Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

Now it was Sully’s turn. Two years. But probably closer to one. Fine, Sully thought. Does it ever trouble you that you haven’t done more with the life God gave you? Not often. Now and then.

“Okay, fuck you, then,” Carl was saying. “If you don’t want to talk about sex, I better get back to work. For which — okay, I admit it — I am going to need your smelly dwarf. I’ve got a job he’s perfect for.”

“Ruth,” Sully called down the counter, again pointing to the clock. “Ten after eleven. Three whole minutes it took him.” Then, to Carl, “So tell me about it, this job.” He already had a pretty good idea, but he was interested to hear Carl characterize it.

“I’ll explain it to him. ”

“Tell me first.”

“And you’re what? His father?”

Actually, that was pretty much how Rub thought of Sully, which might be why he felt a kind of paternal responsibility for him that he’d never managed to summon for his own son, who mostly treated Sully like an inexplicable but undeniable genetic fact. “What if that shit you want him to clean up is toxic?”

“Toxic? It’s a ruptured sewer. Disgusting, I’ll grant you, but hardly toxic.”

“If you don’t know what it is, then you don’t know what it isn’t.”

Carl rubbed his temples. “I liked you better before you came into money.”

“No kidding? You liked it back when you had me over a barrel, Sheetrocking sixty hours a week in subzero temperatures?”

“Forty. You invoiced for sixty. God, those were good times,” Carl sighed, with a far-off, mock-nostalgic expression. “Seeing you Chester into the Horse, caked head to toe with mud and all manner of shit, smelling like Mother Teresa’s pussy? Just looking at you was all I needed to be happy.”

The weird part was that Sully missed those same days himself, not that he’d ever admit any such thing to Carl.

“Anyhow,” Carl said, lowering his voice significantly. “The shit’s not toxic, okay?”

“And you know this how?”

“Think about it. What’s uphill of the factory?”

“Nothing,” Sully said, tracing the sewer line up Limerock Street in his mind. “Except the old—”

“Right,” Carl said. “The rendering plant. Remember why they closed? No, of course you don’t. You can’t remember yesterday. But if you had a memory, you’d recall they got into a spat with the town over back taxes and moved the operation to Mohawk. Gus thinks they flooded that sewer line intentionally. Kind of a parting gift.”

“Except that was, what? Two years ago? Three?”

“That’s what threw us off. The theory is the mill needs repointing along the eaves. Every time it rains, water gets inside. Normally that wouldn’t matter, except it drains into the basement floor.”

Sully nodded, finally understanding. “And the drainage keeps whatever’s down there nice and ripe.”

“Under ideal conditions,” Carl went on, “say a heat wave after a week of rain…”

“Double time,” Sully said.

“Sorry?”

“Whatever you paid Rub for your last filthy job, he gets double for this.”

“Oh, sure. That you remember. Extort your old buddy Carl at every opportunity. Why do I even talk to you?”

“Triple, actually,” Sully said, upon further reflection.

“Fine, I’ll hire somebody else. You think Rub’s the only halfwit in Bath who needs work?”

He had a point there. “Okay, then double.”

“Deal,” Carl said, far too quickly.

Sully’d given in too soon, he realized.

“You think you can talk him into it?”

“I don’t know. He hates you.”

Carl rose to his feet. “Tell him you like me,” he suggested, heading for the men’s room. “He has no opinions that aren’t identical to yours.”

“But I don’t like you.”

“Sure you do, booby.”

When the bathroom door swung shut behind him, Sully went back to studying Roy Purdy, who was now thumbing up the last microscopic crumbs of piecrust from his plate. What he’d told Carl earlier was true. These days he did think of murder more often than sex. Roy had arrived back in Bath the same day Sully was given his diagnosis, the two events dovetailing in his mind and encouraging him to weigh his various options for the scumbag’s permanent removal. Running the little prick over with his pickup truck probably made the most sense, though it struck Sully as kind of impersonal. There was a strong possibility Roy wouldn’t fully comprehend what had hit him, and Sully wanted him to know. Sneaking up behind him and braining him with a shovel would probably be more rewarding. The sound of tempered steel encountering Roy’s skull — that melon softness underneath the fractured bone — would be satisfying. Since turning seventy, though, Sully wasn’t as good at sneaking up on people as he used to be, and here, too, Roy might die without knowing who killed him. Maybe the best guarantee that he would know exactly who was putting an end to his sorry existence would be to lace his coffee with rat poison. Some midmornings, after the breakfast rush, Ruth would ask Sully to watch the counter while she ran to the bank, so he could do it then. It’d be gratifying to watch Roy’s face spasm, the realization dawning, too late, that he’d been poisoned and by whom. The difficulty was in knowing how much poison to administer. Too little and he might not die, too much and he might taste it in the first sip, after which Sully might die. Sully’d never really been afraid of death and wasn’t even now that it was approaching on horseback, but he was fully committed to Roy dying first.

“I guess you liked that all right, then,” Ruth said, clearing Roy’s plate.

“Not bad for day-old,” he said, rubbing his small paunch. “We good here?”

“Aren’t we always?”

Roy evidently had no opinion on this subject. “Tell Janey I’m sorry I missed her.”

Sully saw his eyes settle on the door from the diner to the attached apartment where his ex-wife lived with Tina, their daughter.

“She doin’ okay, then?” he asked. “Everything all right?”

“She’s just fine, Roy,” Ruth said flatly. “So’s your daughter, if that’s of any interest.”

This last Roy appeared not to hear. “Tell her there wasn’t no need for that restraining order. I’m a changed man.”

“She’ll be glad to hear that. Keep your distance just the same.”

“Like I told the judge, it ain’t easy in a town this size.”

Ruth nodded. “That why you hang around the parking lot out at Applebee’s around closing time, waiting for her to get off?”

“I do that?”

“Somebody said they saw you.”

Roy swiveled on his stool to look at Sully now, acknowledging his presence for the first time, then swiveled back again. “Tell her soon as I find a job I’m gonna start making things up to her, and that’s for true.”

“Maybe you’d have better luck job hunting someplace else,” Ruth suggested. “Albany, maybe, or New York City. Someplace with more opportunities.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Roy said, getting to his feet and taking half-a-dozen toothpicks from the cup by the register. “I’ll find something right here in town one of these days.”

Sully opened up the paper to the classifieds and put on his reading glasses. “Here’s something that’d suit you to a T, Roy,” he offered.

“Sully,” Ruth said, with an edge in her voice that a wise man would have paid attention to.

“Wife beater needed,” Sully pretended to read. “Entry level. Minimum wage to start but plenty of opportunity for advancement. Only highly motivated self-starters need apply.”

“Sully,” Ruth repeated.