Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  “If you won another triple, don’t tell me about it,” Sully warned Jocko, who looked up when they came over.

  “Okay,” he agreed. “If you lost another one, I don’t want to hear about that either. Who’s this?”

  “Say hi to Jocko. He’s our friendly neighborhood pharmacist.”

  Will was still squinting at the wall.

  “Speaking of which. I don’t suppose you got any more of those you gave me the last time?”

  “Not on me,” Jocko said. “I got some new samples in yesterday, though. I thought immediately of you.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “Come out to my office.”

  “Can you wait here a minute?” Sully asked Will, who was tugging on his sleeve. A look of panic immediately swept Will’s face. “I’ll only be a minute. Can you be brave that long? I’ll be in that car. You can see it from here.” He pointed out the window at Jocko’s Marquis. “Go see what the triple was yesterday, and by the time you do that, I’ll be back. Okay?”

  Will took a deep breath. Okay.

  Outside, Jocko rummaged through his candy store glovebox, holding up vials of pills to the light, glowering at them through his thick glasses. “Here,” he said finally, “eat these.”

  Sully held them up, noted their color, pocketed them. “I wondered if you’d ever give me anything yellow. I’ve had just about every other color of the rainbow, I think. What are these?”

  “Screaming yellow zonkers. One should do the trick.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let me know if they turn your pee yellow.”

  “My pee is yellow,” Sully said.

  “Oh-oh.” Jocko grinned. “It may already be too late.”

  They got out of the car again. “What do I owe you?”

  As usual, Jocko waved this off. “Nada. I told you. They’re samples.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  “That’s what they always are,” Jocko said. “You’re becoming a regular laboratory rat.”

  “I come from a long line of rats,” Sully said. He could see his grandson at the window, watching anxiously, his courage nearly exhausted.

  “Good-looking kid,” Jocko remarked.

  “He’s a good boy,” Sully said, feeling suddenly swollen with pride, just as he had in talking about Peter the day before with Harold Proxmire. “I like having him around. He’s a little on the nervous side, like his father always was.”

  “They get that from Vera,” Jocko said thoughtfully. “She and her husband have sure had their share lately.”

  “I don’t know much about it,” Sully admitted. “I know Ralph’s been in the hospital.”

  “In and out,” Jocko said. “They’re about a gazillion bucks in debt. Got to be.”

  “I doubt it,” Sully said. “Ralph worked for the post office all those years. He’s got to be covered.”

  “Insurance usually gets the first eighty percent,” Jocko admitted. “You ever tried to pay the other twenty after something major?”

  “I’m not saying they don’t have problems,” Sully said.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this—” Jocko began.

  “Then don’t, for Christ sake,” Sully said.

  “Okay,” Jocko said agreeably enough.

  Sully studied him sadly. He waved at Will, who waved back. “What?” he said finally.

  “Just be careful of Vera if you run into her,” said Jocko, owl-eyed behind his thick glasses, unusually serious.

  “I’m always careful around Vera,” Sully told him. “I wear a cup, in fact.”

  “You miss my point. She’s the one I worry about, not you.”

  Sully frowned. Jocko, a pharmacist, often knew medical information about people in town. “She isn’t sick?”

  “Not exactly,” Jocko admitted, adjusting his glasses up the bridge of his nose significantly. “If this goes any farther, you’re going to have to find a new source of pain pills.”

  Sully promised not to tell anyone.

  “About a month ago, one of my clerks caught her shoplifting. I got back just in time to keep her from being arrested.”

  “You’re kidding,” Sully said, because Jocko so clearly was not kidding.

  “I wish.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Neither could I. I took her back in the office and she came unglued. Un-fucking-glued, Sully. She scared the shit out of me. I thought she was going to have a breakdown right there. Sobbing about disgracing her father. Sixty years old, and she’s worried about ruining her father’s reputation.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Gave her a Valium and sent her home and told her to forget it. She hasn’t been back since. She’s shopping at the drugstore out by the interstate now.”

