Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Invoices and purchases at all three businesses were rung through her register, and when she looked up from that register at her customers, her suspicious expression conveyed something of her inner fear that any one of them might be Satan in disguise. She was certain that Sully, for instance, was in league with the Devil somehow, though she doubted he was very far up in the satanic hierarchy. In a deep, secluded part of her heart to which Mrs. Harold no longer had immediate access, she was very fond of Sully, who always kidded with her, something nobody else had the courage to do, even her husband. Whenever Sully appeared, something of the girl she had once been always slipped out of the fortress she’d been imprisoned in, though that girl was easily recaptured, having forgotten how or where or even why to flee many long years ago.

“Hello, Esmerelda,” Sully said when the door had swung closed behind him and Rub.

Esmerelda was not Mrs. Harold’s name, of course, but it was the name Sully, who couldn’t remember names, had been calling her for years and years. Was it the name of the imprisoned girl?

Mrs. Harold set her Bible down and refused Sully the smile she knew he was after. “Harold!” she barked into the intercom, which crackled to life over the bullhorns mounted on wooden poles in the yard outside. “Customer!”

Sully picked up and examined one of the rubber alligators from the box beside the cash register. “What extortionary price are you asking for these?” Sully asked Mrs. Harold.

Mrs. Harold had been charging three dollars for them and was about to tell Sully this when, to her surprise, Esmerelda spoke up and said, “One dollar.”

“Okay,” Sully said, slipping one of the alligators into his coat pocket and handing Mrs. Harold a dollar. “I’ll take one. I know somebody who likes alligators. But tell me something before your husband gets here.” Sully lowered his voice confidentially and leaned forward toward her, elbows planted on the countertop. “Don’t lie to me, either,” he warned. “Lying is a sin.”

“Christians don’t lie, Mr. Sullivan,” Mrs. Harold said, her eyes narrowing. She leaned back on her stool to preserve the distance between them, even as the young girl imprisoned in Mrs. Harold’s heart leaned forward.

Sully shrugged, as if to suggest that such statements were not worth arguing about. He’d let her skate if she wanted to. “Tell me the truth, then,” he said. “You getting any?”

“Harold!” Mrs. Harold barked into the intercom.

Sully held up his hands as if she’d pointed a gun at him. “What’d I say?” He appealed to Rub, who was standing just inside the door looking like he might wet his pants. “listen, Esmerelda. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s nothing wrong with getting a little if you’re married. Jesus doesn’t mind as long as it’s with Harold, right?”

“Harold!” Mrs. Harold’s voice rocked the bullhorns.

Sully still had his hands raised in surrender. “I understand you gotta slow down a little at our age, but you don’t have to stop completely. Every couple weeks, you should close up for the lunch hour, send the help home, lock the register, take Harold out back where there’s nobody around … Be good for you. Be good for Harold too.”

Harold rushed in then, wheezing and gray-faced, followed by Dwayne. “Oh,” he said immediately, relieved once he’d taken in the situation. “It’s you. I thought we were being robbed.”

“You should hear the things he says when you’re not around,” Mrs. Harold reported, calmly now. With Harold on the scene, she was able to capture the girl, corral her, herd her back inside her heart’s fortress.

“Esmerelda,” Sully said, causing that girl to look back over her shoulder one last time. “Someday you’re going to hurt my feelings.” He pointed at the Bible. “Show me where it says in there that you’re supposed to be mean to people.”

The very worst thing about Sully, to Mrs. Harold’s way of thinking, was that he had a way of routing scripture with sheer outrageousness. As a rule she could locate and quote a scriptural passage for almost any occasion. The moment he was gone, she’d think of dozens of passages that pertained, but never in Sully’s presence. Right now, for instance, she found it impossible to take up his challenge to show him where in the Bible it said you were supposed to be mean to people, though she was sure it was there.

Before Mrs. Harold could think how to respond, Sully had turned away from her to talk to Harold, and both she and Esmerelda were sad.

“You got anything on the lot I might be interested in?” Sully asked.

“Truck give out?” Harold said, feeling guilty. He hated repeat automobile customers. That meant that the car or truck he’d sold them hadn’t lasted forever, as he’d hoped. He knew that anything mechanical, like anything human, had a finite life, but he wished for a better world, one where the vehicles he sold people would run and run. Sully was particularly embarrassing as a repeat customer because the trucks he bought from Harold were always pretty well used up when he bought them. Harold had never sold Sully anything with fewer than eighty thousand miles on it. In fact, he always tried to talk Sully out of his purchases. “You’ll just be back in six months,” he’d warn. But six months always seemed a long way off to Sully, who was by and large an optimist and who always concluded that in six months he’d be better off than he was now for the simple reason that he couldn’t be any worse off. He was almost always wrong, of course, in both the result and the reasoning. The truck Harold sold Sully today would be more dubious than the last, which would make Harold feel guiltier still, and in another year it would happen all over again. Harold wasn’t sure capitalism and Christianity were compatible, even when the capitalism involved was as modest as Harold’s Automotive World, which barely provided a living for Harold and Mrs. Harold, a surly mechanic, a half-blind clerk and a delinquent teenager.

Sully told Harold that the pickup had died this morning, describing its condition for Harold, who listened hopefully. “Could just be corrosion on your battery cables,” he offered.

“Could be,” Sully agreed. “But it isn’t.”

They had strolled outside, Rub tagging along a respectful stride behind, Dwayne lurking even farther in the background. “How do you know?” Harold said.

Sully thought about it. He didn’t know for sure, of course, but it just made fatalistic sense the truck would die today. Yesterday he’d had a job offer that was contingent upon having a truck, which meant the truck had to die. Mired as he was in a stupid streak, Sully credited the perversity of cosmic law that governed such things. “Call it a hunch,” he told Harold.

“Why don’t you let me have a look,” Harold said. He didn’t discredit hunches exactly, but he liked to check them out just in case. “We’ll send Dwayne out and have him tow it back.”

“That’d be good,” Sully admitted, momentarily buoyed by Harold’s common sense.

“You met Dwayne?” Harold said, catching the boy, who wasn’t expecting to be introduced, with his finger in his nose. “Go get Sully’s truck and bring it here,” Harold told him. Dwayne nodded, headed for the wrecker.

“Dwayne?” Harold called after him. “Don’t you want to know where it is?”

Dwayne returned.

Sully gave him his address on Upper Main, told him the truck was parked at the curb.

“What color is it?” Dwayne asked.

Sully told him green. “It’ll be the one that looks like it’s not worth towing,” he added.

Harold smiled as Dwayne retreated again. “Minute ago he was going to get a truck he didn’t know the location of. Then after you tell him right where it is, he wants a full description.”