Nobody's Fool (9 page)

"Don't get all bent out of whack, now," he added, knowing full well that nothing was more likely to bend Carl Roebuck out of whack than to be instructed by Sully to calm down.

Along with Tip Top Construction, Carl had inherited from his father a heart condition that had already required bypass surgery.

"You know the trouble with guys like you?" Carl stood, glowing red now, even though he hadn't raised his voice.

"You figure you got a right to steal from anybody that's got a few bucks. I'm supposed to assume the posit ion because you got a busted knee and no prospects, like this is some kind of Feel-Sorry-for-Sully Week. Well, it ain't, my friend.

This is Fuck- You Week." Carl was pacing back and forth behind his desk as he spoke, and for some reason his speech had a soothing effect on Sully, who put his feet up on CCarl's desk.

"That was last week, actually. And the week before."

"Then go away.

You did shoddy work, and I'm not paying you for it. You think I got where I am doing shoddy work? " Sully couldn't help but smile at this.

Maybe later in the day when he remembered it, this line of bullshit would piss him off, but right now, watching Carl Roebuck, beet red with trumped-up self-righteousness, constituted something like partial payment for the debt.

And when Sully finally spoke, his voice was even lower than CCarl's.

"No, Carl," he admitted.

"You didn't get where you are by doing shoddy work. You didn't get where you are by doing any work. You got where you are because your father worked himself into an early grave so you could piss away everything he worked for on ski trips and sports cars."

Sully let this much sink in before continuing.

"Now personally, I don't care about the ski trips and the sports cars. I don't even care if you wind up broke, which you probably will. But before you do, you're going to pay me the three hundred bucks you owe me, because I dug a fifty-foot trench under your terrace in ninety-degree heat and busted my balls tugging on hundred-year-old pipes that snapped off in my hands every two feet.

That's why you're going to pay me. " He got to his feet then, facing Carl Roebuck across his big desk. " I'll tell you another thing.

You're going to pay for the beer. I just decided. It was only a six-pack, but since you think it was a case, you can pay for a case.

Call it a tax on being a prick.

" That seemed like a pretty good exit line to Sully, and he slammed the door on the way out. The glass hadn't stopped reverberating, however, before he thought of an even better way to leave, so he went back in.

Carl was still standing there behind the desk, so Sully picked up right where he left off.

" The other reason you're going to pay me is that someday you're going to catch me in a really bad mood. My knee's going to be throbbing so bad that even Feel-Sorry-for-Sully Week won't make any difference. The only thing that'll make it feel better will be seeing your sorry ass go flying out that window. About two seconds before you hit the bricks, it'll dawn on you that I wasn't kidding. " Instead of slamming the door again. Sully stood in the open doorway to witness the full effect of his verbal assault. Almost immediately he wished he had slammed the door. CCarl's color, instead of deepening, actually began to return to its normal shade, and with its return came the grin that made it impossible for people to stay mad at Carl Roebuck. Instead of storming out from behind the desk and taking a swing at Sully, as Sully half hoped he would, Carl returned to his swivel chair, sat down and put his own soft-loafered feet up.

"Sully," he said finally.

"You're right. I'm not going to pay you, but you're right.

I am lucky. Most of the time I remember, but sometimes I forget.

Anyway, since we're friends, I'll give you a tip. When you leave, stop outside there on the landing for about five minutes before you go down.

That'll save you having to walk back up here when it occurs to you."

"When what occurs to me?" Carl Roebuck wagged an index finger maddeningly.

"If I told you, it would ruin the surprise, schmucko." Ruby was also grinning at Sully when he left, which probably meant that whatever the surprise was, she'd already figured it out. Outside on the landing, where he'd been told to wait, where the cold air of reality tunneled up from the street. Sully still couldn't think what the surprise was, but he stood there buttoning his coat and pondering his visible breath in the hallway.

Things had gone pretty much the way Sully had envisioned. Naturally, they'd argue over the money Carl refused to pay, and naturally he'd tell Carl where to get off and storm out of his office. Then later Carl would come looking for him at The Horse and offer some shitty job as a peace offering, which Sully would tell him he could stuff, and then Carl would offer him something else, probably just as shitty, but Sully would accept this offer because at least he'd gotten some satisfaction out of telling Carl off, not once but twice. By the end of the week he and Rub would be back on the Tip Top payroll. Except that Carl had thrown him a curve by offering him work right away, which meant that Sully was not only storming out on Carl but the work he'd really come for. On the other hand, Carl hadn't crowed. That was what Sully had dreaded most, Carl smiling smugly and saying, I told you you'd be back. Sully knew from experience that "I told you so" were the four most satisfying words in the English language.

He couldn't remember ever passing up the opportunity to say them, and he had to admit it was pretty decent of Carl not to gloat. And he was definitely right about the stairs.

Carl Roebuck was swiveling and grinning when Sully came back in.

"I'll take the money up front," Sully said.

"Since I'm working for a man who can't be trusted."

"Half now, half when I've inspected the job," Carl insisted, their standard arrangement.

"Since I'm employing Don Sullivan." Sully took the money, counted it while Carl explained the job. As he listened, it occurred to Sully that he was relieved, glad to be back working for a man he wanted to kill half the time, glad he wasn't driving every day to the community college where he didn't belong, glad to be taking the judge's advice about not blaming people for the way things were, glad not to be placing his trust in lawyers and courts. He'd been afraid that a job working for Carl might be one of the real things that had disappeared while he was taking philosophy.

"I should let one of my regular guys do this," Carl was saying.

"But I know you need the money, and besides, we're friends, right?"

"You're lucky I need the money, friend," Sully said.

"You always need the money," Carl pointed out.

"Which is why I always have you by the balls."

That smile again. How could you hate the man?

