Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  “Me too,” Sully said. “In fact, I was so sure of it I actually went over there and waited for you for about an hour.”

  “We must have just missed each other,” Anderson said, backing off a little in his tone of voice. He was apparently willing to share responsibility. “I was delayed at the bank.” When Sully didn’t say anything, Anderson added, “Do I understand this silence to mean that you’re no longer interested in the job we discussed?”

  “No,” Sully said. “I didn’t know it was my turn to talk.”

  “Then I’m to understand that you do want the job?”

  Sully said he did.

  “Because, frankly, I don’t sense much enthusiasm at this moment,” Miles Anderson said, his former impatience returning. “And if you aren’t sure, I’d rather you said so. A man I talked to at the bank this morning intimated you were less than reliable.”

  “Look, Mr. Anderson,” Sully said. “I need the work. I’m just too old to jump up and down, okay? Inside, I’m all aflutter. Trust me.”

  “Hmmm,” Miles Anderson mused. “Well, I was also told you were insolent, though I suppose that’s to be expected. The gruff, frontier independence of the American blue-collar worker and all that.”

  Who was this guy? “I’m dropping out of college to fix your house, actually,” Sully informed him, since this was almost true. “listen, Mr. Anderson. What do you say we start all over? You could begin by saying you’re sorry for standing me up, and then I could say I’m sorry for being insolent, and then we could set up another time to meet at the house, and you could promise to be there this time, and we could just go from there.”

  “How’s ten in the morning?” Miles Anderson suggested.

  “We skipped a few things there, didn’t we?” Sully observed. “Okay, ten. I’ll be the one wearing a carnation in my lapel.”

  “I wonder. Might I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “Only a little. Can I ask you one? What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a university professor.”

  “So is my son.”

  Incredulity. “Indeed?”

  “He was just denied tenure.”

  “These are dark times. Where?”

  “West Virginia.”

  “Oh, my,” Miles Anderson said. “Where does one go from there?”

  When Sully returned to the game, Carl Roebuck was selling chips to Wirf, who had come in while Sully was on the phone. Sully could tell at a glance that Wirf was drunk. When the transaction was complete, Carl Roebuck still had about ninety percent of the chips stacked in front of himself. Still, Sully was optimistic. The winter’s worth of work he’d counted on had returned, and having Wirf in the game meant he didn’t have to worry about going bust right away. Sully sat, then stood again and walked around his chair, clockwise first, then counterclockwise, to dispel the afternoon’s bad luck. “Red River round a green monkey’s asshole,” he added, making a complicated sign in the air over the deck of cards.

  “You through?” Carl said, picking up the deck.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Want to cut?”

  “No, they’re fine now.”

  Actually, the cards were fine for Carl Roebuck. Before Sully could get adjusted again, the pot was up to forty dollars and Sully realized he’d have been wise to drop two cards ago. To make matters worse, Wirf was beaming at him so benevolently that Sully half expected him to make the sort of maudlin declaration of friendship Wirf was capable of when his blood alcohol level achieved a certain balance.

  “What?” Sully finally said.

  “I’m trying to communicate with you telepathically.” Wirf grinned drunkenly.

  “Well, quit it,” Sully said.

  “Don’t waste your time,” Carl Roebuck agreed, tossing chips into the center of the table. “The only way to communicate with Sully is to hit him in the head with a shovel.”

  “Screw you both,” Sully said, raising the bet.

  By the time they finished, it was a seventy-dollar pot. Carl won it with a full house and pulled the money toward him sadly.

  “I was telepathically advising you to drop,” Wirf explained, tossing in his three deuces faceup.

  Sully tossed his own cards in facedown. He didn’t want anyone to know what he’d stayed in with.

  The game broke up at five when three of the players said they’d better go home and eat some leftover turkey while they were still welcome. “I’m going to have to bring my wife in for testing,” a man named Herbert remarked, pushing his chair back from the table, pocketing what money Carl Roebuck hadn’t won. “Just her and me anymore, and every year she buys the biggest turkey in the store. We eat off the son of a bitch all the way to Christmas, and then she buys another one even bigger.”

  “I like turkey,” Rub said.

