Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  “Still keeping an eye on business,” Hattie repeated, nodding vigorously. “Still keeping …” Her attention was diverted, as it was during all conversations, by the ringing of the cash register, the old woman’s favorite sound. She had manned the register for nearly sixty years and imagined herself there still, each time she heard it clang. “Ah!” she said. “Ah …”

  “There’s a booth,” Rub said when the road crew got up with their checks and started for the register.

  “Good,” Sully said. “Go sit in it, why don’t you.”

  Rub hated being dismissed this way, but he did as he was told for fear of losing the booth. It was the perfect booth, in fact, the last in the row, away from traffic, where he could beg a loan from Sully in relative privacy, the threat of interruption greatly reduced.

  “What do you say we go dancing some night?” Sully suggested to Hattie in a loud voice, partly because the old woman was hard of hearing, partly because their conversations were much enjoyed by the regulars at the lunch counter, several of whom rotated on their stools to watch.

  “Dancing?” Hattie said, then bellowed, “Dancing!”

  Now everyone turned and looked.

  “Why not?” Sully said. “Just you and me. First dancing, then we’ll go over to my place.”

  A sly grin crossed the old woman’s face. “Let’s just go to your place. Nuts to the dancing.”

  “Okay,” Sully said, winking at Cass, who was watching now also, with solemn disapproval, as usual.

  “Just tell me one thing!” Hattie shouted. When she got revved up, her voice always reminded Sully of walruses at the zoo. “Who are you?”

  “What do you mean, who am I?” Sully said in mock outrage. “What are you, blind?”

  “You sound like that darn Sully.”

  “That’s who I am, too,” Sully told her.

  “Well, I’m too old to dance,” Hattie said. “I’m too old for your place too. You live on the second floor.”

  “I know it,” Sully said, massaging his knee. “I can hardly get up and down those stairs myself.”

  “How old are you?” Hattie said.

  “Sixty,” Sully said. “Except I feel older.”

  “I’m eighty-nine.” Hattie cackled proudly.

  “I know it. Aren’t you ever going to go meet St. Peter? Make room for somebody else?”

  “No!”

  Sully slid back out of the booth, his leg straight out in front until he could get it safely under him and put some weight on it. “Take it slow, old girl,” he said, patting one of her spotted hands. “Can you still hear the cash register?”

  “You bet I can,” Hattie assured him.

  “Good,” Sully said. “You wake up some morning and you can’t hear it, you’ll know you died in your sleep.”

  In fact, the old cash register’s ringing did have a soothing effect on Hattie. Together with the sound of dishes being bussed and the loud rasp of male laughter, the rattle and clang of the ancient register opened the doorway of Hattie’s memory wide enough for the old woman to slip through and spend a pleasant morning in the company of people dead for twenty years. And when her daughter closed the restaurant behind the last of the lunch customers and ushered Hattie out back to the small apartment they shared, the old woman was exhausted and under the impression that the reason she was so tired was that she’d worked all day.

  A stool had been vacated at the end of the counter, so Sully slid onto it and accepted one of Cass’s dark looks. “How will you know when you’ve died?” Cass wanted to know.

  “I guess everything will stop being so goddamn much fun,” Sully told her.

  “Those don’t look like your school duds,” she observed. “No classes today?”

  “None for me.”

  She studied him. “So. You’re giving up.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be going back, if that’s what you mean.”

  “What have you got, three more weeks till the end of the term?”

  Sully admitted this was true. “You know how it is,” he said.

  Cass made a face. “No idea. Tell me how it is, Sully.”

  Sully had no intention of explaining how it was to Cass. One of the few benefits of being sixty and single and without the enforceable obligations to other human beings was that you weren’t required to explain how it was. “I don’t see why it should frost your window, in any case.”

  Cass held up both hands in mock surrender. “It doesn’t frost my window. In fact, I may have won the pool. You lasted three months, and all those squares were vacant. Either Ruth or I must’ve won.”

  Sully couldn’t help grinning at her, because she was upset. “I hope it was you, then.”

