Nobody's Fool

him, surprised. “You quit, though.”
    Sully shrugged. “I didn’t say I belonged there. I just said I liked it.”
    â€œWhere
do
you belong, Dad?”
    They’d arrived at City Hall, and Sully pointed up the stone steps at the lighted police department door. “Right here, I guess,” he said. “For tonight, at least.”
    â€œI’ll look after things the best I can,” Peter promised seriously.
    â€œOkay,” Sully said. “Good.”
    â€œYou want me to come in with you?”
    â€œNo, I don’t.”
    â€œGood,” Peter said.
    To their mutual surprise, they shook hands then at the foot of the steps. “I’ll see you before you know it,” Sully said. “Pray for snow.”
    They both looked up at the cloudless sky, then Sully limped up the Town Hall steps. When Sully got to the top he went inside and let the door swing shut behind him, then came back out again. “Don’t forget to feed the dog,” he called.
    Peter had forgotten all about Rasputin, who was presumably still chained to the kitchen cabinet in the Bowdon Street house. “It’s not going to be easy being you, is it?” he called back.
    Sully raised his hands out to his sides, shoulder level, as if he were about to burst into song. “Don’t expect too much of yourself in the beginning,” he advised. “I couldn’t do everything at first either.”



THURSDAY

    D owntown Bath, first light. Both traffic signals blinking yellow. Caution.
    Clive Jr., sitting in his Lincoln outside the North Bath Savings and Loan, three large suitcases safely stowed in the trunk, was in a contemplative mood. The way the parking space angled toward the curb, he was able to see both blinking yellows in the small rectangle of his rearview. Caution. And then again, in case anyone missed the first, caution. Funny how over a lifetime meanings changed. Caution was what he’d been taught in school, but experience had taught him other meanings and the blinking yellow had come to mean You Don’t Have to Stop Here, or Do Not Accelerate. For years now he had gone through blinking yellows with his foot poised midway between brake and gas, vaguely thankful that these indulgent yellows were not reds. And every time he rolled beneath the signal, You Do Not Have to Stop Here fired somewhere in the back of his brain, where the deepest truths of human understanding lie untroubled, unquestioned. Mistaken.
    The yellow traffic signals continued to blink caution relentlessly in Clive Jr.’s rearview, their original meaning fully restored now. Too late, naturally. The more he thought about it, life’s truest meanings were all childhood meanings, childhood understandings of how things worked, what they
were
. Do we ever know as deeply as we know in childhood? Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate thedeepest truths we know about ourselves and our world? Well, yes, perhaps, Clive Jr. conceded. No point getting carried away, epistemologywise. It did no good to lament the loss of innocence or to suspect that the child might indeed be father to the man. He was no longer the little boy he’d once been when he and his father had visited the Capitol and Clive Sr. had interpreted traffic signals for him as they waited to cross at a busy intersection. He was now the chief executive officer of the financial institution before him, an institution whose edifice, at least, was constructed of solid granite, stone strong enough to withstand ill winds, like the ones again tunneling up Main and making the deserted street feel lonesome and ghostly. And if he himself was not made of stone, well, neither was he made of paper to be blown about like a hamburger wrapper from the Dairy Queen on Lower Main.
    Speaking of ill winds. The van that carried huge bales of the
Schuyler Springs Sentinel
pulled up behind him, did a three-point turn in the empty street and backed up to the curb in front of the Rexall. The driver got out then, opened the rear hatch and dropped a bale of
Sentinels
into the darkened, recessed doorway. Clive Jr. already had a copy of the
Sentinel
on the front seat next to him, having driven from his golf course town home into Schuyler Springs at four-thirty in the morning to buy one. Not that anything in the paper was news to him. He’d gotten a call from Florida late yesterday afternoon, so he knew, of course, that Escape