Somebody's Fool, page 18
But no, it was a fever dream. Admit it, he’d been sick with guilt since pulling up in front of the house and recognizing Thomas on the porch. In that moment it had come home to him that he’d done to Thomas what Sully had done to him. Probably worse. There was no way to sugarcoat it. Peter had not fought for his kids. Yes, he’d provided a good, safe life for one of them, but the other two he’d abandoned to the care of a crazy woman. Even on that ill-fated trip to West Virginia, there’d already been evidence of his absence. Despite his alimony and child support checks, Thomas and Andy were dressed shabbily and looked undernourished compared with Will, who was the picture of health. What was Charlotte doing with the money? Drinking it? What right did he have to even ask? Later, he’d been relieved to learn she intended to remarry. Maybe her new husband would improve things for all concerned. “It’s possible,” Sully said, when Peter shared the welcome news. “But shouldn’t you go down there and check this guy out?”
“It’s none of my business who she marries, Dad,” Peter told him, though he’d considered doing exactly this.
“No, but your sons are,” Sully replied, which was rich, coming from him. “You want me to go?”
“No,” Peter assured him. “I want you to butt out.”
He should’ve gone himself, though. That much was clear. This afternoon, when he and Thomas were on the porch and he’d wondered if his son’s ancient yellow Caddy would make it to Montreal, Thomas had smiled and assured Peter it would. That smile had revealed a black, rotten tooth. How long had it been like that? Peter wondered. Was it a recent occurrence, or evidence of a life spent without access to dental care and who knew what else? The wave of guilt he felt at the latter possibility had made him weak in the knees. Worse, tonight, his guilt appeared to be morphing into something truly ugly. He was actually imagining that one of the sons he’d abandoned had driven all the way from West Virginia bent on violent revenge. To prevent this, he’d armed himself with an aluminum bat, which he apparently meant to use on the boy he’d failed. Feeling his stomach turn over, he leaned the bat up against the wall.
Think, he told himself. He needed to reconcile two seemingly unreconcilable facts. Whoever was upstairs was (1) an intruder, despite (2) not sounding like one. What he sounded like was someone who lived there. Who belonged there. Someone so familiar with his surroundings that he could navigate them in the dark, as Peter himself had just done downstairs. Someone for whom the place was, well, home. The problem was that no such person existed. Well—and this was where his second working hypothesis took wing—no such living person. If, however, one was open-minded (lunatic) enough to include the dead, then it was obvious who was upstairs. It was none other than Sully himself and, to Peter, the notion that his father had this night returned from the dead felt strangely plausible, despite its utter impossibility. For one thing, if Sully had grown weary of the grave and decided to return to the land of the living, Miss Beryl’s house was definitely where he’d come, and unlike any living person Peter could think of, he’d go straight upstairs, where he’d lived above his landlady for much of his adult life. Moreover, if his father could return from the dead he definitely would. The most single-minded of men, Sully had left Peter a to-do list, and it was just like him to want to check on his progress. In fact, lying there in his grave with nothing to do but think, Sully had probably come up with a few other duties to add to the list, lest his son cross out the last item on the original and finally make his long-delayed escape from North Bath. There was also, though it pained Peter to admit, another possible reason for Sully to return today, of all days. Maybe, just maybe, he’d come to lend a hand, to offer advice, to acknowledge that with Thomas’s return, Peter was in over his head.
Thankfully, in addition to its fundamental lunacy, there were other reasons to discount the theory that Sully had returned from the dead. Start with internal logic. Such a return would render him a ghost, and what need would a ghost have of a toilet? Would the footfalls of a spirit be audible to the living? And if they were, wouldn’t those footfalls sound more like Sully’s, whose gait in life bore more than a passing resemblance to Captain Ahab’s?
One thing was for sure. He wasn’t going to find out who or what was upstairs by remaining downstairs, so up Peter went. At the top of the stairs he again paused to put his ear to the door. From within, silence. When he tried the knob, the door swung open. Inside, the only light came from the street. If someone, alive or dead, came toward him in the darkness, would he be able to detect the movement?
Again Peter paused to listen and, from the far end of the apartment, the bedroom that had been for decades his father’s, there came a resounding fart.
* * *
“I SHOULD’VE KNOWN,” Peter said when he switched on the bedroom light and saw Carl Roebuck, clad only in his boxers, stretched out on the bare mattress. He seemed to have sobered up some since leaving the wine bar, but his eyes were still webbed with red. Peter was actually more relieved to see him than he cared to admit. His rationality having suddenly returned, he felt positively buoyant, better than he’d felt all day, including when he was having sex with Carl’s ex-wife. “I’m a little confused about how you got in, though.”
On the bedside table, next to his wallet and cell phone, lay the key ring that earlier had sat on the bar at Infinity. Carl picked it up and found the key in question. “With this,” he said. “You forgot. I used to live here.”
He was right. Peter had forgotten that. There’d been a period of two or three years when his father was living in a trailer he’d parked out back and Carl had rented the upstairs flat. “But that was a decade ago.”
