Nobody's Fool

  She made a face. “Alas, Ruby is no more, having tendered her resignation last Friday. I should have warned her that resignation would be the outcome.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  She shrugged. “We could follow the trail of mascara …”

  “Let’s not,” Sully suggested. “It’s pretty discouraging to think about so many girls crying over your husband. I know since women’s lib we’re not supposed to say that women are stupid, but the way they all fall for Carl kind of suggests it.”

  “You think they should all fall for you?”

  “Not all,” Sully said. “But if Carl can fool them all, I ought to be able to fool one or two.”

  “You aren’t fooling Ruth any more?”

  Sully ignored the question behind the question. In fact, he had not seen Ruth in three weeks, since Janey’s husband, Roy, shot up the wrong house and put Janey into the hospital with a broken jaw and a severe concussion. Somehow, Ruth had construed the entire series of events to be Sully’s fault. That was the message she’d delivered bright and early the next morning, before he was completely awake even. It had not been one of their usual arguments, carried on in private, in some motel room or the front seat of Sully’s pickup. She’d suddenly just materialized there at Hattie’s before he’d even loaned Rub his first dollar of the day, before he’d taken a sip of his coffee, before he’d even gotten to square one in the business of figuring out what he was going to say to Ruth when he ran into her. He had only just finished hearing about the events in question from a still badly shaken Miss Beryl a few minutes before. In fact, the part of the problem he was working on there at Hattie’s was whether to go looking for Ruth or let her find him. On general principle he hated to go looking for trouble, but he was also aware that trouble could get worse if you let it find you. And here it was before he could decide. He hadn’t even been aware of Ruth at first, just that the lunch counter had gone silent, as if everyone were holding his breath.

  And when he turned and saw who it was at his shoulder, it wasn’t Ruth’s sudden presence that concerned him so much as her appearance. She looked like a woman who’d lost what remained of her youth over night. She looked every day of her forty-eight-plus years, and there was something terrible about her expression, too, as if she herself realized that she’d lost, decisively, some great battle she’d been waging, and was glad, now that she’d thought about it, to have lost it.

  Whatever battle she’d lost, Sully could tell she had no intention of losing the fight she was about to pick with him. She looked ready to make short work of him and anyone foolish enough to take his side. The only person in the diner who might remotely have been Sully’s ally was Rub, who occupied the stool on Sully’s other side and who was so scared when he saw Ruth coming that he was unable to find his voice to warn Sully. In fact, he couldn’t have been more frightened if he’d just been informed that Carl Roebuck had found all those blocks they’d dumped behind the demonic clown, or even if Bootsie had come to whack his peenie.

  And indeed Ruth had made short work of Sully, who’d boldly played the only card in his hand, having mistakenly concluded that it was trump. “I wasn’t even there, Ruth,” he said.

  She’d let this statement hang there until the words themselves began to form, like skywriting, in the air between them. “I know you weren’t, Sully,” she told him, lowering her gruff voice like she always did when she was about to deliver a direct hit. “But then when was the last time you were there for anybody who needed you?”

  Ruth always had a flair for exit lines. Sully watched her go without getting up from his stool, without calling to her, watched her through the diner’s front window as she got into the car where Zack, to Sully’s further astonishment, had been waiting for her. Then the diner was filled with mad cackling. For a moment he wondered if what he was hearing was interior, his own confusion made audible, but it turned out to be old Hattie behind him in her booth, the old woman reacting to dimly perceived tension with raucous hilarity. It had taken Cass the rest of the morning to calm her mother down.

  “I never did fool Ruth,” Sully told Toby Roebuck now. “She just happened to like me regardless.”

  “That’s the way everybody likes you, Sully.”

  “Well, it’s better than being disliked, I guess,” Sully said.

  Toby Roebuck didn’t respond right away, which left the proceedings pretty empty. Had Sully been asked at that moment to name one thing he particularly disliked about women, even women he was most fond of, he’d have said it was the way they could get significantly quiet, as if to afford a man the opportunity to consider what he’d just said.

