Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  Tonight, despite his steadfast intention, Sully had gone to The Horse and gotten involved. Tiny had given his regular bartender, a man he suspected of stealing and giving away too many free drinks, the night off and was being a pain in the ass as usual. He didn’t know why he bothered to stay open in the winter, when he lost money. As soon as The Ultimate Escape opened, he was going to sell out and take his money and go live in Florida. If there was any money left after so many winters of bad business. For the past two hours Sully had half listened to Tiny bellyache, and he was now tired of it. Wirf had been listening to the same shit, but Wirf was impossible to bend out of shape, this night or any other. The more Wirf drank the drunker he got, and the drunker he got the more tolerant he became, and by this time of night he wouldn’t have said shit if he had a mouthful.

  “You know what,” Sully told him, not bothering to conceal his irritation. “You wouldn’t say shit if you had a mouthful.”

  “Wouldn’t be much point,” Wirf observed. He was wearing his postmidnight grin, and this grin had been known to get Sully worked up. It wasn’t really a grin at all. Past a certain point of intoxication, Wirf had imperfect control of his facial muscles, and this was just his rictus face. A big shit-eating grin.

  “When was the last time you won a case?” Sully asked him.

  The question surprised Wirf without, apparently, angering him. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You let everybody piss on your shoes is what it’s got to do with,” Sully explained. “They walk right up, unzip and pee. And what do you do? Stand there and grin at them.”

  Wirf chuckled good-naturedly now. “Who pisses on my shoes, Sully? Besides you, I mean.”

  “Exactly,” Tiny said from down the bar, where he’d retreated to avoid Sully. Tiny, at nearly seventy, was huge, and when he sat on the stool he kept behind the bar on slow nights like this the stool disappeared, creating the illusion that Tiny was being magically supported on a pillow of air, like the puck in a game of air hockey. Tiny’s obesity was another thing that irritated Sully after his fifth or sixth bottle of beer. That and the fact that Tiny kept reminding him of the fact that he’d run his father, Big Jim, out of The Horse when Sully was a boy, thrown him out bodily into the street more than once, and was publicly on record as saying that one asshole Sullivan was pretty much the same as the next.

  “Come here a minute,” Sully suggested.

  There were only a half-dozen customers in the bar. Carl Roebuck had left before Sully and Vince came in. Vince had drunk one beer, handed Sully, like a baton, over to Wirf and then left. Tiny was comfortable right where he was. “What for?”

  “Just come here,” Sully explained.

  Tiny hated this shit. He hated having his chain yanked, especially by Sully. On the other hand, he was tending bar and Sully was with Wirf and Wirf was Tiny’s best customer. He climbed off his stool. “What do you want?”

  Sully waited for him to come all the way down the bar, then said, “How are you?”

  “What do you want?” Tiny repeated.

  “I was just wondering how you are,” Sully said. “Doing well, I hope?”

  Wirf gave Tiny a don’t-blame-me look.

  “I don’t get a chance to talk to you that much,” Sully explained. “I wanted to make sure you were okay. You need any money or anything?”

  When Tiny turned and headed back down the bar, Sully said, “I also thought you might let us in on how you got to be such a cheap son of a bitch.”

  “Don’t start this again,” Tiny warned.

  In fact, Sully’s complaint was an old one. He just couldn’t get over how cheap Tiny was, especially with regard to Wirf, who dropped a lot of money in The Horse every night. The regular bartender would buy every fifth round or so, but Tiny never sprung. He couldn’t even be shamed into buying a round by Sully, who was a past master at shaming bartenders.

  “Look at those fucking lights,” Sully said, pointing to the string of Christmas lights Tiny had just put up that afternoon. Nearly half were fluttering or dead out. “What would it cost you to put some new lights on that string. A buck?”

  “Anymore you can’t buy a candy bar for a buck,” Tiny said, and this observation produced general agreement, despite its being obviously and demonstrably false. Tiny himself sold Snickers bars for seventy-five cents.

