“She chewed on it for about half an hour and then spit it into her napkin,” Miss Beryl told the child. “She’s a real corker about keeping her front steps clean. If it keeps snowing, she’ll probably sweep them two or three more times tonight before she goes to bed, and then she’ll do it again in the morning.”
Without trying, Miss Beryl had listened to most of the Donnelly girl’s telephone conversation. She’d tried to take the old phone she’d insulted out into the hall, but the cord wasn’t long enough, so she’d set it down in the doorway and stretched the cord out as far as it would go so she could sit on the stairs that led up to Sully’s flat. She wasn’t able to manage all that and still close the door, so Miss Beryl overheard most of the one-sided conversation. Apparently, things had not gone well right from the start. Miss Beryl gathered that the young woman was calling her father to ascertain whether it was safe for her and the little girl to come out of hiding. Instead, it was her husband, a man named Roy, who had answered the phone.
“Put Daddy on the phone, Roy,” Miss Beryl heard the young woman say. “Because I don’t want to talk to you, is why. If I’d wanted to talk to you, I’d have called you.”
Silence, a minute, from the hall.
“Well, I’m tickled you got your buck, Roy,” the young woman said when it was her turn again. “I hope you’ll be content with it, ’cause there’s no way I’m coming home. You can cart him back home and eat the son of a bitch all by yourself. I got a job all lined up and an apartment too.… Don’t tell me you’ll find me, Roy. Get you out of Schuyler and turn you around once and you couldn’t find south. You couldn’t find Albany with a map, much less me in it. I’m amazed you found Bath without me to tell you where to turn. You only been here a couple dozen times.… Don’t threaten me, Roy, you’re all done threatening me. You’re just going to have to find yourself another dumb teenage girl to bully, is all. Be a whole lot easier than you trying to find me once I’m gone.… Yeah, well, you let me worry about Tina, okay? And don’t tell me you’re going to change. You don’t change your underwear but once a week, and you haven’t changed your mind once since we been married. Change is a subject you should steer clear of.… Yeah, well, Daddy doesn’t even know where the hell I am, which means he can’t tell you. And you aren’t either smart or tough enough to get it out of Mom.… Yeah, well, don’t go threatening, Roy. Remember what the judge told you. Next person you go and beat the shit out of and you go to jail.… Yeah, well, go ahead and risk it, then. I wouldn’t mind seeing you in jail. Anyhow, I’m going to hang up on you now. This is the longest conversation we’ve had in about a year. The part I like best is I can end it without getting punched.… Just go on home, Roy. Go home and eat your deer. Start at the end with the asshole and just keep going.… No, you don’t know where I am, either. If you did, you’d be over here making everybody’s life misery. You don’t have no idea where I am, and you can just file that with all the other things you don’t know. There’s probably room for one more.… Bye, Roy.… Yeah, yeah, yeah.… I’ll look forward to it, okay?… Go on back to Schuyler, Roy. Go on back and eat your deer.”
Hang up the phone, Miss Beryl thought, but the conversation went on in this manner for another five minutes, escalating without moving, and when it did finally end and the young woman came back in and set the phone back on the end table, Miss Beryl had the strong impression that it was her husband who had finally hung up.
“I better go move the car,” she said, her facial expression a curious mix of annoyance and misgiving. “He’s just dumb enough to find me by pure luck. When I get back, me and Birdbrain’ll go upstairs and wait. You don’t want to get in the middle of this.”
Outside Miss Beryl’s front window the street lamps made halos of the falling snow. Up the street Mrs. Gruber had finished her sweeping and was vigorously banging her broom against her porch pillar to get the snow off. She broke two or three brooms this way each winter and complained bitterly about how brooms weren’t built to last.
Miss Beryl heard the low, throaty throb of a car engine coming up the street from the other direction. It belonged to a huge, rusted-out old Cadillac the color of dirty snow. Miss Beryl simply could not believe what was riding on the car’s hood. She was unable to convince herself, in fact, until the big car lurched over to the curb directly beneath the street lamp, coming to a rocking rest in the spot where the Donnelly girl’s car had been until she moved it.
