“Roof’s talking about moving back to North Carolina,” she said without looking at the cook, who had taken a stool around the other side of the counter to enjoy the lull and was studying them.
“And has been for twenty years,” Sully reminded her.
“I think he means it.”
“He’s meant it all along. Half the town’s been meaning to leave. They don’t, though, most of them.”
“I know one person who’s going to,” Cass said, and she sounded like she meant it. “The day after the funeral.”
They both glanced at old Hattie, who was leaning forward intently and grinning, as if she were in an arm-wrestling match with Death himself, an opponent she was confident of whipping. “Maybe the day before.”
Something of the desperation in her voice got through to Sully, who said, “Listen. You want to get out some night, let me know. I’ll baby-sit.”
Cass smiled dubiously. “And where would I go?”
Sully shrugged. “How the hell should I know? A movie? I can’t figure out everything for you.”
Cass smiled, didn’t say anything immediately. “I should take you up on it. Just to find out what you’d do when she wet her pants and asked you to change her.”
Sully tried to suppress a shudder and failed.
“Right.” Cass nodded knowingly.
“I better go shovel my landlady out,” he said. “How’d this town get so full of old women, is what I’d like to know.”
“We’re closed tomorrow, remember.”
“How come?” Sully said.
“Thanksgiving, Sully.”
“Oh, yeah.”
At the door Sully noticed Hattie was beginning to list slightly to starboard, so he took her by the shoulders and righted her. “Sit straight,” he said. “Bad posture, you’ll grow up crooked.”
Hattie nodded and nodded at no external referent. Sully made a mental note to shoot himself before he got like that.
A block down the street from Hattie’s, two city workers were taking down the banner that had been strung across Main Street since September, where it had become the object of much discussion and derision, THINGS ARE LOOKING ↑ IN BATH, it said. Some of the town’s residents claimed that the banner made no sense because of the arrow. Had a word been left out? Was the missing word hovering in midair above the arrow? Clive Peoples, whose idea the slogan had been, was deeply offended by these criticisms and remarked publicly that this had to be the dumbest town in the world if the people who lived there couldn’t figure out that the arrow was a symbol for the word “up.” It worked, he explained, on the same principle as I ♥ NEW YORK, which everybody knew was the cleverest promotional campaign in the entire history of promotional campaigns, turning a place nobody even wanted to hear about into a place everybody wanted to visit. Anybody could see that the slogan was supposed to read “I Love New York,” not “I Heart New York.” The heart was a symbol, a shortcut.
The citizenry of Bath were not fetched by this argument. To most people it didn’t seem that the word “up” needed to be symbolically abbreviated, brevity being the word’s most obvious characteristic to begin with. After all, the banner stretched all the way across the street, and there was plenty of room for a two-letter word in the center of it. In fact, many of Clive Jr.’s opponents on the banner issue confessed to being less than taken with the “I Heart New York” campaign as well. They remained to be convinced that upstate was much better off for it, and now, after three months of this new banner, the local merchants along Main still remained to be convinced that things were looking ↑ in Bath either. They were waiting for something tangible, like the reopening of the Sans Souci, or groundbreaking on The Ultimate Escape Fun Park.
The new banner (GO SABERTOOTHS! TROUNCE SCHUYLER SPRINGS!) was even more optimistic. The choice of the word “trounce” was more indicative of the town’s mounting frustration with the basketball team’s losing streak to Schuyler Springs than of a realistic goal. The more traditional “beat” had been rejected as mundane and unsatisfying. The real debate had been between “trounce” and “annihilate.” The proponents of “annihilate” had surrendered the field when they were reminded that it was a ten-letter word, and Bath was a town that had recently established a precedent when it abbreviated the word “up.”
