Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

When Carl crossed the street and headed right for the OTB, Sully got ready to slip out the back, but Carl continued right on by, heading Sully couldn’t imagine where. A heavy gambler, Carl seldom bet at the OTB, preferring bookies who didn’t siphon the state’s percentage and who took action all day and most of the night over the phone. Actually, Carl preferred betting sporting events to betting horses. Sully watched Carl out of sight and was about to venture back into the street when he noticed the man at his elbow was Rub.

“I was just looking for you,” Sully said.

“You wasn’t looking very hard,” Rub pointed out. “I been standing right next to you for five minutes.”

“You get your turkey?”

Rub looked blank.

“I thought maybe you were shopping for a turkey here at the OTB,” Sully said.

Still blank.

“Let’s go,” Sully said. “I got us some work.”

“Who for?”

“Carl Roebuck.”

“Wasn’t that Carl you was just hiding from?”

Sully admitted this was true, without offering explanation.

“You said you was never going to work for him again.”

“You want to work or not?”

“I hate that Carl.”

“You hate his money?”

“No,” Rub admitted. “Just Carl.”

Out in the street it felt colder, and Sully noticed that the temperature on the bank clock had fallen several degrees since morning.

“That wife of his I like, though,” Rub said after they’d walked a block. “I wisht she’d take an interest in me. I’d let her be on top.”

Where women were concerned, Rub knew no higher compliment.

“How come women like her are never interested in guys like us?” Rub asked seriously. His innocence regarding women was comprehensive. Rub honestly saw no reason why Toby Roebuck would not be interested in any man who’d let her be on top.

“I only know why they don’t like you,” Sully said. “Why they don’t like me is a mystery.”

“How come they don’t like me?”

“They just don’t.”

Rub accepted this. “Where’s your truck?”

“Out at the job,” Sully told him. Partial explanations always satisfied Rub. It would not occur to him to wonder how Sully and his truck had come to be separated. “Where’s your car?”

“Bootsie’s got it,” Rub said. “She always parks out back of Woolworth’s.”

They turned down the narrow alley that led to the Woohvorth’s lot, walking single file. The morning’s snow remained untrampled there in the dark, narrow alley, and Rub walked backward so he could watch the footprints he left.

“I hope she won’t be too bent out of shape when she finds the car’s gone,” Sully said. He made a mental note to return Bootsie’s car once they got the truck unstuck. That way Rub wouldn’t take a beating.

“She’s been bent out of shape for ten years,” observed Rub, who was generally brave in his wife’s absence.

“How long you been married?”

“Ten years.”

Sully nodded. “See any connection?”

“Shit,” Rub said, turning and surveying the parking lot. “It ain’t here.”

“Let’s take this one then,” Sully suggested, since they happened to be standing right next to Rub’s and Bootsie’s old Pontiac. “You don’t even recognize your own car?”

Rub unlocked the Pontiac and got in, leaning over to unlock the passenger side door for Sully. “At least I recognize my own best friend when he’s standing right next to me,” he said, pulling out of the lot.

It only took them about ten minutes to drive back out to the site. Sully used the time to consider how Rub ever got the idea they were best friends.

“You know what I wisht?” Rub said.

Since he and Sully left the OTB, Rub had already wished for a new car, a raise for himself and a raise for Bootsie, who worked as a cashier at Woolworth’s and hadn’t had a raise in over a year. He’d also wished some big ole company would build a big ole plant right in Bath and make him a foreman at about fifteen dollars an hour. He’d wished it was spring already and not Thanksgiving, that California would just go ahead and fall into the ocean if it was going to, that the climate in upstate New York was more tropical, that someone would die and leave him a big ole boat he could sail down to Mexico, that the Royal Palm Company would start making that red cream soda again. And he’d wished ole Toby Roebuck would sit on his face, just once.

Rub had wished all of this in the space of roughly an hour, one wish gliding naturally into the next, unimpeded by plausibility. Since September, Sully had forgotten how full of wishes Rub’s life was. As fast as Sully’s professor explained things out of existence, Rub wished other things into being. It was not unusual for him to say, “You know what I wisht?” fifty times a day, and the worst part of it was he’d just keep repeating the question until Sully acknowledged it with a “What? What for sweet Jesus’ sake do you wish now?” The thing that always amazed Sully about Rub’s wishes was that most of them were so modest. After wishing a whole company into existence, Rub would settle for a forty-hour-a-week job at union scale, as if he feared some sort of cosmic retaliation for an arrogant imagination. Sully tried to explain from time to time that if he was going to wish an entire corporation into existence, he might as well wish he owned it and had somebody else to do the actual work. But Rub didn’t see it this way. He liked the smaller wishes and he liked to wish them one at a time. Out loud.

“I wisht we were all through with this job and sitting in The Horse eating a big ole cheeseburger” was what Rub would have liked at this instant. He was as covered with mud as Sully, and his wish for warmth and a cheeseburger probably seemed as remote to him as the possibility that somebody would die and leave him a big ole boat. “Next time you find us work, I wisht you’d let me eat lunch first,” he added.

They were now on their second load, and this time they were loading the blocks right, cushioning the bed of the truck with plywood. Half of the bottom two layers of the first load hadn’t made it. Having located Rub with so little trouble, Sully’d made up his mind to reload the truck, but fate had conspired against them. By the time they got back to the site the temperature had dropped and the sloppy ground had firmed up, and the truck, hopelessly mired an hour before, drove right out on the first try. This had looked to Sully like a sign, so he’d said screw the reloading, let’s go. His thinking was that even with the two of them working, they’d be lucky to finish before seven o’clock, which meant they’d have to do the last couple of loads in the dark. He was having all he could do to avoid disaster when he could see the ground.

They’d just left the blocks that broke when Sully hit a pothole right there in the truck. The others they’d piled with extra care out at the new site, next to the shallow hole out of which one of Carl Roebuck’s no-frills government-subsidy two-bedroom ranches would grow in about a week, weather permitting. Carl was behind on the contract, just like he was behind on every contract, and his guys would have to work right through Christmas, probably, or until the ground froze. On the way back for the next load, they’d stopped and tossed the broken blocks behind the clown billboard. “What if somebody finds them?” Rub had wanted to know.

“You didn’t write your name on them, did you?” Sully said.

They were nearly finished with the second load when they heard a car coming and Carl Roebuck’s El Camino, with its TIP TOP CONSTRUCTION COMPANY: C. I. ROEBUCK logo on the door, careened into view. It bore down on them at such an unsafe speed that it could mean only one thing — that Carl Roebuck himself was at the wheel. Carl was careful never to take his Camaro onto a job site, but he considered it executive privilege to wreck at least one company car a year by bouncing it over rutted, unpaved roads at fifty miles an hour.