Nobody's Fool

deal with legal tender smaller than quarters. Clive Jr. pointed at his watch. “You know where I’ve been?” he asked Sully.
    â€œNo clue,” Sully said.
    â€œSitting out back, waiting for you.”
    â€œI’ve been a little busy,” Sully pointed out with a sweeping gesture that took in the whole diner. It wasn’t as busy now as it had been when he’d gone behind the counter, but the point was still valid. “I figured you’d know enough to go home.”
    Clive Jr. bristled. “You’re the one who said to wait.”
    â€œI didn’t mean forever,” Sully said.
    Clive Jr. thought he heard someone snicker. This was not the place to confront Sully, it occurred to him.
    â€œHave a cup of coffee,” Sully suggested, pouring him one. “Tell me about your Thanksgiving. You had a pleasant one, I hope?”
    â€œActually, I had dinner with my fiancée,” Clive Jr. informed him. He was about to hint that his fiancée was someone of Sully’s acquaintance when he was interrupted.
    â€œYeah?” Sully said, apparently uninterested in Clive Jr.’s matrimonial plans. “What else did you do?”
    Clive Jr. narrowed his eyes, guessing now where this conversation was heading. Yesterday, while they were waiting for his mother’s return from her Thanksgiving, he and Joyce had gone upstairs to Sully’s flat to see how much damage Sully’d done since the last time he’d checked. “Nothing much,” he said weakly.
    â€œNothing much,” Sully repeated. “I thought maybe you went someplace you weren’t supposed to go.”
    Clive Jr. could feel the other men at the counter tuning in, with undisguised interest, to this conversation. He could also feel whose side they were on. Not his.
    â€œWe’ve been through this before,” Clive Jr. ventured. “A landlord has the right—”
    â€œYou aren’t my landlord,” Sully interrupted.
    â€œMy mother—”
    â€œIs the only reason I don’t kick your ass,” Sully finished for him. “Next time you go in my apartment without my permission even she won’t save you.”
    Clive Jr. could feel himself begin to shake with rage. And, as always happened in moments of high drama, he found himself outside his own person, one step back, a critical observer of his own weak performance. From this vantage point he saw himself stand with badly feigned dignity, take a dollar out of his wallet, put it wordlessly onto the counter, saw himself pivot like a comic German soldier on television, march ludicrously to the door past the row of silent men at the lunch counter. Maybe they weren’t silent. Maybe silence was what happened when the separation occurred and he found himself outside his own person. Be that as it may, the only thing Clive Jr. heard as he strode out of Hattie’s was the sound of his own voice telling his mother, that very morning, “I can handle Sully.”
    And, as always, it took him a while to reintegrate. The next thing he was aware of was sitting at his oak desk in the savings and loan, which meant that he’d either walked or driven there and let himself in by the side door. Also, he must have drawn back the front curtain that opened onto the street. Through the dark, tinted glass he could see all the way up Main to Hattie’s, where the door of the diner opened and two laughing men emerged. How many times over the years had he looked out this window just in time to see Sully coming up the street, looking for all the world like a man limping away from an accident, too dazed and stupid to assess theextent of his own injuries? Sully’s only design was to keep going, in defiance of reason.
    To Clive Jr. he sometimes seemed immortal, indestructible. He’d sensed Sully’s immortality forty years ago, late that spring afternoon of Sully’s senior year when he’d returned to their house one last time to tell Miss Beryl he was going to enlist in the army. Miss Beryl, to Clive Jr.’s great embarrassment, had tried to talk him out of it. When she was unsuccessful, she had pleaded with Clive Sr. to talk with him. But Clive Sr., as the football coach and a man with a moral duty to the community, took a dim view of draft dodging and applauded Sully’s patriotism. “You fool,” Miss Beryl had said, shocking Clive Jr., who could not recall her ever being contemptuous of