“I wish it was just between twelve and one that they checked,” Carl said. “I can take my lunch break whenever I want.”
“Go home and see Toby,” Sully suggested, wondering if Carl knew yet about the locks. “You’re married to the best-looking woman in town, you jerk.”
Carl rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” he said. “You remember who said that?”
Sully didn’t remember.
“Where do they talk Latin?” Rub wanted to know.
Nobody said anything for a moment, but Carl was grinning now. Talking to Rub seemed to have cheered him. Sully knew the feeling. It was hard to feel sorry for yourself when Rub was around.
“I’m thinking of establishing a college scholarship,” Carl told him. “You should apply.”
“I never graduated from goddamn high school,” Rub said, halfway between recollected anger and regret.
“Then what makes you think you’re eligible for a college scholarship?” Carl asked him.
This question so confused Rub that he looked to Sully for help. “Just don’t listen to him,” Sully advised.
“I can’t believe this is as far as you’ve got,” Carl said, surveying the huge pyramid of blocks that remained.
“I can’t believe anybody set them down here in the first place,” Sully remarked. “Right next to a basement that’s already built.”
Carl Roebuck, more interested in today’s lunacy than yesterday’s, did not appear to have heard this. “At this rate you’ll still be here Christmas.”
“You’ll know right where to bring my Christmas present then,” Sully said. “Don’t go to a lot of trouble. The money you owe me will be fine.”
Carl appeared not to hear this, his attention having been captured by a detail at his feet. There in the mud were the two blocks Sully had placed in front of the truck’s rear wheels three hours earlier. They looked like they were just sitting there, like a man might be able to bend over and just pick them up, except that when Carl Roebuck tried, he discovered they were frozen in place, as immovable as the blocks cemented the day before into the basement foundation a few feet away. Carl looked at Sully, who was grinning at him.
“Go ahead,” Sully invited. “Pick ’em up.”
“You’d like to see me have another heart attack, wouldn’t you?”
Sully snorted at the suggestion. “Don’t worry. It’s not your destiny to die working.”
Carl apparently agreed with this assessment, or was insufficiently motivated to argue the point, though he continued to try to budge the frozen blocks with the heel of his loafer, as he leaned back against the £1 Camino for leverage. From where they were standing, they could just see the top of the Ultimate Escape billboard across the highway and a quarter mile in toward town. “I’m going to feel a lot better when they get started on that son of a bitch,” Carl reflected.
Sully followed his gaze across Carl’s tract of housing development land, across the four-lane spur, all the way to the clown’s head. “Tell me something,” Sully said. “Who the hell’s going to buy these houses with an amusement park across the street? You should be praying they never start.”
“Sully, Sully, Sully,” Carl said. “You just don’t understand the world.”
Sully had to admit this was probably true.
“As soon as they break ground over there, they’re going to need everything on this side of the road for a parking lot. For which they will pay dearly.”
“Then why are you building houses?”
“So they will pay more dearly.”
Sully considered this. The reasoning was vintage Carl Roebuck, of course, and Sully could feel Carl’s father roll over in his grave. Kenny Roebuck had built the company on eighteen-hour days of hard, honest work, only to surrender what he’d built to a high roller, a rogue. “What happens if they don’t build the park?”
“Bite your tongue,” Carl said.
“Well,” Sully said, “I’m sure you’ll be lucky as usual.”
Carl looked as if he’d have given a good deal to be that certain. “Clive Peoples swears it’s going through,” he said with the air of a man comforted by the sound of his own voice.
“And you trust Clive Peoples?”
“He’s in deeper than anybody. He’s got investors lined up all the way to Texas,” Carl said. “What’s in trouble is the Sans Souci. That spring they drilled last summer’s going dry already. They should call that place the Sans Brains.”
Rub was frowning.
“That’s French, Rub,” Carl explained. “You can learn it right after English and Latin.” Then to Sully, “You want to sheetrock the house on Nelson tomorrow? I can have Randy drop all the shit off in the morning if you want the job.”
“Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving,” Rub said.
“Nobody’s talking to you,” Sully told him. Actually, he was of two minds about working tomorrow. If he did, he’d have an excuse not to go to Vera’s, where he wouldn’t be welcome. And he could use the money. And the holiday would go faster if he worked. On the other hand, he hated sheetrocking, and he didn’t know yet how his knee was going to react to today’s labors.
“I ain’t working on Thanksgiving, is all I’m saying,” Rub insisted.
“Nobody asked you to,” Sully reminded him. “When somebody asks you, you can say no.” He turned to Carl. “Double time?”
“In your dreams.”
“Go away and leave us alone then,” Sully said. “Sheetrock the fucker yourself.”
Carl massaged his temples. “Why do you have to hold every simple negotiation hostage? Why should I pay you double time?”
“What’s tomorrow, Rub?” Sully said.
Rub looked even more confused. In his opinion, they’d already been over this. “It’s fuckin’ Thanksgiving,” he said.
“Shut up, Rub,” Carl said. “Nobody’s talking to you.”
“Sully was.”
“When?” Carl said.
“Just now.”
“Just when?”
Rub looked like he might cry.
“What burns my ass, Sully,” Carl said, “is that you wouldn’t even know it was Thanksgiving. You don’t even have a family, for Christ sake. I’m offering to keep you out of trouble for twenty-four hours, and all you can think about is extortion.”
Sully briefly considered telling Carl a couple of things. That his son was in town, for instance, and that strangely enough, he did have an invitation for tomorrow, even if all parties concerned were hoping it would not be accepted. He also considered telling Carl Roebuck what he didn’t know yet—that he was the one who’d probably not have a place to go on this particular Thanksgiving, that none of the keys dangling from the ring in the El Camino’s ignition fit the doors to his house anymore.
Carl got back into the El Camino and started the engine. “Shit,” he said. “All right, time and a half. Call it a Christmas bonus.”
“Pay me what you owe and call it honesty,” Sully suggested.
Carl chose not to hear this. “Time and a half?”
“I’ll consider it,” Sully said, though he knew he’d take it, and knew Carl knew he’d take it.
“It’s a two-man job,” Carl said, nodding imperceptibly in Rub’s direction.
“I ain’t working Thanksgiving,” Rub said stubbornly, and to look at him an objective observer would have concluded that it’d be a waste of time to try to change his mind.
“He will if I ask him,” Sully assured Carl Roebuck. “Won’t you, Rub.”
“Okay,” Rub said.
Carl shook his head sadly, as if to suggest it was a constant trial, this living in an imperfect world. “I see you’re using the plywood, anyway,” he said, shifting the El Camino into gear. “Knowing you two, I’d have sworn it wouldn’t have occurred to you. I figured you’d bust up the whole first load for sure. I just came out to see if I could save the rest.”
Sully didn’t look at Rub. He didn’t have to, having too of
ten seen Rub’s expression when he was about to wet his pants. Fortunately, Carl Roebuck wasn’t paying attention. Sully and Rub watched the El Camino turn and bang its way back out toward the blacktop, where a dark sedan was sitting. For some time Sully had been vaguely aware of the sedan’s presence, but wasn’t sure exactly how long it’d been sitting there. When the El Camino bounced onto the blacktop and headed toward town, the sedan started up and followed.
“Who do you figure was in that other car?” Rub wondered.
“Somebody’s husband, probably.”
They went back to work, silently for a while, until the pickup was all loaded and ready to go. Cold or no cold, Sully rolled down a window in the cab when Rub got in beside him. Rub was as gamy as he ever got in cold weather. “I wisht he’d give me that scholarship,” Rub said.
