Nobody's Fool

had looked, at first, unreal, as if something from a strange dream had invaded the real world. From a distance the boy, his arms straight down at his sides, appeared to be standing up next to the fence and peering up into the sky. Except that his feet were dangling four feet off the ground. The boy had looked like he was standing on air.
    The iron spike had entered the soft cavity under the boy’s chin and now protruded from his open mouth like a black tongue. The kid’s eye reminded Sully of the terrified eye of a fish, darting around in confusion at first, though, by the time the help finally arrived, the eye was still and glazed, staring disinterestedly into the blue sky. Years later, in France and Germany, Sully had seen men die in every manner imaginable, but he’d never seen anything to equal the sight of that boy hanging from the fence. Recollecting it, even now, was still powerful, and Sully suddenly realized that he had walked the block and a half to the house of his childhood and stopped right in front of the spot where the boy had hung. The spikes had been removed from atop the fence not long after the accident, as if to prevent a repetition of the freak tragedy, or perhaps to help people forget so ghastly a sight.
    As Sully stood there, clutching the rusting fence, he became aware of a distant rumbling, and the ground beneath his feet began to shake, as if the past he’d been contemplating were trying to punch a hole through to the present, and he half expected to see his father appear, grinning, at one of the dark, vacant windows. Instead, a huge dump truck, its enormous bed full of dirt, emerged from the trees that surrounded the Sans Souci and bore down on the crooked house at unsafe speed, turning at the last moment and blowing on by, its thunder shaking the ground. Sully’s first thought was that the driver had lost control, for while the truck was slowing, he could tell that it wouldn’t be able to stop before it reached the wrought-iron fence Sully was still clutching with both hands. As he braced for impact, the truck drove right through where a section of fence had been cut away, turned left onto Bowdon and proceeded up the street toward Sully’s position. When the truck rumbled by, the grinning driver saluted Sully with the tip of his billcap, one of his father’s favorite drunken gestures, and it was only when the truck had turned onto Upper Main and disappeared in the direction of Schuyler Springs that Sully, still gripping thefence, was able to dispel the sense of disorientation that had washed over him like a wave. It was the pain shooting through his knee that located him again, though even this did not entirely dispel the feeling that Big Jim had paid him a visit.
    As vivid to Sully as the horror of the hanging boy was the memory of his father, who’d worked the crowd that gathered to gawk at the boy and await help. “You just wait and see … this goddamn country anymore. I bet a hundred dollars they fire me for doing my job,” his father had whispered conspiratorially to anyone who would listen. “You just wait and see if they don’t.” By the time the ambulance arrived, Sully’s father had persuaded half the onlookers to feel sorry for
him
, even though the boy, deep in shock, still hung quietly from the spike a few feet away.
    This gift of persuasion had been, Sully would come to realize, what his father had always been best at. The power to elicit sympathy was not a bad talent for a lazy, mean-spirited man to possess. If you could hang a twelve-year-old boy on a spike by his jaw and convince people who might more reasonably be expected to lynch you that they should be concerned for your job security, what couldn’t you get away with? Certainly you could knock the hell out of your wife and kids and still be thought a regular guy by your neighbors, a guy who maybe had one too many now and then and got a little carried away, but an okay Joe. If you were persuasive enough, the only ones who knew for sure that you were a monster were your wife and kids, and probably you could convince even them that it was love that caused this pain, that the pain had its source in duty, not meanness and frustration. Sully’s brother, Patrick, had never stopped loving the old man. Their mother? Who knew? Maybe even she, the most frequent victim of their father’s cruelty, had remained perplexed to the end, waiting for her