Nobody's Fool

whom Sully had not yet made peace. In fact, on the way out to Carl Roebuck’s development, he’d done what he always did when he drove by the cemetery. He’d rolled down the window, cold be damned, and given Big Jim Sullivan the finger as he flew by. Unlike most of the residents of Bath, Sully didn’t care much whether The Ultimate Escape Fun Park got built or not, except that if it did, they’d probably relocate the cemetery, which meant they’d have to disturb his father’s eternal rest. Sully hated to think of his father at rest, and had there been a way, and if Sully’d had the money, he’d have left instructions to have Big Jim dug up every decade or so, just to make sure he didn’t get comfortable. And so, right now, he was hoping to get a lift past the cemetery so his father wouldn’t have a chance to get a close-up look at him in his present condition. Whenever he was on a stupid streak he was conscious of the faraway sound of his father’s laughter. His next-to-last stupid streak, a little over a year ago, had begun when he fell off a ladder and injured his knee.Anybody could fall off a ladder, of course. That hadn’t been the stupid part. The stupid part had been the reason he’d fallen. Halfway up the ladder, he’d heard a man laughing raucously, and off across the job site, on the other side of the chain-link fence, Sully’d spotted a big man who, from a distance, was a dead ringer for his father. Dead ringer he would indeed have been, since Big Jim had himself been dead for several years. Whoever the man with the horselaugh was, Sully was paying attention to him and not to his footing. He’d fallen twenty feet and then listened to the distant sound of his father’s laughter all the way to the hospital. Right now, so close to the cemetery, the sound of laughter was nearer, was ringing, in fact, in Sully’s ears.
    When he saw the expression on the face of the young woman who swerved, Sully made a conscious effort to look less like a serial killer. After a while he gave up, both the hitching and the trying to look harmless. It was only a mile back to town, and he’d already walked nearly that far backward. He even began to look on the bright side. As long as the truck was buried in the mud, he couldn’t capsize the load. The other good thing was that Rub, whose assistance he would now seek, was blessedly devoid of a sense of humor and therefore never derived much benefit from other people’s stupidity. If Rub himself had backed a truck into a mud hole and then loaded on a ton of concrete blocks and couldn’t drive out again, his stupidity would have been the first thing Sully noticed. But other people’s stupidity elicited only sympathy in Rub, who identified so strongly and immediately with dumbness that he lost all advantage. All Rub would want to know, Sully realized, was how come Sully hadn’t come to get him in the first place, since this was obviously a job for two men, a job that even two men would be hard pressed to finish by dark, now that the morning had been wasted.
    Lost in the soothing contemplation of Rub’s intellectual limitations and having given up on the idea of anybody stopping, Sully did not immediately notice when a small olive green Gremlin pulled over to the shoulder of the road some fifty yards ahead, its turn signal blinking. That it had stopped for him occurred to Sully only when it tooted. The Gremlin was old and banged up, and he half recognized the car as belonging to someone he knew, but couldn’t think who. Sully didn’t know anybody in Bath who drove a Gremlin, which deepened the mystery, because he didn’t know that many people outside of Bath. When the Gremlin tooted a second time, Sully realized that he had stopped walking, that he was stalled right there along the shoulder, as if solving the riddle of who owned theGremlin were prerequisite to accepting a ride in it. Somebody had rolled down the passenger side window and was waving impatiently. Sully started walking.
    The Gremlin had an out-of-state license, though it was too dirty for Sully to guess which state. The little car’s slanting rear window was piled high with clothes and blankets and toys, making it impossible to see inside, and Sully approached the car with serious misgivings, which only increased when a familiar-looking young woman poked her head out the passenger side window and glared at