Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Rub, forkful of bleeding eggs halfway to his open mouth, tried to remember yesterday. Cass and the two men at the counter who’d been listening in to this conversation began to hum “White Christmas” significantly. Then suddenly the answer was there. “A white fucking Christmas,” Rub said and sucked the eggs into his mouth happily.

“That’s what I’m dreaming of, all right,” Sully said. “A white fucking Christmas.”

The men at the counter began to sing it. “I’m dreaming of a white fucking Christmas.” Old Hattie rocked in her booth, her eyes serene, contemplative. The song had always been one of her favorites.

The singing had just died down when Peter and Will came in, the little boy looking sleepy but happy, his father just sleepy. Peter helped Will onto the stool next to Rub, then slid onto the one next to his son. Will wrinkled his nose. “Something smells,” he whispered.

Sully nodded. “Switch stools with your father,” he suggested.

They switched.

“Better?” Sully said.

“A little,” the boy said.

“It’ll be much better in a minute,” Sully said. Rub was mopping up the remainder of his egg yolk and unmindful of every other reality. Sully doubted he’d heard a word of the conversation.

“You had breakfast?” Sully asked the boy.

He nodded. “Grandma made me toast.”

“Can’t you make your own toast?”

“Not in Grandma’s kitchen,” Peter said.

“You want a hot chocolate?”

“Okay.”

Sully made him hot chocolate from a packet, added a spurt of whipped cream from a can. “You going to be my helper again today?”

“Okay,” the boy agreed, whipped cream on his nose.

Sully was studying Peter, who looked extra morose this morning. He was not used to getting up early and was usually silent until midmorning. “How about some coffee?” Sully said.

“Nope,” Peter said sleepily. He was eyeing Rub, who pushed his plate away and noticed Peter there for the first time. “Morning, Sancho,” Peter said.

“You got time for a cup,” Sully said. “Rub’s in no hurry, are you, Rub?”

Rub studied Sully, aware that this might be a trick question. Sometimes Sully said exactly this to indicate that it was time he got off his ass and went to work.

“What do you want us to do today?” Peter said.

Sully shrugged. “It’s supposed to be nice. Up in the forties. I’d work outside. Chop those hedges back, rake up all the sticks and branches, haul it all off someplace. Give our employer the impression we’re making progress in case he shows up, God forbid. We’re going to have to remove that tree stump at some point.”

“I was thinking that would be a good spring job.” Peter ventured a half grin. “Sometime when I’m gone.”

“I don’t see what that stump’s hurting,” Rub said as he did each time the subject of the stump arose. “How come he don’t just leave it alone?”

“Some people don’t like tree stumps in their front yard,” Sully said. “Be thankful. It’ll probably take us a week to dig it out. That’s a week’s pay.”

“Stumps don’t hurt anything, is what I’m saying,” Rub said. He was particularly inflexible on the subject of the stump. “Elm roots go halfway to China. Remember over at Carl’s?”

“Don’t get me started about that,” Sully said.

“I wisht he’d pay us for that job,” Rub said, his face clouding over.

“He will, eventually,” Sully said. “I’ll make sure of it.”

“When?” Rub wondered.

“Eventually,” Sully repeated. “Just like eventually you’ll go to work today.”

“You’re the one just said there was no hurry,” Rub said.

“That was half an hour ago.”

Rub slid off his stool. “You coming over when you’re done here?”

Sully said he would.

When Rub and his father were gone, Will slurped the dregs of his hot chocolate from the bottom of his mug. He still had a spot of whipped cream on his nose. Sully removed it with a napkin. The boy smiled at his grandfather, then frowned in the direction of the front door his father and Rub had just disappeared out of, something clearly troubling him. Leaning toward Sully, he whispered, full of embarrassment, “Rub stinks.”

There’d been several reasons Sully hadn’t wanted to buy the truck he was now driving courtesy of Harold’s Automotive World. One was he couldn’t afford it, even without the snowplow apparatus. The other was that whoever had owned the truck previously had pampered it. There was no rust anywhere, and the upholstery in the cab was without meaningful incision. Even the exterior paint job had been maintained. True, the truck had nearly sixty thousand miles on it, but Sully could tell they weren’t hard miles, and so he distrusted them. There was a distinct possibility that nobody had ever worked in this truck, and he was going to have to work in it. Trucks, to Sully’s mind, were a lot like people. If you pampered them early, they got spoiled and then later became undependable. And so he’d set immediately about showing the truck that the good old days were over. The first day he owned it, he accidentally backed into a pole, splintering the red reflector of the taillight and denting the rear bumper. The following week he’d opened the driver’s side door into a fire hydrant outside the OTB where he’d stopped to play his 1-2-3 triple, dinging the finish impressively. The previous owner had put a mat down in the bed to protect it, a pretty foolish thing to Sully’s way of thinking. He liked to hear the sound his tools made when he tossed them into his truck at the end of the day. A crowbar bouncing off the bed of a pickup truck was a satisfying sound, and he refused to be cheated out of it. The first time he’d tossed a wrench onto the mat he’d heard nothing at all, leading him to believe he’d missed the bed of the truck altogether, and he’d gone around the other side to look for a wrench-shaped pattern in the snowbank. When there wasn’t one, he looked in the bed of the pickup, and there sat the wrench in the middle of the rubber mat. The next day he’d sold the mat for twenty dollars to Ruth’s son, Gregory, who needed cheering up. He’d dropped out of school after the Bath-Schuyler game, gone to work as a stockboy at the new supermarket by the interstate, bought himself a pickup truck so he could get there. He liked the pad. With the pad and an air mattress, you could get laid in the back of the truck. Theoretically.

And so when Sully and Will left Hattie’s at midmorning and climbed into the truck, he noted with satisfaction that the vehicle was beginning to look and feel and even smell like a truck he might own, instead of one he couldn’t afford. The windows were pleasantly dirty, and he’d begun to amass a collection of styrofoam coffee cups and sections of dirty, boot-printed newspaper on the floor. Will had apparently also concluded that it was beginning to look like a truck his grandfather might own, because he climbed in cautiously, testing his footing, as if the newspaper might conceal a hole in the floorboards.

When Sully turned the key in the ignition and started to back out from behind Hattie’s, the boy said, “My seat belt, Grandpa,” and so Sully braked and hooked the boy up.

“There,” Sully said. “Your grandmother finds out I’m driving you around without a seat belt, I’m history, aren’t I.”

“Mom, too,” the boy said, his face clouding over.

“You talk to her lately?” Sully ventured as he put the truck back into reverse and let off the brake.

“She called last night. They yelled at each other,” Will confessed, ashamed.

“Mmmm,” Sully said. “They love you just the same. Just ’cause they get mad at each other doesn’t mean they don’t love you.”