Nobody's Fool

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 feet, 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 ofhis 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, gnomelike 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 coachable. 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 teamwon 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. He chased down boys who were faster than he was and ran through others twice his size. He sometimes cost the team by not being where he was supposed to be, but just as often where he was turned out to be even better. After Sully botched a play, Clive Sr., livid, would call him over to the sideline to read him the riot act. Sometimes Sully came, sometimes he didn’t. Often, before Clive Sr. could substitute for him, Sully’d recover a fumble or intercept a pass, and he’d bring the ball with him so the coach could see the wisdom of doing things his way. “If I only had a dozen more just like him,” Clive Sr. would shake his head. “What a team I’d have.” He was wrong