Somebodys fool, p.35
Somebody's Fool, page 35
I don’t want to nod, Little Bro, but what he’s saying is kind of true, right? I mean, you’ve never said that in so many words, but I can tell that’s what you think. You just love me too much to say it. Anyhow, I nod.
“Now, in your present circumstance—if you were a gifted thinker?—you might just see a path forward. It’s narrow but it’s there. I’m not saying it’s a great hand you’re holding, but you do have a card or two that might be worth playing, and even if you don’t take the trick, what’ve you lost? Because who knows? If you were to help me solve my problem, I might just return the favor, right?” He puts his hands on his knees, hunches his shoulders. “Except that’s not how you’re seeing it. I can tell that just by looking at you. You’re thinking, This fucker who broke my jaw and kicked me in the ribs wants me to help him? Fuck that. And I’ll tell you what else you’re thinking. You’re thinking, If I do what he wants, what guarantee do I have that he won’t turn right around and fuck me?” He pauses here, smiling at me. “Answer? None. All I can guarantee is what happens if you don’t.” Is it my imagination or does he glance over at the pillow?
When I take a slightly deeper breath than usual, I feel a sharp pain between my ribs and close my eyes until it passes. When I open them again, he’s studying me with that same odd expression he wore earlier, like I’m some kind of riddle he can’t quite solve. Like who the hell am I and how did I show up in his world? Like until he figures that out he can’t be sure what his next move should be. This whole time he’s been trying to convince me his problems are small compared to mine and there’s no way out for me unless I do like he says, but I can tell he’s tense. “Sullivan,” he says finally, his brow knit. “Why is that name so familiar, Thomas? You here visiting relatives?”
I consider nodding, because maybe it would be good if he thought there was somebody around here who gave a shit if I lived or died, but I decide against it and shake my head no, which results in another shooting pain. When he sees me grimace, he scoots his chair forward and actually reaches to touch my face, like he’s some kind of healer. I try to lean back, away from him, but there’s no place for me to go. “Oh, don’t be a baby,” he chides me when I flinch, as if the pain I’m in’s got nothing to do with him. “I’m not going to hurt you.” Inserting the tip of his index finger between my upper and lower lips, he tugs the lower one down. “You lost a tooth,” he tells me. “Did you know that?” Like I’ve looked in the mirror lately. “Fell right out when they were setting your jaw. You know the tooth I mean? The black one?” When he touches the spot where it used to be, I can feel its absence. He peers at me critically. “Don’t you ever brush your teeth?” he says, sliding his chair back. “Go to the dentist?” When I don’t respond, he just shrugs, like okay, fine, it’s none of his business. “Anyhow, doesn’t matter,” he tells me. “You won’t be chewing for a while. You’re going to be sucking your meals through a straw for the foreseeable future. You like smoothies? Pureed vegetables?”
There’s noise out in the hall. Voices. A squeaky gurney going by.
“Okay, it sounds like we’re going to have company soon. Time to wrap this up. Later today you’re going to get a visit from the chief of police.” He kind of makes a face when he says “chief of police.” “Black chick. She’ll show a police report that says you were arrested in the parking lot of the Green Hand without incident, that your injuries—all of them—were the result of blacking out and falling off your barstool the night before. The report will bear the signatures of Officer Miller and Lieutenant Delgado. That’s me, in case you were wondering. She’ll ask you if the report is accurate. She’ll say there’s no way you sustained all those injuries falling off a barstool. She’ll tell you your broken jaw and cracked ribs are more likely to have occurred when you were arrested. She’ll want you to say you were roughed up. But you? You’ll assure her you were treated with courtesy and that the report is true, every word. She’ll know you’re lying and she won’t be happy. Just try to remember that my happiness is more important to you than hers. Nod, if you understand.”
I nod. He puzzles over this, like there are twenty or thirty different kinds of nods and he’s trying to figure out whether the one I just gave him was the you-can-count-on-me nod or the fuck-you one. Eventually, he gives up.
