Nobody's Fool (31 page)

In fact, she'd made him several explicit erotic promises if he'd agree to stay in town, promises that made him all the more determined to get away from her long enough to dear his head. He wondered if it was clear enough to call her now and found he was dialing the phone on the end table before he could decide.

"Hi," he said softly when she'd answered the phone and accepted the charges.

"Sorry to have to call collect. I don't want this to appear on my mother's bill."

"I knew you'd call," she said, as if she'd just been arguing the matter with someone and was saying I told you so. In fact, it occurred to him that she might have someone with her. He wasn't sure someone as constantly horny as Deirdre would be able to go the distance of a long, chaste holiday weekend.

Maybe she'd invited half a dozen little Malaysian neighbors over to take rums until he got back. They'd discovered that she seldom wore clothes when she walked around the cottage, and they'd taken to hanging around on their back patio, grinning and clucking and waiting for a glimpse.

"How could you know I'd call when I told you I wouldn't?"

Peter said.

"I know you," 1'1 she said.

"I know what a dirty little boy you are, and I knew you wouldn't get laid in your mommy's nice clean house."

"Clean doesn't begin to describe it," Peter told her.

"I said you should have stayed with me."

"According to Charlotte, my mother's the reason I hate women."

"The cow had an idea?"

Peter let this go. He didn't like for Deirdre to say nasty things about Charlotte, but in this business of infidelity it wasn't easy to draw lines.

He wasn't sure he was in any posit ion to criticize his lover for being unkind to the wife he was cheating on.

"Do you think I hate women?"

NOBODY'S FOOL 165

"As long as you love me, I don't care." Peter considered this.

"Don't they make you surrender your membership in NOW when you say things like that? How can you write a dissertation on Virginia Woolf and say such things?"

"I bet she didn't give great head like I do."

"Lord," Peter said, hoping his mother wasn't listening on the extension. He was pretty sure she wasn't. He'd heard what sounded like two people--his mother and Ralph--coming down the stairs, and now there were the sounds of voices coming from the kitchen, which meant that his mother had pulled herself together enough to come down and offer Sully a cup of coffee.

Across the room Andy rolled over in his playpen, snorted again, momentarily opened his eyes, then closed them again.

"Didi," Peter said, after a moment.

"I'm here."

"You need to start preparing for the end. Of us, I mean."

"I'm not listening," she said.

"I have children. I'm a father."

"So?"

"So I need to be a better one."

"You need me."

"I know," he admitted.

Outside, he thought he heard a car pull up.

"But I can't keep on like this.

We'll talk when I get back.

Finish your dissertation chapter. I'll proof it for you. "

" You're so full of bullshit, Peter. "

" I'm going to have to hang up now," he said, and he did, but not before he heard her say, "You're mine, buddy boy."

He stood then and looked out the window. The Gremlin was again parked at the curb, behind his father's truck. Charlotte, empty handed, was halfway up the walk. Peter watched her from behind the curtain. Since he'd admitted there was someone else. Charlotte had rediscovered her interest in him. She'd known for several weeks, and they'd made angry love every night, the unhappy sex punctuating their discussions about the logistics of their separation, planned now for the first of the year, after the holidays. In the bathroom next door Peter could hear the water still running, and he felt his anger rise at his sons, who were still squabbling, probably not even in the tub yet. But before he could move, he heard a loud bang, followed almost immediately by a startled cry, and he stopped where he was in the middle of the den, counting five in his head, allowing Charlotte enough time to arrive at the back door, share the responsibility of this most recent crisis, whatever it turned out to be, in this wreck of their married lives. Robert Halsey, who had been dozing in the living room, pure oxygen tunneling up his nostrils and down the back of his throat and into what remained of his lungs, also heard the loud bang and cry in the bathroom, and he started awake, faced as he always was when suddenly awakened from one of his naps with determining how long he'd been asleep. Anymore, it was hard to tell.

