If only the dog would just spring and tear out his throat and be done with it. Rasputin continued to grin, but that was all, at least at first. As the eternal microseconds elapsed, Peter noted a subtle tremor in the Doberman’s front legs, like a cold shiver. Gradually the trembling became more violent until the dog’s front legs gave way and he collapsed, snout in a puddle, haunches still in the air. The dog remained that way, balanced for a moment, then either sighed or farted, Peter couldn’t tell which, and tipped over onto a patch of brown snow.
Peter nearly followed the dog’s example, saved from collapse by the sound of his father’s voice at his ear. “That third pill was the winner,” Sully said in that maddening way he had of congratulating himself on his own sound judgment in situations that were hardly conducive. “Hurry and finish before he wakes up.”
Unfortunately, Peter was now shaking too badly to make much of a job of it. The blade didn’t want to stay in the track he was cutting, and his father’s hand on the flashlight didn’t seem as steady now. Peter had nearly cut through three separate places on the remaining prong when the hacksaw blade broke.
“Never mind,” his father said, getting into the El Camino.
“What do you mean, never mind?” Peter wanted to know.
His father rolled down the window and leaned out. “Step back from that gate a minute.”
Peter did as he was told. As things got crazier, he was actually getting the hang of coexisting with his father. Following orders was pretty much essential, far more important than understanding them. Different rules entirely from those that governed his life as an educator. Out on the blacktop the El Camino did a three-point turn and backed into the drive, right up to the gate. “How am I lined up?” his father called.
“For what?”
“Never mind,” Sully said. Then he backed the car into the gate, which strained inward until the padlock stood straight out for a split second, then popped clean, the gate swinging slowly open, stopping only when it came into contact with the inert Rasputin, who didn’t so much as twitch.
The rest of the job took them no more than five minutes. Two minutes to locate the snowblower where Carl Roebuck had hidden it under a tarp, three more to load it into the El Camino. When Sully drove through the gate, Peter started to swing it shut until his father stopped him. “What now?” Peter asked. To his way of thinking, he’d been more than patient.
As usual his father offered no explanation. He was rooting around in the big toolbox in the bed of the truck until his fingers located what they were searching out. Another padlock, as it turned out, which Sully tossed to Peter. “We better lock up. Somebody might come by and steal something.”
At the traffic light by the IGA, Sully switched on the dome light. “Let’s see that hand.”
Peter showed him, proudly, the long, jagged scratch on his palm. It had bled considerably and dried brown and crusty.
Sully nodded and turned off the dome light. “Good,” he said, pulling into the intersection, the light having turned green. “I was afraid you’d gone and hurt yourself.”
Peter stared at the tilting structure. “You’re going to turn this into a bed-and-breakfast?”
Sully couldn’t help smiling. He’d told Peter about the job he’d been hired to do and, when Peter surprised him by exhibiting interest, offered to show Peter the house in question. But then instead of stopping at Miles Anderson’s place, he’d gotten another idea and turned the corner onto Bowdon, parking at the curb in front of Big Jim’s house. “Let’s get out for a minute,” he suggested.
Peter did as he was told, a bit reluctantly, it seemed to Sully, who couldn’t blame him. When they stopped at the black iron fence that surrounded the property, indeed most of the perimeter of the Sans Souci, Peter gave the fence a dubious shake, sending a chill through his father. “You aren’t going to ask me to climb this, are you?”
“Not unless you want to,” Sully said. “In fact, there’s an opening farther down.” He pointed to where the earth mover had passed magically through the fence the day before.
In fact, the last thing Sully wanted was for Peter to climb this fence, even though the spikes that had once run along its top had long since been removed. Half an hour ago, though, out at the Tip Top Construction yard, when Peter had looked like he might lose his balance atop the chain-link fence and impale himself there, the symmetry between this imagined event and the one fifty years ago when Big Jim Sullivan had shook the fence and impaled the boy perched on top was so powerful that in the moment Sully recognized the parallel he had known that the second awful event was fated to happen. It suddenly seemed perfectly natural that he should cause what his father had caused, only more terribly. Afterward, he’d probably act the same way his father did, and during the few seconds that Peter was stalled atop the fence, Sully had imagined not only that his son would be impaled but his own attempt to explain to Vera what had happened to their son, the son she had tried to protect by steering him clear of his father, the son he’d tried to protect by helping her do it, only to be his destroyer in the end. This was what he had caught a whiff of at the door of the White Horse Tavern.
“You got any idea what this place is?” he asked Peter now.
Peter examined the structure in the faint glow of the distant street lamp. “Should I?”
Sully shrugged. “I guess not. I thought maybe your mother might have pointed it out to you. It belonged to your grandfather. It’s the house I grew up in.”
