Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  “You owe me a dollar,” Cass told her.

  “Put it on my tab,” Sully suggested.

  Ruth went to the register, lifted the bottom of the cash drawer, slid a folded invoice underneath. “Your days of running tabs are over, friend.”

  Sully shrugged, took out a dollar and slid it next to his empty cup. “Maybe if I start paying I can get a full cup of coffee now and then.”

  The two women exchanged glances. “You okay to close by yourself?” Cass said.

  “Yup,” Ruth assured her. “You’re a free woman.”

  “My philosophy professor says there’s no such thing as freedom,” Sully offered.

  “He said this before or after he met you?” Ruth wondered.

  Cass was looking around the place with what were clearly mixed emotions.

  Sully, for some reason, squirmed. “What time are you off Monday?”

  “Early.”

  “How early?”

  “Six,” she said. “Maybe seven.”

  “You need help packing?”

  “The movers are doing it all,” she said. “I’m not lifting a finger.”

  Sully shrugged. “I’ll come by.”

  “Don’t,” Cass said, sounding like she meant it, and he saw that her eyes were full.

  “Send me a postcard,” he suggested. “Addressed where?”

  “To The Horse, with the rest of my mail. Piss Tiny off.”

  She came around the counter then and they hugged, and Cass whispered a thanks in his ear. “What for?” he said.

  “No clue,” she admitted.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Ruth warned when Cass was gone.

  “Like what?”

  “like I just won her restaurant in a crooked poker game.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Sully said, realizing that this was precisely the way he must have looked. “In fact, I was about to ask how business was.”

  “Too early to tell,” she said. “Some of the regulars are going down to the donut shop for their morning coffee, or so I hear.”

  Sully nodded, ashamed. “They’ll be back.”

  “If not, to hell with them,” Ruth said jauntily, meeting his eye directly.

  “You get a good deal on this place?” Sully said, deciding a subtle change of emphasis couldn’t hurt.

  “The best,” Ruth said. “I got a good price and used Vince’s money.”

  “Can’t beat that,” Sully conceded.

  “Nope,” Ruth agreed. “It reminded me a lot of the deal Kenny Roebuck offered you twenty years ago.”

  Sully nodded, not so much acknowledging the truth of her observation as her apparent decision that they would quarrel. “I hope you’ll be as content with your decision as I’ve always been with mine,” he told her.

  Ruth couldn’t help but smile. “Your head must be made of solid granite.”

  “It’s a good thing, too,” Sully said, “since everybody keeps kicking it.”

  “You’re the one that keeps kicking it,” she assured him. “You’re double-jointed, and you don’t know it.”

  The front door opened then, and Janey, in a white waitress uniform identical to the one Ruth used to wear waiting tables at Jerry’s Pizza, came in, impatiently towing her daughter. Janey took in the situation at a glance, let the door swing shut behind them. Then she deposited the child and a small stuffed dog she was carrying into the small booth where Hattie used to sit. It seemed to Sully that he’d seen the animal the little girl was carrying somewhere before, but he couldn’t think where. The child was studying it with strange intensity, as if she suspected there might be a real live dog underneath the fabric. “You sit right here, okay?” Janey told her daughter. “Mommy’s just going over there, and Grandma’s here too, okay? You can see us both. Nobody’s going to leave you. You just sit right here for a minute.”

  Then she came over to where Ruth had begun to ring out the register. “Is she getting up?” she whispered.

  “No, she’s sitting right where you put her.”

  “I can’t believe it. She’s getting better.” Janey slipped by her mother and around the counter, where she drew herself a soda from the machine. “Consider the baton officially passed.”

  “Make yourself at home,” Ruth told her.

  “I will,” Janey said. “And since you’re so nice, I’ll tell you I saw Daddy pulling in to the alley. He’ll be coming in the back any second.” She looked at Sully significantly here. “How you doing, Mr. Sullivan?”

  “Wonderful,” Sully assured her. “Things just keep getting better and better.”

  “You’re out of jail, at least,” Janey said, apparently unaware that this bordered on a personal observation. “Next they’ll be letting my husband out.”

