Somebodys fool, p.5
Somebody's Fool, page 5
Sully’s Ghost
THIS MORNING, in addition to the New York Times, Peter arrived at the Horse with the latest, hot-off-the-press issue of Schuyler County Arts, the alternative newspaper he’d started up a couple years earlier when the recession put a stake through the heart of the North Bath Weekly Journal. He placed a large stack of these on the bar along with a small paper bag from the donut shop, which Birdie knew to put behind the bar. “Bad idea,” she said, for the record.
“Nah, it’ll be fine,” he said, though privately he had to admit she was probably right. Hanging his parka on the coatrack by the front entrance, he returned to the bar and slid onto a stool. Seeing him do this always made Birdie smile. His father had had a way of sliding onto a barstool that suggested he’d been put on earth to execute this very maneuver, and Peter had inherited Sully’s very specific grace. Unfolding the Times, he said, “Is that coffee I’m smelling?” As if he didn’t know. As if she didn’t pour him a cup every Saturday morning.
Setting the coffee in front of him, along with cream and sweetener, neither of which his father had taken, she waited for him to engage and wasn’t surprised when he didn’t. Maddening, really, how quickly the man could become engrossed in a newspaper. Wasn’t the ostensible purpose of their weekly State of the Horse meetings to discuss the tavern? For her to let him know if she needed anything in the upcoming week? The fact that most Saturdays the subject of the business never actually came up suggested to Birdie that her minority partner was, for reasons that mystified her, content for the Horse to continue circling the drain. If so, why had he invested in the first place?
As she studied Peter, who continued to be engrossed in the national news, ignoring both her and the coffee she’d just set in front of him, it occurred to Birdie, and not for the first time, that while the man might be more like his deceased father than he cared to admit, there were also several significant, character-defining differences as well. Sully’s narrow bandwidth of interests had been strictly local. Having played a role on the world stage as part of the Normandy invasion, he’d returned home determined to shrink his geographical perimeter to a size that suited him—a small, familiar world that could be navigated drunk if need be. Whereas Peter, despite having stormed no beaches that Birdie was aware of, apparently believed that he belonged on the larger stage that Sully had gladly quit. Infuriatingly, Peter somehow managed to convey that, despite his intelligence and good looks and easy charm, he’d somehow been marooned in this place his father had miniaturized on his own authority. Nor did Birdie quite know how to feel about the aura of fatalism that trailed in Peter’s wake. It was mostly annoying, but there were also times when it was oddly attractive. In her considerable experience as a bartender, most men had higher opinions of themselves than were strictly warranted. Part of Peter’s allure—and women were definitely attracted to him—was that he seemed to have taken the world’s measure, as well as his own, and couldn’t decide which he was more disappointed by. Which was probably why, over the years, he’d grown on her. In particular, she appreciated how nonjudgmental he was. From the time she was a girl Birdie had always blamed herself when things went wrong. Her parents blamed her, too, and so did her older brother, as well as every single one of her teachers. Now here she was on the cusp of old age, unmarried, overweight, with nothing to show for a lifetime of dogged effort but a failing tavern and lower back pain that some mornings was simply not to be believed. Most days it took real effort not to see her life as an abject failure, although when she asked herself just what in hell she was supposed to have done differently, she had no answer. Take men. The ones who’d been interested were all lazy and feckless, and even though she enjoyed their company more than the company of women, the sad truth was that most men weren’t worth the trouble. At the moment the only man who seemed even remotely interested in her was David Proxmire, who owned a towing service on the outskirts of town, but he had a fibroid cyst growing in his skull. He claimed the cyst was benign, but it was also inoperable and, as it grew, was exerting pressure on his brain. That the thing would one day kill him he knew for a certainty because his older brother Harold, from whom he’d inherited the towing business, had had an identical cyst and his killed him. Though Birdie had expressed no doubt that what he was telling her was true, David brought in some sort of magnetic imagery photos of his and his brother’s skulls and laid them out on the bar. Sure enough, in both photos, nestled right up against each man’s brain was a cloudy, ghostlike mass. In other respects David Proxmire wasn’t a completely unattractive man, but Birdie found that when you learned about something like a cyst it was impossible to forget, and she just couldn’t imagine taking on as a lover a man whose head might detonate. So, actually, no, don’t take men.