The significance of this, if indeed there were any, seemed lost on Peter, who kept looking at the scratch on his palm, a gesture that caused Sully to realize how different, as father and son, they were, how much Sully had surrendered by allowing Peter to be raised by his mother. He couldn’t very well start lecturing the boy now. There was every reason to believe that the first thirty-five years of Peter’s life had been the formative ones. Still, it was tempting to tell him to quit looking at the scratch. It hadn’t changed or gotten worse since the last time he’d examined it. The thing to do with wounds was ignore them, like your hole cards in a game of stud poker, which also never changed, no matter how many times you looked at them. Like Sully’s knee, which he allowed himself to examine once, first thing in the morning, and which he then ignored the rest of the day. Like all the mistakes a man made in his life, which could be worried and picked at like scabs but were better left alone. It would have been good to say all this to his son, but age thirty-five was an awkward time to begin parental advice.
“I don’t suppose you could make any use of this property?” Sully suggested.
Peter looked at his father, then at the sagging house, then back at his father. Sully knew what his son must be thinking. It was hard to see where the worth might be. Intellectually he knew Ruth was right, that the land the house was sitting on was probably worth something, especially the way it abutted the property of the Sans Souci, but looking at the graying, weathered structure, you had a hard time imagining anybody being interested enough for money to change hands.
“Sure,” Peter said. “We could use it as a summer home.”
“I know,” Sully admitted. “It doesn’t look like it’s worth much, but I apparently own it, and I’d just as soon somebody else did.”
Peter was still looking at the house. “I don’t blame you,” he said.
Sully didn’t want to be angry with Peter, but he could feel his exasperation growing. What he especially hated was being reduced to using someone else’s logic, which was what he knew he’d have to do now. He’d have to say what Ruth would say if she were here. “You’re looking at the wrong thing,” he told his son without much conviction. “If you owned it, the first thing you’d probably want to do is knock the house down, sell it for scrap. It’s the ground that might be worth a few thousand. You’d pay the back taxes, sell it, put the profit in your pocket.”
“You could do the same thing,” Peter pointed out, not unreasonably.
Sully decided not to go into the real
reason, his refusal to have anything to do with Big Jim Sullivan, alive or dead, which had never convinced anybody yet and wouldn’t convince Peter either. In fact, it occurred to Sully that Peter could well have made just such an oath at some point in his own life. Perhaps it was still in force. “I might, if I had the back taxes, but I don’t.”
“Well,” Peter said. “Neither do I. In fact, I’m not sure I can afford to rent a car in Albany tomorrow. If they don’t take my credit card, I’m going to have to ask you for a loan.”
Sully thought about this, about where he might be able to get the money. “I thought you were doing okay,” he frowned. “You’re a college professor, right?”
Peter chuckled unpleasantly, as if to suggest unworldliness in his father. “You have any idea what an assistant professor makes, Dad?”
In truth, Sully did not. “As high up as you are, I figured quite a bit.”
“High up?” Peter repeated, as if Sully’d said a stupid thing.
“I don’t know the term for it,” Sully said, “but you got your doctorate, right?”
“Low down is the term for it,” Peter explained. “Everybody has a doctorate. If you’d stayed in school another month or two they’d have probably given you one.”
Sully let the implied insult pass. “Then why’d you want to be a professor?”
“So I wouldn’t be you,” Peter said so quickly that Sully wondered if he’d imagined this conversation in advance and had an answer all prepared. As usual, Sully was surprised at how quickly Peter’s resentment surfaced. It wasn’t that he didn’t have reason, just that they’d be going along fine and then, without immediate cause, there it would be. “Actually, that was Mom’s reason. She was the one that wanted it.”
“Well, you can both stop worrying about you ever being me,” Sully told him.
Peter offered his most annoying smirk. “I’m not as tough as you, right?”
“Not nearly,” Sully told him, since it was true and since Peter’s smirk had pushed him beyond his threshold of annoyance. “You’re smarter, though, so that’s something.”
“But not much, in your opinion,” Peter said. “I can tell.”
Sully didn’t reply immediately, and when he did, he chose his words carefully. “I’ve never wanted you to be more like me,” he said. “There’ve been times I wished you were less like your mother, but that’s a different issue.”
Peter’s smirk was less contemptuous now. “Terrific,” he said. “She’s afraid I’ll end up like you, you’re afraid I’ll end up like her.”
When they arrived, Sully pointed out the Miles Anderson property. “This is it.”
“What’s the inside like?” Peter wondered.
“I don’t know,” Sully said. “I’ll see it tomorrow. Apparently it needs a lot of work. Which is good, because I do too. Assuming my knee can stand it.”
Peter nodded, studying the house thoughtfully. “What would you say to my helping you out for a month?” he said, surprising Sully completely.
“You mean it?”
“My last class is December thirteenth. I don’t go back until mid-January.”
“I don’t know how much I could pay you,” Sully said.
“Minimum wage?”
“Maybe a little better than that,” Sully said, calculating. Unless he let Rub go, which he couldn’t, he wasn’t sure he’d have enough for three men, not if it was going to last. “It’d all be under the table, though.”
“Okay,” Peter agreed.
“You’re not just doing this to piss your mother off, are you?”
“No, I need the money.”
“Because it’s sure to,” Sully said.
“Too bad,” Peter said, as if it weren’t.
