Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Sully had been overhearing parts of this serial conversation for years but doubted he’d ever engage in it even if he made it to retirement. He had no house to contemplate the increasing value of, unless he counted his father’s place on Bowdon Street, at the edge of the Sans Souci property, the legal status of which was no longer clear, at least to Sully. Wirf had informed him when his father died that he’d inherited the house, but Sully had told Wirf he not only didn’t want it, he wouldn’t take it. When Sully had been seventeen and enlisted in the army he’d promised his father he’d have nothing further to do with him, in life or in death, and except for one afternoon shortly before the old man died when Ruth had talked him into visiting the nursing home, he’d kept his pledge. His father’s long-neglected house was falling down, its windows boarded up, the grounds overrun with tall weeds. Unless Sully missed his guess, the accumulated back taxes were probably more than the house would bring on the market. Definitely not the sort of house that would gain Sully entry into the Florida/Arizona condo conversation, even if he had wanted to be included, which he didn’t.

The only thing Sully envied these men was that they were finished, like ballplayers in an old-timers game who could look back on an episode in their lives that had a particular shape. Having completed it, they could move on to something else. Their lives were full of dates. They could tell you when they married, when their children were born, the date they retired from their jobs. In Sully’s life the years (never mind days) elided gracefully without dividers, and he was always surprised by the endings and new beginnings other people saw, or thought they saw, in their existences. One day thirty-odd years before, he’d run into Vera on the street, and she’d smiled sadly and said, well, at least it was finally over, a chapter of their lives behind them. Sully had looked at her blankly, wondering what she was talking about. It turned out her reference was to their divorce, which had become final a few days before, the fact of which he had not been notified. Either that or he’d trashed the notification along with the other mail he wasn’t interested in. He’d known Vera was relieved not to be married to him anymore (she would marry her second husband, Ralph, within the year), but the finality of the divorce had impressed her, and Sully could tell she was feeling a little melancholy about the failure of their marriage. For her, the divorce had drawn a line that Sully had missed altogether.

The graceful merging of his days was either depressing or reassuring, depending upon his mood. Even now, at age sixty, he couldn’t imagine feeling finished in the way that the OTB men were, or of being on the brink of anything new. Maybe that’s what had gotten to him about taking classes at the community college, about talk of a new career. That was the point of the philosophy class, he’d come to understand. It was the young professor’s intention to make everything disappear, one thing at a time, and then replace all of it with something new, a new kind of thought or existence maybe. Out with the old, in with the new. And maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea if you were talking to twenty-year-olds. Hell, at twenty, he’d been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more months. He wanted to keep going forward, not stop and turn around and analyze the validity of decisions made and courses charted long ago. He wasn’t even sure he wanted Wirf, his lawyer, to succeed in the various litigations he was pursuing in Sully’s behalf. If Wirf got Sully his total disability, that would be the end of life as he knew it, the beginning of something new, not necessarily good news to a man who didn’t believe in new beginnings any more than he believed in new knees.

“You’re looking especially well this morning,” Otis Wilson observed, in reference, no doubt, to Sully’s crust of mud. Otis claimed every summer that come winter he was Florida bound.

Sully turned a circle so all the windbreaker men could see. “Somebody’s got to work in this country,” he said. “Wasn’t for guys like me, guys like you’d have to get your hands dirty occasionally.”

“We been meaning to say thank you,” Otis said.

“I heard on the news an alligator made off with another one,” Sully said. Otis, a big, soft man with a florid face, was particularly susceptible to alligator stories, and Sully, as part of a running gag, had been for years warning Otis not to go to a wild place like Florida without a tough, experienced guide, someone not afraid to wrestle gators. Someone like Sully. To Sully’s delight, at the mention of alligators Otis’s face drained. “If I was you I’d get a second-floor condo. Alligators hate stairs.”

“Get away from me,” Otis said when Sully joined his elbows together to make alligator jaws. “Go on now, git!” Otis parried Sully’s thrusts nervously. “Go play your damn sucker triple and leave smart people alone.”

“There are no smart people within a block of here,” Sully told him. “The OTB is a tax on stupidity.”

“How many stupid people you paying taxes for beside yourself?” somebody wanted to know.

“I’m smart enough not to move someplace where I’m going to get eaten by an alligator,” Sully said.

“Go bet that fool’s triple,” Otis said.

“All right, I will,” Sully said, heading for the window. For the last year or so he’d been playing 1-2-3 trifectas regardless of the horses or jockeys involved. Never much of a handicapper, he’d given up on trying to figure triples, which, he’d concluded, were invented to drive you crazy. Anymore he bet 1-2-3 and explained, when people wanted to know why, that the horses running around the inside of the track didn’t have as far to go as those running around the outside, which would have been true if there were lanes. “If my triple runs I’ll buy Hilda one of those video cameras to take with you to Florida,” he called back to Otis. “That way she can get it on film. We can show it over at The Horse. Charge admission to see Otis get dragged off into the swamp.”

Sully bet his triple and was about to leave when through the front window he saw Carl Roebuck round the corner a block away and head up the other side of the street in Sully’s direction. Sully couldn’t help but smile at Carl’s jaunty stride, which wouldn’t have been so jaunty had he known that his wife had changed the locks.

In front of the savings and loan, Clive Peoples, who’d just come out, was studying with satisfaction the new banner recently hung across Main Street. Clive Jr., a study in self-importance, was one of the few apples Sully knew that had fallen miles from the tree. True, his father, whom Clive Jr. had grown to greatly resemble, had been proud of his local celebrity as the football coach, but he’d been good-natured too, and Miss Beryl’s gentle mockery shamed him when he got too puffed up. Not so Clive Jr., who lacked, among other things, a sense of humor. That he took himself seriously was proof positive, in Sully’s view. In fact, Sully had little use for his landlady’s son and would have actively disliked him were it not for Miss Beryl, who, Sully sensed, was disappointed in her son, his having become a big shot in town notwithstanding.

Before Clive Jr. could get into his car, a long, sleek black affair that he always parked out front of the savings and loan, Carl Roebuck collared him for one of their thirty-second conversations. Sully didn’t have to be there to know how it would go. “Tell me we’re still in business,” Carl Roebuck would urge, conspiratorially. Clive Jr. would assure him that they were, and then Carl would say, “If this thing ever goes south, don’t tell me. Just come out to the house and shoot me in the head.” Talk that made Clive Jr., a nervous-looking man, even more nervous looking. Clive couldn’t get into his car and away from Carl Roebuck fast enough.