Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

All this peace on earth could mean only one thing. Tomorrow would not be peaceful. So much unseasonal snow would slow the work on Carl Roebuck’s unbuilt houses and make him doubly anxious to finish them before the ground froze and things got really impossible. Unless the weather warmed up some, he and Rub would freeze their asses tomorrow. Sheetrocking was a job you couldn’t do with gloves on, and by midmorning their hands would be so cold they’d feel their fingers only when they hit them with hammers. And Carl would probably visit half a dozen times to badger them and tell them about the next shitty job he had planned for them on Friday, one, he’d claim, even they couldn’t fuck up. And before they could even get started working for Carl, he’d have to shovel the sidewalk and driveway so his landlady could get out. All on a knee that by morning would be a symphony of pain.

It would have been discouraging if he hadn’t gotten an idea.

It took him a minute to find the long-handled brush in the back of his pickup, but when he did he was in business. In thirty seconds he’d brushed the snow off the pickup’s front window and hood, and two minutes after that he was backing the truck into Carl Roebuck’s driveway, right up to where the snowblower sat, itself covered with snow. There were still three sheets of plywood on the floor of the pickup, and these Sully used to form a makeshift ramp. They buckled but did not break under the weight of the snowblower. When Sully popped the tailgate back up with a bang, a light came on upstairs and Toby Roebuck appeared, a dark silhouette in the window, which she slid up so she could poke her head out. “That you, Sully?” she wanted to know.

“Yup,” Sully admitted. “I may deny it tomorrow, though.”

“You come to steal our brand-new snowblower?”

“I’ve done it already, just about.”

“I could legally shoot you and get away with it,” Toby informed him.

“Not really. Not unless I was trying to break into the house.”

“Are you going to break into my house?”

“Not tonight, dolly,” Sully said. The conversation, even with their voices lowered, was a bit unnerving at this hour. Quiet as it was, the whole neighborhood could be listening. “Where’s Dummy, by the way?”

“Who knows?” Toby Roebuck said. “He tried to get in earlier, then gave up. He took my threat to shoot him a lot more seriously than you just did, Sully.”

“I don’t blame him,” Sully said. “You got more reason to shoot him.”

“Do I now,” she said, then after a minute added, “You ever get so mad you just wanted to shoot somebody and didn’t care who?”

“Sure,” Sully admitted, without feeling much urge to tell her that was how he’d been feeling about fifteen minutes ago at The Horse. “It’s the reason I don’t own a gun.”

“You should get one,” she suggested. “I’ve got Carl’s. The two of us could go on a rampage. Rob banks. Go out in a blaze of glory. Bonnie and Clyde.”

“You’d have to be Clyde,” Sully told her. “I couldn’t do much more than drive the getaway car.”

“Men have no imagination,” Toby said, reminding Sully of what Vince had told him at the restaurant, that Toby Roebuck might be involved with someone from Schuyler Springs. Apparently not, to judge from this remark, unless the man in question didn’t have any imagination either.

“Well,” Sully said, surprised to discover that he was about to stand up for Carl Roebuck, of all people, “don’t be too hard on him. The heart bypass is still on his mind. He’s probably just trying to do everything in six months. When it dawns on him he’s going to live to be seventy, he’ll slow down.”

“He pretty nearly didn’t live till Thanksgiving,” she said with what sounded to Sully like genuine conviction. Then, after a long moment of silence, she said, “Well, go ahead and steal our snowblower. You’re the slowest thief I ever saw. I don’t think you’d even be a decent wheel man.”

Back at his flat Sully was suddenly exhausted again, having burned off the energy he’d derived from the half Snickers bar, and he was tempted to leave the snowblower right there in the back of the pickup, except he was afraid he might oversleep in the morning. When Carl Roebuck came over to find out where he was, he’d be just as liable to steal the snowblower back again before Sully had a chance to use it. So he unloaded the machine and hid it safely out of sight in the corner of Miss Beryl’s garage under a tarp.

It turned out to be a good decision, because the first thing Sully noticed when he got upstairs was Carl Roebuck asleep on the couch, his mouth wide open, an empty pint of Canadian whiskey on the floor below his outstretched hand. For a brief moment, Sully wasn’t sure Carl was alive, thought perhaps he’d had his final heart attack right there on the couch. But then Carl snorted loudly and rearranged himself, and Sully was relieved that it was a living man asleep on the sofa and not a dead one, even if that man happened to be Carl Roebuck.

Sully had an extra blanket around somewhere, but he was too tired to think where, so he covered Carl with the blanket off his own bed. His bedroom was often too warm anyway, and the sheet would be plenty. He was asleep before he could doubt it.

Carl Roebuck woke early. Sully heard him turn the TV on low, to an exercise show. The clock on Sully’s dresser said six-thirty, which meant that Carl was watching Wake Up, America , whose aerobic hostess, to judge from her face, had to be in her forties. Her body was pretty remarkable, toned and athletic, but it wasn’t a young body, Sully had noticed. When she danced next to her youthful assistants, she looked merely heroic. Maybe that was what made Sully sad when he watched her. The woman seemed to be dancing for her very life, and Sully would have liked to tell her to go slow.

Carl Roebuck was watching her absently, half asleep, hand in the open fly of his boxers, when Sully looked in.

“Lose something?” Sully said. “Or have you just worn it down to a nub?”

Carl betrayed not the slightest embarrassment. “This is the worst couch I ever slept on,” he observed sleepily without looking up at Sully.

“How old are you?” Sully asked, genuinely curious. Sitting there with his hand in his shorts, Carl Roebuck looked, despite his paunch, like a kid.

Carl gave no evidence of having heard this question. In a minute he said, “You ever wake up horny anymore?”

“No,” Sully told him. In truth, he’d seldom woken up horny as a younger man, and morning lovemaking, back when he was married, had never been terribly successful. Before noon his orgasms were always vague, like the distant rumblings of a train half a mile away and headed in the other direction. It was one of the things wrong with his marriage. Vera had often awakened feeling frisky, an enthusiasm that had seldom survived breakfast. Sully attributed this to her Puritan upbringing. Some girls you just had to catch before they woke up enough to remember who they were.

“Tell me you don’t want to get it on with this broad right now,” Carl challenged. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off the TV, though he’d finally removed his hand from his shorts.

“What’s wrong with you, anyway?” Sully said.

Carl Roebuck sighed. “I have no idea. Honest to God,” he confessed. “Lately I want to fuck ’em all. Even the ugly ones. You ever want to fuck the ugly ones?”

“This conversation’s getting kind of personal,” Sully told him.

Carl looked hurt. “Okay. Ignore me in my moment of pain and crisis. I reach out to you as a friend, and what do I get? Heartache.”