“You’re probably wondering when you get to go home, right?”
He doesn’t ask me to nod if I agree, but I do, anyway.
“That depends on whether Sergeant Dailey presses charges or not. But when he learns the shape you’re in? The full extent of the injuries you sustained falling off that barstool? I’m guessing he’ll feel that justice has been served. If so, you’ll be free to head back as soon as you’re well enough to leave the hospital. In fact, I’ll put you on the bus myself.”
I think, Bus? I know it’s not important, but I want to correct him, so I make a motion, like I’m gripping the steering wheel of the Yellow Sub and driving home.
“Oh, right, I forgot,” he says, though I know that’s not true. The one thing I know for sure about this guy is that he doesn’t forget stuff. “Your vehicle?” His cheeks billow and from deep in his throat comes the sound of a violent explosion, played through a muffler. So. No more Yellow Sub. It’s gone, Little Bro. I’m sorry. I am. I try not to let him see that to me and you the Sub isn’t just some old wreck.
Clearly, something is still bothering him. “West Virginia,” he says, as if where we live is part of whatever’s on his mind. “People do that down there? Drive around with full gas cans in the trunk? Is that, like, a local custom?”
I shake my head.
“So, what, then?” he says. “Explain why you’d be doing that.”
I motion to my jaw.
He nods. “Right, you can’t talk.” And for the first time he actually seems to wish I could.
When his cell phone vibrates, he pulls it out, glances to see who’s calling and flips it open. “Bobby,” he says, heading for the door, his voice low. “Can you hear me?” I figure he’s going to take the call out into the hall, but instead he just peers through the tiny rectangular window in the door. For the first time it occurs to me that he’s not supposed to be in here with me. I see his face light up, and even with his voice low, I hear him say, “You’re shitting me. Really? When?” For some reason he glances over at me and gives me a thumbs-up, like we’re on the same team and we both just got good news. “How can that be?” he says. “I was just with her.” He checks his watch. “I don’t know. Forty-five minutes, maybe? No, she looked fine. All high and mighty. You hear she suspended me again?” He glances over at me. “Okay, do me a favor? See what you can find out? I can’t be anywhere near this, or I’d do it myself. Right. Okay, great. Thanks for letting me know.”
When he hangs up, he stands there, staring at the phone, like he can’t believe what he was just told. Finally, he remembers me and comes back over. Noticing the pillow where he tossed it on the bed, he picks it up and plumps it, like maybe he plans to put it behind my head, and if that’s what he means to do I’d almost rather he smothered me.
“You know who does that?” he says, studying me closely, like he did before. “You know who drives around with full cans of gasoline in the trunk of his car?”
And now I’m glad—really glad—that when he mentioned our last name before, I didn’t say anything about Pop.
“Somebody who’s planning to start a fire,” he says. “Is that what you were planning, Thomas Sullivan? Were you planning to burn something down?”
Mojo
JEROME WAS BACK. “She’s starting to wake up,” he reported. When Raymer, holding his head in his hands, didn’t respond, he said, “Dawg? You okay?”
No, he was not. For the last twenty minutes he’d been sitting alone on the floor of the brightly lit hospital corridor, adrift on a sea of turbulent thoughts, the darkest of which was the memory of the day he’d returned home unexpectedly and found Becka dead at the foot of the stairs. Nobody had blamed him, at least not that he was aware of. She’d fallen because she was in a hurry. If she hadn’t been fleeing her marriage, running off with another man, she’d still be alive. Everyone agreed: she had only herself to blame.
Everyone except Raymer, who had himself to blame. He’d been promising to put a mat under the slippy rug at the top of the stairs but hadn’t gotten around to it, and now here was the result. Dead wife. And if Charice were to die now, her death would be his fault as well. Okay, he hadn’t worked out exactly how just yet, but he had the rest of his miserable life to figure it out. If you were dumb enough to fall in love with Douglas Raymer, however briefly, dead was how you ended up.