Since Peter was still engrossed in the Times, Birdie picked up a copy of Schuyler Arts and skipped to the back where her ad for the Horse, which Peter ran for free, was always located. In Schuyler Springs the SCA was available in every coffee shop, as well as the supermarkets, but so far as Birdie knew, the Horse was the only establishment in North Bath where you could pick up a copy, though not many people did, despite its being free. She herself could never find anything of interest in the damn thing. This week Peter had an article in it that listed and discussed his ten favorite movies of the year, not a one of which Birdie recognized. It was as if Peter had done a careful survey of every single North Bath resident to find out what their interests were, and then made sure the paper covered none of them. No local politics, no sports, no letters to the editor, not even a police log, which was a shame, because the one in the old North Bath Weekly Journal had been a hoot. But of course that was before the Morrison Arms, which housed most of the town’s derelicts and nitwits, and Gert’s Tavern, where those same idiots drank and caroused, were condemned and razed. Maybe there weren’t enough morons to justify a police log anymore, though it struck Birdie as unlikely that the world—certainly not this corner of it—had suddenly run low on fools. Her own regular clientele certainly suggested otherwise. Why wasn’t anyone recording their high jinks?
“So,” she said, probably a little louder than she needed to, in the hopes of getting Peter’s attention.
“Yeah?” Peter said, without looking up.
“About this Sans Souci rumor.”
He lowered the paper ever so slightly to peer at her. “What about it?”
She raised an eyebrow. “What’s your best guess? True or false?”
“I have no idea.” Back to the newspaper. Infuriating.
“I understand that you have no idea,” Birdie assured him. “That’s why I used the word guess. Gut reaction is what I’m looking for.”
Peter sighed and set the paper down on the bar. And in so doing finally noticed the coffee she’d set in front of him five minutes ago. Doctoring it with cream and sugar, he stirred it thoughtfully. “Okay, then, true.”
Which was surprising. Birdie had been pretty certain Peter would dismiss the rumor out of hand. “How come?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Timing? The place has been on the market forever. And there’s all those back taxes. Half a million is the number I heard.”
“So?”
“Well, a buyer would have to pay those up front.”
Birdie squinted at him, still not following.
“Think about it,” he said, as if she wasn’t. “If the Sans Souci sold last month, when North Bath still existed as a township, where would all that money have gone?”
“To us?”
“Whereas now?”
“To Schuyler.”
Peter picked up the paper again and disappeared behind it. “Which would be about par for Bath’s particular course.”
“So you’re saying maybe the deal was kept under wraps? That it actually got done last month?”
“Or last year.”
Birdie snorted. “God, you’re cynical.”
“Hey, this is America,” Peter reminded her, lowering the paper again. “What am I supposed to be?”
“You really think something that big could be kept secret so long?”
“When large sums of money are involved, there are always people who know ahead of time. Do you know what they’re called?”
“Assholes?”
“No, rich.”
“Doesn’t that piss you off?”
Peter appeared to consider this. “I don’t know, Birdie. It’s a slippery slope. Expecting things to be fair? Next, you’ll be demanding justice. Equal opportunity. One morning you’ll wake up and discover you’ve moved to Denmark.”
Birdie sighed, missing Sully, who, having fought for his country, was never glibly dismissive of it. Like his son, he had believed that the deck was stacked against ordinary people, but extolling the political virtues of frigid, socialist countries never would’ve occurred to him.
“Still,” she said. “If the rumor’s true? Could be a good thing for us?”
Peter gave up, folded the paper, set it on the bar. “Good for business, do you mean? Or are you thinking about selling?”
