Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

He said it just as his father delivered a short right that caught the policeman flush on the nose. Officer Raymer didn’t even raise an arm to block the blow. His head went backward and returned red, his hat landing topside down on the roof of the cruiser. Then his knees gave and he slumped gracefully against the side of the car. Sully stood over the man for a second, then looked back at Peter, whose head was still out the window. “What?” Sully said.

Peter shook his head, rolled the window back up.

Sully opened the cruiser’s door then and turned the key in the ignition to off. The car shuddered and was still. Then Sully returned to the truck and got back in. “There,” he said. “Where’d Rub go?” he wondered, scanning the street. Rub was gone.

Peter was staring at his father.

“What?” Sully asked again.

Peter shook his head in disbelief. “Nothing,” he said, throwing up his hands.

“Good,” Sully said. “For a minute there, I thought you were going to be critical.”

“You were right about one thing,” Peter said as they passed the IGA and through the intersection, heading out of town toward the lake in pursuit of Toby Roebuck’s Bronco. “She’s the prettiest woman in Bath.”

They’d pulled up in front of Tip Top Construction just as Toby was locking the street door. She hadn’t the slightest idea where her husband was, but she was willing to show them where the camp was located so they could unload the wood. “Won’t your husband be suspicious if you come home late?” Sully’d asked, flirtatious in such safe circumstances.

“I’ll just tell him I was with you,” she replied, “since that’s always such a chaste experience. Who’s this?”

Sully introduced Peter, who leaned across the front seat to shake her hand. Sully noticed the ease of his son’s gesture, the way Peter was able to convey through it his admiration of Toby Roebuck’s beauty without suggesting he was in awe of it, and Sully wondered where he’d learned such easy confidence. Not from Ralph, certainly. Nor even himself.

“Your son, huh?” Toby had observed. “I guess that means there was a time when you weren’t such a chaste experience.”

“I wouldn’t be now if I had more energy,” Sully assured her, adding, “Let’s hit the road, dolly, before the cops find me by accident and my son has to do this whole job by himself.”

She looked at him quizzically.

“You know an Officer Raymer?”

She made a face. “He’s the one they’re trying to fire, right?”

“He and I just had a little difference of opinion,” Sully said. “He should be just about coming to.”

Toby studied first Sully, then Peter, who nodded at her ruefully that this was true. “Sully, Sully, Sully,” she observed.

And so now they were racing through the dusk toward the lake where the Roebucks’ camp was located, their load of hardwood rattling so noisily in the back that they practically had to shout to be heard above the racket.

“She’s one of the nicest, too,” Sully observed in response to Peter’s observation about Toby’s being the prettiest woman in Bath. “Her husband treats her like shit, of course. He’s given her the clap three times this year. Can you imagine doing that to a girl like her?”

Peter didn’t answer the question right away, perhaps because he was trying to interpret it. After a moment Sully noticed his son was grinning at him in the near dark. “What?” he said.

“How long have you had this crush on her?”

Sully frowned at him. “She’s a little young for me.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Peter pointed out, still grinning at him slyly.

“I just hate to see such a nice girl treated like that, is all,” he explained.

Again Peter delayed answering for a meaningful beat, then finally said, “Okay.”

“You don’t believe me, wise ass?”

“Whatever you say,” Peter agreed, looking ahead at the Bronco’s taillights. “You’d probably have better luck if you thought of her as a woman. Women don’t like to be referred to as ‘girls’ anymore.”

“They don’t?”

“Nope.”

“You learn that at the university?”

“Among other things.”

“And now you know all the right things to say?”

“Nope,” he said. “Just some of the wrong ones.”

“What happened to the shy kid you used to be?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“I liked him.”

“Really?” Peter said. “You should have said something.”

The Roebucks’ camp was located on the far end of the lake, accessible via a rutted, unpaved road that wound in and out of the trees along the water’s edge. The water was a sheet of glass reflecting the quarter moon. They’d left all the other camps behind when Toby finally pulled off the road and down a steep embankment, parking on a narrow ledge just wide enough for one car. Sully pulled in behind her diagonally and turned off the engine, then the headlights, which illuminated the large roof of the camp still farther down the bank. When they got out, they could hear the waves lapping against the shore below.

“Nice hideout, sweetheart,” Peter said, doing Humphrey Bogart. “The cops’ll never find us here.”

“They’re not after you ” Sully pointed out.

“With my luck I’ll be nabbed as your accomplice.”

“I’ll tell them you were no help,” Sully said. “As usual.”

“Don Sullivan, the last of the tough guys,” Toby Roebuck said, her voice near in the dark. Also her perfume, which mingled with the crisp air off the lake below, creating an intoxicating mixture of damp earth and leaves and water and girl. Not woman, in Sully’s opinion. Girl. “I better have the goddamn key,” she said. They could hear her rummaging through her purse.

“We could probably get in anyhow,” Sully said, getting out.

“Right,” Toby snorted. “I heard all about you and your crowbar. There!” she held up the key triumphantly, a glint of silver in the moonlight. “Watch the Weps.”

“Okay,” Sully said. “What steps?”

She took his hand then, placing it on a railing he hadn’t noticed. “Four, then level, then three more,” she said, leading the way, her hand on his elbow now in much the same fashion, he noted, to his embarrassment, that he led old Hattie from the apartment into the diner each morning.

“Ouch,” he said, finding a patch of unlevel ground where his ankle turned, shooting pain from his knee to his groin.

“Why don’t you wait here,” she suggested. “Let me go unlock and turn the kitchen light on.”

As she said this, a light came on, not from below and ahead, but rather from above and behind. There was now enough light for Sully to see that Peter was no longer with them. His voice came to them from above, where they’d left the vehicles. “That help?”

“Hey,” Toby said. “A Sullivan with a brain.” In truth, the headlights helped only marginally, illuminating the trees and the camp’s roof but not the path. “Wait, okay?” she whispered.

Sully decided he would. A moment later Peter joined him, watching dubiously as Sully flexed his knee.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” Sully said. “Terrific.”

“Listen,” Peter said, his voice low and confidential. “Let me do the unloading.”

“I’m fine,” Sully insisted. “I’ll go slow.”

Several lights came on inside the camp and they could see Toby Roebuck moving swiftly from room to room, her hair bouncing.

“Why not just let me?” Peter said.

“Because.”

“Oh,” Peter said. “Well. As long as you have a reason.”

“Look,” Sully said. “When I can’t work any more, I’ll quit, okay. Is that all right with you?”