Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  Sully thought about it. He didn’t know for sure, of course, but it just made fatalistic sense the truck would die today. Yesterday he’d had a job offer that was contingent upon having a truck, which meant the truck had to die. Mired as he was in a stupid streak, Sully credited the perversity of cosmic law that governed such things. “Call it a hunch,” he told Harold.

  “Why don’t you let me have a look,” Harold said. He didn’t discredit hunches exactly, but he liked to check them out just in case. “We’ll send Dwayne out and have him tow it back.”

  “That’d be good,” Sully admitted, momentarily buoyed by Harold’s common sense.

  “You met Dwayne?” Harold said, catching the boy, who wasn’t expecting to be introduced, with his finger in his nose. “Go get Sully’s truck and bring it here,” Harold told him. Dwayne nodded, headed for the wrecker.

  “Dwayne?” Harold called after him. “Don’t you want to know where it is?”

  Dwayne returned.

  Sully gave him his address on Upper Main, told him the truck was parked at the curb.

  “What color is it?” Dwayne asked.

  Sully told him green. “It’ll be the one that looks like it’s not worth towing,” he added.

  Harold smiled as Dwayne retreated again. “Minute ago he was going to get a truck he didn’t know the location of. Then after you tell him right where it is, he wants a full description.”

  Rub was wiping his palms on his shirt. “He picked his nose and then shook my hand,” he said angrily.

  “Here’s what you should buy,” Harold said on the way past the junkyard, indicating a snowplow blade that was leaning up against the chain-link fence. “Guy that owned it made good money doing driveways.”

  “How come he sold it?” Sully said.

  “He didn’t,” Harold said. “His widow sold it. I picked it up at an auction.”

  “I don’t seem to have a truck to attach it to, is the problem,” Sully pointed out, although he was intrigued with the idea. With the town of Bath always cutting back on services and snow already in November, a plow might not be a bad idea. “I don’t think I have the strength to push it myself.”

  “I’ll make you a deal if you decide you want it,” Harold said and quoted Sully a price that wasn’t much more than what he’d paid for it at the auction. “Don’t wait too long.”

  “I’d have to rob a bank if I’m going to buy a truck and the plow rig both,” Sully said.

  “Some people borrow from banks,” Harold pointed out.

  “Not people like me,” Sully said. “Banks like you to own something of equal value they can take from you in case you run into some bad luck.”

  Harold had only two trucks at the moment. One was in pretty good shape. Sully took the other one for a test drive. It was marginally better than the truck he already owned, which was dead.

  “I wouldn’t charge you much for it,” Harold said when Sully returned and looked at the vehicle skeptically. “But then it’s not worth much. I bought it for parts myself. You’d be money ahead to buy the other one.”

  “I know it,” Sully said. “But the money I’d be ahead is money I don’t have.”

  “Well,” Harold said. “Who knows. Maybe I can fix the one you got.”

  At that moment they heard the wrecker returning and watched Dwayne pull into the yard towing a truck that was not Sully’s. Neither was it green.

  Harold sighed mightily. “I’ll be darned,” he said quietly. He’d almost said he’d be damned, but he caught himself at the last second.

  The house Miles Anderson had bought occupied the southwest corner of the intersection. It was the largest of the big houses on Upper Main, a three-level brick affair with two small widow’s walks on the upper story and a huge wraparound porch that looked out upon both Main and Bowdon streets. The previous owner had been an elderly widow frightened into a nursing home two years before when a huge limb from one of Upper Main’s ancient elms had fallen on her roof during the famous ice storm. Since then the house had sat empty. Sully could not recall ever seeing a For Sale sign in front of the house, but he seldom ventured up this way, so there might have been one.

  “I wisht I could afford a big ole house like this,” Rub said as he and Sully sat at the curb in the El Camino waiting for Miles Anderson to show up. So far Anderson was fifteen minutes late, and Rub was no good at loitering he wasn’t paid for.

