Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Nevertheless, this new banner read GO SABERTOOTHS! TROUNCE SCHUYLER SPRINGS! and the men whose job it was to string the banner across the street were more concerned with it than with the old banner, which had become gray and tattered in the wind and would not be restrung after the weekend’s big game. On the Monday following Thanksgiving the Christmas lights always got strung. And so, as the new banner was being attended to — the workers and onlookers shouting instructions to one another to make sure the new banner was centered and straight, as if a botched job might affect the outcome of the game — the old banner was allowed to lie stretched across the street in the slush. When the workers were satisfied that the new banner was secure and had climbed down from their ladders, one of them picked up one end of the old banner just as a car drove by and hooked the cord with one of its rear wheels, dragging the banner all the way up Main and finally out of sight. Sully, shoveling Miss Beryl’s driveway as promised, looked up and saw the banner trail by, though he had no idea what it was.

As much as Sully hated the idea, he was going to have to go find Carl Roebuck, who owed him money and refused to pay it. Sully was pretty sure what the result of this visit would be, too. He’d end up going back to work for Carl, something he’d sworn back in August he’d never do. Even worse, he’d sworn it to Carl, who’d looked smug and said, “We’ll see.”

Carl Roebuck was all of thirty-five and, the way Sully saw it, was threatening to use up, singlehandedly, all the luck there was left in an unlucky town. Just this year he’d won two church raffles and the daily number (on three separate occasions). Five years before that, just as Bath real estate had begun to appreciate, Carl, using part of the money he’d inherited when his father keeled over, bought an old three-story Victorian house on Glendale, getting it for back taxes and the resumption of a tiny 1940 mortgage when the elderly owner died intestate and without relatives. That wasn’t enough. The first thing Carl did was to go up into the attic, where he’d found a box of old coins worth forty thousand dollars. The man could shit in a swinging bucket.

Carl’s red Camaro was parked at the curb below his third-floor downtown office, right in front of the company El Camino. Sully double-parked his pickup so that both of Carl’s vehicles were effectively hemmed in. Carl was not above going down the back way when somebody he didn’t want to see was coming up the front. “When are you going to spring for an elevator, you cheap bastard?” Sully called when he got to the top of the stairs and opened the door that read TIP TOP CONSTRUCTION: C. I. ROEBUCK.

Carl’s new secretary, hired during the summer, was a pretty girl, though not as pretty as the one she replaced. She made a face at Sully, whom she hadn’t seen in three months and hadn’t missed. “He called in sick, he’s on the phone, he’s in the Bahamas. Take your pick. He doesn’t want to talk to you.”

Sully pulled up a chair, sat and massaged his knee, which was pulsing from the climb. He could hear Carl Roebuck on the phone in the inner office.

“The Bahamas sound all right, Ruby,” he said. “Get his checkbook and we’ll go.”

“There’s about a thousand guys I’d take with me before you,” Ruby informed him.

“Don’t be mean,” Sully said. “This is a small town. There can’t be more than a couple hundred guys you’d prefer to me.”

“As long as there’s one, you’re shit out of luck,” she smiled unpleasantly.

Sully shrugged. “Okay, except the one you’re after’s no good for you.”

Ruby’s unpleasant smile vanished, replaced by an expression even more unpleasant. “And who’m I after, in your opinion?”

Sully realized he’d messed up. That she and Carl, a married man, had something going was common knowledge. The look on Ruby’s face suggested she didn’t know this.

Luckily, before Sully could make matters worse, Carl Roebuck was heard to hang up the phone in the inner office. “If those are the dulcet tones of the long-lost and unlamented Donald Sullivan,” he called, “send him in. Tell him I’ve got a job for him that even he can’t fuck up.”

Ruby relocated her unpleasant smile. “Go right in,” she purred. “Mr. Roebuck will see you now.”

Carl Roebuck was leaning back in his swivel chair when Sully opened the door, and the smug expression on his face was identical to the one he’d worn back in August when Sully swore he’d never work for him again. “How’s my favorite cripple?” he wanted to know.

Sully plopped down in one of the room’s fake leather chairs. “In the world’s worst fucking mood,” he said. “I’d like to toss you right out that window just to see what you’d land on.”

Carl smiled. “I’d land on my feet.”

Sully had to admit this was exactly the way it would probably go. “We may have to try it some time, so we know for sure.”

Carl swiveled lazily, grinning. “Sully, Sully, Sully.”

Bad mood or no bad mood, Sully couldn’t help grinning back. Carl Roebuck was one of those people you just couldn’t stay mad at. His father, Kenny Roebuck, hadn’t been able to, and neither, apparently, could Carl’s wife, Toby, who had a world of reason to. The fact that nobody could stay mad at him was, perhaps, the source of Carl Roebuck’s luck. No wonder he had his way with people, especially women. What he managed to convey to all of them was that they were just what he needed to fill his life with meaning.

“What am I going to do with you?” Carl wondered out loud, as if it really were his decision.

“Pay me the money you owe, and I’ll let you alone,” Sully offered.

Carl ignored this. “Is your truck running?”

“At the moment.”

“Then I got a job for you.”

“Not till you pay me for the last one.”

Carl stood up. “We’ve been through this. I’m not paying you and that moron Rub Squeers for that half-ass job. You dug a goddamn hole, stood around in it all afternoon, drank a case of beer, filled the hole, and left my lawn all tore up. And we don’t have an ounce more water pressure now than we did before.”

“I never said you would,” Sully reminded him. Carl became instantly red-faced, and this pleased Sully. “Don’t get all bent out of whack, now,” he added, knowing full well that nothing was more likely to bend Carl Roebuck out of whack than to be instructed by Sully to calm down. Along with Tip Top Construction, Carl had inherited from his father a heart condition that had already required bypass surgery.

“You know the trouble with guys like you?” Carl stood, glowing red now, even though he hadn’t raised his voice. “You figure you got a right to steal from anybody that’s got a few bucks. I’m supposed to assume the position because you got a busted knee and no prospects, like this is some kind of Feel-Sorry-for-Sully Week. Well, it ain’t, my friend. This is Fuck-You Week.”

Carl was pacing back and forth behind his desk as he spoke, and for some reason his speech had a soothing effect on Sully, who put his feet up on Carl’s desk. “That was last week, actually. And the week before.”

“Then go away. You did shoddy work, and I’m not paying you for it. You think I got where I am doing shoddy work?”

Sully couldn’t help but smile at this. Maybe later in the day when he remembered it, this line of bullshit would piss him off, but right now, watching Carl Roebuck, beet red with trumped-up self-righteousness, constituted something like partial payment for the debt. And when Sully finally spoke, his voice was even lower than Carl’s.

“No, Carl,” he admitted. “You didn’t get where you are by doing shoddy work. You didn’t get where you are by doing any work. You got where you are because your father worked himself into an early grave so you could piss away everything he worked for on ski trips and sports cars.”