Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  At six-thirty, when Cass unlocked the front door, a small cluster of men, Rub among them, had gathered outside and were stamping their feet in the cold, awaiting admittance into the warmth and light. Rub immediately slid onto the stool closest to where Sully was stationed at the grill, mixing eggs in a bowl with a metal whisk. This last week, since Peter’s return to Bath, had been tough on Rub. He was used to having Sully all to himself, not having to share him with Peter and the little boy. Until a month ago Rub had been blissfully ignorant of the fact that Sully had a son, much less a grandson, and he didn’t think it was quite fair for these two people to turn up now without warning and just assume they were welcome. He didn’t like having to work with Peter, who was not a good listener like Sully. Plus, when Peter talked to Rub at all, which was not often, it was in a different kind of English than Rub was used to, an English that made him feel stupid. Old Lady Peoples had warned him when he was in the eighth grade that the world rewarded people who talked well enough to make other people feel stupid, and of course it was true, so he wasn’t really that surprised. Even worse, Sully himself had started talking differently, at least to Peter. It was his son that Sully seemed to have things to say to now, not Rub, and there was also some evidence to suggest that Sully actually listened to what his son was saying in return. That Sully would listen and respond to Peter particularly annoyed Rub, who liked to think of Sully as his one true friend. After all, Rub told Sully things he never told anybody else, even Bootsie, his wife. With Sully he shared his deepest desires, which had nothing to do with Bootsie, holding nothing back. As soon as it occurred to Rub to desire something, he told Sully about it right away, so they could contemplate it together. To Rub’s mind, Sully’s one human flaw was that he didn’t seem to want much more than he had, which seemed unaccountable. If you were standing outside in the cold and wet, it was only natural to wish you were inside where it was warm and dry, so Rub wished it, and not just selfishly for himself, but for Sully too. That was friendship. Maybe Peter was Sully’s son, but Rub was pretty sure Peter had no such strong feelings for Sully. He wasn’t really Sully’s friend. And as Rub slid onto the stool, as close as he could get to Sully on the other side of the counter, he’d have liked to explain this whole friendship deal to him, so he’d know. Instead he said, “Could I borrow a dollar?”

  Sully slipped his long spatula under a phalanx of sausage links and flipped them before turning to Rub, who immediately looked at the countertop and flushed. “No,” Sully told him.

  “Okay.” Rub shrugged.

  Sully sighed and shook his head. “You can borrow a couple eggs if you want.”

  “You can’t borrow eggs,” Rub said. “Once you eat them, they’re gone.”

  “When I give you money, it’s gone too,” Sully pointed out. “I’d rather give you eggs.”

  Sully cracked two eggs onto the grill, where they sputtered in bacon grease. Since taking over the morning grill at Hattie’s he’d made several small but significant changes by executive decision. One was that eggs got fried in bacon grease. They tasted better that way, in Sully’s opinion, and the grease was already sitting there anyhow. He also gave people the kind of toast he had handy. White, whole wheat. Once it was toasted you could hardly tell the difference, and Sully liked to finish one loaf before starting another. His inflexibility at the grill was already the occasion of considerable joking from men who knew he was going to make their breakfasts his way. They ordered poached eggs over rye toast, fresh-squeezed orange juice, a croissant and orange marmalade and herbal tea, thereby ensuring that when their breakfast was set in front of them (juice from the carton, eggs scrambled, white toast with strawberry preserves, muddy coffee) it would contain not a single item they’d ordered.

  Sully put the plate of eggs in front of Rub. “You know what I’m dreaming of?” he said.

  Rub dug into his eggs hungrily.

  “Hey,” Sully said.

  Rub looked up.

  “I’m talking to you.”

  “What?” Rub said. It was just like Sully to ignore him until he gave him his food and then want to talk.

  “What am I dreaming of?”

  Rub looked at his friend’s face, as if the answer might be written there.