  “They better not,” Ruth said, glancing over to where the child sat. Sully followed her gaze. With the afternoon light behind her making a halo of her blond hair, the little girl looked unnervingly like old Hattie, who in the last few months had shrunken to near child size. “Not when we’re just starting to make progress.”

  “She just did about half that old lady’s jigsaw puzzle yesterday,” Janey said, confusing Sully, who was still thinking about Hattie.

  “What old lady?”

  “Your landlady,” she said, causing Sully to remember where he’d seen the stuffed dog before. Then, to her mother, “Does he get up to speed?”

  “Not anymore.” Ruth grinned.

  Janey seemed to accept this as truer than true. “Hey, Birdbrain. Mama’s going to work now. You’re going to stay with Grandma, okay? Grandpa’ll be here in a minute, too. You gonna be okay?”

  “She’ll be fine,” Ruth assured her.

  “Better, you mean,” Janey said. “Better off with you than me.”

  “You’re late for work,” Ruth said, glancing at the clock.

  “It’s okay. The boss is in love with me.”

  All three heard the back door open then, and all three waited for Zack to appear, although Sully didn’t turn around. “We’re in here, dumbbell,” Sully called, grateful actually for the arrival of someone he might be able to hold his own against. He often did poorly against women individually, and when they ganged up on him, like Janey and Ruth were doing, he knew it was time to fold the tent. “Just follow the light.”

  Zack came in, slid onto the stool one down from Sully. In lieu of saying hello to anyone, he asked Ruth, “What’re you going to do with that old cash register?”

  “It’s broke,” Ruth told him. “And it killed an old woman.”

  This latter piece of information either did not impress Zack as germane to his inquiry, or else he’d heard how Hattie died. “I know a guy in Schuyler’d probably give you five hundred for it. They don’t make keys like them no more.”

  Ruth studied her husband malevolently. “Do me a favor,” she told him.

  “Okay,” Zack shrugged.

  “From now on, come in the front door,” Ruth told him.

  “I don’t know why you bother, Daddy,” his daughter said. “Can’t you see she just wants to be mean to somebody? Before you came in she was being mean to Sully. She’d be mean to me too if I’d let her.”

  Zack shrugged again. “He might even go seven hundred,” he told his wife. “This guy, he collects cash registers. All kinds.”

  “Fuck me,” Janey murmured, rolling her eyes at the ceiling.

  Ruth studied the two of them, first her husband, then her daughter, then sighed in Sully’s direction. “Genetics,” she said, and then she surrendered the generous smile that had made him love her so long ago and kept her rooted so deep in his affection now. Cass had been right, of course, Ruth was worth wanting. He just hadn’t wanted her bad enough, and in truth he still didn’t. He could be ashamed of that, but he couldn’t change it. He also realized two other things: first, that Ruth’s remark was an act of generosity, the first time she’d ever acknowledged that Janey was not theirs, and second, ironically, that they were indeed through, this time for good,
except possibly as friends.

  “All right, I’ll go,” Zack was saying, though he made no move to get up off his stool. “I just come by to see how you made out, if there was anything you needed.”

  “There isn’t,” Ruth said. She had finished counting money out of the drawer and was binding wads of ones, fives and tens together with rubber bands.

  Zack seemed to understand the sad truth of the situation, that his wife didn’t need him, didn’t need the other man sitting one stool down the counter either.

  “Well,” Sully said, sliding gingerly off his stool. “I better go find Rub.”

  “You like deer meat?” Zack asked suddenly, throwing Sully off guard. “Who, me?” he said. “No, I don’t.”

  “I got a freezer full, is why I asked,” Zack admitted sheepishly. “There’s some real nice steaks. I wouldn’t charge you nothin’ if you wanted to take a couple.”

  “I haven’t cooked anything for myself in twenty years, Zachary,” Sully admitted. “Thanks, though.”

  Janey was chuckling unpleasantly now.

  “What’s so funny?” Ruth said, shutting the drawer to the cash register in a way that suggested her daughter’s explanation had better be good.

