Nobody's Fool (38 page)

Way too early for this shit. Hatric was only vaguely aware that she was in the middle of the deserted street. Her vision was dim at the edges of her milky cataracts, and anyway she was looking down at her slippered feet and watching them go. The sight impressed her, suggesting, wrongly, rapid flight.

She'd made her break a full fifteen minutes ago and in that time had traveled a block and a half. The wind billowed her thin housecoat behind her like a sail. She was unaware of the cold or the fact that the slush had begun to seep through her slippers. She was bound for freedom. Sully, who didn't feel like chasing anybody first thing in the morning, was grateful to be chasing Hattie, perhaps the one person in Bath he could catch before his knee loosened up. Since Miss Beryl had spied her coming up the middle of the street, Hatrie'd traversed another twenty feet and was now directly in front of the house. Her stride.

Sully calculated, was about six inches, but her feet churned dutifully, and she darted furtive glances over each shoulder to check for pursuit.

She did not notice when Sully fell into step alongside of her.

"Hello, old girl," he said. Hattie let out a little cry and ran faster, as if on an exercise treadmill.

"You running away from home?"

"Who are you?" the old woman wanted to know.

"You sound like that dam Sully."

"Right on the first guess," Sully told her. A car turned onto Main and headed toward them. Sully got the driver's attention, directed him around them.

"No driving on the sidewalk," Hattie yelled when she heard the car go by, close.

"Where you headed?" Sully said.

"To live with my sister in Albany," Hattie answered truthfully, because this was indeed her plan, the most obvious flaw of which was the fact that her sister had been dead for twenty years. Also, Albany lay in the other direction.

"How about I give you a lift," Sully suggested.

"We'll get there a lot faster."

"Let's." Sully steered the old woman back toward Miss Beryl's driveway, where they arrived a few minutes later. Clive Jr. had come out onto the porch and was watching. Before he could say anything.

Sully held up a finger to his Ups, then pointed at Clive Jr. "s car, which was nearest.

Clive nodded, went back inside for his keys. Sully got the old woman into the backseat on the passenger side, then went around and slipped in beside her. Clive Jr. got in and started the engine. " Who's driving? " Hattie said, squinting in the direction of the front seat.

" Me," Sully assured her. Hattie located his voice beside her. " Who's up there? "

" Me," Sully insisted. " Who'd you think? "

" My feet are cold," Hattie said, noticing for the first time. She began to cry. Sully took her slippers off. Her feet were wet and ice cold.

One of Clive Jr." s sweaters was in the backseat, so Sully used this to dry and massage the old woman's bony toes.

"Who's driving?" Hattie said.

"Me," Sully said.

"How many times do I have to tell you? We're almost there, too." Sully had Clive Jr. pull in behind the diner and motioned for him to stay put while he went to fetch Cass. Miss Beryl's son wasn't happy to be left alone in the car with Hattie, partly because his continued nonexistence would be harder to prove with Sully gone.

"I gotta get some gas, old girl," Sully explained before he left them.

"You wait here."

"Here," Hattie repeated, wriggling her toes in the warmth of Clive Jr.

"s cashmere sweater. Inside, Cass was taking the orders of two men Sully didn't know who were seated at the counter. Sully waited for them to finish.

"What kind of mood are you in?" Sully said when she put his usual coffee in front of him.

"Rotten," Cass said.

"Like always."

"Good," he said.

"I'd hate to ruin your day."

"Impossible," Cass told him, then frowned suspiciously, as if she knew it were all too possible.

Instinctively, she glanced toward the rear of the diner and the attached apartment where she and her mother lived.

"God, what?" she said, stepping back quickly.

"She's fine." Sully held up a cautioning hand.

"Clive Peoples has her out back in his car."

"I'll wring her neck," Cass said, her panic turning quickly to anger, and she bolted from behind the counter.

"So help me." Sully decided not to follow.

Old Hattie was going to be furious, and he didn't like to watch. The last time he'd brought her back, she'd called him a fart blossom and tried to kick him. Of the four times the old woman had tried to escape her daughter's care, she'd been returned three of them by Sully.

Luckily she never remembered his past treacheries. Only her distant memories were vivid and distinct. More recent perfidy she forgot almost immediately.

Sully went behind the counter and put on an apron, nodding at Roof, the cook.

"Looks like you and me. Rums," he said.

Roof flipped two eggs onto a platter with his long spatula by way of reply.

The platter already contained hash browns and toast triangles at the edges.

Two more smooth movements and three more platters were complete, and all four checks came-'down from the circular spindle.

"Ding dong," he said.

"Order up."

"You're not even going to let me drink my coffee, are you," Sully said, grabbing a platter in each hand. Cass could balance them up and down her arm, but Sully didn't think he'd try. Roof was even-tempered until you dropped his eggs. Working behind the counter.

Sully forgot all about Clive Jr. " who remained in the car with Hattie until her daughter came flying out the back to fetch her. Then he gave Cass a hand as far as the door, for which Clive Jr. was rewarded by a torrent of abuse from the old woman, who thought he was Sully and who called him, among other things, a fart blossom. Then he went back to the car and waited, glancing at his watch every thirty seconds or so with increasing irritation.

