Carl Roebuck was swiveling and grinning when Sully came back in.
“I’ll take the money up front,” Sully said. “Since I’m working for a man who can’t be trusted.”
“Half now, half when I’ve inspected the job,” Carl insisted, their standard arrangement. “Since I’m employing Don Sullivan.”
Sully took the money, counted it while Carl explained the job. As he listened, it occurred to Sully that he was relieved, glad to be back working for a man he wanted to kill half the time, glad he wasn’t driving every day to the community college where he didn’t belong, glad to be taking the judge’s advice about not blaming people for the way things were, glad not to be placing his trust in lawyers and courts. He’d been afraid that a job working for Carl might be one of the real things that had disappeared while he was taking philosophy.
“I should let one of my regular guys do this,” Carl was saying. “But I know you need the money, and besides, we’re friends, right?”
“You’re lucky I need the money, friend,” Sully said.
“You always need the money,” Carl pointed out. “Which is why I always have you by the balls.”
That smile again. How could you hate the man?
“Does this mean you’re through with higher education?” Carl wondered as Sully prepared to leave.
Sully said he supposed it did.
“I wonder who won the pool,” Carl said absently.
“Ruby,” Sully said, without looking at Carl’s secretary on his way through the outer office.
“What?” the girl wanted to know in her best bored-to-death voice.
“Don’t take your love to town.”
One thing was for sure: compared to some of the other guys Carl Roebuck hired, Sully himself was a genius. Apparently one of Carl’s regulars had loaded up about ten tons of concrete basement blocks on the company flatbed and dropped them off at the wrong site. Sully found them in a sloppy pyramid next to a small, two-bedroom ranch home that was already half built. The unexpected snow, together with the fact that tomorrow was a holiday, had apparently sent the guys working on the house back home. In fact, they’d probably never left their homes this morning. Carl didn’t hire union men when he could help it, but even the guys who worked for Tip Top Construction didn’t work in the snow.
Most of the overnight snow had already melted, and the uneven ground was a quagmire of patchy brown slush. The bank sign had said forty-two degrees when Sully drove by. It felt colder now.
There was only one sensible way to approach this, and that was to go fetch Rub, who was surefooted and didn’t mind working in slop of any description. Something was terribly wrong with Rub’s nose, Sully was certain. Rub could stand hip deep in the overflow of a ruptured septic tank as pleasantly as if he were in the middle of a field of daisies. This made him invaluable to Sully who, while not overly fastidious, could distinguish between the smell of shit and that of daisies. The downside was that Rub couldn’t smell himself either, and when he was ripe his own personal odor greatly resembled what he stood in. Still, the smart thing to do would be to go get Rub, station him in the muck. That way Sully could stay up in the dry bed of the pickup and stack the blocks as Rub handed them up to him. He guessed four or five loads would do the trick, and with Rub’s help they could be finished by early afternoon.
Since this was the only sensible way to proceed, Sully decided against it. Rub wasn’t expecting work so soon, and it might take Sully an hour to find him if he wasn’t home or at Hattie’s or the donut shop or the OTB. Then he’d have to listen to Rub chatter all day, and later they’d split the money. Sully didn’t mind splitting the money, but he hadn’t worked in three months, and he wanted to see how things went. Alone, he could work at his own pace, and if his knee couldn’t take it, he could just quit and not owe anybody any explanations. Next week he’d just go back to school.
So he backed the truck up close to the pile of concrete blocks, got out, lowered the tailgate and tested the footing, which wasn’t good. I should definitely go get Rub, he thought. Instead he planted half a dozen blocks in the mud for a makeshift walkway between the pyramid and the truck. Then he began, carrying blocks in each hand at first, then a stack of four balanced against his chest, piling them in rows on the truck bed. The hard part was climbing up onto the truck. The only way was to sit on the tailgate, swing his legs aboard, get his good leg under him, then the bad one. Surprisingly, his knee didn’t feel too bad. In fact, it felt pretty good. If it held up, maybe he’d use the money he earned today to buy a couple new radials for the truck, whose tires were bald from running back and forth to Schuyler Springs every day to study philosophy. It was as if the young professor had disproved the tread on Sully’s tires along with everything else.
