Nobody's Fool (18 page)

"Just see if I do." It didn't take nearly as long to run out of hot water in Sully flat, and when he stepped out of the shower, he wondered if he was going to be sick, if that was why he'd suddenly remembered the YMCA episode after so many years in the limbo of his memory.

He doubted it could be that he needed another reason to bear a grudge against his father, whose ghost, for some reason, seemed to be visiting him more often and vividly of late, starting right around the time he'd fallen from the ladder. The good news was that his knee didn't feel too bad, and Sully considered for the umpteenth time the illogic of his own body. Immediately after hard work, the knee felt pretty good.

Tomorrow morning, he knew from experience, he would pay. Which meant that he would have to go see Jocko first thing.

He was almost out of Tylenol 3s, or whatever it was he was taking.

Jocko did not always dispense his relief in labeled bottles.

At least not to Sully. When Sully needed something for pain. Jocko didn't stand on formalities like a physician's prescription. When he got samples he thought Sully might be interested in, he slipped a bright plastic tube full of pills into Sully's coat pocket and whispered verbal instructions for their use: "Here. Eat these."

Downstairs, Miss Beryl was waiting for him in the hall, dressed in her robe and slippers. She always looked tinier and even more gnome like when she stood in the large doorway to her flat. She was holding a fistful of mail, most of it. Sully could tell at a glance, junk. He often went weeks at a time without checking his mailbox and then, after a cursory glance, tossed whatever had accumulated there in the trash.

People who wanted to contact him left messages for him at The Horse.

People who didn't know him well enough to do that were probably people he didn't want to hear from anyway. Sully had no credit cards, and since his utilities were included in the rent he paid Miss Beryl, he didn't have to worry about bills. To his way of thinking, he had no real relationship with the postal service. He didn't even have his name on the mailbox, refused to put it there, in fact, not wanting to encourage the mailman. Now and then Miss Beryl would gather what collected there and thrust it at him, as she was doing now, with communications she judged to be of possible importance on top. The envelope on top of this particular fistful of mail looked to be a tax document from the Town of North Bath, no doubt reminding him of his obligations on the property his father left him when he died. Sully did not bother to open it to be sure. He leafed through the rest to make sure his disability check was not in the stash. He'd already thrown that away once in his rush to dispose of all the junk.

"You got a pen handy, Mrs. Peoples?"

he asked, knowing full well she kept half a dozen in a glass by the door. In fact, she had anticipated his need and was holding a pen out to him disapprovingly. On the tax envelope he wrote in bold letters return to sender and deposited the junk mail in the small decorative trash can just inside his landlady's door.

"You're the most incurious man in the universe," Miss Beryl remarked, as she often did on these occasions.

"Hasn't anyone ever told you that inquiring minds want to know?"

"Maybe you just have better luck with the post office than I've had," he suggested.

"So far the mail has brought me my draft notice, my divorce papers, jury duty, half a dozen different threats that I can think of. And not a single piece of good news I didn't already know about because somebody told me." Miss Beryl shook her head, studied her tenant.

"You look better, anyhow," she said.

"Than what?"

"Than you did when you came in," said Miss Beryl, who had been watching at the window.

"Long day.

Beryl," Sully admitted.

"They get longer," she warned.

"I read about five books a week to pass the time. Of course, I read only half of some of them. I always stop when I realize I've read a book before."

"Who said "A man's reach should exceed his grasp'?" Sully suddenly remembered CCarl's quotation.

"I did," she said.

"All through eighth grade. Before me, it was Robert Browning.

He said it only once, but he had a better audience. "

" What grade did he teach? " Sully grinned. " I bet you can't finish the quotation, smarty. "

" I thought it was finished," Sully said truthfully. " You had visitors this afternoon," Miss Beryl said. " Really? " Sully said. He had few visitors.

