Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Rub handed Sully the money, then shoved his hands into his pockets. “I had fun anyhow,” he said.

“Me too,” Sully assured him. “That’s the main thing.”

“You lost, and now you’re going to rag me, huh,” Rub said.

Carl returned from the men’s room, slid onto the stool Rub was blocking and took a long swig from the bottle Sully had told Rub was his. Rub started to open his mouth, then closed it, blood draining from his face.

“I gotta go,” Rub said and went.

Carl Roebuck was staring at the lip of his bottle. “Did he drink out of this?” he said.

“Nah,” Sully said.

Carl took another swig, more tentatively this time, then frowned over at Sully, who was grinning. “Maybe just a little,” Sully admitted.

Carl stood, leaned over the bar, poured the remainder of the beer into the sink. “Sully, Sully, Sully,” he said.

“What, what, what?”

“I wish you were rich.”

“Me, too,” Sully said.

“If you were, I’d chain you in my basement and play you for a living.”

“Bad cards,” Sully said. “It happens. Not to you, but to other people.”

Carl waved Birdie away. “I leave you alone to consider that pathetic explanation. I’m overdue somewhere. You all right?”

Sully assured Carl Roebuck he was fine, but the truth was he was far from it. As he often did at such moments to stave off regret, he was trying to remember what he’d been thinking about when he sat down at a poker game with money he couldn’t afford to lose, as if recollecting his reasoning and discovering it to be valid, or partly valid, would restore the money. Unfortunately, his reasoning had vanished as completely as the money. Even had he won four hundred dollars instead of losing it, he still wouldn’t have been able to afford the truck he needed to buy from Harold, and it was crystal clear to him now that he’d lost the money that the truck was his first order of business. He couldn’t shake the irrational conclusion that four hundred dollars in the debit column right now loomed far larger than the same four hundred in the credit. The desperate situation that had induced him to play poker with money he couldn’t afford to lose was now the precise situation to which he aspired. He would have to work for several more days to climb back to the financial plateau that had had him feeling so rotten to begin with. The more he thought about it, the closer he came to feeling the kind of specific regret to which he had always been opposed.

The good news was that the Miles Anderson deal had not gone south as he’d feared. The scary part was that he’d very nearly let it go south by being a smart-ass on the phone. Giving guys like Miles Anderson shit was something he’d been doing all his adult life, though he’d not become the richer for it even once. It was his father again, sneaking into his life, Sully suspected. When sober, Big Jim was meek and groveling, almost doglike, in the presence of the educated, the well-dressed, the well-spoken. Later, drunk, he’d vilify these absent doctors, lawyers and professional men and take out his resentment of them on whoever was handy. Sully, even as a boy, had understood that such men held great power over his father. Without knowing exactly how, Big Jim had guessed that men who dressed this way and spoke this way were capable of doing him harm if they chose, and whenever he saw such a man on the street, his eyes narrowed in suspicion and, yes, fear. A bully himself, Big Jim knew what it felt like to be bullied by money and privilege. Sully suspected his father saw such men in his mind’s eye all the time. Like the men who gave him his orders at the Sans Souci. It was probably them he imagined himself fighting with in the taverns. It was always somebody that Big Jim thought was putting on airs that he made trouble for. Somebody who made a little more money at his job or was dressed a little better. Somebody who could serve as a stand-in for the ones he really hated. And so Sully, as a younger man, had decided not to be cowed by the sort of men who made his father feel small. Giving the Miles Andersons of the world their share of shit had gotten him no further than obsequiousness had gotten his father, of course, but Sully considered his way more satisfying, and he hated to think he might have to give up such small satisfactions. But the truth was that he was in pretty deep, a lot deeper than he could ever remember being, and almost losing the work that would help him climb out would have been the species of stubborn stupidity that Ruth always claimed was uniquely Sully.

But somehow he’d gotten away with it, which meant he wasn’t done quite yet. Tomorrow he’d be more agreeable, tell Miles Anderson he hadn’t meant to be such a prick. Even losing all this money to Carl Roebuck might not be totally bad, since Carl would now feel guilty enough to let him keep the El Camino for a few days until he could solve the problem of how to buy a new truck. If Sully could come up with a decent down payment, Harold might be convinced to let him take the truck and the snowplow blade and make monthly payments until the balance was paid off. If it snowed like hell all winter, as it looked like it might, he might be able to pay Harold off by spring, assuming he didn’t get into any more poker games, didn’t do anything else equally deficient in judgment.

Sometime soon, he feared, he was going to have to swallow hard and ask to borrow money from somebody. Ruth would give it to him if she had it, but she didn’t have it. Wirf probably did, and probably would give it to him, but Sully owed him far too much already. On principle he refused to borrow money from old women, which left Miss Beryl out. Carl Roebuck might give him some money if Sully could catch him drunk again, but he disliked the idea of taking money from Carl, whom he preferred to resent. He could go see Clive Jr. at the savings and loan, but Sully’s stomach curdled at the thought, and it occurred to him, now that he thought about it, that it was probably Clive Jr. who had warned Miles Anderson against him.

Finally, there was Ruth’s solution: sell his father’s property and use the money. He wondered how much more desperate he’d have to get before that became a real possibility. Quite a bit more, he suspected.

“Well,” Carl said, breaking into Sully’s reverie, “the time has come for me to see if I have a home to go home to this evening.”

“I wouldn’t suggest going to visit Ruby right away,” Sully advised.

“Still worked up, huh?”

“I don’t know about now. She was pretty bent out of shape early this afternoon.”

Carl looked genuinely sad to hear it. “I should never have mentioned marriage,” he conceded.

“That’s right,” Sully said, recalling that he himself had proposed marriage within the last twenty-four hours. “Women tend to take that kind of talk seriously, even when they know better.”

Carl sighed. “Ruby deserves marriage,” he reflected. “That’s the trouble, though. They all do. They spread their beautiful legs, and I hear myself saying why don’t you and I get married, and right then I mean it, too. Every time.”

Sully couldn’t help grinning, Carl looked so genuinely lost. “You’re a piece of work.”

“It seems wrong not to offer them something,” Carl said. “I’d marry them all if I could.”

“I believe it,” Sully assured him. “You wouldn’t leave a single one for the rest of us, either.”

“I’d leave Bootsie for Rub,” Carl said, then nodded in the direction of the big dining room where they’d been playing poker. “I see Ahab woke up.”

Wirf was standing in the doorway, trying to shake the cobwebs. “What happened to the game?” he wondered, stumping over to the bar.

“The white whale went that way,” Carl Roebuck said, pointing up Main Street.