Nobody's Fool

disability payments.
    Sully stood—Miss Beryl wincing again as he placed his full weight on the arms of the Queen Anne—and, having inserted his toes into the unlaced work boot, scuffed it along the hardwood floor until he managed to pin it against the wall and force the entire foot in. “About time I went back to work, don’t you think?” he said.
    â€œWhat if they find out?”
    He grinned at her. “You aren’t going to squeal on me, are you?”
    â€œI should,” she said. “There’s probably a reward for turning people like you in. I could use the money.”
    Sully studied her, nodding. “Good thing Coach kicked off before he found out how mean you’d get in your old age.”
    Miss Beryl sighed. “I can’t suppose it would do any good to point out the obvious.”
    Sully shook his head. “Probably not. What’s the obvious?”
    â€œThat you’re going to hurt yourself. They’ll stop paying for your schooling, and you’ll be even worse off.”
    Sully shrugged. “You could be right, Beryl, but I think I’ll try. Anymore my leg hurts just as bad when I sit around as when I stand, so I might as well stand. I’ve pretty much decided I don’t want to fix air conditioners for the rest of my life.”
    He stomped his boot a couple times to make sure his foot was all the way in, rattling the knickknacks. “I swear to Christ, though. If you couldlearn to put this shoe on for me mornings, I’d marry you and learn to drink tea.”
    When Sully collapsed, exhausted, back into the Queen Anne and took out his cigarettes, Miss Beryl headed for the kitchen, where she kept her lone ashtray. Sully was the only person she allowed to smoke in her house, this exception granted on the grounds that he honestly couldn’t remember that she didn’t want him to. He never took note of the fact that there were no ashtrays. Indeed, it never occurred to him even to look for one until the long gray ash at the end of his cigarette was ready to fall. Even then Sully was not the sort of man to panic. He simply held the cigarette upright, as if its vertical position removed the threat of gravity. When the ash eventually fell anyway, he was sometimes quick enough to catch it in his lap, where the ash would stay until, having forgotten about it again, he stood up.
    By the time Miss Beryl arrived back with the crystal ashtray she’d bought in London five years before, Sully already had a pretty impressive ash working. “So,” Sully said, “you decide where you’re going this year?”
    Every winter for the past twenty, Miss Beryl had sallied forth, as she called it, around the first of the year, returning sometime in March when winter’s back was broken. Her flat was crowded with the souvenirs from these excursions—her walls adorned with an Egyptian spear, a Roman breastplate, a bronze dragon, tiki torches, her flat table surfaces crowded with Wedgwood, an Etruscan spirit boat, a two-headed Foo dog, the floor with wicker elephants, terra-cotta pots, a wooden sea chest. In the months preceding her safaris, she read travel books on her destination. This year she’d checked out books on Africa, where she hoped to find a companion for Driver Ed, who had been purchased in Vermont, actually, and might or might not have been authentic Zamble. Vermont had been about as far as she’d ever been able to convince Clive Sr. to sally forth. He didn’t like to go anywhere people wouldn’t recognize him as the North Bath football coach, which put them on a pretty short leash.
    â€œI’m staying put this winter,” she told Sully, surprised to discover that she’d come to this decision just a few minutes before while looking up into the trees.
    â€œThat must mean you’ve been everywhere,” Sully said.
    â€œThe early snow convinced me that this is our winter. God’s going to lower the boom. One of those limbs is going to come crashing down on us.”
    â€œSounds like a good reason to head for the Congo,” Sully offered.
    â€œThere’s no such place as the Congo anymore.”
    â€œNo?”
    â€œNo. And besides,” Miss Beryl reminded him, “God finds Jonah even in the belly of a whale.”
    Sully nodded. “God and the cops. That’s how come I stay close to home. So they know where to find me. Maybe that way they’ll go