Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

They’d gotten some work done, at least. The bare forsythia had been trimmed back and a huge pile of sticks and branches raked onto the terrace. Sully’s ax stood upright, its blade embedded in the center of the tree trunk on the front lawn. A few wood chips littered the immediate vicinity of the stump, but otherwise there was little evidence they’d made much of an impression on it. Rub was right. Elm tree roots went halfway to China. It was okay with Sully that they hadn’t gotten very far. Getting the elm stump out of the lawn was going to be a ballbuster of a job, but it was one he could do himself, come spring, when the ground softened. He could do it with an ax and a shovel, a chain saw if he felt like borrowing one, and he could do it standing more or less straight up. It was the kind of work he specialized in, that he’d spent his life doing, the kind of work that required no special skills beyond dogged determination and the belief that he’d still be there when the stump was gone. The kind of job it would have probably been better to do another way, with the right equipment, quicker and with less effort. It had always been Ruth’s position that if Sully had put his bullheadedness to some constructive purpose when he was younger he could have been president.

Will scampered up the walk past Sully and joined his father, who studied the boy’s face knowledgeably. The boy wasn’t crying anymore, but Peter probably had enough of a father’s eye to guess that he had been. Sully himself had always been dumbstruck by grief, even his own, and considered it one of life’s wonders that other people had the ability to see grief coming from a long way off or to detect when it had recently passed. One of the things every woman he’d ever been associated with had held against him was his inability to see when they were grief-stricken. Even his own son seemed to possess this ability so conspicuously lacking in himself.

“I thought you said you was coming by after Hattie’s,” Rub said, sounding not a little like a child suffering a broken promise.

“And here I am,” Sully pointed out.

“It’s almost lunchtime,” Rub observed. “You probably aren’t even going to let us eat lunch today, are you?”

“Go ahead,” Sully suggested. “If you’re going to sit around all day, you might as well go eat.”

“We was just waiting for the truck,” Rub explained. “We’d have to make about ten trips in the Canimo.”

“Camino,” Sully corrected him. Rub was unable to pronounce this word. “El Camino.”

“We needed the truck,” Rub stated, too wise to try the word again, knowing the price of failure around Sully.

Sully handed him the keys. “Try not to wreck it,” he suggested. “At least not until I make the first payment.”

“I’ve never wrecked a single truck of yours,” Rub pointed out.

“It’s the reason we’re still friends,” Sully assured him.

Rub shrugged. “You’re more his friend now,” he remarked sadly, his voice lowered so Peter wouldn’t hear.

“Peter’s my son, Rub,” Sully told him. “I’m sorry if you object, but I’m allowed to be friends with my son if I want to.”

“He doesn’t even like you,” Rub said.

“True,” Sully admitted, not minding if his voice was audible to Peter. “But I’m growing on him. He just needs a little more time to get over the fact that I ignored him for about thirty years. He hasn’t quite figured out yet that I did it for his own good.”

Rub’s brow furrowed deeper. “How come he always calls me Sancho? It’s like he thinks I’m stupid.”

“Well,” Sully said.

Rub surrendered a half grin. “How come I don’t mind when you say I’m stupid?” he asked with genuine curiosity.

Sully was grinning too now. Nobody could cheer him up faster than Rub. “Because we’re friends, Rub. Friends can tell each other the truth.”

“How come I don’t get to tell you you’re stupid?”

“Because I’m smart,” Sully told him.

Rub sighed. They’d had this conversation before, and it always came out the same way.

Peter had been talking to Will in hushed tones, the boy seated on his lap. Peter listened, nodded knowingly, glanced at Sully, then said something to his son that Sully couldn’t quite make out. Then the boy scooted down the steps past them, down the walk and into the front seat of the El Camino, which was parked at the curb.

“I guess I’ll take him back,” Peter said to no one in particular. “Mom should be getting home about now.”

“Okay,” Sully said, meeting his son’s accusing eye.

“You want to tell me what happened?”

Sully shrugged. “I wish I knew,” he said truthfully. “I looked over and he was crying.”

“He said you got angry.”

“Not at him.”

“Well, something sure scared him,” Peter insisted.

“Just about everything seems to,” Sully said and was immediately sorry. “If I scared him, I sure didn’t mean to,” he added lamely.

Peter snorted. “You forgot all about him, didn’t you? You forgot he was even there.”

Which made Sully wonder if Will had told him about the lumberyard. He decided probably not. If Peter’d found out about that he’d have said something. Or he’d have said, “You forgot him again. ”

“I don’t remember you being there,” he said weakly. Nevertheless, Sully was stung by the accuracy of Peter’s intuition.

“That’s my line,” Peter said by way of a parting shot. He fished in his pocket for the keys to the El Camino. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Sully and Rub watched him depart. Starting the El Camino up, Peter did a U-turn and whipped the car back down Main. Sully caught just a glimpse of his grandson’s white face in the front seat before it and the car disappeared, leaving Sully to contemplate the fact that his son had just echoed Ruth’s refrain — that he was never around when needed. It had been one of Vera’s principal complaints, too, Sully remembered, though it had gotten lost in all her other complaints. Other people also offered variations on this same theme. From his old football coach, Clive Peoples Sr., who’d become homicidal when Sully strayed from his assigned duties, to Carl Roebuck, who would send him someplace and come by later and find him gone, to Rub, who would have liked to know right where Sully was every minute. In fact, so many people seemed to agree that Sully was never where he was needed that he was greatly tempted to acknowledge the truth of the observation, except that this would in turn have led to the sort of specific regret that Sully was too wise to indulge.

“Well.” Sully frowned at Rub. “You want to hear the good news?”

“I guess so,” Rub said a little suspiciously. Sully’s good news sometimes meant they’d been hired to dig up somebody’s ruptured septic tank.

“I got us another job,” Sully told him. “Working for your favorite person, too.”

Rub’s eyes narrowed. “Carl?”

Sully nodded. “He’s waiting for us. Impatiently, would be my guess.”

“Waiting where?”

“At the house,” Sully nodded in the direction of his father’s place.

“I thought you said you didn’t want nothing to do with that place,” Rub remembered.

It was one of the things about Rub that Sully couldn’t get used to. Occasionally, out of the blue Rub would remember something, sometimes a thing he’d been told only once, or overheard. Usually the things Rub recalled at moments like these were things Sully’d just as soon he forgot.

“I guess I did say that, didn’t I,” Sully admitted. He wasn’t sure how to explain to Rub or anyone else the attraction of ripping up the floors of his father’s house, gutting the inside, furthering the house’s destruction.