Nobody's Fool (57 page)

In truth, she did not want to see Sully tonight or be charmed by him or be reminded of the boy she and Clive Sr. had been so fond of so long ago. Nor would she listen to Driver Ed anymore. If she'd been able to, she'd have turned a deaf ear to the sound of Sully's defiant laughter filtering down through the ceiling, as if to lift her deadened spirits, as if, after the events that had taken place outside her front window, anything were capable of lifting them. Still, what a fine sound that laughter was compared to Clive Jr. "s humorless, professionally modulated banker's voice, his "Haven't I been warning you all along" that she'd been forced to listen to tonight. He had come by with the dreadful Joyce woman, claiming to have seen the police cars, but Miss Beryl suspected her friend Mrs. Gruber had called him.

And at the time she was still badly shaken by everything that had happened and not unhappy to see Clive Jr. " who was, after all, her son, who bore the name of the man who'd loved her, who'd been the star other firmament. No, she was grateful to see Clive Jr." who'd spoken to the policemen outside with the calm assurance of a man who paid their salaries, and they had nodded at him in perfect agreement.

Later, she had told him her fear that this was the year God intended to lower the boom, and then she'd let him convince her that Sully, NOBODY'S FOOL307 as he had so long warned her, was the symbolic branch poised to fall upon her from above. How disappointing to have to admit that her son was right, to see the sense of accomplishment in his face when he realized that at last she intended to follow his advice. What a shame to lose Sully as an ally after so many years. How dreadful to see clearly, finally, what she had no choice but to do.

in the dark mid-December gray of first light, a I i new banner was being strung, and Cass, behind the lunch counter, paused to see what this new one would say. Recent banners had not brought much luck.

Bath had not trounced Schuyler Springs. They had not beaten Schuyler Springs. Indeed, Bath had not been in the game, and the Schuyler Springs Sentinel had again run an editorial suggesting that Bath be dropped from the Schuyler schedule on humanitarian grounds. People were none too sure things were looking f in Bath, either. A rumor had recently begun to circulate that the Sans Souci would not reopen in the summer as planned, and there was new trouble with The Ultimate Escape.

Opposit ion had arisen in the form of a group concerned that the new Bath cemetery on the outskirts of town would be uprooted, the eternal rest of its inhabitants disturbed. So far the group consisted of no more than a handful of residents whose attempts to draw attention to its cause had been unsuccessful in their own community. The North Bath Weekly Journal had failed to cover their maiden protest in front of the demonic clown billboard. Predictably, the Schuyler Sentinel, ever alert to the possibility of humiliating its onetime rival and current straw opponent, had covered the protest in a small article in the back section of the weekend edition and since then had run three more articles on the ensuing "controversy," each longer than the previous, each inching closer to section A. The interest raised by the Sentinel articles had forced the North Bath Weekly Journal to run a stern editorial suggesting that Schuylcr Springs, which had its racetrack and its baths and its summer theater and concert series, should stay out of its less fortunate sister city's affairs, quit trying to torpedo its long-awaited and much-deserved good fortune. The living residents of Bath needed this economic shot in the arm, the Journal said, so let the dead bury the dead. More important, the land designated for the new cemetery had never been suitable for a burial site, the ground being far too boggy.

Last spring, after several days of heavy rain, a plot had been back hoed only to discover that the ground beneath already contained an occupant.

The casket had migrated several feet from where it was supposed to be located and was no longer precisely beneath the gravestone that marked it, though another casket was. It was feared that the entire regiment of caskets planted since the new cemetery opened ten years earlier, row upon row of them, was slowly marching toward the freeway at the rate of an inch or two a month. Face it, the editorial said, all these dead people were already on the move. Better to dig them up now while they were still more or less where they were supposed to be, before they reached the sea. The Journal urged the establishment of a commission to find another cemetery site. At the front door of the diner, after letting himself in. Sully stared at the new banner, trying to draw the words into focus. new england holy days, it seemed to say.

"Holy Days?" Sully looked again.

"Holly Days," he corrected.

"Neither one makes much sense, does it," Cass said, "since this isn't New England."

"Well, we're only thirty miles from Vermont," Sully reminded her, closing the door behind him and locking it again.

"Seems like more, doesn't it," she said.

"How come their towns look like postcards?"

"Want me to get the old girl?" Sully said, seeing that Hattie was not in her booth. When Cass did not answer. Sully took this for a yes.