  “I ran into her yesterday, actually,” Toby said finally.

  “Who?”

  “Who?” she repeated. “Ruth, who. Who were we just talking about?”

  “Oh, her,” Sully said, forcing a grin.

  “She had a tiny little girl with her.”

  This was probably a question, but Sully decided not to go into it. Janey had still not been released from the hospital. Sully himself had only a sketchy knowledge of what had transpired during the last two weeks. Vince had come into The Horse late one night after closing Jerry’s Pizza and filled him in. According to Vince, Ruth had taken her two weeks’ vacation from her day job at the IGA, as well as from her waitressing at the restaurant (for which Vince held Sully responsible) so she could look after Tina while Janey remained at the hospital. This loss of income from his wife’s two jobs had forced Zack to contemplate finding a steady job himself. Janey’s husband, Roy, having failed to make bond, was still in jail awaiting trial. Everyone seemed to agree that that was the best place for him, especially since he’d threatened, as soon as he got out, to get even with Sully for hiding his wife and kid.

  “So,” Toby Roebuck said.

  “So,” Sully agreed. To what, he had no idea.

  “So, just like that, you and Ruth are finished.”

  “It’s true I’m available, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “Sully, Sully, Sully.”

  “That’s what your husband always says,” Sully told her. Then, seeing a welcome opportunity to change the subject, “You didn’t answer my question, though. Are you just filling in, or can I sneak up here and find you any time?”

  “For a while, it looks like,” she said. “He’s out at the yard, in case you were wondering. He’s a new man, he says. A man of many resolutions. You should ask him all about them. They’re over an hour old, though, so he may not remember.”

  Sully nodded, getting to his feet. “I can’t wait to hear all about it. If I miss him, tell him I was here.” To Will: “What do you say, sport? You ready to go?”

  Will, who had not uttered a word since his mumbled hello, got to his feet and preceded his grandfather into the hall.

  “You’re sure he’s related to you?” Toby said.

  “I know,” Sully said. Then, since the boy was out of earshot, he said, “I don’t want to say anything, but Ruby always wore see-through blouses. Of course, it’s up to you …”

  Sully wasn’t sure what he expected the result of this teasing to be. Maybe that she’d pitch something at him in mock outrage. And so he was closing the door, even as he spoke, and the door was almost closed by the time he finished. Almost. Which meant that he almost didn’t see when Toby Roebuck flashed him from where she sat behind the desk, her sweatshirt pulled up and then back down for a millisecond. Unsure he’d seen what he’d seen, he remained rooted to the spot in the hall outside the door. Exactly how long he stood there, he wasn’t sure. A beat? Two beats? Three?

  It was Will’s voice coming from the head of the stairs that reestablished a time/space context. “What’s the matter, Grandpa?” the boy said, his face a mask of urgent worry.

  From inside, a peal of hilarity. “Yeah, Grandpa,” Toby Roebuck called. “What’s the matter?”

  The night Sully and Peter had stolen the snowblower from Carl Roebuck’s equipment yard there had b
een, unknown to them, a casualty, indeed a near fatality. Rasputin, Carl’s Doberman, had suffered a stroke. Sully and Peter had seen the dog crumple, but they’d assumed it had simply gone to sleep on its feet and dropped. This was not the case. The dog’s training, to attack savagely any unauthorized nocturnal visitors to the yard, had come into deep psychological conflict with drug-induced goodwill and drowsiness. Unable to resolve the urge to kill with the urge to sleep, Rasputin’s circuitry had simply shut down.

  Since that night the dog had regained only a small measure of its physical capabilities. He had a lopsided appearance now, one side of his body, corresponding to the opposite side of his brain, pretty much nonfunctional, his former ferocity vanished. As if the dog had learned the value of a good night’s sleep, he now slept most of the time and even when awake wandered along the perimeter of the fence aimlessly, drooling out of one side of his mouth, as if in search of his lost aggression. Visitors he’d previously made nervous with deep-throated growls he now nuzzled affectionately with his long snout, then licked their fingers. All except Sully.

