Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  Sully wanted no part of it. “Put the money in an envelope and drop it. It’ll take you two seconds. Even you can’t lose a hard-on that fast.”

  “It must be a long time since you’ve had one,” Carl said. “You’ve forgotten.” He disappeared.

  In a minute he was back again with an envelope. “This is going to land on the ledge, you know.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Sully said. “The money you owe me usually ends up stuck in your pocket, not on window ledges.”

  “This is no way to do business,” Carl said, but he let go of the envelope, which cleared the second-story ledge and Frisbeed out into the street. Sully fielded it cleanly, opened the envelope, extracted the bills. “Before you go I got something else for you,” Carl called down, and when Sully looked up he saw he was being mooned. Carl’s white ass was sticking out the window, and there was the sound of female laughter inside. The ass disappeared before Sully could pack and deliver a new snowball. The window slammed shut.

  Sully was about to leave when he noticed that the dark sedan that had been parked along the road by the job site yesterday was parked a ways down the street. There was a man at the wheel who appeared to be closely inspecting some sort of black box. Sully waved. The man did not wave back. Only when the snowball exploded on his windshield did he lower the electric window and poke his head partially out.

  “You get a good shot of all that?” Sully said, indicating the window above.

  “I don’t follow you,” the man said evenly.

  “I thought that’s all you guys did.”

  “I think you have an imperfect understanding of the situation,” the man said in the kind of voice that Sully despised. It reminded him of the way the insurance company lawyers talked at his disability hearings.

  “I’d be careful just the same,” Sully said. Carl, he knew, owned a handgun.

  “Are you threatening me?” the man wanted to know.

  “Not unless you’re afraid of snowballs.”

  “Good,” the man said, and the window hummed up.

  Rub was dancing back and forth on the balls of his feet when Sully arrived at Hattie’s.

  “I wisht Hattie’s was open,” he said. He had dried donut cream in both corners of his mouth.

  “How come, Rub?”

  “So I could’ve gone inside and waited for you where it was warm,” he explained seriously.

  Sully just stood there and grinned at him until Rub got embarrassed and studied his shoes. “You’re going to rag me all day, aren’t you,” he said sadly.

  They walked up the street to where Sully’s pickup was parked. Miss Beryl, clutching her thick robe to her throat, was standing on the side porch, peering down at the snowblower. Which gave Sully an idea. Taking the chain he always kept in the toolbox and the Yale lock he used to secure the box, he limped up the drive to where his landlady was standing. “That’s so you can start doing the driveway yourself when you feel like it,” Sully told her.

  “I couldn’t, even with that,” Miss Beryl said. She was staring at the machine suspiciously. “It’d probably get going along and just drag me down the street. The neighbors would look out their windows and say, ‘There goes old Beryl.’ ”

  “Don’t be silly,” Sully kidded her. “It’d be good exercise.”

  “I don’t want exercise. These are my golden years. What are you going to do with that chain?”

  Sully already had the snowblower secured to the railing. He could have just hidden the machine in the garage, but he liked the idea of showing Carl right where it was. “Keeping the man I stole this from stealing it back. If he comes by, call the cops.”

  It took Miss Beryl a minute to digest this. She was an old woman who’d lived a schoolteacher’s life, but she was also a good sport, Sully knew. “As I said, you’re a cur, sir.”

  Then she grew serious. “Tell me something, Donald,” she said. “Does it ever bother you that you haven’t done more with the life God gave you?”

  Sully had decided years ago not to take offense at Miss Beryl’s more personal observations. “Not often,” he admitted, rattling the chain to make sure it was secure. “Now and then.”

  Maybe sheetrocking wasn’t one of Sully’s favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm it’d get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years—that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it. This morning, in fact, it moved right along. The temperature rose steadily, and Sully and Rub, who had figured to be frozen by midmorning, still had feeling in their fingers. The two men fell naturally into a smooth, moderate pace that would probably get them finished more quickly than hurrying.