  “I used to myself,” Herbert said, “before I had to eat fifty pounds of it every year.”

  “Should we wake him up?” somebody wondered in reference to Wirf, who had fallen asleep with his mouth open midway through the last hand. Wirf, playing drunk and unpredictably, had been the final nail in Sully’s coffin.

  “Let him sleep,” said Sully, who had come to view sleep as a precious commodity since his knee.

  In the bar it was warmer than in the back room, and Sully realized he’d been cold and achy for about two hours and wondered if he was coming down with something. Maybe it would be quick and painless and fatal.

  Carl Roebuck, having stuffed his winnings into his pockets, slid onto the bar stool next to Sully. “Well, smart guy, how bad was the damage?”

  Sully ran his fingers through his hair. “Bad enough,” he said. Three hundred and fifty or four hundred dollars was what he figured. Maybe more.

  “I told you you’d be safer on the roof,” Carl reminded him.

  “How did you know that I-told-you-so was just what I wanted to hear?”

  “To know you is to need to say it. Ask anybody,” Carl observed.

  “Somehow I always mind it more coming from you,” Sully observed. Actually, he minded it more or less universally. He’d minded it earlier when Ruth had either said or suggested it half a dozen times in the hour they’d been together. He minded it when Wirf said it. He minded it even when people didn’t say it but were thinking it.

  “I gotta go pee,” Carl said. “You want anything while I’m in there?”

  Rub was coming out of the men’s room when Carl went in. He joined Sully at the bar but didn’t sit down. “I gotta go home,” he said. “Bootsie’s gonna whack my peenie for sure.”

  “Aren’t you going to drink your beer at least?” Sully said, indicating Carl Roebuck’s long-neck bottle.

  “I thought that was Carl’s,” Rub said.

  “I bought it for you,” Sully assured him.

  Rub looked at it suspiciously. “It looks like somebody already took a drink out of it,” he said.

  “Nah,” Sully told him. “I’ve been sitting right here.”

  “How come it’s not full, then?”

  “Sometimes they aren’t,” Sully told him. “No one knows why.”

  Rub took a swig. “It feels like somebody’s lips have been on it,” he said.

  Sully grinned at him. “How’d you end up?”

  Rub took out his money and counted it. “I won twenty dollars,” he said happily.

  “Good,” Sully said. “Terrific, in fact. Just as long as you didn’t forget anything.”

  Rub frowned.

  “Like the twenty I loaned you to get into the game, for instance,” Sully told him.

  Rub handed Sully the money, then shoved his hands into his pockets. “I had fun anyhow,” he said.

  “Me too,” Sully assured him. “That’s the main thing.”

  “You lost, and now you’re going to rag me, huh,” Rub said.

  Carl returned from the men’s room, slid onto the stool Rub was blocking and took a long swig from the bottle Sull
y had told Rub was his. Rub started to open his mouth, then closed it, blood draining from his face.

  “I gotta go,” Rub said and went.

  Carl Roebuck was staring at the lip of his bottle. “Did he drink out of this?” he said.

  “Nah,” Sully said.

  Carl took another swig, more tentatively this time, then frowned over at Sully, who was grinning. “Maybe just a little,” Sully admitted.

  Carl stood, leaned over the bar, poured the remainder of the beer into the sink. “Sully, Sully, Sully,” he said.

  “What, what, what?”

  “I wish you were rich.”

  “Me, too,” Sully said.

  “If you were, I’d chain you in my basement and play you for a living.”

  “Bad cards,” Sully said. “It happens. Not to you, but to other people.”

  Carl waved Birdie away. “I leave you alone to consider that pathetic explanation. I’m overdue somewhere. You all right?”

  Sully assured Carl Roebuck he was fine, but the truth was he was far from it. As he often did at such moments to stave off regret, he was trying to remember what he’d been thinking about when he sat down at a poker game with money he couldn’t afford to lose, as if recollecting his reasoning and discovering it to be valid, or partly valid, would restore the money. Unfortunately, his reasoning had vanished as completely as the money. Even had he won four hundred dollars instead of losing it, he still wouldn’t have been able to afford the truck he needed to buy from Harold, and it was crystal clear to him now that he’d lost the money that the truck was his first order of business. He couldn’t shake the irrational conclusion that four hundred dollars in the debit column right now loomed far larger than the same four hundred in the credit. The desperate situation that had induced him to play poker with money he couldn’t afford to lose was now the precise situation to which he aspired. He would have to work for several more days to climb back to the financial plateau that had had him feeling so rotten to begin with. The more he thought about it, the closer he came to feeling the kind of specific regret to which he had always been opposed.