Sometimes a five-minute nap felt like hours, whereas hours of sleep sometimes felt like minutes. At least a little time had elapsed, because when he'd dozed off, he'd been talking to Sully, who'd been seated at the end of the sofa. Now Sully was in the kitchen with Vera and Ralph, neither of whom had been around when he'd fallen asleep.

This was how far Robert Halsey had gotten in solving the riddle of how long he'd been asleep when he was presented with another riddle. Down the hall, the bathroom door was flung open so hard that it banged against the wall like a gunshot. A small naked boy, Robert Halsey's great- grandson, the one they called Wacker, the one he'd caught earlier that afternoon turning off the valve on his oxygen tank, bolted from the bathroom and ran hooting down the hall and clutching his tiny penis as if it were an emergency brake. In the kitchen doorway the boy skidded on the slick linoleum, where he paused, appearing to count the stunned house, taking in who was present, who absent, as well as the implications of these. Then he flung himself into the air, crashed down hard on his back and bounced along the floor like a tiny beached whale, his little stem spraying small blasts of urine into the air.

Vera, who had been on her way over to the table with a pot of coffee, went into retreat, as if the spray her grandson were emitting might be sulfuric acid.

"Ooooh!" she cried.

"The little" -- she searched here for the correct word, "--beast!" It was then that the kitchen door opened and the boy's mother appeared, took in the situation at a glance and smiled unpleasantly at her husband, Peter, who had that moment emerged from the den, where the baby started to cry. Now ringed by speechless adults, Wacker continued to bump and hoot and squirt along the floor, impossible to ignore, impossible to take seriously. Robert Halsey took all this in from the living room and made no attempt to get up from his chair. By his own calculations, seconded by 167 numerous physicians, he had no more than three months to live, and he studied the cluster of humans in the next room with detached, almost clinical interest. Both sexes and the spectrum of ages were represented, and the old man managed to take in each person efficiently--his unhappy daughter, Vera, and her long-suffering husband, his crippled ex-son in-law, Sully, the little boy's father, Peter, and his large, graceless, sad wife, and the boy himself, his great-grandson, little dick in hand, so full of life and energy. Robert Halsey took them all in, felt affection for one and all, but concluded then and there that even if his next breath of pure oxygen proved to be his last, he wouldn't trade places with any of these people, and so he closed his eyes and drifted back to sleep, riddles still unanswered, mysteries still unsolved. When Wacker bolted from the bathroom, his brother Will closed the door behind him and locked it. He wasn't afraid of getting spanked. His father never spanked him hard. Nor was he afraid of the humiliation attendant upon what he'd done. His young life was full of embarrassment, all of which he shouldered with adult resignation. What he was afraid of was his little brother, who had made no promises of amnesty and who would not honor them if he had.

Wacker was a boy without honor, a boy born to terrorize other boys, even bigger ones. Will was deeply afraid ofWacker's fearlessness, which, combined with the little boy's long memory, made him a formidable adversary. His parents understood none of this. Will knew.

They were simply disgusted with Will's cowardice.

"You're bigger than he is, for Christ sake," his father always said.

"He's a half-pint.

You're a full pint. Are you going to go through life tattling and running to Mommy and Daddy? It's"--his father took a while to locate the right word" --unnatural," he finally said. In Will's opinion it was Wacker who was unnatural. It was unnatural the way his brother's eyes narrowed when he contemplated a new act of terror, the way those narrowed eyes focused on Will to let him know that once he'd perfected whatever he was concocting. Will would derive its full benefit. Also, Wacker's lack of fear was unnatural.

He wasn't afraid of anything, even Grandpa Sully, who looked like a murderer on TV, all limping and grinning and covered with dirt. Will himself liked his grandfather, even though he knew he wasn't supposed to. Grandpa Sully had at least tried to scare Wacker yesterday, warning him not to whack his bad knee again. How was he to know that nothing scared Wacker, whose attack on Grandpa yesterday signaled to Will that his little brother had reached a new plateau of courage and malice? He had actually attacked and hurt a grown-up. That Wacker truly inflicted pain was one of the things Will had never been able to convince his father, who seemed to think Wackcr was too small to really hurt anyone.

