Somebody's Fool, page 34
“I got a question for you,” Peter said, nudging Rub again. “If you could wish somebody dead, who would it be?”
Rub, who spent a large part of his life wishing things were other than they were, answered without hesitation, “Carl.”
This time it was Carl who nudged him. “You don’t really muh-muh-mean that.” And give the man credit: he was a natural mimic. It had been months since Rub had stuttered, but Carl still had it down. It was as if he’d spent the whole time practicing. Peter’s only grounds for objection would’ve been cruelty, but he knew from experience that being made fun of sometimes had the counterintuitive effect of lifting Rub’s spirits, perhaps because it reminded him of Sully, who’d always ribbed him mercilessly.
“Who else?” Peter prodded.
“Me?” Rub suggested pitifully.
Peter shook his head. “Nah. I need you to help me finish work on the Main Street house. Try again.”
Rub sighed deeply. “Why? Wishes don’t come true.”
“Wuh-wuh-wishes don’t come true,” Carl translated, as if for Peter’s benefit.
“Except sometimes they do,” Peter said. “Who else do you wish would just disappear.”
A trace of a smile formed on Rub’s lips. “Mr. Proxmire?”
Peter nodded encouragement. “Yeah? How come?”
“Every Sunday morning he says the same thing.”
“Wuh-wuh-what’s that?” Carl wanted to know.
Rub’s expression darkened again. “Don’t wreck the wrecker.” Clearly, he was still chafing at what he considered unnecessary instruction. “Like I’m always getting in accidents, even though I never had a single one.”
“Until today,” Carl added, for the record. Rub shot him a look of pure hatred.
“Okay, but guess what?” Peter said, nudging Rub again. “Your wish is granted. He died an hour ago.”
Rub’s brow furrowed. Clearly, this was too good to be true. “Did not.”
“Did too.”
“Really?” Rub said, won over just that easily, no evidence required, his face brightening.
Carl, by contrast, appeared stricken. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “That fucking thing in his head?”
Peter nodded. “Birdie said he was talking to her and stopped midsentence.”
Carl cocked his head, like a dog. “And this happened where?”
“At the Horse.”
“Huh,” Carl said, puzzled. “You don’t suppose they were…?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Peter told him. It would’ve pleased him to learn that Birdie had a sex life, but he didn’t care to contemplate the particulars. “Anyhow,” he said, turning his attention back to Rub, “cheer up. He’s all done ragging you about the wrecker.”
But Rub’s shoulders had slumped again. “Except now I’m out of a job,” he pointed out. The look on his face suggested that he was coming to terms—and not for the first time—with a sad, eternal truth: that nothing in this life ever comes to you clean.
“True,” Carl said, nudging Rub again, harder this time, so that he leaned into Peter. “But what do you care? You’re rich, right?” When Peter raised an eyebrow at this, Carl said, “You didn’t know our friend here was loaded?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Peter admitted, shouldering Rub up straight again. Another man might’ve objected to being buffeted about like this, but Rub seemed to consider it his due, or, if not his due, then yet another life circumstance over which he had no control.
“Forty grand in the bank is what he told me,” Carl explained. “Personally, I found that difficult to credit.”
So did Peter until he thought about it. “Hey, he works seven days a week and lets other people buy his donuts.”
At this, Rub again sighed deeply.
“What interests me,” Peter said, eyeing Carl suspiciously now, “is how the subject came up.”
Carl gave Rub another nudge. “He brought it up himself, didn’t you, Rub.”
Rub apparently saw no need to deny this.
“Admit it,” Carl continued. “You wanted your old buddy Carl to know that even though you had all this money in the bank and he was going through a rough patch, you weren’t going to help him out.”
Rub didn’t deny this, either. You only had to look at him to know how utterly devoted he was to Carl’s financial ruin.
Peter decided it might be time to shift rhetorical gears. He wasn’t sure they’d lifted Rub’s spirits, but his former dejection seemed to have been replaced by red-hot, glowing animosity toward Carl, which struck Peter as an excellent trade-off. “So, Carl,” Peter said. “Don’t you have someplace to be?”
