Nobody's Fool

chain-link fence as they’d expected, Peter wouldn’t have hesitated. But there was no sign of Rasputin. Even the styrofoam packaging for the ground beef had disappeared. “Where’s the styrofoam package?” Peter wondered out loud.
    Again Sully directed the beam of the flashlight along the ground inside the fence. No package. “He probably ate it,” Sully said. “This isn’t the world’s smartest dog we’re talking about here. Just the world’s meanest.”
    â€œThat’s the part that worries me,” Peter admitted. “The way the last few days have gone, it’d follow that I’d end up getting my throat ripped out by a junkyard dog.”
    â€œAre you going to climb over or what?” Sully said. “I should have asked Wirf. Even a one-legged drunk could have climbed this fence by now.”
    â€œTell me again how this is your own snowblower we’re stealing,” Peter said. Sully had explained to him on the way that “in a sense” the snowblower was really his, because the man who owned it also owed Sully some money and wouldn’t pay. Sully’d already stolen the snowblower once, and this Carl Roebuck guy had stolen it back. This was kind of a game, apparently. Still, the whole thing gave Peter pause. What they wereup to resembled burglary so closely that the law might not be able to tell the difference.
    â€œI had a feeling your mother was raising you this way,” Sully said, a more potent criticism than he could have guessed.
    Peter grabbed the chain-link fence and tested it by shaking.
    â€œClimb,” his father said. “We’re getting old.”
    It was not easy climbing the fence. The bottoms of Peter’s tennis shoes were wet from standing in the slush, and they kept slipping. Also, he hadn’t climbed anything since he was a kid, and his clumsiness embarrassed him mightily. When he finally got the side of one foot planted on top of the fence, wedged in between two twists of the chain link, he discovered he hadn’t the necessary strength to hoist himself over.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” his father wanted to know. A fair question.
    â€œNothing,” Peter lied, his arms trembling. “I’m just catching my breath.”
    â€œDon’t get stuck.”
    Don’t get stuck. Words to live by.
    Then suddenly Peter was over and standing on the other side, facing Sully, who was barely visible in the dark, though only a foot away, separated by just the chain-link fence. Feeling his hand burn, Peter examined his palm and discovered he’d raked it along the top of the fence. His father aimed the flashlight beam on the injury. It was only a scratch, but small beads of blood were forming along its length. Peter felt an odd exhilaration at the wound and the sight of his own blood, drawn in the dubious service of a dangerous man. Who happened to be his father.
    â€œHere’s the hacksaw,” Sully said, slipping the blade under the fence. “It’s just a padlock.”
    Peter took the blade and followed along the fence a few feet until he felt the gate. Sure enough, there was a padlock dangling on the inside. Sully illuminated it with the flashlight as best he could. “Try not to saw your thumb off,” he advised.
    Peter gripped the hacksaw’s handle, which was smooth and fit perfectly over the fresh scratch on his palm. For some reason it was satisfying to return his father’s saw with his own blood on the smooth grip. Sully, Peter knew, was suspicious of intellectuals and therefore suspicious of himself and his education, especially the private schools he had attended until the money had run out. According to his mother, when Peter had been sent off to prep school, Sully had accused her of trying to raise him above his station. Vera had replied that this was not true, that she was justtrying to raise their son above Sully’s station. It was one of his mother’s favorite anecdotes, though Peter suspected the conversation had probably not gone that way.
    â€œYou want a glove?” his father offered.
    Peter declined the offer and began to saw. In the night’s stillness, the rasping sound was louder than he’d expected, and Peter imagined it waking his mother back in town, imagined her understanding intuitively that it was the sound of her thirty-five-year-old son, the college professor, helping his father, whose influence she had