People who knew him knew they had a better chance of running into him at Hattie's or The Horse or the OTB. " A young woman with a huge bosom and a tiny little girl. " Sully was about to say he had no idea who this could be when it occurred to him. " Did the little girl have a bad eye? "

" Yes, poor little soul," Miss Beryl confirmed.

"The mother was all mouth and chest." This did not strike Sully as a fair assessment of Ruth's daughter, Jane, though it was an accurate enough first impression.

"I must be losing patience with my fellow humans," Miss Beryl went on.

"Anymore I'm all for executing people who are mean to children. I used to favor just cutting off their feet.

Now I want to rid the world of them completely. If this keeps up I'll be voting Republican soon."

"You're definitely getting mean in your old age, Mrs. Peoples," Sully said, trying to match her joking tone, though he could sense that the encounter had upset her.

"She didn't say what she wanted?" he asked, half fearfully, though he doubted Ruth's daughter would have revealed much to Miss Beryl.

"I think she was just as glad you weren't here," Miss Beryl told him.

"I got the impression she was on the lam from a no-good husband."

"That would fit," Sully admitted, recalling now that back in the summer, when Jane had run away from her husband the first time. Sully had told Ruth to send her and the little girl over to his flat if they needed a place her husband wasn't likely to look.

"She married some stiff from Schuyler Springs who's in and out of jail."

"Well," Miss Beryl said.

"I'm relieved that's the explanation. I thought at first you'd gone and got that young thing pregnant."

"The young ones won't have me anymore, Beryl," Sully told her, Toby Roebuck flashing into his consciousness unbidden, as she'd been doing all afternoon.

"I wish one or two would."

"You're a cur, sir," Miss Beryl told him.

"I've always wanted to say that to a man." Sully nodded, accepted the indictment.

"I thought you were a Republican," he said.

"No," Miss Beryl told him.

"Clive Jr. is. His father was too. Clive Sr. was a hardheaded man in many respects."

"Not a bad one, though," Sully remembered.

"No," Miss Beryl admitted thoughtfully.

"I miss arguing with him. It would have taken a lifetime to win him over to my way of thinking. There are times I think he died so he wouldn't have to admit I was right." When Sully was gone. Miss Beryl returned to her chair in the front room where she had been reading. The chair was placed directly in front of the television she seldom turned on. On top of it were Clives Jr. and Sr. " stars present and past of her firmament. " You were hardheaded," she informed her husband. Never an articulate man, Clive Sr. had lost every argument he ever got into with Miss Beryl, who possessed sufficient intellect and verbal dexterity to corner and dispatch him, and so he learned early on in their marriage not to detail his logic to a woman who was not above explaining where it was flawed.

"I have my reasons," he'd learned to say, and to accompany this statement with an expression he deemed enigmatic. He died wearing that very expression, and he was still wearing it when Miss Beryl arrived at the scene of the accident. After young Audrey Peach had braked him into the windshield, Clive Sr. had rocked back into the car's bucket seat, his head angled oddly because of his broken neck. He appeared to be thinking. I have my reasons, he seemed to say, and for the past twenty-five years he'd left her alone to ponder them.

"And you .. ." she told her son, but she let the sentence trail off. Miss Beryl was still holding the letter that Sully had marked return to sender. She did not need to open it to know what was inside. In the metal box in her bedroom she had an entire manila folder marked "Sully," and she would add this letter to the others when she retired for the night.

"I'm doing the right thing," she said aloud to the two Clives.

"So just pipe down." One of the things Sully appreciated about the White Horse Tavern was that it had a window out front with a Black Label Beer sign that hadn't worked in years. That allowed Sully to peek in and see who was inside before committing himself. There were nights--and this was one of them--when he didn't want to get involved. What he wanted was supper and bed. One beer might not be bad, but one had a way of leading directly to half a case. Tonight, a quick glance inside was enough to convince Sully. Wirf, predictably, was there, no doubt preparing his lecture about why Sully should stay in school, about how his going back to work would fuck everything up.

