Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“That’s a black thought, Wirf,” Sully pointed out.

Wirf sighed, shook his head. “Why do I even try with you?”

“Now there’s a question. Go home and think about that.”

They were grinning at each other now. “Jesus,” Wirf said.

“Right,” Sully agreed.

“Carl paying you under the table?”

“You have to ask?”

“Just don’t go on the fucking books. Anywhere,” Wirf advised solemnly.

“listen. You don’t have to tell me to work under the table,” Sully reminded him. “The only time I ever worked on the up and up I got hurt.”

This was not literally true, but pretty near. One of Sully’s myriad financial headaches was that he’d done so little work on the books and paid so little FICA that his Social Security at retirement was going to be a drop in the bucket. His service pension was going to be the other drop. Which meant he’d be eligible for welfare and food stamps. The trouble with that was that he knew too many people on the public dole and he didn’t want to be one of them. You had to stand in too many lines and fill out too many forms, and Sully had a low opinion of both. He’d made up his mind in the army that if he ever lived through the war he’d never stand in another line. That was one of the reasons he’d returned to Bath, a town pretty much devoid of queues. Besides, welfare was begging, and he’d been saying for years that when the time came that he couldn’t be useful enough to earn what little he needed to live on he’d shoot himself, a promise two or three people he could think of would hold him to if they could.

“Work a little if you gotta, but remember our strategy,” Wirf was saying. “Keep ’em busy with paperwork, keep documenting the deterioration of that knee. Sooner or later they’ll see it’s costing them by not settling one or two of these claims. The court’s already starting to get pissed. You hear the judge yesterday?”

“He sounded pissed at you , Wirf.”

“Only ’cause he knows I won’t go away,” Wirf explained.

“I know how he feels,” Sully said.

Wirf didn’t rise to the bait. He pushed his salad bowl to the center of the table. “When they start getting bent out of shape, then you know you’re getting somewhere. Intro Law 101.”

“You ever take 102?”

Wirf dropped his fork, looked hurt.

“I just wondered,” Sully grinned.

“I can’t do this without you,” Wirf implored. “I’m way the fuck out on a limb here, and all I can hear is you sawing away.”

“I been telling you to quit for months,” Sully reminded him. “I’m tired of watching you get beat up. I can’t pay you what I owe you now.”

“Have I asked you for anything?”

“Yes. Just now. You ate half my linguine.”

“I never asked for that. You offered.”

“I can’t stand to see you look starved. I wish you’d go away and do something profitable. If guys like you and me could beat insurance companies there wouldn’t be any insurance companies. Common Sense 101.”

Wirf waved his hand at Sully in disgust, then picked up the clam in the center of the table and made a pretense of braining Sully with it. “I guess it’s true,” he said. “A little knowledge is a dangerous fucking thing. Who’d have guessed you could learn anything at Schuyler Springs Community College? I liked you better when you were completely stupid.”

Ruth reappeared and began to bus their dishes. “Vince says to take this discussion upstreet to The Horse. It’s almost Thanksgiving, and if you leave he’ll have the one thing to be thankful for.” She balanced the stack of dishes against her chest. “He also wants to know what makes you think Sully isn’t completely stupid.”

“Call it a hunch,” Wirf told her, then to Sully, “Come have a beer with me.”

“There’s no such thing as one beer with you,” Sully said.

“That’s true,” Wirf admitted. “So what?”

“So I’m working tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving.”

“I heard that somewhere.”

Wirf gave up, slid out of the booth, located his scarf and gloves. “Listen to me. Don’t drop your classes officially. That would fuck us. Take incompletes. That gives us until spring, maybe fall. With any luck by then we’ll be able to prove you’re a complete cripple. It’s time for another X ray, too, and photos of that knee, so get in and get that done.”

Sully agreed to all this so Wirf would go away. X rays were not cheap, but if he mentioned this, Wirf would start pushing money at him.

“Come have a beer with me,” Wirf said.

“No. Don’t you understand no?”

“And next time save me a clam,” Wirf called over his shoulder.

“You didn’t eat the one you got,” Sully reminded him. It was still sitting in the middle of the table.

When Wirf was gone, Ruth returned and slid quietly into the booth behind Sully. Kneeling there, she gave his shoulders a rub over the back of the booth. “How’s Peter?” she wondered.

Sully relaxed into the massage, too tired to try to figure out how she knew his son was in town. “Is there anything about my day you don’t know?”

“Yup,” she said cheerfully. “I don’t know why you jumped out of his car and ran across the parking lot of the IGA.”

“I thought Wednesday was your day off,” he said. Her day job was as a cashier at the IGA, which meant she must have seen him out the window.

“Not since the end of September,” she told him. “You used to keep better track of my days off.”

“Well, I know my memory stinks, but I do seem to recall you were the one who wanted to cool it for a while.”

They’d agreed to this back in August when Gregory, Ruth’s youngest, now a senior at Bath High, had seen them together coming out of The Horse late one night. Having lied about his own plans for the evening, the boy was in no position to accuse his mother, and in fact he’d said nothing about seeing her with Sully, but their eyes had met across the nearly deserted street, and Ruth had seen the look on his face when the realization dawned on him. She’d told Sully right then that they were going to have to be good for a while.

And so, since August, they’d been good, Ruth working her two jobs, Sully going to school and spending his evenings at The Horse with Wirf and the other regulars, often until closing. In truth, their being good every now and then had always been part of the rhythm of their relationship, and Sully sometimes thought that had they been able to marry, as they’d once wanted to, by now they’d have succeeded in making each other miserable. Being good was often just what they needed, provided they weren’t good too long.

Because their sporadic abstinence was imposed upon them by periods of heightened suspicion in Ruth’s husband, they’d never had to face the possibility that they enjoyed being good nearly as much as being bad. Lately their periodic seasons of virtue had grown gradually longer, and this, though Sully didn’t dare admit it to Ruth, suited him fine. Adultery, like full-court basketball, was a younger man’s sport, and engaging in it these last few years had made Sully feel a little foolish and undignified. Over twenty years now he and Ruth had been lovers, and they were unable to decide, together or separately, whether to be proud or ashamed of their relationship, just as they had been unable to explain the ebb and flow of their need for each other. It was far easier to acknowledge the need when it was upon them than to admit its absence later, and their bitterest arguments tended to be over who it was that decided to be good for a while, who was responsible for their lapse into virtue, who had been avoiding and ignoring whom. Sully could feel one of these arguments coming on now, and he also sensed that he was going to lose it.