Nobody's Fool

girdle on.”

    There were only half a dozen paved roads into and out of North Bath. In addition to Route 27A, the two-lane blacktop that became Main (Upper and Lower) within the city limits, there were five other narrow two-lanes linking Bath to its neighbors: Schuyler Springs to the north and smaller communities like Shaker Heights, Dollsville, Wapford, Glen. And there was the new four-lane spur that linked Bath to the interstate that ran between Albany and Montreal. The new spur was just three miles long, traversing the large tract of marshy land that separated Bath from the interstate, the future site, according to a large billboard planted just off the roadway, of the five-hundred-acre “Ultimate Escape Pun Park,” an “extravaganza of water slides, roller coasters, a Wild West town and a fantasy village where fairy-tale characters spring to life.” The majority of the huge billboard was a garish clown’s face, and there was something about this face, about its lewd grin perhaps, that suggested more malice than fun, and small children who had the sign pointed out to them by their mothers as they sped by had been known to burst into tears of fright. Adults were disconcerted also to notice that within sight of the billboard, just before you entered the village of North Bath, was the new cemetery, a stark, treeless place of, for the most part, horizontal gravestones. There was considerable speculation that the cemetery would have to be relocated once construction on the fun park got under way. Already the juxtaposition of the two “ultimate escapes” had become a dark local joke.
    This midmorning, thanks to the grand opening of the new supermarket at the interstate exit, there was more traffic than usual speeding down the spur toward the demonic clown billboard. For the most part, the motorists were housewives hurrying back toward town, the back of their vans and station wagons loaded down with groceries. They’d gotten carried away in the festive new store and bought twice as much as they normally would, purchasing items not available at the North Bath IGA. As they flew home, feet bearing down a little more heavily on the accelerator than was their custom, contemplating their greater-than-anticipated expenditure of time and money, they were greeted by an unsettling apparition in the form of a hitchhiker attempting to thumb a ride into town. These housewives, many of whom had small, fussy children with them, were not the sort to pick up even decent-looking hitchhikers, and so they were not even fleetingly tempted to stop for this one, who was so besotted with mud that the speeding housewives concluded, despite the fact that there was no prisonwithin a hundred-mile radius, that the man must be an escaped convict, a murderer surely, who had spent the night in the marsh to escape the dogs. Either that or he was a premature burial from the nearby cemetery who had clawed his way out of his casket and up through the black earth and into the air. Where most hitchhikers at least attempted to look friendly or, failing that, pitiful, this one looked just plain dangerous. Something about the way he held out his thumb suggested that the fist attached to it might contain a live grenade. One young woman driving a station wagon full of groceries actually swerved into the left lane when she drew near him, as if she feared he might lunge at the car and grab the door handle as she hurtled by.
    Nothing could have been further from Sully’s intention. If he was dangerous, he certainly wasn’t dangerous in the way the young woman feared. His murderous expression was simply the result of spending the morning doing a thankless job on a bum knee, getting his truck stuck in the mud, spending half an hour of fruitless exertion trying to get unstuck, during which time it had occurred to him what Carl Roebuck, the man he’d sworn he’d never go back to work for, would say when he found out what Sully’d done. Carl Roebuck would say he’d been wrong—that the job
had
been one Sully could fuck up after all, a remark Sully did not want to hear uttered outside the precincts of his own thoughts. Every time Carl said it, even within those precincts, Sully threw him out the window. To make matters worse, he could hear his young philosophy professor snickering an I-told-you-so about free will.
    Also his father, who lay buried in the cemetery another half mile up the highway, a man with