  “I was just thinking I’m the only one here who’s got anything anybody else wants.” She adjusted her breasts for emphasis.

  “Enjoy it while you can,” her mother advised.

  “You know what this kind of dog says?” Sully asked the little girl on the way out, wondering if Miss Beryl had told her.

  It was Tina’s bad eye that found him, her good one still examining the dog, and once again Sully had the strange feeling that he was addressing old Hattie reincarnated. Just when he concluded the child wouldn’t answer, she said, almost inaudibly, “Foo on you.”

  “Right,” Sully agreed. “Foo on me.”

  The front door to Rub and Bootsie’s flat was unlocked, so Sully went in, knocking loudly as he did. For a moment he thought he’d made a mistake and walked into the wrong house. Rub and Bootsie’s had always been crowded with end tables, lamps, the big aquarium, the zillion knickknacks Bootsie had lifted from the dime store. The walls had been covered with huge paintings of waterfalls, sad clowns, puppies and Elvis. Now the flat resembled Sully’s. The walls were bare, and about the only things that remained were the Squeers’ ratty sofa and their old console television.

  Rub was sitting on the floor in the front room, motionless, his back against the wall. For a fleeting moment Sully thought he was dead. He had his overcoat on and his work boots, his wool cap pulled down over his ears. Next to him was a jug of Thunderbird wine. He glanced up at Sully, dazed, then went back to studying his own booted feet.

  “Hello, dumbbell,” Sully said.

  “Hi,” Rub said, as if it was all he could do to choke out this single syllable.

  Sully cuffed him gently, knocking off his filthy wool cap. “Take your hat off. You’re indoors.”

  Rub picked the cap up off the rug and fingered it. “I wisht we was still friends,” he said.

  “We still are, Rub,” Sully assured him.

  Rub looked up at him again, dubiously.

  “You know what I wish?” Sully said.

  “What?” Rub seemed genuinely curious.

  “I wish you’d get up off your ass. We got a lot of work to do, and I can’t do it all by myself.”

  Rub stood unsteadily, kicking over the empty bottle of Thunderbird. “Bootsie got herself arrested.”

  Sully nodded. “So I heard.”

  “Did you see her in jail?”

  “They don’t put the men and women in the same place.”

  “They took back all the stuff she stole,” he added, looking around the empty flat.

  “Now you got some room to breathe in here,” Sully said, though breathing wasn’t something he’d have recommended. The place still smelled like ten pounds of dead dime-store fish. “Let’s go to work.”

  “Okay,” Rub agreed.

  They went outside. “How come you got the Canimo?” Rub said, climbing in.

  “Camino, you dope,” Sully corrected him. “How many times do I have to tell you that?”

  Rub thought about this and rephrased the question. “Where’s the truck?”

  “Peter’s got it.”

  “He’s still here?” Rub said, clearly disappointed to hear it.

  Sully turned the key in the ignition, then turned it off again. “Hey,” he said.

  Rub studied his knees.

  “Look at me,” Sully insisted. “He’s my son. You’re my best friend. That okay with you?”

  Rub nodded, snuffed his nose.

  “Don’t cry either,” Sully warned him, intuiting this possibility too late. “You hear me?”

  “I won’t,” Rub said, though it was a promise he couldn’t keep.

  Sully watched him, shook his head in disbelief, and sighed. He’d gotten away without apologizing, but this was worse. “I should have stayed in jail,” he said, turning the key in the ignition again. Then he put the radio on to drown out the sound of his best friend’s sniffles.

  Since it hadn’t taken nearly as long to locate Rub as Sully had anticipated, he decided to swing by Silver Street, where Vera and Ralph lived, in case Peter was still there. Apparently he was, because the U-Haul trailer was still in the drive. For some reason, it was unhitched from the ball of Sully’s truck and resting off to the side. The back door to the house, the one that opened into the garage, had been propped open. Since Vera’s car wasn’t in evidence, Sully backed the El Camino next to the curb and turned the ignition off.

