Nobody's Fool (45 page)

"Woman," Birdie said.

"Said she'd reach you at home tomorrow morning."

"So the guy keeps going up the off ramp," Wirf continued.

"Now there's a great big sign with huge red letters that says 'danger! turn around!"

" Sully fished around in his pocket for change that wasn't there. He handed Birdie a dollar bill.

"How about some quarters?" he said. Birdie was squinting at the set intently.

"Anyway," Wirf said.

"The -guy ignores the sign and keeps going the wrong way, and just before he hits the oncoming traffic there's a tiny sign on the shoulder that says "What the hell, you've come this far."

" Birdie slapped four quarters onto the bar in front of Sully. Wirf picked his money off the bar and stood up. " I don't know why I even come in here," he said. " To be among friends? " Sully guessed. " That must be it. " Wirf nodded. " Vaya con huevos, amyos. "

"That was a pretty terrific joke, Wirf," Sully called to Wirfs retreating figure.

"Laugh, I thought I'd die."

"All you people should treat me better," Wirf said over his shoulder.

"When I'm gone, you'll discover how hard it is to find another one-legged attorney who's always in a good mood."

"He's right, too," Birdie said seriously when the door closed behind Wirf.

"I don't know how we'll replace him."

Sully frowned.

"Why would we want to? He's right there on that bar stool about eight hours a day."

"I hear he's a sick man," Birdie said.

Sully considered this possibility.

"I don't think so," he said.

"He just drinks too much."

"My cousin works up at the hospital," Birdie said ominously.

"According to her, his liver's about gone. He's been peeing blood for months."

"Wirf?" Sully said. Hell, he started to say, they'd been standing together side by side peeing into the trough in The Horse's men's room every night for the past ten years. Except that this wasn't true.

Sully realized. Lately, though he couldn't recall when it had started, Wirf had been peeing in the single-stall commode.

"He doesn't look sick," Sully said weakly. Birdie shook her head.

"He looks sick as hell. When was the last time you really looked at him?"

"He'd have said something," Sully said.

"No," Birdie said.

"He wouldn't." She was right, too, Sully was suddenly sure. Wirf wouldn't have said shit if he had a mouthful.

"I hope you're wrong. Birdie."

"Me too," she said.

"Go make your phone call." Ruth picked up on the first ring.

"Hi," Sully said.

"That you that called The Horse?"

"It was," she said.

"I've got exactly an hour and a half if you feel up to some love in the afternoon."

"There is nothing in this wide world I'd like more," Sully said quite honestly.

"Except a new truck."

More honestly still. A new truck and an assurance that what he'd just heard about Wirf wasn't true.

"Did he say, "Go with eggs'?" Birdie wondered when Sully returned.

"Who?" Sully said.

"Wirf," Birdie said.

"He said, voya con huevos."

"

" I wasn't paying any attention," Sully admitted.

"No kidding," Birdie said.

"You're just all discombobulated," Mrs.

Gruber explained in response to Miss Beryl's announcement that she was not in the best of spirits. Discombobulated was one of Mrs. Gruber's favorite terms, and when she used it over the phone, she did so unselfconsciously, as if it were common, a word you'd hear half a dozen times in conversations everywhere, regardless of demographics.

"I'm all discombobulated myself," she told Miss Beryl.

"I just can't help thinking it's Monday." She went on to explain why. Yesterday, Thanksgiving Day, they'd gone out for dinner at the Northwoods Inn, a place they seldom visited except for Sunday dinner. So yesterday had 243 become Sunday in Mrs. Gruber's mind, which meant that today had to be Monday.

"I don't see what difference it makes," Miss Beryl told her friend irritably. It wasn't as if Mrs. Gruber now had to look forward to a workweek instead of a weekend.

"Let it be Monday if it wants to." Mrs. Gruber considered this lunatic advice.

"Well," she said after a brief pause.

"I see somebody's grumpy today." This was true enough. The dreadful Joyce woman was gone at last.

She'd finally emerged groggily from the guest bedroom at eleven o'clock in the morning, having finally been awakened by the telephone. Clive Jr. had called three times between nine and eleven to check on her.

It was his plan to finish up at the bank and take her to lunch in Schuyler Springs, there being no suitable place in Bath.

Proximity to Schuyler was a good way to sell Bath, Clive Jr. had long ago discovered. His usual strategy was to put visitors up in a plush Schuyler Springs hotel, wine and dine them there, take them to the races or to a concert in the summer and thereby impress them that all this was only ten minutes from where the money'd be spent. When he could avoid it, he never took potential investors to Bath at all.

"Do you think she's all right?" he asked Miss Beryl the last time he called.

"I can't believe she's still asleep."

"You would if you could hear the way she's snoring," Miss Beryl had told him. Normally, getting this dreadful Joyce woman out other house would have improved Miss Beryl's spirits enormously, but all morning she had remained haunted by the sight of old Hattie in grim flight, her flimsy housecoat trailing behind her like a cape in the wind. Miss Beryl had never much cared for the old woman, whom she'd always considered grasping and crude, but the indignity of her flight and capture had brought Miss Beryl to the edge of tears. Worse, she'd seen herself in the old woman and recognized that it was this very eventuality that her son was attempting to guard against. The day would come when they'd need a net for her too. Clive Jr. just wanted to make sure that "when the time came" at least her financial affairs would be in order. Maybe that's all he wanted. She would just have to face reality and do as Clive Jr.

asked. Sell him the house as a hedge against the boom getting lowered.

Do it now rather than later. Come to terms instead of stubbornly putting it off until it was too late. Having reached this sensible conclusion, her spirits plummeted precipitously the rest of the morning. Midmorning, she'd had a nosebleed, then, just when she thought they couldn't get any lower, the North Bath Weekly Journal arrived, as it always did on Friday, midmorning. Today, as usual, two of its eight pages were devoted exclusively to local opinion.