Despite being awash in self-pity, Raymer was surprised to discover there was also plenty of room in his unruly heart for a shitload of seething resentment. As Charice’s brother, Jerome had been allowed into the recovery room, while Raymer, her significant other (though his significance seemed to be waning), had to remain in the corridor. Being ostracized like this only confirmed his sense of how things stood, how they’d stood, in fact, for a very long time. After all, it was Jerome—batshit, nutcase, bizarro Jerome—that Charice had taken into her confidence about being pregnant, and Raymer who’d been kept in the dark. Who had she texted from the ambulance on her way to the hospital? Again, her brother. Would Jerome even have told Raymer where he was going if he’d had any other way to get there?
They’d bickered the entire way, Raymer driving at unsafe speed. “How could she be pregnant?” he said, glaring at Jerome in the passenger seat.
“The usual way, Dawg,” Jerome said, one hand gripping the door’s armrest, the other bracing against the dashboard.
Raymer shook his head. “She’s forty, Jerome. She’s on the pill.” Though having declared this, he now wondered if the latter was true. Back when they were still living together (before his significance as her other had begun to wane), Charice had told him that her periods were becoming more irregular of late, leading her to speculate that she might be premenopausal. Had she stopped taking the pill?
“Watch the road, Dawg,” Jerome said, noting that Raymer had crossed the centerline.
“No, I mean it. How can she be pregnant?”
“It happens.”
Since there was no arguing this, Raymer shifted gears to a different resentment. “How long have you known?”
At this, Jerome let out an audible sigh. “What difference does it make?”
To Raymer, it made a difference. “How long, Jerome?”
“A while.”
“She told you and not me.”
“I’m her brother,” Jerome pointed out unnecessarily. “Her twin. Also, she didn’t tell me. I guessed.”
“Oh, come on. Why would you think she’d be pregnant?”
“We live in the same apartment.”
“I’m aware of that,” Raymer said. “I used to live there.”
“The walls are thin. Mornings, I could hear her…regurgitating.”
The word sent Raymer over the edge. “You mean she’s throwing up, right? Vomiting. Puking her guts out.”
Each word caused Jerome to wince, as if from a series of stiff left jabs.
“Barfing,” Raymer continued. “Hurling. Tossing her cookies.”
Jerome took a deep breath, as if he might toss his own. “It wasn’t just the morning sickness. There were other signs as well.”
Right, Raymer thought, understanding the implication here. Other signs that he, being an idiot, had missed.
“Look,” Jerome said. “She was going to tell you, okay?”
“When?”
“As soon as she made up her mind about what to do.”
About what? Just in time Raymer had saved himself the humiliation of asking yet another dumb-ass question out loud.
“Dawg?” Jerome repeated now, taking a seat beside Raymer on the cold linoleum floor. “She’s going to be okay.”
At this, Raymer sat up straight, allowing the back of his head to bang against the wall. “She was hemorrhaging blood, Jerome. If someone hadn’t come into the bathroom and found her when they did, she could’ve died.”
“But they did find her,” Jerome pointed out, not unreasonably, “and she didn’t die.” Painful though it was to admit, Jerome was dealing with the present moment better than Raymer was. Charice had explained more than once how things worked with obsessive-compulsives. When there was nothing real to worry about, they would invent things to stress over, as Jerome had been doing all morning, imagining that he had a target on his back, that some white woman would get him lynched if he wasn’t careful. But now that the world had unexpectedly conformed to his perception of it, Jerome became a different man—calm, rational, collected. “The D and C fixed things,” he assured Raymer. “She’s no longer bleeding. She’s no longer pregnant.”
“What about the infection?” Her doctor had mentioned an infection, right? The possibility of sepsis?
“The antibiotics will clear it up,” Jerome said. “A week of bed rest and she’ll be good as new.”
