Nobody's Fool

his fingers through his hair. “Bad enough,” he said. Three hundred and fifty or four hundred dollars was what he figured. Maybe more.
    â€œI told you you’d be safer on the roof,” Carl reminded him.
    â€œHow did you know that I-told-you-so was just what I wanted to hear?”
    â€œTo know you is to need to say it. Ask anybody,” Carl observed.
    â€œSomehow I always mind it more coming from you,” Sully observed. Actually, he minded it more or less universally. He’d minded it earlier when Ruth had either said or suggested it half a dozen times in the hour they’d been together. He minded it when Wirf said it. He minded it even when people didn’t say it but were thinking it.
    â€œI gotta go pee,” Carl said. “You want anything while I’m in there?”
    Rub was coming out of the men’s room when Carl went in. He joined Sully at the bar but didn’t sit down. “I gotta go home,” he said. “Bootsie’s gonna whack my peenie for sure.”
    â€œAren’t you going to drink your beer at least?” Sully said, indicating Carl Roebuck’s long-neck bottle.
    â€œI thought that was Carl’s,” Rub said.
    â€œI bought it for you,” Sully assured him.
    Rub looked at it suspiciously. “It looks like somebody already took a drink out of it,” he said.
    â€œNah,” Sully told him. “I’ve been sitting right here.”
    â€œHow come it’s not full, then?”
    â€œSometimes they aren’t,” Sully told him. “No one knows why.”
    Rub took a swig. “It feels like somebody’s lips have been on it,” he said.
    Sully grinned at him. “How’d you end up?”
    Rub took out his money and counted it. “I won twenty dollars,” he said happily.
    â€œGood,” Sully said. “Terrific, in fact. Just as long as you didn’t forget anything.”
    Rub frowned.
    â€œLike the twenty I loaned you to get into the game, for instance,” Sully told him.
    Rub handed Sully the money, then shoved his hands into his pockets. “I had fun anyhow,” he said.
    â€œMe too,” Sully assured him. “That’s the main thing.”
    â€œYou lost, and now you’re going to rag me, huh,” Rub said.
    Carl returned from the men’s room, slid onto the stool Rub was blocking and took a long swig from the bottle Sully had told Rub was his. Rub started to open his mouth, then closed it, blood draining from his face.
    â€œI gotta go,” Rub said and went.
    Carl Roebuck was staring at the lip of his bottle. “Did he drink out of this?” he said.
    â€œNah,” Sully said.
    Carl took another swig, more tentatively this time, then frowned over at Sully, who was grinning. “Maybe just a little,” Sully admitted.
    Carl stood, leaned over the bar, poured the remainder of the beer into the sink. “Sully, Sully, Sully,” he said.
    â€œWhat, what, what?”
    â€œI wish you were rich.”
    â€œMe, too,” Sully said.
    â€œIf you were, I’d chain you in my basement and play you for a living.”
    â€œBad cards,” Sully said. “It happens. Not to you, but to other people.”
    Carl waved Birdie away. “I leave you alone to consider that pathetic explanation. I’m overdue somewhere. You all right?”
    Sully assured Carl Roebuck he was fine, but the truth was he was far from it. As he often did at such moments to stave off regret, he was trying to remember what he’d been thinking about when he sat down at a poker game with money he couldn’t afford to lose, as if recollecting his reasoning and discovering it to be valid, or partly valid, would restore the money. Unfortunately, his reasoning had vanished as completely as the money. Even had he won four hundred dollars instead of losing it, he still wouldn’t have been able to afford the truck he needed to buy from Harold, and it was crystal clear to him now that he’d lost the money that the truck was his first order of business. He couldn’t shake the irrational conclusion that four hundred dollars in the debit column right now loomed far larger than the same four hundred in the credit. The desperate situation that had induced him to play poker with money he couldn’t afford to lose was now the precise situation to which he aspired. He would have to work for severalmore days to climb back to the financial