The banner also promised to revive another controversy, this one turning on a point of grammar. Nearly three decades earlier, when football had to be dropped due to the postwar decline in the region’s population and the high school’s other sports began to show signs that they could no longer compete successfully against archrival Schuyler Springs, the high school’s principal had decided it was time to change the school’s nickname (the Antelopes) to something more ferocious in the hopes of spurring Bath’s young athletes to greater ferocity. After all, there weren’t any antelope within fifteen hundred miles of Bath, and all those animals were famous for was running anyway. So there had been a Name the Team contest and the Sabertooth Tigers were born, all the antelope logos repainted at town expense. Predictably, the whole thing had not turned out well. The fans had immediately shortened the name to the Tigers, which the high school principal thought common and uninspiring and a violation of the contest rules. The best thing about the sabertooth tiger was its saber teeth, which ordinary tigers didn’t have, and the principal insisted that the name not be corrupted, even in casual conversation. He’d spent good money repainting all the logos, even if the saber teeth had turned out looking like walrus tusks.
If all this weren’t enough, a controversy had erupted on the editorial page of the North Bath Weekly Journal over whether the plural of Sabertooth should be Sabertooths or Saberteeth. When the cheerleaders led the spell cheer, how should it go? The principal said Saberteeth sounded elitist and silly and dental. The chair of the high school’s English department disagreed, claiming this latest outrage was yet another symptom of the erosion of the English language, and he threatened to resign if he and his staff were expected to sanction tooths as the plural of tooth. Why not? the public librarian had asked in the next letter to the editor. Wasn’t this, after all, the same English department that had sanctioned “antelopes” as the plural of “antelope”? The letters continued to pour in for weeks. Beryl Peoples, who’d nursed a twenty-year grudge against the principal for caving in and allowing history courses in the junior and senior high school to be redesignated “social studies,” had the last editorial word, reminding her fellow citizens that the sabertooth tiger was an extinct animal. Food, she suggested, for thought.
Nevertheless, this new banner read GO SABERTOOTHS! TROUNCE SCHUYLER SPRINGS! and the men whose job it was to string the banner across the street were more concerned with it than with the old banner, which had become gray and tattered in the wind and would not be restrung after the weekend’s big game. On the Monday following Thanksgiving the Christmas lights always got strung. And so, as the new banner was being attended to—the workers and onlookers shouting instructions to one another to make sure the new banner was centered and straight, as if a botched job might affect the outcome of the game—the old banner was allowed to lie stretched across the street in the slush. When the workers were satisfied that the new banner was secure and had climbed down from their ladders, one of them picked up one end of the old banner just as a car drove by and hooked the cord with one of its rear wheels, dragging the banner all the way up Main and finally out of sight. Sully, shoveling Miss Beryl’s driveway as promised, looked up and saw the banner trail by, though he had no idea what it was.
As much as Sully hated the idea, he was going to have to go find Carl Roebuck, who owed him money and refused to pay it. Sully was pretty sure what the result of this visit would be, too. He’d end up going back to work for Carl, something he’d sworn back in August he’d never do. Even worse, he’d sworn it to Carl, who’d looked smug and said, “We’ll see.”
Carl Roebuck was all of thirty-five and, the way Sully saw it, was threatening to use up, singlehandedly,
all the luck there was left in an unlucky town. Just this year he’d won two church raffles and the daily number (on three separate occasions). Five years before that, just as Bath real estate had begun to appreciate, Carl, using part of the money he’d inherited when his father keeled over, bought an old three-story Victorian house on Glendale, getting it for back taxes and the resumption of a tiny 1940 mortgage when the elderly owner died intestate and without relatives. That wasn’t enough. The first thing Carl did was to go up into the attic, where he’d found a box of old coins worth forty thousand dollars. The man could shit in a swinging bucket.
Carl’s red Camaro was parked at the curb below his third-floor downtown office, right in front of the company El Camino. Sully double-parked his pickup so that both of Carl’s vehicles were effectively hemmed in. Carl was not above going down the back way when somebody he didn’t want to see was coming up the front. “When are you going to spring for an elevator, you cheap bastard?” Sully called when he got to the top of the stairs and opened the door that read TIP TOP CONSTRUCTION: C. I. ROEBUCK.
