Nobody's Fool

“You want to live in a trailer?”
    â€œI’m only paying two hundred a month now,” Sully pointed out.
    â€œThat’s because your landlady’s carrying you,” Wirf said. “She could get four hundred a month for that flat, easy.”
    Sully shrugged. “Okay, if you think I should take it, I’ll take it.”
    Wirf threw up his hands.
    â€œWhat?” Sully said. “What do you want from me?”
    â€œWhy do I bother?”
    â€œNo clue,” Sully admitted.
    Wirf waved him away with both hands. They were grinning at each other now. “What’d Barton want with you?”
    After the judge and Wirf and the county prosecutor and the police chief had hammered out their settlement, Judge Flatt had sent for Sully. Wirf, afraid Sully would do something stupid to queer the deal, had wanted to stay, but Flatt had sternly banished him to the corridor outside. To Sully’s astonishment, what the judge wanted to ask him about was whathad really happened all those years ago when the boy had been impaled on the spiked fence. The judge, himself a young man then, had been one of those who’d gathered on the sidewalk to await the ambulance. Like Sully, he’d apparently never forgotten the scene. Sully explained that he hadn’t been there to see it happen, hadn’t witnessed any more than the other gawkers. And he thought about telling the judge what his brother had told him, that the reason the boy had been impaled was that his father had shaken the iron fence, shaken it in a paroxysm of rage until the boy fell. That was what the boy had later said happened, but it had been his word against Sully’s father’s, and anyway, the boy had been where he wasn’t supposed to be. Sully had started to tell the judge what he knew, then, without knowing why, decided not to.
    â€œNothing important,” Sully told Wirf now, feeling the same odd reticence. He’d never made any attempt to conceal his contempt for his father, but he’d never shared with anyone what his brother had told him that day.
    â€œOkay, fine,” Wirf said. “Don’t confide in your own lawyer. See if I care.”
    â€œOkay,” Sully agreed.
    â€œGoddamn you.”
    â€œWhat?” Sully said.
    â€œYou’ve hurt my feelings.”
    â€œYou just said ‘See if I care.’ ”
    â€œI’m your lawyer. We zig together. And this is the thanks I get.” Wirf pouted. “Piss on you.”
    Sully sat on one of the radiators and flexed his knee.
    â€œWhat the hell’s the matter with you today?” Wirf wanted to know. “I get you out of jail, and you act like somebody died.”
    It was true. An hour or so ago, sitting alone in the drab coffee room at City Hall, before he even knew for sure that he was going to be released, that the assault charges would be dropped, he’d felt his spirits soar. There were indications that his stupid streak had run its tortured course, that luck was back on his side. He still felt this to be true. Why then the sudden sense that this shift of fortune wouldn’t mean much? That all the luck in the world might not be enough? Probably he was just feeling a little overwhelmed. Jail had been an odd, unexpected release from anxiety and expectation. If he wasn’t making any progress toward resolving his various financial and personal headaches, neither was he making them worse, and nobody could justifiably expect much of him, at least until he got out again.Now that he was a free man, he saw that he had a mountain to move. There was the truck to pay for and Miles Anderson’s house to transform. He owed Harold Proxmire and Wirf, and in order to pay them he was going to have to work, and in order to work he was going to have to make things up with Rub. Most of this, with effort, could be done. There was still the outside possibility of selling the Bowdon Street property, though he knew he was very near the end of the so-called redemption period.
    Even more disturbing was that Sully could trace his plummeting spirits to the precise moment when he looked up and saw his son and grandson standing in the doorway of the lounge area of City Hall moments after Officer Raymer’s demolition of the coffee machine. Every time he laid eyes on Peter he felt in the pit of his stomach the vague, monstrous debt a man owes, a debt more difficult to make good on than money you don’t have. A