  Carl Roebuck wondered how Sully could stand to work with Rub, but in truth, Rub was one of the few people he’d ever been able to work with. Rub was the perfect dance partner, always content to let Sully, or whoever he was working with, lead. The beauty of Rub was that he had no agenda of his own. If Sully was in a hurry or had somewhere to go, another job to do when this one was finished, hauling ass was fine with Rub. If for some reason—like they were being paid by the hour—they needed to go slow, then Rub was even more of a marvel the way he was able to stay in motion without accomplishing anything. Rub was a perfect laborer, born to follow orders, not minding in the least when he was told to do things wrong, able to convey the impression of progress even as he ensured that the job wouldn’t get done today. If need be, you could rest easy that the job wouldn’t get done until there was another one to replace it. All of this without ever appearing to stall or even rest. Sully always maintained that if you had ten guys working on a rock pile, Rub would be the last you’d fire for laziness. Only when you’d fired all the others would you realize that Rub had not yet addressed his first rock.

  Truth be told, Sully and Rub had gone slow the day they dug up Carl Roebuck’s terrace and laid the new water pipe. It’d been a hot August day, and somehow they’d managed to talk Carl into an hourly wage arrangement, which meant there was no reason to bust their balls, especially with Toby Roebuck coming out every now and then to ask how it was coming and wonder how they could actually work in such heat. She gave them tall, cold glasses of lemonade to drink. Dressed in a thin, loose-fitting blouse, she’d bent over to hand the lemonade down into the trench they’d dug, and every time she did this Rub stared deep into her blouse, as if it afforded a glimpse of the promised land. Even when she went back into the house Rub continued to stare, slack-jawed, at the place in the air where Toby Roebuck’s full naked breasts had been, as if he could still see them there, like an afterimage burned in the dark. “They’re tan all over,” he kept saying, half admiring, half angry, perhaps at the fact that these breasts had so little to do with himself.

  Sully’d been guilty of five errors in judgment that day. Five that he knew of. There might have been more. First, he’d overestimated the amount of time the first part of the job would take. It had been raining all week and the ground was unexpectedly soft, and they dug most of the trench so quickly he feared they’d be finished by noon with a job they’d hoped to stretch into a full day. So they’d slowed down but good. If Rub was a master at looking busy above ground, he was an absolute artist in a ditch.

  Sully’s second error was in assuming that the last third of the job would go along at the same pace as the first two thirds. He knew better than to assume this, just as Carl Roebuck knew better than to hire him and Rub by the hour, but knowledge, as Sully’s young philosophy professor was fond of observing, often bore little relation to behavior. By the time he and Rub got up close to the house and encountered the roots of the old oak that had provided them with shade to drink their lemonade in during the long, pleasant afternoon, they’d slowed down so completely that it was hard to get started again. By then it was the hottest part of the day and they’d
drunk too much sweet lemonade. Stirred by lust for Toby Roebuck, the lemonade had begun to churn in their stomachs. And so around four in the afternoon they talked her into going over to the IGA and getting them a six-pack of beer (Sully’s third error in judgment), which arrived ice cold. That first can, in conjunction with the terrific heat, pole-axed them. To make matters worse, Toby Roebuck drank one with them, and then another, and they all began to enjoy the heat. Toby sat at the edge of the ditch and dangled her long creamy legs down into the hole like the schoolgirl she so resembled.

  She’d finally gone inside, to draw a cool bath, she said, before they had to turn the water off, when Carl came home to a sight he found difficult to credit. He’d hoped, if not expected, that the job would be finished, the new pipe laid, the trench filled in, water pressure restored. Instead he found a trench extending from the street all the way up the lawn to the house, a trench that was about twice as wide and ugly as it needed to be, beer cans strewn along its edge, and Sully, half in the bag with heat and beer, flailing maniacally with his pickax at the stubborn tough roots of the recently encountered oak.

