Nobody's Fool (77 page)

"What?"

he said.

"What are you doing?" Rub wanted to know.

"Who?"

"You. The both of you," Rub explained.

"You're just sitting there."

Sully shrugged.

"What do you want. Rub?" What Rub wanted was in. In the car. In the conversation. Back in his friend's company. In.

"Can I get in?" he said.

"It's cold out here."

"In here too," Sully told him.

"The heater doesn't work. We'll only be another minute.

Then we'll get out and all be cold together." And then he rolled up the window, leaving Rub to stare at his own reflection. Even his reflection appeared to be inside the car, where it was warm, or warmer.

Rub was contemplating all of this, including the unfairness of his own reflection being inside the car while he was kept out, when the window rolled back down again a minute later.

"What're you doing?" Sully wanted to know.

"Waiting," Rub explained.

"Well, do it over there," Sully told him.

"Go sit on the porch."

"I ain't hurting anything here," said Rub, who knew his rights. This was a public street.

"Couldn't I just tell you one thing?"

"In a minute you can tell me everything. Go over and sit down on the porch."

Sully said all of this as he was rolling the window up, and it closed completely just as the sentence ended. Leaving Rub alone once again with just his own reflection for company. The young man who stared back at Rub looked like somebody full of need but fresh out of options.

Reluctantly, Rub did what he was told. Inside the car. Sully and Will watched a sullen Rub retreat up the walkway to the front porch steps, where he stubbornly took a cold seat. What they'd been talking about was fear.

Will was still afraid to enter his grandfather's house.

Sully had explained to him that when he was Will's age, he'd been afraid of things too. Will appeared to doubt this. He eyed the ramshackle house fearfully. It looked even scarier than it had Ac day before, because now there was a mountain of boards stacked on the sloping front porch, which, to Will's way of thinking, meant that there was even less holding up the house than there had been.

"You want to know what Grandpa used to do?" Sully said. He wasn't sure he wanted to know what Grandpa Sully had done to combat fear, because he sensed that after his grandfather explained what had worked for him, he'd want Will to try it out, and Will already knew he didn't want to. He doubted sincerely that Grandpa Sully had ever been truly afraid of anything. He could no more imagine his grandfather afraid than he could imagine his brother Wacker merciful. Wacker was a boy without pity. Add pity and he'd no longer be Wacker. He'd be somebody else entirely who looked liked Wacker. They'd have to rename him. Grandpa Sully? Who wasn't even afraid of a policeman with a gun?

"I used to make a deal with myself," Grandpa Sully explained.

"I'd tell myself I'd be brave for exactly a minute." Will frowned, studied his grandfather.

"You could stand being brave for a minute, couldn't you?

You were brave for more than a minute back at the betting place, and a good thing happened. You won money. "

" What happened after the minute? "

" Then I'd let myself be scared again. But at least I could say I'd been brave for a minute. The next time I'd try to be brave for two minutes. That way I'd be getting braver and braver all the time.

" Will continued to study his grandfather, who appeared to be telling the truth.

"What were you scared of?" His grandfather shrugged.

"I

don't remember. You won't either when you're my age." Will looked out the window at his fear. He didn't believe he'd ever forget what he was afraid of. He didn't believe his grandfather had forgotten. Which meant he hadn't been afraid.

"Wait here a minute," Grandpa Sully said, getting out of the car and

R U S S 0

limping around to the open rear end of the El Camino. Throwing open the lid to the big toolbox he kept there. Sully rummaged around in it, making a racket. Eventually he must have found whatever he was looking for, because he let the heavy lid of the toolbox fall shut and slid back into the front seat next to WU.

"Here," he said, tossing something heavy and metallic into Will's lap. Will caught the thing between his knees, then picked it up and examined it, confused until he identified the object as a stopwatch.

"You can time yourself," his grandfather explained, showing Will how it worked.

"That way you'll know exactly how long you were brave." Will studied the watch dubiously for a minute, then the house more dubiously still, finally his grandfather. Then he took a deep breath.

"Okay."

"Good boy."

They got out of the El Camino and made their way up the rippled walkway.

Will watching the second hand make its slow sweep, as if to get straight in his own mind just how long the minute he'd agreed to would be in real time.

Somewhere close by a dog was barking. It sounded to Sully like the dog was right out back of the house, though that was unlikely. Sully came to a halt where Rub was seated, still sulking, and looked up at the house. There were no sounds of boards being ripped asunder, or any kind of work being accomplished, for that matter.

"Where's Peter?" it occurred to him to wonder. Wherever the dog was, he barked louder and seemingly nearer now, a bark that had an angry, strangling quality to it.

"That's what I come out to tell you," Rub said angrily, "but all you wanted to do was pretend I wasn't even there.

So now I'm not telling nothing." He looked away again, whether out of anger or because he had tears in his eyes Sully couldn't tell.

Will looked so worried by Rub's refusal that Sully gave him a quick wink and a grin.

"Rub?" he said.

"What?"

"Where's Peter?"

"Over to the other house," Rub said, still pouting but apparently satisfied that he'd held out as long as he could under such fierce interrogation.

"What other house. Rub? There are about five hundred other houses right here in Bath. More if we include the whole state."

"The other house we're working on," Rub said, angrily again.

"CCarl's camp?"

Sully said. Had Peter taken a load of hardwood out to the lake?

"No, that one," Rub said, pointing up the street at the Miles Andersen house. They all turned to look then, just as Peter and another man came out the front door and stood on the porch talking.

