Nobody's Fool

already and not Thanksgiving, that California would just go ahead and fall into the ocean if it was going to, that the climate in upstate New York was more tropical, that someone would die and leave him a big ole boat he could sail down to Mexico, that the Royal Palm Company would start making that red cream soda again. And he’d wished ole Toby Roebuck would sit on his face, just once.
    Rub had wished all of this in the space of roughly an hour, one wish gliding naturally into the next, unimpeded by plausibility. Since September, Sully had forgotten how full of wishes Rub’s life was. As fast as Sully’s professor explained things out of existence, Rub wished other things into being. It was not unusual for him to say, “You know what I wisht?” fifty times a day, and the worst part of it was he’d just keep repeating the question until Sully acknowledged it with a “What? What for sweet Jesus’ sake do you wish now?” The thing that always amazed Sully about Rub’s wishes was that most of them were so modest. After wishing a whole company into existence, Rub would settle for a forty-hour-a-week job at union scale, as if he feared some sort of cosmic retaliation for an arrogant imagination. Sully tried to explain from time to time that if he was going to wish an entire corporation into existence, he might as well wish he owned it and had somebody else to do the actual work. But Rub didn’t see it this way. He liked the smaller wishes and he liked to wish them one at a time. Out loud.
    â€œI wisht we were all through with this job and sitting in The Horse eating a big ole cheeseburger” was what Rub would have liked at this instant. He was as covered with mud as Sully, and his wish for warmth and a cheeseburger probably seemed as remote to him as the possibility that somebody would die and leave him a big ole boat. “Next time you find us work, I wisht you’d let me eat lunch first,” he added.
    They were now on their second load, and this time they were loading the blocks right, cushioning the bed of the truck with plywood. Half of the bottom two layers of the first load hadn’t made it. Having located Rub with so little trouble, Sully’d made up his mind to reload the truck, but fate had conspired against them. By the time they got back to the site the temperature had dropped and the sloppy ground had firmed up, and the truck, hopelessly mired an hour before, drove right out on the first try. This had looked to Sully like a sign, so he’d said screw the reloading, let’s go. His thinking was that even with the two of them working, they’d be lucky to finish before seven o’clock, which meant they’d have to do the last couple of loads in the dark. He was having all he could do to avoid disaster when he could see the ground.
    They’d just left the blocks that broke when Sully hit a pothole right there in the truck. The others they’d piled with extra care out at the new site, next to the shallow hole out of which one of Carl Roebuck’s no-frills government-subsidy two-bedroom ranches would grow in about a week, weather permitting. Carl was behind on the contract, just like he wasbehind on every contract, and his guys would have to work right through Christmas, probably, or until the ground froze. On the way back for the next load, they’d stopped and tossed the broken blocks behind the clown billboard. “What if somebody finds them?” Rub had wanted to know.
    â€œYou didn’t write your name on them, did you?” Sully said.
    They were nearly finished with the second load when they heard a car coming and Carl Roebuck’s El Camino, with its TIP TOP CONSTRUCTION COMPANY: C. I. ROEBUCK logo on the door, careened into view. It bore down on them at such an unsafe speed that it could mean only one thing—that Carl Roebuck himself was at the wheel. Carl was careful never to take his Camaro onto a job site, but he considered it executive privilege to wreck at least one company car a year by bouncing it over rutted, unpaved roads at fifty miles an hour.
    â€œUh-oh,” Rub said. “I bet he found them blocks already.”
    Sully just looked at him. “Pay attention a minute,” he said.
    Rub was paying attention, all right, but not to Sully. He was watching the approaching El Camino and looking scared.
    Sully reached down from the truck bed where he was standing and cuffed Rub, who was