“Not really,” Carl told him cheerfully, as if Peter would be relieved to hear this.
“But hey, I know when I’m not wanted.” Rising from the bench, he said, as if the thought had just occurred to him, “Hey, Rubberhead, do you know what I miss? Those poker games we used to have at the Horse. We should start those up again. What do you think?”
“You just want to take my money,” Rub told him.
Carl winked at Peter. “The thing about our good friend Rub?” he told Peter. “He’s a lot smarter than people give him credit for. He’s a handsome devil, too.”
“Am not,” Rub said, in answer, perhaps, to both of Carl’s observations.
“Well, not handsome like me.” Carl conceded. “But not bad looking for a man of your height and weight and overall appearance. And women like guys with money. They hate it when you run out, though, so if I were you I’d keep saving.”
“Goodbye, Carl,” Peter said.
Together he and Rub watched the other man head up the street. When he disappeared around the corner, Peter nudged Rub again.
“What?” said Rub, though he was reluctantly smiling now.
“You’ve really got that much money in the bank?”
Rub shrugged.
“Hey, I’m glad,” Peter assured him, feeling an unexpected surge of emotion. Could it be pride in how far Rub had come since Peter found him living all alone in the ramshackle house he’d shared with Bootsie, hollow eyed and half starved, completely disinterested in life? “Look, I’m sorry about the wrecker. It wasn’t your fault.”
Rub shook his head. “If I’d done like Mr. Proxmire said and gone straight back to the yard—”
“He’d still be dead,” Peter told him. “And you’d still be out of a job.”
“I just wish…,” he began.
“What?” Peter said, figuring Rub would say he was sorry for wishing his boss dead.
“How come Carl gets to live with you?”
“It’s just until he gets back on his feet and finds a place of his own,” Peter assured him.
“What if he doesn’t?”
At this, Peter snorted. “Guys like Carl always land on their feet,” he said, though in truth he was far from certain. Beneath his bravado, Carl did seem genuinely untethered lately. Did he really think Toby would ever come back to him? That they’d be husband and wife again? Two hearts beating as one?
Rub nodded, but there was clearly something else on his mind. “When we’re done working on the house, you’re really going to move away?”
Peter nodded. “That’s the plan.”
“How come?”
“You’d rather I didn’t?”
Again, Rub’s brow knit. You didn’t need to be a mind reader to know the question he was trying to formulate: What about me?
“Carl was right about one thing, though,” Peter told him. “You are smarter than people give you credit for.”
Rub turned to regard him now, as if he might be waiting to see if Peter would say he was good-looking, too, because then he would know that Peter was ribbing him. When Peter didn’t, his eyes filled with tears.
“Hey,” Peter said, nudging him one last time. “No crying on the street.”
Rub swallowed hard and wiped his runny eyes on the crusty sleeve of his parka. “That’s not a rule.”
“You know what? You’re right,” Peter admitted. “In fact, you’re free to think and behave however you want. You don’t have to check with me or anybody.”
“Okay,” Rub said, though he didn’t look all that thrilled by his freedom.
“By the way,” Peter said. “Why didn’t you go straight back to the yard after you picked up the Caddy this morning?”
“I figured you’d want to know your son never went up to Canada like he said. And you’d want to see what they did to his car. How they smashed all the windows and everything.”
“Who did?”
“The cops.”
So, Peter thought. He’d been right. He and Ruth knew only part of the story. Thomas had done a lot more than get drunk and fall off his barstool.