  “You and Ruth still on the outs?”

  “Not that I know of. I try not to have that much to do with married women, Cassandra.”

  “Sometimes you don’t try very hard, the way I hear it.”

  “I’ve been trying pretty hard lately, not that it’s anyone’s business but mine.”

  Cass let it go, and after a moment she nodded in Rub’s direction. “Somebody’s about to hemorrhage, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  Sully smiled. “There’s the real reason I gotta go back to work. Rub’s going to hell without my good example to live by.”

  Ever since Sully had slid onto the stool at the counter Rub had been waving, trying to catch Sully’s attention. Sully waved back now and called, “Hi, Rub.”

  Rub frowned, confused, unable to figure out whether to leave the many places you could safely stand on the back of a garbage truck, and the Squeers boys owned and occupied these, so that when Rub was permitted to tag along he had to latch onto the side as best he could. The turns could be treacherous, and Rub sometimes had the impression that his cousins were waiting for him to be thrown from the truck so they wouldn’t have to stretch their already thin profits with an extra worker. Being family, they couldn’t deny him the work, but if Rub let himself get tossed on some sharp turn it’d be his own fault.

  “I could do all the hard jobs,” Rub offered.

  “You might have to,” Sully told him.

  “I don’t mind,” Rub said, which was true.

  “I’ll see if I can find us something for tomorrow,” Sully told him.

  “Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving,” Rub reminded him.

  “So be thankful.”

  “Bootsie’ll shoot me if I have to work on Thanksgiving.”

  “She probably will shoot you one of these days,” Sully conceded, “but it won’t be for working.”

  “I was wondering …” Rub began.

  “Really?” Sully said. “What about?”

  Rub had to look at the floor again. “If you could loan me twenty dollars. Since we’re going back to work.”

  Sully finished his coffee, pushed the cup toward the back of the counter where it might attract a free refill. “I worry about you, Rub,” he said. “You know that?”

  Rub looked up hopefully.

  “Because if you think I’ve got twenty dollars to loan you right now, you haven’t been paying attention.”

  Down at the floor again. Sometimes Sully was just like Miss Beryl, who’d also specialized in making Rub stare at the floor. He hadn’t had the courage to look up more than half a dozen times in the whole of eighth grade. He could still see the geometric pattern of the classroom floor in his mind’s eye. “I been paying attention,” he said in the same voice he always used with Miss Beryl when she cornered him about his homework. “It’s just that tomorrow’s Thanksgiving and—”

  Sully held up his hand. “Stop a minute. Before we get to tomorrow, let’s talk about yesterday. You remember yesterday?”

  “Sure,” Rub said, though it sounded a little like one of Sully’s trick questions.

  “Where was I yesterday?”

  “You want some coffee?” Sully said.

  “Okay,” Rub said sadly. “I just don’t see how come you can sit in her booth and not in the one down there.”
His face was flushed with the effort to understand. “And how come you can sit on a stool, but not in a booth?”

  Sully couldn’t help grinning at him. “I wish I could give you this knee for about fifteen minutes,” he said.

  “Hell, I’d take it,” Rub said earnestly, shaming Sully with his customary sincerity. “I just wisht there was someplace for me to sit here at the counter, is all. We could have both sat over there in that booth.”

  Both Sully and Cass were grinning at him now, and after a few seconds of being grinned at, Rub had to look at the floor. He was devoted to Sully and just regretted that, with Sully, whenever there were three people, it ended up two against one, and Rub was always the one. Sully could stare and grin at you forever, too, and when he did this Rub got so self-conscious he had to look down at the floor. “We going back to work?” he said finally, for something to say.

  Sully shrugged. “You think we should?”

  Rub nodded enthusiastically.

  “Okay,” Sully said. “As long as you’re not too worried.”

  Rub frowned. “About what?”

  “About my bad knee. The one you never forget about. I thought you might be worried I’d hurt it again.”