It was when he thought of all the things the truck was going to need that he got mad about the money Carl Roebuck wouldn’t pay him. The pickup had been pretty long in the tooth when Sully bought it. It had needed new tires a month ago, along with a rebuilt carburetor. The valves needed grinding too. In another month the truck would need all of these repairs even worse, and the month after that it would need them so bad he’d have to make them. And pay for them. New shocks, too, Sully thought, as the truck groaned beneath the weight of the concrete. The three hundred Carl Roebuck owed him would have paid for the tires or the valves or the shocks, whichever Sully decided to fix first. Not that he would necessarily have used the money on the truck if he had it in his pocket that very minute. Sometimes when he got money ahead he gave some to Miss Beryl as advance rent, a hedge against the scarcity of winter work. Sometimes he’d give Cass a hundred so that if things got skinny he’d be able to eat on account for a while. Other times he gave money to Ruth to hold on to for him, which was one way of ensuring that the OTB or the poker table wouldn’t get it. The trouble with Ruth was that once he instructed her not to give it back to him unless he really needed it, then it was up to her to decide his need, and sometimes her judgment was a little too refined. And one time her no-good husband Zack had stumbled onto her stash and spent Sully’s money, thinking it was his wife’s. The more Sully thought about it, the more it didn’t seem like such a bad idea to be owed the three hundred. Letting Carl hang on to the money for a while might actually be the safest thing. When Sully needed it most, money had a way of first liquefying, then evaporating, and finally leaving just a filmy residue of vague memory.
And so, as Sully fell deeply into the rhythm of his work, he had the luxury of knowing that his money was safe without in any way diminishing his righteous anger at Carl Roebuck for refusing to pay up, anger that swelled like music in his chest to the distant beat of his throbbing knee. Smiling, he imagined Carl Roebuck tossed out his office window, his arms flapping frantically, his legs wildly pedaling an invisible bicycle as he fell. Sully didn’t allow him to hit the ground. He just tossed Carl from the window again and again, so that the other man tumbled and pedaled and screamed.
It was so much fun tossing Carl Roebuck out of his office window that Sully had the truck over half loaded before he noticed it was starting to tilt slightly, like old Hattie in her booth. At first he thought it might be an optical illusion, so he stood back away from the truck and looked at it. There was no reason the truck should be tipping. Off to the side Sully noticed some sheets of plywood, and he wished he’d seen them before so he could have lined the bed of the truck and cushioned the load. Probably it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to separate every other layer too, not that the plywood would have distributed the weight differently. It was too late now, in any case. That was the bad news. The good news was he’d worked hard for an hour and his knee didn’t feel any worse. In fact, by working and contemplating Carl Roebuck tumbling from his office window, he’d forgotten all about his knee. It wasn’t strictly logical, but maybe his injured knee actually was encouraging him to work. Either that or it was telling him to murder Carl Roebuck.
He knew one thing for sure. It was more satisfying to be mad at Carl
than to be mad at the courts. Over the last nine months that Wirf had been trying to get him total disability, Sully’d come to understand that all his trips to Albany, even the hearings themselves, were only tangentially related to his deteriorating knee. Maybe the knee wasn’t quite as bad as Wirf portrayed it. Maybe. But Sully’s growing sense of these legal proceedings was that they were taking place independent of reality. The question wasn’t his injury, or whether or not it allowed him to work, or how an injured man might fairly be compensated. At issue was whether the insurance company and the state could be forced to pay. Sully hadn’t seen the same insurance company lawyer twice, but they were all sharp and their sheer numbers suggested that he and Wirf, who referred to them as “the Windmills” and insisted that you just had to keep tilting at them, were fighting a losing battle. You couldn’t even get good and angry and entertain yourself by imagining that the next time you saw that smug son of a bitch of a lawyer you’d throw him out the window, because the next time there’d be a different guy altogether. You didn’t even get the same judge all the time, though all the judges seemed to have pretty much the same attitude toward Sully’s claim. They all lectured Wirf and, when the hearing was over, kidded cozily with the insurance company lawyers. Sully himself was generally ignored, and lately he’d come to suspect that if his leg just went ahead and fell off, this (to him) significant event probably wouldn’t change anything. Nobody would admit they’d been wrong. They’d use the old X rays to prove he still had a leg. It’d be a philosophical argument.