  “I’ll give you one hint. It’s the same thing I was dreaming of yesterday and the day before that. I’ve been dreaming of this one thing for the last two weeks, and every morning I’ve dreamed it right in front of you. I’ve sung this dream out loud.”

  Rub, forkful of bleeding eggs halfway to his open mouth, tried to remember yesterday. Cass and the two men at the counter who’d been listening in to this conversation began to hum “White Christmas” significantly. Then suddenly the answer was there. “A white fucking Christmas,” Rub said and sucked the eggs into his mouth happily.

  “That’s what I’m dreaming of, all right,” Sully said. “A white fucking Christmas.”

  The men at the counter began to sing it. “I’m dreaming of a white fucking Christmas.” Old Hattie rocked in her booth, her eyes serene, contemplative. The song had always been one of her favorites.

  The singing had just died down when Peter and Will came in, the little boy looking sleepy but happy, his father just sleepy. Peter helped Will onto the stool next to Rub, then slid onto the one next to his son. Will wrinkled his nose. “Something smells,” he whispered.

  Sully nodded. “Switch stools with your father,” he suggested.

  They switched.

  “Better?” Sully said.

  “A little,” the boy said.

  “It’ll be much better in a minute,” Sully said. Rub was mopping up the remainder of his egg yolk and unmindful of every other reality. Sully doubted he’d heard a word of the conversation.

  “You had breakfast?” Sully asked the boy.

  He nodded. “Grandma made me toast.”

  “Can’t you make your own toast?”

  “Not in Grandma’s kitchen,” Peter said.

  “You want a hot chocolate?”

  “Okay.”

  Sully made him hot chocolate from a packet, added a spurt of whipped cream from a can. “You going to be my helper again today?”

  “Okay,” the boy agreed, whipped cream on his nose.

  Sully was studying Peter, who looked extra morose this morning. He was not used to getting up early and was usually silent until midmorning. “How about some coffee?” Sully said.

  “Nope,” Peter said sleepily. He was eyeing Rub, who pushed his plate away and noticed Peter there for the first time. “Morning, Sancho,” Peter said.

  “You got time for a cup,” Sully said. “Rub’s in no hurry, are you, Rub?”

  Rub studied Sully, aware that this might be a trick question. Sometimes Sully said exactly this to indicate that it was time he got off his ass and went to work.

  “What do you want us to do today?” Peter said.

  Sully shrugged. “It’s supposed to be nice. Up in the forties. I’d work outside. Chop those hedges back, rake up all the sticks and branches, haul it all off someplace. Give our employer the impression we’re making progress in case he shows up, God forbid. We’re going to have to remove that tree stump at some point.”

  “I was thinking that would be a good spring job.” Peter ventured a half grin. “Sometime when I’m gone.”

  “I don’t see what that stump’s hurting,” Rub said as he did each time the subject of the stump arose. “How come he don’t just leave it alone?”

  “Some people don’t like tree stumps in their front yard,” Sully said. “Be thankful. It’ll probably take us a week to dig it out. That’s a week’s pay.”

  “Stumps don’t hurt anything, is what I’m saying,” Rub said. He was particularly inflexible on the subject of the stump. “Elm roots go halfway to China. Remember over at Carl’s?”

  “Don’t get me started about that,” Sully said.

  “I wisht he’d pay us for that job,” Rub said, his face clouding over.

  “He w
ill, eventually,” Sully said. “I’ll make sure of it.”

  “When?” Rub wondered.

  “Eventually,” Sully repeated. “Just like eventually you’ll go to work today.”

  “You’re the one just said there was no hurry,” Rub said.

  “That was half an hour ago.”

  Rub slid off his stool. “You coming over when you’re done here?”

  Sully said he would.

  When Rub and his father were gone, Will slurped the dregs of his hot chocolate from the bottom of his mug. He still had a spot of whipped cream on his nose. Sully removed it with a napkin. The boy smiled at his grandfather, then frowned in the direction of the front door his father and Rub had just disappeared out of, something clearly troubling him. Leaning toward Sully, he whispered, full of embarrassment, “Rub stinks.”

