Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Sully studied him sadly. He waved at Will, who waved back. “What?” he said finally.

“Just be careful of Vera if you run into her,” said Jocko, owl-eyed behind his thick glasses, unusually serious.

“I’m always careful around Vera,” Sully told him. “I wear a cup, in fact.”

“You miss my point. She’s the one I worry about, not you.”

Sully frowned. Jocko, a pharmacist, often knew medical information about people in town. “She isn’t sick?”

“Not exactly,” Jocko admitted, adjusting his glasses up the bridge of his nose significantly. “If this goes any farther, you’re going to have to find a new source of pain pills.”

Sully promised not to tell anyone.

“About a month ago, one of my clerks caught her shoplifting. I got back just in time to keep her from being arrested.”

“You’re kidding,” Sully said, because Jocko so clearly was not kidding.

“I wish.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Neither could I. I took her back in the office and she came unglued. Un-fucking-glued, Sully. She scared the shit out of me. I thought she was going to have a breakdown right there. Sobbing about disgracing her father. Sixty years old, and she’s worried about ruining her father’s reputation.”

“What’d you do?”

“Gave her a Valium and sent her home and told her to forget it. She hasn’t been back since. She’s shopping at the drugstore out by the interstate now.”

Sully nodded. “No good deed ever goes unpunished.”

“I’m grateful,” Jocko said as though he meant it. “When I was a kid, one of my friends stole a toy truck of mine. I saw him take it, and I could never face him afterwards. I felt more guilty than if I stole his truck.”

Will met them at the back door. He was holding a ticket. Sully had given the boy his triple ticket the day before to hold on to for luck. Sully couldn’t quite read yesterday’s results from where they were standing. “What was yesterday?” he asked Jocko.

“Four-five-seven.”

Sully nodded, took the ticket from Will, glancing at it with disinterest. “I haven’t been off the schnide all week. You’re supposed to be able to pick one of the three, aren’t you?”

“Just as well you didn’t hit yesterday,” Jocko commiserated. “The payoff would have just pissed you off. Nice two-eight daily double, though, for the magician who could have picked it.”

Sully blinked at the ticket Will had handed him. Two-eight, it said. “Here’s the magician right here,” he told Jocko. He’d completely forgotten he’d bought the boy a ticket, let him pick the numbers. In fact, he’d been about to tear the ticket up.

Jocko examined the ticket, then the board, then Will, who was beaming and blushing. “That’s the genuine article. Hundred and eighty-seven fifty.”

“How do you like that?” Sully said. “You’re rich.”

Jocko handed Will his racing form. “Who do you like today, kid?”

Sully and the boy had been sitting outside at the curb for nearly five minutes when Rub, who had all kinds of things to tell Sully, couldn’t take it any longer. First Sully didn’t come, and then he still didn’t, and then he finally did come, and now he was finally here but still wouldn’t get out of the car. A lot had happened since Rub and Peter had left Hattie’s over three hours ago, and Rub didn’t approve of any of it. It wasn’t bad enough that Peter had just gone off like he was the boss and could give himself orders, leaving Rub to work all by himself and take messages for everybody in town who wanted to leave one. But now when Sully and the boy finally did come back, they had to just sit there by the curb while he was inside doing his work and everybody else’s, full of longing and the morning’s unspoken wishes and messages and information. To Rub’s way of thinking, there were suddenly too many people in the world, and two of the extra unnecessary ones were Sully’s son and his grandson who, together, had sort of made Rub himself disappear. So he went out to where they sat at the curb and reasserted his existence. He went around to the driver’s side and knocked on the window.

Inside, Sully and the boy kept talking. Actually, Sully was talking, and Rub thought he had an idea what he was saying. He was telling the little boy to pretend he didn’t see Rub, who was standing right there in plain sight. “Don’t look at him,” Sully was saying, the words barely audible outside the glass. The little boy tried not to, but he kept darting furtive glances at Rub, who understood that this was one of Sully’s games. One of the ones designed to make himself feel like shit. Which was exactly how he did feel already. So he rapped harder on the window.

This time Sully noticed him, and he mouthed the words, “Hi, Rub,” as if he and the boy were a long way off, too far for a human voice to carry. Then he whispered something to the boy and they waved at him together. For Rub there were a great many mysteries, but none was more perplexing than the way his best friend would team up with any human being on earth against himself. It was almost enough to make Rub doubt that they were best friends.

When Sully and the kid were through waving at him, Rub made a circular motion in the air to signify that Sully should roll down the window. That way, at least, Sully couldn’t pretend not to hear. Not that Rub expected this ploy to work, and indeed he was not surprised when Sully feigned confusion and made the same motion back at him. Slowly, silently, Rub mouthed the words “ROLL DOWN THE WINDOW.”

Sully rolled it down. “What?” he said.

“What are you doing?” Rub wanted to know.

“Who?”

“You. The both of you,” Rub explained. “You’re just sitting there.”

Sully shrugged. “What do you want, Rub?”

What Rub wanted was in. In the car. In the conversation. Back in his friend’s company. In. “Can I get in?” he said. “It’s cold out here.”

“In here too,” Sully told him. “The heater doesn’t work. We’ll only be another minute. Then we’ll get out and all be cold together.” And then he rolled up the window, leaving Rub to stare at his own reflection. Even his reflection appeared to be inside the car, where it was warm, or warmer.

Rub was contemplating all of this, including the unfairness of his own reflection being inside the car while he was kept out, when the window rolled back down again a minute later. “What’re you doing?” Sully wanted to know.

“Waiting,” Rub explained.

“Well, do it over there,” Sully told him. “Go sit on the porch.”

“I ain’t hurting anything here,” said Rub, who knew his rights. This was a public street. “Couldn’t I just tell you one thing?”

“In a minute you can tell me everything. Go over and sit down on the porch.”

Sully said all of this as he was rolling the window up, and it closed completely just as the sentence ended. Leaving Rub alone once again with just his own reflection for company. The young man who stared back at Rub looked like somebody full of need but fresh out of options. Reluctantly, Rub did what he was told.

Inside the car, Sully and Will watched a sullen Rub retreat up the walkway to the front porch steps, where he stubbornly took a cold seat. What they’d been talking about was fear. Will was still afraid to enter his grandfather’s house. Sully had explained to him that when he was Will’s age, he’d been afraid of things too. Will appeared to doubt this.

He eyed the ramshackle house fearfully. It looked even scarier than it had the day before, because now there was a mountain of boards stacked on the sloping front porch, which, to Will’s way of thinking, meant that there was even less holding up the house than there had been. “You want to know what Grandpa used to do?” Sully said.