  Tiny’s bellyaching was also an old song, and tonight’s lyric had been about how expensive utilities were anymore and how it didn’t pay to keep the place open on slow nights in winter.

  “I got an idea,” Sully said. “Let’s take up a collection and help Tiny out. He’s beginning to look thin. I don’t think he’s got enough money for food.”

  “Go home, Sully,” Tiny advised.

  Sully returned to Wirf. “I just don’t see how you can let guys like him piss on your shoes. How much money have you spent in here tonight?”

  “Not a dime,” Wirf said. “I haven’t paid my tab yet. Besides, I don’t expect people to buy me drinks. I can buy my own drinks.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What is the point, then?”

  Sully wasn’t sure, but he knew there was one. He wasn’t really angry with Tiny or Wirf, though he’d been bickering with both of them. The one he was really angry at, somewhat belatedly, was Ruth’s husband, Zack, whom he now realized he should have punched. And for reasons that made less than perfect sense to him he was also mad at Ruth, whom he’d never treated as well as she deserved. And he was angry over the general state of things. He’d allowed himself to start working for Carl Roebuck again after swearing he wouldn’t. And he was angry at himself for slipping back into his old infatuation with Carl’s wife. He was even mad and drunk enough to fight about all of this if he could find somebody to fight with.

  “I tell you what,” Wirf said. “Let’s call it a night before you get us eighty-sixed from the only bar in the county that doesn’t play rock-and-roll music.”

  “Hell, yes,” Sully agreed. “I never wanted to come in here in the first place, if you recall.”

  They left money on the bar. “You must’ve,” Wirf pointed out. “Otherwise you’d have gone home.”

  On the way out Sully stopped at the end of the bar where Tiny had returned to his stool. “Let me have one of those Snickers bars if it’s not too much trouble,” he said.

  Tiny got up and handed Sully the candy bar suspiciously. Sully handed him two one-dollar bills. Tiny shoved one of the bills back at him, growling, “Seventy-five.”

  “Nah,” Sully said, pushing it back. “You can’t get a candy bar for a buck anymore. You said so yourself.”

  “Take your fucking dollar, Sully. Don’t be a pain in the ass.”

  Sully put his hands up, as if he were under arrest. “Uh-uh,” he said. “That’s your dollar.”

  Tiny put it into his pocket. “That make you happy, you mallet head?”

  “Yes,” Sully told him. “I’ve never been happier.”

  “You remain the uncontested master of the futile gesture,” Wirf observed as they struggled drunkenly on with their winter coats by the door. “Give me half of that, will you?”

  “Sure,” Sully said, breaking the candy bar in two. “You owe me a dollar. I’ll let it go, since I owe you about two thousand.”

  “Why don’t you go back to school?” Wirf wanted to know. “You’re just going to get hurt.”

  “It’s out of my hands,” Sully said before shoving his half of the candy bar in his mouth. Wirf waited for him to chew and swallow. “My philosophy professor doesn’t believe there’s any such thing as free will.”

  “What does he believe in?” Wirf wanted to know.

  Sully shrugged. “He’s a Jew. He probably believes in all sorts of screwball things.”

  “Not necessarily,” Wirf said, pushing the door open and holding it for Sully. “I’m a Jew, and I don’t believe in much of anything.”

  Outside, the two men stopped on the top step and stared out into the s
treet in disbelief. They’d been vaguely aware that it had started snowing again. Sully had seen the flakes coming down through the Black Label sign in the tavern’s window. But neither man had expected this. Beneath the lamps that lined Main the whole street was ghostly white.

  “I believe it snowed,” Sully said. “That’s what I believe.”

  They stepped down into it. “About a foot, I believe,” Wirf said, staring at where his scuffed brown wingtips had disappeared. “I believe I need some boots.”

  Sully was wearing his work boots, but the snow was over these too, and it was still snowing. “I didn’t know you were a Jew,” Sully said truthfully. “I thought Jews were supposed to be sharp lawyers.”