Not really. Maybe. Last Sunday she’d suggested she was thinking about it to David Proxmire, who’d casually mentioned on more than one occasion that he wanted to grow his own business beyond towing. In order to do that, though, he’d need someone like his brother’s wife, who’d basically run the business side of Harold’s Automotive World, leaving Harold free to concentrate on buying, fixing up and reselling the vehicles on his lot. He’d need, in other words, somebody like Birdie herself. Except that when she mentioned she was thinking about selling the Horse, he hadn’t made the leap she’d been half hoping he’d make—that together they might restore Harold’s Automotive World to its glory days, if that’s what they were. Had he just been blowing smoke about wanting to grow the business? Worse, had she misread his joining her at the Horse on Sundays, his only day off, as evidence of romantic interest?
No need to share any of this with Peter, of course, so she just said, “Hey, I’m not getting any younger.”
“If you sold, would you stay around here?”
She snorted at this. “Hell, no.”
“Where would you go?”
“Not Denmark. Someplace hot and cheap. Belize? Costa Rica? Someplace with a swimming pool. And servants.”
“Sounds good. Take me with you.”
Birdie allowed herself to entertain, for about two seconds, the notion of her and Peter sharing a condo somewhere hot, then banished it and gave his coffee, which had to have gone cold, a warm-up. “You wouldn’t be pissed off if I bailed?”
“Of course not. Why would I be?”
“You sunk money in the place.”
“I had this idea that somebody would’ve wanted me to,” he said, nodding down the bar at his father’s stool. After his death, Birdie had affixed to that stool a small metal plate that said: DONALD “SULLY” SULLIVAN. It had not escaped her notice that it was the one stool Peter never sat in. “It was his money, not mine.”
Well, technically it was his. In addition to the house on Upper Main, he’d inherited his father’s savings, the contents of which had been surprising. For that matter, Peter had been surprised to learn that Sully even had a bank account. He’d always kept his money in a clip in his front pocket and paid for everything in cash. He’d died, so far as Peter knew, without ever having owned a credit card.
“Still, I would’ve had to close down if it hadn’t been for you,” Birdie said, adding, “and your friend Tina.” Who showed even less interest in how the tavern was doing than Peter. Strange, but back when Birdie had reluctantly accepted their help—in the process making them minority partners—she’d fretted they might interfere with how she ran the business. What if they encouraged her to spend money she didn’t have sprucing the place up, or made dumb suggestions about the menu? As it turned out, she needn’t have worried. Their hands-off approach was so comprehensive it suggested indifference, which, when she thought about it, was borderline insulting. As if they knew right from the start that the money they’d invested might better have been pounded down the nearest rat hole.
“Speaking of Tina,” Birdie continued, “I ran into her on the street one day last week, and I don’t think she even knew who I was.” Though with her usual blank expression and that wonky eye of hers, who could even tell what she was looking at.
Peter nodded. “I’ve been meaning to drop in on her, actually.”
Tina Purdy was yet another on the long list of people his father had asked him to check on from time to time. Exasperating, really. Right to the bitter end, Sully had assumed that Peter was back in Bath for good, that he’d learned his lesson living in New York City. Every time Sully suggested he was now a Bath lifer, Peter had corrected him, not that it did any good. Particularly galling, a year and a half after his father’s passing, was the possibility that he’d been right. Because really. Had anybody ever made a slower getaway? As to Tina, why had Sully imagined she would require looking in on? Although it wasn’t common knowledge, she was one of North Bath’s wealthier inhabitants, a successful, if hermitic, businesswoman. Admittedly, appearances did suggest otherwise. She lived in the same shabby old house at the edge of town that had belonged to her grandparents. Her Grandpa Zack, a lifelong scavenger, had owned what he called a salvage business. (Ruth, his wife, referred to it as the town’s second, unofficial dump.) For forty years the man had gotten up at the crack of dawn to canvass neighborhoods all over Schuyler County, loading onto the back of his flatbed truck whatever people put out on their front terraces to be carted off. He also was a regular at area flea markets and weekend yard sales, where he would purchase anything that, as he put it, you could buy for fifty cents and later resell for a dollar.