Carl nodded. “I have to admit, I was pretty surprised when the key still worked.”
“Okay if I come in?” Peter said. He was feeling a little awkward, standing in the doorway.
“Hey,” Carl said with a sweeping gesture. “Mi casa, su casa.”
“Es verdad,” Peter replied. Unless he was much mistaken, the two men had pretty well exhausted their Spanish. There was a paint-splattered step stool leaning up against the wall, so Peter unfolded it and took a seat. On the floor at the foot of the bed lay a copy of the Schuyler Democrat, which people in Bath referred to as the Dumb-o-crat because of its left-leaning opinion page. Picking this up, Peter used it to fan the air, which was still rich with Carl’s flatulence. “So…you’ve been up here this whole time?”
Carl met his eye. “You mean the whole time you were screwing my wife?”
“I feel like I should say—for the record?—that she divorced you fifteen years ago. If you still think of her as your wife, you’re the only one who does.”
“Also for the record?” Carl replied. “I’m not the only one. There’s also God, before whom we swore an oath. Till death do us part.”
“Fascinating that this is the part of the ceremony you should fixate on,” Peter smiled. “Anyway, I’m sorry you had to listen, even if it does serve you right. I hear you’ve had a rough day.”
“Day?” Carl snorted. “Try week. Month. Six months.”
Peter tossed the newspaper back on the floor, the air somewhat less polluted now. “What’s been going on?”
“That’s the weird part. Until recently, I never really understood the allure of gambling.”
Peter couldn’t help chuckling at this. Part of Carl’s charm, or perhaps its entirety, derived from his being so completely full of shit. “I seem to recall you were one of the regulars at the poker game in the back room of the Horse.”
“True,” Carl admitted, “but I never really considered that gambling. Playing cards with your old man and the rest of those dimwits was more like a lucrative hobby. Games of actual chance are completely different. They’re designed for suckers who believe you can beat the house, and you can’t. If you could, there’d be no casinos.”
Peter nodded agreeably. He’d heard this same sermon from any number of compulsive gamblers. “Okay, so what changed?”
Carl scratched his groin thoughtfully, as if the answer to this question might be located in his boxers. And why not? The majority of Carl’s problems had always been located there, not to mention a few of Peter’s own, if he was completely honest. “I’m not sure,” Carl admitted. “Divorce? Prostate cancer? Losing my old man’s construction company? I think at some point self-doubt may have crept in.”
Peter shook his head in wonder. If ever there was a man who stood to benefit from self-doubt, that man lay stretched out before him.
“On the other hand,” Carl continued, “maybe it was simple boredom. Long story short? I discovered online poker.”
“And now you’re fucked.”
“If by fucked you mean broke, jobless and homeless, then, yeah, I guess.”
“That’s what I meant,” Peter nodded.
“Also, my car was repossessed.”
“When it rains.”
“And tonight,” he said, “on my way over here? Something else occurred to me. I have no friends. Which didn’t use to be the fucking case.”
“Are you sure?” Peter asked, because he knew most of the men Carl used to hang around and they mostly just tolerated him. Sully had liked Carl more than most, and even he frequently wanted to murder the man.
“And the really unfair part?” Carl went on.
“There’s more?”
“The really unfair part is that your old man warned me, more than once, that all this would come to pass.”
“You didn’t believe him.”
Carl made a pained face. “Why the fuck would I? The guy was a compass that pointed due south. Whenever he told me I was going to end up truly fucked, I had no choice but to conclude my luck would hold.” Clearly, the man could still find no flaw in this logic even now. “Anyhow. Thank God he’s dead. At least I don’t have to listen to him saying I told you so.”
“Sounds to me like that’s exactly what you’re doing,” Peter said. “Also, you’re wrong about being homeless. If you don’t mind living in a construction site, you can camp here until you find something else.”
“Seriously?”
“Well, you seem to have a key.”
Carl was studying him now. His eyes narrowed. “You’re not doing this out of the goodness of your heart,” he said. “You just feel guilty about screwing my wife.”
“If you say so,” Peter said agreeably. “There’s one stipulation, though. Rub and I will be working here on Saturdays. You’ll have to find someplace else to go.”
Carl smiled sadly. “How is old Rubberhead? Still in mourning?”
“Pretty much.”
“Tell me something,” Carl said. “Do you still think about him? Sully?”
“Are you kidding? Living in this house? When I heard the toilet flush up here I smelled his aftershave.”
“I think about my old man, too,” Carl said wistfully. “Kenny Roebuck. Now there was a man who had friends. For all the good they did him.”
“What do you mean?”
“He still died.”
“Well…,” Peter said.
“No, I mean really. Think about it. You do everything right. You never fuck up. People respect you. Love you. Then one day you wake up dead. Couple days after that, you’re in the ground next to somebody who never did anything right and couldn’t even be bothered to try. Same result. What’s it all supposed to mean?”
“You’re asking me?”
He shrugged. “I keep thinking about that poor bastard out at the Sans Souci. You ever consider doing what he did? Just be done with all of it?”