  “Be a little big for just you and Bootsie, wouldn’t it?” said Sully, who’d been sitting there wondering what anybody would do with a house that big, how you’d go about filling it up. Actually, Bootsie might be one of the few people he knew equal to the task. She swiped something from the Woohvorth’s she worked at every day and brought it home with her, and their apartment was about to burst under the strain. The easiest thing to steal at Woolworth’s was goldfish, and Rub and Bootsie had an aquarium so full of them that the fish barely had room to turn around without knocking into one another. The murky water they swam in was permanently brown from processed fish food. In such conditions the fish died about as fast as Bootsie could slip them in their water-filled baggies into her spacious pockets. She also took things that didn’t fit into her pockets. Somehow she’d managed to swipe a sofa-sized painting of the Atlantic Ocean at sunset, its crashing waves bright orange and blue. Neither Bootsie nor Rub had ever seen the Atlantic and so could not judge the painting’s realism.

  “I’d have my room way up there.” Rub pointed to the room under the eave where the larger of the two widow’s walks was located. “I could just walk out there on that little porch and stand there.”

  “I suppose you could, Rub,” Sully said, trying to picture Rub on the widow’s walk.

  “I wisht we’d stopped for lunch,” Rub added.

  Sully consulted his watch for the umpteenth time. “Go eat,” he said. His meeting with Miles Anderson would probably go better without Rub anyway. The only reason he’d wanted Rub along was to reassure Miles Anderson he had an able-bodied helper. Time enough for that later.

  “Where?” Rub said.

  “Hattie’s is just down the street.”

  Rub turned and looked out the rear window, as if to verify this information. “What about you?”

  “Bring me a hamburger.”

  “Could I borrow five dollars?”

  “No,” Sully said. “But I’ll pay you for yesterday.”

  “Okay.” Rub shrugged.

  Sully gave him the money.

  “What do you want on yours?”

  “A bun.”

  “That’s all?” Rub frowned.

  “And ketchup.”

  “Okay.” Rub started to get out.

  “And cheese.”

  “Okay.”

  “And a pickle. And a slice of onion.”

  “Okay.”

  “And some relish.”

  “That’s a hamburger with everything.” Rub frowned.

  “Okay. A hamburger with everything.” Sully grinned.

  “How come you didn’t just say that?”

  “And some fries,” Sully told him. “And some ketchup for the fries.”

  Rub sighed, thought about it, waited for the information to sift down. “Okay,” he said finally.

  Sully gave him another three dollars.

  “Why don’t you come with me,” Rub suggested.

  “Because if I do, Miles Anderson will turn up here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s the way it works.”

  When Rub was gone, Sully lit a cigarette and started making a list in his head. The porches were all sagging and the wood trim around the windows needed sanding and repainting and the odd board needed replacing. The roof didn’t look too bad except where the limb had fallen, causing the chimney to tilt. On the ground there was a huge stump that Sully would have just left there but which Miles Anderson apparently wanted removed. Brown tangles of weeds festered everywhere. Indoors? Miles Anderson had mentioned half a dozen time-consuming
tasks, which was fine with Sully, because most of the outdoor stuff would have to wait for spring anyway. If the weather turned mild, he might prune some bushes, rake up the two years’ worth of sticks and leaves that had accumulated on the lawn, cart everything off. There looked to be enough work to keep him and Rub occupied, if not busy, all winter and most of the spring. Since Miles Anderson would be in New York, they could putter around at their own pace. On days when he felt up to it, Sully could do little jobs in the evening, which would actually save some money by keeping him out of The Horse and away from Wirf and out of conflict with Tiny. And on days when his knee wouldn’t let him work, he could say screw it and Miles Anderson would never know.

