Nobody's Fool

money?”
    â€œTo bet the triple.”
    â€œWho knows?” Peter said. “Who cares?”
    Sully could tell he hadn’t given his son the money. “Because if you bet your money, then what you won is yours. That’s the way it works.”
    â€œI wouldn’t even have gone into the OTB except on your instructions,” Peter pointed out.
    â€œThat’s not the issue.”
    â€œThis’ll be rich,” Wirf broke in. “I always love it when your father explains the moral significance of things. Follow the logic and win a prize.”
    â€œHow did
you
get into this conversation?” Sully wondered.
    â€œI don’t know,” Wirf admitted. “I think I’ll go downstairs and stand in the cold.”
    â€œGood,” Sully said. “Go.”
    Father, son and grandson listened to him lumber down the stairs.Sully studied his son and felt even more powerfully than before that he couldn’t let Peter be his deliverer.
    â€œlisten, you take this,” he said. “You got Will, and you got Wacker’s doctor bills now. You’re going to need it.”
    â€œNot as bad as you,” Peter said. “I don’t owe anybody.”
    Sully considered these words. For most of his life he’d been able to say the same thing. Now, suddenly, he was awash in debt. “I tell you what,” Sully said, arriving at a compromise. “Why don’t we call it a loan?”
    From the back stairs came a peal of laughter from Wirf, who had stopped to wait on the landing, still in listening range. “That’s your old man,” he called up to Peter. “He’d rather owe it to you than cheat you out of it.”
    They left it that Sully and Peter would meet back at the flat in an hour to unload Peter’s things, which were still sitting in a small U-Haul trailer in the driveway at Ralph and Vera’s house. Peter would pack the rest of his and Will’s clothes into their suitcases, leave Will with Ralph while Peter and Sully effected the move. Vera, blessedly, would not be there, having driven to Schuyler Springs VA hospital, to which Robert Halsey had been admitted during the night. Sully would use the hour to locate Rub, whose assistance they would need to cart the furniture up the narrow stairs to the flat. “Good luck,” said Peter, who was convinced that Rub would have nothing more to do with them.
    â€œHe’ll do what I ask him,” Sully assured his son, though he himself was far from certain. In fact, he was not looking forward to what was almost certain to be a humbling experience. Sully wasn’t the sort of man to offer direct apology, and he had a feeling that the indirect ones he usually used on Rub—offering to buy him a big ole cheeseburger at The Horse, for instance—might not work this time. He might actually have to say he was sorry for the way he’d acted. Which he was. It wasn’t that he denied that he owed Rub an apology. He just hated to establish an ugly precedent of public apology, which could conceivably open the floodgates to other forms of regret.
    A good place to start looking for Rub, he decided, was the OTB. Not because Rub would be there so much as that he could cash his triple and bet another. This was no time to come off 1-2-3. In a perverse world it was liable to pop twice in the same week, especially if he wasn’t on it.
    The windbreaker men had all left, but Jocko was there, peering at theracing form through his thick glasses. When Sully’s shadow fell across it, he peered up over the top of his glasses, which had slid down his nose. “Free at lass, free at lass,” he said. “Thank God a’mighty.” “It’s a great country,” Sully agreed.
    â€œSomebody said you’d walked,” Jocko folded his racing form and slipped it under his arm. “I found that difficult to credit.”
    â€œIt’s true, though,” Sully said. “I punched out the right cop, as it turned out.”
    â€œHow did Barton look?”
    â€œThe judge? Half dead. At least half.”
    â€œYou’re lucky. He used to be a terror. He must be preparing to meet his maker.”
    â€œYou haven’t seen Rub around?” Sully inquired.
    â€œNot once since you went in. Is his wife’s name Elizabeth?”
    Sully shook his head. “Bootsie,” though now that he thought about it, Bootsie could conceivably derive from