The deer was secured by ropes that snaked under the car’s hood and through the grille and front windows in a pattern that could only have been improvised on the spot. The animal’s head swayed on its slender neck, tongue lolling out, its entire body sliding dangerously. A large man wearing an orange plaid jacket and cap with earflaps got out of the car then, and when he slammed the door the deer slid further among the straining web of rope. The man seemed to be surveying not Miss Beryl’s house but that of her next-door neighbor.
“Daddy,” the little girl said, her voice, so unexpected, startling Miss Beryl, who had momentarily forgotten she was there despite the fact that she had both hands on the child’s shoulders. When she tried to draw the little girl back from the window, she discovered, as the young woman had predicted, that Tina would not budge. Since that was the case, Miss Beryl drew the sheer that she pulled back each morning to let light into her front room, and she turned off the nearby floor lamp as well. Through the sheer’s gauzy material, she and the child were still able to make out the man’s movements, saw him open the Cadillac’s rear door and take out a rifle. When he slammed this door also, the deer slid again, its antlers forming a tripod on the snowy curb. The man with the rifle came around the car then, looked at the animal, shook his head, turned back to the house, shouldered the rifle and fired. The explosion of the gun was immediately mixed with the sound of shattering glass.
Miss Beryl did not wait for a second shot. Before that came, she had dialed the phone for the police. Her conversation with the officer at the desk was punctuated by further explosions as the Donnelly girl’s husband systematically shot out every window on the second floor of both the front and side of Miss Beryl’s neighbor’s house, shouting, indistinctly, in between volleys, for his wife to get her ass outside and not make him go up after her.
“I’ll be damned,” said the policeman on the telephone. “That does sound like somebody shooting. You sure it’s not the television?”
By the time Miss Beryl got back to the window, the man had stopped shooting, and Miss Beryl saw why. The Donnelly girl was standing there with him beneath the street lamp, apparently furious and unafraid. He wasn’t holding the rifle at his shoulder anymore, but rather across his body with both hands, one on the stock, the other on the barrel. He appeared to be listening intently to his wife and trying to comprehend, among other things, that he was shooting out the windows of the wrong house. He must also have been listening to his wife’s low opinion of him.
In the distance Miss Beryl heard a siren. The patrol car pulled up just as the man with the rifle had apparently heard enough. Miss Beryl saw the butt of the rifle come up and the Donnelly girl’s head snap back. As she crumpled to the sidewalk, Miss Beryl cried out and reached down to cover the little girl’s eyes, only to discover that the child was no longer there. In fact, when Miss Beryl turned to look, she discovered that the little girl was no longer in the room. Both the door to Miss Beryl’s flat and the outer door stood open.
Their first stop was the IGA, where Sully bought the smallest package of ground beef he could find.
“How about buns?” Peter said, abstractedly, picking up a package. It was one of the things Sully liked least about his son, the fact that he seldom seemed to focus. No matter where he was, he was half somewhere else. Right at the moment he had an excuse, though. Yesterday, when Ralph went to pick Will up at the restaurant where Sully had taken him for ice cream, and while Vera and Peter were returning Robert Halsey to the VA home in Schuyler, Charlotte had packed Wacker and Andy into the Gremlin, along wi
th their clothes and toys, and left. She had warned Peter of her intention to leave, even offered him the opportunity to come with her. He could go pick up Will, and when they returned, they’d be off. They could return to Morgantown, at least, as a family. But Peter had refused, telling her to calm down, they’d discuss everything when he and Vera returned from Schuyler Springs. Charlotte had warned him again that there’d be nobody to discuss anything with, but he had not taken this threat seriously. He knew that she was furious and that she had reason to be. He just couldn’t imagine her doing it. Packing everything up and driving back to West Virginia by herself, at night.