When they shook hands. Sully frowned and said, "Who's that with Peter, Rub? And don't tell me it's Miles Anderson either, because he said he wasn't coming up till the first of the year." Rub started to open his mouth, then shut it again.

"Who is it. Rub?"

"It's Miles Fuckin' Anderson, just like you said. And don't blame me."

"Shit," Sully said. The person he blamed was Carl Roebuck for taking him off the big job to do a little one which would probably cost him the big one.

Then again, maybe not. They heard laughter coming from up the block, and Peter and Miles Anderson sauntered down the steps together amiably enough.

And when Anderson got into his little car, Peter leaned down and waved in the window. When Anderson did a U-turn and headed back up Main toward the village, Peter watched him go for a second, then crossed the street and started toward them. Will darted down the steps and up the street toward his father, while Sully took a seat on the porch steps next to Rub, who continued morose.

"I wouldn't sit here too long," Sully advised.

"The tip of your dick'll freeze to the step." Rub glanced down to see if this were possible.

"I forgot," Sully said.

"Yours doesn't hang down quite that far, docs it."

"Yours don't either," Rub said, grinning sheepishly now, too happy to have his friend back to hold a grudge much longer.

"That's true," Sully said, nudging Rub hard.

"I fold it so it won't." Rub slid away, out of easy nudging range.

"You want to know how many times I have to fold it?"

Sully said, nudging Rub again, since he hadn't moved quite far enough to be out of nudging range completely.

"It would hurt if you folded it," Rub said, imagining.

"Not mine," Sully assured him.

"You know what I like best?" Rub blushed, wondered if it had to do with ole Toby Roebuck.

"Carnation Milk," Sully said.

"You know why?"

Rub was frowning, trying to recall why. He felt like he knew the answer to this question, though it wouldn't come.

"No tits to pull, no shit to haul," Sully explained.

"You get any work done in there?"

"Almost all of it. Are we going to stop for lunch?"

"Stop work or stop sitting here freezing our dicks?"

"Work."

"I

suppose."

"Good," Rub said. Together they sat and listened to the barking dog. Will had joined up with his father and they were slowly making their way up the street toward where Sully and Rub were sitting. The boy was talking excitedly, showing his father the money he'd won, the stopwatch Sully had given him.

Even a block away, Peter looked less than thrilled.

"Where the hell's that damn dog I'm hearing?" Sully wondered.

"He sounds like he's inside the house."

"He's in the kitchen," Rub said.

"Who?"

"The dog," Rub said. He could have sworn they'd been discussing the dog.

"What dog?"

"The one that's barking. CCarl's," Rub explained. That had been the second thing he'd been trying to tell Sully when he'd gone out to the car and been sent away for his trouble.

There'd been a third thing too, but now Rub couldn't remember what it was.

Sully opened the front door and stepped inside. From the doorway he could see Rasputin slumped against the kitchen cabinet Carl Roebuck had chained him to. The reason the dog's bark had a strangling quality to it was that the dog was apparently strangling. Carl had run the animal's chain through one of the upper kitchen cabinets, which was fine as long as the dog was standing up, because the chain was just long enough. But either the dog had lost his balance and slumped against the cabinets or had tried to lie down of his own volition, only to discover that the chain did not allow this. Spying Sully and Rub in the doorway, the dog tried valiantly to get to its feet, but the linoleum floor did not provide much traction and the stroke-deadened side of its body did not work in concert with the good side, and so the dog quickly gave up and slumped against the cabinets again, his head and neck suspended mere inches from the floor.

"Careful," Rub warned, and Sully at first thought he meant the dog before noticing that there was no floor between where they stood and the kitchen, just the lengthwise-running foundation beams and the darkness of the deep cellar below. To Sully's surprise, he felt vaguely embarrassed to see the house he'd grown up in flayed back for inspection, like a terminally ill patient, its pipes and wires and wood exposed. Certainly the sight was not as satisfying as he'd hoped. Rub slid a sheet of plywood he'd apparently been using to stand on into posit ion in front of them, stepped onto it, then danced nimbly onto a double floor beam and into the kitchen.

"Right," Sully said, stepping onto the plywood and recollecting as he did so that he'd just been encouraging his grandson to go on into a house with no floor. Also Otis's observation that there was danger everywhere Sully was. Rub held out his hand.

"I'll grab you," he said.

"Get away," Sully said.

"You'll just make me bang my knee, is all you'll do." Rub frowned, his feelings hurt yet again, but stepped back as he was told. Sully tested the double beam with his good leg, pushed off, and strode forward across the dark gap, landing on the kitchen's linoleum. He felt his bad knee start to give under the full weight, but he caught the door frame for support and quickly shifted his weight.

"You should have just gone around," Rub said.

"It's just like you to give me good advice after I've killed myself," Sully told him, wiping the cold sweat from his brow with his sleeve. When the Doberman again tried to stand.

Sully noticed there was an envelope taped to the animal's collar.

Since the crowbar he'd used the day before to get into the house was still sitting on the counter. Sully picked it up and showed it to the dog.

"If you bite me, I'm going to beat you to death right here in the kitchen," he said. The dog seemed to understand this threat and quit growling and lay still while Sully removed the small envelope, which was addressed in Carl Roebuck's graceful, almost feminine, hand to Don Sullivan, Jack-Off, All Trades. The note inside said simply: you broke him. he's yours. As if to confirm this, the dog strained forward as far as he could and licked Sully's knuckles. When Peter and the boy arrived a minute later, having gone around back. Sully showed his son the note. Peter read it and chuckled unpleasantly. Will, who'd hesitated on the back porch, took a deep breath, engaged his stopwatch, eyed the dog warily and stepped inside.