  Sully nodded. “No good deed ever goes unpunished.”

  “I’m grateful,” Jocko said as though he meant it. “When I was a kid, one of my friends stole a toy truck of mine. I saw him take it, and I could never face him afterwards. I felt more guilty than if I stole his truck.”

  Will met them at the back door. He was holding a ticket. Sully had given the boy his triple ticket the day before to hold on to for luck. Sully couldn’t quite read yesterday’s results from where they were standing. “What was yesterday?” he asked Jocko.

  “Four-five-seven.”

  Sully nodded, took the ticket from Will, glancing at it with disinterest. “I haven’t been off the schnide all week. You’re supposed to be able to pick one of the three, aren’t you?”

  “Just as well you didn’t hit yesterday,” Jocko commiserated. “The payoff would have just pissed you off. Nice two-eight daily double, though, for the magician who could have picked it.”

  Sully blinked at the ticket Will had handed him. Two-eight, it said. “Here’s the magician right here,” he told Jocko. He’d completely forgotten he’d bought the boy a ticket, let him pick the numbers. In fact, he’d been about to tear the ticket up.

  Jocko examined the ticket, then the board, then Will, who was beaming and blushing. “That’s the genuine article. Hundred and eighty-seven fifty.”

  “How do you like that?” Sully said. “You’re rich.”

  Jocko handed Will his racing form. “Who do you like today, kid?”

  Sully and the boy had been sitting outside at the curb for nearly five minutes when Rub, who had all kinds of things to tell Sully, couldn’t take it any longer. First Sully didn’t come, and then he still didn’t, and then he finally did come, and now he was finally here but still wouldn’t get out of the car. A lot had happened since Rub and Peter had left Hattie’s over three hours ago, and Rub didn’t approve of any of it. It wasn’t bad enough that Peter had just gone off like he was the boss and could give himself orders, leaving Rub to work all by himself and take messages for everybody in town who wanted to leave one. But now when Sully and the boy finally did come back, they had to just sit there by the curb while he was inside doing his work and everybody else’s, full of longing and the morning’s unspoken wishes and messages and information. To Rub’s way of thinking, there were suddenly too many people in the world, and two of the extra unnecessary ones were Sully’s son and his grandson who, together, had sort of made Rub himself disappear. So he went out to where they sat at the curb and reasserted his existence. He went around to the driver’s side and knocked on the window.

  Inside, Sully and the boy kept talking. Actually, Sully was talking, and Rub thought he had an idea what he was saying. He was telling the little boy to pretend he didn’t see Rub, who was standing right there in plain sight. “Don’t look at him,” Sully was saying, the words barely audible outside the glass. The little boy tried not to, but he kept darting furtive glances at Rub, who understood that this was one of Sully’s games. One of the ones designed to make himself feel like shit. Which was exactly how he did feel already. So he rapped harder on the window.

  This time Sully noticed him, and he mouthed the words, “Hi, Rub,” as if he and the bo
y were a long way off, too far for a human voice to carry. Then he whispered something to the boy and they waved at him together. For Rub there were a great many mysteries, but none was more perplexing than the way his best friend would team up with any human being on earth against himself. It was almost enough to make Rub doubt that they were best friends.

  When Sully and the kid were through waving at him, Rub made a circular motion in the air to signify that Sully should roll down the window. That way, at least, Sully couldn’t pretend not to hear. Not that Rub expected this ploy to work, and indeed he was not surprised when Sully feigned confusion and made the same motion back at him. Slowly, silently, Rub mouthed the words “ROLL DOWN THE WINDOW.”

  Sully rolled it down. “What?” he said.

  “What are you doing?” Rub wanted to know.

  “Who?”

  “You. The both of you,” Rub explained. “You’re just sitting there.”

  Sully shrugged. “What do you want, Rub?”

  What Rub wanted was in. In the car. In the conversation. Back in his friend’s company. In. “Can I get in?” he said. “It’s cold out here.”

