Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“He’s not too bright, is he?” Sully conceded.

“Not too.”

Feeling around in the dark for his keys, Sully located the clam and put it into his coat pocket. A clam, as Wirf pointed out, was a small thing, but you never knew when you might need one.

“Where the hell’s the door?” he said.

Vince lit his cigarette lighter up next to his face to show where he was. His huge good-natured face reminded Sully of the demonic clown on the billboard outside of town.

“If I bang my knee between here and there,” Sully warned, “your brother’s going to own two restaurants.”

The White Horse Tavern had gone, in Sully’s lifetime, from a classy watering hole for the Albany young and well-to-do, a summer haunt of well-dressed New Yorkers upstate for the August Thoroughbred meet at Schuyler Springs, to a shabby local restaurant/pub. The completion of the interstate, which allowed New York and Albany direct access to Schuyler Springs, Lake George, Lake Placid and Montreal did the deed, effectively isolating Bath, Schuyler Springs’ onetime rival for healing waters. The old, winding, two-lane blacktop once invited half a dozen drunken stops and supported twice that many roadhouses. In the forties and fifties, on an average Saturday night, there were numerous accidents along the twenty-five-mile stretch of road between Albany and Schuyler Springs, though fatalities, even serious injuries, were relatively rare. On the dark, tree-lined curves it was difficult to generate deadly speed, and the roadhouse taverns were close together and enough alike when you got there to make speed unnecessary. It wasn’t unusual for drivers involved in head-on collisions to get out of their cars and fight drunkenly in the middle of the road over whose fault the accident had been. The occasional hot-rodding teen would kill himself, as Sully’s older brother, Patrick, had done, but everyone knew teenagers were going to kill themselves. You couldn’t blame the road or the roadhouses, really.

On the new interstate there were no head-on collisions. Most places, the median dividing north- and southbound traffic was fifty yards or more across. Drivers simply fell asleep on its straight, smooth surface, then left the pavement, flew through the air at eighty miles an hour and located the nearest tree. The drivers didn’t pick fights over whose fault it was. They were taken to the hospital as a formality, to be pronounced dead.

Of the two dozen taverns that once had flourished in the corridor before the interstate was completed, only a handful were still in existence, and of these only The Horse and one or two others weren’t seasonal. Most reopened, often under new ownership, during the summer, doing real business only during August, when the Schuyler Springs flat track opened and downstate headed north for the meet. Then every restaurant and bar within a twenty-mile radius of the track made a killing by raising its prices. Or as much of a killing as they could hope to make, knowing it’d have to last them the year. The owners of these local spots owed their marginal existence to the downstaters, who were used to being stolen from and who admired upstaters’ limited imaginations when it came to thievery.

The Horse, because it was located in the village of North Bath and was not technically a roadhouse at all, stayed open year round, though its character was dramatically different during racing season. In June, the whole place got a facelift. Stools and tables got repaired, the bar got varnished, the large back room was opened and cleaned, the light bulbs in its chandeliers replaced. A whole new staff, mostly college students imported from the Albany area, arrived wearing tennis shorts and polo shirts and began their drills (“Hi, I’m Todd, and I’ll be your server tonight”), and this was the sign for the locals to slink off into their seasonal exile. The new drink prices told them they weren’t welcome in July and August. So did the new bartenders, ponytailed girls in some instances, who didn’t have much to say to the likes of Sully and Wirf. Rub Squeers wasn’t even allowed in the door.

Come September, after the snotty New Yorkers went home, taking with them their insults and their downstate accents and what remained of their cash, the roadhouses closed up one by one. The air was again cool at night, and familiar faces began to reappear at The Horse to compare notes and assess the damages of the season. Tiny Duncan, who owned The Horse, often thought about trying to keep the big dining room open, then thought again and closed it. Business was always so good in August that he never quite believed it would shut off, like water from a new tap, after Labor Day. Intellectually he knew it would, because it always did, every year, without exception. But in August, when he surveyed the crowded dining room, the line at the door that snaked down the street, he simply was unable to credit what he knew to be true. He began to contemplate the laws of cause and effect, wondering if maybe, just maybe, he didn’t have things backwards. What if it was closing the dining room after Labor Day that caused the crowds to disappear, and not the disappearing crowds that caused him to close the dining room? But when the college-student waiters and bartenders said good-bye and returned to Albany and another semester at SUNY and RPI and Russell Sage, taking their bizarre, cheery optimism with them, Tiny knew that the gig was again up, and he allowed the establishment to slide again into gentle decline. For Tiny, the worst day of each year was the one when he let the regulars talk him into lugging the pool table back into the bar, where it stayed until the following July, when he would again need the space. The big round table in the dining room, the one he reserved for parties of eight to ten, got centered under a chandelier and became a poker table. It was all very depressing. For the winter holidays Tiny ran a single string of festive lights along the back bar, and each year the string contained fewer lights that worked. After New Year’s, nobody was able to summon the energy to take them down.

Tonight, despite his steadfast intention, Sully had gone to The Horse and gotten involved. Tiny had given his regular bartender, a man he suspected of stealing and giving away too many free drinks, the night off and was being a pain in the ass as usual. He didn’t know why he bothered to stay open in the winter, when he lost money. As soon as The Ultimate Escape opened, he was going to sell out and take his money and go live in Florida. If there was any money left after so many winters of bad business. For the past two hours Sully had half listened to Tiny bellyache, and he was now tired of it. Wirf had been listening to the same shit, but Wirf was impossible to bend out of shape, this night or any other. The more Wirf drank the drunker he got, and the drunker he got the more tolerant he became, and by this time of night he wouldn’t have said shit if he had a mouthful.

“You know what,” Sully told him, not bothering to conceal his irritation. “You wouldn’t say shit if you had a mouthful.”

“Wouldn’t be much point,” Wirf observed. He was wearing his postmidnight grin, and this grin had been known to get Sully worked up. It wasn’t really a grin at all. Past a certain point of intoxication, Wirf had imperfect control of his facial muscles, and this was just his rictus face. A big shit-eating grin.

“When was the last time you won a case?” Sully asked him.

The question surprised Wirf without, apparently, angering him. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You let everybody piss on your shoes is what it’s got to do with,” Sully explained. “They walk right up, unzip and pee. And what do you do? Stand there and grin at them.”

Wirf chuckled good-naturedly now. “Who pisses on my shoes, Sully? Besides you, I mean.”