Carl’s new secretary, hired during the summer, was a pretty girl, though not as pretty as the one she replaced. She made a face at Sully, whom she hadn’t seen in three months and hadn’t missed. “He called in sick, he’s on the phone, he’s in the Bahamas. Take your pick. He doesn’t want to talk to you.”
Sully pulled up a chair, sat and massaged his knee, which was pulsing from the climb. He could hear Carl Roebuck on the phone in the inner office.
“The Bahamas sound all right, Ruby,” he said. “Get his checkbook and we’ll go.”
“There’s about a thousand guys I’d take with me before you,” Ruby informed him.
“Don’t be mean,” Sully said. “This is a small town. There can’t be more than a couple hundred guys you’d prefer to me.”
“As long as there’s one, you’re shit out of luck,” she smiled unpleasantly.
Sully shrugged. “Okay, except the one you’re after’s no good for you.”
Ruby’s unpleasant smile vanished, replaced by an expression even more unpleasant. “And who’m I after, in your opinion?”
Sully realized he’d messed up. That she and Carl, a married man, had something going was common knowledge. The look on Ruby’s face suggested she didn’t know this.
Luckily, before Sully could make matters worse, Carl Roebuck was heard to hang up the phone in the inner office. “If those are the dulcet tones of the long-lost and unlamented Donald Sullivan,” he called, “send him in. Tell him I’ve got a job for him that even he can’t fuck up.”
Ruby relocated her unpleasant smile. “Go right in,” she purred. “Mr. Roebuck will see you now.”
Carl Roebuck was leaning back in his swivel chair when Sully opened the door, and the smug expression on his face was identical to the one he’d worn back in August when Sully swore he’d never work for him again. “How’s my favorite cripple?” he wanted to know.
Sully plopped down in one of the room’s fake leather chairs. “In the world’s worst fucking mood,” he said. “I’d like to toss you right out that window just to see what you’d land on.”
Carl smiled. “I’d land on my feet.”
Sully had to admit this was exactly the way it would probably go. “We may have to try it some time, so we know for sure.”
Carl swiveled lazily, grinning. “Sully, Sully, Sully.”
Bad mood or no bad mood, Sully couldn’t help grinning back. Carl Roebuck was one of those people you just couldn’t stay mad at. His father, Kenny Roebuck, hadn’t been able to, and neither, apparently, could Carl’s wife, Toby, who had a world of reason to. The fact that nobody could stay mad at him was, perhaps, the source of Carl Roebuck’s luck. No wonder he had his way with people, especially women. What he managed to convey to all of them was that they were just what he needed to fill his life with meaning.
“What am I going to do with you?” Carl wondered out loud, as if it really were his decision.
“Pay me the money you owe, and I’ll let you alone,” Sully offered.
Carl ignored this. “Is your truck running?”
“At the moment.”
“Then I got a job for you.”
“Not till you pay me for the last one.”
Carl stood up. “We’ve been through this. I’m not paying you and that moron Rub Squeers for that half-ass job. You dug a goddamn hole, stood around in it all afternoon, drank a case of beer, filled the hole, and left my lawn all tore up. And we don’t have an ounce more water pressure now than we did before.”
“I never said you would,” Sully reminded him. Carl became instantly red-faced, and this pleased Sully. “Don’t get all bent out of whack, now,” he added, knowing full well that nothing was more likely to bend Carl Roebuck out of whack than to be instructed by Sully to calm down. Along with Tip Top Construction, Carl had inherited from his father a heart condition that had already required bypass surgery.
“You know the trouble with guys like you?” Carl stood, glowing red now, even though he hadn’t raised his voice. “You figure you got a right to steal from anybody that’s got a few bucks. I’m supposed to assume the position because you got a busted knee and no prospects, like this is some kind of Feel-Sorry-for-Sully Week. Well, it ain’t, my friend. This is Fuck-You Week.”
Carl was pacing back and forth behind his desk as he spoke, and for some reason his speech had a soothing effect on Sully, who put his feet up on Carl’s desk. “That was last week, actually. And the week before.”
