curtain in the front room had twitched. “I wisht she’d just go ahead and die instead of spying on people.”

  “That’s kind of mean, don’t you think?” Sully said, as they headed back downtown on foot.

  “She started it,” Rub said. “She was mean to me all during eighth grade. I’m just being mean back.”

  “She probably just wanted you to learn something,” Sully suggested.