Nobody's Fool (21 page)

"Your wife'll be out in a minute. You can give her a lift home. She looks beat." Zack wasn't ready to sit down.

"I'm not sure I like walking in here and finding you," he complained.

Sully shrugged.

"I don't know what to tell you. It's one of three restaurants in town." He thumbed the sliver of Bermuda onion and flicked it into the rubber plant with his forefinger.

1 9 "How come you're sitting way down here in the dark?"

"I don't know, Zachary." Sully sighed.

"Do I need a reason? Do I follow you around and ask you how come you sit in one chair and not another one?" Zack didn't have an answer.

"Pretty funny, you sitting here in the dark," Zack managed, though he'd clearly lost the edge, somehow. He couldn't help thinking he should have had Sully in some kind of corner, that the other man had a hell of a lot of explaining to do. But here they were arguing pleasantly over whether Sully had a right to sit in here by himself in the dark if he felt like it. Which he did, Zack had to admit. Ruth emerged from the kitchen drying her hands on a rag. She glared at Zack, who immediately fidgeted guiltily.

"What's the matter?" she said.

"Can't start a fight?"

"What's he doing here?"

"Let's you and me go home, sport," Ruth said.

"I'll fight with you."

Zack looked like he'd rather fight with Sully and was sorry now to have missed the opportunity. Ruth turned to Sully.

"I'd like to go home tonight," she said.

"Are you going to leave me a tip or what?"

"I'm half afraid to," Sully said.

"Some not-too-bright person might get the wrong idea."

"Let him," Ruth said.

"Somebody's got to make a living in this family." Zack watched his wife pick up the dollar and change Sully put on the table.

"Not the sort of tip that would make anybody suspicious, is it?" she said, stuffing the money into her husband's shirt pocket.

"Can I trust you to act like a grown-up for about two minutes while I get my coat?"

"Sure." Zack shrugged, not looking up from the floor.

When Ruth was gone. Sully again motioned to the bench across from him, and this time Zack sighed and sat down. He looked so pitiful and unhappy that Sully had half a mind to tell him the truth and promise to reform.

"I don't know, Zachary," he admitted instead.

Zack was studying his fingernails now.

"Me neither, I guess," he said.

Which made Sully laugh. Which made Zack grin sheepishly.

"I don't know what I'm worried about even," he admitted.

"Hell, I'm a grandpa and she's a grandma."

"Me, too," Sully said, his knee humming to the tune his grandson Wacker had taught it that morning.

"A grandfather, that is."

110 Zack shrugged.

"We're too old to get ourselves arrested for fighting in public, I guess."

"That's assuming that people would recognize it as fighting." Ruth came out with her coat on, stood by the door.

"Well," she barked.

"Come on, dumbbell." Sully and Zack exchanged glances.

"I think she means you," Sully said. Zack cot up slowly. He knew who she meant without having to be told.

"You drive," V^told turn as they headed out the door- it1 wait both my hands free. " When the door swung shut behind them, Vince came out of the kitchen and started switching off the restaurant's remaining lights and singing, "Hello, young lovers, wherever you arc." When he pulled the plug on the jukebox, it made a resentful sound before the light went out.

"Tell the truth and shame the Devil," he said.

"Are you doing the two-step with young Mrs. Roebuck? Don't tell me you're too tired, either."

Sully slid out of the booth.

"I suppose I could find the energy if she'd have me " he admitted. It was a question he had never seriously considered.

"My guess is she loves her husband. Why is a mystery, but apparently she does."

"What makes you think so?" Sully didn't know why he thought so exactly, but he did. Maybe because she was supposed to. Maybe because every other young woman in Bath seemed to.

"The reason I ask,"

"Vince said, " is that I keep hearing she's involved with somebody in Schuyler. "

" I doubt it," Sully said, perhaps too quickly.

"You do?" ^"lee grinned. " I do. "

" I don't. " Vi"

" said- " Know why? "

"No, why."

"Because I don't want to go through life like that dumb bastard Zack.

Twenty years you and Ruth have been giving him horns, and he still can't make up his feeble mind if it's true. I'd rather be suspicious than a damn fool."

"He's not too bright, is he?" Sully conceded.

"Not too."

Feeling around in the dark for his keys. Sully located the clam and put it into his coat pocket. A clam, as Wirf pointed out, was a small thing, but you never knew when you might need one.

NOBODY'S FOOL 111

"Where the hell's the door?" he said. Vines, lit his cigarette lighter up next to his face to show where he was. His huge good-natured face reminded Sully of the demonic clown on the billboard outside of town.

"If I bang my knee between here and there," Sully warned, "your brother's going to own two restaurants." The White Horse Tavern had gone, in Sully's lifetime, from a classy watering hole for the Albany young and well-to-do, a summer haunt of well-dressed New Yorkers upstate for the August Thoroughbred meet at Schuyler Springs, to a shabby local restaurant pub The completion of the interstate, which allowed New York and Albany direct access to Schuyler Springs, Lake George, Lake Placid and Montreal did the deed, effectively isolating Bath, Schuyler Springs' onetime rival for healing waters.

