Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  “She wanted me to learn everything,” Rub recalled angrily. “I wisht she’d just die so I could forget her.”

  Jocko was at the OTB, holding up one section of wall. “Those were some pills,” Sully told him. “I slept like a baby.”

  “Good,” Jocko said, suspicious of something in Sully’s voice.

  “Only trouble was, I happened to be at the wheel of my truck at the time.”

  Jocko nodded. “I warned you, if you recall. I see you’re in one piece, anyhow.”

  “Mmmmm,” Sully said. “What was Wednesday’s triple?”

  “Three-one-seven,” Jocko told him. “The reason I remember is that’s what I bet.”

  “Good for you,” Sully told him. “The rich get richer. Do me a favor and don’t spend it all. I may need a loan.”

  “I just signed it over to my wife. Brought me almost up to speed, alimonywise. I’m still on the same rung of the ladder, affectionwise.”

  “I like a woman whose love can’t be bought. What was that triple again?” Sully wanted to know.

  “Three-one-seven. Pay attention, for Christ sake.”

  Sully had located the stub and stared at it to make sure he hadn’t been given the winner by mistake. “I had two thirds of it myself,” he said.

  “Good,” Jocko congratulated him. “How many of those pills did you take yesterday?”

  “Two.”

  Jocko nodded. “They’re not aspirin.”

  “The first one didn’t seem to have much effect.”

  “How about the second one?” Jocko said.

  “That was a doozy,” Sully admitted.

  “Next time wait for the first one to kick in.”

  “I will.”

  Sully bet his 1-2-3 triple and collected Rub, who’d used the dollar Sully had given him earlier to bet a daily double.

  “What’d you bet?” Sully said when they were back on the street. “I forgot,” Rub admitted.

  “Naturally,” Sully said. “You bet it almost a minute ago.”

  “I like Carnation best of all,” Rub said, and he recited the rest of the Carnation Milk jingle as flawlessly as he’d done yesterday in Sully’s dream.

  “Well, what do you know,” Sully said, stopping dead in the middle of the sidewalk. He’d have bet Jocko’s winnings that Rub wouldn’t be able to remember yesterday’s jingle.

  “Old Lady Peoples always tried to get me to memorize poetry back in eighth grade,” Rub told him. “Back then I never could.”

  The same girl was behind the counter at the donut shop, and she looked less than thrilled to see Sully and Rub. Carl Roebuck was sitting at one of the tables in back, and that thrilled Sully, who, since hearing the deathly silence of his pickup truck, had been wishing fervently that he’d taken a fistful of Carl’s money the night before when he had a chance. The woman with Carl in the booth was a blonde, and Sully thought for a minute it was Toby until he saw it wasn’t.

  “Can I borrow another dollar?” Rub said.

  “If you’ll sit here at the counter and not bother me while I’m over there,” Sully said, indicating Carl’s table.

  “I hate Carl,” Rub reminded him.

  Sully handed him a dollar. “There are women in this town I could associate with who’d be cheaper than you,” he said.

  “They wouldn’t be your real friend,” Rub reminded him seriously.

  “Well, I see you’ve recovered,” Sully said when Carl looked up and saw him approaching.

  “Two hours’ sleep,” Carl said proudly. “And I’m fresh as a fucking daisy.”

  Carl did look amazingly well, Sully had to admit. “If you were a daisy, that’d be the kind, all right,” he said. He put a hand on the shoulder of the woman sitting across from Carl, who, now that Sully looked at her, was about the plainest-looking woman he’d ever seen, her age indeterminate, her gender less obvious from the front than the rear. “Would you give us about two minutes, dolly?” he said.

  The woman looked at Carl, who shrugged a yes.

  “Go keep that fellow at the counter company,” Sully suggested, indicating Rub, who’d ordered a big ole cream-filled donut. “He’ll recite you a poem if you ask him nice.”

  The woman went over to the counter but settled on a stool for from Rub, perhaps because his donut had already erupted obscenely.

  “You have to be the dumbest man in Bath,” Sully told Carl Roebuck.

  “That wouldn’t be such an insult if you hadn’t just walked in here with the dumbest man in Bath,” Carl said. “You never count yourself, either.”