Will knew better. Pain was Wacker's business. He gave it to you like a present. You'll like this, the expression on his face always said.

Until recently Wacker's favorite act of terror had been the twisting pinch, administered from behind. Wacker had learned somehow that the loose skin on the underside of the arm, just above the elbow, was especially tender, and he always waited until Will's back was turned before sneaking up and locking on with thumb and forefinger. Wacker was still perfecting the twist-pinch maneuver that sent Will high onto his tiptoes, howling in pain. The injuries that Wacker inflicted never had a chance to heal either, because he always returned to the same spot, where the broken blood vessels and flesh were still tender. And lately Wacker had shown indications of branching out. At the dinner table he'd catch Will's eye and show him the sharp tines of his fork.

Anymore, Will thought of little except keeping Wacker in front of him and in full view. He relaxed only when his brother was asleep. Each night Will remained awake in their room until he was sure Wacker was sleeping soundly, and his last waking thought was to remind himself that he must wake up before his brother. Wacker seemed aware of how much he occupied his older brother's thoughts and was proud to be his waking nightmare. And so today Will had finally retaliated. Neither forgiveness nor negotiation nor sweeping policies of appeasement had the least effect on Wacker, and Will had come to suspect that his brother was permanently stuck in attack mode. Until recently Will had tried to do anything he could to avoid even greater cruelty. He now understood that there was no need to fear greater cruelty.

If Wacker were capable of greater cruelty, he'd already be engaging in it.

And so, this afternoon, when Will saw his opportunity, he'd seized it.

He'd been awaiting his turn at the commode, and Wacker was stalling as usual.

The water running in the tub made Will have to go bad, and Wacker would not share Grandma Vera's tall, old-fashioned commode, which Wacker was just tall enough to pee over if he stood on his toes and rested his little penis on the cold porcelain. His trickle had stopped minutes before, but he refused to budge.

"Come o , Wacker," Will had whined.

"I gotta^o."

169 Wacker responded by grinning and releasing another spurt of urine into the commode to prove he wasn't done. Will clutched himself. He knew from experience that this could go on a long time. His brother liked to "save it." He'd stop peeing, then start again, half a dozen times.

The toilet seat, Will noticed, was raised. Will stared at the seat, then at his brother, who emitted two short blasts of urine, like a signal in Morse code. It acted like a signal for Will, who, before he allowed himself to consider the consequences, let go of his penis, stepped around his brother, grabbed the upraised toilet seat and slammed it, hard. Wacker had not been badly hurt. The bottom of the toilet seat was prevented from lying flat against the porcelain by four small rubber knobs that were of approximately the same thickness as Wacker's penis and which protected him from the full impact. He'd been startled mostly, and the rip of his penis tingled from the concussion.

In the split second before he cried out, Wacker formulated a plan, and his eyes narrowed in that way that terrified his brother, and he'd bolted, bare-assed, from the bathroom to play the scene out, a strictly over-the-top performance, for the adults in the kitchen. Will watched through the keyhole while his father and Grandpa Ralph took turns examining Wacker's penis.

Their evident concern for his brother's well-being caused Will's heart to sink. Didn't they understand anything? Didn't they know that Wacker couldn't be hurt? When he couldn't stand to watch anymore.

Will backed away from the door, realizing as he did so that he was standing in warm water.

Grandma Vera's tub was finally full, the water a level sheet right at the top, like glass. He turned off the faucets then, understanding as he did so the full consequences of his rash act. By trying and failing to inflict pain upon Wacker, he had succeeded only in losing the sympathy and slender protection of the adults, all of whom now sided with Wacker. Neither his father nor his mother would protect Will now.