Nobody's Fool (48 page)

"Can I play?"

Rub said. He'd been standing just inside the doorway since they came in, eyeing the one remaining free chair. These were not men Rub presumed in the presence of.

"No, Rub," Carl said.

"Nope," the others agreed. Rub looked at the floor.

"Sure, Rub," Carl said.

"Jesus.

Can't you tell when people are pulling your chain? " In fact. Rub couldn't.

Sometimes these same men refused to let him play, claiming he stank.

He wasn't sure how he was supposed to tell it was a joke now, when most of the time it wasn't. " You didn't deal me in," Rub noted when he'd taken the chair next to Sully. " You weren't playing when the hand started," Carl explained. " I was standing right there," Rub said, pointing at the air he had so recently displaced.

"How can I deal you in when you're standing over there?" Carl said. To illustrate, he sent a card whistling through the air toward the doorway.

"That what you wanted me to do?"

"Misdeal," somebody said.

"I had a pair of wired sevens," one man complained angrily.

"That was a deliberate misdeal." Carl turned over his own hole cards, revealing a pair of tens.

"Mr. Lucky," the man who had said this before repeated, then whistled the theme song. Rub went and fetched the card Carl had tossed across the room, then sat back down. Carl reshuffled.

Sully cut. Carl dealt, skipping Rub again.

"What about me?" Rub said.

"Sorry, Rub," Carl said.

"Did you want to play?" Everybody tossed their cards back in, groaned.

"Make up your mind," Carl said.

"You want to play or not?"

"In about one minute I'm going to rip your head off," Sully said. Carl shuffled, dealt again.

"I told you you'd be happier roofing. Some people don't know what's good for them." The man to Rub's left opened. Rub, who was a surprisingly good poker player, raised.

"Did it ever occur to you that you might be one of them?"

Sully asked, calling Rub's bet.

"I know exactly what's good for me," Carl said, tossing his cards into the center of the table. Two others followed, leaving just the man who had opened, Rub and Sully. Sully consulted his hole cards, which made, together with his first two up cards, a Sausalito straight--two, four, six, eight. Tiny had set up an old space heater near the table. Its whirring reminded Sully of the sound of approaching traffic.

No doubt about it, the smart thing to do would be to fold. On the other hand, Sully considered, he'd come this far. 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."

NOBODY'S FOOL 259

"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."

"Hmnun," 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 face up.

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 CCarl'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 Ups 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. 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, Td 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 HCarld, 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 NOBODY'S FOOL263 more days to climb back to the financial plateau that had had him feeling so rotten to begin with.