Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“Exactly,” Tiny said from down the bar, where he’d retreated to avoid Sully. Tiny, at nearly seventy, was huge, and when he sat on the stool he kept behind the bar on slow nights like this the stool disappeared, creating the illusion that Tiny was being magically supported on a pillow of air, like the puck in a game of air hockey. Tiny’s obesity was another thing that irritated Sully after his fifth or sixth bottle of beer. That and the fact that Tiny kept reminding him of the fact that he’d run his father, Big Jim, out of The Horse when Sully was a boy, thrown him out bodily into the street more than once, and was publicly on record as saying that one asshole Sullivan was pretty much the same as the next.

“Come here a minute,” Sully suggested.

There were only a half-dozen customers in the bar. Carl Roebuck had left before Sully and Vince came in. Vince had drunk one beer, handed Sully, like a baton, over to Wirf and then left. Tiny was comfortable right where he was. “What for?”

“Just come here,” Sully explained.

Tiny hated this shit. He hated having his chain yanked, especially by Sully. On the other hand, he was tending bar and Sully was with Wirf and Wirf was Tiny’s best customer. He climbed off his stool. “What do you want?”

Sully waited for him to come all the way down the bar, then said, “How are you?”

“What do you want?” Tiny repeated.

“I was just wondering how you are,” Sully said. “Doing well, I hope?”

Wirf gave Tiny a don’t-blame-me look.

“I don’t get a chance to talk to you that much,” Sully explained. “I wanted to make sure you were okay. You need any money or anything?”

When Tiny turned and headed back down the bar, Sully said, “I also thought you might let us in on how you got to be such a cheap son of a bitch.”

“Don’t start this again,” Tiny warned.

In fact, Sully’s complaint was an old one. He just couldn’t get over how cheap Tiny was, especially with regard to Wirf, who dropped a lot of money in The Horse every night. The regular bartender would buy every fifth round or so, but Tiny never sprung. He couldn’t even be shamed into buying a round by Sully, who was a past master at shaming bartenders.

“Look at those fucking lights,” Sully said, pointing to the string of Christmas lights Tiny had just put up that afternoon. Nearly half were fluttering or dead out. “What would it cost you to put some new lights on that string. A buck?”

“Anymore you can’t buy a candy bar for a buck,” Tiny said, and this observation produced general agreement, despite its being obviously and demonstrably false. Tiny himself sold Snickers bars for seventy-five cents.

Tiny’s bellyaching was also an old song, and tonight’s lyric had been about how expensive utilities were anymore and how it didn’t pay to keep the place open on slow nights in winter.

“I got an idea,” Sully said. “Let’s take up a collection and help Tiny out. He’s beginning to look thin. I don’t think he’s got enough money for food.”

“Go home, Sully,” Tiny advised.

Sully returned to Wirf. “I just don’t see how you can let guys like him piss on your shoes. How much money have you spent in here tonight?”

“Not a dime,” Wirf said. “I haven’t paid my tab yet. Besides, I don’t expect people to buy me drinks. I can buy my own drinks.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point, then?”

Sully wasn’t sure, but he knew there was one. He wasn’t really angry with Tiny or Wirf, though he’d been bickering with both of them. The one he was really angry at, somewhat belatedly, was Ruth’s husband, Zack, whom he now realized he should have punched. And for reasons that made less than perfect sense to him he was also mad at Ruth, whom he’d never treated as well as she deserved. And he was angry over the general state of things. He’d allowed himself to start working for Carl Roebuck again after swearing he wouldn’t. And he was angry at himself for slipping back into his old infatuation with Carl’s wife. He was even mad and drunk enough to fight about all of this if he could find somebody to fight with.

“I tell you what,” Wirf said. “Let’s call it a night before you get us eighty-sixed from the only bar in the county that doesn’t play rock-and-roll music.”

“Hell, yes,” Sully agreed. “I never wanted to come in here in the first place, if you recall.”

They left money on the bar. “You must’ve,” Wirf pointed out. “Otherwise you’d have gone home.”

On the way out Sully stopped at the end of the bar where Tiny had returned to his stool. “Let me have one of those Snickers bars if it’s not too much trouble,” he said.

Tiny got up and handed Sully the candy bar suspiciously. Sully handed him two one-dollar bills. Tiny shoved one of the bills back at him, growling, “Seventy-five.”

“Nah,” Sully said, pushing it back. “You can’t get a candy bar for a buck anymore. You said so yourself.”

“Take your fucking dollar, Sully. Don’t be a pain in the ass.”

Sully put his hands up, as if he were under arrest. “Uh-uh,” he said. “That’s your dollar.”

Tiny put it into his pocket. “That make you happy, you mallet head?”

“Yes,” Sully told him. “I’ve never been happier.”

“You remain the uncontested master of the futile gesture,” Wirf observed as they struggled drunkenly on with their winter coats by the door. “Give me half of that, will you?”

“Sure,” Sully said, breaking the candy bar in two. “You owe me a dollar. I’ll let it go, since I owe you about two thousand.”

“Why don’t you go back to school?” Wirf wanted to know. “You’re just going to get hurt.”

“It’s out of my hands,” Sully said before shoving his half of the candy bar in his mouth. Wirf waited for him to chew and swallow. “My philosophy professor doesn’t believe there’s any such thing as free will.”

“What does he believe in?” Wirf wanted to know.

Sully shrugged. “He’s a Jew. He probably believes in all sorts of screwball things.”

“Not necessarily,” Wirf said, pushing the door open and holding it for Sully. “I’m a Jew, and I don’t believe in much of anything.”

Outside, the two men stopped on the top step and stared out into the street in disbelief. They’d been vaguely aware that it had started snowing again. Sully had seen the flakes coming down through the Black Label sign in the tavern’s window. But neither man had expected this. Beneath the lamps that lined Main the whole street was ghostly white.

“I believe it snowed,” Sully said. “That’s what I believe.”

They stepped down into it. “About a foot, I believe,” Wirf said, staring at where his scuffed brown wingtips had disappeared. “I believe I need some boots.”

Sully was wearing his work boots, but the snow was over these too, and it was still snowing. “I didn’t know you were a Jew,” Sully said truthfully. “I thought Jews were supposed to be sharp lawyers.”

“Sully,” Wirf said, whipping his scarf over his shoulder so that it swatted Sully in the face. “You’re a prince. Remember. No black thoughts.”

Sully watched Wirf inch his way across the street warily to where his Regal was parked before heading upstreet toward his flat. In a minute the Regal slalomed by. Wirf had his window rolled down so he could chant “Goodnight, sweet prince.”

The thick blanket of snow was a silencer on the land, and by the time Sully got home the street was utterly still. It was after one o’clock, and the curb-parked cars along the street looked like white hills, and Sully would not have been surprised to see a horse-drawn carriage turn down the street, its harness bells all astir.