Nobody's Fool

to any oath, yet as always he was unwilling to indulge regret. According to Ruth, it was wrong of him not to forgive, but in truth the only time he’d even been tempted was at his brother’s funeral. There, in church, his parents had both surprised him. His mother, dry-eyed and dressed in somber black, had borne a look closer to triumph than to grief. This is
his
doing, she seemed to be saying of the big man who stood, hunched over the wooden pew, sobbing next to her.
    Big Jim had worn an ill-fitting suit of mismatched plaid so outrageously inappropriate for a funeral that Sully, himself dressed in his brother’s old sport coat, a dark color at least, had noticed and felt terrible shame on top of his sorrow. Still, his father’s wracking sobs in the front pew of the church seemed so genuine that Sully had wavered in his oath until he remembered the way his father had behaved at the funeral home, the way he’d greeted each visitor to his son’s casket in a voice clear and rich with whiskey, “Come look what they’ve done to my boy,” as if he himself were the victim of this accident, as if Patrick were just a prop, a visible proof of Big Jim’s loss. It was the same way he’d behaved the day he impaled the boy on the fence. Before the boy even could be taken down, Big Jim had convinced the crowd to feel sorry for himself. And self, in the end, was the source of Big Jim’s sorrow at the loss of his eldest son, Sully realized. For months, maybe years, Sully had watched his brother’s transformation, watched Patrick become more and more like his father—more cruel, more careless, more angry, more of a bully. Though only seventeen, he was often drunk, and he’d been drunk when he hit the other driver head on. Big Jim was, in a sense, mourning his own death, and Sully decided not to, not then when Patrick died, not many years later when Big Jim himself finally died peacefully in his untroubled sleep.
    Halfway up the walk, Sully paused, stared at the house of his childhood, listening in the stillness to what sounded like freeway traffic, though it could not be. The interstate was miles away, and Sully couldn’t remember ever hearing the sound of it, even on the stillest nights. For the umpteenth time today Sully felt disoriented, as if the geography of his life were suddenly subject to new rules, as if his young philosophy professor had gone right on disproving things during the long weeks since Sully dropped out of school and as if now, as things disappeared, the spaces between them were shrinking. Somebody had apparently disproved The Ultimate Escape, and maybe the huge tract of marshland the park was to sit on had disappeared along with Carl Roebuck’s housing development. Perhaps the disappearance of all these things had drawn the once distant interstate closer, everything shrinking to fill up the void occasioned by rampant philosophy. That would explain the traffic sounds, which grew louder as Sully halted on the top step, listening to them.
    To Ruth’s way of thinking, Sully’s unwillingness to forgive was the source of his own stubborn failures, and in the past she’d been capable of being very persuasive on this subject, would in fact have persuaded just about anyone but Sully. Her failure to convince him was probably the best single explanation for why things never worked out between them. She made it clear that he could not have them both—herself and his stubborn, fixed determination. For a while he’d allowed her to undermine it in subtle ways. Once they’d even visited Big Jim in his nursing home. But Sully could only surrender so much, and he understood that if he and Ruth married, she’d eventually have him visiting Big Jim’s grave with fresh flowers. She’d go with him and make sure he left them. And where was the justice in that? It would mean that in the end Big Jim had fooled them all and beat the rap, walked out of court on some flimsy Christian loophole called forgiveness. No. Fuck him. Eternally.
    â€œFuck you,” Sully said out loud at the front door to the house on Bowdon Street, pushing it open angrily as the second of Jocko’s screaming yellow zonkers finally ripped wide open the portal to the past, setting his brain, his heart, his soul churning. “Fuck you, old man,” the words he’d wanted to say as a boy, words that sounded fine, even now, in the empty house.
    Big Jim