Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

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 before 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.”