  Rub wasn’t at all sure how to respond to this. He could think of only two responses—no, he wasn’t too worried, and yes, he was worried. Neither seemed quite right. He knew he was supposed to be worried. If true, this meant he was expected to hope they didn’t go back to work, something Rub couldn’t really hope, because he’d missed working with Sully a great deal this fall and hated working with his cousins collecting trash, almost as much as they hated letting him. North Bath had recently suspended trash collection as a city service, leading to entrepreneurial daring on the part of Rub’s relatives, who had for generations worked for the sanitation department. Last year they’d purchased the oldest and most broken down of the town’s aging fleet of three garbage trucks, had SQUEERS REFUSE REMOVAL stenciled on the door, and prepared to compete on the free market. In addition to the driver, there were always at least two Squeers boys hanging on to the back of the truck as it careened through the streets of Bath, and when the vehicle came to a halt they leapt off the truck like spiders and scurried for curbside trash cans. There were only so booth or not. He’d been under the distinct impression that when Sully told him to go grab a booth, he himself had intended to join him there when he finished with the old woman. Except that now Sully was seated at the counter talking to Cass as if he’d forgotten all about Rub and the booth. To make matters worse, several people had come in and were waiting near the door for a booth to be vacated. They kept looking at Rub, all alone in his big one. Had the stool next to Sully been empty Rub would have made for it, but that stool was occupied, which meant he had to choose between sitting alone at a booth for six and not having a place to sit at all. His deeply furrowed expression suggested that the conundrum might be causing a cranial blood clot.

  “He has been even more pathetic than usual this fall,” Cass had to admit. “He was in here earlier looking for you.”

  “I figured.”

  “He ask you yet?”

  Sully shook his head. “He keeps getting interrupted. In another minute or two he’ll cry.”

  Indeed, Rub looked to be on the verge of tears when Sully finally relented and waved him over. Jumping up quickly, he came toward them at a trot, like a dog released from a difficult command.

  “There’s no stool,” he said as soon as he arrived.

  Sully swiveled on his, a complete circle. “You know what? You’re right.”

  The people waiting by the door made for the booth Rub had vacated. Rub sighed deeply as he watched them take possession. “What was wrong with the booth?”

  “Nothing,” Sully told him. “Not a goddamn thing. Booths are great, in fact.”

  Rub threw up his hands. The look on his face was pure exasperation.

  “Think a minute,” Sully reminded him. “What’d you just do for me over at the house?”

  Rub thought. “Tied your shoe,” he suddenly remembered.

  “Which means?” Sully prompted.

  Cass set a steaming cup of coffee in front of Sully and asked Rub if he wanted any.

  “Don’t interrupt,” Sully told her. “He’s deep in thought.”

  “I never minded tying your shoe,” Rub said. “I know your knee’s hurt. I didn’t forget.” This last was delivered so unconvincingly that Sully and Cass exchanged glances.

  Rub’s spirits plunged. He remembered yesterday. “Albany.”

  “How come I was in Albany?”

  “For your disability.”

  “And what did they tell me?”

  Rub fell silent.

  “Come on, Rub. This was only yesterday, and I told you at The Horse as soon as I got back.”

  “I know they turned you down, Sully. Hell, I remember.”

  “So what do you do first thing this morning?”

  “How come you can’t just say no?” Rub said, summoning the courage to look up. The conversation had attracted exactly the sort of interest Rub had hoped to avoid over in the far booth, and everybody at the counter seemed interested in watching him squirm. “I wasn’t the one busted up your knee.”

  Sully took out his wallet, handed Rub a ten-dollar bill. “I know you didn’t,” Sully said, gently now. “I just can’t help worrying about you.”

  “Bootsie told me to buy a turkey is all,” he explained.

  Cass came by then and refilled Sully’s cup, topped Rub’s off. “I don’t think you heard her right. She probably said you were a turkey.”

