Nobody's Fool (90 page)

They'd eaten another deer one winter several years before, and she'd made up her mind then that she'd never eat another. This earlier deer Zack had bagged himself with his Dodge pickup, knocking the animal right back into the woods from which it had darted in front of him, as inescapable as rare good fortune. Even before he'd skidded to a stop, Zack had concluded that they were going to need a freezer, and he knew a guy who had a good used one for sale. He bought it on the way home, put it into the bed of the truck with the dead deer. Then he'd driven over to the IGA, parked in the lot and gone to fetch Ruth from her cash register.

"Free meat for the winter," he said.

Ruth had examined first the dead deer and then her live husband. It was the pleased look on Zack's face that got to her. Clearly, he couldn't have been more proud of his deer had he shot it with a bow and arrow at a distance of a hundred and fifty yards.

"Hell, I can pound that out," he said when she went around to examine the stove-in, bloody grille of the Dodge.

But she'd already turned and headed back into the IGA and her register, preferring to say nothing than to give voice to the clearest sentiment she was at that moment feeling--that she'd married a man whose idea of luck was a road kill. They'd eaten venison that entire winter, and with every forkful she'd had to swallow his reminder that the meat was free. When Zack claimed this second deer, something in Ruth that had been stretched thin and taut for a long time had snapped. She was married to a hyena. Their house was full of junk he scavenged from the dump, trash he'd brought home and insisted she inspect. Often the things he brought home were not even complete things but rather the insides of things-- copper coils and rotors and sections of fiberglass and electromagnets, all of which he insisted were "perfectly good," by which he meant perfectly free. There were a great many mysteries in Zack's life, but the one he kept returning to, the one that caused him to scratch his furrowed brow in slack-jawed disbelief, was that so many people just up and threw away things that were "perfectly good" --tires with enough tread to be recapped, appliances with motors and pumps that still worked, heavy hunks of metal that could be sold for scrap. It was amazing how much of it there was out there, and Zack brought it all home. What he couldn't seem to grasp was that his wife's objection was to his practice of scavenging, not his selections. He kept thinking that once he explained an item's value, she'd understand. He didn't grasp that the only thing she hated worse than being married to a scavenger was having to listen to the reasoning of one. Her idea of hell was having to listen to Zack explain, throughout eternity, all the things that people thought were worthless that you could actually get two cents a pound for if you knew where to go. Janey was drying her hands now, and Ruth studied her daughter, fighting back unexpected tears as she did so. How different Janey's life would have been, Ruth thought, if she had been pretty. With that body, had Janey been pretty, the boys would have been scared and given her room. It wasn't that Janey was ugly, just plain, like Ruth herself, and it was that plainness that always gave boys courage. And of course they couldn't keep their hands off her. At thirteen she'd had the bust development of a twenty-year-old, and at fourteen Ruth had come home late one afternoon to find a boy groping her on the living room sofa, both hands caught underneath Janey's bra by Ruth's sudden appearance. To Ruth, her daughter was still that vulnerable teenager whose body was well out ahead other brain. She wasn't innocent, exactly. Janey enjoyed the groping, had been enjoying it even that afternoon when Ruth had interrupted. Her problem was that she couldn't seem to put the groping into perspective. Ruth sympathized. Her daughter came by her limitations rightly.

"I don't suppose I could get you to watch Birdbrain while I go out for a couple hours?" Janey said from the doorway.

"Out where?" Ruth inquired before she could stop herself.

"Out of here," Janey explained.

"Don't be nosy. I'm grown up."

"You just got out of the hospital."

"And you're afraid I might have some fun. You dedde to swear off men, so I'm supposed to do the same thing."

There was enough truth to this to bring Ruth up short. Having decided to try celibacy, she'd have preferred company. Lots of it. Rather than admit this, she reminded her daughter, "I've got an early morning tomorrow. I could use some help."

"I thought Cass was going to be there."

"She is," Ruth admitted. Cass had promised to guide her through the rest of the week to ease the transit ion with customers and delivery men, both of who seemed anxious for the diner, which had been closed for almost a week since Hattie's death, to open again.

"Then you won't need me," Janey said, throwing on her coat.

"You think you'll take my old job?"

"Hard to say," Janey responded, as if this too were an unwarranted intrusion into her private affairs.

"Vince will need to hire somebody.

He won't hold it open for you forever."

"Yes, he will." Janey grinned.

