Nobody's Fool (59 page)

And maybe other things too, none of them good. No matter what it meant, he was glad to see her there at Ruby's desk with the phone to her ear and apparently in good spirits, to judge from the grin she flashed him. She motioned to the two chairs behind the coffee table.

"I'll tell him, Clyde," she was saying.

"No guarantees. You know how he is .. ."

Sully ignored the invitation to sit down but stuck his head inside CCarl's inner office. No Carl.

NOBODY'S FOOL 323

Toby hung up the phone, stared at Sully.

"I heard you'd made another career move," she said.

"You smell like grease." Sully had been all set to comment on her own apparent career move before being beaten to the punch. Also, it was disquieting to note how often women commented upon how he smelled right up front, before hello even.

"It's a terrible thing to have so many talents," he told her.

"Who's this?"

she said, examining Will, whose existence Sully had momentarily forgotten under Toby Roebuck's influence.

"My grandson," he told her, then to Will, "Say hi to Mrs. Roebuck." Will, shy as always, murmured something like a hello.

"I hadn't even gotten used to the idea that you had a son yet," Toby observed, "and here you are a grandfather.

Hard to imagine. "

" My son said almost the same thing this morning," he admitted. " What's the deal? Is Ruby sick? " She made a face. " Alas, Ruby is no more, having tendered her resignation last Friday. I should have warned her that resignation would be the outcome. "

" Where'd she go? " She shrugged. " We could follow the trail of mascara .. . "

"Let's not," Sully suggested.

"It's pretty discouraging to think about so many girls crying over your husband. I know since women's lib we're not supposed to say that women are stupid, but the way they all fall for Carl kind of suggests it."

"You think they should all fall for you?"

"Not all," Sully said.

"But if Carl can fool them all, I ought to be able to fool one or two."

"You aren't fooling Ruth any more?"

Sully ignored the question behind the question. In fact, he had not seen Ruth in three weeks, since Janey's husband, Roy, shot up the wrong house and put Janey into the hospital with a broken jaw and a severe concussion.

Somehow, Ruth had construed the entire series of events to be Sully's fault.

That was the message she'd delivered bright and early the next morning, before he was completely awake even. It had not been one of their usual arguments, carried on in private, in some motel room or the front seat of Sully's pickup. She'd suddenly just materialized there at Hattie's before he'd even loaned Rub his first dollar of the day, before he'd taken a sip of his coffee, before he'd even gotten to square one in the business of figuring out what he was going to say to Ruth when he ran into 324 RICHARD R U S S 0 her. He had only just finished hearing about the events in question from a still badly shaken Miss Beryl a few minutes before. In fact, the part of the problem he was working on there at Hattie's was whether to go looking for Ruth or let her find him. On general principle he hated to go looking for trouble, but he was also aware that trouble could get worse if you let it find you. And here it was before he could decide. He hadn't even been aware of K"^ at first, just that the lunch counter had gone silent, as if everyone were holding his breath. And when he turned and saw who it was at his shoulder, it wasn't Ruth's sudden presence that concerned him so much as her appearance. She looked like a woman who'd lost what remained of her youth over night. She looked every day of her forty-eight-plus years, and there was something terrible about her expression, too, as if she herself realized that she'd lost, decisively, some great battle she'd been waging, and was glad, now that she'd thought about it, to have lost it. Whatever battle she'd lost. Sully could tell she had no intention of losing the fight she was about to pick with him. She looked ready to make short work of him and anyone foolish enough to take his side. The only person in the diner who might remotely have been Sully's ally was Rub, who occupied the stool on Sully's other side and who was so scared when he saw Ruth coming that he was unable to find his voice to warn Sully. In fact, he couldn't have been more frightened if he'd just been informed that Carl Roebuck had found all those blocks they'd dumped behind the demonic clown, or even if Bootsie had come to whack his peenie. And indeed Ruth had made short work of Sully, who'd boldly played the only card in his hand, having mistakenly concluded that it was trump. " I wasn't even there, Ruth," he said.

She'd let this statement hang there until the words themselves began to form, like skywriting, in the air between them.

"I know you weren't, Sully," she told him, lowering her gruff voice like she always did when she was about to deliver a direct hit.

"But then when was the last time you were there for anybody who needed you?"

Ruth always had a flair for exit lines. Sully watched her go without getting up from his stool, without calling to her, watched her through the diner's front window as she got into the car where Zack, to Sully's further astonishment, had been waiting for her. Then the diner was filled with mad cackling. For a moment he wondered if what he was hearing was interior, his own confusion made audible, but it turned out to be old Hattie behind him in her booth, the old woman reacting to dimly perceived tension with NOBODY'S FOOL325 raucous hilarity. It had taken Cass the rest of the morning to calm her mother down.

"I never did fool Ruth," Sully told Toby Roebuck now.

"She just happened to like me regardless."

"That's the way everybody likes you. Sully."

"Well, it's better than being disliked, I guess," Sully said. Toby Roebuck didn't respond right away, which left the proceedings pretty empty. Had Sully been asked at that moment to name one thing he particularly disliked about women, even women he was most fond of, he'd have said it was the way they could get significantly quiet, as if to afford a man the opportunity to consider what he'd just said.

"I ran into her yesterday, actually," Toby said finally.

"Who?"

"Who?" she repeated.

"Ruth, who. Who were we just talking about?"

"Oh, her," Sully said, forcing a grin.

"She had a tiny little girl with her." This was probably a question, but Sully decided not to go into it. Janey had still not been released from the hospital. Sully himself had only a sketchy knowledge of what had transpired during the last two weeks. Vince had come into The Horse late one night after closing Jerry's Pizza and filled him in.