  Sully’s fourth error in judgment had been fated when he looked up and saw that what Carl Roebuck had slung over his shoulder was his golf clubs. At that moment, for Sully, the whole world took on the aspect of feces. Golf was not a game he’d ever particularly wanted to take up. Nobody he liked had ever played golf, and a lot of the people he disliked intensely played all the time. But the moment he looked up and saw that Carl Roebuck had been playing golf while he and Rub were busting their balls in the heat (it seemed to him at that moment that they had been busting their balls all day), it occurred to Sully that golf was one of a great number of fine things in life that had been denied him. And he could have listed all the others, had anyone asked him what they were. No one did.

  So, before Carl Roebuck could say a word, Sully had held up a grimy index finger in warning and told his employer that if he said one word he was going to take one of those golf clubs and shove it up Carl Roebuck’s ass until he could hit high “C.”

  Then Carl Roebuck made an error in judgment. He set his golf bag down on the lawn, sat down on top of it and laughed. By laughing, of course, he was doing as he was told. He was not saying a word, and this fact kept Sully in the trench, from which he’d been prepared, bum leg or no bum leg, to climb out and make good on his threat. Instead, he stayed where he was and waited for Carl to stop laughing, which, eventually, he did.

  “You think this is funny?” Sully had said weakly.

  Carl nodded, still not saying a word.

  “Well, wait till you get the bill.”

  Carl grunted to his feet, shouldered the golf bag. “Sully, Sully, Sully,” he said. “You’re right. That will be funny too. Not as funny as the look on your face when you try to cash the check I’m going to pay you with, but definitely funny.”

  Sully hadn’t thought Carl Roebuck would follow through on his threat, and that had been his fifth mistake. He and Rub had run into more trouble, all of it legitimate, and he’d thought Carl understood this. The pipes they’d exposed were old, as old as the house probably, and they disintegrated like papyrus to the touch, which was fine until Sully managed to break the last section off at the elbow joint where the pipe connected to the main line under the street. The old pipe was rusted and frozen there, impossible to remove, impossible to install the new plastic pipe around. It was terrible luck, but the only decent piece of metal in the whole line was the six-inch joint, frozen there at the elbow. If it could have been removed by banging on or swearing at, Sully would have managed it, because he swore at the pipe and banged on it until it was too dark to see anymore. Then Carl Roebuck called the County Water and Sewer and was told they’d send a man out in the morning. Which meant that the Roebucks would have to spend the night without water. Fortunately, Toby had already taken her cool bath, and when she came out to say an embarrassed good-bye she looked fresh and cool in a thin blouse that was even looser than the one she’d been wearing earlier. Sully had to lead Rub back to the truck.

  Today, months later, as they sheetrocked, the only breasts around were those in the obscene jingle Sully was trying to teach Rub, who always worked happily when he had something to distract him. Almost anything distracted Rub. Several times, after he’d recited it perfectly, they’d congratulated themselves that Rub had mastered its intricacies:

  I like Carnation best of all.

  No tits to pull

  No shit to haul.

  No shit to haul,

  No hay to pitch.

  Just pop a hole in that son of a bitch.

  But ten minutes later Rub would forget how it began. He kept wanting to start it “I like tits best of all.” Which rendered the second line inaccessible. “It’s because I do like tits best of all,” Rub explained. “I like pussy too, as long as I don’t have to look at it. It kind of scares me to look at.”

  What scared Sully was the pain in his knee. It’d been growing steadily worse all morning, pain shooting all the way down into his ankle and up almost to his groin. Until a few weeks ago he’d been able to ignore it. He’d always prided himself on a high threshold of pain. Pain, he’d learned as a kid, would peak, and from that point forward it would get no worse. What you looked for was the moment when the pain peaked and you realized you could stand it, that it wouldn’t kill you. As a boy, Sully had learned to accommodate his father’s drunken whuppings by waiting for Big Jim’s fury to hit its apex, then slide away, spent, leaving Sully full of pride and, yes, love. You could feel good in pain, and that was something not everybody knew. One of his father’s favorite jokes had been the one that went “Why did the moron beat his head against the wall? Because it felt so good when he stopped.” Sully understood that the reason his father liked the joke was not so much that it was funny as because it was literally true. There was pleasure to be taken from the diminishment of pain. It did feel good when you stopped.

