Nobody's Fool

him!” Big Jim always bellowed. “Jesus Christ, everything scares him. A piece of goddamn carrot scares him. What happens when he runs up against something
really
scary? What then?”
    â€œAll I’m saying,” his mother said quietly, knowing better than to raise her voice when her husband was in such a state, “is that he does better when you leave him alone. Yelling at him guarantees he
won’t
eat. You know that.”
    â€œI’ll
tell
you what I know,” his father said, turning to Sully. “He’s going to eat this stew. Every bite. If we have to sit here till Tuesday, it’s going down. If he throws up, he gets another bowl, and that one’ll have more stew in it. Every time he throws up, he gets more stew, until it stays down.”
    And so they’d sat there in the tiny kitchen, always the hottest room in the house, all the other dishes cleared away from the table except for Sully’s small bowl of mutton stew, Sully choking back tears and choking down stew for what seemed to him like hours, his mother and brother exiled to the porch by his father’s order. It was just the two of them, alone with their thoughts and the food, which disappeared a grain at a time, Sully swallowing sobs of fear with every mouthful. He paused when he felt his stomach rise until he was sure it would accept his next mouthful, all under his father’s unwavering gaze. He believed his father’s threat to keep feeding him more stew, and so he did not dare throw up what he’d already forced down. He’d have died rather than start over.
    â€œThere,” his father said when Sully had swallowed the last of it, and Sully hung his head, which was pounding now with his effort. When it was over, he felt exhausted, as if he could have slept right there, sitting upright in the kitchen chair, for days. Depositing the bowl in the sink, Big Jim returned to Sully. “You ate it, didn’t you,” he said, and Sully realized that his father was still furious, his rage undiminished by Sully’s accomplishment. He even suspected that his father was secretly disappointed that the ordeal was over. He’d expected the food to rise in his son’s throat and had looked forward to making good on his threat to force-feed Sully another bowl. This realization, harder to swallow than the mutton had been, almost brought it all back up, but somehow Sully had willed the food to stay where it was.
    â€œYou learn anything tonight?” his father wanted to know. What he was getting at, Sully guessed, was who the boss was at 12 Bowdon Street.
    Sully nodded.
    â€œBecause we can do this every night until you do learn who the boss is around here.” His father stood then, glaring down at Sully. “You can fight me all you want, but you aren’t going to win.”
    As it turned out, though, his father was wrong. The very next night, Sully, in a state of even greater nervous excitement and fear, had to be led to the table by his mother when his father refused to accept the boy’s claim of being sick. He’d have been wiser to accept it. Sully took one bite of his mother’s steaming hot macaroni casserole, which she had made precisely because everything in it was soft and did not require chewing, and Sully tossed his school lunch the length of the table. For some reason this had not angered his father as much as the previous night’s chewing, the boy’s inability to swallow. And Sully realized, to both his surprise and relief, that his father
had
been bluffing the night before. He had no intention of engaging in lengthy combat every night. That night, for instance, his father felt a particularly strong urge to leave their house in favor of the corner tavern, and so when he saw the mess Sully had made of the dinner table, he calmly stood, shot his wife a look of contempt and strode out the door. He didn’t return home until late, after the tavern closed, and then he’d taken it out on Sully’s mother, not him. Sully, who’d been unable to fall asleep, heard it all, first his father shouting at her, then the slap that resounded throughout the house, his mother’s cry of surprise, then silence. Sully remembered smiling to himself in the dark. He’d won after all.
    â€œYou can look now,” Wirf grinned. “I’m all done.”
    Sully had been feigning interest in the college football game above thebar and wondering