  “Speaking of counting,” Sully said. “Count out what you owe me for yesterday.”

  “I haven’t even been out to check on your work,” Carl said.

  “This is the wrong fucking day to start that,” Sully said. “Last night you shoved about a thousand dollars at me. Told me to take what I wanted.”

  Carl nodded, recalling it. “What a day that’d been,” he sang. “What a rare mood I was in.”

  Sully nodded impatiently. “Well, fork it over if you want to be around for your next mood swing.”

  Carl counted out the money he owed Sully for the sheetrocking, pushed it across the formica tabletop. “What?” he said when Sully put the money in his pocket. “You aren’t going to bust my balls about the other?”

  “I don’t want to think about it,” Sully told him. “My truck died this morning, and if I start thinking about all the money you owe me I might kill you before you kill yourself.”

  “Who will you blame for your sad pitiful state of affairs when I’m gone?” Carl wondered.

  Sully got up. “I’ll still blame you,” he said.

  Neither man spoke for a second. Sully didn’t think he’d ever seen a sadder-looking man than Carl Roebuck at that moment. “How about letting me take the El Camino for a day or two,” Sully said.

  “Why not? It’s about shot anyhow,” Carl said, fishing in his pocket for the keys. “Somebody said you were working at Hattie’s,” he added.

  Sully shook his head, amazed as always about the speed with which inconsequential news traveled in Bath. “I better go see if Harold’s got another beater to sell me. And I’m supposed to meet a guy named Miles Anderson who wants me to renovate some house on Main for him.”

  “You should have some business cards printed up,” Carl suggested. “Don Sullivan: Jack-Off. All Trades.”

  “Thanks for the car.” Sully jiggled the keys.

  “I was under the impression you were going to do a job for me today,” Carl said.

  “I’ll see if I can work you in this afternoon when I’m done jacking off,” Sully said, sliding out of the booth again.

  “Send that girl back over on your way out,” Carl told him. “She was just offering to give me a header under the table.”

  Rub was wiping cream off his face with a paper napkin when Sully returned. “That girl kept looking at me,” he said, indicating the woman who’d been sitting in Carl’s booth and who now returned to it. “Now Carl’s got her,” he added unhappily.

  Proxmire Motors was located a mile out of town, just off the blacktop, sandwiched in between Harold’s Junkyard and Harold’s Auto Parts, all three establishments owned and operated by Harold Proxmire. A tow truck with PROXMIRE WRECKING stenciled on the doors also sat in the yard. The sign out front, atop a bent pole, said HAROLD’S AUTOMOTIVE WORLD. Harold’s had five full-time employees—Harold Proxmire; Harold’s wife, Gloria; his chief and only mechanic, a sour-dispositioned man Harold had instructed never, under any circumstances, to speak to the public; a tiny, elderly man who wandered up and down the aisles of the auto parts store, squinting up into the dark upper reaches of the metal shelving stacked with remaindered auto parts; and a teenager, usually a dropout from the high school, whom the Proxmires took under their wing. Harold and Mrs. Proxmire were both Christians, and they hired only troubled Christian teens to fill the teenager slot in their employment scheme. Harold always tried to find a boy who’d been to jail or
reform school at least once, somebody no one else would hire. He paid this boy minimum wage, and Mrs. Harold tutored him in Christian precepts for free from her seat at the cash register. Harold usually hired three of these boys a year. Four months was their average tenure, after which some were lured away by Mammon, in the form of a quarter-an-hour raise. Others just cleaned out the till and bolted. The last had left Mrs. Harold a note in the big bill slot of the cash register that said: “Jesus was a stupid fuck. And so are you.”

  Harold’s current teenager, Dwayne, was lanky and red-haired and sullen, and so far he hadn’t stolen anything from Harold’s Automotive World, though he was beginning to wilt under the weight of daily moral instruction. Mrs. Harold’s lectures about honesty, her constant reminders to be on the alert for Satan in his many guises, worried him some. Dwayne was never tempted to steal anything from Harold, whom he was fond of and grateful to, or even from Mrs. Harold, whom he could tolerate in small doses, and he wondered what was wrong with him that Satan should pay him so little attention. What annoyed him even more than the fact that Satan ignored him was the fact that Harold’s customers did too. Every one of them wanted to deal with Harold only, and Dwayne’s principal duty was to locate his boss, who divided himself among the lot, the garage, the junkyard and the parts store, supervising the operation of all of these at once, abandoning one to wait on an impatient customer in the other.

