Nobody's Fool

lost track. Weekday mornings there were so few customers at Harold’s that Dwayne spent most of his time daydreaming and trying to steer clear of Mrs. Harold, who that day happened to be in an Old Testament mood.
    Harold Proxmire himself was tall and lean and sallow-skinned and always clad in gray, and on a day as gray as this one he moved about the lot like a phantom on quiet, thick-soled shoes. “Somewheres,” Dwayne said with a sweeping gesture that included all three businesses.
    While her husband might be anywhere, Mrs. Harold, a tiny, round woman with a beehive hairdo that appeared to nearly double her height, could always be found at the cash register, and so this was where Sully sought her out. Mrs. Harold was the immediate source of her husband’s Christianity, which had burrowed deep into his bones, an inner presence to counterbalance Mrs. Harold’s brand of devotion, which was right out there in the open. In between sales she read scripture on her stool at the cash register, surrounded by Disney souvenirs. Disney World was Mrs. Harold’s favorite place, and every year in February she dragged her husband to Orlando and rode every ride in the Magic Kingdom, where everything was clean and sunny and the lines moved. There was probably dirty, smelly, greasy machinery somewhere that ran the whole Kingdom, but the Disney people knew enough to keep it out of sight. Underground, probably. There was supposed to be a tour you could take where they’dshow you how everything ran, but it was the one thing in Disney World Mrs. Harold wasn’t interested in. It’d spoil the magic, was the way she looked at it. She wouldn’t let Harold go see it either for fear he’d explain everything to her, which would be even worse.
    Each year before they returned home, Mrs. Harold bought about two thousand dollars’ worth of Disney paraphernalia, and she ran a small Disney concession, without authorization or permission, in the office of Harold’s Automotive World. For most of the spring the walls would be covered with Disney movie posters and T-shirts, the cash register surrounded by water-skiing Goofys and rubber Plutos and a stack of big-eared mouse hats. Now, in late November, most of the merchandise had been sold off and the drab walls were again bare, except for a tall Cinderella poster that depicted, among other things, three plump Disney fairies, one of which reminded Sully of Mrs. Harold herself. Next to the cash register was a small box of cheap plastic Disney figurines and a half-dozen rubber alligators.
    Invoices and purchases at all three businesses were rung through her register, and when she looked up from that register at her customers, her suspicious expression conveyed something of her inner fear that any one of them might be Satan in disguise. She was certain that Sully, for instance, was in league with the Devil somehow, though she doubted he was very far up in the satanic hierarchy. In a deep, secluded part of her heart to which Mrs. Harold no longer had immediate access, she was very fond of Sully, who always kidded with her, something nobody else had the courage to do, even her husband. Whenever Sully appeared, something of the girl she had once been always slipped out of the fortress she’d been imprisoned in, though that girl was easily recaptured, having forgotten how or where or even why to flee many long years ago.
    â€œHello, Esmerelda,” Sully said when the door had swung closed behind him and Rub.
    Esmerelda was not Mrs. Harold’s name, of course, but it was the name Sully, who couldn’t remember names, had been calling her for years and years. Was it the name of the imprisoned girl?
    Mrs. Harold set her Bible down and refused Sully the smile she knew he was after. “Harold!” she barked into the intercom, which crackled to life over the bullhorns mounted on wooden poles in the yard outside. “Customer!”
    Sully picked up and examined one of the rubber alligators from the box beside the cash register. “What extortionary price are you asking for these?” Sully asked Mrs. Harold.
    Mrs. Harold had been charging three dollars for them and was aboutto tell Sully this when, to her surprise, Esmerelda spoke up and said, “One dollar.”
    â€œOkay,” Sully said, slipping one of the alligators into his coat pocket and handing Mrs. Harold a dollar. “I’ll take one. I know somebody who likes