  “In here too,” Sully told him. “The heater doesn’t work. We’ll only be another minute. Then we’ll get out and all be cold together.” And then he rolled up the window, leaving Rub to stare at his own reflection. Even his reflection appeared to be inside the car, where it was warm, or warmer.

  Rub was contemplating all of this, including the unfairness of his own reflection being inside the car while he was kept out, when the window rolled back down again a minute later. “What’re you doing?” Sully wanted to know.

  “Waiting,” Rub explained.

  “Well, do it over there,” Sully told him. “Go sit on the porch.”

  “I ain’t hurting anything here,” said Rub, who knew his rights. This was a public street. “Couldn’t I just tell you one thing?”

  “In a minute you can tell me everything. Go over and sit down on the porch.”

  Sully said all of this as he was rolling the window up, and it closed completely just as the sentence ended. Leaving Rub alone once again with just his own reflection for company. The young man who stared back at Rub looked like somebody full of need but fresh out of options. Reluctantly, Rub did what he was told.

  Inside the car, Sully and Will watched a sullen Rub retreat up the walkway to the front porch steps, where he stubbornly took a cold seat. What they’d been talking about was fear. Will was still afraid to enter his grandfather’s house. Sully had explained to him that when he was Will’s age, he’d been afraid of things too. Will appeared to doubt this.

  He eyed the ramshackle house fearfully. It looked even scarier than it had the day before, because now there was a mountain of boards stacked on the sloping front porch, which, to Will’s way of thinking, meant that there was even less holding up the house than there had been. “You want to know what Grandpa used to do?” Sully said.

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what Grandpa Sully had done to combat fear, because he sensed that after his grandfather explained what had worked for him, he’d want Will to try it out, and Will already knew he didn’t want to. He doubted sincerely that Grandpa Sully had ever been truly afraid of anything. He could no more imagine his grandfather afraid than he could imagine his brother Wacker merciful. Wacker was a boy without pity. Add pity and he’d no longer be Wacker. He’d be somebody else entirely who looked liked Wacker. They’d have to rename him. Grandpa Sully? Who wasn’t even afraid of a policeman with a gun?

  “I used to make a deal with myself,” Grandpa Sully explained. “I’d tell myself I’d be brave for exactly a minute.”

  Will frowned, studied his grandfather.

  “You could stand being brave for a minute, couldn’t you? You were brave for more than a minute back at the betting place, and a good thing happened. You won money.”

  “What happened after the minute?”

  “Then I’d let myself be scared again. But at least I could say I’d been brave for a minute. The next time I’d try to be brave for two minutes. That way I’d be getting braver and braver all the time.”

  Will continued to study his grandfather, who appeared to be telling the truth. “What were you scared of?”

  His grandfather shrugged. “I don’t remember. You won’t either when you’re my age.”

  Will looked out the window at his fear. He didn’t believe he’d ever forget what he was afraid of. He didn’t believe his grandfather had forgotten. Which meant he hadn’t been afraid.

  “Wait here a minute,” Grandpa Sully said, getting out of the car and limping around to the open rear end of the El Camino. Throwing open the lid to the big toolbox he kept there, Sully rummaged around in it, making a racket. Eventually he must have found whatever he was looking for, because he let the heavy lid of the toolbox fall shut and slid back into the front seat next to Will. “Here,” he said, tossing something heavy and metallic into Will’s lap.

  Will caught the thing between his knees, then picked it up and examined it, confused until he identified the object as a stopwatch.

  “You can time yourself,” his grandfather explained, showing Will how it worked. “That way you’ll know exactly how long you were brave.”

  Will studied the watch dubiously for a minute, then the house more dubiously still, finally his grandfather. Then he took a deep breath. “Okay.”

  “Good boy.”

  They got out of the El Camino and made their way up the rippled walkway, Will watching the second hand make its slow sweep, as if to get straight in his own mind just how long the minute he’d agreed to would be in real time.

