Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

By the time Sully arrived a large crowd had gathered to watch the house burn. Flames were shooting out of the windows and into the low gray sky. The firemen had already given up combating the blaze and were using their hoses to wet down the houses on either side, trying to prevent them from bursting into sympathetic flame. Losing a house was one thing, but they didn’t want to lose the whole block. There didn’t seem to be anything to do but join the crowd and watch, so Sully did.

After he’d been there awhile, a man he knew noticed him and said hello. “You live around here somewheres, don’t you?” the man added. “I live right there,” Sully pointed at the inferno. “Or I used to.” This admission attracted considerable attention. “Hey!” somebody yelled. “There’s Sully. He’s not dead, he’s right here.” Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetically at the crowd.

Kenny Roebuck, Carl’s father, who owned the building, arrived finally and came over to where Sully was standing. “I heard you were dead,” he said. “Burned alive.”

“I hope they don’t put it in the paper,” Sully said.

Kenny Roebuck agreed. “I wonder how the hell it started.”

“The rumor or the fire?”

“The fire.”

“That would be me, probably,” Sully admitted. He told his landlord and sometime employer about the cigarette he vaguely remembered leaving when he went out to buy more cigarettes. “I hope to Christ there wasn’t anybody inside,” he added. The house had been divided into three flats. In the middle of the afternoon there was probably nobody home, but he wasn’t sure.

“I don’t think there was,” Kenny said, adding, “according to a cop I just talked to, you were the only one killed.”

The roof fell then, shooting red embers high into the afternoon sky and down into the crowd.

“You’re taking this well,” Sully observed.

Kenny Roebuck leaned toward him confidentially and lowered his voice. “Just between us, I’ve been thinking about burning the son of a bitch down myself. Costs me more to fix what goes wrong every month than I collect in rent. I guess I wasn’t cut out to be a slumlord.”

The two men watched until the fire burned itself out.

“Well,” Kenny Roebuck said. “That’s about it, and I should get back to work. I don’t know how to thank you.”

Sully was still mulling over what his landlord had said before in light of Ruth’s constant pestering him to find a decent place to live. “I never thought of it as a slum,” he admitted.

“You’re the only one that didn’t, then,” Kenny Roebuck said. “Somebody said old Beryl Peoples has a flat for rent on Upper Main.”

This rumor turned out to be true. Kenny Roebuck also wasn’t kidding about being grateful. The next day he gave Sully five hundred dollars for new clothes and some furniture, since Miss Beryl’s flat wasn’t furnished. That made the whole episode pretty much of a bonanza as far as Sully was concerned. He spent two hundred on underwear, socks, shirts, pants and shoes. Two hundred went a considerable distance at the Army-Navy store, which had a used clothing outlet around back. He spent another two hundred on some well-broken-in furniture — a double bed and rickety nightstand, a lamp in the shape of a naked woman, a small chest of drawers, a metal dinette and chairs with plastic seats, a huge sofa for the living room and a coffee table that came with only three legs. The other leg was around somewhere, the man at the used furniture store said. To show his appreciation for Sully’s business he threw in a used toaster. When Sully got all these new worldly goods set up in Miss Beryl’s flat, he plugged in the toaster to see if it worked, without much in the way of expectation. The inner coils glowed angry red though, so he unplugged it again. Since then he hadn’t found an occasion to use the toaster. The only place he ever ate toast was at Hattie’s, as part of the breakfast special.

It was ironic that in a flat so remarkable for its wide-open spaces Sully should be cramped in the kitchen, but he was. The room was tiny, like kitchens in most old houses that had formal dining rooms, so there wasn’t much room for the dinette. Sully finally wedged it into the corner anyway so he’d have something to bang into and swear at. He’d originally set it up in the dining room, but it looked like a joke there, so small and bent and metallic in the middle of such a large room. He couldn’t imagine sitting down and eating anything in there, not even a bowl of cereal. So he ended up shutting the floor register to save on heat and closed the room. He did the same with the second bedroom, which also stood empty.

He was glad the sofa he bought was huge because it at least displaced some air in the cavernous living room. He set it and the tippy, three-legged coffee table against the long wall facing the television he planned to get as soon as he could afford one. He made a mental note that the television had better be a good-size one if he was going to be able to see it from all the way across the room. He made another mental note to do something about the floral pink wallpaper. And he’d need a rug or two to cut down on the constant reminders of his own presence as he tapped across the hardwood floors. He still had a hundred dollars of Kenny Roebuck’s money, so he went out in search of bargain rugs.

As luck would have it, he found Kenny Roebuck instead, and Kenny was on his way to the track. He forced Sully into accompanying him there by asking him if he wanted to. On the way back Sully decided he hadn’t needed the rugs anyway. They stopped at Ray’s corner market for a six-pack of beer and from there went to the new flat so Kenny could see how Sully was making out. Sully took the six-pack and put it in the refrigerator while Kenny Roebuck laughed. In fact, Kenny stood in the middle of the living room and howled. He couldn’t stop. He went from room to room, each room striking him as funnier than the last. In the two empty, closed-off rooms he laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. Finally he joined Sully in the tiny kitchen and collapsed into one of the plastic dinette chairs, his face beet red with exertion. “How long do you figure before you’ll fill it up?”

Sully took two beers out of the refrigerator. He felt the metal shelf before handing one to Kenny Roebuck. “I’m not sure the refrigerator works too well,” he said, which started Kenny in all over again.

It didn’t seem possible to Sully that Kenny Roebuck had been dead for most of the dozen years since he got that first look at Sully’s new flat. One thing was certain. If Kenny were there now he’d get just as good a laugh. Except for a throw rug and a big white-cabineted television with a small screen, the flat looked pretty much as it had the day he moved in. What he’d decided to do about the floral wallpaper was to let it peel off.

Tonight, like most nights, he was too tired to care. Regulating the water as hot as he could stand it, Sully stripped, climbed into the shower and let the water beat down on his shoulders and lower back. In a few minutes the rising steam brought with it a childhood memory he’d not thought of in forty years. It was a Saturday afternoon, and his father had taken Sully and his older brother, Patrick, to the new YMCA in Schuyler Springs for the free swim, a monthly event intended to drum up membership. Sully’s father had no intention of letting his sons join, but as long as it was free, well.… Also, he’d discovered there was a Saturday afternoon poker game in back. When Sully and his brother were buzzed downstairs, his father remained above to play cards. The locker room was cold and uncarpeted, and the pool lifeguards had made all the boys shower and then stand, shivering, at the side of the pool while each boy was inspected for head lice and read the rules about no running, no pushing, no diving in the shallow end. Several boys were found to be dirty and required to go take another shower. The clean ones, including Sully and his brother, had to wait for them.