Nobody's Fool (42 page)

Each year before they returned home, Mrs. HCarld bought about two thousand dollars' worth of Disney paraphernalia, and she ran a small Disney concession, without authorization or permission, in the office of HCarld's Automotive World. For most of the spring the walls would be covered with Disney movie posters and T-shirts, the cash register surrounded by waterskiing Goofys and rubber Plutos and a stack of big-eared mouse hats. Now, in late November, most of the merchandise had been sold off and the drab walls were again bare, except for a tall Cinderella poster that depicted, among other things, three plump Disney fairies, one of which reminded Sully of Mrs. HCarld herself. Next to the cash register was a small box of cheap plastic Disney figurines and a half-dozen rubber alligators. Invoices and purchases at all three businesses were rung through her register, and when she looked up from that register at her customers, her suspicious expression conveyed something other inner fear that any one of them might be Satan in disguise.

She was certain that Sully, for instance, was in league with the Devil somehow, though she doubted he was very far up in the satanic hierarchy. In a deep, secluded part other heart to which Mrs. HCarld no longer had immediate access, she was very fond of Sully, who always kidded with her, something nobody else had the courage to do, even her husband. Whenever Sully appeared, something of the girl she had once been always slipped out of the fortress she'd been imprisoned in, though that girl was easily recaptured, having forgotten how or where or even why to flee many long years ago.

"Hello, Esmerelda," Sully said when the door had swung closed behind him and Rub. Esmerelda was not Mrs. HCarld's name, of course, but it was the name Sully, who couldn't remember names, had been calling her for years and years.

Was it the name of the imprisoned girl? Mrs. HCarld set her Bible down and refused Sully the smile she knew he was after.

"HCarld!" she barked into the intercom, which crackled to life over the bullhorns mounted on wooden poles in the yard outside.

"Customer!" Sully picked up and examined one of the rubber alligators from the box beside the cash register.

"What extortionary price are you asking for these?" Sully asked Mrs. HCarld. Mrs. HCarld had been charging three dollars for them and was about to tell Sully this when, to her surprise, Esmerelda spoke up and said, "One dollar."

"Okay," Sully said, slipping one of the alligators into his coat pocket and handing Mrs. HCarld a dollar.

"I'll take one. I know somebody who likes alligators. But tell me something before your husband gets here."

Sully lowered his voice confidentially and leaned forward toward her, elbows planted on the countertop.

"Don't lie to me, either," he warned.

"Lying is a sin."

"Christians don't lie, Mr. Sullivan," Mrs. HCarld said, her eyes narrowing.

She leaned back on her stool to preserve the distance between them, even as the young girl imprisoned in Mrs. HCarld's heart leaned forward. Sully shrugged, as if to suggest that such statements were not worth arguing about.

He'd let her skate if she wanted to.

"Tell me the truth, then," he said.

"You getting any?"

"HCarld!" Mrs. HCarld barked into the intercom.

Sully held up his hands as if she'd pointed a gun at him.

"What'd I say?"

He appealed to Rub, who was standing just inside the door looking like he might wet his pants.

"Listen, Esmerelda. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's nothing wrong with getting a little if you're married.

Jesus doesn't mind as long as it's with HCarld, right? "

" HCarld! " Mrs. HCarld's voice rocked the bullhorns. Sully still had his hands raised in surrender.

"I understand you gotta slow down a little at our age, but you don't have to stop completely. Every couple weeks, you should close up for the lunch hour, send the help home, lock the register, take HCarld out back where there's nobody around ... Be good for you. Be good for HCarld too."

HCarld rushed in then, wheezing and gray-faced, followed by Dwaync.

"Oh," he said immediately, relieved once he'd taken in the situation.

"It's you. I thought we were being robbed."

"You should hear the things he says when you're not around," Mrs. HCarld reported, calmly now. With HCarld on the scene, she was able to capture the girl, corral her, herd her back inside her heart's fortress.

"Esmerelda," Sully said, causing that girl to look back over her shoulder one last time.

"Someday you're going to hurt my feelings."

He pointed at the Bible.

"Show me where it says in there that you're supposed to be mean to people." The very worst thing about Sully, to Mrs. HCarld's way of thinking, was that he had a way of routing scripture with sheer outrageousness. As a rule she could locate and quote a scriptural passage for almost any occasion. The moment he was gone, she'd think of dozens of passages that pertained, but never in Sully's presence.

Right now, for instance, she found it impossible to take up his challenge to show him where in the Bible it said you were supposed to be mean to people, though she was sure it was there. Before Mrs.

HCarld could think how to respond. Sully had turned away from her to talk to HCarld, and both she and Esmerelda were sad.

"You got anything on the lot I might be interested in?"

Sully asked.

"Truck give out?"

HCarld said, feeling guilty. He hated repeat automobile customers.

That meant that the car or truck he'd sold them hadn't lasted forever, as he'd hoped. He knew that anything mechanical, like anything human, had a finite life, but he wished for a better world, one where the vehicles he sold people would run and run. Sully was particularly embarrassing as a repeat customer because the trucks he bought from HCarld were always pretty well used up when he bought them. HCarld had never sold Sully anything with fewer than eighty thousand miles on it.

In fact, he always tried to talk Sully out of his purchases.

"You'll just be back in six months," he'd warn. But six months always seemed a long way off to Sully, who was by and large an optimist and who always concluded that in six months he'd be better off than he was now for the simple reason that he couldn't be any worse off. He was almost always wrong, of course, in both the result and the reasoning The truck HCarld sold Sully today would be more dubious than the last, which would make HCarld feel guiltier still, and in another year it would happen all over again. HCarld wasn't sure capitalism and Christianity were compatible, even when the capitalism involved was as modest as HCarld's Automotive World, which barely provided a living for HCarld and Mrs.