Those voiced in the "Sound Offl" section collectively represented the rhetorical sophistication of a Bronx cheer played through a bullhorn.

Since the authors were allowed to use aliases, there were no discernible rules. One letter was a character assassination of the high school marching band leader, another a fundamentalist Christian credo of sons, the point of which, if one existed, was lost to faulty grammar and syntax, while yet another letter was an inflammatory attack on homosexuals in particular and perverts in general, a letter which stopped just short of advocating their summary extermination.

The reason for the author's reticence on this last ethical point was that extermination was thankfully not needed now that God had sent His very own virus to do the job. Yet another writer urged every resident of Bath to turn out for the long-awaited Big Game this Saturday, thus proclaiming to the whole world that their community was second to none when it came to school spirit. This last was the sort of letter that would have warmed the cockles of Clive Sr. "s heart. School spirit had been one of his most deeply held tenets until his school did away with football and gave him driver education by way of compensation.

Miss Beryl read each of these letters in its entirety, searching among them for some even accidental lapse into good sense, true feeling, even rudimentary decency or goodwill and wishing that the thoughts therein expressed by her neighbors could be explained as simple discombobulation. The best she was able to do was to reflect that people invariably exhibited the very worst side of their flawed natures when invited to put their thoughts into writing, especially when the invitation was sanctioned hit and-run posing as democracy in action.

Here was the rub, Miss Beryl knew. If she was going to surrender her affairs and thus her freedom, one had better trust the wisdom of so doing. Admittedly, Clive Jr.

was not one of the letter writers in the Bath Weekly, and turning over her affairs, her leverage, to him was not the same as signing over her assets to eighth-graders, past or present. Still, Miss Beryl could not help suspecting that even if she was slipping, even if she was not the woman she had been a decade ago, her health, like her equilibrium, more precarious, even if she was more given to momentary confusions and disorientations, she was still sharper than most of the people she knew, including the people who wrote letters to the Bath Weekly, including her friend Mrs. Gruber, who wanted today to be Monday, perhaps even including her son, who looked out her front window and saw the Gold Coast. Miss Beryl was not old Hattie and never had been. More to the point, there was a good chance she never would be.

"This is your fault," she'd been telling Clive Sr. when Mrs. Gruber called to explain her present discombobuladon. The last time Miss Beryl had willingly surrendered her future to another human being had been when she'd allowed Clive Sr.

to talk her into marrying him and living out their lives in Bath. How had he ever managed that? she wondered.

Love, demit, was how. He had loved her, and in return for this great gift she had allowed him to bring her to Bath, where he had then promptly abandoned her to a life of fighting with eighth-graders. Then he'd gone and let himself be killed and left her to live out the rest other many years with "Finally Fed Up" and "A True Christian" for company. Now here she was contemplating mortgaging her independence to this same man's son, a man who'd grown to resemble his father so minutely that he might have been Clive Sr. "s clone. " I'm sorry if I sound grumpy," Miss Beryl told Mrs. Gruber. " I was just sitting here wishing I had somebody to fight with when you called. " Mrs. Gruber ignored this explanation. " I saw Clive Jr. drive by," she said. " Was that a woman with him in the car? " Mrs. Gruber knew perfectly well it was. " Clive Jr. " star of my firmament, is to wed," Miss Beryl said.

"I only just learned of it myself."

"And that's made you grumpy."

"Hardly," Miss Beryl objected.

"I'm perfectly happy to turn Clive Jr.

over to any woman who will have him, and this one apparently will. " "Well, I'm eating like a bird today," said Mrs. Gruber, who had little use for transit ions.

"Prune juice. Later a little dry toast and tea."

Dry toast, tea and prune juice was Mrs. Gruber's way of warding off the constipation that tormented her after a heavy meal at the Northwoods Inn.

Yesterday she had eaten a green salad, ambrosia salad, carrot-raisin salad, pea-cheese salad and macaroni salad from the buffet. Then Old Tom, stuffing, cranberries and a candied yarn. Then pumpkin pie and whipped cream. There wasn't room for all of this on Mrs. Gruber's ninety-five- pound frame, and today it all weighed on her rather heavily. The other thing that weighed her down was guilt.

For more than a year, as Miss Beryl suspected, she had been secretly feeding information concerning her friend to Clive Jr. " who called her at least once a week to make sure that his mother was okay. She wasn't spying for Clive Jr. exactly, just passing along information.

For Miss Beryl's own good, as Clive Jr.

himself insisted. His mother was too stubborn for her own safety.

Hadn't she tried to keep a secret of her fall last summer, along with the badly sprained wrist that resulted? Mrs. Gruber understood Clive Jr. "s concern for his mother, and so she told him little things. In return, he told her things, too. She already knew, for instance, that Clive Jr. was getting married, and she now made a mental note to pretend she hadn't known. The only misgiving that Mrs. Gruber had about her arrangement with her best friend's son was that sometimes she ended up telling Clive Jr.

things she never intended to.

This morning, for instance, when Clive Jr. called from the bank to inquire whether they'd had a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner at the Northwoods Motor Inn, Mrs. Gruber hadn't the slightest intention of telling him how Miss Beryl had gotten lost in Albany and how they'd nearly not found the restaurant at all.

"Tell me about her," Mrs.

Gruber said.

"About whom?"

"Clive Jr." s young woman. "

" She's not young," Miss Beryl said. " She's late fifties, if she's the girl in the yearbook. "

" Is she nice? "

" She talks a lot," Miss Beryl said. " She's a fan of the president's. "