Nobody's Fool

street lamp, coming to a rocking rest in the spot where the Donnelly girl’s car had been until she moved it.
    The deer was secured by ropes that snaked under the car’s hood andthrough the grille and front windows in a pattern that could only have been improvised on the spot. The animal’s head swayed on its slender neck, tongue lolling out, its entire body sliding dangerously. A large man wearing an orange plaid jacket and cap with earflaps got out of the car then, and when he slammed the door the deer slid further among the straining web of rope. The man seemed to be surveying not Miss Beryl’s house but that of her next-door neighbor.
    â€œDaddy,” the little girl said, her voice, so unexpected, startling Miss Beryl, who had momentarily forgotten she was there despite the fact that she had both hands on the child’s shoulders. When she tried to draw the little girl back from the window, she discovered, as the young woman had predicted, that Tina would not budge. Since that was the case, Miss Beryl drew the sheer that she pulled back each morning to let light into her front room, and she turned off the nearby floor lamp as well. Through the sheer’s gauzy material, she and the child were still able to make out the man’s movements, saw him open the Cadillac’s rear door and take out a rifle. When he slammed this door also, the deer slid again, its antlers forming a tripod on the snowy curb. The man with the rifle came around the car then, looked at the animal, shook his head, turned back to the house, shouldered the rifle and fired. The explosion of the gun was immediately mixed with the sound of shattering glass.
    Miss Beryl did not wait for a second shot. Before that came, she had dialed the phone for the police. Her conversation with the officer at the desk was punctuated by further explosions as the Donnelly girl’s husband systematically shot out every window on the second floor of both the front and side of Miss Beryl’s neighbor’s house, shouting, indistinctly, in between volleys, for his wife to get her ass outside and not make him go up after her.
    â€œI’ll be damned,” said the policeman on the telephone. “That does sound like somebody shooting. You sure it’s not the television?”
    By the time Miss Beryl got back to the window, the man had stopped shooting, and Miss Beryl saw why. The Donnelly girl was standing there with him beneath the street lamp, apparently furious and unafraid. He wasn’t holding the rifle at his shoulder anymore, but rather across his body with both hands, one on the stock, the other on the barrel. He appeared to be listening intently to his wife and trying to comprehend, among other things, that he was shooting out the windows of the wrong house. He must also have been listening to his wife’s low opinion of him.
    In the distance Miss Beryl heard a siren. The patrol car pulled up justas the man with the rifle had apparently heard enough. Miss Beryl saw the butt of the rifle come up and the Donnelly girl’s head snap back. As she crumpled to the sidewalk, Miss Beryl cried out and reached down to cover the little girl’s eyes, only to discover that the child was no longer there. In fact, when Miss Beryl turned to look, she discovered that the little girl was no longer in the room. Both the door to Miss Beryl’s flat and the outer door stood open.
    Their first stop was the IGA, where Sully bought the smallest package of ground beef he could find.
    â€œHow about buns?” Peter said, abstractedly, picking up a package. It was one of the things Sully liked least about his son, the fact that he seldom seemed to focus. No matter where he was, he was half somewhere else. Right at the moment he had an excuse, though. Yesterday, when Ralph went to pick Will up at the restaurant where Sully had taken him for ice cream, and while Vera and Peter were returning Robert Halsey to the VA home in Schuyler, Charlotte had packed Wacker and Andy into the Gremlin, along with their clothes and toys, and left. She had warned Peter of her intention to leave, even offered him the opportunity to come with her. He could go pick up Will, and when they returned, they’d be off. They could return to Morgantown, at least, as a family. But Peter had refused, telling her to calm down, they’d discuss everything when he and Vera returned from Schuyler Springs. Charlotte had warned him again that there’d