According to Vince, Ruth had taken her two weeks' vacation from her day job at the IGA, as well as from her waitressing at the restaurant (for which Vince held Sully responsible) so she could look after Tina while Janey remained at the hospital. This loss of income from his wife's two jobs had forced Zack to contemplate finding a steady job himself.

Janey's husband, Roy, having failed to make bond, was still in jail awaiting trial. Everyone seemed to agree that that was the best place for him, especially since he'd threatened, as soon as he got out, to get even with Sully for hiding his wife and kid.

"So," Toby Roebuck said.

"So," Sully agreed. To what, he had no idea.

"So, just like that, you and Ruth are finished."

"It's true I'm available, if that's what you're getting at."

"Sully, Sully, Sully."

"That's what your husband always says," Sully told her.

Then, seeing a welcome opportunity to change the subject, "You didn't answer my question, though. Are you just filling in, or can I sneak up here and find you any time?"

"For a while, it looks like," she said.

"He's out at the yard, in case you were wondering. He's a new man, he says. A man of many resolutions. You should ask him all about them. They're over an hour old, though, so he may not remember." Sully nodded, getting to his feet.

"I can't wait to hear all about it. If I miss him, tell him I was here." To Will: "What do you say, sport? You ready to go?" Will, who had not uttered a word since his mumbled hello, got to his feet and preceded his grandfather into the hall.

"You're sure he's related to you?" Toby said.

"I know," Sully said. Then, since the boy was out of earshot, he said, "I don't want to say anything, but Ruby always wore see-through blouses. Of course, it's up to you .. ." Sully wasn't sure what he expected the result of this teasing to be. Maybe that she'd pitch something at him in mock outrage. And so he was closing the door, even as he spoke, and the door was almost closed by the time he finished. Almost. Which meant that he almost didn't sec when Toby Roebuck flashed him from where she sat behind the desk, her sweatshirt pulled up and then back down for a millisecond. Unsure he'd seen what he'd seen, he remained rooted to the spot in the hall outside the door. Exactly how long he stood there, he wasn't sure. A beat?

Two beats? Three? It was Will's voice coming from the head of the stairs that reestablished a time space context.

"What's the matter, Grandpa?" the boy said, his face a mask of urgent worry. From inside, a peal of hilarity.

"Yeah, Grandpa," Toby Roebuck called.

"What's the matter?" The night Sully and Peter had stolen the snow blower from Carl Roebuck's equipment yard there had been, unknown to them, a casualty, indeed a near fatality. Rasputin, CCarl's Doberman, had suffered a stroke. Sully and Peter had seen the dog crumple, but they'd assumed it had simply gone to sleep on its feet and dropped. This was not the case. The dog's training, to attack savagely any unauthorized nocturnal visitors to the yard, had come into deep psychological conflict with drug-induced goodwill and drowsiness. Unable to resolve the urge to kill with the urge to sleep, Rasputin's circuitry had simply shut down.

Since that night the dog had regained only a small measure of its 327 physical capabilities. He had a lopsided appearance now, one side of his body, corresponding to the opposite side of his brain, pretty much nonfunctional, his former ferocity vanished. As if the dog had learned the value of a good night's sleep, he now slept most of the time and even when awake wandered along the perimeter of the fence aimlessly, drooling out of one side of his mouth, as if in search of his lost aggression.

Visitors he'd previously made nervous with deep-throated growls he now nuzzled affectionately with his long snout, then licked their fingers.

All except Sully. It is possible a dog will not forget his poisoner.

When Sully pulled up and parked by the fence, Rasputin, who had been lying asleep in his favorite spot--the one where he'd collapsed the night Sully's hamburger changed his life--woke up, growled deep in his throat and tried to stand, an activity that always drew a crowd. Carl Roebuck and two of his men, just emerging from the Tip Top Construction trailer, stopped to watch this excellent entertainment. Once Rasputin was on his feet he could limp along well enough, but getting up from the cold ground after a long nap required, on the average, half a dozen attempts. The problem seemed to be that the animal's good side, which responded as it always had, was impatient with the defective side, which refused to function at high speed, causing the dog to circle itself, like a boat with only one oar in the water, until finally the animal collapsed and had to start over again. Only when the dog was sufficiently exhausted for the functioning side of his body to go slowly enough to meet the requirements of the stroke-damaged side could he stand.

By then he was ready for another nap. The men on the trailer steps watched several of these aborted attempts, shaking their heads in good-humored disbelief. Sully and Will watched for a moment also, the boy's eyes growing wide and round with wonder and fear.

"What's wrong with him. Grandpa?" the boy asked.

"He had a little accident a couple weeks ago," explained Sully, who had seen the dog a couple of times in the interim.

"You want to ride on my shoulders?"

When Will nodded enthusiastically. Sully swung him aboard.

"Look who's here," Carl Roebuck said when he noticed Sully and the boy approaching.

"You come to admire your handiwork?"

"It's not my fault you got a spastic Doberman," Sully said, setting Will down on the step.

The boy was still warily watching Rasputin circle. Hearing Sully's voice, the dog was now emitting small howls of frustration.

"I think it is your fault," Carl said.

"I just wish I could prove 3 2 it."

Then, to the two men who were watching the dog, "I know you guys'd love to stay here all afternoon and watch this dog have another stroke .. "

"I would," one of the men said.

"I admit it." But he and the other man headed for the gate, and Carl and Sully and the boy went inside the trailer.

Carl Roebuck went around behind the small metal desk and sat down, put his feet up and studied first the boy, then Sully.

"Don Sullivan," he said knowingly.

"Thief of Snowblowcrs, Poisoner of Dogs, Flipper of Pancakes.

Secret Father and Grandfather. Jack-Off, All Trades. How they hangin'?"