It was nearly seven when they finally finished. They’d done the last two loads in the dark, with just the quarter moon, darting in and out of high clouds, for light and company. For entertainment Rub continued to wish. Since five o’clock he’d wished it wasn’t dark. He wished they’d stopped for dinner, especially since they didn’t get any lunch. He wished he had one of those big ole double cheeseburgers they served at The Horse, the kind with lots of onions and a big ole slice of cheese and some lettuce and tomato, so big you had to open your mouth as far as you could just to get a bite. He wished he had some of that coleslaw they serve too, and some fries, right out of the grease, so the salt stuck real good. And he wished he’d never said yes to working on Thanksgiving. Only his final wish was really worth wishing. He wished they’d thought to return Bootsie’s car to the Woolworth’s lot before his wife got off work and had to walk home, which always made her mad enough to whack his peenie.
“Let’s stop at The Horse,” Rub said when they’d dropped off the last load of blocks and Sully’d paid him. Rub didn’t like to keep money lying around. He liked it to get up and work. To buy big ole double cheeseburgers and draft beers. He liked to spend it before his wife discovered he had it.
“Not me, Rub,” Sully said. “I’m tired and filthy and I stink almost as bad as you.”
“So?” Rub said. It was impossible to insult him with references to the way he smelled. “It’s just The Horse. Ain’t you hungry?”
“Too tired to chew, actually.” All of Sully’s earlier enthusiasm for going back to work had fallen victim to fatigue. He couldn’t imagine the optimism that had led him to believe he’d be able to do the job without Rub’s help.
“Anybody’s got enough strength to chew,” Rub said.
“Maybe later I’ll feel like it,” Sully said. “Say hi to Bootsie for me. Tell her I’m sorry she married such a dummy.”
“I wisht I didn’t have to go home and see her,” Rub admitted, getting into his wife’s Pontiac. “She’s gonna whack my peenie.”
“Bob and weave,” Sully advised. “It’s a small target.”
Sully’s flat was identical in floor plan to Miss Beryl’s below. The floor plan was the only similarity. Where the downstairs flat was crowded with Miss Beryl’s heavy oak furniture, terra-cotta pots and wicker elephants, its walls freshly papered and hung with framed prints and museum posters under glass, its tables covered with ghostly spirit boats and ornate vases, the various mementoes of her travels, Sully’s flat was wide open, pastoral. In fact, it didn’t look dramatically different from the way it had looked before he moved in with his furniture so many years ago. That morning, it had taken him just under an hour to complete the move, and the few things he brought with him only served to emphasize the flat’s high ceilings, its terrible spaciousness, the echoing sounds he made moving from room to room over the hardwood floors. He’d been forty-eight then and had lived almost his entire adult life in dark, cramped, furnished quarters, which he’d found pretty much to his liking. Ruth had been urging him for a long time to find a decent place to live, claiming that what ailed Sully was his morbid surroundings. He hadn’t argued with her, but he hadn’t moved, either. He hadn’t had any idea, then or now, what ailed him, but he suspected it wasn’t his surroundings. In fact, about the only thing that could have induced him to move was the thing that had happened. He’d left the old flat one afternoon to go buy a pack of cigarettes. The last cigarette of his last pack he left half smoked in an ashtray perched on the arm of his battered sofa.
The corner grocery was only two blocks away, so Sully had walked. He was between jobs and in no particular hurry. When he ran into a couple of guys he knew, he stopped to shoot the breeze. At the store he bought cigarettes and talked with a cop who was loitering near the register. When a fire alarm sounded, the cop left, so Sully took the opportunity to bet a daily double with Ray, the sad, fatalistic store owner who was in his last year of competition with the IGA supermarket. The OTB would open the following year, officially burying Bath’s three neighborhood groceries. “Looks like we got us some midday excitement,” Ray said when the fire engine roared by.
“We could probably stand a little,” Sully’d said absently, lighting a cigarette and trying to account for the vague, distant unease, a sense of menace almost, that he’d become aware of at the edge of his consciousness. He said good-bye to Ray and started home. The fire engine had careened around the corner onto Sully’s street and for some reason turned its siren off. People were running through the intersection, and Sully saw there was a black plume of smoke ascending into the sky above the rooftops. There were more sirens in the distance. A police car flew by.
