Nobody's Fool

Carl from the window again and again, so that the other man tumbled and pedaled and screamed.
    It was so much fun tossing Carl Roebuck out of his office window that Sully had the truck over half loaded before he noticed it was starting to tilt slightly, like old Hattie in her booth. At first he thought it might be an optical illusion, so he stood back away from the truck and looked at it. There was no reason the truck should be tipping. Off to the side Sullynoticed some sheets of plywood, and he wished he’d seen them before so he could have lined the bed of the truck and cushioned the load. Probably it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to separate every other layer too, not that the plywood would have distributed the weight differently. It was too late now, in any case. That was the bad news. The good news was he’d worked hard for an hour and his knee didn’t feel any worse. In fact, by working and contemplating Carl Roebuck tumbling from his office window, he’d forgotten all about his knee. It wasn’t strictly logical, but maybe his injured knee actually was encouraging him to work. Either that or it was telling him to murder Carl Roebuck.
    He knew one thing for sure. It was more satisfying to be mad at Carl than to be mad at the courts. Over the last nine months that Wirf had been trying to get him total disability, Sully’d come to understand that all his trips to Albany, even the hearings themselves, were only tangentially related to his deteriorating knee. Maybe the knee wasn’t quite as bad as Wirf portrayed it. Maybe. But Sully’s growing sense of these legal proceedings was that they were taking place independent of reality. The question wasn’t his injury, or whether or not it allowed him to work, or how an injured man might fairly be compensated. At issue was whether the insurance company and the state could be forced to pay. Sully hadn’t seen the same insurance company lawyer twice, but they were all sharp and their sheer numbers suggested that he and Wirf, who referred to them as “the Windmills” and insisted that you just had to keep tilting at them, were fighting a losing battle. You couldn’t even get good and angry and entertain yourself by imagining that the next time you saw that smug son of a bitch of a lawyer you’d throw him out the window, because the next time there’d be a different guy altogether. You didn’t even get the same judge all the time, though all the judges seemed to have pretty much the same attitude toward Sully’s claim. They all lectured Wirf and, when the hearing was over, kidded cozily with the insurance company lawyers. Sully himself was generally ignored, and lately he’d come to suspect that if his leg just went ahead and fell off, this (to him) significant event probably wouldn’t change anything. Nobody would admit they’d been wrong. They’d use the old X rays to prove he still had a leg. It’d be a philosophical argument.
    Sully knew all this was worth getting angry about, and sometimes he did get mad when he thought about it, but there in court he merely felt intimidated, and he was glad to be represented by a lawyer, even one as bad as Wirf, who looked almost as lost and out of place in court as Sully himself. Probably, it occurred to Sully, this was why you paid an attorney torepresent you. If it weren’t for Wirf, the judge would talk down to you personally and not to Wirf, whose single professional skill seemed to be his ability to eat shit and not mind. Wirf didn’t even dress like the lawyers for the insurance company, nor did he appear to notice the way the other lawyers regarded him. Sully felt bad for him, because he and Wirf went way back, but he knew it was better for Wirf to eat shit than for Sully to eat it, because Sully would eat only so much before he’d decide it was somebody else’s turn, whereas Wirf seemed to understand that it was always his turn. Since they were friends, Wirf was representing Sully on contingency. If they ended up winning any of the half-dozen concurrent litigations Wirf had filed on Sully’s behalf, they would share the booty. Lately, though, it had become obvious to Sully that they weren’t going to collect a dime, and he’d begun to feel guilty about letting Wirf file appeal after appeal. To win, you’d have to throw every one of the bastards out the window, and there were more lawyers and judges than