Nobody's Fool

for spring anyway. If the weather turned mild, he might prune some bushes, rake up the two years’ worth of sticks and leaves that had accumulated on the lawn, cart everything off. There looked to be enough work to keep him and Rub occupied, if not busy, all winter and most of the spring. Since Miles Anderson would be in New York, they could putter around at their own pace. On days when he felt up to it, Sully could do little jobs in the evening, which would actually save some money by keeping him out of The Horse and away from Wirf and out of conflict with Tiny. And on days when his knee wouldn’t let him work, he could say screw it and Miles Anderson would never know.
    Stubbing out his cigarette, he got out of the El Camino, went up the front walk, climbed the front porch. Through the large, uncurtained front window Sully could see a huge staircase leading upstairs, and along one wall was a fireplace big enough for a grown man to sit in the center of. In feet, the empty rooms were about twice as cavernous looking as his own, and he remembered how empty the rooms in Carl and Toby’s house had looked before they started filling them up with possessions. This house was bigger than the Roebucks’. Whoever Miles Anderson was, Sully thoughtagain, he must have a lot of shit if he expected to fill so many rooms. In two and a half decades he hadn’t been able to fill his own flat, half the rooms of which he’d closed off. Other people seemed to have the opposite problem, he knew. Ruth was always complaining that she couldn’t turn around in her house without bumping into something that wasn’t there yesterday. And Miss Beryl’s flat, the same size as Sully’s own, was full of stuff she’d brought back from her travels. Sully was sure his inability to attract clutter meant something, but he wasn’t sure what. He sat on the front porch steps and thought about it.
    When it got to be eleven-thirty and Miles Anderson was half an hour late, Sully pulled out the slip of paper on which he’d written the address and checked it again, not that there was much chance of having made a mistake. This was the only vacant house on the street, and he had repeated what Anderson said on the phone. No, Miles Anderson was just late, and Sully was not surprised. He’d had the kind of voice Sully hated, the kind that suggested whatever time he arrived at a place was “on time” by definition. The good news was that if he hired Sully they wouldn’t have to see each other much. That wouldn’t be a bad arrangement if Sully could keep from getting bent out of shape here at the start. To avoid that, he stood, flexed his knees, strolled to the corner.
    A block and a half down Bowdon, just before the street dead-ended, was the house where Sully had grown up. Until the Sans Souci went under and the baths were closed to the public, the house had been the caretaker’s. For years Sully’s father himself had been employed there, his job being to enforce the NO TRESPASSING signs posted every few feet along the eight-foot-high, rusting, cast-iron fence that ringed the estate. Basically the job was keeping kids out and making sure that no one got into the old hotel and stole its fixtures, its marble tiles and stained glass. Big Jim Sullivan was the perfect man for a job with few defined duties besides being mean to other people’s kids. He was mean to his own for free, and it suited him fine to be paid for being mean to other people’s. One boy he’d sent to the hospital, where he nearly died. Sully’s father had caught him inside the fence and given chase, catching the boy perched delicately atop the fence where he was attempting to negotiate its jagged iron spikes.
    Big Jim had been a slow, powerfully built man, proud of his bulk when bulk was called for and easily infuriated when faced with any situation, like chasing kids, that called not for bulk but for speed. And so it had enraged him to be first outrun, then made fun of (his father had claimed the boy was taunting him from atop the tall fence). And so Big Jim shookthe fence, “to get him on down from there before he hurt himself,” he later told the police. When the boy slipped, Big Jim had returned to the house, his face pale, to tell Sully’s mother to call the fire department to come get the boy down. Also to call for a doctor. Both Sully and his brother had run outside to see. What they found