The old, winding, two-lane blacktop once invited half a dozen drunken stops and supported twice that many roadhouses. In the forties and fifties, on an average Saturday night, there were numerous accidents along the twenty-five-mile stretch of road between Albany and Schuyler Springs, though fatalities, even serious injuries, were relatively rare. On the dark, tree-lined curves it was difficult to generate deadly speed, and the roadhouse taverns were close together and enough alike when you got there to make speed unnecessary. It wasn't unusual for drivers involved in head-on collisions to get out of their cars and fight drunkenly in the middle of the road over whose fault the accident had been. The occasional hot-rodding teen would kill himself, as Sully's older brother, Patrick, had done, but everyone knew teenagers were going to kill themselves. You couldn't blame the road or the roadhouses, really. On the new interstate there were no head-on collisions. Most places, the median dividing north- and southbound traffic was fifty yards or more across. Drivers simply fell asleep on its straight, smooth surface, then left the pavement, flew through the air at eighty miles an hour and located the nearest tree. The drivers didn't pick fights over whose fault it was. They were taken to the hospital as a formality, to be pronounced dead. Of the two dozen taverns that once had flourished in the corridor before the interstate was completed, only a handful were still in existence, and of these only The Horse and one or two others weren't seasonal. Most reopened, often under new ownership, during the summer, doing real business only during August, when the Schuyler Springs flat track opened and downstate headed north for the meet. Then every restaurant and bar within a twenty-mile radius of the track made a killing by raising its prices. Or as much of a killing as they could hope to make, knowing it'd have to last them the year. The owners of these local spots owed their marginal existence to the downstaters, who were used to being stolen from and who admired upstaters' limited imaginations when it came to thievery. The Horse, because it was located in the village of North Bath and was not technically a roadhouse at all, stayed open year round, though its character was dramatically different during racing season. In June, the whole place got a facelift. Stools and tables got repaired, the bar got varnished, the large back room was opened and cleaned, the light bulbs in its chandeliers replaced. A whole new staff, mostly college students imported from the Albany area, arrived wearing tennis shorts and polo shirts and began their drills ("Hi, I'm Todd, and I'll be your server tonight" ), and this was the sign for the locals to slink off into their seasonal exile. The new drink prices told them they weren't welcome in July and August. So did the new bartenders, ponytailed girls in some instances, who didn't have much to say to the likes of Sully and Wirf.

Rub Squeers wasn't even allowed in the door. Come September, after the snotty New Yorkers went home, taking with them their insults and their downstate accents and what remained of their cash, the roadhouses closed up one by one. The air was again cool at night, and familiar faces began to reappear at The Horse to compare notes and assess the damages of the season.

Tiny Duncan, who owned The Horse, often thought about trying to keep the big dining room open, then thought again and closed it. Business was always so good in August that he never quite believed it would shut off, like water from a new tap, after Labor Day.

Intellectually he knew it would, because it always did, every year, without exception. But in August, when he surveyed the crowded dining room, the line at the door that snaked down the street, he simply was unable to credit what he knew to be true. He began to contemplate the laws of cause and effect, wondering if maybe, just maybe, he didn't have things backwards. What if it was closing the dining room after Labor Day that caused the crowds to disappear, and not the disappearing crowds that caused him to close the dining room? But when the college-student waiters and bartenders said good-bye and returned to Albany and another semester at SUNY and RPI and Russell Sage, taking their bizarre, cheery optimism with them, Tiny knew that the gig was again up, and he allowed the establishment to slide again into gentle decline. For Tiny, the worst day of each year was the one when he let the regulars talk him into lugging the NOBODY'S FOOL 113 pool table back into the bar, where it stayed until the following July, when he would again need the space. The big round table in the dining room, the one he reserved for parties of eight to ten, got centered under a chandelier and became a poker table. It was all very depressing. For the winter holidays Tiny ran a single string of festive lights along the back bar, and each year the string contained fewer lights that worked. After New Year's, nobody was able to summon the energy to take them down. Tonight, despite his steadfast intention. Sully had gone to The Horse and gotten involved. Tiny had given his regular bartender, a man he suspected of stealing and giving away too many free drinks, the night off and was being a pain in the ass as usual. He didn't know why he bothered to stay open in the winter, when he lost money.

As soon as The Ultimate Escape opened, he was going to sell out and take his money and go live in Florida. If there was any money left after so many winters of bad business. For the past two hours Sully had half listened to Tiny bellyache, and he was now tired of it. Wirf had been listening to the same shit, but What was impossible to bend out of shape, this night or any other. The more Wirf drank the drunker he got, and the drunker he got the more tolerant he became, and by this time of night he wouldn't have said shit if he had a mouthful.

"You know what," Sully told him, not bothering to conceal his irritation.

"You wouldn't say shit if you had a mouthful."

"Wouldn't be much point," Wirf observed. He was wearing his postmidnight grin, and this grin had been known to get Sully worked up.

It wasn't really a grin at all. Past a certain point of intoxication, Wirf had imperfect control of his facial muscles, and this was just his rictus face. A big shit-eating grin.

"When was the last time you won a case?"

Sully asked him. The question surprised Wirf without, apparently, angering him.

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"You let everybody piss on your shoes is what it's got to do with," Sully explained.

"They walk right up, unzip and pee. And what do you do?

Stand there and grin at them. " Wirf chuckled good-naturedly now. " Who pisses on my shoes. Sully? Besides you, I mean. "

" Exactly," Tiny said from down the bar, where he'd retreated to avoid Sully.

Tiny, at nearly seventy, was huge, and when he sat on the stool he kept behind the bar on slow nights like this the stool disappeared, creating the illusion that Tiny was being magically supported on a pillow 114RICHARD RLSSO of air, like the puck in a game of air hockey. Tiny's obesity was another thing that irritated Sully after his fifth or sixth bottle of beer.

That and the fact that Tiny kept reminding him of the fact that he'd run his father. Big Jim, out of The Horse when Sully was a boy, thrown him out bodily into the street more than once, and was publicly on record as saying that one asshole Sullivan was pretty much the same as the next. " Come here a minute," Sully suggested.

There were only a half-dozen customers in the bar. Carl Roebuck had left before Sully and Vince came in. Vmce had drunk one beer, handed Sully, like a baton, over to Wirf and then left. Tiny was comfortable right where he was.