Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“What are you doing?” Raymer said.

“This is a three-man job,” Sully said. “I’ll dig the hole, but I’m not climbing down into it on my bum knee.” Also, though his breathing was okay now, that might change. Better safe than sorry.

Carl appeared at the window, squinting out into the darkness. He must’ve recognized Sully’s silhouette below, because he said, “What do you want now? You already took my last bent farthing.”

“Get dressed,” Sully told him.

“You decided to evict me after all?”

“Not tonight.”

“Because that would be just like you.”

“What are you, hard of hearing? Get dressed. Old clothes.”

“Who’s that with you? Because it looks like Raymer.”

“It is,” said Raymer, who’d gone back to absentmindedly digging at his palm.

“Okay,” Carl said, “but only because I’m curious. The sight of you two together beggars the imagination. Give me five minutes.”

“Two,” Sully said.

He and Raymer went out to the curb to wait, Rub panting along with them. Sully lowered the truck’s tailgate. “Jump in,” Sully said, and Rub, a talented leaper, did as instructed.

“He understands you?” Raymer said, clearly impressed.

“Seems to,” Sully said, raising and latching the tailgate. “You can sometimes lose him with abstract concepts.”

“When I was a kid we had a dog who chewed himself like that,” he said sadly.

“What happened to him?”

“He got hit by a car.”

“Hey, Dummy,” Sully said, and the dog perked up. “You hear that?”

—

CARL, noticing the dried streaks on the windshield, ran his index finger through one, verifying his suspicion that, yes, it was on the inside of the glass.

“I wouldn’t,” Sully warned him.

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Lick that finger.”

Carl sniffed it instead, then shot Sully a look of unadulterated disgust before rolling down the passenger window. “Who was the last human being to ride in this vehicle besides you?”

“Rub, I think,” Sully told him. The outside air smelled clean and fresh but still thick with ozone from the storms.

“Rub’s a dog.”

“The other Rub.”

“In this vehicle,” Carl continued, “we witness the sad demise of fundamental Western values. Pride. Order. Personal responsibility. Rudimentary hygiene.”

“This from a man who pisses himself.”

“See, that’s the difference between us. I was embarrassed this morning. You, by contrast, think this truck’s normal.”

That wasn’t entirely true. Every now and then Sully considered giving the cab a good scouring but always decided against it. For one thing, a clean vehicle would only encourage his Upper Main Street ladies to take further advantage of him. Elderly widows, they already relied on him for small handyman jobs, as well as snowblowing their sidewalks and driveways in winter. When their middle-aged children, who mostly lived in Schuyler or the Albany suburbs, weren’t available to take them to the doctor or the supermarket or the hairdresser or out to the new Applebee’s for lunch, it was Sully they turned to. After all, cabs cost money, whereas he could be paid in banana bread. They always began by saying how grateful they were, and what would they ever do without him, but once this pro forma gratitude was entered into the record, they commenced complaining about the condition of his truck, the springs poking up through the truck’s passenger seat and goosing their withered flanks, the floor strewn with sloshing Styrofoam coffee cups, the crowbar on the dash — how did that get there? — that would vibrate and inch toward them menacingly whenever he accelerated.

Mostly Sully didn’t mind being at their beck and call, as his long afternoons were hard to fill. But the old women chattered at him incessantly, and when he dropped them back home they always wanted to know if he’d be free the following Tuesday, as if that were the sort of thing a man like him would know offhand. They might be old — ancient, many of them — but they wanted what all women had demanded of Sully his entire life: commitment. His determination to remain uncommitted was strengthened with each new request. Besides, why clean the cab if Rub was just going to pee in it again?

“Okay,” he said. “I got one for you. What kind of man owns a construction company and no work clothes?” Despite Sully’s explicit instructions, Carl was wearing his usual outfit: polo shirt, chinos and what looked to be expensive Italian loafers.

Carl ignored him, distracted by the sound of Rub’s toenails scrabbling in the truck bed. “You shouldn’t let him ride back there.”

“He enjoys it,” Sully said weakly, because of course Carl was right. “He’s a dog.”

“Yeah, but what happens if you have to jam on the brakes? How are you going to feel when he goes flying and gets dead?”

“You’re right,” Sully said. “On the drive home you can ride back there.”

When they came to a stop sign, Carl adjusted his side-view mirror so he could study Raymer’s Jetta as it pulled up behind them. “Who the hell is he talking to?”

Sure enough, when Sully glanced at his rearview, Raymer did appear to be in an animated conversation with somebody. “He must have a police-band radio in there,” Sully ventured. But then he remembered the parrotlike voice on the other side of the bathroom door. So maybe not.

“Does he seem right to you?” Carl said. “Because to me he looks unhinged. And this business about the garage-door thingy? How does that make any sense?”

“He seems adamant.”

“Or just batshit.”

“He’s had a rough day.”

Carl snorted at this. “No, I’ve had a rough day.”

“He fainted into a grave this morning,” Sully said. “Tonight he got struck by lightning.”

Carl considered this, then shrugged. “Okay, I stand corrected.”

In good weather the cemetery’s backhoe was kept under the sloping metal awning attached to the maintenance shed. The shed itself was locked, but Sully knew where Rub hid the key. As he inserted it into the lock, he remembered something. “Wait here,” he told his companions, then went quickly inside, shutting the door behind him. It took only a minute to locate the backhoe’s ignition key dangling by a cord from its peg. What he’d remembered just in time was that Raymer’s three missing wheel boots were stashed in here under a tarp. Sully had originally hidden them out at Harold Proxmire’s auto yard in the trunk of a rusted-out Crown Victoria, but such contraband made Harold nervous, so when Rub got the job at Hilldale, Sully’d moved them here, then promptly forgot all about them. He raised one corner of the tarp, and sure enough, there they were, good as new. Tomorrow, he told himself, after he and Rub hauled that tree branch away, he’d transfer them out to Zack’s shed, where it was unlikely anyone would come across them by accident.

The eastern horizon was graying, which meant they didn’t have much time. Tossing Carl the keys to the pickup, he climbed aboard the backhoe, and Rub leaped up beside him. “Don’t get too far ahead,” he told the other two. “I don’t know where we’re going, and top speed on this thing’s about two miles an hour.”

As they crept slowly through the cemetery, Sully found himself wishing that Peter was here. His son’s default mode was disapproval, at least where Sully was concerned, but there were also occasions when he let his guard down and surrendered to the madcap spirit of the moment. Once, years earlier, Sully had conscripted him to help steal the Roebuck snowblower. Every time it snowed, Sully would swipe it, only to have Carl steal it back. With each theft they increased their security measures to prevent further larceny. Finally Carl had brought it out to the yard and chained it to a pole. The property was surrounded by a high chain-link fence and patrolled at night by a Doberman named Rasputin. Sully’d knocked the dog out with a handful of sleeping pills inserted in a package of hamburger, but he still needed Peter to climb the fence and liberate the snowblower with the bolt cutters he’d also swiped from Carl. All had gone smoothly, the Doberman off sleeping somewhere (they assumed), until, just as Peter severed the chain, they heard a low growl, and there stood Rasputin within a yard of him, his feet wide apart, his teeth bared hideously. For a long minute he and Peter just stared at each other until the dog began to palsy and froth at the mouth. A moment later, the pills trumped his malice, and he just keeled over in the snow.