  Stubbing out his cigarette, he got out of the El Camino, went up the front walk, climbed the front porch. Through the large, uncurtained front window Sully could see a huge staircase leading upstairs, and along one wall was a fireplace big enough for a grown man to sit in the center of. In feet, the empty rooms were about twice as cavernous looking as his own, and he remembered how empty the rooms in Carl and Toby’s house had looked before they started filling them up with possessions. This house was bigger than the Roebucks’. Whoever Miles Anderson was, Sully thought again, he must have a lot of shit if he expected to fill so many rooms. In two and a half decades he hadn’t been able to fill his own flat, half the rooms of which he’d closed off. Other people seemed to have the opposite problem, he knew. Ruth was always complaining that she couldn’t turn around in her house without bumping into something that wasn’t there yesterday. And Miss Beryl’s flat, the same size as Sully’s own, was full of stuff she’d brought back from her travels. Sully was sure his inability to attract clutter meant something, but he wasn’t sure what. He sat on the front porch steps and thought about it.

  When it got to be eleven-thirty and Miles Anderson was half an hour late, Sully pulled out the slip of paper on which he’d written the address and checked it again, not that there was much chance of having made a mistake. This was the only vacant house on the street, and he had repeated what Anderson said on the phone. No, Miles Anderson was just late, and Sully was not surprised. He’d had the kind of voice Sully hated, the kind that suggested whatever time he arrived at a place was “on time” by definition. The good news was that if he hired Sully they wouldn’t have to see each other much. That wouldn’t be a bad arrangement if Sully could keep from getting bent out of shape here at the start. To avoid that, he stood, flexed his knees, strolled to the corner.

  A block and a half down Bowdon, just before the street dead-ended, was the house where Sully had grown up. Until the Sans Souci went under and the baths were closed to the public, the house had been the caretaker’s. For years Sully’s father himself had been employed there, his job being to enforce the NO TRESPASSING signs posted every few feet along the eight-foot-high, rusting, cast-iron fence that ringed the estate. Basically the job was keeping kids out and making sure that no one got into the old hotel and stole its fixtures, its marble tiles and stained glass. Big Jim Sullivan was the perfect man for a job with few defined duties besides being mean to other people’s kids. He was mean to his own for free, and it suited him fine to be paid for being mean to other people’s. One boy he’d sent to the hospital, where he nearly died. Sully’s father had caught him inside the fence and given chase, catching the boy perched delicately atop the fence where he was attempting to negotiate its jagged iron spikes.

  Big Jim had been a slow, powerfully built man, proud of his bulk when bulk was called for and easily infuriated when faced with any situation, like chasing kids, that called not for bulk but for speed. And so it had enraged him to be first outrun, then made fun of (his father had claimed the boy was taunting him from atop the tall fence). And so Big Jim shook the fence, “to get him on down from there before he hurt himself,” he later told the police. When the boy slipped, Big Jim had returned to the house, his face pale, to tell Sully’s mother to call the fire department to come get the boy down. Also to call for a doctor. Both Sully and his brother had run outside to see. What they found had looked, at first, unreal, as if something from a strange dream had invaded the real world. From a distance the boy, his arms straight down at his sides, appeared to be standing up next to the fence and peering up into the sky. Except that his feet were dangling four feet off the ground. The boy had looked like he was standing on air.

  The iron spike had entered the soft cavity under the boy’s chin and now protruded from his open mouth like a black tongue. The kid’s eye reminded Sully of the terrified eye of a fish, darting around in confusion at first, though, by the time the help finally arrived, the eye was still and glazed, staring disinterestedly into the blue sky. Years later, in France and Germany, Sully had seen men die in every manner imaginable, but he’d never seen anything to equal the sight of that boy hanging from the fence. Recollecting it, even now, was still powerful, and Sully suddenly realized that he had walked the block and a half to the house of his childhood and stopped right in front of the spot where the boy had hung. The spikes had been removed from atop the fence not long after the accident, as if to prevent a repetition of the freak tragedy, or perhaps to help people forget so ghastly a sight.

