Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“Could I borrow a dollar?” Rub said.

Sully gave him a dollar. Rub put it into his pocket.

Sully stared at him, shook his head.

“What?” Rub said.

“Nothing,” Sully told him.

“Then how come you’re looking at me?”

Sully didn’t answer.

“You’re both looking at me,” Rub observed, since Cass was also watching the two of them with her usual quiet astonishment.

“You’re a good-looking man, Rub,” Sully told him. “Handsome.”

Rub looked at Cass, hoping for a clue as to how to take this remark.

“Am not,” Rub said.

“Sure you are,” Sully said. Pushing his empty coffee cup away, he stood and planted a kiss on Rub’s bristly cranium.

Rub flushed bright red. “You’re going to make people think I’m queer,” he said sadly.

“That ship has sailed, Rub,” Sully said. “Let’s go to work.”

Rub stood, gulped his coffee down. “I didn’t know we had work.”

“There’s always work,” Sully told him. “Today some of it’s ours.”

Cass wouldn’t take money for the coffees. “Thanks,” she said to Sully. “I’m grateful, even if I don’t act like it.”

“So long, old girl,” Sully said loudly to Hattie on their way out.

“Who is it?” the old woman grinned maniacally. “It sounds like that darn Sully.”

Perfect silence. This in response to Sully’s key being turned in the ignition of the pickup. It was as if the ignition were connected to nothing but the cold November air on the other side of the dash. Sully tried it several more times, trying to elicit some sort of sound, even a bad one. A bad sound — a grating, a straining, a scraping — might have suggested some diagnosis, and a diagnosis might have had some tentative price tag affixed to it. Sully wasn’t sure what the sound of perfect silence meant, pricewise. What it suggested was finality, a vehicle beyond resuscitation. Sully leaned back, left the key in the ignition, ran his fingers through his hair. Rub stared at his knees, afraid. This was a hell of a time to be seated next to Sully, who was not above flying into rages at inanimate objects. In such a confined space there was the danger of ricochet.

Rub didn’t want to be the first to speak, but the unbroken silence took a greater toll on him than on Sully, who looked to Rub like he might sit there all winter. When he couldn’t stand it anymore, Rub said, “Won’t it start?”

Sully just looked at him. Ricochet was the least of his worries, Rub realized.

“Let’s take a walk,” Sully suggested, getting out.

Rub got out too. “Don’t you want to take your keys?” he said. “What for?”

“Somebody might steal your truck,” Rub said.

“Think about it,” Sully advised.

Rub thought about it. “Somebody might steal your keys.”

“There’s only three on the ring,” Sully said. “One’s for the truck. I don’t remember what the other two are for, even.”

“Old Lady Peoples is spying on us again,” Rub noticed, grateful for the change of subject. The curtain in the front room had twitched. “I wisht she’d just go ahead and die instead of spying on people.”

“That’s kind of mean, don’t you think?” Sully said, as they headed back downtown on foot.

“She started it,” Rub said. “She was mean to me all during eighth grade. I’m just being mean back.”

“She probably just wanted you to learn something,” Sully suggested.

“She wanted me to learn everything,” Rub recalled angrily. “I wisht she’d just die so I could forget her.”

Jocko was at the OTB, holding up one section of wall. “Those were some pills,” Sully told him. “I slept like a baby.”

“Good,” Jocko said, suspicious of something in Sully’s voice.

“Only trouble was, I happened to be at the wheel of my truck at the time.”

Jocko nodded. “I warned you, if you recall. I see you’re in one piece, anyhow.”

“Mmmmm,” Sully said. “What was Wednesday’s triple?”

“Three-one-seven,” Jocko told him. “The reason I remember is that’s what I bet.”

“Good for you,” Sully told him. “The rich get richer. Do me a favor and don’t spend it all. I may need a loan.”

“I just signed it over to my wife. Brought me almost up to speed, alimonywise. I’m still on the same rung of the ladder, affectionwise.”

“I like a woman whose love can’t be bought. What was that triple again?” Sully wanted to know.

“Three-one-seven. Pay attention, for Christ sake.”

Sully had located the stub and stared at it to make sure he hadn’t been given the winner by mistake. “I had two thirds of it myself,” he said.

“Good,” Jocko congratulated him. “How many of those pills did you take yesterday?”

“Two.”

Jocko nodded. “They’re not aspirin.”

“The first one didn’t seem to have much effect.”

“How about the second one?” Jocko said.

“That was a doozy,” Sully admitted.

“Next time wait for the first one to kick in.”

“I will.”

Sully bet his 1-2-3 triple and collected Rub, who’d used the dollar Sully had given him earlier to bet a daily double.

“What’d you bet?” Sully said when they were back on the street. “I forgot,” Rub admitted.

“Naturally,” Sully said. “You bet it almost a minute ago.”

“I like Carnation best of all,” Rub said, and he recited the rest of the Carnation Milk jingle as flawlessly as he’d done yesterday in Sully’s dream.

“Well, what do you know,” Sully said, stopping dead in the middle of the sidewalk. He’d have bet Jocko’s winnings that Rub wouldn’t be able to remember yesterday’s jingle.

“Old Lady Peoples always tried to get me to memorize poetry back in eighth grade,” Rub told him. “Back then I never could.”

The same girl was behind the counter at the donut shop, and she looked less than thrilled to see Sully and Rub. Carl Roebuck was sitting at one of the tables in back, and that thrilled Sully, who, since hearing the deathly silence of his pickup truck, had been wishing fervently that he’d taken a fistful of Carl’s money the night before when he had a chance. The woman with Carl in the booth was a blonde, and Sully thought for a minute it was Toby until he saw it wasn’t.

“Can I borrow another dollar?” Rub said.

“If you’ll sit here at the counter and not bother me while I’m over there,” Sully said, indicating Carl’s table.

“I hate Carl,” Rub reminded him.

Sully handed him a dollar. “There are women in this town I could associate with who’d be cheaper than you,” he said.

“They wouldn’t be your real friend,” Rub reminded him seriously.

“Well, I see you’ve recovered,” Sully said when Carl looked up and saw him approaching.

“Two hours’ sleep,” Carl said proudly. “And I’m fresh as a fucking daisy.”

Carl did look amazingly well, Sully had to admit. “If you were a daisy, that’d be the kind, all right,” he said. He put a hand on the shoulder of the woman sitting across from Carl, who, now that Sully looked at her, was about the plainest-looking woman he’d ever seen, her age indeterminate, her gender less obvious from the front than the rear. “Would you give us about two minutes, dolly?” he said.

The woman looked at Carl, who shrugged a yes.

“Go keep that fellow at the counter company,” Sully suggested, indicating Rub, who’d ordered a big ole cream-filled donut. “He’ll recite you a poem if you ask him nice.”

The woman went over to the counter but settled on a stool for from Rub, perhaps because his donut had already erupted obscenely.

“You have to be the dumbest man in Bath,” Sully told Carl Roebuck.