Nobody's Fool

bowls of Campbell’s tomato soup, surrendering the field to the poorer, more desperate, more compulsive types who turned the state’s profit. This late in the year, the well-scrubbed, well-mannered windbreaker men all wore sweaters beneath their jackets, and many wore scarves at the insistence of their wives, who, since their husbands’ retirement, had come to treat them like school-bound children, making sure their scarves were wrapped high and snug about their wattled throats, jackets zipped up as far as they would go. Toasty was the word these wives used. Toasty warm. In response to being treated like children, these husbands retaliated by behaving like children, unzipping and unwrapping as soon as they were safely out of sight. They shared the child’s natural aversion to heavy winter wear and could not be induced to don bulky overcoats until it snowed and the snow stayed. It had snowed today, but the snow was melting.
    â€œSully!” they cheered when he came in, all doffing their baseball caps. Sully knew most of these men and liked them well enough, their comparative good fortune notwithstanding. Why shouldn’t they wear thin windbreakers in late November? They left warm houses at midmorning, got into cars with good heaters that had been sitting in warm, if not toasty warm, garages overnight, drove five minutes to the donut shop, dashed inside where it was warm, and there they stayed, gossiping over hot coffee refills, until it was time to visit the OTB and play their daily double. Then home again. When they wanted a change of pace, they visited the insurance office or the hardware store or the post office or the drugstore where they’d worked for thirty years before retiring. They were never outside long enough to find out what the temperature was, much less catch a cold, and so they all looked hale and hearty and weather resistant even in their out-of-season clothing.
    They were insulated against cold economic weather too. Having spent their working lives in North Bath, they were not rich, but they were comfortable, and they congratulated themselves that they’d be more comfortable still if Bath real estate would just go ahead and boom like everybody was predicting. Or like everybody in Bath was predicting. Albany had already spilled northward, and realtors were predicting excitedly that the entire interstate corridor would share in the boom. The best of the shabby old Victorian houses along Glendale, like the Roebucks’, had already been bought up and restored by young men and women, most of whom workedin Albany. They hopped on the interstate in the morning and returned in the evening, a twenty-five-minute drive. These OTB men were angry with themselves for having once considered the old Victorians mere dinosaurs. Thirty years ago such houses could have been bought for a song, but instead they had built well-insulated, new, split-level ranches with picture windows. These were also beginning to creep up in assessed value and taxes, but much more slowly. They all knew now they could have made their killing in the Victorians if they’d guessed that an entire generation of Vietnam draft protesters in torn, faded jeans would end up with money and spend it resuscitating decrepit old houses. Now all they could do was watch the value of their split-levels inch up and worry about timing. Higher taxes were eating into their pensions and Social Security and savings. They didn’t want to sell their split-levels too early, only to discover that the real boom in the market hadn’t come yet. The conventional wisdom seemed to be that things were just beginning to pick up momentum, what with the Sans Souci scheduled to reopen in the summer and the groundbreaking on the amusement park imminent.
    But, of course, waiting was risky, too. What if the Ultimate Escape deal collapsed at the last minute? They didn’t want to wait too long and find themselves stuck with their dream homes of thirty years ago. They had new dream homes now—condos in warmer climes—and they spent the long mornings discussing these. Most favored condos on the Florida gulf, except these were getting expensive and there were disturbing reports of alligators lumbering out of the glades and devouring small children. The windbreaker men didn’t have any small children, but the alligator stories haunted them anyway, a single incident circulating so many times that you’d have thought there was