Nobody's Fool

pitiful state of affairs when I’m gone?” Carl wondered.
    Sully got up. “I’ll still blame you,” he said.
    Neither man spoke for a second. Sully didn’t think he’d ever seen a sadder-looking man than Carl Roebuck at that moment. “How about letting me take the El Camino for a day or two,” Sully said.
    â€œWhy not? It’s about shot anyhow,” Carl said, fishing in his pocket for the keys. “Somebody said you were working at Hattie’s,” he added.
    Sully shook his head, amazed as always about the speed with which inconsequential news traveled in Bath. “I better go see if Harold’s got another beater to sell me. And I’m supposed to meet a guy named Miles Anderson who wants me to renovate some house on Main for him.”
    â€œYou should have some business cards printed up,” Carl suggested. “Don Sullivan: Jack-Off. All Trades.”
    â€œThanks for the car.” Sully jiggled the keys.
    â€œI was under the impression you were going to do a job for
me
today,” Carl said.
    â€œI’ll see if I can work you in this afternoon when I’m done jacking off,” Sully said, sliding out of the booth again.
    â€œSend that girl back over on your way out,” Carl told him. “She was just offering to give me a header under the table.”
    Rub was wiping cream off his face with a paper napkin when Sully returned. “That girl kept looking at me,” he said, indicating the woman who’d been sitting in Carl’s booth and who now returned to it. “Now Carl’s got her,” he added unhappily.
    Proxmire Motors was located a mile out of town, just off the blacktop, sandwiched in between Harold’s Junkyard and Harold’s Auto Parts, all three establishments owned and operated by Harold Proxmire. A tow truck with PROXMIRE WRECKING stenciled on the doors also sat in the yard. The sign out front, atop a bent pole, said HAROLD’S AUTOMOTIVE WORLD . Harold’s had five full-time employees—Harold Proxmire; Harold’s wife, Gloria; his chief and only mechanic, a sour-dispositioned man Harold had instructed never, under any circumstances, to speak to the public; a tiny, elderly man who wandered up and down the aisles of the auto parts store, squinting up into the dark upper reaches of the metal shelving stacked with remaindered auto parts; and a teenager, usually a dropout from the high school, whom the Proxmires took under their wing. Harold and Mrs. Proxmire were both Christians, and they hired only troubled Christian teens to fill the teenager slot in their employment scheme. Harold always tried to find a boy who’d been to jail or reform school at least once, somebody no one else would hire. He paid this boy minimum wage, and Mrs. Harold tutored him in Christian precepts for free from her seat at the cash register. Harold usually hired three of these boys a year. Four months was their average tenure, after which some were lured away by Mammon, in the form of a quarter-an-hour raise. Others just cleaned out the till andbolted. The last had left Mrs. Harold a note in the big bill slot of the cash register that said: “Jesus was a stupid fuck. And so are you.”
    Harold’s current teenager, Dwayne, was lanky and red-haired and sullen, and so far he hadn’t stolen anything from Harold’s Automotive World, though he was beginning to wilt under the weight of daily moral instruction. Mrs. Harold’s lectures about honesty, her constant reminders to be on the alert for Satan in his many guises, worried him some. Dwayne was never tempted to steal anything from Harold, whom he was fond of and grateful to, or even from Mrs. Harold, whom he could tolerate in small doses, and he wondered what was wrong with him that Satan should pay him so little attention. What annoyed him even more than the fact that Satan ignored him was the fact that Harold’s customers did too. Every one of them wanted to deal with Harold only, and Dwayne’s principal duty was to locate his boss, who divided himself among the lot, the garage, the junkyard and the parts store, supervising the operation of all of these at once, abandoning one to wait on an impatient customer in the other.
    When the C. I. Roebuck El Camino pulled in, therefore, Dwayne did not expect to be accorded much respect, and he wasn’t disappointed when Sully got out and said, “Where’s Harold?” Dwayne had