Sully knew all this was worth getting angry about, and sometimes he did get mad when he thought about it, but there in court he merely felt intimidated, and he was glad to be represented by a lawyer, even one as bad as Wirf, who looked almost as lost and out of place in court as Sully himself. Probably, it occurred to Sully, this was why you paid an attorney to represent you. If it weren’t for Wirf, the judge would talk down to you personally and not to Wirf, whose single professional skill seemed to be his ability to eat shit and not mind. Wirf didn’t even dress like the lawyers for the insurance company, nor did he appear to notice the way the other lawyers regarded him. Sully felt bad for him, because he and Wirf went way back, but he knew it was better for Wirf to eat shit than for Sully to eat it, because Sully would eat only so much before he’d decide it was somebody else’s turn, whereas Wirf seemed to understand that it was always his turn. Since they were friends, Wirf was representing Sully on contingency. If they ended up winning any of the half-dozen concurrent litigations Wirf had filed on Sully’s behalf, they would share the booty. Lately, though, it had become obvious to Sully that they weren’t going to collect a dime, and he’d begun to feel guilty about letting Wirf file appeal after appeal. To win, you’d have to throw every one of the bastards out the window, and there were more lawyers and judges than windows.
When the pickup was three-quarters loaded and listing even more dangerously, Sully roped off the load and surveyed it dubiously. There was no reason the blocks on the right side of the truck should be heavier than the ones on the left, but they must have been, because the truck was tilting right. As Sully stood there, ankle deep in muck, he realized that he was faced with an honest-to-God decision. He could, against his better judgment, take the unbalanced load out onto the highway and hope for the best, or he could unload it partway, make the first load a small one, drop it off and go find Rub to help him finish.
Free will. An issue much discussed in his philosophy class, and one of the first things to disappear. His professor, a very young man it seemed to Sully, had surprised him by taking the position that there was no such thing as choice, that free will was merely an illusion. Sully had been one of the few older students in the large class and had never said much, but he wished he had the professor here now so he could explain why this wasn’t really a choice. He’d probably go about it by disproving the truck. To Sully it looked for all the world like a choice. His. Fuck it, he decided.
Climbing into the cab, Sully turned the ignition, ground the truck into gear, released the brake, paused and stepped on the accelerator. He might have stopped when he heard and felt the tires spinning in the mud, but he didn’t, even though he knew what that meant. Instead, he gunned the engine, put the accelerator to the floor, months of submerged fury suddenly at the surface, the high-pitched unrelenting scream of the truck’s engine almost his own, the truck’s rear wheels shooting mud all the way up the side of Carl Roebuck’s half-built house. Then, without moving either forward or back, the truck began to shake so violently that Sully was barely able to keep his hands on the wheel until the engine finally hiccuped twice, shuddered and died. Just as well, too. The rear wheels’ lug nuts were already below ground. Stupid, he thought. Just an hour ago he’d been wondering if a second stupid streak in the same year was a possibility, and now here he was right in the middle of one before he’d even had a chance to contemplate the odds. Sully got out and surveyed the situation. The wind had picked up, and whistling through the pines nearby it sounded like laughter.
Mrs. Gruber, who had been disappointed by the snail, phoned midmorning, wondering if Miss Beryl’s mail had been delivered and if she’d looked over the circular that announced the grand opening of the new supermarket out by the interstate exit. Miss Beryl, as Mrs. Gruber feared, had tossed the circular into the trash without so much as a glance.
“They have some wonderful bargains,” said Mrs. Gruber, who hated to miss a grand opening of anything. She had pored over the circular with mounting excitement and regret, the latter caused by the fact that she did not drive and that the supermarket was five miles away. The circular had been six full pages, and each page was in full color, picturing deep red cuts of beef, Kelly green vegetables. Even the most mundane items, like toilet paper and laundry detergent, looked exotic and thrilling. And all at incredible savings. Mrs. Gruber wanted to go to the supermarket and find out for herself if the circular truly represented the wonders of the new store. She knew it was against the law for advertisers to say things that weren’t true, so she was hopeful. Wasn’t it just like Miss Beryl to toss the circular, she thought, genuinely irked by her friend’s perverse refusal to be excited by anything exciting. “Go find it,” she urged Miss Beryl. “Take a look at it.”
