Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Rub was wiping his palms on his shirt. “He picked his nose and then shook my hand,” he said angrily.

“Here’s what you should buy,” Harold said on the way past the junkyard, indicating a snowplow blade that was leaning up against the chain-link fence. “Guy that owned it made good money doing driveways.”

“How come he sold it?” Sully said.

“He didn’t,” Harold said. “His widow sold it. I picked it up at an auction.”

“I don’t seem to have a truck to attach it to, is the problem,” Sully pointed out, although he was intrigued with the idea. With the town of Bath always cutting back on services and snow already in November, a plow might not be a bad idea. “I don’t think I have the strength to push it myself.”

“I’ll make you a deal if you decide you want it,” Harold said and quoted Sully a price that wasn’t much more than what he’d paid for it at the auction. “Don’t wait too long.”

“I’d have to rob a bank if I’m going to buy a truck and the plow rig both,” Sully said.

“Some people borrow from banks,” Harold pointed out.

“Not people like me,” Sully said. “Banks like you to own something of equal value they can take from you in case you run into some bad luck.”

Harold had only two trucks at the moment. One was in pretty good shape. Sully took the other one for a test drive. It was marginally better than the truck he already owned, which was dead.

“I wouldn’t charge you much for it,” Harold said when Sully returned and looked at the vehicle skeptically. “But then it’s not worth much. I bought it for parts myself. You’d be money ahead to buy the other one.”

“I know it,” Sully said. “But the money I’d be ahead is money I don’t have.”

“Well,” Harold said. “Who knows. Maybe I can fix the one you got.”

At that moment they heard the wrecker returning and watched Dwayne pull into the yard towing a truck that was not Sully’s. Neither was it green.

Harold sighed mightily. “I’ll be darned,” he said quietly. He’d almost said he’d be damned, but he caught himself at the last second.

The house Miles Anderson had bought occupied the southwest corner of the intersection. It was the largest of the big houses on Upper Main, a three-level brick affair with two small widow’s walks on the upper story and a huge wraparound porch that looked out upon both Main and Bowdon streets. The previous owner had been an elderly widow frightened into a nursing home two years before when a huge limb from one of Upper Main’s ancient elms had fallen on her roof during the famous ice storm. Since then the house had sat empty. Sully could not recall ever seeing a For Sale sign in front of the house, but he seldom ventured up this way, so there might have been one.

“I wisht I could afford a big ole house like this,” Rub said as he and Sully sat at the curb in the El Camino waiting for Miles Anderson to show up. So far Anderson was fifteen minutes late, and Rub was no good at loitering he wasn’t paid for.

“Be a little big for just you and Bootsie, wouldn’t it?” said Sully, who’d been sitting there wondering what anybody would do with a house that big, how you’d go about filling it up. Actually, Bootsie might be one of the few people he knew equal to the task. She swiped something from the Woohvorth’s she worked at every day and brought it home with her, and their apartment was about to burst under the strain. The easiest thing to steal at Woolworth’s was goldfish, and Rub and Bootsie had an aquarium so full of them that the fish barely had room to turn around without knocking into one another. The murky water they swam in was permanently brown from processed fish food. In such conditions the fish died about as fast as Bootsie could slip them in their water-filled baggies into her spacious pockets. She also took things that didn’t fit into her pockets. Somehow she’d managed to swipe a sofa-sized painting of the Atlantic Ocean at sunset, its crashing waves bright orange and blue. Neither Bootsie nor Rub had ever seen the Atlantic and so could not judge the painting’s realism.

“I’d have my room way up there.” Rub pointed to the room under the eave where the larger of the two widow’s walks was located. “I could just walk out there on that little porch and stand there.”

“I suppose you could, Rub,” Sully said, trying to picture Rub on the widow’s walk.

“I wisht we’d stopped for lunch,” Rub added.

Sully consulted his watch for the umpteenth time. “Go eat,” he said. His meeting with Miles Anderson would probably go better without Rub anyway. The only reason he’d wanted Rub along was to reassure Miles Anderson he had an able-bodied helper. Time enough for that later.

“Where?” Rub said.

“Hattie’s is just down the street.”

Rub turned and looked out the rear window, as if to verify this information. “What about you?”

“Bring me a hamburger.”

“Could I borrow five dollars?”

“No,” Sully said. “But I’ll pay you for yesterday.”

“Okay.” Rub shrugged.

Sully gave him the money.

“What do you want on yours?”

“A bun.”

“That’s all?” Rub frowned.

“And ketchup.”

“Okay.” Rub started to get out.

“And cheese.”

“Okay.”

“And a pickle. And a slice of onion.”

“Okay.”

“And some relish.”

“That’s a hamburger with everything.” Rub frowned.

“Okay. A hamburger with everything.” Sully grinned.

“How come you didn’t just say that?”

“And some fries,” Sully told him. “And some ketchup for the fries.”

Rub sighed, thought about it, waited for the information to sift down. “Okay,” he said finally.

Sully gave him another three dollars.

“Why don’t you come with me,” Rub suggested.

“Because if I do, Miles Anderson will turn up here.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s the way it works.”

When Rub was gone, Sully lit a cigarette and started making a list in his head. The porches were all sagging and the wood trim around the windows needed sanding and repainting and the odd board needed replacing. The roof didn’t look too bad except where the limb had fallen, causing the chimney to tilt. On the ground there was a huge stump that Sully would have just left there but which Miles Anderson apparently wanted removed. Brown tangles of weeds festered everywhere. Indoors? Miles Anderson had mentioned half a dozen time-consuming tasks, which was fine with Sully, because most of the outdoor stuff would have to wait for spring anyway. If the weather turned mild, he might prune some bushes, rake up the two years’ worth of sticks and leaves that had accumulated on the lawn, cart everything off. There looked to be enough work to keep him and Rub occupied, if not busy, all winter and most of the spring. Since Miles Anderson would be in New York, they could putter around at their own pace. On days when he felt up to it, Sully could do little jobs in the evening, which would actually save some money by keeping him out of The Horse and away from Wirf and out of conflict with Tiny. And on days when his knee wouldn’t let him work, he could say screw it and Miles Anderson would never know.

Stubbing out his cigarette, he got out of the El Camino, went up the front walk, climbed the front porch. Through the large, uncurtained front window Sully could see a huge staircase leading upstairs, and along one wall was a fireplace big enough for a grown man to sit in the center of. In feet, the empty rooms were about twice as cavernous looking as his own, and he remembered how empty the rooms in Carl and Toby’s house had looked before they started filling them up with possessions. This house was bigger than the Roebucks’. Whoever Miles Anderson was, Sully thought again, he must have a lot of shit if he expected to fill so many rooms. In two and a half decades he hadn’t been able to fill his own flat, half the rooms of which he’d closed off. Other people seemed to have the opposite problem, he knew. Ruth was always complaining that she couldn’t turn around in her house without bumping into something that wasn’t there yesterday. And Miss Beryl’s flat, the same size as Sully’s own, was full of stuff she’d brought back from her travels. Sully was sure his inability to attract clutter meant something, but he wasn’t sure what. He sat on the front porch steps and thought about it.