  When the C. I. Roebuck El Camino pulled in, therefore, Dwayne did not expect to be accorded much respect, and he wasn’t disappointed when Sully got out and said, “Where’s Harold?” Dwayne had lost track. Weekday mornings there were so few customers at Harold’s that Dwayne spent most of his time daydreaming and trying to steer clear of Mrs. Harold, who that day happened to be in an Old Testament mood.

  Harold Proxmire himself was tall and lean and sallow-skinned and always clad in gray, and on a day as gray as this one he moved about the lot like a phantom on quiet, thick-soled shoes. “Somewheres,” Dwayne said with a sweeping gesture that included all three businesses.

  While her husband might be anywhere, Mrs. Harold, a tiny, round woman with a beehive hairdo that appeared to nearly double her height, could always be found at the cash register, and so this was where Sully sought her out. Mrs. Harold was the immediate source of her husband’s Christianity, which had burrowed deep into his bones, an inner presence to counterbalance Mrs. Harold’s brand of devotion, which was right out there in the open. In between sales she read scripture on her stool at the cash register, surrounded by Disney souvenirs. Disney World was Mrs. Harold’s favorite place, and every year in February she dragged her husband to Orlando and rode every ride in the Magic Kingdom, where everything was clean and sunny and the lines moved. There was probably dirty, smelly, greasy machinery somewhere that ran the whole Kingdom, but the Disney people knew enough to keep it out of sight. Underground, probably. There was supposed to be a tour you could take where they’d show you how everything ran, but it was the one thing in Disney World Mrs. Harold wasn’t interested in. It’d spoil the magic, was the way she looked at it. She wouldn’t let Harold go see it either for fear he’d explain everything to her, which would be even worse.

  Each year before they returned home, Mrs. Harold bought about two thousand dollars’ worth of Disney paraphernalia, and she ran a small Disney concession, without authorization or permission, in the office of Harold’s Automotive World. For most of the spring the walls would be covered with Disney movie posters and T-shirts, the cash register surrounded by water-skiing Goofys and rubber Plutos and a stack of big-eared mouse hats. Now, in late November, most of the merchandise had been sold off and the drab walls were again bare, except for a tall Cinderella poster that depicted, among other things, three plump Disney fairies, one of which reminded Sully of Mrs. Harold herself. Next to the cash register was a small box of cheap plastic Disney figurines and a half-dozen rubber alligators.

  Invoices and purchases at all three businesses were rung through her register, and when she looked up from that register at her customers, her suspicious expression conveyed something of her inner fear that any one of them might be Satan in disguise. She was certain that Sully, for instance, was in league with the Devil somehow, though she doubted he was very far up in the satanic hierarchy. In a deep, secluded part of her heart to which Mrs. Harold no longer had immediate access, she was very fond of Sully, who always kidded with her, something nobody else had the courage to do, even her husband. Whenever Sully appeared, something of the girl she had once been always slipped out of the fortress she’d been imprisoned in, though that girl was easily recaptured, having forgotten how or where or even why to flee many long years ago.

  “Hello, Esmerelda,” Sully said when the door had swung closed behind him and Rub.

  Esmerelda was not Mrs. Harold’s name, of course, but it was the name Sully, who couldn’t remember names, had been calling her for years and years. Was it the name of the imprisoned girl?

  Mrs. Harold set her Bible down and refused Sully the smile she knew he was after. “Harold!” she barked into the intercom, which crackled to life over the bullhorns mounted on wooden poles in the yard outside. “Customer!”

  Sully picked up and examined one of the rubber alligators from the box beside the cash register. “What extortionary price are you asking for these?” Sully asked Mrs. Harold.

  Mrs. Harold had been charging three dollars for them and was about to tell Sully this when, to her surprise, Esmerelda spoke up and said, “One dollar.”