They were both quiet then, Raymer feeling his various resentments finally begin to leak away despite his grim determination to hold on to them. “I don’t understand why she didn’t tell me, Jerome. I would’ve supported whatever she wanted to do. If she didn’t want…” He let his voice trail off, unable to say the word baby. Her baby. His. Theirs.
“She knows that. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
But the recovery room door swung open just then, and the same nurse who had earlier allowed Jerome inside and made Raymer wait in the corridor appeared, saying, “She’s asking for you,” causing Jerome to stir. “Not you,” she said. “Him.” Raymer quickly rose to his feet, then balked, surprised to discover he would have preferred that Jerome accompany him.
“Go,” said Jerome, who had noticed his hesitation.
Inside, Charice lay on a gurney, its metal railings halfway up, her eyes closed. Had she fallen back to sleep? Apparently not, because when the nurse touched her shoulder, her eyes opened. “Your friend is here.”
Friend, Raymer thought, feeling yet again the sting of diminished significance. Was this how Charice had described their relationship, or did he have Jerome to thank? A chair had been placed next to the gurney, so Raymer sank into it gratefully, his knees suddenly weak.
“Five minutes,” the nurse warned them, before leaving him and the woman he couldn’t stop loving alone together. Raymer swallowed hard, unsure what came next.
“You’re here,” Charice said, trying and failing to smile.
He took her hand carefully, so as to not disturb the IV. “Where else would I be?”
“You don’t hate me?”
“Hate you,” he repeated.
“I would, if I were you.”
He wanted desperately to tell her that nothing could be further from the truth, but of course that might be the exact wrong thing. What if she was planning to tell him that it was time for her to stop pretending things were ever going to work out between them?
“It was wrong of me,” she continued. “Keeping it a secret from you. Jerome begged me to tell you.”
Really? he thought. Jerome had? “I should’ve figured it out on my own.” Which was true. Last night at the Horse when she ordered that diet soda? Why hadn’t he put two and two together? And again this morning on the phone, when she’d admitted to having an upset stomach? He hadn’t questioned that, either. Why, he wondered—and not for the first, or even the twentieth, time—did he always accept what people told him? Why had he believed Charice’s story about having a butterfly tattooed on her buttock? Because he was stupid, that’s why. Because he didn’t think she would lie to him. Even after Becka, who’d done nothing but lie. He was, in a word, gullible, and was there anything in the world more pitiful than a gullible cop? No wonder even odious Dougie had given up on him and fled the headspace they’d for a time shared, no doubt sick and tired of Raymer’s refusal to accept—admit it—his often sage advice, especially where women were concerned. “I guess I wasn’t paying attention.”
Charice shook her head and this time did manage something akin to a smile. “People who love you are the easiest to lie to. I took unfair advantage of that.” She looked away now, no longer able to meet his eye. “I wanted this job so bad. Or, I used to.”
“You will again,” he assured her. “You just need a break.”
She sighed. “Nah, they’ll fire me now. This gives them the excuse they’ve been looking for. Oh, they’ll be nice about it. They’ll say it’s my health they’re worried about. But what they’ll really mean is that they need somebody who can bear up under pressure. I don’t blame them, really. Five minutes after interviewing Delgado, I’m bleeding all over the bathroom floor.”
“It was that sudden?” Raymer said, wanting to understand. “There was no warning?”
The smile she offered him this time was real but wan. “Actually, there were all kinds of warnings. Dizziness. Lower back pain. Spotting. Even some mild cramps. Not constant. Just off and on this last week. I told myself it was stress. The job. Worrying about Jerome.” She paused here to meet his eye. “Us.”
“And I made things worse?” he said, prepared to accept responsibility for yet another slippy rug. Prepared, yes, to own it.
She made a face. “Why do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Blame yourself for other people’s mistakes? You gave me everything I asked for. I just asked for the wrong things. I lied to you when I should’ve taken you into my confidence. Yesterday? When you called? There wasn’t any conference of police chiefs. I was in Albany to get some tests run. Ultrasound. Pelvic exam. When I spoke to you, I actually had my feet in the stirrups.”