Vera, at the end of her short rope, had precipitated this confrontation by blaming Charlotte for her ruined bathroom. She’d insisted that it was ruined, that the overflow from the boys’ tub had gotten beneath the tiles, which would now have to be torn up, which would cost thousands of dollars. This seemed to Charlotte demonstrably untrue. After all, they were standing in an inch of water, which meant it wasn’t beneath the tiles but rather on top of them. The bathroom floor wasn’t ruined, it was wet. The floor needed to be mopped up, not pulled up, and she made the mistake of saying so, of refusing her mother-in-law the gravity she felt the situation deserved. Which allowed Vera the opportunity to tell Charlotte about all the other things her daughter-in-law was responsible for. It was Charlotte’s fault that Peter had been denied the tenure he’d earned, Vera said. Maybe that wasn’t the reason the university gave, but everyone knew that men were often held back in their careers because of their wives’ deficiencies. Charlotte was also to blame not only for the fact that their children didn’t know how to behave but for the dreadful state of their unhappy marriage. “Tott’re what’s wrong with my son,” Vera had hissed at Charlotte before dropping tragically to her knees on the wet tiles and starting to mop up the flooded bathroom floor with her brand-new bath towels, which now, she sobbed, would have to be replaced, along with the floor. Everything, just everything, was ruined.
Charlotte had been struck dumb by her mother-in-law’s litany of accusation, but the sheer outrageousness of it finally allowed her to locate her voice, and she had just expressed her heartfelt belief that Vera was full of more shit than the Thanksgiving turkey when Robert Halsey, looking pale and feeble, appeared behind them in the bathroom doorway, gasping for breath from his journey from the living room. “Would someone …” he said in his thin, high voice, “be so kind … as to take … me … home.”
Vera gasped, struggled to her feet. “Now look what you’ve done,” she sobbed, glaring not only at Charlotte, but at Peter, who had been trying ineffectually to calm his mother down. “Look at him!” she demanded. “You’re all trying to kill him!”
Peter confided very few of the details of these events to his father, telling Sully only that Charlotte had left with the two boys, that her leaving was the immediate result of hostilities with Vera that had been brewing for a long time and finally boiled over. And he hinted again that there were other causes which had nothing to do with his mother.
Sully was surprised that his son was confiding even this much. After all, it wasn’t likely Sully would find out on his own. And, as was usually the case with confidences, the knowledge did not sit well. Something about the way Peter chose to relate what had transpired, or the broad outlines of what had transpired, suggested that he was not fully committed to or engaged by these events, even in the telling. He was indeed the sort of man to express outrage in a car without ever being motivated to get out with a clenched fist. He’d told Sully about Charlotte’s leaving matter-of-factly, almost abstractly, staring into the meat case, as if what it all meant might be explained on the labels of packaged hamburger. He’d actually picked up several packages to inspect them.
“Dogs don’t cat buns,” Sully assured him in answer to Peter’s question about whether they’d need any.
“You’re buying ground beef for your dog?” Peter said absently, without real curiosity.
Sully decided not to explain until Peter showed some genuine interest. “I don’t own a dog,” he said. “This is for someone else’s.”
When they got to the checkout, Sully paid the girl and grabbed the hamburger before she could bag it. “This is fine as it is, dolly,” he assured her.
“Want your receipt?” she called to him urgently.
“What for?” Sully said.
Outside, he tossed Peter the keys to the El Camino. “You drive,” he said.
“What’s wrong with Alpo?” Peter wondered as he backed the El Camino out of the parking space and headed for the street.
“I want to be sure,” Sully said, tearing the cellophane off the package. “This particular dog might not like Alpo.”
Following Sully’s instructions, Peter headed out of town. Sully found the vial of Jocko’s pills in his pants pocket. From the plastic tube he extracted two capsules and buried them in the mound of hamburger. “That oughta do it,” he said, “don’t you think?”
Peter looked at the meat blankly.
Sully couldn’t help grinning. There was something about educated people that made it impossible for them to admit when they didn’t understand something. His young philosophy professor at the college was that way, pretending he understood the sports talk that was always under way when he entered the classroom. “Maybe you’re right,” Sully said, extracting a third pill. Two had done the trick for him, but he wanted to be safe. He added the third pill to the hamburger. “Pull in here,” he said, pointing to the yard where Carl Roebuck kept his heavy equipment. “Go around by the back gate.”