  It is possible a dog will not forget his poisoner. When Sully pulled up and parked by the fence, Rasputin, who had been lying asleep in his favorite spot—the one where he’d collapsed the night Sully’s hamburger changed his life—woke up, growled deep in his throat and tried to stand, an activity that always drew a crowd. Carl Roebuck and two of his men, just emerging from the Tip Top Construction trailer, stopped to watch this excellent entertainment. Once Rasputin was on his feet he could limp along well enough, but getting up from the cold ground after a long nap required, on the average, half a dozen attempts. The problem seemed to be that the animal’s good side, which responded as it always had, was impatient with the defective side, which refused to function at high speed, causing the dog to circle itself, like a boat with only one oar in the water, until finally the animal collapsed and had to start over again. Only when the dog was sufficiently exhausted for the functioning side of his body to go slowly enough to meet the requirements of the stroke-damaged side could he stand. By then he was ready for another nap.

  The men on the trailer steps watched several of these aborted attempts, shaking their heads in good-humored disbelief. Sully and Will watched for a moment also, the boy’s eyes growing wide and round with wonder and fear.

  “What’s wrong with him, Grandpa?” the boy asked.

  “He had a little accident a couple weeks ago,” explained Sully, who had seen the dog a couple of times in the interim. “You want to ride on my shoulders?”

  When Will nodded enthusiastically, Sully swung him aboard.

  “Look who’s here,” Carl Roebuck said when he noticed Sully and the boy approaching. “You come to admire your handiwork?”

  “It’s not my fault you got a spastic Doberman,” Sully said, setting Will down on the step. The boy was still warily watching Rasputin circle. Hearing Sully’s voice, the dog was now emitting small howls of frustration.

  “I think it is your fault,” Carl said. “I just wish I could prove it.” Then, to the two men who were watching the dog, “I know you guys’d love to stay here all afternoon and watch this dog have another stroke …”

  “I would,” one of the men said. “I admit it.” But he and the other man headed for the gate, and Carl and Sully and the boy went inside the trailer.

  Carl Roebuck went around behind the small metal desk and sat down, put his feet up and studied first the boy, then Sully. “Don Sullivan,” he said knowingly. “Thief of Snowblowers, Poisoner of Dogs, Flipper of Pancakes. Secret Father and Grandfather. Jack-Off, All Trades. How they hangin’?”

  Sully took a seat. “By a thread, as usual,” he said. He motioned for Will to go ahead and sit on the sofa. “Don’t ruin that,” he warned.

  Will looked at the sofa fearfully. It was torn to shreds, stuffing exploding from slits in the upholstery. Will climbed on carefully and found both men grinning at him.

  “Your grandfather tell you how he poisons dogs?”

  Will’s eyes got big again.

  “He steals people’s snowblowers, too.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to him,” Sully said. “He just can’t keep track of his possessions.”

  “You hid it pretty well, I’ll give you that,” Carl said.

  Sully nodded. “I think you’ve lost it for good this time,” he said. He’d told Miss Beryl to expect Carl Roebuck to come nosing around after the snowblower, and sure enough, Carl had. He’d told her to let him search the flat too, if he felt like it. But when she offered, Carl had declined, observing sadly that Sully wouldn’t hide it anyplace so obvious and he didn’t have anything up there to encourage collateral theft.

  “It’ll turn up eventually,” Carl said. “When it snows, for sure.”

  “I’d like to see it snow,” Sully admitted, thinking again about Harold Proxmire’s snowplow blade and the money he could make with it. “A good blizzard or two, and I’d be free of you for good.”

  Carl grinned. “You’ll never be free of me. If there were twenty blizzards and you had twenty plows, you’d still be desperate a week later.”

  “I never claimed to be lucky,” Sully admitted. “In a town this size there’s only room for one lucky man, and you’re him. The rest of us just have to do the best we can.”

  Carl snorted. “You’re the only man I know who believes in luck.”

  Sully nodded. “I believed in intelligence and hard work until I met you. Only luck explains you.”

  “That still leaves your own self with no good explanation.”

  “Bad luck explains me.” Sully grinned.

