Nobody's Fool (53 page)

He just couldn't imagine her doing it. Packing everything up and driving back to West Virginia by herself, at night. Vera, at the end of her short rope, had precipitated this confrontation by blaming Charlotte for her ruined bathroom. She'd insisted that it was ruined, that the overflow from the boys' tub had gotten beneath the tiles, which would now have to be torn up, which would cost thousands of dollars. This seemed to Charlotte demonstrably untrue. After all, they were standing in an inch of water, which meant it wasn't beneath the tiles but rather on top of them. The bathroom floor wasn't ruined, it was wet. The floor needed to be mopped up, not pulled up, and she made the mistake of saying so, of refusing her mother-in-law the gravity she felt the situation deserved. Which allowed Vera the opportunity to tell Charlotte about all the other things her daughter-in-law was responsible for. It was Charlotte's fault that Peter had been denied the tenure he'd earned, Vera said. Maybe that wasn't the reason the university gave, but everyone knew that men were often held back in their careers because of their wives' deficiencies.

Charlotte was also to blame not only for the fact that their children didn't know how to behave but for the dreadful state of their unhappy marriage.

"Tow're what's wrong with my son," Vera had hissed at Charlotte before dropping tragically to her knees on the wet tiles and starting to mop up the flooded bathroom floor with her brand-new bath towels, which now, she sobbed, would have to be replaced, along with the floor. Everything, just everything, was ruined. Charlotte had been struck dumb by her mother-in-law's litany of accusation, but the sheer outrageousness of it finally allowed her to locate her voice, and she had just expressed her heartfelt belief that Vera was full of more shit than the Thanksgiving turkey when Robert Halsey, looking pale and feeble, appeared behind them in the bathroom doorway, gasping for breath from his journey from the living room.

"Would someone .. ."

he said in his thin, high voice, "be so kind ... as to take .. . me home."

Vera gasped, struggled to her feet.

"Now look what you've done," she sobbed, glaring not only at Charlotte, but at Peter, who had been trying ineffectually to calm his mother down.

"Look at him!" she demanded.

"You're all trying to kill him!" Peter confided very few of the details of these events to his father, telling Sully only that Charlotte had left with the two boys, that her leaving was the immediate result of hostilities with Vera that had been brewing for a long time and finally boiled over. And he hinted again that there were other causes which had nothing to do with his mother. Sully was surprised that his son was confiding even this much.

After all, it wasn't likely Sully would find out on his own. And, as was usually the case with confidences, the knowledge did not sit well.

Something about the way Peter chose to relate what had transpired, or the broad outlines of what had transpired, suggested that he was not fully committed to or engaged by these events, even in the telling. He was indeed the sort of man to express outrage in a car without ever being motivated to get out with a clenched fist. He'd told Sully about Charlotte's leaving matter-of factly, almost abstractly, staring into the meat case, as if what it all meant might be explained on the labels of packaged hamburger. He'd actually picked up several packages to inspect them.

"Dogs don't eat buns," Sully assured him in answer to Peter's question about whether they'd need any.

"You're buying ground beef for your dog?" Peter said absently, without real curiosity. Sully decided not to explain until Peter showed some genuine interest.

"I don't own a dog," he said.

"This is for someone else's." When they got to the checkout. Sully paid the girl and grabbed the hamburger before she could bag it.

"This is fine as it is, dolly," he assured her.

"Want your receipt?" she called to him urgently.

"What for?" Sully said.

Outside, he tossed Peter the keys to the El Camino.

"You drive," he said.

"What's wrong with Alpo?" Peter wondered as he backed the El Camino out of the parking space and headed for the street.

"I want to be sure," Sully said, tearing the cellophane off the package.

"This particular dog might not like Alpo." Following Sully's instructions, Peter headed out of town. Sully found the vial of Jocko's pills in his pants pocket. From the plastic tube he extracted two capsules and buried them in the mound of hamburger.

"That oughta do it," he said, "don't you think?" Peter looked at the meat blankly.

Sully couldn't help grinning. There was something about educated people that made it impossible for them to admit when they didn't understand something. His young philosophy professor at the college was that way, pretending he understood the sports talk that was always under way when he entered the classroom.

