Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

So he backed the truck up close to the pile of concrete blocks, got out, lowered the tailgate and tested the footing, which wasn’t good. I should definitely go get Rub, he thought. Instead he planted half a dozen blocks in the mud for a makeshift walkway between the pyramid and the truck. Then he began, carrying blocks in each hand at first, then a stack of four balanced against his chest, piling them in rows on the truck bed. The hard part was climbing up onto the truck. The only way was to sit on the tailgate, swing his legs aboard, get his good leg under him, then the bad one. Surprisingly, his knee didn’t feel too bad. In fact, it felt pretty good. If it held up, maybe he’d use the money he earned today to buy a couple new radials for the truck, whose tires were bald from running back and forth to Schuyler Springs every day to study philosophy. It was as if the young professor had disproved the tread on Sully’s tires along with everything else.

It was when he thought of all the things the truck was going to need that he got mad about the money Carl Roebuck wouldn’t pay him. The pickup had been pretty long in the tooth when Sully bought it. It had needed new tires a month ago, along with a rebuilt carburetor. The valves needed grinding too. In another month the truck would need all of these repairs even worse, and the month after that it would need them so bad he’d have to make them. And pay for them. New shocks, too, Sully thought, as the truck groaned beneath the weight of the concrete. The three hundred Carl Roebuck owed him would have paid for the tires or the valves or the shocks, whichever Sully decided to fix first. Not that he would necessarily have used the money on the truck if he had it in his pocket that very minute. Sometimes when he got money ahead he gave some to Miss Beryl as advance rent, a hedge against the scarcity of winter work. Sometimes he’d give Cass a hundred so that if things got skinny he’d be able to eat on account for a while. Other times he gave money to Ruth to hold on to for him, which was one way of ensuring that the OTB or the poker table wouldn’t get it. The trouble with Ruth was that once he instructed her not to give it back to him unless he really needed it, then it was up to her to decide his need, and sometimes her judgment was a little too refined. And one time her no-good husband Zack had stumbled onto her stash and spent Sully’s money, thinking it was his wife’s. The more Sully thought about it, the more it didn’t seem like such a bad idea to be owed the three hundred. Letting Carl hang on to the money for a while might actually be the safest thing. When Sully needed it most, money had a way of first liquefying, then evaporating, and finally leaving just a filmy residue of vague memory.

And so, as Sully fell deeply into the rhythm of his work, he had the luxury of knowing that his money was safe without in any way diminishing his righteous anger at Carl Roebuck for refusing to pay up, anger that swelled like music in his chest to the distant beat of his throbbing knee. Smiling, he imagined Carl Roebuck tossed out his office window, his arms flapping frantically, his legs wildly pedaling an invisible bicycle as he fell. Sully didn’t allow him to hit the ground. He just tossed Carl from the window again and again, so that the other man tumbled and pedaled and screamed.

It was so much fun tossing Carl Roebuck out of his office window that Sully had the truck over half loaded before he noticed it was starting to tilt slightly, like old Hattie in her booth. At first he thought it might be an optical illusion, so he stood back away from the truck and looked at it. There was no reason the truck should be tipping. Off to the side Sully noticed some sheets of plywood, and he wished he’d seen them before so he could have lined the bed of the truck and cushioned the load. Probably it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to separate every other layer too, not that the plywood would have distributed the weight differently. It was too late now, in any case. That was the bad news. The good news was he’d worked hard for an hour and his knee didn’t feel any worse. In fact, by working and contemplating Carl Roebuck tumbling from his office window, he’d forgotten all about his knee. It wasn’t strictly logical, but maybe his injured knee actually was encouraging him to work. Either that or it was telling him to murder Carl Roebuck.

He knew one thing for sure. It was more satisfying to be mad at Carl than to be mad at the courts. Over the last nine months that Wirf had been trying to get him total disability, Sully’d come to understand that all his trips to Albany, even the hearings themselves, were only tangentially related to his deteriorating knee. Maybe the knee wasn’t quite as bad as Wirf portrayed it. Maybe. But Sully’s growing sense of these legal proceedings was that they were taking place independent of reality. The question wasn’t his injury, or whether or not it allowed him to work, or how an injured man might fairly be compensated. At issue was whether the insurance company and the state could be forced to pay. Sully hadn’t seen the same insurance company lawyer twice, but they were all sharp and their sheer numbers suggested that he and Wirf, who referred to them as “the Windmills” and insisted that you just had to keep tilting at them, were fighting a losing battle. You couldn’t even get good and angry and entertain yourself by imagining that the next time you saw that smug son of a bitch of a lawyer you’d throw him out the window, because the next time there’d be a different guy altogether. You didn’t even get the same judge all the time, though all the judges seemed to have pretty much the same attitude toward Sully’s claim. They all lectured Wirf and, when the hearing was over, kidded cozily with the insurance company lawyers. Sully himself was generally ignored, and lately he’d come to suspect that if his leg just went ahead and fell off, this (to him) significant event probably wouldn’t change anything. Nobody would admit they’d been wrong. They’d use the old X rays to prove he still had a leg. It’d be a philosophical argument.

Sully knew all this was worth getting angry about, and sometimes he did get mad when he thought about it, but there in court he merely felt intimidated, and he was glad to be represented by a lawyer, even one as bad as Wirf, who looked almost as lost and out of place in court as Sully himself. Probably, it occurred to Sully, this was why you paid an attorney to represent you. If it weren’t for Wirf, the judge would talk down to you personally and not to Wirf, whose single professional skill seemed to be his ability to eat shit and not mind. Wirf didn’t even dress like the lawyers for the insurance company, nor did he appear to notice the way the other lawyers regarded him. Sully felt bad for him, because he and Wirf went way back, but he knew it was better for Wirf to eat shit than for Sully to eat it, because Sully would eat only so much before he’d decide it was somebody else’s turn, whereas Wirf seemed to understand that it was always his turn. Since they were friends, Wirf was representing Sully on contingency. If they ended up winning any of the half-dozen concurrent litigations Wirf had filed on Sully’s behalf, they would share the booty. Lately, though, it had become obvious to Sully that they weren’t going to collect a dime, and he’d begun to feel guilty about letting Wirf file appeal after appeal. To win, you’d have to throw every one of the bastards out the window, and there were more lawyers and judges than windows.

When the pickup was three-quarters loaded and listing even more dangerously, Sully roped off the load and surveyed it dubiously. There was no reason the blocks on the right side of the truck should be heavier than the ones on the left, but they must have been, because the truck was tilting right. As Sully stood there, ankle deep in muck, he realized that he was faced with an honest-to-God decision. He could, against his better judgment, take the unbalanced load out onto the highway and hope for the best, or he could unload it partway, make the first load a small one, drop it off and go find Rub to help him finish.