Nobody's Fool

Sullivan, at the base of the stairs and about to head up with fists clenched, turned drunkenly to face Sully in the doorway, nothing but darkness between them. His face was bloody and unnatural, its skin pulled tightly in conflicting directions by the clumsy stitches of old wounds. His nose, broken half a dozen times in brawls, was no longer plumb, hisrespiration audible. He grinned at his son across what separated them, the same grin Sully remembered from the day he missed the next rung of the ladder and fell off. That day, a tall chain-link fence had separated them. Now, nothing.
    â€œIt’s about time you decided to stand up and testify,” Big Jim said.
    â€œI’m right here, old man,” Sully assured him, feeling solid for the first time in days. If this was destiny, so be it. “Let’s go a few rounds, you and me. We’ll see who quits first.”
    His father’s grin broadened. “Come take your medicine,” he said.
    Still sensing ambush, Sully let the door swing shut behind him so there could be no retreat. Unless his father had made friends in Hell, it was just the two of them.
    At two o’clock Miss Beryl was awakened by what sounded like someone dragging a heavy chain across some distant floor. “We wear the chains we forge in life,” she thought, half expecting Clive Jr., gotten up as a ghost in Dickensian garb, to appear at her bedroom door. She wondered if what all this meant was that she was about to have another gusher. She sat up in bed and swung her feet over the side in search of her slippers. Before standing up, she wiggled her toes and flexed her fingers questioningly. In the past her spells had been preceded by a tingling at the extremities, though she felt no such sensation now. Nor, when she stood, did she feel woozy or distant.
    Maybe it was just that the long day—so lacking in pity—was still not finished with her. She found her robe and made her way into the kitchen, where she turned on the bright overhead, confident that if there was a chain-rattling ghost on the premises, it wouldn’t possess the temerity to pursue her into this cheerful, bright, hundred-watt realm. Tea, at this hour, was probably not a good idea, but she put the kettle on anyway and stood watching it, half expecting the phone in the next room to ring.
    It had been ringing when she returned from Schuyler Springs, and she took several calls before unplugging the phone. There’d been two more from reporters, who were now referring to Clive Jr.’s unavailability for comment as his disappearance. There had also been another call from the woman at the savings and loan, who sounded suspicious when Miss Beryl insisted that, no, Clive Jr. had not contacted her, had not left her any instructions, no hint of a destination or intentions.
    In her mailbox when she returned from Schuyler Springs there’d beenthe manila envelope she’d given to Abraham Wirfly the day before. Its contents, for which she should have been relieved and grateful, had done little to cheer her up. Inside, she found a handwritten note: “Unable to reach you, I’ve taken the rather large liberty of rescuing the enclosed from the county clerk’s office, where it had not been fully processed. We can, of course, refile any time you wish, but given recent events I must strongly advise you against transferring any property to your son at this time. The second matter we discussed has been dealt with as per your instructions.”
    This, then, was what had come of her poor compromise, her attempt to do right, to separate the conflicting dictates of head and heart, to assuage conscience, which was, as Mark Twain had shrewdly observed, “no better than an old yeller dog.” For fairness and loyalty, however important to the head, were issues that could seldom be squared in the human heart, at the deepest depths of which lay the mystery of affection, of love, which you either felt or you didn’t, pure as instinct, which seized you, not the other way around, making a mockery of words like “should” and “ought.” The human heart, where compromise could not be struck, not ever. Where transgressions exacted a terrible price. Where tangled black limbs fell. Where the boom got lowered.
    When Miss Beryl again heard the sound of a distant chain being dragged across a floor, she went to investigate, turning on lights as she moved from one room to the next. She