  Somewhere close by a dog was barking. It sounded to Sully like the dog was right out back of the house, though that was unlikely.

  Sully came to a halt where Rub was seated, still sulking, and looked up at the house. There were no sounds of boards being ripped asunder, or any kind of work being accomplished, for that matter. “Where’s Peter?” it occurred to him to wonder.

  Wherever the dog was, he barked louder and seemingly nearer now, a bark that had an angry, strangling quality to it.

  “That’s what I come out to tell you,” Rub said angrily, “but all you wanted to do was pretend I wasn’t even there. So now I’m not telling nothing.” He looked away again, whether out of anger or because he had tears in his eyes Sully couldn’t tell.

  Will looked so worried by Rub’s refusal that Sully gave him a quick wink and a grin. “Rub?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Where’s Peter?”

  “Over to the other house,” Rub said, still pouting but apparently satisfied that he’d held out as long as he could under such fierce interrogation.

  “What other house, Rub? There are about five hundred other houses right here in Bath. More if we include the whole state.”

  “The other house we’re working on,” Rub said, angrily again.

  “Carl’s camp?” Sully said. Had Peter taken a load of hardwood out to the lake?

  “No, that one,” Rub said, pointing up the street at the Miles Anderson house. They all turned to look then, just as Peter and another man came out the front door and stood on the porch talking. When they shook hands, Sully frowned and said, “Who’s that with Peter, Rub? And don’t tell me it’s Miles Anderson either, because he said he wasn’t coming up till the first of the year.”

  Rub started to open his mouth, then shut it again.

  “Who is it, Rub?”

  “It’s Miles Fuckin’ Anderson, just like you said. And don’t blame me.”

  “Shit,” Sully said. The person he blamed was Carl Roebuck for taking him off the big job to do a little one which would probably cost him the big one. Then again, maybe not. They heard laughter coming from up the block, and Peter and Miles Anderson sauntered down the steps together amiably enough. And when Anderson got into his little car, Peter leaned down and waved in the window. When Anderson did a U-turn and headed back up Main toward the
village, Peter watched him go for a second, then crossed the street and started toward them.

  Will darted down the steps and up the street toward his father, while Sully took a seat on the porch steps next to Rub, who continued morose. “I wouldn’t sit here too long,” Sully advised. “The tip of your dick’ll freeze to the step.”

  Rub glanced down to see if this were possible.

  “I forgot,” Sully said. “Yours doesn’t hang down quite that far, does it.”

  “Yours don’t either,” Rub said, grinning sheepishly now, too happy to have his friend back to hold a grudge much longer.

  “That’s true,” Sully said, nudging Rub hard. “I fold it so it won’t.” Rub slid away, out of easy nudging range.

  “You want to know how many times I have to fold it?” Sully said, nudging Rub again, since he hadn’t moved quite far enough to be out of nudging range completely.

  “It would hurt if you folded it,” Rub said, imagining.

  “Not mine,” Sully assured him. “You know what I like best?”

  Rub blushed, wondered if it had to do with ole Toby Roebuck.

  “Carnation Milk,” Sully said. “You know why?”

  Rub was frowning, trying to recall why. He felt like he knew the answer to this question, though it wouldn’t come.

  “No tits to pull, no shit to haul,” Sully explained. “You get any work done in there?”

  “Almost all of it. Are we going to stop for lunch?”

  “Stop work or stop sitting here freezing our dicks?”

  “Work.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Good,” Rub said. Together they sat and listened to the barking dog.

  Will had joined up with his father and they were slowly making their way up the street toward where Sully and Rub were sitting. The boy was talking excitedly, showing his father the money he’d won, the stopwatch Sully had given him. Even a block away, Peter looked less than thrilled.

  “Where the hell’s that damn dog I’m hearing?” Sully wondered. “He sounds like he’s inside the house.”

  “He’s in the kitchen,” Rub said.

  “Who?”

  “The dog,” Rub said. He could have sworn they’d been discussing the dog.