Again Sully felt what must surely be an irrational urge to defend his ex-wife, a woman for whom he had little use and, he thought, less affection. Instead he said, “You can stay with me if you like. I’ve got room.”
Peter grinned. “Now that would piss her off.”
Sully turned up the collar of his coat against the wind, which was tunneling up Main the way it always did in winter, the way it had when Sully himself was a boy and had to trek uptown to school.
“Bring Will with you,” he suggested.
Peter grinned. “Not Wacker?”
Sully shrugged, not wanting to express a clear preference for one of his grandsons, though clear preference was what he felt. “He told me yesterday that you and Charlotte were going to split up.”
This clearly surprised Peter. “Will did?”
“He must have overheard a conversation,” Sully suggested. He recalled himself and his brother, Patrick, listening in the dark of their small bedroom to his parents, waiting for the sound of fist or open hand on flesh. At first it had scared them both, but Sully had noticed a gradual change in his brother, whom he sometimes caught smiling darkly at the sounds of violence. Sully hoped his grandsons hadn’t had to listen to anything like that.
“I doubt it,” Peter said. “Talk is one of the things Charlotte and I almost never do. If one of us walks into the room, the other generally gets up and leaves.”
Sully tried to imagine this and couldn’t. The only two women he’d ever had much to do with—Vera and Ruth—were both fighters. Their styles differed: Vera always jabbing, nicking you, two steps forward, one step back, relentless, tap-tap-tapping, right between the eyes; Ruth lunging at you, bullying, enjoying the clinches, not above throwing low blows. He guessed he preferred either to silence.
“She blames you for everything, you know?”
Sully found this hard to believe. He’d always been under the impression that Charlotte liked him. “Charlotte does?”
“No, Mom.”
“Oh,” Sully said, relieved. He thrust his hands deeper into his coat pockets, one of which, he noticed, had a hole. Rooting around in the lining and feeling something foreign there, he extracted the rubber alligator he had bought from Mrs. Harold and then forgotten about. Peter studied the alligator without surprise or interest. Strangenesswise, the evening had already been too rich. Why shouldn’t his father have an alligator in his pocket?
Sully sniffed the alligator, which reeked powerfully of the same foul stench that had been pursuing him all night. “I think this son of a bitch shit in my pocket,” he said.
Peter wrinkled his nose and stepped back.
Sully returned the alligator to his pocket. “I don’t hate your mother,” he said for the record.
“That’s good of you,” said Peter.
They drove back to Vera’s house, parked at the curb right where Sully had fallen asleep. Neither man made a quick move to get out of the car. “You want to hear a good one,” Peter finally said. Sully wasn’t sure, but he said yes.
“I had fun tonight,” Peter told him, adding, “Poor Mom. It’s her worst fear. That your life has been fun.”
“Tell her not to worry.”
The garage door opened then and Ralph emerged slowly, peering into the street at the strange car. Peter rolled down the window and called to him quietly, “It’s just me, Pop.”
“That your dad with you?” Ralph wondered.
Sully got out, waved.
Ralph sauntered down the drive to where they were parked. “What’s that?” he wanted to know, pointing at the snowblower in back of the El Camino. Having successfully swiped it back from Carl Roebuck, Sully had all but forgotten the snowblower. Which fit in with one of his theories about life, that you missed what you didn’t have far more than you appreciated what you did have. It was for this reason he’d always felt that owning things was overrated. All you were doing was alleviating the disappointment of not owning them.
“It’s the snowblower I promised you,” Sully said. “Come have a look.”
Ralph approached dubiously. “It’s a beauty,” he said when he’d had a chance to examine it under the street lamp. “I can’t afford it, though, Sully.”
“Sure, you can,” Sully told him. “I got it for n
othing.”
“It’s true,” Peter said, surprising Sully, who hadn’t expected such easy complicity. He’d half expected Vera’s stern moral training to reassert itself, for Peter to confess to Ralph that the snowblower was stolen. Instead, there he was, grinning mischievously beneath the halo of lamplight.
“I might want to borrow it sometimes,” Sully warned. “Like every time it snows real hard.”
“Sure,” Ralph said.
Together the three men unloaded the snowblower, put it safely into Ralph’s garage, where, unless Carl Roebuck conducted a house-to-house search, it would be safe for a while. The three men stood in the dark garage, staring at the stolen snowblower.
“Awful good of you, Sully,” Ralph said. “I’m sure Vera’d want me to thank you for her too.”
“If you’re sure.” Sully grinned. “Tell her she’s welcome.”
“Where is she?” Peter said, his voice confidential, as if a normal tone of voice might possess the power to conjure her into their midst.
“Asleep, finally,” Ralph said, as if he shared his stepson’s fear.
“Some day, huh?” Sully said.
They all agreed it had been a humdinger.
“Charlotte didn’t call, did she?” Peter said.
Ralph shook his head. “I still can’t believe she went off and left you here.” Clearly, he’d never heard of a woman doing anything like this to her husband before, and even after a lifetime of women doing things that surprised him, he’d been unprepared for this one.