  As Sully stood there, clutching the rusting fence, he became aware of a distant rumbling, and the ground beneath his feet began to shake, as if the past he’d been contemplating were trying to punch a hole through to the present, and he half expected to see his father appear, grinning, at one of the dark, vacant windows. Instead, a huge dump truck, its enormous bed full of dirt, emerged from the trees that surrounded the Sans Souci and bore down on the crooked house at unsafe speed, turning at the last moment and blowing on by, its thunder shaking the ground. Sully’s first thought was that the driver had lost control, for while the truck was slowing, he could tell that it wouldn’t be able to stop before it reached the wrought-iron fence Sully was still clutching with both hands. As he braced for impact, the truck drove right through where a section of fence had been cut away, turned left onto Bowdon and proceeded up the street toward Sully’s position. When the truck rumbled by, the grinning driver saluted Sully with the tip of his billcap, one of his father’s favorite drunken gestures, and it was only when the truck had turned onto Upper Main and disappeared in the direction of Schuyler Springs that Sully, still gripping the fence, was able to dispel the sense of disorientation that had washed over him like a wave. It was the pain shooting through his knee that located him again, though even this did not entirely dispel the feeling that Big Jim had paid him a visit.

  As vivid to Sully as the horror of the hanging boy was the memory of his father, who’d worked the crowd that gathered to gawk at the boy and await help. “You just wait and see … this goddamn country anymore. I bet a hundred dollars they fire me for doing my job,” his father had whispered conspiratorially to anyone who would listen. “You just wait and see if they don’t.” By the time the ambulance arrived, Sully’s father had persuaded half the onlookers to feel sorry for him, even though the boy, deep in shock, still hung quietly from the spike a few feet away.

  This gift of persuasion had been, Sully would come to realize, what his father had always been best at. The power to elicit sympathy was not a bad talent for a lazy, mean-spirited man to possess. If you could hang a twelve-year-old boy on a spike by his jaw and convince people who might more reasonably be expected to lynch you that they should be concerned for your job security, what couldn’t you get away with? Certainly you could knock the hell out of your wife and kids and still be thought a regular guy by your neighbors, a guy who maybe had one too many now and then and got a little carried away, but an okay Joe. If you were persuasive enough, the only ones who knew for sure that you were a monster were your wife and kids, and probably you could convince even them that it was love that caused this pain, that the pain had its source in duty, not meanness and frustration. Sully’s brother, Patrick, had never stopped loving the old man. Their mother? Who knew? Maybe even she, the most frequent vi
ctim of their father’s cruelty, had remained perplexed to the end, waiting for her husband to change back into the man she’d fallen in love with.

  Ruth had not understood Sully’s refusal to make amends with his father. She’d thought she was making headway when Sully agreed to visit the old man at the VA nursing home in Schuyler Springs. That had been almost five years ago, a year before Big Jim Sullivan died, as it turned out. It was clear to Sully right from the start that his father had not lost his gift. It took the old man about three minutes to charm Ruth, a woman not easily fooled, into easy affection. Big Jim’s act had changed a little, Sully observed, to take full advantage of the wheelchair he was now confined to after his stroke, but it was basically the same sly appeal. The nurses scurried around him, ignoring the urgent appeals of the other residents to attend to his father’s needs in much the same fashion as his mother had attended to them, though she had done it out of fear. “I’ve made a man’s mistakes,” Big Jim, seemingly on the verge of tears, had told Ruth with that same mixture of humility and arrogance that Sully recalled from his childhood. He still slipped quite naturally into obsequious charm and sentimentality around those whose favor he wished to curry—professional men whose skills he feared or attractive young women whom he occasionally invited out to see the old hotel. Indeed, when Big Jim Sullivan was finally fired from his caretaker’s job, it was for sneaking young women onto the property, not hanging the boy on the fence by his chin. “Yes, I’ve lived a man’s life and made a man’s mistakes,” he told Ruth sadly, “and I’m plenty sorry for them, but they tell me God forgives all sinners, so I guess he’ll forgive me too.

  “Not that my own son ever will,” he added when Sully snorted.

  In fact, Sully’s heart had hardened as soon as he saw his father, upon whom he had not laid eyes in years. He nodded agreement with his father’s assessment of the situation. “You may fool God, Pop,” he told the old man. “But you ain’t shittin’ me even for a minute.”