Nobody's Fool

started.”
    â€œThe rumor or the fire?”
    â€œThe fire.”
    â€œThat would be me, probably,” Sully admitted. He told his landlord and sometime employer about the cigarette he vaguely remembered leaving when he went out to buy more cigarettes. “I hope to Christ there
wasn’t
anybody inside,” he added. The house had been divided into three flats. In the middle of the afternoon there was probably nobody home, but he wasn’t sure.
    â€œI don’t think there was,” Kenny said, adding, “according to a cop I just talked to, you were the only one killed.”
    The roof fell then, shooting red embers high into the afternoon sky and down into the crowd.
    â€œYou’re taking this well,” Sully observed.
    Kenny Roebuck leaned toward him confidentially and lowered his voice. “Just between us, I’ve been thinking about burning the son of a bitch down myself. Costs me more to fix what goes wrong every month than I collect in rent. I guess I wasn’t cut out to be a slumlord.”
    The two men watched until the fire burned itself out.
    â€œWell,” Kenny Roebuck said. “That’s about it, and I should get back to work. I don’t know how to thank you.”
    Sully was still mulling over what his landlord had said before in light of Ruth’s constant pestering him to find a decent place to live. “I never thought of it as a slum,” he admitted.
    â€œYou’re the only one that didn’t, then,” Kenny Roebuck said. “Somebody said old Beryl Peoples has a flat for rent on Upper Main.”
    This rumor turned out to be true. Kenny Roebuck also wasn’t kiddingabout being grateful. The next day he gave Sully five hundred dollars for new clothes and some furniture, since Miss Beryl’s flat wasn’t furnished. That made the whole episode pretty much of a bonanza as far as Sully was concerned. He spent two hundred on underwear, socks, shirts, pants and shoes. Two hundred went a considerable distance at the Army-Navy store, which had a used clothing outlet around back. He spent another two hundred on some well-broken-in furniture—a double bed and rickety nightstand, a lamp in the shape of a naked woman, a small chest of drawers, a metal dinette and chairs with plastic seats, a huge sofa for the living room and a coffee table that came with only three legs. The other leg was around somewhere, the man at the used furniture store said. To show his appreciation for Sully’s business he threw in a used toaster. When Sully got all these new worldly goods set up in Miss Beryl’s flat, he plugged in the toaster to see if it worked, without much in the way of expectation. The inner coils glowed angry red though, so he unplugged it again. Since then he hadn’t found an occasion to use the toaster. The only place he ever ate toast was at Hattie’s, as part of the breakfast special.
    It was ironic that in a flat so remarkable for its wide-open spaces Sully should be cramped in the kitchen, but he was. The room was tiny, like kitchens in most old houses that had formal dining rooms, so there wasn’t much room for the dinette. Sully finally wedged it into the corner anyway so he’d have something to bang into and swear at. He’d originally set it up in the dining room, but it looked like a joke there, so small and bent and metallic in the middle of such a large room. He couldn’t imagine sitting down and eating anything in there, not even a bowl of cereal. So he ended up shutting the floor register to save on heat and closed the room. He did the same with the second bedroom, which also stood empty.
    He was glad the sofa he bought was huge because it at least displaced some air in the cavernous living room. He set it and the tippy, three-legged coffee table against the long wall facing the television he planned to get as soon as he could afford one. He made a mental note that the television had better be a good-size one if he was going to be able to see it from all the way across the room. He made another mental note to do something about the floral pink wallpaper. And he’d need a rug or two to cut down on the constant reminders of his own presence as he tapped across the hardwood floors. He still had a hundred dollars of Kenny Roebuck’s money, so he went out in search of bargain rugs.
    As luck would have it, he found Kenny Roebuck instead, and Kenny was on his way to the track. He