Carl Roebuck, less predictably, was anchoring the near corner of the bar, a bad sign. Carl usually did his drinking and carousing in Schuyler Springs and came into The Horse only when he was looking for somebody. Usually Sully. And Sully knew that if Carl was trying to find him, he'd just as soon stay lost. True, Carl owed him for the other half of his day's work, but that couldn't be why he was there.

Kenny, CCarl's father, had been the kind of man who went looking for people he owed, but Carl just looked for people who owed him. Maybe he was just there because he was locked out of his house, but Sully decided not to take a chance. When Carl slid off his stool and headed for the men's room. Sully ducked back from the window, peering in again in time to see Carl disappear into the head. Though Sully'd never noticed it before, it occurred to him now how much Carl reminded him of his father, even though he was about halfpenny's size and Kenny had been far too homely to be much of a ladies' man. Sully found himself wishing it was Kenny, not his son, who was peeing in the men's room trough. Had it been Kenny, Sully wouldn't have minded getting involved. There was much to be said for a man who wouldn't hold it against you when you burned down his house. The only other place that might be open at this time of night was Jerry's Pizza a few doors down, where all the kids hung out. Normally a greasy burger at The Horse would have been preferable, but there weren't any kids hanging around Jerry's entrance, so Sully decided to take a chance. It was Thanksgiving Eve, after all, and maybe the kids were all home and the jukebox that blared heavy metal would be silent for once. Besides, Ruth would be working, and he was going to have to face her eventually anyway. Maybe he'd find her in a holiday mood. Maybe if he saw her he'd quit thinking about Toby Roebuck. It could happen.

And it might be a good idea to find out why Jane had come over to the flat that afternoon. Blessedly, the place was empty. Sully selected a booth out of sight from the street and far from the jukebox which, though silent, glowed red and angry, as if gathering energy and venom from the unaccustomed quiet.

"Sully!" a voice boomed from the kitchen.

"Thank God we stayed open!" The voice belonged to Vmce, who owned Jerry's. Jerry, Vmce's brother, ran another pizza place just like it, called Vince's, in Schuyler Springs. The Schuyler Springs restaurant did a better business, and whoever won the wager on the Bath-Schuylcr basketball game got to run the Schuyler Springs place for the following year. By betting on his alma mater, Bath, Vmce had lost the better business the last ten years in a row. Jerry always gave his brother points, but never enough of them. Both-brothers were huge, burly men with more hair on their chests than their heads. They looked so much alike that over the years people had begun to confuse them, thanks to their physical resemblance and the fact that for the last ten years each had been managing the other's restaurant. Vince minded losing his identity a lot more than losing his restaurant to basketball wagers, and so, sensing this.

Sully had taken to calling him by his brother's name.

"How about a little service?" Sully called, rapping the back of the booth with his pepper shaker. The door to the kitchen swung open and Ruth appeared.

She did not look to be in a holiday mood. It took her a minute to locate Sully at the far end of the room.

"I don't know what good it does to send a man to college who can't even read," she said, in reference to the this section closed sign in the center of the floor. In fact. Sully had not noticed it. He'd just found a spot where nobody would notice him from the street and feel compelled to keep him company.

"Sorry," he said.

"I just wanted to get as far from the jukebox as I could. Besides," he added when Ruth came over, "I don't go to college any more."

"So I heard," Ruth said.

"Wirfwas in looking for you earlier." She was making rather a point of just standing there over him instead of slipping into the booth like she would have done if they were still friends. Eventually, Sully knew, they would quarrel over his going back to work, but not now.

That was one of the things Sully'd always liked about Ruth. She knew when not to say what she was thinking. What he didn't like about her was her ability to make clear what she was thinking without saying anything. Right now, for instance, she was thinking his going back to work was not smart, which it probably wasn't. You'll be sorry, she was thinking, which he probably would.