Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Rub nodded enthusiastically.

“Okay,” Sully said. “As long as you’re not too worried.”

Rub frowned. “About what?”

“About my bad knee. The one you never forget about. I thought you might be worried I’d hurt it again.”

Rub wasn’t at all sure how to respond to this. He could think of only two responses — no, he wasn’t too worried, and yes, he was worried. Neither seemed quite right. He knew he was supposed to be worried. If true, this meant he was expected to hope they didn’t go back to work, something Rub couldn’t really hope, because he’d missed working with Sully a great deal this fall and hated working with his cousins collecting trash, almost as much as they hated letting him. North Bath had recently suspended trash collection as a city service, leading to entrepreneurial daring on the part of Rub’s relatives, who had for generations worked for the sanitation department. Last year they’d purchased the oldest and most broken down of the town’s aging fleet of three garbage trucks, had SQUEERS REFUSE REMOVAL stenciled on the door, and prepared to compete on the free market. In addition to the driver, there were always at least two Squeers boys hanging on to the back of the truck as it careened through the streets of Bath, and when the vehicle came to a halt they leapt off the truck like spiders and scurried for curbside trash cans. There were only so booth or not. He’d been under the distinct impression that when Sully told him to go grab a booth, he himself had intended to join him there when he finished with the old woman. Except that now Sully was seated at the counter talking to Cass as if he’d forgotten all about Rub and the booth. To make matters worse, several people had come in and were waiting near the door for a booth to be vacated. They kept looking at Rub, all alone in his big one. Had the stool next to Sully been empty Rub would have made for it, but that stool was occupied, which meant he had to choose between sitting alone at a booth for six and not having a place to sit at all. His deeply furrowed expression suggested that the conundrum might be causing a cranial blood clot.

“He has been even more pathetic than usual this fall,” Cass had to admit. “He was in here earlier looking for you.”

“I figured.”

“He ask you yet?”

Sully shook his head. “He keeps getting interrupted. In another minute or two he’ll cry.”

Indeed, Rub looked to be on the verge of tears when Sully finally relented and waved him over. Jumping up quickly, he came toward them at a trot, like a dog released from a difficult command.

“There’s no stool,” he said as soon as he arrived.

Sully swiveled on his, a complete circle. “You know what? You’re right.”

The people waiting by the door made for the booth Rub had vacated. Rub sighed deeply as he watched them take possession. “What was wrong with the booth?”

“Nothing,” Sully told him. “Not a goddamn thing. Booths are great, in fact.”

Rub threw up his hands. The look on his face was pure exasperation.

“Think a minute,” Sully reminded him. “What’d you just do for me over at the house?”

Rub thought. “Tied your shoe,” he suddenly remembered.

“Which means?” Sully prompted.

Cass set a steaming cup of coffee in front of Sully and asked Rub if he wanted any.

“Don’t interrupt,” Sully told her. “He’s deep in thought.”

“I never minded tying your shoe,” Rub said. “I know your knee’s hurt. I didn’t forget.” This last was delivered so unconvincingly that Sully and Cass exchanged glances.

Rub’s spirits plunged. He remembered yesterday. “Albany.”

“How come I was in Albany?”

“For your disability.”

“And what did they tell me?”

Rub fell silent.

“Come on, Rub. This was only yesterday, and I told you at The Horse as soon as I got back.”

“I know they turned you down, Sully. Hell, I remember.”

“So what do you do first thing this morning?”

“How come you can’t just say no?” Rub said, summoning the courage to look up. The conversation had attracted exactly the sort of interest Rub had hoped to avoid over in the far booth, and everybody at the counter seemed interested in watching him squirm. “I wasn’t the one busted up your knee.”

Sully took out his wallet, handed Rub a ten-dollar bill. “I know you didn’t,” Sully said, gently now. “I just can’t help worrying about you.”

“Bootsie told me to buy a turkey is all,” he explained.

Cass came by then and refilled Sully’s cup, topped Rub’s off. “I don’t think you heard her right. She probably said you were a turkey.”

Rub put the ten into his pocket. Everybody in the place was grinning at him, enjoying how hard it was for him to get ten dollars out of his best friend. He recognized in one or two of the faces the same people who, as eighth-graders, had always enjoyed the fact that he couldn’t produce his homework for Old Lady Peoples. “You’re all in cahoots against me,” he grinned sheepishly, relieved that at last the ordeal was over and he could leave. “It’s less work to go out and earn money than it is to borrow it in here.”

“Did they even look at your knee yesterday?” Cass wanted to know. In the five minutes since Rub had left, the diner had emptied out. Sully was the only customer seated at the counter now, which allowed him to flex his knee. It was hard to tell, but the swelling seemed to have gone down a little. Mornings were the worst, until he got going. He didn’t really blame Rub for not understanding why he could neither sit nor stand for very long, or how if he happened to be seated the knee throbbed until he stood up, giving him only a few moments’ peace before throbbing again until he sat down, back and forth, every few minutes until he loosened up and the knee settled into ambient soreness, like background music, for the rest of the day, sending only the occasional current of scalding pain, a rim shot off the snare drum, down to his foot and up into his groin, time to rock and roll.

“They don’t look at knees,” Sully told her, finishing his second cup of coffee and waving off another free refill. “They look at reports. X rays. Knees they don’t bother with.”

In fact, Sully had suggested showing the judge his knee, just approaching the bench, dropping his pants and showing the judge his red, ripe softball of a knee. But Wirf, his one-legged sot of a lawyer, had convinced him this tactic wouldn’t work. Judges, pretty much across the board, Wirf said, took a dim view of guys dropping their pants in the courtroom, regardless of the purpose. “Besides,” Wirf explained, “what the knee looks like is irrelevant. They got stuff that’d make even my prosthesis swell up like a balloon. One little injection and they could make you look like gangrene had set in, then twenty-four hours later the swelling goes down again. Insurance companies aren’t big believers in swelling.”

“Hell,” Sully said. “They can keep me overnight. Keep me all week. If the swelling goes down, the drinks are on me.”

“Nobody wants you overnight, including the court,” Wirf assured him. “And these guys can all afford to buy their own drinks. Let me handle this. When it’s our turn, don’t say a fuckin’ word.”

So Sully had kept his mouth shut, and after they waited all morning, the hearing had taken no more than five minutes. “I don’t want to see this claim again,” the judge told Wirf. “Your client’s got partial disability, and the cost of his retraining is covered. That’s all he’s entitled to. How many times are we going to go through this?”

“In our view, the condition of my client’s knee is deteriorating—” Wirf began.