Nobody's Fool (80 page)

So, almost, had the housekeeper, so terrifying was the sight. One must assume that the mortician, a member of the parish, had done his best, but the results were shockingly inadequate, for despite all efforts the dead priest'sexpression retained much of the horror present when he was first discovered by the housekeeper. And so many of the faithful were given quite a turn when they saw the priest for the final time in his rich casket. The mortician had worked feverishly on the bugged eyes and contorted features and had managed to mute the expression of abject terror, but the priest still looked anything but confident about meeting his maker, and those who had for years followed his spiritual guidance did not stay long in his presence; The line past the casket moved swiftly, a bottleneck forming only once, when Sully's father held things up by kneeling to say a prayer, though something about his posture suggested he might be whispering advice to an old friend.

For the rest of the mourners, a single stunned glance was sufficient to send them packing into the next room. Only later, when those who had been at the front of the line compared nervous notes with those who had been nearer the rear, did it become clear that during the viewing, the dead man's mouth had gradually opened. At first his lips had been clamped tight, forming a white crease, but two hours later, when the last of the faithful had been led, like the blind, out of the dark rectory and into the afternoon sunlight, the mortician had had to go back to work, for the priest's mouth had opened wide and the last unnerved mourners recalled vividly that the dead man had appeared to be begging them to reach into his throat and remove the bone that had choked him to death two days before. But what Sully recollected more vividly than the appearance of the dead priest was his own father.

Even as a boy. Sully had understood about his father's ingratiating charm, even about the way it worked. His father was the sort of man people hated to see coming. If they noticed him before he saw them, they'd turn away and their heads would come together to plot escape.

Perhaps they'd seen him drunk and belligerent the night before, or maybe he'd actually been in a fight and been thrown out of a bar and they'd tried to help him off the sidewalk, and maybe he'd looked up at them then, bloody-chinned and bleary-eyed, and told them right where they could stuff it. Or maybe they'd just heard a grim story about him. Big Jim had a reputation as a hard man in his own home, this being the euphemism for wife beaters at the time. At any rate, it was frequently within the social context of some prejudice against him that Sully's father deftly charmed his way into acceptance. Before he was finished, the very people who'd pretended not to see him when he entered the room were slapping him on the back, doubting the truth of the tale they'd heard about him or even the evidence of their own senses, the ones who'd seen his face turn black with rage and red with his own blood. Now they hated to see him go, he was such a good fellow, and their only reservations were that he was a trifle crude and laughed a little too loud. The day of the viewing, Sully's father was the only one in the crowded rectory who appeared unfazed by the dead priest's ghastly appearance, as if, to Big Jim, the priest had always looked this way.

After holding up the line so he could pretend to say a prayer and then making his sons do the same at the ornate kneeler, he'd introduced himself and the two boys to the bishop, who had come up from Albany to say tomorrow's high requiem Mass. Sully noticed that several of the parishioners had kissed the bishop's ring and was grateful when neither he nor his brother nor his father was required to do so. Indeed, the robed man appeared to take in Sully's father whole, in a single glance, and he stared a hole right through him.

Before leaving the rectory.

Big Jim told Sully and his brother to wait where they were, he'd be back in a minute. In the hallway they saw him lean toward the old woman who had been the dead priest's housekeeper and ask her something.

Flustered, she pointed down the hall. Sully and his brother watched their father start out in the direction the old woman pointed, then dart left unexpectedly and head up the big staircase that led to the rectory's upper rooms. Sully's brother grinned at him knowingly. When their father did not return for what seemed a long time. Sully, nervous, told his brother he had to go.

"Bad," he added, so there'd be no mistake. If it was okay for his father to pee in the dead priest's house, maybe it would be okay if he did too. He needed to do it, in any case. Since there was no one to tell them they shouldn't--indeed, no one seemed to notice--they followed their father upstairs. The upper story of the rectory contained five rooms so lavishly furnished that Sully and his brother were stunned, having never seen anything like it. They found their father in the priest's study, just standing in the middle of the book-lined room, taking it all in--the plush leather sofa, the silver-framed pictures hanging from pristine white walls, the huge oak rolltop desk with its brass lamp, the gigantic free-standing globe, the leather-bound books from floor to ceiling, and pervading the room the smells of tobacco and what Sully would later identify as cologne and liqueurs. On the desk's blotter there lay a gold pen and pencil set, along with a sleek gold letter opener. Their father seemed neither surprised nor angry to see them, despite the fact that on other occasions he'd been known to strap them for not obeying his orders to stay put.

"Not a bad racket, huh?" he said with a sweeping gesture that included not just the priest's study but the surrounding rooms upstairs and down.

"Those nickels and dimes in the collection plate add up, don't they? All those collections, seven days a week, three on Sundays. You can do all right. See all this? This is what they call a vow of poverty. I bet the bastard was as chaste as he was poor too, what do you think?" Sully didn't know what the word chaste meant, but he knew he had to go to the bathroom.

"In there," his father pointed.

"It don't look like one, but that's what it is just the same." Truly, had it not been for the commode' Sully would not have recognized it for a bathroom.

It was bigger than his and his brother's bedroom. There was a sofa along one wall, velvet drapes concealing the tub and shower.

The atmosphere was foul though, thanks to Big Jim's visit. Sully himself finished his own business quickly and guiltily, washing his hands and drying them on his pants to avoid soiling the priest's thick purple towels.

"Some stutter, huh?" his father said when Sully emerged, and then they waited for Sully's brother to go too, though the boy said he didn't have to.

"Try," Sully's father insisted.

"You'll be able to squeeze something out."

They stopped at a bar on the way home so Sully's father could describe the rectory for the bartender. He remembered all the details Sully'd missed, and the more beer his father drank, the more vivid and angry his memory became.

