Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

I like Carnation best of all .

No tits to pull

No shit to haul .

No shit to haul,

No hay to pitch .

Just pop a hole in that son of a bitch .

But ten minutes later Rub would forget how it began. He kept wanting to start it “I like tits best of all.” Which rendered the second line inaccessible. “It’s because I do like tits best of all,” Rub explained. “I like pussy too, as long as I don’t have to look at it. It kind of scares me to look at.”

What scared Sully was the pain in his knee. It’d been growing steadily worse all morning, pain shooting all the way down into his ankle and up almost to his groin. Until a few weeks ago he’d been able to ignore it. He’d always prided himself on a high threshold of pain. Pain, he’d learned as a kid, would peak, and from that point forward it would get no worse. What you looked for was the moment when the pain peaked and you realized you could stand it, that it wouldn’t kill you. As a boy, Sully had learned to accommodate his father’s drunken whuppings by waiting for Big Jim’s fury to hit its apex, then slide away, spent, leaving Sully full of pride and, yes, love. You could feel good in pain, and that was something not everybody knew. One of his father’s favorite jokes had been the one that went “Why did the moron beat his head against the wall? Because it felt so good when he stopped.” Sully understood that the reason his father liked the joke was not so much that it was funny as because it was literally true. There was pleasure to be taken from the diminishment of pain. It did feel good when you stopped.

What frightened Sully about this new, more intense pain in his knee was its relentlessness. As a boy, he had not realized what his father must have known, that pain could have a cumulative effect. Your ability to withstand it had much to do with your ability to catch your breath between its assaults. The pain in Sully’s knee had not truly worried him as long as bad days alternated with good ones. But now he was beginning to suspect that the periods of respite, the troughs in the wave that had so far allowed him to prepare for the peaks, were beginning to disappear. Anymore, it was rare for him to sleep more than four hours a night, and even these hours were tinged with dream pain. Even the self of his dreams was hobbled now, and when he awoke it was with the sensation that he hadn’t really been asleep.

If this weren’t enough, Jocko’s pills made him feel dreamy even when he was awake, and Sully’d begun to fear that he was slowly migrating toward a state that was somewhere in between sleep and consciousness where the only constant was pain, and this to Sully was more frightening than the specific shooting pains he felt on bad days like today. Shooting pains were human, like the whuppings he got from his father. He’d endured such pain by remembering that his father had only so much strength, so much meanness, in him. At some point Big Jim always saw what he was doing and would be satisfied and the pain would stop. What Sully feared now was that he was facing a new kind of pain, one that wouldn’t know or care when he’d had all he could take. It might never be satisfied.

This morning Sully’d resisted taking one of Jocko’s pills, fearing that it would render him useless. It didn’t take a lot of mental agility to sheetrock, but it did take some. You couldn’t do it and sleep too, and some of Jocko’s better painkillers worked like Mickey Finns, with about as much warning. And Rub required supervision at all tasks. Rub’s cousins, none of whom would themselves be mistaken for theoretical mathematicians, complained that he couldn’t even collect garbage right, and Sully didn’t want to be doped up and in the immediate vicinity of a grown man who couldn’t learn a short bawdy jingle after three hours of practice. No pills until they finished.

“Doesn’t pussy kind of scare you to look at?” Rub wanted to know.

“I don’t remember,” Sully told him.

“How can you forget pussy?” Rub said.

“How can you forget the Carnation jingle?”

“Well,” Rub said, ignoring this. “I don’t like how it looks.”

It was nearly two in the afternoon when they finished. Rub was disappointed at not mastering the jingle but able to console himself that at least they were done working on Thanksgiving and therefore no longer in need of the jingle’s distraction. He was also pleased to contemplate the big ole turkey Bootsie had browning in the oven, getting all crispy. “I like that big ole flap of skin over the turkey’s asshole,” he told Sully as they stashed their hammers and belts in Sully’s toolbox.

Sully suspected that Rub’s understanding of a turkey’s anatomy was imperfect. The “asshole” he was referring to was probably the turkey’s neck cavity, which Rub couldn’t visualize with the head missing, the neck detached. “I don’t know, Rub,” Sully said as they climbed into the pickup. “The sight of pussy scares you, but you can’t wait to eat the asshole out of a turkey.” He extracted one of Jocko’s pills from its bright pink tube, made the sign of the cross, and swallowed it dry.

“Say la vee,” Rub said.

Sully, who had been half listening to Rub and half to the singing of his own knee, blinked and looked over at his friend, who was patiently waiting for him to turn the key in the ignition so they could go home to the big ole turkey. Rub was only vaguely aware of having spoken in a foreign language, and when he saw Sully staring at him, he concluded that for once he knew something somebody else didn’t. “To each his fuckin’ own,” he translated for Sully’s benefit.

Sully was still laughing ten minutes later when he dropped Rub off in front of his house. “Uh-oh,” Rub said, and Sully saw why.

Rub’s wife, Bootsie, was coming down the walk from their apartment, and she had a pretty good head of steam up, given her size. As Wirf was fond of observing, there was enough of Bootsie to make two perfectly ugly grown women and enough left over to make the ugliest baby you ever saw. When angered, as she apparently was now, she was a fearful sight.

Sully rolled down his window anyhow. He’d managed to avoid hostilities with Zack last night by remaining seated and being friendly, and he wondered if the same tactic might work again. He had his doubts. Unlike Zack, Bootsie liked to fight. “Happy Thanksgiving, dolly,” he called. “How are you?” What she looked like was a complete list of a man’s past sins come to life, bent on retribution.

“My Thanksgiving turkey’s burnt to shit, is how I am,” she said. “You don’t have no work for him all fall and then you make him work Thanksgiving and ruin the damn holiday is how I am.”

One of the things Sully was never able to get Rub’s wife to understand was that he himself wasn’t an employer, that Rub didn’t really work for him, that he wasn’t Rub’s boss. Her difficulty in grasping the situation may have been in part due to the fact that Sully seemed to be the one who provided the work (since there wasn’t any when Sully didn’t provide it) and because Sully was the one who paid Rub for his services and because Sully told him what to do and when, which made Sully look enough like a boss to Bootsie that she was disinclined to draw the crucial distinction. Sully guessed this wasn’t the proper time or place to press for clarification.

“Well,” he said. “I am sorry. It’s the way these things go sometimes. The job took us a little longer than we figured.”

“Ruined the whole holiday is all,” Bootsie said, though Sully thought he detected a slight softening in her tone. Rub wasn’t taking any chances. He’d made no move to get out of the truck, and it was clear to Sully that he had no intention of entering into the conversation. Sully was on his own for the moment. Later, Rub knew, he’d be on his own, so for now he’d let Sully fend for himself.