Nobody's Fool

the corner, POLICE DEPT . The note had been scrawled in pen, and someone had inserted, in pencil, a comma between the words “this” and “dear.” Sully considered the various riddles presented by both the dead animal and the note for about thirty seconds before giving up, glad that there were some riddles in this always strange life that had nothing to do with himself, a conclusion that was probably valid in general, if not in this instance.
    Upstairs, he tossed his winter coat onto the arm of the sofa and collapsed there, exhausted but feeling better, he knew, than he had a strict right to feel. The situation he would awaken to in the morning was dramatically and demonstrably worse than it had been in recent memory. His magnanimous gifts to Ralph and Peter represented not solutions but the deepening of his personal dilemma. Still, he felt an unreasonable surge of sleepy confidence that he would figure something out. There
were
solutions. Some you discovered, some you made, some you willed, some you forced.
    Of life’s mysteries, the one Sully fell asleep, sitting up on the sofa,trying to solve, was the smell that had been following him around all night. Carl Roebuck had noticed it first near the front door of The Horse, but when Sully’d left the bar the stench had followed him. In the car, on the way out to the IGA, Peter had noticed it, remarked that the smell reminded him of the place near Boca Raton where he and Charlotte had honeymooned. Later, the odor had been so powerful in the El Camino that Sully’d had to roll down a window despite the cold.
    He slept only a few minutes before awakening violently from a dream in which the smell was his leg rotting off. Oddly, he awoke with the answer. Picking up his overcoat, he fished around in the pocket until he located the tear in the lining, then finally the putrefying cherrystone clam, which had opened and trailed slime all the way to the other pocket, where it had come to rest beneath the wad of Sully’s gloves. The clam, as Wirf had observed, was a small thing, but Sully was unable to restrain his jubilation at having found a solution.
    Downstairs in her dark bedroom, Miss Beryl could hear her tenant laughing. In fact, she’d heard the car pull up outside and considered getting up and meeting him at the door, but decided not to. Morning was a few short hours away, plenty of time for bad news. In truth, she did not want to see Sully tonight or be charmed by him or be reminded of the boy she and Clive Sr. had been so fond of so long ago. Nor would she listen to Driver Ed anymore. If she’d been able to, she’d have turned a deaf ear to the sound of Sully’s defiant laughter filtering down through the ceiling, as if to lift her deadened spirits, as if, after the events that had taken place outside her front window, anything were capable of lifting them. Still, what a fine sound that laughter was compared to Clive Jr.’s humorless, professionally modulated banker’s voice, his “Haven’t I been warning you all along” that she’d been forced to listen to tonight. He had come by with the dreadful Joyce woman, claiming to have seen the police cars, but Miss Beryl suspected her friend Mrs. Gruber had called him. And at the time she was still badly shaken by everything that had happened and not unhappy to see Clive Jr., who was, after all, her son, who bore the name of the man who’d loved her, who’d been the star of her firmament. No, she was grateful to see Clive Jr., who’d spoken to the policemen outside with the calm assurance of a man who paid their salaries, and they had nodded at him in perfect agreement. Later, she had told him her fear that this was the year God intended to lower the boom, and then she’d let him convince her that Sully,as he had so long warned her, was the symbolic branch poised to fall upon her from above. How disappointing to have to admit that her son was right, to see the sense of accomplishment in his face when he realized that at last she intended to follow his advice. What a shame to lose Sully as an ally after so many years. How dreadful to see clearly, finally, what she had no choice but to do.



TUESDAY

    O utside Hattie’s in the dark mid-December gray of first light, a new banner was being strung, and Cass, behind the lunch counter, paused to see what this new one would say. Recent banners had not brought much luck. Bath had not trounced