Nobody's Fool (60 page)

Sully took a seat.

"By a thread, as usual," he said. He motioned for Will to go ahead and sit on the sofa.

"Don't ruin that," he warned.

Will looked at the sofa fearfully. It was torn to shreds, stuffing exploding from slits in the upholstery. Will climbed on carefully and found both men grinning at him.

"Your grandfather tell you how he poisons dogs?"

Will's eyes got big again.

"He steals people's snow blowers, too."

"Don't pay any attention to him," Sully said.

"He just can't keep track of his possessions."

"You hid it pretty well, I'll give you that," Carl said. Sully nodded.

"I think you've lost it for good this time," he said. He'd told Miss Beryl to expect Carl Roebuck to come nosing around after the snow blower and sure enough, Carl had. He'd told her to let him search the flat too, if he felt like it. But when she offered, Carl had declined, observing sadly that Sully wouldn't hide it anyplace so obvious and he didn't have anything up there to encourage collateral theft.

"It'll turn up eventually," Carl said.

"When it snows, for sure."

"I'd like to see it snow," Sully admitted, thinking again about HCarld Proxmire's snowplow blade and the money he could make with it.

"A good blizzard or two, and I'd be free of you for good." Carl grinned.

"You'll never be free of me. If there were twenty blizzards and you had twenty plows, you'd still be desperate a week later."

"I never claimed to be lucky," Sully admitted.

"In a town this size there's only room for one lucky man, and you're him. The rest of us just have to do the best we can."

Carl snorted.

"You're the only man I know who believes in luck." Sully nodded.

"I

believed in intelligence and hard work until I met you. Only luck explains you."

"That still leaves your own self with no good explanation."

"Bad.

luck explains me. " Sully grinned. Carl Roebuck grinned his infuriating grin. " You find a new place to live yet? "

" Don't remind me," Sully told him. He'd promised Miss Beryl to be out by the first of the year, which left about two weeks, but so far he hadn't made much progress in locating another flat. It had been Clive Jr."

the day after the shooting incident, who'd tried to evict him first, but Sully had told him to go fuck himself. When Miss Beryl said she wanted him out, he'd go, but not before. Despite the fact that just about everybody wanted to blame him for just about everything.

Sully wasn't buying. He hadn't been there at the time, and he'd never met the man who'd done the shooting. Maybe Janey had come to Miss Beryl's looking for him, for a place to hide, but that didn't make him responsible for what trailed in her wake. In fact, after he'd had a chance to let all the accusations leveled against him sift down, he'd come to the conclusion that there was a little too much loose blame flying in his direction. His ears were still ringing with Ruth's denunciation when Clive Jr. had started in. Screw him and the horse he rode in on, was the way Sully looked at it.

But later that night, when he sat zigging at The Horse with Wirf, he'd decided that maybe he'd move. Miss Beryl hadn't blamed him, and her refusal to do so made Sully think maybe he should return the kindness by making sure she wasn't in the line of fire any more. Maybe he hadn't caused the events in question, but they couldn't have happened without him. Maybe he was right and Janey wasn't his daughter, but Ruth persisted in believing she was, and maybe Janey believed it too.

And maybe Zack. It was all pretty complicated, and it reminded Sully of one of those cockamamie theories his young philosophy professor had so enjoyed tossing out. According to him, everybody, all the people in the world, were linked by invisible strings, and when you moved you were really exerting influence on other people. Even if you couldn't see the strings pulling, they were there just the same. At the time Sully had considered the idea bullshit.

After all, he'd been lurching through life for pretty close to sixty years without having any noticeable effect on anybody but himself, and maybe Rub.

His wife had barely noticed his absence after the divorce and a new life had closed in around her. His son thought of another man as his father. Again, excepting Rub, he couldn't think of anybody who depended on him, which demonstrated, he had to admit, their good judgment. But all this had been before Thanksgiving, before Peter showed up needing things and bringing his own needy little boy with him, before Janey had come looking for him when she needed a place to hide, before he learned of Ralph and Vera's troubles and that Wirfwas sick. Maybe there were strings. Maybe you caused things even when you tried hard not to. If that was the case, he probably should find a new place to live. Miss Beryl was eighty and a hell of a good sport, but she deserved some peace and quiet in her old age. She didn't deserve to have dead deer turn up on her terrace and crazy, jealous husbands from the wrong side of the Schuyler Springs tracks shooting up her neighborhood, and with Sully gone, they wouldn't. So the next morning he'd told his landlady he'd move out the first of the year, provided Clive Jr.

stayed the hell out of his way and didn't badger him further. Though she'd appeared genuinely saddened by his decision, Miss Beryl hadn't objected, and it occurred to Sully, as it had off and on for forty years, that maybe he was the dangerous man people considered him to be.

"I'm not too worried," he told Carl Roebuck now.

"Toby says I can stay with you until something turns up.

"It'd be nice to have a man around the house' were her exact words."

Outside the trailer door there was a low growl, then a scratching and sniffing at the door. Will edged closer to Sully on the sofa.

"Funny how that dog hates you," Carl observed.

"How do you know it's me?"

Another low growl from outside. Carl Roebuck grinned.

"His master's voice."

"Can he get in?" Will wanted to know.

"Watch this," Carl told the boy.

"Go over to that window. Peck through the curtain."

Will looked more than a little dubious but did as instructed.

"Is he standing there?" When Will nodded, Carl Roebuck kicked the door, hard.

