Nobody's Fool

an army of Florida alligators advancing against a defenseless line of condos all the way from the Everglades to St. Petersburg. Even the golf courses were rumored to be full of alligators. Talk about your hazards. For this reason an increasing number of these morning OTB men favored Arizona, where the condos were rumored to be cheaper and where there weren’t any alligators. There were rattlesnakes and scorpions and tarantulas and spiders and Gila monsters, but none of these were big enough to glom onto a man and drag him back into the swamp to eat. In the desert there weren’t even any swamps to drag you into.
    Sully had been overhearing parts of this serial conversation for years but doubted he’d ever engage in it even if he made it to retirement. He had no house to contemplate the increasing value of, unless he counted hisfather’s place on Bowdon Street, at the edge of the Sans Souci property, the legal status of which was no longer clear, at least to Sully. Wirf had informed him when his father died that he’d inherited the house, but Sully had told Wirf he not only didn’t want it, he wouldn’t take it. When Sully had been seventeen and enlisted in the army he’d promised his father he’d have nothing further to do with him, in life or in death, and except for one afternoon shortly before the old man died when Ruth had talked him into visiting the nursing home, he’d kept his pledge. His father’s long-neglected house was falling down, its windows boarded up, the grounds overrun with tall weeds. Unless Sully missed his guess, the accumulated back taxes were probably more than the house would bring on the market. Definitely not the sort of house that would gain Sully entry into the Florida/Arizona condo conversation, even if he had wanted to be included, which he didn’t.
    The only thing Sully envied these men was that they were finished, like ballplayers in an old-timers game who could look back on an episode in their lives that had a particular shape. Having completed it, they could move on to something else. Their lives were full of dates. They could tell you when they married, when their children were born, the date they retired from their jobs. In Sully’s life the years (never mind days) elided gracefully without dividers, and he was always surprised by the endings and new beginnings other people saw, or thought they saw, in their existences. One day thirty-odd years before, he’d run into Vera on the street, and she’d smiled sadly and said, well, at least it was finally over, a chapter of their lives behind them. Sully had looked at her blankly, wondering what she was talking about. It turned out her reference was to their divorce, which had become final a few days before, the fact of which he had not been notified. Either that or he’d trashed the notification along with the other mail he wasn’t interested in. He’d known Vera was relieved not to be married to him anymore (she would marry her second husband, Ralph, within the year), but the finality of the divorce had impressed her, and Sully could tell she was feeling a little melancholy about the failure of their marriage. For her, the divorce had drawn a line that Sully had missed altogether.
    The graceful merging of his days was either depressing or reassuring, depending upon his mood. Even now, at age sixty, he couldn’t imagine feeling finished in the way that the OTB men were, or of being on the brink of anything new. Maybe that’s what had gotten to him about taking classes at the community college, about talk of a new career. That was the point of the philosophy class, he’d come to understand. It was the young professor’s intention to make everything disappear, one thing at a time, andthen replace all of it with something new, a new kind of thought or existence maybe. Out with the old, in with the new. And maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea if you were talking to twenty-year-olds. Hell, at twenty, he’d been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more months. He wanted to keep going forward, not stop and turn around and analyze the validity of decisions made and courses charted long ago. He wasn’t even sure he wanted Wirf, his lawyer, to succeed in the various litigations he was pursuing in Sully’s behalf. If Wirf