Nobody's Fool

gonna whack my peenie.”
    â€œBob and weave,” Sully advised. “It’s a small target.”
    Sully’s flat was identical in floor plan to Miss Beryl’s below. The floor plan was the only similarity. Where the downstairs flat was crowded with Miss Beryl’s heavy oak furniture, terra-cotta pots and wicker elephants, its walls freshly papered and hung with framed prints and museum posters under glass, its tables covered with ghostly spirit boats and ornate vases, the various mementoes of her travels, Sully’s flat was wide open, pastoral. In fact, it didn’t look dramatically different from the way it had looked beforehe moved in with his furniture so many years ago. That morning, it had taken him just under an hour to complete the move, and the few things he brought with him only served to emphasize the flat’s high ceilings, its terrible spaciousness, the echoing sounds he made moving from room to room over the hardwood floors. He’d been forty-eight then and had lived almost his entire adult life in dark, cramped, furnished quarters, which he’d found pretty much to his liking. Ruth had been urging him for a long time to find a decent place to live, claiming that what ailed Sully was his morbid surroundings. He hadn’t argued with her, but he hadn’t moved, either. He hadn’t had any idea, then or now, what ailed him, but he suspected it wasn’t his surroundings. In fact, about the only thing that could have induced him to move was the thing that had happened. He’d left the old flat one afternoon to go buy a pack of cigarettes. The last cigarette of his last pack he left half smoked in an ashtray perched on the arm of his battered sofa.
    The corner grocery was only two blocks away, so Sully had walked. He was between jobs and in no particular hurry. When he ran into a couple of guys he knew, he stopped to shoot the breeze. At the store he bought cigarettes and talked with a cop who was loitering near the register. When a fire alarm sounded, the cop left, so Sully took the opportunity to bet a daily double with Ray, the sad, fatalistic store owner who was in his last year of competition with the IGA supermarket. The OTB would open the following year, officially burying Bath’s three neighborhood groceries. “Looks like we got us some midday excitement,” Ray said when the fire engine roared by.
    â€œWe could probably stand a little,” Sully’d said absently, lighting a cigarette and trying to account for the vague, distant unease, a sense of menace almost, that he’d become aware of at the edge of his consciousness. He said good-bye to Ray and started home. The fire engine had careened around the corner onto Sully’s street and for some reason turned its siren off. People were running through the intersection, and Sully saw there was a black plume of smoke ascending into the sky above the rooftops. There were more sirens in the distance. A police car flew by.
    By the time Sully arrived a large crowd had gathered to watch the house burn. Flames were shooting out of the windows and into the low gray sky. The firemen had already given up combating the blaze and were using their hoses to wet down the houses on either side, trying to prevent them from bursting into sympathetic flame. Losing a house was one thing, but they didn’t want to lose the whole block. There didn’t seem to be anything to do but join the crowd and watch, so Sully did.
    After he’d been there awhile, a man he knew noticed him and said hello. “You live around here somewheres, don’t you?” the man added. “I live right there,” Sully pointed at the inferno. “Or I used to.” This admission attracted considerable attention. “Hey!” somebody yelled. “There’s Sully. He’s not dead, he’s right here.” Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetically at the crowd.
    Kenny Roebuck, Carl’s father, who owned the building, arrived finally and came over to where Sully was standing. “I heard you were dead,” he said. “Burned alive.”
    â€œI hope they don’t put it in the paper,” Sully said.
    Kenny Roebuck agreed. “I wonder how the hell it