“It’s in the trash,” Miss Beryl told her. “Under my wet tea bag.”
“You won’t believe the bargains,” Mrs. Gruber said, quoting almost directly from the circular itself.
Miss Beryl glanced out the front room window, hoping the snow might be pretext for refusal. She did need to go to the store today, though the North Bath IGA would do her fine. It was close, and she didn’t mind that there weren’t any bargains. It was Miss Beryl’s view that anything involving crowds of jostling bargain seekers wouldn’t be a bargain. But most of the snow had melted, and the street was actually dry in a few spots.
“It’ll be good to get out,” Mrs. Gruber said. “Let’s go. Let’s sally forth,” she said, purposely using one of her friend’s favorite phrases.
“I’ll pick you up in half an hour,” Miss Beryl told her.
“I’ll be outside,” Mrs. Gruber said. To her mind, being on the porch and saving her friend the necessity of pulling into the driveway was a way of paying Miss Beryl back for agreeing to go to the new supermarket.
“Stay inside,” Miss Beryl said. “I’ll toot.”
“I don’t mind,” Mrs. Gruber insisted. “I’ll be on the porch.”
“Half an hour,” Miss Beryl said.
“Goody,” Mrs. Gruber said, hanging up.
Miss Beryl had half a page remaining in the chapter of her Trollope, so she finished it, then stood up. From the side windows of her front room she could see up and down Main Street, and when she set her book down and looked up Main in the direction of Mrs. Gruber’s house she could see that Mrs. Gruber was already standing on her porch and peering down the street at Miss Beryl’s house, fully expecting, no doubt, Miss Beryl’s car to be backing out of the drive. All of two
minutes had elapsed since they’d hung up.
Miss Beryl rose and sighed. She was just about to fetch her overcoat when a big, noisy car she’d never seen before pulled up at the curb outside her front window and a young woman who looked to be in her early twenties got out and checked something written on a slip of paper. She was wearing a sweater and no overcoat, and Miss Beryl could not help but notice, even at that distance, that the young woman had an absolutely huge bosom.
“Who the heck are you?” the old woman said out loud. “Look at those bazooms,” she added to Clive Sr., on the TV, who smiled back at her appreciatively, though he was facing the wrong direction to see. “You too, Ed. Take a gander at those,” she instructed Driver Ed.
Before closing the car door, the young woman leaned back inside. At first, she appeared to be looking for something on the seat, but then Miss Beryl saw a small head move inside the vehicle on the passenger side of the front seat.
When the young woman started across the snowy terrace and up the walk toward the porch, the car door opened and a very small child clambered out. Apparently, the young woman (the child’s mother?) heard the door open, because she spun and almost flew back to the curb, shoving the child back inside roughly, punching the door lock down and slamming the door shut. Even from inside, Miss Beryl could hear the young woman shouting. “Sit, goddamn it!” she was instructing the child. “I’m coming right back. You hear me? Just sit in the goddamn car and look at your goddamn magazine. You hear me? If you get out of this car again, I’m going to knock your block off, you hear?”
“Someone ought to knock your block off,” Miss Beryl said as the young woman turned on her heel and started back across the terrace. She wasn’t quite to the porch when the door opened again, and the child climbed back out. This time the young woman stayed where she was, looked up into the web of black elm branches as if some answer, in the form of a chattering squirrel perhaps, might be offering advice. “You could close the goddamn door, at least,” she yelled at the child, who had begun to follow and now stopped. Miss Beryl couldn’t tell if the child was a boy or a girl, but whichever it was turned, put a small shoulder to the heavy door and pushed. When the door swung shut, the child lost its footing and slipped to its knees. Again the young woman looked to the sky for answers. “Come on, then, if you’re coming,” she shouted, and the child, wet kneed now but surprisingly dry eyed, did as it was told. There was something frighteningly robotlike about the child’s movements, and Miss Beryl was reminded of a movie she’d started to watch on television years ago about zombie children, a movie she’d quickly turned off.