  Carl Roebuck grinned his infuriating grin. “You find a new place to live yet?”

  “Don’t remind me,” Sully told him. He’d promised Miss Beryl to be out by the first of the year, which left about two weeks, but so far he hadn’t made much progress in locating another flat. It had been Clive Jr., the day after the shooting incident, who’d tried to evict him first, but Sully had told him to go fuck himself. When Miss Beryl said she wanted him out, he’d go, but not before. Despite the fact that just about everybody wanted to blame him for just about everything, Sully wasn’t buying. He hadn’t been there at the time, and he’d never met the man who’d done the shooting. Maybe Janey had come to Miss Beryl’s looking for him, for a place to hide, but that didn’t make him responsible for what trailed in her wake. In fact, after he’d had a chance to let all the accusations leveled against him sift down, he’d come to the conclusion that there was a little too much loose blame flying in his direction. His ears were still ringing with Ruth’s denunciation when Clive Jr. had started in. Screw him and the horse he rode in on, was the way Sully looked at it.

  But later that night, when he sat zigging at The Horse with Wirf, he’d decided that maybe he’d move. Miss Beryl hadn’t blamed him, and her refusal to do so made Sully think maybe he should return the kindness by making sure she wasn’t in the line of fire any more. Maybe he hadn’t caused the events in question, but they couldn’t have happened without him. Maybe he was right and Janey wasn’t his daughter, but Ruth persisted in believing she was, and maybe Janey believed it too. And maybe Zack. It was all pretty complicated, and it reminded Sully of one of those cockamamie theories his young philosophy professor had so enjoyed tossing out. According to him, everybody, all the people in the world, were linked by invisible strings, and when you moved you were really exerting influence on other people. Even if you couldn’t see the strings pulling, they were there just the same. At the time Sully had considered the idea bullshit. After all, he’d been lurching through life for pretty close to sixty years without having any noticeable effect on anybody but himself, and maybe Rub. His wife had barely noticed his absence after the divorce and a new life had closed in around her. His son thought of another man as his father. Again, excepting Rub, he couldn’t think of anybody who depended on him, which demonstrated, he had to admit, their good judgment.

  But all this had been b
efore Thanksgiving, before Peter showed up needing things and bringing his own needy little boy with him, before Janey had come looking for him when she needed a place to hide, before he learned of Ralph and Vera’s troubles and that Wirf was sick. Maybe there were strings. Maybe you caused things even when you tried hard not to. If that was the case, he probably should find a new place to live. Miss Beryl was eighty and a hell of a good sport, but she deserved some peace and quiet in her old age. She didn’t deserve to have dead deer turn up on her terrace and crazy, jealous husbands from the wrong side of the Schuyler Springs tracks shooting up her neighborhood, and with Sully gone, they wouldn’t.

  So the next morning he’d told his landlady he’d move out the first of the year, provided Clive Jr. stayed the hell out of his way and didn’t badger him further. Though she’d appeared genuinely saddened by his decision, Miss Beryl hadn’t objected, and it occurred to Sully, as it had off and on for forty years, that maybe he was the dangerous man people considered him to be.

  “I’m not too worried,” he told Carl Roebuck now. “Toby says I can stay with you until something turns up. ‘It’d be nice to have a man around the house’ were her exact words.”

  Outside the trailer door there was a low growl, then a scratching and sniffing at the door. Will edged closer to Sully on the sofa.

  “Funny how that dog hates you,” Carl observed.

  “How do you know it’s me?”

  Another low growl from outside.

  Carl Roebuck grinned. “His master’s voice.”

  “Can he get in?” Will wanted to know.

  “Watch this,” Carl told the boy. “Go over to that window. Peek through the curtain.”

  Will looked more than a little dubious but did as instructed.

  “Is he standing there?”

  When Will nodded, Carl Roebuck kicked the door, hard. Outside, there was a muffled thud.

  “He fell down,” Will reported.

  Carl shook his head at Sully. “Isn’t that pitiful? A perfectly good Doberman, mean as hell. Ruined.”