Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Miles Anderson called back three times during the afternoon. The last time Sully, an even hundred dollars down in the game, took the call.

“I thought we were going to meet today,” Miles Anderson said, his voice a study in impatience.

“Me too,” Sully said. “In fact, I was so sure of it I actually went over there and waited for you for about an hour.”

“We must have just missed each other,” Anderson said, backing off a little in his tone of voice. He was apparently willing to share responsibility. “I was delayed at the bank.” When Sully didn’t say anything, Anderson added, “Do I understand this silence to mean that you’re no longer interested in the job we discussed?”

“No,” Sully said. “I didn’t know it was my turn to talk.”

“Then I’m to understand that you do want the job?”

Sully said he did.

“Because, frankly, I don’t sense much enthusiasm at this moment,” Miles Anderson said, his former impatience returning. “And if you aren’t sure, I’d rather you said so. A man I talked to at the bank this morning intimated you were less than reliable.”

“Look, Mr. Anderson,” Sully said. “I need the work. I’m just too old to jump up and down, okay? Inside, I’m all aflutter. Trust me.”

“Hmmm,” Miles Anderson mused. “Well, I was also told you were insolent, though I suppose that’s to be expected. The gruff, frontier independence of the American blue-collar worker and all that.”

Who was this guy? “I’m dropping out of college to fix your house, actually,” Sully informed him, since this was almost true. “listen, Mr. Anderson. What do you say we start all over? You could begin by saying you’re sorry for standing me up, and then I could say I’m sorry for being insolent, and then we could set up another time to meet at the house, and you could promise to be there this time, and we could just go from there.”

“How’s ten in the morning?” Miles Anderson suggested.

“We skipped a few things there, didn’t we?” Sully observed. “Okay, ten. I’ll be the one wearing a carnation in my lapel.”

“I wonder. Might I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“Only a little. Can I ask you one? What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a university professor.”

“So is my son.”

Incredulity. “Indeed?”

“He was just denied tenure.”

“These are dark times. Where?”

“West Virginia.”

“Oh, my,” Miles Anderson said. “Where does one go from there?”

When Sully returned to the game, Carl Roebuck was selling chips to Wirf, who had come in while Sully was on the phone. Sully could tell at a glance that Wirf was drunk. When the transaction was complete, Carl Roebuck still had about ninety percent of the chips stacked in front of himself. Still, Sully was optimistic. The winter’s worth of work he’d counted on had returned, and having Wirf in the game meant he didn’t have to worry about going bust right away. Sully sat, then stood again and walked around his chair, clockwise first, then counterclockwise, to dispel the afternoon’s bad luck. “Red River round a green monkey’s asshole,” he added, making a complicated sign in the air over the deck of cards.

“You through?” Carl said, picking up the deck.

“Yes, I am.”

“Want to cut?”

“No, they’re fine now.”

Actually, the cards were fine for Carl Roebuck. Before Sully could get adjusted again, the pot was up to forty dollars and Sully realized he’d have been wise to drop two cards ago. To make matters worse, Wirf was beaming at him so benevolently that Sully half expected him to make the sort of maudlin declaration of friendship Wirf was capable of when his blood alcohol level achieved a certain balance.

“What?” Sully finally said.

“I’m trying to communicate with you telepathically.” Wirf grinned drunkenly.

“Well, quit it,” Sully said.

“Don’t waste your time,” Carl Roebuck agreed, tossing chips into the center of the table. “The only way to communicate with Sully is to hit him in the head with a shovel.”

“Screw you both,” Sully said, raising the bet.

By the time they finished, it was a seventy-dollar pot. Carl won it with a full house and pulled the money toward him sadly.

“I was telepathically advising you to drop,” Wirf explained, tossing in his three deuces faceup.

Sully tossed his own cards in facedown. He didn’t want anyone to know what he’d stayed in with.

The game broke up at five when three of the players said they’d better go home and eat some leftover turkey while they were still welcome. “I’m going to have to bring my wife in for testing,” a man named Herbert remarked, pushing his chair back from the table, pocketing what money Carl Roebuck hadn’t won. “Just her and me anymore, and every year she buys the biggest turkey in the store. We eat off the son of a bitch all the way to Christmas, and then she buys another one even bigger.”

“I like turkey,” Rub said.

“I used to myself,” Herbert said, “before I had to eat fifty pounds of it every year.”

“Should we wake him up?” somebody wondered in reference to Wirf, who had fallen asleep with his mouth open midway through the last hand. Wirf, playing drunk and unpredictably, had been the final nail in Sully’s coffin.

“Let him sleep,” said Sully, who had come to view sleep as a precious commodity since his knee.

In the bar it was warmer than in the back room, and Sully realized he’d been cold and achy for about two hours and wondered if he was coming down with something. Maybe it would be quick and painless and fatal.

Carl Roebuck, having stuffed his winnings into his pockets, slid onto the bar stool next to Sully. “Well, smart guy, how bad was the damage?”

Sully ran his fingers through his hair. “Bad enough,” he said. Three hundred and fifty or four hundred dollars was what he figured. Maybe more.

“I told you you’d be safer on the roof,” Carl reminded him.

“How did you know that I-told-you-so was just what I wanted to hear?”

“To know you is to need to say it. Ask anybody,” Carl observed.

“Somehow I always mind it more coming from you,” Sully observed. Actually, he minded it more or less universally. He’d minded it earlier when Ruth had either said or suggested it half a dozen times in the hour they’d been together. He minded it when Wirf said it. He minded it even when people didn’t say it but were thinking it.

“I gotta go pee,” Carl said. “You want anything while I’m in there?”

Rub was coming out of the men’s room when Carl went in. He joined Sully at the bar but didn’t sit down. “I gotta go home,” he said. “Bootsie’s gonna whack my peenie for sure.”

“Aren’t you going to drink your beer at least?” Sully said, indicating Carl Roebuck’s long-neck bottle.

“I thought that was Carl’s,” Rub said.

“I bought it for you,” Sully assured him.

Rub looked at it suspiciously. “It looks like somebody already took a drink out of it,” he said.

“Nah,” Sully told him. “I’ve been sitting right here.”

“How come it’s not full, then?”

“Sometimes they aren’t,” Sully told him. “No one knows why.”

Rub took a swig. “It feels like somebody’s lips have been on it,” he said.

Sully grinned at him. “How’d you end up?”

Rub took out his money and counted it. “I won twenty dollars,” he said happily.

“Good,” Sully said. “Terrific, in fact. Just as long as you didn’t forget anything.”

Rub frowned.

“Like the twenty I loaned you to get into the game, for instance,” Sully told him.