Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“You know Jerry’s brother Vince?” Jocko said.

“You mean Vince’s brother Jerry?”

“The one that has the Schuyler restaurant,” Jocko clarified.

“Right. Jerry.”

“How can you tell them apart?”

“Apparently Jerry will give you Bath and twenty points. That’s one way,” Sully said. “Listen, what do I owe you here?”

“Nada. They’re samples. Let me know if they make you sick,” Jocko suggested when Sully opened the door and began the slow process of getting out. When this was finally accomplished and Sully’d limped back around to the driver’s side, Jocko was shaking his head. “You know what you should do?” he said.

“No, what?” Sully said.

“You should go back into the arson business.”

Sully pretended to consider this. “It’s a thought,” he said, since Jocko was probably joking. Ever since he’d burned down Kenny Roebuck’s house, people kidded him about being an arsonist. Some of them, he’d learned over the years, really thought he was, thanks to Kenny’s publicly treating the fire as good fortune.

“Hell,” Jocko snorted, “if that theme park ever falls through, you’d have clients up and down Main Street. I might hire you myself.”

“Keep the faith,” Sully suggested. “They’ll run again tomorrow.”

Carl’s red Camaro was parked out front of the third-floor office and so was the El Camino, which meant that Carl was probably inside. Still, that was three flights up, so Sully made a snowball, went out into the middle of the empty street and tossed it at the row of windows that said TIP TOP CONSTRUCTION: C. I. ROEBUCK. The sound the snowball made on the windowpane was louder than Sully expected, and Carl’s face quickly appeared at the window behind the snowball’s powdery smudge. Also his shoulders, which were inexplicably bare. There was movement behind him too, a white, frightened face darting away. Carl raised the window. “I ever tell you what the C.I. in my name is for?”

“Yesterday,” Sully grinned up at him. A curtain in the next-door window that represented the outer office drew stealthily back. “Hi, Ruby,” Sully waved. “Happy Thanksgiving.” The curtain fell back into place.

“What the hell do you want, Sully?” Carl said. “You’re supposed to be sheetrocking.”

And you’re supposed to be home, Sully considered reminding him. Instead he said, “I missed you at the donut shop. You probably don’t remember saying you’d meet me there because that was where you were going to pay me.”

“And when I’m not there that means you come here and give me a heart attack by throwing snowballs at my office window.”

“It’s a good thing I did, too,” Sully said. “It’d be just like you to let me walk up three flights of stairs and then not answer the door.”

“Why don’t I follow you out to the site in half an hour?” Carl said. On his face was a pleading, man-to-man, I’m-in-the-middle-of-something-here, have-a-fucking-heart sort of expression.

Sully wanted no part of it. “Put the money in an envelope and drop it. It’ll take you two seconds. Even you can’t lose a hard-on that fast.”

“It must be a long time since you’ve had one,” Carl said. “You’ve forgotten.” He disappeared.

In a minute he was back again with an envelope. “This is going to land on the ledge, you know.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Sully said. “The money you owe me usually ends up stuck in your pocket, not on window ledges.”

“This is no way to do business,” Carl said, but he let go of the envelope, which cleared the second-story ledge and Frisbeed out into the street. Sully fielded it cleanly, opened the envelope, extracted the bills. “Before you go I got something else for you,” Carl called down, and when Sully looked up he saw he was being mooned. Carl’s white ass was sticking out the window, and there was the sound of female laughter inside. The ass disappeared before Sully could pack and deliver a new snowball. The window slammed shut.

Sully was about to leave when he noticed that the dark sedan that had been parked along the road by the job site yesterday was parked a ways down the street. There was a man at the wheel who appeared to be closely inspecting some sort of black box. Sully waved. The man did not wave back. Only when the snowball exploded on his windshield did he lower the electric window and poke his head partially out.

“You get a good shot of all that?” Sully said, indicating the window above.

“I don’t follow you,” the man said evenly.

“I thought that’s all you guys did.”

“I think you have an imperfect understanding of the situation,” the man said in the kind of voice that Sully despised. It reminded him of the way the insurance company lawyers talked at his disability hearings.

“I’d be careful just the same,” Sully said. Carl, he knew, owned a handgun.

“Are you threatening me?” the man wanted to know.

“Not unless you’re afraid of snowballs.”

“Good,” the man said, and the window hummed up.

Rub was dancing back and forth on the balls of his feet when Sully arrived at Hattie’s.

“I wisht Hattie’s was open,” he said. He had dried donut cream in both corners of his mouth.

“How come, Rub?”

“So I could’ve gone inside and waited for you where it was warm,” he explained seriously.

Sully just stood there and grinned at him until Rub got embarrassed and studied his shoes. “You’re going to rag me all day, aren’t you,” he said sadly.

They walked up the street to where Sully’s pickup was parked. Miss Beryl, clutching her thick robe to her throat, was standing on the side porch, peering down at the snowblower. Which gave Sully an idea. Taking the chain he always kept in the toolbox and the Yale lock he used to secure the box, he limped up the drive to where his landlady was standing. “That’s so you can start doing the driveway yourself when you feel like it,” Sully told her.

“I couldn’t, even with that,” Miss Beryl said. She was staring at the machine suspiciously. “It’d probably get going along and just drag me down the street. The neighbors would look out their windows and say, ‘There goes old Beryl.’ ”

“Don’t be silly,” Sully kidded her. “It’d be good exercise.”

“I don’t want exercise. These are my golden years. What are you going to do with that chain?”

Sully already had the snowblower secured to the railing. He could have just hidden the machine in the garage, but he liked the idea of showing Carl right where it was. “Keeping the man I stole this from stealing it back. If he comes by, call the cops.”

It took Miss Beryl a minute to digest this. She was an old woman who’d lived a schoolteacher’s life, but she was also a good sport , Sully knew. “As I said, you’re a cur, sir.”

Then she grew serious. “Tell me something, Donald,” she said. “Does it ever bother you that you haven’t done more with the life God gave you?”

Sully had decided years ago not to take offense at Miss Beryl’s more personal observations. “Not often,” he admitted, rattling the chain to make sure it was secure. “Now and then.”

Maybe sheetrocking wasn’t one of Sully’s favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm it’d get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years — that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it. This morning, in fact, it moved right along. The temperature rose steadily, and Sully and Rub, who had figured to be frozen by midmorning, still had feeling in their fingers. The two men fell naturally into a smooth, moderate pace that would probably get them finished more quickly than hurrying.