It was becoming clear to him that gathering the old woman from the apartment in the rear of the diner and getting her settled in her booth for the long morning was one of his duties. Otherwise, Cass was perversely content to let her mother pound on the apartment door with her bony fists. Hattie had been instructed not to try to come into the diner by herself because the passageway between the apartment and the diner had a step and she needed help to NOBODY'S FOOL 313 negotiate this, but if the old woman felt that she was being left alone too long in the apartment she felt no compunction about bellowing at the top of her voice and banging on the door until her arthritic hands swelled grotesquely. Then she sat in her booth and chewed Anacin tablets all morning for the pain.

"Let her bang," Cass always advised, but Sully knew it was better to fetch the old woman, make her happy and comfortable in her booth. He also suspected that Cass appreciated his accomplishing this task, that it was a small vacation from the larger burden of her constant responsibility. Cass also enjoyed the few minutes she had in the dark diner by herself before her early morning customers arrived when she opened at six-thirty. Old Hattie, who couldn't hear much of anything else, always heard Sully when he came to get her. Either that or she felt the vibration of his heavy footfalls in the passageway, because when Sully poked his head into the dark living room of the apartment, the old woman was always in the process of struggling to her feet.

"Hello, old woman," he said this morning.

"I see you're still kickin'."

"Still kickin'." Hattie grinned fiercely, righting herself with the aid of the sofa arm and extending a bony elbow to him.

"Ready for another hard day's work?" He took her arm and steadied himself for her added weight.

Hattie couldn't weigh more than eighty-five pounds, but he'd learned quickly that eighty-five pounds was enough to cause him to lose his own balance, especially this early, before his knee loosened up.

"Hard day's work!" Hattie echoed, latching onto him with her claws.

"Wait a second," Sully said, trying to unfasten her talons.

"Get on my good side. Every morning we go through this. Pay attention, will you?"

"Attention!" Hattie bellowed. It took a minute, but he finally got her situated and they headed for the door.

"I know you love to bang my bad knee, but I'm not going to let you do it today, all right?"

"Right!"

"Here comes the step."

"Up?"

"Down, dumbbell, same as yesterday. You think somebody built a new step going the other way just to confuse you?"

"Down," Hattie said, and together they took the step.

"There," Sully said.

"We made it again."

"Made it!"

"Now," he said.

"When you go back tonight, which way will the step be?"

"Down!"

"Down?" Sully said.

"You just went down. They can't all be down.

Sooner or later you got to go up, don't you?"

"Up!"

"Here you are, old girl," Sully said when they'd traveled the length of the diner under Cass's watchful eye.

"You want anything?" The old woman slid in, smoothed her hands over the cool formica tabletop as if there might be a message for her there in Braille.

"Who are you?" she said finally.

"You sound like that dam Sully."

"She's losing ground," Sully said when he joined Cass behind the counter and tied on an apron.

Cass looked at him over the tops other glasses.

"Don't try to cheer me up," she said. Sully had been working at Hatrie's for over two weeks now, since Roof quit and went back home to North CCarlina, leaving the village of Bath temporarily without a black man and thus a convenient external referent for the word "nigger." It was not a much-used word anyway, and the residents of Bath, at least those who frequented Hatrie's, discovered that its rare use was now tied to muscle memory.

For years whenever they'd used the word they'd looked around to locate Roof and make sure he hadn't overheard them or to apologize if he had.

Now that he was gone they sri ll looked around and felt a little foolish when they remembered he was gone. For a day or two the regulars at Hatrie's had joked that a delegation would have to be sent over to Schuylcr Springs, which had plenty of blacks, as evidenced by their football and basketball teams, and borrow a nigger until a permanent replacement for Roof could be found.

When Sully decided to help Cass in the mornings, he'd had to take a lot of ribbing from those (it was Carl Roebuck's line) who said they were relieved to discover how easy it was to find another nigger when you lost one.

Helping Cass out was Sully's official reason for doing the breakfast shift, but there were other reasons, all of them money. Since borrowing a small down payment from Wirf and getting HCarld Proxmire to let him make payments on the truck and borrow the snowplow blade when it snowed, it hadn't snowed once, which meant that Sully wouldn't be able to make his first payment next week. HCarld wouldn't be expecting it, given the fact that it hadn't snowed, but the continued blue skies made NOBODY'S FOOL 315 Sully nervous.