HCarld, a surly mechanic, a half-blind clerk and a delinquent teenager.

Sully told HCarld that the pickup had died this morning, describing its condition for HCarld, who listened hopefully.

"Could just be corrosion on your battery cables," he offered.

"Could be," Sully agreed.

"But it isn't." They had strolled outside, Rub tagging along a respectful stride behind, Dwayne lurking even farther in the background.

"How do you know?" HCarld said. Sully thought about it.

He didn't know for sure, of course, but it just made fatalistic sense the truck would die today. Yesterday he'd had a job offer that was contingent upon having a truck, which meant the truck had to die.

Mired as he was in a stupid streak. Sully credited the perversity of cosmic law that governed such things.

"Call it a hunch," he told HCarld.

"Why don't you let me have a look," HCarld said. He didn't discredit hunches exactly, but he liked to check them out just in case.

"We'll send Dwayne out and have him tow it back."

"That'd be good," Sully admitted, momentarily buoyed by HCarld's common sense.

"You met Dwayne?" HCarld said, catching the boy, who wasn't expecting to be introduced, with his finger in his nose.

"Go get Sully's truck and bring it here," HCarld told him. Dwayne nodded, headed for the wrecker.

"Dwayne?" HCarld called after him.

"Don't you want to know where it is?" Dwayne returned. Sully gave him his address on Upper Main, told him the truck was parked at the curb.

"What color is it?" Dwayne asked. Sully told him green.

"It'll be the one that looks like it's not worth towing," he added. HCarld smiled as Dwayne retreated again.

"Minute ago he was going to get a truck he didn't know the location of. Then after you tell him right where it is, he wants a full description." Rub was wiping his palms on his shirt.

"He picked his nose and then shook my hand," he said angrily.

"Here's what you should buy," HCarld said on the way past the junkyard, indicating a snowplow blade that was leaning up against the chain-link fence.

"Guy that owned it made good money doing driveways."

"How come he sold it?" Sully said.

"He didn't," HCarld said.

"His widow sold it. I picked it up at an auction."

"I don't seem to have a truck to attach it to, is the problem," Sully pointed out, although he was intrigued with the idea. With the town of Bath always cutting back on services and snow already in November, a plow might not be a bad idea.

"I don't think I have the strength to push it myself."

"I'll make you a deal if you decide you want it," HCarld said and quoted Sully a price that wasn't much more than what he'd paid for it at the auction.

"Don't wait too long."

"I'd have to rob a bank if I'm going to buy a truck and the plow rig both," Sully said.

229 "Some people borrow from banks," HCarld pointed out.

"Not people like me," Sully said.

"Banks like you to own something of equal value they can take from you in case you run into some bad luck." HCarld had only two trucks at the moment. One was in pretty good shape. Sully took the other one for a test drive. It was marginally better than the truck he already owned, which was dead.

"I wouldn't charge you much for it," HCarld said when Sully returned and looked at the vehicle skeptically.

"But then it's not worth much. I bought it for parts myself. You'd be money ahead to buy the other one."

"I know it," Sully said.

"But the money I'd be ahead is money I don't have."

"Well," HCarld said.

"Who knows. Maybe I can fix the one you got."

At that moment they heard the wrecker returning and watched Dwayne pull into the yard towing a truck that was not Sully's. Neither was it green. HCarld sighed mightily.

"I'll be darned," he said quietly.

He'd almost said he'd be damned, but he caught himself at the last second.

The house Miles Anderson had bought occupied the southwest corner of the intersection. It was the largest of the big houses on Upper Main, a three-level brick affair with two small widow's walks on the upper story and a huge wraparound porch that looked out upon both Main and Bowdon streets.

The previous owner had been an elderly widow frightened into a nursing home two years before when a huge limb from one of Upper Main's ancient elms had fallen op her roof during the famous ice storm. Since then the house had sat empty. Sully could not recall ever seeing a For Sale sign in front of the house, but he seldom ventured up this way, so there might have been one.

"I wisht I could afford a big ole house like this," Rub said as he and Sully sat at the curb in the El Camino waiting for Miles Anderson to show up. So far Anderson was fifteen minutes late, and Rub was no good at loitering he wasn't paid for.

"Be a little big for just you and Bootsie, wouldn't it?" said Sully, who'd been sitting there wondering what anybody would do with a house that big, how you'd go about filling it up. Actually, Bootsie might be one of the few people he knew equal to the task. She swiped something from the Woolworth's she worked at every day and brought it home with her, 230 and their apartment was about to burst under the strain. The easiest thing to steal at Woolworth's was goldfish, and Rub and Bootsie had an aquarium so full of them that the fish barely had room to turn around without knocking into one another. The murky water they swam in was permanently brown from processed fish food. In such conditions the fish died about as fast as Bootsie could slip them in their water-filled baggies into her spacious pockets. She also took things that didn't fit into her pockets.

Somehow she'd managed to swipe a sofa-sized painting of the Atlantic Ocean at sunset, its crashing waves bright orange and blue. Neither Bootsie nor Rub had ever seen the Atlantic and so could not judge the painting's realism.

"I'd have my room way up there." Rub pointed to the room under the cave where the larger of the two widow's walks was located.

"I could just walk out there on that little porch and stand there."

"I suppose you could. Rub," Sully said, trying to picture Rub on the widow's walk.

"I wisht we'd stopped for lunch," Rub added. Sully consulted his watch for the umpteenth time.