Nobody's Fool

proudly. “You see that big shiny ring he had on? You’re supposed to kiss it, because he’s the bishop and you’re nobody. But he’d kiss my ass before I’d kiss his ring, and he knew it, too. All those bastards can go straight to hell, is what I say.”
    â€œMe too,” Patrick agreed, and to prove he shared their father’s contempt, he took from his jacket pocket the sleek gold letter opener he’d clipped from the priest’s study.
    Seeing this, their father’s rage disappeared, and he howled appreciatively, slapping Patrick on the back. “Why the hell not?” he wanted to know. “He won’t be needing it anymore, will he? The bastard’s opened his last letter.”
    It was years later, long after his mother’s death, that Sully remembered what she’d said to the priest that afternoon in the dark church, how she’d wept and confessed her secret shame, that she’d prayed every day for her own husband to be struck down. How old had he been when he realized that his mother’s prayer had been answered, or half answered? She’d prayed for Sully’s father to be struck down—emphatically, decisively, unambiguously—so there would be no question about the message. The priest who reminded her of Paul’s conversion needn’t have. A direct hit with a lightning bolt, preferably to the center of the forehead, was precisely the sort of message she’d hoped God would deliver. She knew her husband, and she knew, even if God didn’t, that no glancing blow wouldsuffice. But instead of sending a divine lightning bolt, God had sent an endless progression of ham-fisted bartenders and bouncers and cops to show her husband the way, as if, even in His infinite wisdom, He wasn’t quite savvy enough to realize that Big Jim Sullivan had a head of pure stone and that, in the end, all those bartenders and bouncers and cops would do was scrape their knuckles on such a skull. It was only the man’s intoxication that allowed them to do what little damage they did. They waited until he was stinking drunk before tossing him out into the rainy gutter, calling instructions after him. “Go home, Sully,” they advised. Advice he always followed with fists clenched.
    The night he and his sons went to the rectory, he’d finally delivered them back home in the early evening and then gone back out again, leaving the house quiet. In bed, in the dark of their room, the boys had discussed the day’s events until Sully’s brother, Patrick, fell asleep, still fingering the gold-plated letter opener he’d stolen from the rectory. Sully himself had lain awake, cruelly ashamed that he himself had
stolen
nothing, for of course he saw the wisdom of his father’s logic. The rich priest wasn’t going to need any of his wealth anymore, and what’s more, he didn’t have any children of his own to inherit his possessions. Sully thought he would have liked to have the big globe, the one that stood as tall as he was, with its vast blue oceans and tall mountains jutting out in relief, all contained inside the sickle of gleaming brass. He could see himself standing next to it, poring over the globe for hours, spinning it, even as the world it represented spun through space, and he would know that this world was his. He’d finally fallen asleep thinking about it, and somewhere in the middle of the night his father had come back home again, this time drunk beyond redemption, and he’d shaken Sully awake in his bed. Had the boy’s last happy waking thought been etched there on his sleeping face for his father to read in the dark? Was that why Big Jim had awakened him? Impossible, but that was the impression Sully had when his father, his breath boozy and sour, issued him a warning. “Don’t think you’re going to grow up and be somebody, ’cause you’re not. So you can get
that
shit right out of your head.”
    The next morning, the bright morning sun streaming in the bedroom window, Sully saw that his father was right. Swiping a slender, gold-plated letter opener from a dead priest was something a person could do. But you couldn’t steal the whole world.

    They finished late that afternoon, just about the time Peter returned. Rub didn’t look too happy to see Peter until he saw the six-pack of Genesee. “Howdy, Sancho,” Peter said, extending the beer. Rub frowned