By the time Sully arrived a large crowd had gathered to watch the house burn. Flames were shooting out of the windows and into the low gray sky. The firemen had already given up combating the blaze and were using their hoses to wet down the houses on either side, trying to prevent them from bursting into sympathetic flame. Losing a house was one thing, but they didn’t want to lose the whole block. There didn’t seem to be anything to do but join the crowd and watch, so Sully did.
After he’d been there awhile, a man he knew noticed him and said hello. “You live around here somewheres, don’t you?” the man added. “I live right there,” Sully pointed at the inferno. “Or I used to.” This admission attracted considerable attention. “Hey!” somebody yelled. “There’s Sully. He’s not dead, he’s right here.” Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetically at the crowd.
Kenny Roebuck, Carl’s father, who owned the building, arrived finally and came over to where Sully was standing. “I heard you were dead,” he said. “Burned alive.”
“I hope they don’t put it in the paper,” Sully said.
Kenny Roebuck agreed. “I wonder how the hell it started.”
“The rumor or the fire?”
“The fire.”
“That would be me, probably,” Sully admitted. He told his landlord and sometime employer about the cigarette he vaguely remembered leaving when he went out to buy more cigarettes. “I hope to Christ there wasn’t anybody inside,” he added. The house had been divided into three flats. In the middle of the afternoon there was probably nobody home, but he wasn’t sure.
“I don’t think there was,” Kenny said, adding, “according to a cop I just talked to, you were the only one killed.”
The roof fell then, shooting red embers high into the afternoon sky and down into the crowd.
“You’re taking this well,” Sully observed.
Kenny Roebuck leaned toward him confidentially and lowered his voice. “Just between us, I’ve been thinking about burning the son of a bitch down myself. Costs me more to fix what goes wrong every month than I collect in rent. I guess I wasn’t cut out to be a slumlord.”
The two men watched until the fire burned itself out.
“Well,” Kenny Roebuck said. “That’s about it, and I should get back to work. I don’t know how to thank you.”
&nbs
p; Sully was still mulling over what his landlord had said before in light of Ruth’s constant pestering him to find a decent place to live. “I never thought of it as a slum,” he admitted.
“You’re the only one that didn’t, then,” Kenny Roebuck said. “Somebody said old Beryl Peoples has a flat for rent on Upper Main.”
This rumor turned out to be true. Kenny Roebuck also wasn’t kidding about being grateful. The next day he gave Sully five hundred dollars for new clothes and some furniture, since Miss Beryl’s flat wasn’t furnished. That made the whole episode pretty much of a bonanza as far as Sully was concerned. He spent two hundred on underwear, socks, shirts, pants and shoes. Two hundred went a considerable distance at the Army-Navy store, which had a used clothing outlet around back. He spent another two hundred on some well-broken-in furniture—a double bed and rickety nightstand, a lamp in the shape of a naked woman, a small chest of drawers, a metal dinette and chairs with plastic seats, a huge sofa for the living room and a coffee table that came with only three legs. The other leg was around somewhere, the man at the used furniture store said. To show his appreciation for Sully’s business he threw in a used toaster. When Sully got all these new worldly goods set up in Miss Beryl’s flat, he plugged in the toaster to see if it worked, without much in the way of expectation. The inner coils glowed angry red though, so he unplugged it again. Since then he hadn’t found an occasion to use the toaster. The only place he ever ate toast was at Hattie’s, as part of the breakfast special.
It was ironic that in a flat so remarkable for its wide-open spaces Sully should be cramped in the kitchen, but he was. The room was tiny, like kitchens in most old houses that had formal dining rooms, so there wasn’t much room for the dinette. Sully finally wedged it into the corner anyway so he’d have something to bang into and swear at. He’d originally set it up in the dining room, but it looked like a joke there, so small and bent and metallic in the middle of such a large room. He couldn’t imagine sitting down and eating anything in there, not even a bowl of cereal. So he ended up shutting the floor register to save on heat and closed the room. He did the same with the second bedroom, which also stood empty.
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