  Rub put the ten into his pocket. Everybody in the place was grinning at him, enjoying how hard it was for him to get ten dollars out of his best friend. He recognized in one or two of the faces the same people who, as eighth-graders, had always enjoyed the fact that he couldn’t produce his homework for Old Lady Peoples. “You’re all in cahoots against me,” he grinned sheepishly, relieved that at last the ordeal was over and he could leave. “It’s less work to go out and earn money than it is to borrow it in here.”

  “Did they even look at your knee yesterday?” Cass wanted to know. In the five minutes since Rub had left, the diner had emptied out. Sully was the only customer seated at the counter now, which allowed him to flex his knee. It was hard to tell, but the swelling seemed to have gone down a little. Mornings were the worst, until he got going. He didn’t really blame Rub for not understanding why he could neither sit nor stand for very long, or how if he happened to be seated the knee throbbed until he stood up, giving him only a few moments’ peace before throbbing again until he sat down, back and forth, every few minutes until he loosened up and the knee settled into ambient soreness, like background music, for the rest of the day, sending only the occasional current of scalding pain, a rim shot off the snare drum, down to his foot and up into his groin, time to rock and roll.

  “They don’t look at knees,” Sully told her, finishing his second cup of coffee and waving off another free refill. “They look at reports. X rays. Knees they don’t bother with.”

  In fact, Sully had suggested showing the judge his knee, just approaching the bench, dropping his pants and showing the judge his red, ripe softball of a knee. But Wirf, his one-legged sot of a lawyer, had convinced him this tactic wouldn’t work. Judges, pretty much across the board, Wirf said, took a dim view of guys dropping their pants in the courtroom, regardless of the purpose. “Besides,” Wirf explained, “what the knee looks like is irrelevant. They got stuff that’d make even my prosthesis swell up like a balloon. One little injection and they could make you look like gangrene had set in, then twenty-four hours later the swelling goes down again. Insurance companies aren’t big believers in swelling.”

  “Hell,” Sully said. “They can keep me overnight. Keep me all week. If the swelling goes down, the drinks are on me.”

  “Nobody wants you overnight, including the court,” Wirf assured him. “And these guys can all afford to buy
their own drinks. Let me handle this. When it’s our turn, don’t say a fuckin’ word.”

  So Sully had kept his mouth shut, and after they waited all morning, the hearing had taken no more than five minutes. “I don’t want to see this claim again,” the judge told Wirf. “Your client’s got partial disability, and the cost of his retraining is covered. That’s all he’s entitled to. How many times are we going to go through this?”

  “In our view, the condition of my client’s knee is deteriorating—” Wirf began.

  “We know your view, Mr. Wirfly,” the judge said, holding up his hand like a traffic cop. “How’s school going, Mr. Sullivan?”

  “Great,” Sully said. “Terrific, in fact. The classes I needed were full, so I’m taking philosophy. The hundred bucks I spent on textbooks in September I haven’t been reimbursed for yet. They don’t like to pay for my pain pills either.”

  The judge took all this in and processed it quickly. “Register early next term,” he advised. “Don’t blame other people for the way things are. Keep that up and you’ll end up a lawyer like Mr. Wirfly here. Then where will you be?”

  Where indeed? Sully had wondered. In truth, he wouldn’t trade places with Wirf.

  “So, arc you going to keep after them?” Cass wanted to know.

  Sully stood up, tested his knee with some weight, rocked on it. “Wirf wants to.”

  “What do you want?”

  Sully thought about it. “A night’s sleep’d be good.”

  When he started for the door, Cass motioned him back with a secretive index finger and they moved farther down the counter. “Why don’t you come to work here at the restaurant?” she said, her voice lowered.

  “I don’t think so,” Sully said. “Thanks, though.”

  “Why not?” she insisted. “It’s warm and safe and you’re in here half the time anyway.”

  This was true, and even though Sully had half a dozen reasons for not wanting to work at Hattie’s, he wasn’t sure any of them would make sense to Cass. For one thing, if he worked at Hattie’s he wouldn’t be able to wander in off the street when he felt like it because he’d already be there. And he much preferred the side of the counter he was on to the side Cass was on. “You don’t need me, for one thing,” he pointed out.