Little Bro—
This time when I come to, I’m in the hospital, not jail, so my first thought is, Hey, things are looking up, right? Except not really. I’m hooked up to an IV and surrounded by beeping machines and the first real deep breath I take tells me I’m pretty busted up. I remember the parking lot, that second cop showing up, feeling his fist on my chin, the toe of his boot in my ribs, over and over, and me laying there on the ground, my hands cuffed behind me, unable to fight back, even. No wonder everything hurts. I try telling myself to cheer the fuck up, I’ve been here before. But have I? Have things ever been this bad? So far from home, racking up a hospital bill I can’t pay, no chance anymore of carrying out the plan I swore I wouldn’t fuck up and then did? In fact, I can kind of feel myself giving up, so I close my eyes and make a mental list of things that could be worse. Like, I’m not dead. That’s good, right? Also, I might be busted up, but it doesn’t look like I’m dying. If I was, there’d be doctors running around yelling Stat! like they do on TV. And let’s not forget, this isn’t the first time I’ve gotten my ass kicked by cops. It’s never been a big deal before. No reason it should be now. Hey, it’s one of the ways me and you are different, right? How much pain I can suck up? Okay, that sounds like bragging and saying you’re a wimp, and I don’t mean it to. You’ve been through your share, too. More than your share. It’s just somewhere along the line I learned to put hurt in a different room from the one I’m in. I know it’s there, but it’s like there’s a door between me and it. You could never do that.
This time does feel different, though. Before, it was always parts of me that got broke. A hand. My nose. A knee. This time? This time it feels like maybe it’s me they broke, Little Bro. I wouldn’t admit that to anybody but you. Could be I’ll feel different later on—tomorrow, maybe—but right now? I’m thinking maybe this is it. Maybe I’ve taken my last beating. Remember the poker game I got into that time? How I caught that guy dealing off the bottom of the deck and me and him got into it? I always told that story like I was the hero, you know? Like I was the smart one, because I caught him cheating. Anymore, I don’t know. Could be that I was the dumb one for being in the game to begin with. For thinking I could win. Is that what you’ve been trying to tell me all these years? You figured that out? Hell, maybe you’ve known that all along, even back when we were kids and living with Mom and Dickweed. Maybe that’s why me and you turned out so different. Why I always have such a hard time convincing you to do things my way. Like our plan this time. Could you see from the start that it wasn’t going to work? That I’d find a way to screw things up? That it would just be more of the same? Me pretending to be a hero? Me thinking we can win? You knowing better?
Anyhow, I’m laying here feeling sorry for myself when the door opens and in comes a doc and a nurse, except the doc is a girl and the nurse is a guy. “Somebody’s awake,” one of them says, I can’t tell which, what with them both wearing masks. I hear someone moan and realize it’s me. “Don’t try to talk,” the doc tells me. “Your jaw’s broken.” She leans over and shines a light in one eye and then the other. She tells me that as soon as the surgeon gets here, they’ll take me down to surgery, but in the meantime here’s something for pain. Good, I think, because if the pain went away maybe I wouldn’t feel so low? I see the nurse inject something into my drip. The doc does a countdown on her fingers and says, “It should be kicking in right about…now.” And sure enough, when she says “now” I feel whatever they put in the IV crash over me like a big, beautiful wave. Just before it carries me off, I wonder who I’ll see when I wake up again and I think how nice it would be if it was you, but that’s not going to happen, is it. Pop maybe? But, hey, that’s almost as crazy. How would he even know where I am? Nah, I’m on my own, like always, but before I can stop myself, I think, Hey, it wouldn’t be so bad, would it? If Pop was there when I woke up? Crazy, right? I guess what they say is true. Drugs do fuck you up.
* * *
—
How long am I out? An hour? A day? No idea, Little Bro. I’d probably still be asleep, except I feel this sudden sharp pain in my side and whoa! I’m wide awake. And you’ll never guess who’s sitting there next to the bed, looking at me like I’m some kind of puzzle with no solution. Hah! I know what you’re thinking. Pop, right? Even though he’s got no idea I’m here? And I said you’d never guess? But no, it’s even weirder than that. It’s the cop from the parking lot. The one that broke my jaw and kicked me when I was on the ground, not the other one. Can you believe it? And the pain that woke me up? I’m pretty sure that was him poking me in the ribs where he kicked me. And, hey, get this! What do you suppose he’s got on his lap? A fucking pillow. I shit you not. So, I’m thinking, What’s he going to do? Smother me? Finish what he started out there in the parking lot? When he sees me staring at the pillow, he gives me this big, shit-eating grin, like he knows what I’m thinking. But no, instead of getting up and putting it over my face, he just tosses it onto a nearby bed.