Because his wife had insisted on a fire wall between her business (Hattie’s Lunch) and any dim-witted enterprise her husband might be involved in, they each had, in addition to their shared personal checking account, a separate business one. Ruth had no interest in Zack’s—which he referred to as the Tina Fund—because (1) she thought of his business as a hobby, and (2) how much money could possibly be in it? Actually, she’d snuck a peek (he kept his passbook in his sock drawer), so she knew the answer: just a few hundred dollars.
The Tina Fund. One of the few things she and her husband agreed on was that their granddaughter was going to have a rough life. She had that wandering eye—the one that two expensive surgeries had failed to correct when she was young—which made her the butt of much cruelty among the neighborhood kids. But really, the eye was the least of it. The child hadn’t learned to talk until she was three (either that or she chose not to), and immediately fell behind at school. Everyone assumed she couldn’t read until one day Ruth noticed the girl’s lips moving as she examined a picture book Ruth had bought the day before and hadn’t yet read to her. “Hey, Two-Shoes,” Ruth said, sitting down next to her granddaughter on the sofa. (Two-Shoes was her favorite nickname for the child; Janey, her mother, called her Bird Brain.) “Can you read?” But the child just stared up at her blankly, as if she didn’t know what the word read meant. Later that evening, after the little girl had been returned to her mother, Ruth was still mulling the possibility over. “You’re not going to believe this,” she told her husband, “but I think that child can read.”
For his part, Zack, whose own lips moved when he read a restaurant menu, didn’t doubt it. Weekends, he let Tina tag along when he went to yard sales, and even though she had just the one good eye, he’d often noted that this eye didn’t miss much. In fact, Tina often noticed things that other people, even adults, missed completely. Maybe you couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but something was clearly going on in that little noggin of hers. Though he’d never really explained exactly what he was doing at these yard sales and flea markets, why he bought certain things and left others alone, the child seemed to understand. Sometimes when he picked something up to examine it more closely, she’d shake her head no, and he’d put it back. Other times she’d pick something up and hand it to him, and he’d think, Really? But since the items she selected were never things she’d want for herself, if it was cheap he’d buy it, and guess what? He was usually able to resell it in a day or two. Noting this pattern, whenever he couldn’t decide whether or not to buy something, he’d hold it up to Tina and say, “What do you think?” and she would nod or shake her head, though other times she’d just stare at him, as if to say, You’re asking me?
“She’s Grandpa’s little adviser,” he told Ruth, who, happy to play along, replied, “Of course she is,” never suspecting that her husband was speaking literal truth.
The other thing both Ruth and Zack noticed was that the child forgot exactly nothing. When something went missing, either in the house or out in the shed, where her grandfather kept most of what he referred to as his inventory, they’d ask Tina where it was, and instead of telling them, which would involve the use of her vocal cords, she’d go to wherever the missing thing was and stare at it. “You,” Ruth would say whenever she did this, “are one spooky kid.”
All of which begged a fairly obvious question: Was the child miles behind other kids her age, or miles ahead? Neither grandparent could be certain. Ruth’s theory was that her granddaughter was suffering from trauma. Roy Purdy, her father, had been a petty criminal who spent half his time in jail and the other half punching Janey, her mother, in the face, his preferred method of getting her to stop finding fault with him. How many times, Ruth wondered, had the child walked into a room and seen Janey laid out on the floor, bleeding from mouth and nose, but otherwise still, as if asleep, her father, wraith-thin and shirtless, standing over her with a balled fist. As a result, violence, or the perceived approach of something too scary for the child to contemplate, caused her to shut down, to go to some dark place where whatever frightened her couldn’t follow. Ruth thought of it as her own private psychological bomb shelter. Once there—wherever there was—she’d await the all clear, a sign (for some reason her grandfather’s voice usually did the trick) that it was safe for her to return to the real world, where in her absence order had somehow been restored (her father arrested for assault and then, since he could never make bail, returned to the county jail to await trial, after which, with luck, a good long stretch somewhere downstate). What scared Ruth was that each time Tina went away like this it was harder to bring her back.