  What frightened Sully about this new, more intense pain in his knee was its relentlessness. As a boy, he had not realized what his father must have known, that pain could have a cumulative effect. Your ability to withstand it had much to do with your ability to catch your breath between its assaults. The pain in Sully’s knee had not truly worried him as long as bad days alternated with good ones. But now he was beginning to suspect that the periods of respite, the troughs in the wave that had so far allowed him to prepare for the peaks, were beginning to disappear. Anymore, it was rare for him to sleep more than four hours a night, and even these hours were tinged with dream pain. Even the self of his dreams was hobbled now, and when he awoke it was with the sensation that he hadn’t really been asleep.

  If this weren’t enough, Jocko’s pills made him feel dreamy even when he was awake, and Sully’d begun to fear that he was slowly migrating toward a state that was somewhere in between sleep and consciousness where the only constant was pain, and this to Sully was more frightening than the specific shooting pains he felt on bad days like today. Shooting pains were human, like the whuppings he got from his father. He’d endured such pain by remembering that his father had only so much strength, so much meanness, in him. At some point Big Jim always saw what he was doing and would be satisfied and the pain would stop. What Sully feared now was that he was facing a new kind of pain, one that wouldn’t know or care when he’d had all he could take. It might never be satisfied.

  This morning Sully’d resisted taking one of Jocko’s pills, fearing that it would render him useless. It didn’t take a lot of mental agility to sheetrock, but it did take some. You couldn’t do it and sleep too, and some of Jocko’s better painkillers worked like Mickey Finns, with about as much warning. And Rub required supervision at all tasks. Rub’s cousins, none of whom would themselves be mistaken for theoretical mathematicians, complained that he couldn’t even collect garbage right, and Sully didn’t want to be doped up and in the immediate vicinity of a grown man who couldn’t learn a short bawdy jingle afte
r three hours of practice. No pills until they finished.

  “Doesn’t pussy kind of scare you to look at?” Rub wanted to know.

  “I don’t remember,” Sully told him.

  “How can you forget pussy?” Rub said.

  “How can you forget the Carnation jingle?”

  “Well,” Rub said, ignoring this. “I don’t like how it looks.”

  It was nearly two in the afternoon when they finished. Rub was disappointed at not mastering the jingle but able to console himself that at least they were done working on Thanksgiving and therefore no longer in need of the jingle’s distraction. He was also pleased to contemplate the big ole turkey Bootsie had browning in the oven, getting all crispy. “I like that big ole flap of skin over the turkey’s asshole,” he told Sully as they stashed their hammers and belts in Sully’s toolbox.

  Sully suspected that Rub’s understanding of a turkey’s anatomy was imperfect. The “asshole” he was referring to was probably the turkey’s neck cavity, which Rub couldn’t visualize with the head missing, the neck detached. “I don’t know, Rub,” Sully said as they climbed into the pickup. “The sight of pussy scares you, but you can’t wait to eat the asshole out of a turkey.” He extracted one of Jocko’s pills from its bright pink tube, made the sign of the cross, and swallowed it dry.

  “Say la vee,” Rub said.

  Sully, who had been half listening to Rub and half to the singing of his own knee, blinked and looked over at his friend, who was patiently waiting for him to turn the key in the ignition so they could go home to the big ole turkey. Rub was only vaguely aware of having spoken in a foreign language, and when he saw Sully staring at him, he concluded that for once he knew something somebody else didn’t. “To each his fuckin’ own,” he translated for Sully’s benefit.

  Sully was still laughing ten minutes later when he dropped Rub off in front of his house. “Uh-oh,” Rub said, and Sully saw why.

  Rub’s wife, Bootsie, was coming down the walk from their apartment, and she had a pretty good head of steam up, given her size. As Wirf was fond of observing, there was enough of Bootsie to make two perfectly ugly grown women and enough left over to make the ugliest baby you ever saw. When angered, as she apparently was now, she was a fearful sight.