  There’d been several reasons Sully hadn’t wanted to buy the truck he was now driving courtesy of Harold’s Automotive World. One was he couldn’t afford it, even without the snowplow apparatus. The other was that whoever had owned the truck previously had pampered it. There was no rust anywhere, and the upholstery in the cab was without meaningful incision. Even the exterior paint job had been maintained. True, the truck had nearly sixty thousand miles on it, but Sully could tell they weren’t hard miles, and so he distrusted them. There was a distinct possibility that nobody had ever worked in this truck, and he was going to have to work in it. Trucks, to Sully’s mind, were a lot like people. If you pampered them early, they got spoiled and then later became undependable. And so he’d set immediately about showing the truck that the good old days were over. The first day he owned it, he accidentally backed into a pole, splintering the red reflector of the taillight and denting the rear bumper. The following week he’d opened the driver’s side door into a fire hydrant outside the OTB where he’d stopped to play his 1-2-3 triple, dinging the finish impressively. The previous owner had put a mat down in the bed to protect it, a pretty foolish thing to Sully’s way of thinking. He liked to hear the sound his tools made when he tossed them into his truck at the end of the day. A crowbar bouncing off the bed of a pickup truck was a satisfying sound, and he refused to be cheated out of it. The first time he’d tossed a wrench onto the mat he’d heard nothing at all, leading him to believe he’d missed the bed of the truck altogether, and he’d gone around the other side to look for a wrench-shaped pattern in the snowbank. When there wasn’t one, he looked in the bed of the pickup, and there sat the wrench in the middle of the rubber mat. The next day he’d sold the mat for twenty dollars to Ruth’s son, Gregory, who needed cheering up. He’d dropped out of school after the Bath-Schuyler game, gone to work as a stockboy at the new supermarket by the interstate, bought himself a pickup truck so he could get there. He liked the pad. With the pad and an air mattress, you could get laid in the back of the truck. Theoretically.

  And so when Sully and Will left Hattie’s at midmorning and climbed into the truck, he noted with satisfaction that the vehicle was beginning to look and feel and even smell like a truck he might own, instead of one he couldn’t afford. The windows were pleasantly dirty, and he’d begun to amass a collection of styrofoam coffee cups and sections of dirty, boot-printed newspaper on the floor. Will had apparently also concluded that it was beginning to look like a truck his grandfather might own, because he climbed in cautiously, testing his footing, as if the newspaper might conceal a hole in the floorboards.

  When Sully turned the key in the ignition and started to back out from behind Hattie’s, the boy said, “My seat belt, Grandpa,” and so Sully braked and hooked the boy up.

  “There,” Sully said. “Your grandmother finds out I’m driving you around without a seat belt, I’m history, aren’t I.”

  “Mom, too,” the boy said, his face clouding over.

  “You talk to her lately?” Sully ventured as he put the truck back into reverse and let off the brake.

  “She called last night. They yelled at each other,” Will confessed, ashamed.

  “Mmmm,” Sully said. “They love you just the same. Just ’cause they get mad at each other doesn’t mean they don’t love you.”

  The boy didn’t say anything.

  When Sully pulled out of the alley onto Main, he said, “You know what?”

  When the boy didn’t answer, Sully nudged him. “Grandpa loves you too.”

  Will frowned. “Grandpa Ralph?”

  “No,” Sully said. “Grandpa Me.”

  “I know,” the boy said.

  The damndest thing about what Sully’d said, he realized, was that it was true. He enjoyed having his grandson around. The first morning Peter had appeared for work with Will in tow, Sully’d let it be known that it wasn’t such a great idea. “He won’t get in the way,” Peter had promised, his voice lowered.

  “That’s not the point,” Sully’d responded, though it was the point, or a large part of the point. “What if he gets hurt?”

  “How?”

  “Suppose you whack a nail off center and it flies through the air and catches him in the eye. Your mother will have both our asses.”

