Nobody's Fool

winner,” Sully said in that maddening way he had of congratulating himself on his own sound judgment in situations that were hardly conducive. “Hurry and finish before he wakes up.”
    Unfortunately, Peter was now shaking too badly to make much of a job of it. The blade didn’t want to stay in the track he was cutting, and his father’s hand on the flashlight didn’t seem as steady now. Peter had nearly cut through three separate places on the remaining prong when the hacksaw blade broke.
    â€œNever mind,” his father said, getting into the El Camino.
    â€œWhat do you mean, never mind?” Peter wanted to know.
    His father rolled down the window and leaned out. “Step back from that gate a minute.”
    Peter did as he was told. As things got crazier, he was actually getting the hang of coexisting with his father. Following orders was pretty much essential, far more important than understanding them. Different rules entirely from those that governed his life as an educator. Out on the blacktop the El Camino did a three-point turn and backed into the drive, right up to the gate. “How am I lined up?” his father called.
    â€œFor what?”
    â€œNever mind,” Sully said. Then he backed the car into the gate, which strained inward until the padlock stood straight out for a split second, then popped clean, the gate swinging slowly open, stopping only when it came into contact with the inert Rasputin, who didn’t so much as twitch.
    The rest of the job took them no more than five minutes. Two minutes to locate the snowblower where Carl Roebuck had hidden it under a tarp, three more to load it into the El Camino. When Sully drove through the gate, Peter started to swing it shut until his father stopped him. “What now?” Peter asked. To his way of thinking, he’d been more than patient.
    As usual his father offered no explanation. He was rooting around in the big toolbox in the bed of the truck until his fingers located what they were searching out. Another padlock, as it turned out, which Sully tossed to Peter. “We better lock up. Somebody might come by and steal something.”
    At the traffic light by the IGA, Sully switched on the dome light. “Let’s see that hand.”
    Peter showed him, proudly, the long, jagged scratch on his palm. It had bled considerably and dried brown and crusty.
    Sully nodded and turned off the dome light. “Good,” he said, pulling into the intersection, the light having turned green. “I was afraid you’d gone and hurt yourself.”
    Peter stared at the tilting structure. “You’re going to turn
this
into a bed-and-breakfast?”
    Sully couldn’t help smiling. He’d told Peter about the job he’d been hired to do and, when Peter surprised him by exhibiting interest, offered to show Peter the house in question. But then instead of stopping at Miles Anderson’s place, he’d gotten another idea and turned the corner ontoBowdon, parking at the curb in front of Big Jim’s house. “Let’s get out for a minute,” he suggested.
    Peter did as he was told, a bit reluctantly, it seemed to Sully, who couldn’t blame him. When they stopped at the black iron fence that surrounded the property, indeed most of the perimeter of the Sans Souci, Peter gave the fence a dubious shake, sending a chill through his father. “You aren’t going to ask me to climb this, are you?”
    â€œNot unless you want to,” Sully said. “In fact, there’s an opening farther down.” He pointed to where the earth mover had passed magically through the fence the day before.
    In fact, the last thing Sully wanted was for Peter to climb this fence, even though the spikes that had once run along its top had long since been removed. Half an hour ago, though, out at the Tip Top Construction yard, when Peter had looked like he might lose his balance atop the chain-link fence and impale himself there, the symmetry between this imagined event and the one fifty years ago when Big Jim Sullivan had shook the fence and impaled the boy perched on top was so powerful that in the moment Sully recognized the parallel he had known that the second awful event was fated to happen. It suddenly seemed perfectly natural that he should cause what his father had caused, only more terribly. Afterward, he’d probably act the same way his father did, and during the few