"Maybe you're right," Sully said, extracting a third pill. Two had done the trick for him, but he wanted to be safe. He added the third pill to the hamburger.

"Pull in here," he said, pointing to the yard where Carl Roebuck kept his heavy equipment.

"Go around by the back gate." Peter did as he was told, still not comprehending.

"Stay here," Sully said, and he got out. Rasputin, Carl Roebuck's Doberman, was already snarling and leaping at the fence.

Sully checked along the bottom, looking for a gap big enough to slide the hamburger through, while Rasputin, foaming at the mouth, lunged at the fence with undiminished fury. Finding a space. Sully set the package down and pushed it under with a stick. Rasputin stopped barking for about two seconds, long enough to inhale the package of hamburger in one impressive gulp, then resumed his attack on the fence.

"I hope you have better dreams than I did," Sully said, recalling the one Peter had awakened him from the day before.

"I can't believe it," Peter said when Sully climbed back into the El Camino.

"I just helped you poison a dog, didn't I?"

"Nope," Sully said.

"For one thing, it wasn't poison. For another, you were no help. Your pan comes later. We got time for one beer though."

"Why not?" Peter said, with the air of a man whose day couldn't get much worse.

"You had dinner?" Peter admitted he hadn't.

"Good," Sully said, suddenly feeling hungry.

"I'll buy you a hamburger."

"I'm not sure I want to eat one of your hamburgers," Peter said, pulling back onto the blacktop.

Back at The Horse Wirfwas right where SuBy had left him.

There was an episode of The People's Court on the television above the bar, and Wirfand half a dozen other regulars were trying to predict how the judge would rule. This was an evening ritual. The regulars had a running contest to see who guessed the most correct decisions. Wirfwas currently in fourth place behind Jeff, the night bartender. Birdie, the day bartender, who sometimes stuck around after her shift ended, and Sully, who wasn't a big believer in justice and usually just flipped a mental coin between the defendant and the plaintiff.

"The defendant's an asshole," Jeff was saying.

Jeff was opinionated and pretty good at predicting how things would go in the court.

"The judge will never rule for him." Birdie shook her head.

"This is a court of law," she said.

"Being an asshole is beside the point."

"That's where you're wrong," Wirf said.

"Judges don't like assholes any better than you do." Since Wirf hadn't seen them come in. Sully nudged Peter to keep still while he snuck up behind his lawyer and kicked him hard in the calf of his prosthetic leg, so hard the leg flew off the rung of the bar stool and ricocheted off the front of the bar.

"Jesus Christ!"

Peter gasped, the same look of horror on his face as when he had realized his father's intention to U S S 0 poison the dog at the yard.

He couldn't decide which was more bizarre, that his father would sneak up behind a man and kick him or that the kicked man registered no pain.

"Move," Sully said, sliding onto the stool next to the man he'd just kicked.

"How come you always gotta take up two stools?"

"I was saving that one for you," Wirf said.

"Why?" Sully said.

"I

told you I was going home."

"I never believe anything you say," Wirf explained.

"And I certainly don't believe it when you say you're going home at six-thirty on Friday night. Someday," he added, "you're going to forget which is my fake leg." Sully nodded.

"I've already forgot," he said.

"I was just guessing. You ever met my son?" Wirf rotated on his stool, offered his hand to Peter.

"I don't get it," Wirf frowned.

"He looks intelligent."

"He is," Sully said, feeling an unexpected surge of pride.

He tried to remember the last time he'd introduced his son to anyone.

Many years ago, he decided.

"He's a college professor."

Peter shook Wirfs hand.

"Your old man was a college student up until a couple days ago," Wirf said.

"He must've been on the verge of learning something, though, because he quit." To Sully he added, "You missed all the excitement, as usual."

"Good," Sully said.

"I've had enough excitement today. What excitement?"

"Some guy shot a deer right in the middle of Main Street." Sully frowned, considered this. A deer in the middle of Main Street was possible. When he was growing up, deer used to graze on the grounds of Sans Souci. Even now, at first light and after a fresh snow, people on Upper Main sometimes claimed to see deer tracks across their lawns, though Sully had never seen any himself.

"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 docs 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?" Wirfsaid, 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."