"You should see the stutter," he told the man behind the bar, who. Sully could tell, was already tired of hearing about the rectory.

"It's bigger than your goddamn house."

"You never even seen my house. Sully," the man said.

"Yeah?" Sully's father said.

"Well, you never saw that shitter either, because you wouldn't believe it. Not only that. You shoulda seen the getup the bishop was wearing. Cost more than all your clothes put together, just that one robe. All your clothes and your wife's put together, I bet, and we're just talking about what he had on."

"I ain't even married. Sully," the man said.

"Lucky you," his father said.

"This religion is some goddamn racket.

We should all drop what we're doing and start wearing gold crosses and passing collection plates. " The bartender had gone pale. " How about a little respect? It's a dead priest you're talking about. The guy just died.

God's priest he was, Sully. "

" You oughta see the casket he's gonna be buried in," Sully's father went on, undeterred.

"I bet it cost more than this whole bar."

"Why don't you go home, Sully," the bartender said.

"Why don't you go fuck a rock, George, you dumb Pollack ass- kisser," Sully's father replied.

They'd walked the rest of the way home then, Sully's father getting angrier every step of the way, the beer churning in him, souring his vision.

"You see the way that asshole bishop looked at me?" he nudged Sully's brother, Patrick.

"I don't think he liked you. Pop," Patrick admitted.

"You figure out why?"

Patrick wanted to know why. "

" Cause I wouldn't kiss his ring, is why," their father explained proudly. " You see that big shiny ring he had on?

You're supposed to kiss it, because he's the bishop and you're nobody.

But he'd kiss my ass before I'd kiss his ring, and he knew it, too.

All those bastards can go straight to hell, is what I say. "

" Me too," Patrick agreed, and to prove he shared their father's contempt, he took from his jacket pocket the sleek gold letter opener he'd clipped from the priest's study. Seeing this, their father's rage disappeared, and he howled appreciatively, slapping Patrick on the back. " Why the hell not? " he wanted to know. " He won't be needing it anymore, will he? The bastard's opened his last letter. " It was years later, long after his mother's death, that Sully remembered what she'd said to the priest that afternoon in the dark church, how she'd wept and confessed her secret shame, that she'd prayed every day for her own husband to be struck down. How old had he been when he realized that his mother's prayer had been answered, or half answered?

She'd prayed for Sully's father to be struck down--emphatically, decisively, unambiguously--so there would be no question about the message. The priest who reminded her of Paul's conversion needn't have. A direct hit with a lightning bolt, preferably to the center of the forehead, was precisely the sort of message she'd hoped God would deliver. She knew her husband, and she knew, even if God didn't, that no glancing blow would suffice. But instead of sending a divine lightning bolt. God had sent an endless progression of ham-fisted bartenders and bouncers and cops to show her husband the way, as if, even in His infinite wisdom.

He wasn't quite savvy enough to realize that Big Jim Sullivan had a head of pure stone and that, in the end, all those bartenders and bouncers and cops would do was scrape their knuckles on such a skull.

It was only the man's intoxication that allowed them to do what little damage they did. They waited until he was stinking drunk before tossing him out into the rainy gutter, calling instructions after him.

"Go home. Sully," they advised. Advice he always followed with fists clenched. The night he and his sons went to the rectory, he'd finally delivered them back home in the early evening and then gone back out again, leaving the house quiet. In bed, in the dark of their room, the boys had discussed the day's events until Sully's brother, Patrick, fell asleep, still fingering the gold-plated letter opener he'd stolen from the rectory. Sully himself had lain awake, cruelly ashamed that he himself had stolen nothing, for of course he saw the wisdom of his father's logic. The rich priest wasn't going to need any of his wealth anymore, and what's more, he didn't have any children of his own to inherit his possessions. Sully thought he would have liked to have the big globe, the one that stood as tall as he was, with its vast blue oceans and tall mountains jutting out in relief, all contained inside the sickle of gleaming brass. He could see himself standing next to it, poring over the globe for hours, spinning it, even as the world it represented spun through space, and he would know that this world was his.

He'd finally fallen asleep thinking about it, and somewhere in the middle of the night his father had come back home again, this time drunk beyond redemption, and he'd shaken Sully awake in his bed. Had the boy's last happy waking thought been etched there on his sleeping face for his father to read in the dark? Was that why Big Jim had awakened him? Impossible, but that was the impression Sully had when his father, his breath boozy and sour, issued him a warning.

"Don't think you're going to grow up and be somebody, 'cause you're not. So you can get that shit right out of your head." The next morning, the bright morning sun streaming in the bedroom window. Sully saw that his father was right. Swiping a slender, gold-plated letter opener from a dead priest was something a person could do. But you couldn't steal the whole world.

They finished late that afternoon, just about the time Peter returned. Rub didn't look too happy to see Peter until he saw the six-pack of Genesee.

"Howdy, Sancho," Peter said, extending the beer.

Rub frowned at the nickname but expertly twisted a can free of its plastic ring. Sully took one too, opened the passenger side door and sat down, flexing his knee, flinching as he did so.

"Your timing's getting better," he observed, taking a swig of beer.

"We only finished up about thirty seconds ago."

"I know," Peter said, setting the other three beers on the hood of the El Camino.

"I drove by and you weren't done yet, so I drove around the block."

Rub looked like he believed this.

"Besides," Peter said.

"I already earned my money this morning."

"When?" Rub wanted to know. He remembered the morning clearly, and what he remembered was that he'd worked alone in the cold while Peter went off without permission and spent the morning in Miles Andersen's house, where it was warm. All he'd done over there was talk, too. He hadn't done any work at all.