Outside, there was a muffled thud.

"He fell down," Will reported.

Carl shook his head at Sully.

"Isn't that pitiful? A perfectly good Doberman, mean as hell. Ruined."

"Listen," Sully said.

"I heard you had some work for me."

"That depends," Carl said, sitting back down and putting his feet up again.

"You still own that piece of shit property on Bowdon?"

"Beats me."

331 "You don't know?"

"I don't care," Sully told him, though this response was more force of habit than literal truth. In the last few weeks he'd found himself thinking about the house almost every day. He'd even wandered down from the Anderson place and contemplated it one afternoon, wondered again if the property could be worth more than the taxes owed on it and, if so, how much more. Enough more to be a possible solution to his deepening financial woes, for instance. Or enough more to make a difference to Peter. His son's return to Bath had caused the resurgence of Sully's unaccountable desire to give him something.

When Peter was a boy, Sully'd sent him presents for Christmas and, when he remembered, on his birthday, but he couldn't remember a single specific gift, which felt a lot to Sully like he hadn't given anything.

Maybe if he gave Peter the house, or the money from selling the house, it'd be something.

"You remember if it had hardwood floors?" Sully said it had. He could picture his mother cleaning them on her knees. Carl picked up the phone and dialed it.

"Hi," he said, not bothering to identify himself.

"Do me a favor.

Call City Hall and find out the status of Sully's place on Bowdon. He doesn't seem to know if it's his. Give little Rodrigo a kiss for me."

Before Sully could attempt to make sense of this conversation, Carl hung up and said, "You want to run by there and take a look?"

"We could," Sully said, feigning indifference. In fact, the idea of getting CCarl's opinion of the place appealed to him. He'd even considered asking him for that opinion more than once and had been prevented only by the fact that by asking CCarl's opinion he might appear to be wavering from his public view that Carl Roebuck's advice on any subject was not worth having.

"Let's," Carl suggested without getting up or even taking his feet off the desk. Will, taking their apparent agreement literally, stood up, then, seeing that neither man had moved, sat down again, confused.

Sully studied Carl carefully.

Something about his attitude was different, and he recalled Toby Roebuck's remark that her husband was a changed man.

"You're looking especially smug today," Sully observed, leaning forward and pulling a small end table covered with magazines around in front of the sofa so he could put his own feet up.

To Sully's way of thinking, if there were two men in a room and one of them had his feet up on something, that man had a distinct advantage.

Especially if the man was Carl Roebuck. Whenever possible. Sully liked to put his feet up around Carl, even if the maneuver hurt, and he did so now, especially pleased with the fact that his work shoes were wet and that a slushy puddle began immediately to form on the cover of the top magazine.

"It's true," Carl said.

"I'm in such a good mood that even a visit from you hasn't dampened my spirits."

"I'm glad to hear it," Sully told him.

"I'm glad to know that people like you are happy. Of course, I'd be happy too if I'd inherited a fortune, married the prettiest girl in the county and got to bang all the others besides."

Carl grinned and leaned even farther back in his swivel chair, hooking his fingers behind his neck.

"You're right," he admitted, sadly it seemed to Sully.

"She is the prettiest girl in the county."

"I've been telling you that for years, if you recall."

"Okay, you told me so, smart-ass," Carl conceded.

"In which case you'll be pleased to know I've turned over a new leaf."

"That's what she just told me," Sully told him.

"I didn't have the heart to remind her who she was talking about."

"Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau," Carl said.

Whatever it was that Carl was feeling so smug about, he was dying to tell somebody about it. Which meant that the only thing for Sully to do was feign absolute indifference.

"Mock on who?" Carl ignored this.

"You saw Toby over at the office?"

"I did indeed," Sully told him.

And if he hadn't been taken by surprise, he'd have really seen what he saw.

With Carl Roebuck sitting there looking so smug. Sully actually considered for a brief moment telling Carl about what had happened, just to see if maybe that good mood couldn't be ruined after all. What prevented him was the possibility, however remote, that Toby Roebuck's flashing him had been some sort of invitation to return when he didn't have his grandson with him. He'd been flirting with the woman for years, after all. She'd be foolish to take him seriously, but a woman capable of taking Carl Roebuck seriously just might.

"She didn't say anything to you?" Carl was still grinning maniacally.

"Well, never mind," he continued.

"She's probably only telling people she likes."

Suddenly Sully figured it out.

"What?" he said.

"Don't tell me she's pregnant?"

"Knocked up like a cheerleader," Carl said. His grin had taken over his face so completely now that Sully himself couldn't help grinning through the disappointment. Neither man said anything for a long moment.

"So," Carl Roebuck said finally.

"Now I suppose you'll want to be the godfather."

"I can't be both the father and the godfather," Sully said.

"You're going to have to contribute some goddamn thing."

"Anyhow.

No more messing around for the studmcister. I realize now," he explained, pulling on his heavy coat, gloves, tweed hat, "that I just wanted to be a father. Isn't it something the way the mind works?"

"It sure is," Sully agreed.

"You had the rest of us fooled completely.

We figured you were just a jerk.

How long you figure you can keep this up? " Carl took a deep breath.

"Except for Toby I've been a monk for three days, and I'm not even horny.

I've never felt better, in fact. You should have told me it was okay to have a limp dick. I'm giving up gambling and drinking and smoking and all of it.

Everything but bad companions, which is why I'm still talking to you."