Nobody's Fool

who paid attention. Rub himself seldom paid attention, and he considered inattention normal human behavior. Back in eighth grade Miss Beryl was always cracking her ruler on the edge of the desk in her English class, right after lunch when he was about to doze off, and barking, “Pay attention!” Sometimes she stared right at Rub and added, “You might learn something.” Rub still considered attentiveness hateful and exhausting and perverse. And since he knew no one in Bath more alert than Miss Beryl, there was no one he disliked more.
    Sully couldn’t help grinning. “Let’s go have a cup of coffee before she comes out and warns me against bad companions.”
    As they crossed the street where the snow had already begun to turn to slush and headed toward Hattie’s Lunch, Sully was surprised by an unexpected feeling of well-being he could find no rational justification for. The feeling was far too strong to ignore, though, so he decided to be grateful and enjoy it and not be troubled by the fact that throughout his life, such sudden sensations of well-being were often harbingers of impending catastrophe. They were, in fact, leading indicators of the approach ofa condition that Sully had come to think of as a stupid streak, where everything he did would turn out wrong, where each wrong turn would be compounded by the next, where even smart moves would prove dumb in the particular circumstance, where thoughtlessness and careful consideration were guaranteed to arrive at the same end—disaster.
    He generally suffered through about one stupid streak a year and was under the impression that this year’s was already in the books. But then again, maybe not. Or maybe this year he’d be awarded two. Maybe going back to work on an injured knee was the beginning of the granddaddy of all stupid streaks. He already knew that one of the things he had to look forward to today was everybody telling him he was stupid, he’d be better off to stay in school, collect his partial disability, let his knee heal completely and, since it wasn’t likely to heal completely, let Wirf, his lawyer, work on getting him his full disability. What kind of sense could it possibly make for him to go back to work on a busted, arthritic knee?
    Some sort of sense, obviously, Sully concluded, or he wouldn’t be feeling so good about doing it. Of course, he might feel differently later,
after
a day’s hard work, but right this minute, as he limped down Upper Main in the direction of Hattie’s and coffee, half listening to Rub complain about Miss Beryl, going back to work made more sense to him than driving over to the community college north of Schuyler Springs, where he had, for the last few months, been taking classes with teenagers and feeling foolish. The only class he enjoyed was philosophy, the course he’d been forced to sign up for when one of the classes he needed was full, and the philosophy class, ironically, was the one that made him feel the most foolish. It was taught by a young professor with a small body and a massive head who would have looked like Rub except for a crop of unruly black hair. The young professor seemed bent on disproving everything in the world, one thing at a time. First he disproved things like chairs and trees that fell in the forest, and then he moved on to concepts like cause and effect and, most recently, free will. Sully’d gotten a kick out of it, watching everything disappear but the bad grades he got along with all the other students. If going back to work turned out okay, philosophy was the only class he’d miss. In fact, he already felt bad about quitting with only three weeks left in the term and a few things left, like God and love, to be disproved. He wasn’t sure how the young professor meant to make these disappear with the rest, but Sully was sure he’d find a way.
    What was disappearing even faster than trees in his philosophy class was Sully’s small reserve of money, and besides, he was curious to knowif work was something he could still do. The fact that he could barely get his shoes on did not bode well. But lately the knee hurt worse when he sat there in the classroom than when he walked around on it. The classroom desks were anchored to the floor and placed too close together, and he couldn’t seem to get comfortable. If he straightened the leg out in the aisle, he ran the risk of somebody bumping it. If he