  The good news was that the Miles Anderson deal had not gone south as he’d feared. The scary part was that he’d very nearly let it go south by being a smart-ass on the phone. Giving guys like Miles Anderson shit was something he’d been doing all his adult life, though he’d not become the richer for it even once. It was his father again, sneaking into his life, Sully suspected. When sober, Big Jim was meek and groveling, almost doglike, in the presence of the educated, the well-dressed, the well-spoken. Later, drunk, he’d vilify these absent doctors, lawyers and professional men and take out his resentment of them on whoever was handy. Sully, even as a boy, had understood that such men held great power over his father. Without knowing exactly how, Big Jim had guessed that men who dressed this way and spoke this way were capable of doing him harm if they chose, and whenever he saw such a man on the street, his eyes narrowed in suspicion and, yes, fear. A bully himself, Big Jim knew what it felt like to be bullied by money and privilege. Sully suspected his father saw such men in his mind’s eye all the time. Like the men who gave him his orders at the Sans Souci. It was probably them he imagined himself fighting with in the taverns. It was always somebody that Big Jim thought was putting on airs that he made trouble for. Somebody who made a little more money at his job or was dressed a little better. Somebody who could serve as a stand-in for the ones he really hated. And so Sully, as a younger man, had decided not to be cowed by the sort of men who made his father feel small. Giving the Miles Andersons of the world their share of shit had gotten him no further than obsequiousness had gotten his father, of course, but Sully considered his way more satisfying, and he hated to think he might have to give up such small satisfactions. But the truth was that he was in pretty deep, a lot deeper than he could ever remember being, and almost losing the work that would help him climb out would have been the species of stubborn stupidity that Ruth always claimed was uniquely Sully.

  But somehow he’d gotten away with it, which meant he wasn’t done quite yet. Tomorrow he’d be more agreeable, tell Miles Anderson he hadn’t meant to be such a prick. Even losing all this money to Carl Roebuck might not be totally bad, since Carl would now feel guilty enough to let him keep the El Camino for a few days until he could solve the problem of how to buy a new truck. If Sully could come up with a decent down payment, Harold might be convinced to let him take the truck and the snowplow blade and make monthly payments until the balance was paid off. If it snowed like hell all winter, as it looked like it might, he might be able to pay Harold off by spring, assuming he didn’t get into any more poker games, didn’t do anything else equally deficient in judgment.

  Sometime soon, he feared, he was going to have to swallow hard and ask to borrow money from somebody. Ruth would give it to him if she had it, but she didn’t have it. Wirf probably did, and probably would give it to him, but Sully owed him far too much already. On principle he refused to borrow money from old women, which left Miss Beryl out. Carl Roebuck might give him some money if Sully could catch him drunk again, but he disliked the idea of taking money from Carl, whom he preferred to resent. He could go see Clive Jr. at the savings and loan, but Sully’s stomach curdled at the thought, and it occurred to him, now that he thought about it, that it was probably Clive Jr. who had warned Miles Anderson against him.

  Finally, there was Ruth’s solution: sell his father’s property and use the money. He wondered how much more desperate he’d have to get before that became a real possibility. Quite a bit more, he suspected.

  “Well,” Carl said, breaking into Sully’s reverie, “the time has come for me to see if I have a home to go home to this evening.”

  “I wouldn’t suggest going to visit Ruby right away,” Sully advised.

  “Still worked up, huh?”

  “I don’t know about now. She was pretty bent out of shape early this afternoon.”

  Carl looked genuinely sad to hear it. “I should never have mentioned marriage,” he conceded.

  “That’s right,” Sully said, recalling that he himself had proposed marriage within the last twenty-four hours. “Women tend to take that kind of talk seriously, even when they know better.”