“Then go away. You did shoddy work, and I’m not paying you for it. You think I got where I am doing shoddy work?”
Sully couldn’t help but smile at this. Maybe later in the day when he remembered it, this line of bullshit would piss him off, but right now, watching Carl Roebuck, beet red with trumped-up self-righteousness, constituted something like partial payment for the debt. And when Sully finally spoke, his voice was even lower than Carl’s.
“No, Carl,” he admitted. “You didn’t get where you are by doing shoddy work. You didn’t get where you are by doing any work. You got where you are because your father worked himself into an early grave so you could piss away everything he worked for on ski trips and sports cars.”
Sully let this much sink in before continuing. “Now personally, I don’t care about the ski trips and the sports cars. I don’t even care if you wind up broke, which you probably will. But before you do, you’re going to pay me the three hundred bucks you owe me, because I dug a fifty-foot trench under your terrace in ninety-degree heat and busted my balls tugging on hundred-year-old pipes that snapped off in my hands every two feet. That’s why you’re going to pay me.”
He got to his feet then, facing Carl Roebuck across his big desk. “I’ll tell you another thing. You’re going to pay for the beer. I just decided. It was only a six-pack, but since you think it was a case, you can pay for a case. Call it a tax on being a prick.”
That seemed like a pretty good exit line to Sully, and he slammed the door on the way out. The glass hadn’t stopped reverberating, however, before he thought of an even better way to leave, so he went back in. Carl was still standing there behind the desk, so Sully picked up right where he left off. “The other reason you’re going to pay me is that someday you’re going to catch me in a really bad mood. My knee’s going to be throbbing so bad that even Feel-Sorry-for-Sully Week won’t make any difference. The only thing that’ll make it feel better will be seeing your sorry ass go flying out that window. About two seconds before you hit the bricks, it’ll dawn on you that I wasn’t kidding.”
Instead of slamming the door again, Sully stood in the open doorway to witness the full effect of his verbal assault. Almost immediately he wished he had slammed the door. Carl’s color, instead of deepening, actually began to return to its normal shade, and with its return came the grin that made it impossible for people to stay mad at Carl Roebuck. Instead of storming out from behind the desk and taking a swing at Su
lly, as Sully half hoped he would, Carl returned to his swivel chair, sat down and put his own soft-loafered feet up. “Sully,” he said finally. “You’re right. I’m not going to pay you, but you’re right. I am lucky. Most of the time I remember, but sometimes I forget. Anyway, since we’re friends, I’ll give you a tip. When you leave, stop outside there on the landing for about five minutes before you go down. That’ll save you having to walk back up here when it occurs to you.”
“When what occurs to me?”
Carl Roebuck wagged an index finger maddeningly. “If I told you, it would ruin the surprise, schmucko.”
Ruby was also grinning at Sully when he left, which probably meant that whatever the surprise was, she’d already figured it out. Outside on the landing, where he’d been told to wait, where the cold air of reality tunneled up from the street, Sully still couldn’t think what the surprise was, but he stood there buttoning his coat and pondering his visible breath in the hallway. Things had gone pretty much the way Sully had envisioned. Naturally, they’d argue over the money Carl refused to pay, and naturally he’d tell Carl where to get off and storm out of his office. Then later Carl would come looking for him at The Horse and offer some shitty job as a peace offering, which Sully would tell him he could stuff, and then Carl would offer him something else, probably just as shitty, but Sully would accept this offer because at least he’d gotten some satisfaction out of telling Carl off, not once but twice. By the end of the week he and Rub would be back on the Tip Top payroll.
Except that Carl had thrown him a curve by offering him work right away, which meant that Sully was not only storming out on Carl but the work he’d really come for. On the other hand, Carl hadn’t crowed. That was what Sully had dreaded most, Carl smiling smugly and saying, I told you you’d be back. Sully knew from experience that “I told you so” were the four most satisfying words in the English language. He couldn’t remember ever passing up the opportunity to say them, and he had to admit it was pretty decent of Carl not to gloat. And he was definitely right about the stairs.