"He's got the world's fattest crush on me." Ruth considered this. It might, she decided, be true.

"You could do worse. Vince is a sweet man.

He'd be good to you. "

" He's an old man. Mama. "

" He's younger than I am. "

" Yeah, well .. . " she came over to the sofa and lifted Tina, rubbed noses with the little girl. " Mommy's going out for a while, Birdbrain. Be a good girl for Grandma. "

" She'll be fine," Ruth said.

"torn be a good girl for Grandma."

"Grandma was never a good girl," Janey pointed out.

"I don't know why I should be."

"So you won't end up like Grandma?" Ruth offered. Janey grew suddenly serious, though the glow of anticipated groping lingered on her features maddeningly.

"I don't know what I'd do without Grandma." When her daughter was gone, Ruth let the tears come. She wept quietly so Tina wouldn't know. The little girl, who was studying a picture in the magazine intently, as if she expected to be tested on its contents later in the day, hadn't even looked up when her mother left. When she finally allowed Ruth to turn the page, Tina broke into a big grin, and her small hand reached up and found her grandmother's earlobe.

Pointing to the picture, she said, "Snail." The clock in the Lincoln said three-thirty a. m. " and Clive Jr.

couldn't remember the last time he was awake at such an hour. And not just awake. Wide awake. Full of wakefulness. Alert down to his pores. Trees were flying by, big ones, raked by his headlights. He imagined his brights as laser beams slicing through bark and wood effortlessly, imagined the giant trees, severed, crashing into the road behind him, cutting off pursuit. Not that there would be any actual pursuit for a while.

Maybe never, in the conventional sense. Perhaps his trail of credit card purchases might be tracked through a computer, but not Clive Jr.

himself and not the Lincoln. Still, he was enjoying the sensation of flight and pursuit. As a boy he had run from bullies, but then he'd been humiliated and it had never occurred to him that running could be fun, exhilarating, a challenge that flight needn't be blind panic but rather liberating, like knowledge, like the taste of one's own blood.

Clive Jr. ran his tongue over his busted lip and smiled. Who could have guessed that the taste of blood could dispel fear? This was what Sully must have known even as a teenager. It was what had given him the courage to pick himself up off the turf, his nose bloodied, and go right back into battle.

Perhaps it was even what Clive Jr. "s own father had been trying to teach him that blood and pain were manageable things. When the right front wheel of the Lincoln located the soft shoulder, Clive Jr. yanked the big car back into the center of the two-lane blacktop, where he straddled the solid yellow line, noting again the strange absence of fear that had accompanied his departure almost from the beginning. He was now in the twenty-first hour of his flight, which had begun that morning where the spur intersected the interstate, where he'd been faced with a choice he hadn't anticipated.

North lay Schuyler Springs and Lake George, where Joyce, suitcases packed, awaited him and their planned long weekend in the Bahamas.

Instead he had headed south and punched the accelerator, sensing immediately the power of his decision just to leave her behind with the rest of it.

Something about meeting the Squeers boys that morning had allowed him to see everything in a new light, and one of the things he saw differently was Joyce, who, it occurred to him for the first time, was neurotic, self-centered, used up. Marrying her, he saw with stunning clarity, would guarantee a life of misery. He was somewhere in western Pennsylvania, he wasn't sure where. Half an hour ago he'd flown by a sign that said Pittsburgh was seventy-five miles, but he'd come upon two forks in the road since then and he was now seeing signs for places he'd never heard of. In the glove compartment he had three speeding tickets, one from New York, the other two from here in Pennsylvania, both issued by the same patrolman. In New York he'd been clocked at eighty-five, the two Pennsylvania citations had him doing exactly ninety. This was not a coincidence, since Clive Jr.

had set the cruise control for this speed. He'd accepted the first Pennsylvania ticket and put it into the glove compartment without a word, refusing the young cop the satisfaction of visible regret.

Another liberating experience. All his life, Clive Jr. had sweet-talked cops. Caught speeding, he always started off by admitting his guilt. ("I guess I was lead-footing it a little, right. Officer?"

