Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Wirf shook his head. “He sat right where you’re sitting, drank a Jack Daniel’s.”

“Next you’ll be telling me his wife was with him drinking Singapore Slings.”

“You know that kid Dwayne they hired? Red hair? Always picking his nose?”

Sully said he knew Dwayne.

“He emptied the cash register on them and took off,” Wirf said. “Harold was supposed to be out looking for him, but he didn’t have the heart.”

“This is about the fifth time it’s happened,” Sully observed.

Wirf nodded. “Have you ever noticed how people do the same things over and over?”

“You don’t mean us?”

“No. I was referring to other people,” Wirf explained. “Hell, we’re full of surprises.”

In fact, the conclusion Sully’d come to today was that just about everybody was full of surprises. A month ago he’d have agreed with Wirf that both people and events were predictable to the point of boredom. But since getting out of jail this morning, Sully had been pursued by the strange sensation that everything had changed, that the rules of existence had been subverted somehow while he was away. Even the fact that his luck had changed contributed to this somewhat otherworldly feeling, as if he’d returned to a place he no longer knew. It looked the same, but it felt deep down different. How else to explain the fact that he’d gotten lost going to Bootsie and Rub’s flat? How else to explain the strange conversation he’d just had with Jocko, who’d not even returned to the bar but rather slunk out the door? Exhausted as he was, the only reason he’d come into The Horse at all was in the hopes of ending the day with some degree of normalcy, some zigging with Wirf and quarreling with Tiny to restore his equilibrium, dispel the sense of disorientation that had him reeling.

And now here was Wirf, for all his bleary-eyed normality, the most predictable of humans, studying him with an odd seriousness, Sully’s five hundred dollars still sitting in front of him. Wirf looked for all the world like a man about to zag in the face of a man who’d joined him in the hopes of zigging.

“What?” Sully said finally. “You’re not going to start in on me, are you?”

“No,” Wirf promised. “But I am going to ask you a favor.”

“Okay,” Sully said. “As long as you don’t want me to do it tonight.”

Wirf consulted his watch. “It probably won’t be tonight,” he said seriously. “But whenever it is, I want you to do it.”

“Ask, then,” Sully said. “How can I do it or not do it if you won’t tell me what it is?”

“I just want you to know I’m serious,” Wirf went on. “I know you think I wouldn’t say shit if I had a mouthful, and that’s true most of the time, but right now I want you to promise me this, and if you don’t, we’re through.”

Sully studied his friend warily. “I’m not quitting work,” he said. “And I’m not going back to college, not even for you. My son’s going to start teaching out there next term, and with my luck they’ll make me take his course.”

Wirf grinned broadly at the idea. “That’s not the favor. The favor is your landlady.”

Sully was enormously relieved to hear it. After all the buildup, maybe this would be easy after all. “Anything I can do for Beryl, I’ll do. I’ll be more than happy to, in fact.”

Wirf was looking at him with the same almost cross-eyed seriousness. “She feels the same way about you. Which is why she did something for you, with my help.”

“What?” Sully said, though he had an idea.

“You own the house on Bowdon again,” Wirf said.

“She paid the back taxes?”

“Just over ten grand.”

“And you let her.”

“I encouraged her,” Wirf said emphatically.

“Knowing I wanted no fucking part of the place, knowing that it wasn’t worth selling for scrap, you let her.”

“It’s worth twenty thousand at least, maybe more,” Wirf said.

“You’re full of shit.”

Wirf shook his head. “I already have an offer of twenty from the people who own the Sans Souci. They’ll go higher, too.”

“Why?”

“To avoid litigation. That dirt road they carved runs right across the corner of your property. I checked. And they don’t have an easement. We could sue their asses. They might give twice what they’ve offered so far. Three times.” He stopped, let Sully digest this. “At the very least, at twenty thousand, you could pay her back, square away your truck, start new.”

Sully thought about it. Starting new was an attractive concept. Why didn’t he believe in it? Big Jim Sullivan again, no doubt. This would be his father’s money, a windfall from the one direction he couldn’t accept it.

“That’s the favor,” Wirf said. “When she tells you, be grateful. Thanks to that son of hers, she’s going to have a rough time for a while. Make her feel good.”

“It’s not that—” Sully started to explain.

“I don’t give a shit what it is, Sully,” Wirf said. “You’re going to do this, or we’re through.”

Neither man said anything for a moment. Sully could feel Jocko’s second pill kicking in, could feel himself going fuzzy about the edges. There was no place on the planet where he felt more comfortable than The Horse, than this particular stool, next to this particular man, and yet how strange it all seemed right then. The Christmas lights strung along the back wall, half of them flickering or dead out, Tiny seated on his invisible stool at the other end of the bar, magically supported on a cushion of air, even Wirf glaring at him so seriously. Even The Horse had taken on the quality of strangeness, and he felt the same panic that had come over him half an hour earlier when he’d gotten lost on a street he knew. He heard himself say okay, but it was almost another person speaking, someone far away. Then, just as suddenly, he was back again.

“Good,” Wirf said, apparently satisfied. “Now tell me. What’d Barton want with you this morning?”

Sully snorted. “He wanted to know about the day my old man spiked that kid on the fence.”

Wirf nodded thoughtfully. “He must be preparing to die,” he said finally, as if he knew. “Tying up loose ends. What’d you tell him?”

“Nothing,” Sully said. “That it was an accident.”

Wirf nodded.

“Which was a lie. He shook the fence until the kid lost his grip and fell.”

“You saw him?”

“My brother did,” Sully grinned. “All I saw was the kid hanging there by his jaw with the spike sticking out his mouth.”

Wirf took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It’s a wonder we aren’t all insane,” he said.

“We are,” Sully said, getting up from his stool. His conviction surprised him. “I believe that.”

Sully glanced at the clock above the bar. In less than five hours he was going to have to meet Rub at the house on Bowdon. Which reminded him. “I’m going to feed my dog and then go home.”

“When did you get a dog?”

“I don’t know,” Sully said. “But I’m told I have one. By the way, did you know about my son and Carl’s wife?”

“Sure,” Wirf said.

“How come you never said anything?”

“Because I’m the only one in this town who doesn’t repeat gossip. Actually, I was surprised. I’d been hearing she had a girlfriend in Schuyler.”

“I guess I’m the last to know about that too,” he said. “You think Carl is going to be okay?” Sully wondered, not even sure exactly what he meant by the question.

“No, I don’t,” Wirf said.

“He’s parked out front of Peter’s right now,” Sully said. “Toby’s up there with him.”

“That girl with the tits still with Carl?”

Sully said she was.