Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“Okay,” Peter agreed. “Thanks.”

“I guess this means you’re going to stick around awhile,” Sully ventured.

Peter nodded. “I picked up a couple night courses at Schuyler CC,” he said.

“Good,” Sully said, impressed that his son could go out to the college and come back home with work. “It’s not such a bad place.”

“That’s what the chair of the department said. ‘Not as bad as you might imagine’ were his exact words.”

“You have to start somewhere.” Sully shrugged, hoping to cheer his son up.

“I started at a university,” Peter said. “This is where I’m ending, not starting.”

Sully decided to give up. “You got enough money for first and last months’ rent?” he wondered, trying to think how much he could contribute.

Peter nodded, surprising him.

“I could let you have a hundred or two if you need it,” Sully offered.

“I don’t,” Peter said. “But thanks.”

Sully nodded, winking at Wirf. “I’m glad somebody in my family’s got money.”

“You’ve got more than you know,” Peter said, taking out his wallet and handing Sully a parimutuel racing ticket. A 1-2-3 trifecta, to be exact. Sully checked the date. Two days previous.

“You were on this?”

“No,” Peter said. “ You were. You don’t even remember, do you?”

Suddenly he did. Sometime during that drunken night before he’d gone to jail, among all the other instructions he’d had for Peter — what to do first at the Miles Anderson house, how to cook eggs at Hattie’s, how to get Rub to help him lay the floor at the Roebuck camp, to look in on Miss Beryl when he thought about it, to feed Rasputin — somewhere among these myriad instructions he vaguely remembered instructing Peter to bet his triple, explaining that it would be just his luck for the son of a bitch to run while he was in jail, further evidence of the evil deity whose existence Sully had long suspected, the god who was probably listening to the whispered instructions of Sully’s own father, whose life on earth would have earned him a place in such a deity’s inner circle, a chosen advisor, confidant, secretary of war. Miraculously, through drunken inspiration, Sully had apparently thwarted divine intention.

“I would have given it to you at the funeral,” Peter said, “but I didn’t know there’d been a winner until you told me, and you didn’t know which day. I forgot to bet it a couple days.”

Before Sully could fully absorb the fact that the ticket in his hand was worth over three thousand dollars, he was assailed by a doubt. “Did I give you the money?”

“What money?”

“To bet the triple.”

“Who knows?” Peter said. “Who cares?”

Sully could tell he hadn’t given his son the money. “Because if you bet your money, then what you won is yours. That’s the way it works.”

“I wouldn’t even have gone into the OTB except on your instructions,” Peter pointed out.

“That’s not the issue.”

“This’ll be rich,” Wirf broke in. “I always love it when your father explains the moral significance of things. Follow the logic and win a prize.”

“How did you get into this conversation?” Sully wondered.

“I don’t know,” Wirf admitted. “I think I’ll go downstairs and stand in the cold.”

“Good,” Sully said. “Go.”

Father, son and grandson listened to him lumber down the stairs. Sully studied his son and felt even more powerfully than before that he couldn’t let Peter be his deliverer.

“listen, you take this,” he said. “You got Will, and you got Wacker’s doctor bills now. You’re going to need it.”

“Not as bad as you,” Peter said. “I don’t owe anybody.”

Sully considered these words. For most of his life he’d been able to say the same thing. Now, suddenly, he was awash in debt. “I tell you what,” Sully said, arriving at a compromise. “Why don’t we call it a loan?”

From the back stairs came a peal of laughter from Wirf, who had stopped to wait on the landing, still in listening range. “That’s your old man,” he called up to Peter. “He’d rather owe it to you than cheat you out of it.”

They left it that Sully and Peter would meet back at the flat in an hour to unload Peter’s things, which were still sitting in a small U-Haul trailer in the driveway at Ralph and Vera’s house. Peter would pack the rest of his and Will’s clothes into their suitcases, leave Will with Ralph while Peter and Sully effected the move. Vera, blessedly, would not be there, having driven to Schuyler Springs VA hospital, to which Robert Halsey had been admitted during the night. Sully would use the hour to locate Rub, whose assistance they would need to cart the furniture up the narrow stairs to the flat. “Good luck,” said Peter, who was convinced that Rub would have nothing more to do with them.

“He’ll do what I ask him,” Sully assured his son, though he himself was far from certain. In fact, he was not looking forward to what was almost certain to be a humbling experience. Sully wasn’t the sort of man to offer direct apology, and he had a feeling that the indirect ones he usually used on Rub — offering to buy him a big ole cheeseburger at The Horse, for instance — might not work this time. He might actually have to say he was sorry for the way he’d acted. Which he was. It wasn’t that he denied that he owed Rub an apology. He just hated to establish an ugly precedent of public apology, which could conceivably open the floodgates to other forms of regret.

A good place to start looking for Rub, he decided, was the OTB. Not because Rub would be there so much as that he could cash his triple and bet another. This was no time to come off 1-2-3. In a perverse world it was liable to pop twice in the same week, especially if he wasn’t on it.

The windbreaker men had all left, but Jocko was there, peering at the racing form through his thick glasses. When Sully’s shadow fell across it, he peered up over the top of his glasses, which had slid down his nose. “Free at lass, free at lass,” he said. “Thank God a’mighty.” “It’s a great country,” Sully agreed.

“Somebody said you’d walked,” Jocko folded his racing form and slipped it under his arm. “I found that difficult to credit.”

“It’s true, though,” Sully said. “I punched out the right cop, as it turned out.”

“How did Barton look?”

“The judge? Half dead. At least half.”

“You’re lucky. He used to be a terror. He must be preparing to meet his maker.”

“You haven’t seen Rub around?” Sully inquired.

“Not once since you went in. Is his wife’s name Elizabeth?”

Sully shook his head. “Bootsie,” though now that he thought about it, Bootsie could conceivably derive from Elizabeth.

“Big fat girl? Worked at the dime store?”

“Right.”

“She was arrested this morning.”

“Good God,” Sully said. “What for?”

“Theft. She had half the dime store out at their house.”

Sully nodded. “She did have a habit of taking a little something home with her every day.”

“Turns out they been watching her do it for about a month.”

“I hope they have bigger jail cells than the one I was in. Bootsie wouldn’t be able to turn around in that one,” Sully said, then showed Jocko his ticket. “By the way. Turns out I was on this after all.”

Buoyed by the security of his windfall, Sully decided now might be the best time to stop into the diner. It was after one o’clock, and the small lunch crowd would be gone.

Indeed, when he arrived the diner was empty except for Cass, who was sponging down the lunch counter and, to Sully’s surprise, Roof, who’d been gone for a month. Ruth was not in evidence, and the combination of her absence and Roofs unexplained presence was disorienting. It was as if Sully’d stepped back in time, and he checked Hattie’s booth to make sure she wasn’t there, that he hadn’t dreamed the events of the last several days. That he’d dreamed the last month of his life seemed a distinct possibility, given the fact that the dream ended with his winning a triple. But Roof was there, all right, wordlessly scrubbing the grill two-handed with the charcoal brick, and Sully selected a stool nearby, in case he needed an ally.