  “Sully,” Wirf said, whipping his scarf over his shoulder so that it swatted Sully in the face. “You’re a prince. Remember. No black thoughts.”

  Sully watched Wirf inch his way across the street warily to where his Regal was parked before heading upstreet toward his flat. In a minute the Regal slalomed by. Wirf had his window rolled down so he could chant “Goodnight, sweet prince.”

  The thick blanket of snow was a silencer on the land, and by the time Sully got home the street was utterly still. It was after one o’clock, and the curb-parked cars along the street looked like white hills, and Sully would not have been surprised to see a horse-drawn carriage turn down the street, its harness bells all astir.

  All this peace on earth could mean only one thing. Tomorrow would not be peaceful. So much unseasonal snow would slow the work on Carl Roebuck’s unbuilt houses and make him doubly anxious to finish them before the ground froze and things got really impossible. Unless the weather warmed up some, he and Rub would freeze their asses tomorrow. Sheetrocking was a job you couldn’t do with gloves on, and by midmorning their hands would be so cold they’d feel their fingers only when they hit them with hammers. And Carl would probably visit half a dozen times to badger them and tell them about the next shitty job he had planned for them on Friday, one, he’d claim, even they couldn’t fuck up. And before they could even get started working for Carl, he’d have to shovel the sidewalk and driveway so his landlady could get out. All on a knee that by morning would be a symphony of pain.

  It would have been discouraging if he hadn’t gotten an idea.

  It took him a minute to find the long-handled brush in the back of his pickup, but when he did he was in business. In thirty seconds he’d brushed the snow off the pickup’s front window and hood, and two minutes after that he was backing the truck into Carl Roebuck’s driveway, right up to where the snowblower sat, itself covered with snow. There were still three sheets of plywood on the floor of the pickup, and these Sully used to form a makeshift ramp. They buckled but did not break under the weight of the snowblower. When Sully popped the tailgate back up with a bang, a light came on upstairs and Toby Roebuck appeared, a dark silhouette in the window, which she slid up so she could poke her head out. “That you, Sully?” she wanted to know.

  “Yup,” Sully admitted. “I may deny it tomorrow, though.”

  “You come to steal our brand-new snowblower?”

  “I’ve done it already, just about.”

  “I could legally shoot you and get away with it,” Toby informed him.

  “Not really. Not unless I was trying to break into the house.”

  “Are you going to break into my house?”

  “Not tonight, dolly,” Sully said. The conversation, even with their voices lowered, was a bit unnerving at this hour. Quiet as it was, the whole neighborhood could be listening. “Where’s Dummy, by the way?”

  “Who knows?” Toby Roebuck said. “He tried to get in earlier, then gave up. He took my threat to shoot him a lot more seriously than you just did, Sully.”

  “I don’t blame him,” Sully said. “You got more reason to shoot him.”

  “Do I now,” she said, then after a minute added, “You ever get so mad you just wanted to shoot somebody and didn’t care who?”

  “Sure,” Sully admitted, without feeling much urge to tell her that was how he’d been feeling about fifteen minutes ago at The Horse. “It’s the reason I don’t own a gun.”

  “You should get one,” she suggested. “I’ve got Carl’s. The two of us could go on a rampage. Rob banks. Go out in a blaze of glory. Bonnie and Clyde.”

  “You’d have to be Clyde,” Sully told her. “I couldn’t do much more than drive the getaway car.”

  “Men have no imagination,” Toby said, reminding Sully of what Vince had told him at the restaurant, that Toby Roebuck might be involved with someone from Schuyler Springs. Apparently not, to judge from this remark, unless the man in question didn’t have any imagination either.

  “Well,” Sully said, surprised to discover that he was about to stand up for Carl Roebuck, of all people, “don’t be too hard on him. The heart bypass is still on his mind. He’s probably just trying to do everything in six months. When it dawns on him he’s going to live to be seventy, he’ll slow down.”