He didn't mind being pressed into service, but it was just like Sully to disappear, to leave him sitting next to the foul-smelling Dumpster in the alley behind Hattie's Lunch. Also, he'd discovered the use to which his cashmere sweater had been put. Now that he had the leisure to consider it, he was also miffed at his mother, who had instinctively summoned Sully when she saw the old woman in distress, as if Clive Jr.

himself were not to be trusted with so delicate a task. Secretly, he doubted he would have performed as well as Sully. He had little experience in trying to talk ninety-year-old runaways into returning home, and he probably would have messed everything up. In his mind's eye he could see himself struggling with the old woman in the middle of the street like a mugger or purse snatcher, being clawed and cursed at until he finally gave up. What annoyed him was that his mother apparently had imagined a similar outcome and had turned to Sully, a man who would know what to do. Was it his mother's implied opinion of him or Sully's ability to assume command that made a boy of Clive Jr.

again? He couldn't be sure, but as he sat in the car, obediently following Sully's instructions, the irony of the situation did not escape him. After all, he, Clive Jr. " was arguably the most important man in Bath, and once when they broke ground on The Ultimate Escape, there'd be no arguing the issue. Then everyone would be forced to admit that Bath's renaissance was attributable to Clive Jr." who'd made it happen by bringing in the big boys from downstate, from as far away as Texas, making them see the area's potential through Clive Jr.

"s own eyes, making them all believers. Well, almost all. For Clive Jr. had come to realize that there would always be at least two skeptics in Bath, at least as long as his mother and Sully were on the scene. The two of them seemed not to notice that it was NOBODY'S FOOL 207 a new Clive Jr. who'd returned to Bath to rescue the savings and loan and give the town a future. They seemed to see the boy he had once been, not the man he'd made of himself. How odd that these two skeptics lived in the same house, his house, the house of his childhood on Upper Main. His own mother and Sully, who'd been an intruder in that house for almost as long as Clive Jr. could remember. Living there together in the house that Clive Jr.

had come to think of as his opponents' campaign headquarters. Clive Jr.

knew he was lucky to have two such opponents, neither of whom would act against him, both of whom would be surprised to discover he considered them in this role. Especially his mother, whom he'd work so hard to convert.

He'd done everything he could think of to earn her trust.

He'd borrowed large sums of money he didn't need and paid her back when he said he would, even offering interest. He'd given her excellent investment advice that would have made her money, advice that to his knowledge she had never, not one single time, followed. Any more than she had even once in the last twenty years asked his advice on any subject. Most of the time he was able to console himself that his mother just happened to be the most independent, free-thinking woman in all of Schuyler County. Maybe she didn't require his counsel, but then she didn't require anyone else's either. She jokingly claimed to get all the advice she needed from Clive Sr. " long dead, and, even more spookily, from the African spirit mask hanging on the living room wall.

Which would have been tolerable, except for those rare occasions like this morning, when she discovered there were limits to her self-sufficiency and then turned not to Clive Jr. " but rather to Sully, arguably the least trustworthy man in Bath. And even that, which would have been bad enough, wasn't the worst of it. No sooner did his mother turn to Sully than Sully enlisted Clive Jr. in a subordinate role. It was worse than ridiculous.

The most important man in Bath taking orders from the least important man in Bath, Donald Sullivan, a man essentially forgotten while he was still breathing, a man who'd peaked at age eighteen and who'd been sliding toward a just oblivion ever since. Sully and Clive Jr. went way back. In fact, though it would have surprised Sully to know it, Clive Jr. considered Sully an integral part of his prolonged and painful adolescence. As a boy Clive Jr. had feared for his masculinity. In fact, he'd pretty much concluded he was destined to be a homosexual--a homo, as they were called in Bath back then. Oh, he got hard-ons, like other boys his age, looking at pictures of naked girls in the magazines he stole from the drugstore and stashed in the upper reaches of his closet, where his tiny mother wasn't likely to run across them by accident. But Clive Jr. had discounted these erections as irrelevant, certain that the day would come (next year?

next month? tomorrow? ) when he would wake up and the naked women would no longer stir him. There were a few that didn't stir him already, and he stole more magazines in the hopes that a variety of new naked women would forestall his inevitable homodom. The cause of Clive Jr. "s fear was that he seemed to harbor deeper, more intense feelings for boys than for girls, in much the same fashion he craved the affection and love of his father far more urgently than that of his mother, whose diminutive stature had always seemed to Clive Jr.

emblematic of her insignificance. He couldn't imagine what had possessed his father to marry her or what had attracted him to her in the first place. No teacher in the entire junior high school was the butt of more cruel jokes than Beryl Peoples, whose round-shouldered, gnome like appearance and correct speech were mimicked to devastating effect, especially in Clive Jr." s presence. He hated to think what his life would have been like had his father not been the football coach. Clive Jr. had loved his father, and as a boy he'd loved all the boys his father loved. He himself had never excelled in sports.

He'd inherited his father's size (he'd nearly killed Miss Beryl in being born) but was blessed with neither speed nor balance nor eye-hand coordination. Clive Sr. was too kind a man to express his disappointment in his son's inability to catch, throw or dribble a ball of any size or description, but Clive Jr. sensed it, in part, from his father's enthusiasm for the boys he coached. At dinner Clive Sr. was often unable to restrain himself from recounting tales of their athletic prowess.

The coach himself had been an indifferent athlete, but he possessed a pure love of sport and had gone into coaching because he believed that sport was the truest and best metaphor for life. He remained unshakable in this conviction, despite Miss Beryl's gentle ridicule of the cliches that lay imbedded so deeply in his soul. And of all the boys he had coached, Clive Sr.

had seemed fondest of Sully, and it was Sully's praises that were sung the loudest at the dinner table. He was a varsity starter as a sophomore, and it was Clive Sr. "s contention that if he had a dozen Sullys he could take his team to state every year, this despite the fact that Sully himself was gifted with neither extraordinary size nor speed. Nor was he coach able He was lazy in practice, resentful of constructive criticism, and he could not be made to understand the concept of team play. At times he seemed not to care whether the team won or lost. He refused to quit smoking, even when threatened with suspension, and he provided about the worst possible example to the other players, most of whom naturally gravitated to bad example. But come game day. Sully was a wrecker.