) Admitting guilt took away a trooper's opening questions ("Do you know the speed limit here, Mr. Peoples? Do you know how fast you were going?" ) and forced him to script the rest of the conversation on the spot. A fair number of cops, faced with this dilemma, concluded it was easier to let this one off with a warning. And Clive Jr. had sensed that this young trooper might have been susceptible to just such a tactic, but one of the things he had sworn off when he headed south out of Bath instead of north toward Lake George and his fiancee, was genuflecting for cops. In fact, Clive Jr. had pretty much decided to give up genuflecting altogether. So he'd silently accepted the citation, stuffed it into the glove box and, after being instructed by the young trooper to have a good evening, pulled the Lincoln back onto the interstate and punched it back up to cruise control ninety. When the same trooper pulled him over again ten miles farther west on the interstate, he seemed genuinely perplexed.

"You're a slow learner, Mr.

Peoples," he observed, and this time he had Clive Jr. assume the posit ion alongside the Lincoln. It was snowy there on the shoulder, and when the patrolman helped him spread his legs, Clive Jr. had lost his footing and slumped to his knees in the snow, banging his mouth on the roof of the Lincoln on the way. The patrolman allowed him to climb back to his feet then and shined his flashlight into Clive Jr. "s face, revealing the busted, bloody lip. " Tell me what you're grinning at, Mr. Peoples. I'd like to know. " But Clive Jr.

had again said nothing. Instead, he'd turned away from the question and spat red into the snow, one of the more satisfying gestures of his life, he now thought. The patrolman had detained him there in the cold for nearly half an hour, talking on the radio, while Clive Jr. first stood in the frigid wind, then finally sat in the Lincoln. Eventually, the cop let him go again, this time with a stern warning. " I think I may just follow you a ways, Mr. Peoples. Do ninety again, and we'll see who grins. " And so Clive Jr. had gotten off at the next exit, headed south along the deserted two-lane blacktops of the western Alleghenies, flying through at two in the morning a series of tiny, dying villages with little mor& than a dark, run-down gas station/garage/convenience store to offer. America, it occurred to him now, was still full of bad locations. Feeling the shoulder again, Clive Jr. pulled the Lincoln back onto the blacktop, surprised by the fact that the car did not react immediately to his command. There seemed to be a split-second delay between his turning the wheel and the car's responding, which caused Clive Jr. to wonder if he had been in a rut. But when he hit a straightaway, the car felt fine again. The sensation was strange but also familiar, though he had to travel back more than fifty years to locate it.

How old had he been at that amusement park when he was placed in one of the brightly painted kiddie cars that slowly circled an oval track? He couldn't remember, but what he did recall was his sense of disappointment to discover that the little car's steering wheel was a fraud, that his spinning it left or right, fast or slow, had no effect upon the car's direction, anymore than the two fake pedals--supposedly accelerator and brake--on the floor had. And he remembered trying to conceal his disappointment from his father and mother, even, perhaps, from himself.

In a wide spot in the road called Hatch, Clive Jr. flew out of the woods, took the blinking yellow caution light at sixty-five and was just as quickly back in the woods again, tall trees forming a cathedral arch above. Then the three-quarter moon came out from behind some clouds and sat on the Lincoln's hood ornament, on what Clive Jr.

imagined must be the western horizon, lighting his way. He wondered how fast he'd have to go to keep the moon right there, to keep the sun from rising behind him. It would have been nice to prevent another sunrise. Speed, enough of it, could do that. He checked his rearview to make sure that nothing, not even the dawn, was gaining on him, and was gratified to see that the small rectangle of mirror was perfectly black. Even had he not been looking at the rearview, it was unlikely that he would have seen the pothole or, having seen it, would have been able to avoid it. The Lincoln's right front tire hit the hole dead center, the right rear wheel a quickened heartbeat later, sending a shiver throughout the Lincoln and a buzz through the steering wheel and into Clive Jr. "s soft hands. " Ouch," he said out loud and, hearing his voice, considered it might be wise to slow down. He couldn't, after all, outrun the dawn. Then he felt the Lincoln on the shoulder again, and felt that too when he turned the steering wheel, the Lincoln did not respond. Before him, a two-hundred-yard straightaway and, at sixty-five miles an hour, not much time. Enough, though, to recall HCarld Proxmire's warning to get the Lincoln's axle checked after Joyce parked it on the tree stump, enough time to imagine what lay ahead at the end of the straightaway, enough time to imagine what it would feel like to leave the road, to be briefly airborne, headlights straining to locate the other side of the ravine, with only darkness and silence below, time to reflect that his own father had been killed going thirty miles an hour on a quiet residential street without the car hitting anything, time to calculate his own slim odds.