Leaning forward and shaking his head, he says, “Look at you, Thomas.” And I’m thinking, He knows my name? “Concussion, multiple contusions and abrasions, a fractured jaw, three cracked ribs. Amazing, really, how bad you can hurt yourself falling off a barstool.”
I just lay there, because I can’t decide if he’s real, if he’s actually there in the room with me, or if I’m dreaming him because of the drugs they gave me before. Or maybe from the anesthesia. Because I just had surgery, right? Wasn’t that where they were taking me when that big, beautiful painkiller carried me off? And I’ve got that drugged feel. You know the one I mean? Where everything’s kind of blurry around the edges? Am I still in the hospital even? Where did all the doctors and nurses go?
When he sees me looking around, all confused, he says, “You’re in recovery. The good news is, the operation was a success.”
I’m thinking, The good news? Nobody ever says “good news” like that unless there’s bad news coming.
“Best not to talk,” he says, when he sees me trying to. “Your mouth’s wired shut.”
Now that he’s told me this, I can feel it.
“Never mind,” he says, waving this off like it doesn’t matter. “I’ll do all the talking. There’s a fair amount of ground to cover and not much time. Nod, if you understand.”
It hurts to nod but I do because I’m still thinking about that pillow, wondering why it was in his lap.
“Like I said, the surgery was successful. You lucked out, actually. There was just the one clean break, right here.”
He lifts and angles his chin and points to the spot on his own lower jaw where mine’s broke.
“That’s some kind of strong jaw you got there,” he continues, flexing the fingers of his right hand, which I can see are swollen. “Usually when I land that kind of uppercut, the result is multiple fractures. All you needed was one small plate and a couple screws.” He pauses, so I can appreciate my good fortune. “Interesting procedure, actually. I watched.” He scoots his chair up closer. “They do an incision on the inside of the gum,” he explains, opening his mouth so he can demonstrate with his index finger, which makes him hard to understand. “Then they realign the upper and lower jaw and screw everything in place so it heals right.” When I don’t say anything, he says, “Stop me if I’m telling you something you already know.” I just stare at him, his face inches from mine. He could still grab that pillow and finish me. “I only bring it up, because you seem like the sort of guy who naturally invites a fair amount of blunt force trauma. I mean, assaulting a police officer at the station? You thought that would lead to a good outcome?” He pauses here, as if he’s forgotten my jaw is wired shut and thinks I might explain why I would do such a thing. “Nah,” he continues, “I know. You weren’t thinking at all. And, hey, I get it. Sometimes you just see red, right? Nod, if you agree.”
I nod. You bet I do.
“Well,” he says. “We have that much in common.” I must look skeptical because he says, “No, I mean it. Roughing you up like I did back there in the parking lot? If I’m thinking? I just help Officer Miller secure you in the back seat of his cruiser. Trust the system to fuck you up. After all, that’s what it’s designed to do. But in the end it all comes down to hubris.” I expect him to say, Nod if you agree, but he doesn’t. “I wanted to be the one to fuck you up. Me. And now, as a result, I’ve got some problems I shouldn’t have.” He gives me this look that says we’re brothers under the skin, me and him, cut from the same bolt of cloth, unable to govern our impulses. “Okay, my problems aren’t like yours. I don’t mean that. My problems have solutions. My problems are an annoyance. Yours?” He pauses here to let me reflect on the difference between his problems and mine. “The way I see it, you got two options, bad and worse, and I have this feeling you’re going to choose worse. Why? Because you always do. I ran a quick check on you, Thomas, and you fall neatly into several well-established categories that most people try to avoid, like knucklehead, slow learner and ungifted thinker. You keep doing things the same way, thinking this time things’ll break in your favor, but somehow they never do, right? Nod, if you agree.”
