Nobody's Fool

demolished could tell by looking at it. “Don’t be afraid to sit in it,” he said, clearly proud of his work.
    â€œReally?”
    â€œIt’s fixed,” he assured her. “People don’t believe things can be fixed anymore. They break something and throw it away first thing. That’s what I’m trying to teach the boy here. Things can be fixed. Better than new sometimes.”
    â€œNew’s better,” the boy said stubbornly. “New’s new.”
    â€œYeah?” his grandfather said. “Well put this old chair out in this fine lady’s old car, and do it careful.”
    â€œI ain’t broke nothin’ yet,” the boy reminded Mr. Blue.
    â€œBroke my heart is what he broke,” he said when his grandson was out the door. “Him and his mother and her nigger boyfriend.”
    Given this ugly sentiment, Miss Beryl couldn’t decide whether it was appropriate to sympathize with Mr. Blue, but she did anyway. An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.
    Outside, Miss Beryl found the boy standing next to the locked Ford, looking cosmically annoyed at having been assigned an impossible task. In another year or two, he’d view all tasks in this same light.
    â€œLet’s try putting it in the backseat,” she told him with as much good cheer as she could muster. Short as she was, getting anything heavy or awkward out of the Ford’s trunk was a struggle.
    When she opened the back door for Mr. Blue’s grandson, he surveyed the space, then the chair, then the gnomelike old woman who wanted him to put the chair where there wasn’t room. “Muthafucka ain’t gon’ fit,” he said.
    â€œTry,” Miss Beryl told him.
    The chair fit. Not by much, but it slid along the backseat with a slender inch to spare. Clearly, having been wrong had no effect on the boy, who looked no less put upon. He was at an emotional age where he was right by definition, because other people were stupid. There existed no proof to the contrary.
    Miss Beryl got in the Ford and sat for a moment, thinking about her son and wondering how far he would run. As a boy he’d shamed Clive Sr., who’d tried, without much success, to teach his son to defend himself. But even sparring with Clive Sr. had frightened the boy. His father had taught him how to keep his hands up, to protect his face, but as soon as Clive Sr. aimed a feather punch at the boy’s soft tummy, the hands came down, and when his father cuffed him lightly on the ear to illustrate his mistake, Clive Jr. flat quit. He hadn’t wanted any lessons in self-defense. He’d wanted his father to protect him, to be on his side, to follow the bullies home from school and beat them up.
    No doubt it was what he’d wanted from her too. To take his side in things. To see things his way. To trust him. To be the star of her firmament. Love, probably, was not too strong a word for what Clive Jr. wanted.
    There were two naked people sitting at the table, though it took Sully’s grandson Will a moment to realize this because, in the center of the table, in addition to a pile of crumpled money, was a mound of clothing and a revolver and, most startling to Will, the lower half of a leg, standing up straight. The leg wore a shoe, a brown wing tip, and a sock, argyle, and above the sock the leg was pink, the color of Will’s own skin when his mother or Grandma Vera drew his bathwater too hot and he’d stayed in it too long. Near the top of the limb was what looked like some sort of complex harness. Because he was busy trying to account for this leg, he didn’t immediately notice the two naked people.
    â€œOh, look!” squealed the girl, who was wearing a green visor and noshirt. “A little boy!” It was then that Will noticed her nakedness and was embarrassed. Her chest looked unnatural, limp, as if some invisible bone had been broken. Will had seen his mother bare-chested before and remembered feeling the same way at that sight, as if these breasts that women had were the result of some terrible injury, a bad fall perhaps. He stayed where he was when the girl in the green visor beckoned to him, her arms extended. “Isn’t he handsome?”
    â€œYou stay away from my grandson,” Sully, mildly drunk, advised her,