  “Okay,” Sully said, slipping one of the alligators into his coat pocket and handing Mrs. Harold a dollar. “I’ll take one. I know somebody who likes alligators. But tell me something before your husband gets here.” Sully lowered his voice confidentially and leaned forward toward her, elbows planted on the countertop. “Don’t lie to me, either,” he warned. “Lying is a sin.”

  “Christians don’t lie, Mr. Sullivan,” Mrs. Harold said, her eyes narrowing. She leaned back on her stool to preserve the distance between them, even as the young girl imprisoned in Mrs. Harold’s heart leaned forward.

  Sully shrugged, as if to suggest that such statements were not worth arguing about. He’d let her skate if she wanted to. “Tell me the truth, then,” he said. “You getting any?”

  “Harold!” Mrs. Harold barked into the intercom.

  Sully held up his hands as if she’d pointed a gun at him. “What’d I say?” He appealed to Rub, who was standing just inside the door looking like he might wet his pants. “listen, Esmerelda. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s nothing wrong with getting a little if you’re married. Jesus doesn’t mind as long as it’s with Harold, right?”

  “Harold!” Mrs. Harold’s voice rocked the bullhorns.

  Sully still had his hands raised in surrender. “I understand you gotta slow down a little at our age, but you don’t have to stop completely. Every couple weeks, you should close up for the lunch hour, send the help home, lock the register, take Harold out back where there’s nobody around … Be good for you. Be good for Harold too.”

  Harold rushed in then, wheezing and gray-faced, followed by Dwayne. “Oh,” he said immediately, relieved once he’d taken in the situation. “It’s you. I thought we were being robbed.”

  “You should hear the things he says when you’re not around,” Mrs. Harold reported, calmly now. With Harold on the scene, she was able to capture the girl, corral her, herd her back inside her heart’s fortress.

  “Esmerelda,” Sully said, causing that girl to look back over her shoulder one last time. “Someday you’re going to hurt my feelings.” He pointed at the Bible. “Show me where it says in there that you’re supposed to be mean to people.”

  The very worst thing about Sully, to Mrs. Harold’s way of thinking, was that he had a way of routing scripture with sheer outrageousness. As a rule she could locate and quote a scriptural passage for almost any occasion. The moment he was gone, she’d think of dozens of passages that pertained, but never in Sull
y’s presence. Right now, for instance, she found it impossible to take up his challenge to show him where in the Bible it said you were supposed to be mean to people, though she was sure it was there.

  Before Mrs. Harold could think how to respond, Sully had turned away from her to talk to Harold, and both she and Esmerelda were sad.

  “You got anything on the lot I might be interested in?” Sully asked.

  “Truck give out?” Harold said, feeling guilty. He hated repeat automobile customers. That meant that the car or truck he’d sold them hadn’t lasted forever, as he’d hoped. He knew that anything mechanical, like anything human, had a finite life, but he wished for a better world, one where the vehicles he sold people would run and run. Sully was particularly embarrassing as a repeat customer because the trucks he bought from Harold were always pretty well used up when he bought them. Harold had never sold Sully anything with fewer than eighty thousand miles on it. In fact, he always tried to talk Sully out of his purchases. “You’ll just be back in six months,” he’d warn. But six months always seemed a long way off to Sully, who was by and large an optimist and who always concluded that in six months he’d be better off than he was now for the simple reason that he couldn’t be any worse off. He was almost always wrong, of course, in both the result and the reasoning. The truck Harold sold Sully today would be more dubious than the last, which would make Harold feel guiltier still, and in another year it would happen all over again. Harold wasn’t sure capitalism and Christianity were compatible, even when the capitalism involved was as modest as Harold’s Automotive World, which barely provided a living for Harold and Mrs. Harold, a surly mechanic, a half-blind clerk and a delinquent teenager.

  Sully told Harold that the pickup had died this morning, describing its condition for Harold, who listened hopefully. “Could just be corrosion on your battery cables,” he offered.

  “Could be,” Sully agreed. “But it isn’t.”

  They had strolled outside, Rub tagging along a respectful stride behind, Dwayne lurking even farther in the background. “How do you know?” Harold said.