"Does this mean you're through with higher education?" Carl wondered as Sully prepared to leave.

Sully said he supposed it did.

"I wonder who won the pool," Carl said absently.

"Ruby," Sully said, without looking at CCarl's secretary on his way through the outer office.

"What?" the girl wanted to know in her best bored-to-death voice.

"Don't take your love to town." One thing was for sure: compared to some of the other guys Carl Roebuck hired. Sully himself was a genius. Apparently one of CCarl's regulars had loaded up about ten tons of concrete basement blocks on the company flatbed and dropped them off at the wrong site.

Sully found them in a sloppy pyramid next to a small, two-bedroom ranch home that was already half built. The unexpected snow, together with the fact that tomorrow was a holiday, had apparently sent the guys working on the house back home. In fact, they'd probably never left their homes this morning. Carl didn't hire union men when he could help it, but even the guys who worked for Tip Top Construction didn't work in the snow.

NOBODY'S FOOL 47

Most of the overnight snow had already melted, and the uneven ground was a quagmire of patchy brown slush. The bank sign had said forty-two degrees when Sully drove by. It felt colder now. There was only one sensible way to approach this, and that was to go fetch Rub, who was surefooted and didn't mind working in slop of any description.

Something was terribly wrong with Rub's nose. Sully was certain. Rub could stand hip deep in the overflow of a ruptured septic tank as pleasantly as if he were in the middle of a field of daisies. This made him invaluable to Sully who, while not overly fastidious, could distinguish between the smell of shit and that of daisies. The down side was that Rub couldn't smell himself either, and when he was ripe his own personal odor greatly resembled what he stood in. Still, the smart thing to do would be to go get Rub, station him in the muck.

That way Sully could stay up in the dry bed of the pickup and stack the blocks as Rub handed them up to him. He guessed four or five loads would do the trick, and with Rub's help they could be finished by early afternoon.

Since this was the only sensible way to proceed. Sully decided against it.

Rub wasn't expecting work so soon, and it might take Sully an hour to find him if he wasn't home or at Hattie's or the donut shop or the

OTB.

Then he'd have to listen to Rub chatter all day, and later they'd split the money.

Sully didn't mind splitting the money, but he hadn't worked in three months, and he wanted to see how things went. Alone, he could work at his own pace, and if his knee couldn't take it, he could just quit and not owe anybody any explanations. Next week he'd just go back to school. So he backed the truck up close to the pile of concrete blocks, got out, lowered the tailgate and tested the footing, which wasn't good. I should definitely go get Rub, he thought. Instead he planted half a dozen blocks in the mud for a makeshift walkway between the pyramid and the truck. Then he began, carrying blocks in each hand at first, then a stack of four balanced against his chest, piling them in rows on the truck bed. The hard part was climbing up onto the truck.

The only way was to sit on the tailgate, swing his legs aboard, get his good leg under him, then the bad one. Surprisingly, his knee didn't feel too bad.

In fact, it felt pretty good. If it held up, maybe he'd use the money he earned today to buy a couple new radials for the truck, whose tires were bald from running back and forth to Schuyler Springs every day to study philosophy. It was as if the young professor had disproved the tread on Sully's tires along with everything else. It was when he thought of all the things the truck was going to need S S 0 that he got mad about the money Carl Roebuck wouldn't pay him. The pickup had been pretty long in the tooth when Sully bought it. It had needed new tires a month ago, along with a rebuilt carburetor. The valves needed grinding too. In another month the truck would need all of these repairs even worse, and the month after that it would need them so bad he'd have to make them. And pay for them. New shocks, too. Sully thought, as the truck groaned beneath the weight of the concrete. The three hundred Carl Roebuck owed him would have paid for the tires or the valves or the shocks, whichever Sully decided to fix first. Not that he would necessarily have used the money on the truck if he had it in his pocket that very minute. Sometimes when he got money ahead he gave some to Miss Beryl as advance rent, a hedge against the scarcity of winter work. Sometimes he'd give Cass a hundred so that if things got skinny he'd be able to eat on account for a while. Other times he gave money to Ruth to hold on to for him, which was one way of ensuring that the OTB or the poker table wouldn't get it. The trouble with Ruth was that once he instructed her not to give it back to him unless he really needed it, then it was up to her to decide his need, and sometimes her judgment was a little too refined. And one time her no-good husband Zack had stumbled onto her stash and spent Sully's money, thinking it was his wife's. The more Sully thought about it, the more it didn't seem like such a bad idea to be owed the three hundred. Letting Carl hang on to the money for a while might actually be the safest thing. When Sully needed it most, money had a way of first liquefying, then evaporating, and finally leaving just a filmy residue of vague memory. And so, as Sully fell deeply into the rhythm of his work, he had the luxury of knowing that his money was safe without in any way diminishing his righteous anger at Carl Roebuck for refusing to pay up, anger that swelled like music in his chest to the distant beat of his throbbing knee. Smiling, he imagined Carl Roebuck tossed out his office window, his arms flapping frantically, his legs wildly pedaling an invisible bicycle as he fell. Sully didn't allow him to hit the ground. He just tossed Carl from the window again and again, so that the other man tumbled and pedaled and screamed. It was so much fun tossing Carl Roebuck out of his office window that Sully had the truck over half loaded before he noticed it was starting to tilt slightly, like old Hattie in her booth. At first he thought it might be an optical illusion, so he stood back away from the truck and looked at it. There was no reason the truck should be tipping. Off to the side Sully NOBODY'S FOOL49 noticed some sheets of plywood, and he wished he'd seen them before so he could have lined the bed of the truck and cushioned the load.

Probably it wouldn't have been a bad idea to separate every other layer too, not that the plywood would have distributed the weight differently. It was too late now, in any case.