Nobody's Fool

about that, of course. A dozen more like Sully, and he wouldn’t have had a team at all.
    Clive Jr., as the son of the coach, was always allowed to hover around the bench as long as he didn’t get in the way. And it was there along the sideline that he’d fallen in some kind of love with Sully and began to doubt his masculinity. Sully, even as a sophomore, was everything Clive Jr., an eighth-grader, aspired to be—reckless, imaginative, contemptuous of authority and, above all, indifferent to pain. Sully, it seemed, scarcely got interested in the contest until someone on the other team landed a good shot or offered an insult, after which something changed in Sully’s eyes. If Sully couldn’t win the game, he’d start a fight and win that. If he couldn’t win the fight he’d started, he’d continue to hurl himself at whatever he couldn’t beat with increased fury, as if the knowledge that the battle was unwinnable heightened its importance. What Sully did better than anybody else was pick himself up off the ground, and when he returned to the huddle, bruised, nose-bloodied, limping, he’d still be hurling
insults
over his shoulder at whoever had put him on the ground. Seeing this, Clive Jr. had filled with terrible admiration and longing.
    And awful as that was, it would have remained longing and admiration, except that in August of what would be Sully’s senior year, Sully’s older brother had gotten drunk and killed himself in a head-on collision late one Saturday night on the way home from Schuyler Springs. Clive Sr. had felt bad for Sully, who took it hard, and he also felt bad for his football team, which needed a focused Sully. Everyone knew what the boy’s home life was like, his father a drunken barroom brawler, his mother a cowed little mouse of a woman whose slender comfort derived from the Catholic church where she confessed her husband’s sins in the cool darkness of theconfessional where you couldn’t see her black eyes. So Clive Sr. had invited Sully over to dinner one evening and later that night told him he was welcome anytime, an invitation Sully took literally. He became, for the rest of the football season, a fixture in their dining room. The first few nights Miss Beryl set an extra place for him when he arrived. Then, after a week, she decided it was easier to just set Sully’s place in the beginning. The boy clearly preferred the Peoples family, their table, their food, to that of his own now diminished family.
    Actually, it was Clive Jr.’s job to set the table, and in this way he was made an unwilling accomplice, forced to welcome the intruder into their home. By the time Sully was a senior, Clive Jr. was himself in high school and the ambiguous longing he’d felt when he looked at Sully two years before had mutated into an equally impossible longing to be more like Sully, who was dating the new object of his desire, Joyce Freeman, a junior who was far too good-looking and popular to talk to. And so Clive Jr. hadn’t the slightest desire for Sully to join their family, where Clive Jr.’s own light already shown dimly enough under the bushel of his parents’ disappointment in him. And so Clive Jr. did everything he could think of to suggest to Sully that he was not welcome. If there was a chipped plate, Clive Jr. set it where Sully would be seated. If there was a fork with a bent tine, Sully got that too, along with the glass that hadn’t come quite clean the night before. The inference should have been clear to anyone, but Sully seemed oblivious, incapable of registering any slight. If the bent tine of the fork jabbed him in the lip, he simply straightened the offending prong between his grubby thumb and forefinger, held it up to the light to make sure all the tines were lined up and said, “There, you little rat.” Since Clive Jr. had been the one who bent the tine dangerously to begin with, Sully, speaking to the fork, seemed to be speaking to him.
    Midway through football season Clive Sr. seemed to understand that he’d made a mistake inviting Sully into their home. He didn’t say anything, but Clive Jr. could tell his father knew he’d goofed. The idea had been to make Sully a better citizen, a better team player. Clive Sr. had seen an opportunity to take one of his pivotal players home with him and extend practice sessions over the dinner table, get the boy
thinking
straight,