Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Sully grinned at him. This “What do I get? Heartache” line was one of Carl’s favorites and was impossible to take seriously, though it occurred to Sully that there just might be an element of seriousness now. “Just because I don’t lock my front door doesn’t make us friends. What’re you doing here, anyhow?”

Carl stood up, pretended to do jumping jacks, his feet firmly planted on the floor, only his arms in motion. “I wanted to make sure you got an early start. You have a lot of work to do,” he observed. “You and your smelly dwarf finish with those blocks yesterday?”

Sully told him they had.

“I missed you at The Horse last night,” Carl said. “Rub was there. He said you finished.”

“Then why’d you ask me?”

“ ’Cause Rub had that scared look he gets when he lies,” Carl said and stopped with the jumping jacks to study Sully.

Sully had to smile at the idea of Rub trying not to blurt out that they had broken a load of blocks. “He’s always nervous around his betters,” Sully explained. “I’ve told him you aren’t one of them, but Rub’s a slow learner.”

“I don’t see how you can work with somebody who smells like a pussy finger.”

“I keep him downwind when I can.”

“Wouldn’t it be simpler to tell the little fuck he stinks?”

“I have,” Sully said. “He thinks I’m kidding. He says if he stunk that bad Bootsie would mention it.”

Carl shuddered. “That’s what I should do when I get horny. Think of Bootsie.”

“I thought you wanted to fuck the ugly ones,” Sully reminded him.

“Not that ugly,” Carl conceded.

Sully went back into the bedroom to dress. He could hear Carl poking around the tiny kitchen.

“You got any coffee?” he called.

“No,” Sully said. “Hattie’s does though, just down the street.”

Sully was seated on the edge of the bed, flexing his knee, when Carl poked his head in. “Mind if I grab a quick shower?” he said. Then, catching sight of Sully’s knee, he added, “Jesus.”

Anymore, that’s the effect Sully’s knee had on people, which was one reason he didn’t like to let people see it. The sight of the grotesque swelling, the deep discoloration, the skin stretched so tightly that it glistened, was something Sully himself had grown accustomed to. It was the look on other people’s faces that scared him.

He pulled on a fresh pair of work pants, stood to zip and buckle. “Yesterday was a long one,” he explained.

Carl was still looking at the knee, as Peter had done yesterday, through the fabric.

“I got a hell of an idea,” Sully said. “Why don’t you pay me for yesterday. My knee always feels better when I take money from you.”

“You should have that operation,” Carl said. “If they can fix my heart, they can fix your knee.”

“I got news for you,” Sully said. “They didn’t fix your heart. They just made it so it wouldn’t stop beating for a while. If they’d fixed it, you’d be faithful to your wife and pay your employees what you owe them.”

“I’ve thought about paying you for last August,” Carl admitted. “But if I did that you’d have nothing to bitch about. You’re better off thinking you’ve been cheated. This way you’ve got somebody to blame. You can tell yourself if it wasn’t for C. I. Roebuck, you’d have the world by the short hairs.”

When Carl hit the shower, Sully went downstairs and outside. It was only quarter to seven, but Miss Beryl had already leaned the shovel against the porch post. The sun was out, but the early morning air was bitter, and the sun’s reflection off the new powder contained little warmth. What did warm Sully was the sight of Carl Roebuck’s snowblower sitting snugly under the tarp in the corner of the garage where he’d left it. The motor started on the first pull.

Sully had finished the sidewalk and half the drive by the time Carl Roebuck, freshly showered but in yesterday’s clothes, appeared on the porch.

“Meet me at the donut shop,” he called. “I’ll pay you for yesterday.”

Sully turned the snowblower off. “You should go home and tell Toby you love her before somebody else does. Say it like you mean it,” he suggested, suddenly feeling something like affection for his dead friend’s son. He remembered the dark sedan at the job site yesterday — that it had followed Carl back to town. Maybe he was wrong about Toby’s devotion to him. Maybe she was considering a divorce and had hired someone to follow him. Sully considered mentioning the sedan to Carl, then decided not to. “Say Happy Thanksgiving to her for me,” he said instead.

Carl was looking at the snowblower. “I’ve got one just like that,” he said. “Identical.”

By the time Sully finished with the driveway, he knew that his first order of business was to find Jocko and some prescription painkillers. Just as he’d predicted to Ruth, his knee, which always hummed dully, was singing full throat this morning. Naturally, the drugstore would be closed on Thanksgiving, which meant that Jocko, who lived alone and wasn’t in the book, would not be easy to locate. Actually, Jocko had given Sully his phone number half a dozen times, but Sully’d always managed to lose it.

The first place to check was Hattie’s because Hattie’s was only half a block away and if he didn’t find Jocko, he’d at least find coffee. And besides, Rub was supposed to meet him there. The trouble was that when Sully arrived the CLOSED sign was hanging in the window. He had a vague recollection of Cass warning him of this yesterday. The rest of Bath looked closed too, and Sully wondered if he might be better off to go home and wait for the town to wake up, even if that meant waiting until tomorrow. It wouldn’t kill Carl Roebuck if his two-bedroom ranch didn’t get sheetrocked until Friday. Except that on Friday, Carl might hire the guy who regularly did the sheetrocking and line up an even shittier job for himself and Rub. In a few weeks there’d be nothing but indoor work, up and down stairs, and precious little of that. Today might be his last chance for a while to do a job he hated in the freezing cold.

Normally, the best place to look for Jocko was the OTB, except the OTB wouldn’t be open on Thanksgiving either. Since it wasn’t, Sully decided to stop by the Rexall where Jocko worked just in case. As he expected, the interior of the store was dark, its rows of shelves disappearing into deepening shadow as they receded from the street. The donut shop, at least, would be open.

There, Sully found Rub sitting at the counter, and since Rub didn’t see him coming, Sully cuffed Rub’s wool hat halfway down the counter, where it landed on top of a sugar dispenser. “I thought I told you to meet me at Hattie’s,” he said, sliding onto the stool next to Rub. Except for a sullen teenage waitress and a foursome of sleepy-looking truckers in a booth, they had the place to themselves.

Rub didn’t appear to miss his hat, nor did he make any attempt to smooth the cowlick Sully’d created. “Hattie’s was closed,” he observed. “I wisht we didn’t have to work on Thanksgiving.”

“You don’t have to,” Sully assured him. The young woman behind the counter intuited that Sully would want coffee and that he’d want nothing else. She put a steaming cup in front of him and walked away without inquiring. On her way past the sugar dispenser she delicately removed Rub’s hat by making forceps of her thumb and forefinger.

“If I don’t work, you’ll be mad at me,” Rub said sadly.

“Well, that’s true,” Sully admitted.

“And Bootsie’s still mad at me about the car,” Rub told him. “Everybody’s mad at me.”

“See?” Sully said. “You’re better off working.”