  “He pretty nearly didn’t live till Thanksgiving,” she said with what sounded to Sully like genuine conviction. Then, after a long moment of silence, she said, “Well, go ahead and steal our snowblower. You’re the slowest thief I ever saw. I don’t think you’d even be a decent wheel man.”

  Back at his flat Sully was suddenly exhausted again, having burned off the energy he’d derived from the half Snickers bar, and he was tempted to leave the snowblower right there in the back of the pickup, except he was afraid he might oversleep in the morning. When Carl Roebuck came over to find out where he was, he’d be just as liable to steal the snowblower back again before Sully had a chance to use it. So he unloaded the machine and hid it safely out of sight in the corner of Miss Beryl’s garage under a tarp.

  It turned out to be a good decision, because the first thing Sully noticed when he got upstairs was Carl Roebuck asleep on the couch, his mouth wide open, an empty pint of Canadian whiskey on the floor below his outstretched hand. For a brief moment, Sully wasn’t sure Carl was alive, thought perhaps he’d had his final heart attack right there on the couch. But then Carl snorted loudly and rearranged himself, and Sully was relieved that it was a living man asleep on the sofa and not a dead one, even if that man happened to be Carl Roebuck.

  Sully had an extra blanket around somewhere, but he was too tired to think where, so he covered Carl with the blanket off his own bed. His bedroom was often too warm anyway, and the sheet would be plenty. He was asleep before he could doubt it.

  THURSDAY

  Carl Roebuck woke early. Sully heard him turn the TV on low, to an exercise show. The clock on Sully’s dresser said six-thirty, which meant that Carl was watching Wake Up, America, whose aerobic hostess, to judge from her face, had to be in her forties. Her body was pretty remarkable, toned and athletic, but it wasn’t a young body, Sully had noticed. When she danced next to her youthful assistants, she looked merely heroic. Maybe that was what made Sully sad when he watched her. The woman seemed to be dancing for her very life, and Sully would have liked to tell her to go slow.

  Carl Roebuck was watching her absently, half asleep, hand in the open fly of his boxers, when Sully looked in.

  “Lose something?” Sully said. “Or have you just worn it down to a nub?”

  Carl betrayed not the slightest embarrassment. “This is the worst couch I ever slept on,” he observed sleepily without looking up at Sully.

  “How old are you?” Sully asked, genuinely curious. Sitting there with his hand in his shorts, Carl Roebuck looked, despite his paunch, like a kid.

  Carl gave no evidence of having heard this question. In a minute he said, “You ever wake up horny anymore?”

  “No,” Sully told him. In truth, he’d seldom woken up horny as a younger man, and morning lovemaking, back when he was married, had never been terribly successful. Before noon his orgasms were always vague, like the distant rumblings of a train half a mile away and headed in the other direction. It was one of the things wrong
with his marriage. Vera had often awakened feeling frisky, an enthusiasm that had seldom survived breakfast. Sully attributed this to her Puritan upbringing. Some girls you just had to catch before they woke up enough to remember who they were.

  “Tell me you don’t want to get it on with this broad right now,” Carl challenged. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off the TV, though he’d finally removed his hand from his shorts.

  “What’s wrong with you, anyway?” Sully said.

  Carl Roebuck sighed. “I have no idea. Honest to God,” he confessed. “Lately I want to fuck ’em all. Even the ugly ones. You ever want to fuck the ugly ones?”

  “This conversation’s getting kind of personal,” Sully told him.

  Carl looked hurt. “Okay. Ignore me in my moment of pain and crisis. I reach out to you as a friend, and what do I get? Heartache.”

  Sully grinned at him. This “What do I get? Heartache” line was one of Carl’s favorites and was impossible to take seriously, though it occurred to Sully that there just might be an element of seriousness now. “Just because I don’t lock my front door doesn’t make us friends. What’re you doing here, anyhow?”

  Carl stood up, pretended to do jumping jacks, his feet firmly planted on the floor, only his arms in motion. “I wanted to make sure you got an early start. You have a lot of work to do,” he observed. “You and your smelly dwarf finish with those blocks yesterday?”