Nobody's Fool

got Sully his total disability, that would be the end of life as he knew it, the beginning of something new, not necessarily good news to a man who didn’t believe in new beginnings any more than he believed in new knees.
    â€œYou’re looking especially well this morning,” Otis Wilson observed, in reference, no doubt, to Sully’s crust of mud. Otis claimed every summer that come winter he was Florida bound.
    Sully turned a circle so all the windbreaker men could see. “Somebody’s got to work in this country,” he said. “Wasn’t for guys like me, guys like you’d have to get your hands dirty occasionally.”
    â€œWe been meaning to say thank you,” Otis said.
    â€œI heard on the news an alligator made off with another one,” Sully said. Otis, a big, soft man with a florid face, was particularly susceptible to alligator stories, and Sully, as part of a running gag, had been for years warning Otis not to go to a wild place like Florida without a tough, experienced guide, someone not afraid to wrestle gators. Someone like Sully. To Sully’s delight, at the mention of alligators Otis’s face drained. “If I was you I’d get a second-floor condo. Alligators hate stairs.”
    â€œGet away from me,” Otis said when Sully joined his elbows together to make alligator jaws. “Go on now, git!” Otis parried Sully’s thrusts nervously. “Go play your damn sucker triple and leave smart people alone.”
    â€œThere are no smart people within a block of here,” Sully told him. “The OTB is a tax on stupidity.”
    â€œHow many stupid people you paying taxes for beside yourself?” somebody wanted to know.
    â€œI’m smart enough not to move someplace where I’m going to get eaten by an alligator,” Sully said.
    â€œGo bet that fool’s triple,” Otis said.
    â€œAll right, I will,” Sully said, heading for the window. For the last year or so he’d been playing 1-2-3 trifectas regardless of the horses or jockeysinvolved. Never much of a handicapper, he’d given up on trying to figure triples, which, he’d concluded, were invented to drive you crazy. Anymore he bet 1-2-3 and explained, when people wanted to know why, that the horses running around the inside of the track didn’t have as far to go as those running around the outside, which would have been true if there were lanes. “If my triple runs I’ll buy Hilda one of those video cameras to take with you to Florida,” he called back to Otis. “That way she can get it on film. We can show it over at The Horse. Charge admission to see Otis get dragged off into the swamp.”
    Sully bet his triple and was about to leave when through the front window he saw Carl Roebuck round the corner a block away and head up the other side of the street in Sully’s direction. Sully couldn’t help but smile at Carl’s jaunty stride, which wouldn’t have been so jaunty had he known that his wife had changed the locks.
    In front of the savings and loan, Clive Peoples, who’d just come out, was studying with satisfaction the new banner recently hung across Main Street. Clive Jr., a study in self-importance, was one of the few apples Sully knew that had fallen miles from the tree. True, his father, whom Clive Jr. had grown to greatly resemble, had been proud of his local celebrity as the football coach, but he’d been good-natured too, and Miss Beryl’s gentle mockery shamed him when he got too puffed up. Not so Clive Jr., who lacked, among other things, a sense of humor. That he took himself seriously was proof positive, in Sully’s view. In fact, Sully had little use for his landlady’s son and would have actively disliked him were it not for Miss Beryl, who, Sully sensed, was disappointed in her son, his having become a big shot in town notwithstanding.
    Before Clive Jr. could get into his car, a long, sleek black affair that he always parked out front of the savings and loan, Carl Roebuck collared him for one of their thirty-second conversations. Sully didn’t have to be there to know how it would go. “Tell me we’re still in business,” Carl Roebuck would urge, conspiratorially. Clive Jr. would assure him that they were, and then Carl would say, “If this thing ever goes south, don’t tell me. Just come out to the house and shoot me in the head.” Talk that