Last winter there'd been virtually no snow, and if this winter was another one like it, he'd be going into spring buried under the kind of debt he'd have had a hard time paying off even on two good legs. His knee didn't seem to be any worse since going back to work, but it wasn't any better either, and he dreaded another accident on it, knowing that would finish him for good. Working behind the lunch counter at Hattie's had its advantages. Standing next to the warm grill gradually loosened his knee, which always felt its worst early in the morning. The two or three steps he had to take between the grill and the fridge was just the right amount of exercise for the first three hours of his day, between six-thirty and nine-thirty, after which he'd be limber enough to join Rub and Peter out at the Anderson house or go out on a job for Carl Roebuck if Carl happened to have one of those small, scum-sucking, nasty jobs he delighted in giving to Sully.

He preferred to work for Carl when he could, because there wasn't really enough work at the house to keep three men busy for an entire winter, even when one was a cripple, another a born sandbagger and the third a moonlighting college professor. Actually, Sully had been surprised when Peter appeared in the El Camino two weeks after returning to West Virginia.

That period of time had been nearly sufficient for Sully to forget the offer of work he had extended to his son, work he'd since come to think of as his own and Rub's. Which meant that he'd either have to let Rub go back to work for his cousins or find additional work. So he told Cass not to worry about finding a breakfast fry cook, at least for the rest of the winter. That decision was easy once he made his mind up.

More difficult was coaxing work out of Carl Roebuck, who was constantly bellyaching that Tip Top Construction was slowly going under and claiming it would go under fast if Clive Peoples fucked up and let the Ultimate Escape deal go south.

Sully doubted whether this was any more than bellyaching, and while he was confident of Clive Jr. "s ability to fuck anything up, he doubted it would happen in this instance, because that could just conceivably ruin Carl Roebuck, whose good fortune. Sully believed, was one of the few constants in an otherwise mutable life. It was true enough that Carl never had much at this time of year. Worse, he was a wizard at sensing Sully's need and was not above paying him less than Sully would have accepted if his need hadn't been so great and then telling him he was a lot more likable when he was humble, to which Sully always responded that this was one of the differences between them--that Carl was never likable. At six-thirty, when Cass unlocked the front door, a small cluster of men. Rub among them, had gathered outside and were stamping their feet in the cold, awaiting admittance into the warmth and light. Rub immediately slid onto the stool closest to where Sully was stationed at the grill, mixing eggs in a bowl with a'metal whisk.

This last week, since Peter's return to Bath, had been tough on Rub.

He was used to having Sully all to himself, not having to share him with Peter and the little boy. Until a month ago Rub had been blissfully ignorant of the fact that Sully had a son, much less a grandson, and he didn't think it was quite fair for these two people to turn up now without warning and just assume they were welcome. He didn't like having to work with Peter, who was not a good listener like Sully. Plus, when Peter talked to Rub at all, which was not often, it was in a different kind of English than Rub was used to, an English that made him feel stupid. Old Lady Peoples had warned him when he was in the eighth grade that the world rewarded people who talked well enough to make other people feel stupid, and of course it was true, so he wasn't really that surprised. Even worse. Sully himself had started talking differently, at least to Peter. It was his son that Sully seemed to have things to say to now, not Rub, and there was also some evidence to suggest that Sully actually listened to what his son was saying in return. That Sully would listen and respond to Peter particularly annoyed Rub, who liked to think of Sully as his one true friend. After all. Rub told Sully things he never told anybody else, even Bootsie, his wife. Wah Sully he shared his deepest desires, which had nothing to do with Bootsie, holding nothing back. As soon as it occurred to Rub to desire something, he told Sully about it right away, so they could contemplate it together. To Rub's mind, Sully's one human flaw was that he didn't seem to want much more than he had, which seemed unaccountable. If you were standing outside in the cold and wet, it was only natural to wish you were inside where it was warm and dry, so Rub wished it, and not just selfishly for himself, but for Sully too. That was friendship. Maybe Peter was Sully's son, but Rub was pretty sure Peter had no such strong feelings for Sully. He wasn't really Sully's friend. And as Rub slid onto the stool, as close as he could get to Sully on the other side of the counter, he'd have liked to explain this whole friendship deal to him, so he'd know. Instead he said, "Could I borrow a dollar?" Sully slipped his long spatula under a phalanx of sausage links and flipped them before turning to Rub, who immediately looked at the countertop and flushed.