Nobody's Fool (49 page)

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, HCarld might be convinced to let him take the truck and 264RICHARD R L S S 0 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 HCarld 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. Wuf 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."

265 "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.

Wirf slid onto the stool Carl had vacated.

"Good," he said.

"Let him. Why should I chase whales?"

"Beats me," Carl said on his way to the door.

"I woke up in there and couldn't remember where I was. It felt like New York City in the forties, staring up into that chandelier. I thought I'd died and gone to the WaldorfAstoria."

"You aren't going to believe this," Carl called from across the room. He was out through the beer sign in the window.

"But it's snowing again."

"I believe it," Sully said. In fact, it was perfect.

"Something stinks over here," Carl said, then went outside and the door swung shut behind him.

Sully and Wirf considered Carl Roebuck's departing statement. It was Wirf who came up with the solution.

"Let's stay over here, then," he said. Fish, Miss Beryl decided. She'd been trying to place the odor that permeated Sully's entire flat. It was a mystery. How did a man who never cooked, who didn't even keep food in his refrigerator, manage to have an apartment that smelled like fish?

By not opening his windows was one way, she speculated. Granted, he couldn't very well open them now in the late November subfreezing weather, but she doubted Sully ever aired the place, even in summer.

In fact, now that she thought about it, she knew he hadn't done so for the simple reason that he never bothered to remove his storm windows.

He'd dutifully replaced hers with screens every spring for the last twenty years, but he always maintained it was too much trouble to do his own.

"You'll swelter," Miss Beryl always warned, to which Sully responded with his usual shrug, as if to suggest that she was probably right, he would suffer.

"Don't worry, Mrs. Peoples," he always added.

"If it gets too hot up there I'll come down and sleep with you." Miss Beryl wondered how oppressive it would have to get before the heat would register on Sully as discomfort. At the moment the flat was insufferable, as if all the heat it had stored up in August had not yet escaped the sealed rooms. The thermostat provided the explanation.

Seventy-five degrees. No wonder the wallpaper was peeling. Miss Beryl set the thermostat back to seventy and thought, as she often did whenever she considered her tenant's odd existence, that Sully should have found a way to stay married. He needed a keeper. Somebody to take charge of the thermostat and rescue the lighted cigarettes (Clive Jr. was right; there were brown burns everywhere) he left burning on tables and counters. Also to flush the toilet. Miss Beryl noted when she peered into the bathroom and was greeted by the solemn pool of urine he'd left in the toilet that morning when he left for work. Miss Beryl flushed and watched the bright yellow water become diluted until finally, with a gurgle, it was clear again. The cycle of the flush was the exact amount of time she needed to solve the riddle posed by Sully's urine, for Miss Beryl remembered the timing of this morning's dramatic flush that had coincided with Clive Jr. "s insistence that Sully be evicted. Was it possible that after that dramatic flush Sully had been able to dye the water in the bowl so deeply yellow with a second release of urine so soon after the first? Possible, she supposed, if he'd spent the evening drinking beer with his cronies at The Horse. A second, more satisfying explanation occurred to her though, and this was that Sully was the sort of man whose flushing was preparatory to elimination rather than its natural conclusion. His morning flush removed the previous evening's offering. His morning release would be noticed for the first time this evening when he returned from work. Miss Beryl couldn't help wondering whether discovering clear water in the commode when he returned would alert Sully to the fact that he'd had a visitor.

Men, she thought. Surely they were a different species. Only their essentially alien nature could account for any sane woman's attraction to and affection for a male. Had any woman ever looked at a man and felt kinship?

Miss Beryl doubted it. Ironically, though, only an alien would be so understandable. Compared to women's, men's needs were so simple.

What's more, men seemed unable to conceal them. Sully was an exaggeration, of course--a man with even fewer needs than most men, the male principle taken to some outlandish extreme--but Clive Sr.

had not been so different. He'd liked thick, fleece-lined sweatshirts and soft chinos, considering these the greatest perk of his posit ion as football coach since he was allowed to wander around the high school dressed pretty much the same way he dressed at home (except that at school he wore a whistle around 267 his neck), while his colleagues suffered (he imagined, since he would have suffered) in jackets and ties and sharply creased dress pants. Keeping Clive Sr. "s sweatshirts soft and fluffy, replacing them when they got thin and scratchy, had been one of the few demands her husband had ever made upon her. When his sweatshirts felt good, so did he, and whenever Miss Beryl bought him a new one and slipped it into his dresser drawer, she could count upon his coming up behind her in the kitchen and giving her a big, affectionate hug. When she asked him what it was for, he'd always reply "Nothing," and in fact she was never able to tell for sure whether Clive Sr.

was able to trace his sudden affection to her love--the source of these simple gifts--or whether the fleecy sweatshirt itself fulfilled a basic need in him, his affection for her the mere by-product of his satisfaction.

She was never quite sure how she was to feel about a man whose affection, whose inner contentment, could be purchased for the price of a sweatshirt and then maintained with fabric softener. What she felt for her husband was love, then and now, but she had her doubts she'd be able to justify this reaction to another woman. Or at least to another woman who'd known Clive Sr. And it was even harder to imagine any woman being able to justify love for Sully, Miss Beryl had to admit as she returned to her tenant's front room. He had, according to gossip, a longtime paramour, a married woman who apparently sustained her affection by never visiting his flat. Standing in the middle of Sully's front room. Miss Beryl tried to think of what these surroundings reminded her of, and finally it dawned on her. Sully's rooms looked like those of a man who had just gone through a ruinous divorce, whose wife had taken everything of value, leaving her ex-husband to furnish the place with the furniture they had long ago consigned to their damp cellar and forgotten. Maybe it was his sofa that was responsible for the fishy odor.

Miss Beryl went over and sniffed a cushion tentatively. It was redolent of old, slept-in clothing, but not fish. Maybe, Miss Beryl considered, what she was sniffing was the odor of her own perfidy.

Driver Ed had advised her not to betray Sully with this sneak inspection. And it did no good to rationalize that Sully would not mind, that he trusted her with his affairs.

He knew that she screened his mail, thrusting at him items she felt he should open. He probably was even aware that she retrieved and opened envelopes he'd consigned to her trash can that had contained disability checks and reimbursements for medication. He probably did not suspect that she kept a large manila envelope marked "sully" that contained important documents he might someday need, but she doubted he'd mind if he did, and besides. Miss Beryl never felt guilty about surreptitiously guarding her tenant's interests. But this was a different kind of intrusion, and she knew it. She had not intended to follow up on Clive Jr. "s suggestion to inspect Sully's flat for herself until she was actually on the stairs, and now that she was here, she wished that she had followed her usual rule of thumb and dismissed Clive Jr." s advice on general principle. How had he managed to convince her to invade her longtime tenant's privacy? Was Clive Jr. becoming more persuasive? Or was she becoming, in her advancing age, more uncertain and susceptible to persuasion? She feared it could well be the latter and wondered if it might be a good idea to make, for future reference, a list of things she should never agree to do at her son's urging.