Nobody's Fool

Jesus.”
    Then she took her daughter by the hand she’d slapped and led her across the room to the phone, picking up the receiver and staring at the phone critically. “I bet you’ve had this since Christ was a corporal,” she hollered to Miss Beryl, who had gone into the kitchen to look for the scissors because she could think of nothing else to do.
    If there was anything more obscene than Rub eating a cream-filled donut, it was Wirf eating one of The Horse’s pickled eggs. To Sully, just the sightof the eggs floating in their salty brine was unsettling enough. He always positioned himself in such a way that he didn’t have to look at them or at Wirf eating them.
    Wirf was on his third and, sensing Sully’s discomfort, was taking his time, sucking off the brine from both ends of the soft egg before puncturing its flesh with his front teeth. The sound Wirf made eating an egg was not unlike the sound of a tennis shoe being extracted from mud. “Want one?” Wirf grinned. “I’ll buy.”
    Sully was green and sweating. “You should hire yourself out to people who want to lose weight. After watching you, my appetite’s always gone for about a week.”
    Or what was left of his appetite. Anymore Sully had to be reminded. Left to himself, he’d eat no more than a single meal a day. The only reason he ate more regularly was Rub, who was always hungry and served as a reminder to eat, even as his personal aroma ruined Sully’s appetite.
    â€œYou’ve got the stomach of a thirteen-year-old girl,” Wirf said. “How the hell did you survive the army?”
    â€œI never stepped on anything that exploded, was one way,” Sully told him, deflecting the conversation. For reasons Sully had never understood, he’d eaten with more genuine appetite when he was in the army than at any other time in his life, this despite the fact that he’d never eaten worse-tasting food. The other times in his life he’d eaten with genuine appetite were few. In high school he’d eaten pizza ravenously with his teammates after football games. But it was true what Wirf said. He’d always been a nervous, fastidious eater, and getting older had only made him worse. He’d get the occasional craving, as for the chicken-fried steak he’d eaten to celebrate Thanksgiving, but these were infrequent. One reason was probably that he had never entirely disassociated food from fear.
    As a boy, at his father’s table, Sully had frequently, though unintentionally, enraged his father, a man of prodigious appetites who had known hunger and viewed Sully’s fastidiousness as an affront both to the food and to its provider. On such occasions the dinner table became a battleground. Big Jim could not comprehend that certain foods Sully found offensive were capable of inducing the gag reflex, which the boy had learned to control by taking very small bites and chewing until there was virtually nothing left, at which point it became possible, with great effort of will, for him to swallow. But this process took forever, and as he chewed and chewed the odd morsel, his father’s rage smoldered. Sully always sensed this without having to look up from his plate, and the knowledge that hisfather was about to combust did not make the job of chewing any easier. He would try to hurry the reluctant piece of mutton gristle along, swallowing before it was possible to do so, and then the piece of meat would get caught there in the back of his throat until Sully gagged and coughed it up into his napkin. Whereupon his father would take the napkin, open it, and force Sully to examine what had refused to go down. Seen in the harsh yellow light of the kitchen, Sully had always been surprised to see how tiny the morsel was as it sat there in his napkin in a puddle of mucus. It had felt ten times that size in his throat. “
This
is what you’re telling me you can’t swallow?” his father would say, his hands shaking with anger. He’d show it to Sully’s mother then, and sometimes her refusal to look would transfer some of his rage to herself, for which Sully was always grateful.
    There had always been something about his father—and Sully had intuited this even as a boy—that made him do things wrong. “Leave him alone,” Sully’s mother always counseled wisely. “You only make things worse by scaring him.”
    â€œScaring