  Rub opened the passenger side door and threw up into the gutter, practically the same spot where Sully had upchucked on Thanksgiving. Rub had more to offer. A whole jug of Thunderbird, apparently. When he finished, he said, “I feel better.”

  “I bet,” said Sully, who sympathized, though he had declined to watch.

  They were halfway up the drive when Peter backed out the kitchen door holding on to one end of a box spring. “You got a step coming, Pop,” he warned.

  Then Ralph appeared on the other end. “I know it,” he said. “Set it down a minute.”

  They noticed Sully and Rub then, and Ralph looked relieved. “Just lean it up against the door,” he suggested.

  “You know Rub Squeers?” Sully asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Ralph said, extending his hand. Rub, who was surprised by Sully’s introduction, missed two full beats before realizing what had happened, a look of pure astonishment on his face. Also, he was embarrassed by the condition of his shirtfront.

  “He’s my best friend,” Sully explained, “but he’s a little slow on the uptake.”

  “You never introduced me before,” Rub said.

  “Sure I have,” Sully said. “You just forgot.”

  “Well, I don’t remember it,” Rub explained.

  “That’s what I just said,” Sully pointed out.

  “I’d remember,” Rub insisted.

  Sully nodded, grinning at him. “Say the Carnation Milk jingle.”

  “I like tits best of all,” Rub began confidently, only to discover he was lost.

  “Aren’t you going to say hi to Peter?” Sully suggested.

  “Howdy, Sancho,” Peter said. “Hi.” Rub scowled.

  “Why don’t you grab the other end of that mattress?” Sully suggested. “Ralph here looks pooped.”

  “I am too,” Ralph admitted. “I don’t have to do nothing to get pooped, either.”

  “That’s because you’re old,” Sully explained.

  “I’m not as old as you, and you work all day.”

  “Actually, he watches us work,” Peter observed over his shoulder as he and Rub, who’d begun to look a little pale again, carted the mattress past them toward the U-Haul.

  “You want a cup of coffee, Sully?” Ralph offered. “I got some made.”

  “Good,” Sully said. “Let’s go inside and sit down and watch them work. It’s cold
out here.”

  Ralph led the way. Will was in the kitchen drinking from a coffee cup, so Sully pulled up a chair next to his grandson. “What’s that?”

  “Hot chocolate.”

  “I can make you that if you want,” Ralph offered.

  “Coffee’s fine,” Sully assured him.

  “No trouble,” Ralph said. “The cocoa’s right here.”

  “Coffee’s fine.”

  “Take me two minutes to heat the water, is all.”

  “No wonder Vera’s annoyed with you all the while,” Sully said. “Bring me a cup of coffee.”

  Ralph poured a cup from the coffee maker on the drain board. “You want cream and sugar?”

  “No, I want coffee.”

  “They’re right here,” Ralph said, indicating them and that it was no trouble.

  Sully nudged Will. “I still don’t have my coffee,” he said. “I could have drunk three cups by now.”

  “Here,” Ralph said, setting the cup in front of Sully and pulling up a chair. “I’m glad you and your friend showed up. Now maybe it’ll all be done before Vera gets back from Schuyler. That’s the bed from the guest room they’re loading, and she’s going to have a kitten.”

  “They could take my bed,” Sully suggested.

  “Then where would you sleep?”

  “On the couch. I don’t sleep enough to bother anymore anyhow.”

  “Me neither,” Ralph said sadly. “I bet I’m up twenty times a night.”

  “Vera finds out you let Peter take that bed, and you’re going to be the one with no place to sleep.”

  “I wish I hadn’t been asleep last night,” he said. “We were burglarized.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Ralph looked guilty. “Just the garage. You’ll never guess what they took.”

  “Yes, I will,” Sully warned him. “They took the snowblower.”

  “Was it you who did it?” Ralph said, slack-jawed with amazement.

  “No, but I know who did.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy I stole it from. Don’t worry. I’ll steal it back.”

  Ralph shook his head, studied Will, who was taking all this in. “Your grandpa Sully’s one of a kind, ain’t he?”

  Will looked back and forth between the two men, clearly unprepared to voice an opinion.