Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“That wouldn’t be such an insult if you hadn’t just walked in here with the dumbest man in Bath,” Carl said. “You never count yourself, either.”

“Speaking of counting,” Sully said. “Count out what you owe me for yesterday.”

“I haven’t even been out to check on your work,” Carl said.

“This is the wrong fucking day to start that,” Sully said. “Last night you shoved about a thousand dollars at me. Told me to take what I wanted.”

Carl nodded, recalling it. “What a day that’d been,” he sang. “What a rare mood I was in.”

Sully nodded impatiently. “Well, fork it over if you want to be around for your next mood swing.”

Carl counted out the money he owed Sully for the sheetrocking, pushed it across the formica tabletop. “What?” he said when Sully put the money in his pocket. “You aren’t going to bust my balls about the other?”

“I don’t want to think about it,” Sully told him. “My truck died this morning, and if I start thinking about all the money you owe me I might kill you before you kill yourself.”

“Who will you blame for your sad pitiful state of affairs when I’m gone?” Carl wondered.

Sully got up. “I’ll still blame you,” he said.

Neither man spoke for a second. Sully didn’t think he’d ever seen a sadder-looking man than Carl Roebuck at that moment. “How about letting me take the El Camino for a day or two,” Sully said.

“Why not? It’s about shot anyhow,” Carl said, fishing in his pocket for the keys. “Somebody said you were working at Hattie’s,” he added.

Sully shook his head, amazed as always about the speed with which inconsequential news traveled in Bath. “I better go see if Harold’s got another beater to sell me. And I’m supposed to meet a guy named Miles Anderson who wants me to renovate some house on Main for him.”

“You should have some business cards printed up,” Carl suggested. “Don Sullivan: Jack-Off. All Trades.”

“Thanks for the car.” Sully jiggled the keys.

“I was under the impression you were going to do a job for me today,” Carl said.

“I’ll see if I can work you in this afternoon when I’m done jacking off,” Sully said, sliding out of the booth again.

“Send that girl back over on your way out,” Carl told him. “She was just offering to give me a header under the table.”

Rub was wiping cream off his face with a paper napkin when Sully returned. “That girl kept looking at me,” he said, indicating the woman who’d been sitting in Carl’s booth and who now returned to it. “Now Carl’s got her,” he added unhappily.

Proxmire Motors was located a mile out of town, just off the blacktop, sandwiched in between Harold’s Junkyard and Harold’s Auto Parts, all three establishments owned and operated by Harold Proxmire. A tow truck with PROXMIRE WRECKING stenciled on the doors also sat in the yard. The sign out front, atop a bent pole, said HAROLD’S AUTOMOTIVE WORLD. Harold’s had five full-time employees — Harold Proxmire; Harold’s wife, Gloria; his chief and only mechanic, a sour-dispositioned man Harold had instructed never, under any circumstances, to speak to the public; a tiny, elderly man who wandered up and down the aisles of the auto parts store, squinting up into the dark upper reaches of the metal shelving stacked with remaindered auto parts; and a teenager, usually a dropout from the high school, whom the Proxmires took under their wing. Harold and Mrs. Proxmire were both Christians, and they hired only troubled Christian teens to fill the teenager slot in their employment scheme. Harold always tried to find a boy who’d been to jail or reform school at least once, somebody no one else would hire. He paid this boy minimum wage, and Mrs. Harold tutored him in Christian precepts for free from her seat at the cash register. Harold usually hired three of these boys a year. Four months was their average tenure, after which some were lured away by Mammon, in the form of a quarter-an-hour raise. Others just cleaned out the till and bolted. The last had left Mrs. Harold a note in the big bill slot of the cash register that said: “Jesus was a stupid fuck. And so are you.”

Harold’s current teenager, Dwayne, was lanky and red-haired and sullen, and so far he hadn’t stolen anything from Harold’s Automotive World, though he was beginning to wilt under the weight of daily moral instruction. Mrs. Harold’s lectures about honesty, her constant reminders to be on the alert for Satan in his many guises, worried him some. Dwayne was never tempted to steal anything from Harold, whom he was fond of and grateful to, or even from Mrs. Harold, whom he could tolerate in small doses, and he wondered what was wrong with him that Satan should pay him so little attention. What annoyed him even more than the fact that Satan ignored him was the fact that Harold’s customers did too. Every one of them wanted to deal with Harold only, and Dwayne’s principal duty was to locate his boss, who divided himself among the lot, the garage, the junkyard and the parts store, supervising the operation of all of these at once, abandoning one to wait on an impatient customer in the other.

When the C. I. Roebuck El Camino pulled in, therefore, Dwayne did not expect to be accorded much respect, and he wasn’t disappointed when Sully got out and said, “Where’s Harold?” Dwayne had lost track. Weekday mornings there were so few customers at Harold’s that Dwayne spent most of his time daydreaming and trying to steer clear of Mrs. Harold, who that day happened to be in an Old Testament mood.

Harold Proxmire himself was tall and lean and sallow-skinned and always clad in gray, and on a day as gray as this one he moved about the lot like a phantom on quiet, thick-soled shoes. “Somewheres,” Dwayne said with a sweeping gesture that included all three businesses.

While her husband might be anywhere, Mrs. Harold, a tiny, round woman with a beehive hairdo that appeared to nearly double her height, could always be found at the cash register, and so this was where Sully sought her out. Mrs. Harold was the immediate source of her husband’s Christianity, which had burrowed deep into his bones, an inner presence to counterbalance Mrs. Harold’s brand of devotion, which was right out there in the open. In between sales she read scripture on her stool at the cash register, surrounded by Disney souvenirs. Disney World was Mrs. Harold’s favorite place, and every year in February she dragged her husband to Orlando and rode every ride in the Magic Kingdom, where everything was clean and sunny and the lines moved. There was probably dirty, smelly, greasy machinery somewhere that ran the whole Kingdom, but the Disney people knew enough to keep it out of sight. Underground, probably. There was supposed to be a tour you could take where they’d show you how everything ran, but it was the one thing in Disney World Mrs. Harold wasn’t interested in. It’d spoil the magic, was the way she looked at it. She wouldn’t let Harold go see it either for fear he’d explain everything to her, which would be even worse.

Each year before they returned home, Mrs. Harold bought about two thousand dollars’ worth of Disney paraphernalia, and she ran a small Disney concession, without authorization or permission, in the office of Harold’s Automotive World. For most of the spring the walls would be covered with Disney movie posters and T-shirts, the cash register surrounded by water-skiing Goofys and rubber Plutos and a stack of big-eared mouse hats. Now, in late November, most of the merchandise had been sold off and the drab walls were again bare, except for a tall Cinderella poster that depicted, among other things, three plump Disney fairies, one of which reminded Sully of Mrs. Harold herself. Next to the cash register was a small box of cheap plastic Disney figurines and a half-dozen rubber alligators.