“Nope.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Me neither,” Carl said, perhaps a little too quickly. “What does that make us?”
“Alive?”
“Okay, that. But here’s what I’d like to know. Why are you still here?”
Peter squinted at him. “You mean still alive? Here in Bath? Or here in this room talking to a crazy person?”
“The middle one,” Carl said. “I mean, I know you enjoy fucking my wife every now and then, but that can’t be what’s keeping you here.”
Peter made a sweeping gesture that took in the entire upstairs flat. “As soon as I finish these renovations and put the place on the market, I’m gone.”
Carl was grinning at him now. “I got a thousand bucks says you’ll be right here ten years from now.”
Given Carl’s bluesy mood, Peter was relieved to learn that he was thinking in ten-year increments. “Except you don’t have a thousand bucks.”
“I would have, if you’d take the bet.”
Peter was curious about something. “Were you serious before? About you and Toby getting back together. That’s what you want?”
“I don’t know. Lately I’ve been wondering if maybe she was my good luck charm. Maybe if I got her back, everything else would fix itself?”
“When was the last time anything broken ever fixed itself?”
Carl blinked. “Now just hold on,” he said. “Back up. You’re suggesting I should fix things myself instead of waiting for my old dumb luck to return? That’s your advice?”
“You’re right,” Peter agreed. “Dumb idea. Forget I said anything.” Going over to the closet, he pulled out a set of sheets, a blanket and a pillow, all of which he tossed to Carl. “Get some sleep,” he suggested.
He was halfway out the door when he heard Carl chuckle. “You and your old man are two peas in a pod, you know that?”
“How so?”
“He was a soft touch, too. Back in the day? When Toby would get pissed off and toss me out of the house, I’d come over here and sack out on the sofa until she cooled down.”
“How many times did that happen?”
“I lost track. A dozen? More? You think maybe that’s why I keep waiting for her to take me back again?”
“Could be.”
“You in love with her?”
“Nope.”
“You sure?”
Peter nodded.
“Excellent,” Carl said, placing the pillow under his head and stifling a yawn. “Good night, John-Boy.”
Back downstairs in his own flat, listening to his new tenant snore overhead, Peter tried to remember if Carl had been on the original list of people his father had asked him to check on. It probably didn’t matter. He was apparently on it now. Which made Peter wonder if Sully’s ghost really had paid him a visit.
Lie Detector
WHEN JANEY ARRIVED at the Green Hand, Del was holding court at the large round table the Schuyler cops always commandeered on weekends. Tonight, he had an attentive audience of a dozen or so officers and their spouses and dates. She saw him notice when she entered and glance at his watch so he’d know how much shit to give her later on, then went back to the story he was telling. Like most of Del’s stories, this one—about how he and the cops at his old Philly precinct would mess with guys in the drunk tank on slow nights—was cruel but also, she had to admit, pretty funny. Everybody always howled at the end, never mind the fact that most of them had heard the story before. Janey didn’t know what to make of Copworld, as she’d come to think of it, the way these officers saw no contradiction between their stated duty—to maintain law and order—and their unstated conviction that to do their jobs effectively meant bending every single rule in the book and breaking the ones that wouldn’t bend. Was this why Charice Bond had it in for Del?
Since the story was a long one and the Hand’s lone cocktail waitress was taking drink orders at another large table, Janey stopped at the bar and ordered a shot of tequila and a beer chaser. Hah! Just like that she’d decided what kind of night this would be. Amazing, really, how truly gratifying making the first bad decision of the night could be. She was getting a late start, but that was the good thing about the Hand. Come closing time, the door would be locked, but if you were already there, you would continue to be served. No need to worry about getting raided, not with all the guys who would’ve conducted the raid already there and fully complicit. Looking around, Janey wondered if maybe Del was right. Eleven o’clock and the joint was hopping. Maybe she should just go ahead and sell Hattie’s. She’d probably make more money waitressing here and, God knew, there’d be fewer headaches. If she sold the restaurant, its attached apartment would have to be part of the deal, but that was fine by her. She could rent someplace here in Schuyler. It would be more expensive, but with money from the sale of the restaurant in her pocket, she could probably swing it. Putting North Bath, which technically didn’t exist anymore, in her rearview mirror, along with lingering memories of her ratfuck husband, didn’t seem like such a bad idea. It would mean her daughter and mother would be in one place and she in another, but so what? Would they even miss her? Fifteen minutes ago she’d been crying her eyes out to think of her daughter alone on a Saturday night, pining for a boy who probably hadn’t thought of her once in the last decade, but really, what the fuck was Janey supposed to do about it? How were you supposed to comfort somebody who wanted nothing to do with you? Who blamed you for her pitiful, sorry-ass circumstance. Tina was unhappy? Wake up, little girl. There was a lot of that going around. If she was having her spells again, well, she just was. Janey’s being close by wouldn’t prevent them. Saint Ruth was right there on the premises, and she couldn’t do anything about them, either.
