Nobody's Fool (96 page)

"You want a cup of coffee.

Sully? " Ralph offered. " I got some made. "

" Good," Sully said.

"Let's go inside and sit down and watch them work. It's cold out here."

Ralph led the way. Will was in the kitchen drinking from a coffee cup, so Sully pulled up a chair next to his grandson.

"What's that?"

"Hot chocolate."

"I can make you that if you want," Ralph offered.

"Coffee's fine," Sully assured him.

"No trouble," Ralph said.

"The cocoa's right here."

"Coffee's fine."

"Take me two minutes to heat the water, is all."

"No wonder Vera's annoyed with you all the while," Sully said.

"Bring me a cup of coffee." Ralph poured a cup from the coffee maker on the drain board.

"You want cream and sugar?"

"No, I want coffee."

"They're right here," Ralph said, indicating them and that it was no trouble. Sully nudged Will.

"I still don't have my coffee," he said.

"I could have drunk three cups by now."

"Here," Ralph said, setting the cup in front of Sully and pulling up a chair.

"I'm glad you and your friend showed up. Now maybe it'll all be done before Vera gets back from Schuyler. That's the bed from the guest room they're loading, and she's going to have a kitten."

"They could take my bed," Sully suggested.

"Then where would you sleep?"

"On the couch. I don't sleep enough to bother anymore anyhow."

"Me neither," Ralph said sadly.

"I bet I'm up twenty times a night."

"Vera finds out you let Peter take that bed, and you're going to be the one with no place to sleep."

"I wish I hadn't been asleep last night," he said.

"We were burglarized."

"You're kidding." Ralph looked guilty.

"Just the garage. You'll never guess what they took."

"Yes, I will," Sully warned him.

"They took the snow blower

"Was it you who did it?" Ralph said, slack-jawed with amazement.

"No, but I know who did."

"Who?"

"The guy I stole it from. Don't worry. I'll steal it back." Ralph shook his head, studied Will, who was taking all this in.

"Your grandpa Sully's one of a kind, ain't he?" Will looked back and forth between the two men, clearly unprepared to voice an opinion.

"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 sex-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 a hold 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 a hold 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 aloneV "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'sex-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 sex-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."

"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 ("Docs 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." Hisex-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.