Peter did as he was told, still not comprehending.
“Stay here,” Sully said, and he got out.
Rasputin, Carl Roebuck’s Doberman, was already snarling and leaping at the fence. Sully checked along the bottom, looking for a gap big enough to slide the hamburger through, while Rasputin, foaming at the mouth, lunged at the fence with undiminished fury. Finding a space, Sully set the package down and pushed it under with a stick. Rasputin stopped barking for about two seconds, long enough to inhale the package of hamburger in one impressive gulp, then resumed his attack on the fence.
“I hope you have better dreams than I did,” Sully said, recalling the one Peter had awakened him from the day before.
“I can’t believe it,” Peter said when Sully climbed back into the El Camino. “I just helped you poison a dog, didn’t I?”
“Nope,” Sully said. “For one thing, it wasn’t poison. For another, you were no help. Your part comes later. We got time for one beer though.”
“Why not?” Peter said, with the air of a man whose day couldn’t get much worse.
“You had dinner?”
Peter admitted he hadn’t.
“Good,” Sully said, suddenly feeling hungry. “I’ll buy you a hamburger.”
“I’m not sure I want to eat one of your hamburgers,” Peter said, pulling back onto the blacktop.
Back at The Horse Wirf was right where Sully had left him. There was an episode of The People’s Court on the television above the bar, and Wirf and half a dozen other regulars were trying to predict how the judge would rule. This was an evening ritual. The regulars had a running contest to see who guessed the most correct decisions. Wirf was currently in fourth place behind Jeff, the night bartender, Birdie, the day bartender, who sometimes stuck around after her shift ended, and Sully, who wasn’t a big believer in justice and usually just flipped a mental coin between the defendant and the plaintiff.
“The defendant’s an asshole,” Jeff was saying. Jeff was opinionated and pretty good at predicting how things would go in the court. “The judge will never rule for him.”
Birdie shook her head. “This is a court of law,” she said. “Being an asshole is beside the point.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Wirf said. “Judges don’t like assholes any better than you do.”
Since Wirf hadn’t seen them come in, Sully nudged Peter to keep still while he snuck up behind hi
s lawyer and kicked him hard in the calf of his prosthetic leg, so hard the leg flew off the rung of the bar stool and ricocheted off the front of the bar. “Jesus Christ!” Peter gasped, the same look of horror on his face as when he had realized his father’s intention to poison the dog at the yard. He couldn’t decide which was more bizarre, that his father would sneak up behind a man and kick him or that the kicked man registered no pain.
“Move,” Sully said, sliding onto the stool next to the man he’d just kicked. “How come you always gotta take up two stools?”
“I was saving that one for you,” Wirf said.
“Why?” Sully said. “I told you I was going home.”
“I never believe anything you say,” Wirf explained. “And I certainly don’t believe it when you say you’re going home at six-thirty on Friday night. Someday,” he added, “you’re going to forget which is my fake leg.”
Sully nodded. “I’ve already forgot,” he said. “I was just guessing. You ever met my son?”
Wirf rotated on his stool, offered his hand to Peter. “I don’t get it,” Wirf frowned. “He looks intelligent.”
“He is,” Sully said, feeling an unexpected surge of pride. He tried to remember the last time he’d introduced his son to anyone. Many years ago, he decided. “He’s a college professor.”
Peter shook Wirf’s hand. “Your old man was a college student up until a couple days ago,” Wirf said. “He must’ve been on the verge of learning something, though, because he quit.” To Sully he added, “You missed all the excitement, as usual.”
“Good,” Sully said. “I’ve had enough excitement today. What excitement?”
“Some guy shot a deer right in the middle of Main Street.”
Sully frowned, considered this. A deer in the middle of Main Street was possible. When he was growing up, deer used to graze on the grounds of Sans Souci. Even now, at first light and after a fresh snow, people on Upper Main sometimes claimed to see deer tracks across their lawns, though Sully had never seen any himself.