  Peter shook his head. “Well, what do you know? My father is worried something might fly through the air and hit his grandson.”

  “Okay,” Sully said. “You don’t want me to worry about him, I won’t.”

  “Worry all you want,” Peter had said. “It’s a little out of character, is all I’m saying.”

  “I never worried about you, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Hey,” Peter said, shrugging his shoulders significantly.

  And he was right, of course. Sully hadn’t worried about Peter once during his entire childhood. Partly because he’d had his own worries. Partly because Vera could worry enough for ten people. Partly because he just hadn’t. He’d neglected to, not feeling much need, even glad to be out of the picture, telling himself during moments of self-pity (self-knowledge?) that if he were involved in his son’s life it would probably be to fuck things up.

  That had been his attitude at the time, and in truth it had not felt as unnatural as this new attitude, this tightness of the heart he felt for his grandson, as if some natural, biological affection were coming to him late, after skipping a generation.

  “Anyhow,” Peter had remarked, “we don’t have much choice.”

  The reason they didn’t, Peter explained, was that Vera was working mornings at the stationer’s, a job she’d taken after Ralph’s first visit to the hospital.

  “What about Ralph?” Sully said. “Don’t tell me he’s going back to work too.”

  “He offered to watch Will, but …”

  “But?”

  Peter had explained later, when the boy wasn’t around, that Will hadn’t wanted to stay alone in the house with Grandpa Ralph, who, the boy knew, had recently been in the hospital. He was afraid his grandfather would die while the others were away, that he’d be alone in the house with a dead man until everybody returned. Maybe that was part of Sully’s strange affection for the boy, who seemed to Sully a quivering collection of terrible, unnecessary fears. Also, Ralph had a lot of running around to do. His work with the lions, the Parks Commission.

  Instead of joining Rub and Peter at the Miles Anderson house, Sully swung by Carl Roebuck’s office. It had been a couple days since he’d seen Carl, who’d made an elliptical reference to the possibility of work. With an unpaid-for truck, Sully couldn’t afford to ignore any elliptical references. He parked the truck in the street below and, with Will in tow, climbed the narrow stairs to the third floor, figuring that if Carl was not there—always a distinct possibility—maybe he’d be able to find out where he was from Ruby, who might be wearing her see-through blouse again, always a heartwarming spectacle, that. To his surprise, Ruby wasn’t there. Toby Roebuck was, though she wasn’t wearing anything see-through. What she had on was a bulky gray sweatshirt of the sort that usually said “property of” some college athletic department. What did it mean, Sully wondered, that he prefer
red the sight of Toby Roebuck in a bulky sweatshirt to Ruby, a young woman not without physical charms, in a see-through blouse? It meant, he suspected, that he was sixty. And a fool. And maybe other things too, none of them good. No matter what it meant, he was glad to see her there at Ruby’s desk with the phone to her ear and apparently in good spirits, to judge from the grin she flashed him. She motioned to the two chairs behind the coffee table.

  “I’ll tell him, Clyde,” she was saying. “No guarantees. You know how he is …”

  Sully ignored the invitation to sit down but stuck his head inside Carl’s inner office. No Carl.

  Toby hung up the phone, stared at Sully. “I heard you’d made another career move,” she said. “You smell like grease.”

  Sully had been all set to comment on her own apparent career move before being beaten to the punch. Also, it was disquieting to note how often women commented upon how he smelled right up front, before hello even.

  “It’s a terrible thing to have so many talents,” he told her.

  “Who’s this?” she said, examining Will, whose existence Sully had momentarily forgotten under Toby Roebuck’s influence.

  “My grandson,” he told her, then to Will, “Say hi to Mrs. Roebuck.”

  Will, shy as always, murmured something like a hello.

  “I hadn’t even gotten used to the idea that you had a son yet,” Toby observed, “and here you are a grandfather. Hard to imagine.”

  “My son said almost the same thing this morning,” he admitted. “What’s the deal? Is Ruby sick?”