  Carl sighed. “Ruby deserves marriage,” he reflected. “That’s the trouble, though. They all do. They spread their beautiful legs, and I hear myself saying why don’t you and I get married, and right then I mean it, too. Every time.”

  Sully couldn’t help grinning, Carl looked so genuinely lost. “You’re a piece of work.”

  “It seems wrong not to offer them something,” Carl said. “I’d marry them all if I could.”

  “I believe it,” Sully assured him. “You wouldn’t leave a single one for the rest of us, either.”

  “I’d leave Bootsie for Rub,” Carl said, then nodded in the direction of the big dining room where they’d been playing poker. “I see Ahab woke up.”

  Wirf was standing in the doorway, trying to shake the cobwebs. “What happened to the game?” he wondered, stumping over to the bar.

  “The white whale went that way,” Carl Roebuck said, pointing up Main Street.

  Wirf slid onto the stool Carl had vacated. “Good,” he said. “Let him. Why should I chase whales?”

  “Beats me,” Carl said on his way to the door.

  “I woke up in there and couldn’t remember where I was. It felt like New York City in the forties, staring up into that chandelier. I thought I’d died and gone to the Waldorf-Astoria.”

  “You aren’t going to believe this,” Carl called from across the room. He was out through the beer sign in the window. “But it’s snowing again.”

  “I believe it,” Sully said. In fact, it was perfect.

  “Something stinks over here,” Carl said, then went outside and the door swung shut behind him.

  Sully and Wirf considered Carl Roebuck’s departing statement. It was Wirf who came up with the solution. “Let’s stay ov
er here, then,” he said.

  Fish, Miss Beryl decided.

  She’d been trying to place the odor that permeated Sully’s entire flat. It was a mystery. How did a man who never cooked, who didn’t even keep food in his refrigerator, manage to have an apartment that smelled like fish? By not opening his windows was one way, she speculated. Granted, he couldn’t very well open them now in the late November subfreezing weather, but she doubted Sully ever aired the place, even in summer. In fact, now that she thought about it, she knew he hadn’t done so for the simple reason that he never bothered to remove his storm windows. He’d dutifully replaced hers with screens every spring for the last twenty years, but he always maintained it was too much trouble to do his own.

  “You’ll swelter,” Miss Beryl always warned, to which Sully responded with his usual shrug, as if to suggest that she was probably right, he would suffer. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Peoples,” he always added. “If it gets too hot up there I’ll come down and sleep with you.”

  Miss Beryl wondered how oppressive it would have to get before the heat would register on Sully as discomfort. At the moment the flat was insufferable, as if all the heat it had stored up in August had not yet escaped the sealed rooms. The thermostat provided the explanation. Seventy-five degrees. No wonder the wallpaper was peeling.

  Miss Beryl set the thermostat back to seventy and thought, as she often did whenever she considered her tenant’s odd existence, that Sully should have found a way to stay married. He needed a keeper. Somebody to take charge of the thermostat and rescue the lighted cigarettes (Clive Jr. was right; there were brown burns everywhere) he left burning on tables and counters. Also to flush the toilet, Miss Beryl noted when she peered into the bathroom and was greeted by the solemn pool of urine he’d left in the toilet that morning when he left for work.

  Miss Beryl flushed and watched the bright yellow water become diluted until finally, with a gurgle, it was clear again. The cycle of the flush was the exact amount of time she needed to solve the riddle posed by Sully’s urine, for Miss Beryl remembered the timing of this morning’s dramatic flush that had coincided with Clive Jr.’s insistence that Sully be evicted. Was it possible that after that dramatic flush Sully had been able to dye the water in the bowl so deeply yellow with a second release of urine so soon after the first? Possible, she supposed, if he’d spent the evening drinking beer with his cronies at The Horse. A second, more satisfying explanation occurred to her though, and this was that Sully was the sort of man whose flushing was preparatory to elimination rather than its natural conclusion. His morning flush removed the previous evening’s offering. His morning release would be noticed for the first time this evening when he returned from work. Miss Beryl couldn’t help wondering whether discovering clear water in the commode when he returned would alert Sully to the fact that he’d had a visitor.