Nobody's Fool

forced Sully into accompanying him thereby asking him if he wanted to. On the way back Sully decided he hadn’t needed the rugs anyway. They stopped at Ray’s corner market for a six-pack of beer and from there went to the new flat so Kenny could see how Sully was making out. Sully took the six-pack and put it in the refrigerator while Kenny Roebuck laughed. In fact, Kenny stood in the middle of the living room and howled. He couldn’t stop. He went from room to room, each room striking him as funnier than the last. In the two empty, closed-off rooms he laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. Finally he joined Sully in the tiny kitchen and collapsed into one of the plastic dinette chairs, his face beet red with exertion. “How long do you figure before you’ll fill it up?”
    Sully took two beers out of the refrigerator. He felt the metal shelf before handing one to Kenny Roebuck. “I’m not sure the refrigerator works too well,” he said, which started Kenny in all over again.
    It didn’t seem possible to Sully that Kenny Roebuck had been dead for most of the dozen years since he got that first look at Sully’s new flat. One thing was certain. If Kenny were there now he’d get just as good a laugh. Except for a throw rug and a big white-cabineted television with a small screen, the flat looked pretty much as it had the day he moved in. What he’d decided to do about the floral wallpaper was to let it peel off.
    Tonight, like most nights, he was too tired to care. Regulating the water as hot as he could stand it, Sully stripped, climbed into the shower and let the water beat down on his shoulders and lower back. In a few minutes the rising steam brought with it a childhood memory he’d not thought of in forty years. It was a Saturday afternoon, and his father had taken Sully and his older brother, Patrick, to the new YMCA in Schuyler Springs for the free swim, a monthly event intended to drum up membership. Sully’s father had no intention of letting his sons join, but as long as it was free, well.… Also, he’d discovered there was a Saturday afternoon poker game in back. When Sully and his brother were buzzed downstairs, his father remained above to play cards. The locker room was cold and uncarpeted, and the pool lifeguards had made all the boys shower and then stand, shivering, at the side of the pool while each boy was inspected for head lice and read the rules about no running, no pushing, no diving in the shallow end. Several boys were found to be dirty and required to go take another shower. The clean ones, including Sully and his brother, had to wait for them.
    Sully, who had been eight at the time, couldn’t stop shivering, even when they were finally allowed to jump into the pool. The water felt cold,and he was one of the youngest boys there. All the rules frightened him, and he was afraid he’d violate one unintentionally and be expelled while his brother, four years older, was allowed to stay. The building’s subterranean corridors were confusing, and Sully wasn’t sure he could find his locker again, much less his father. Also permitted to join the boys’ free swim were two old men who lived at the Y, and they swam without bathing suits, which also frightened Sully, even after his brother explained that it was okay since they were all men and there weren’t any girls around to see your equipment. Sully’s own equipment had withdrawn almost into his body cavity. He tried to have a good time, but his lips were blue and he couldn’t stop shivering. One of the lifeguards noticed and ordered him back into the showers until he warmed up.
    In the tiled shower room he’d stood beneath the powerful spray, the hot water beating down on him until it began to cool, whereupon he moved to another on the opposite side of the room. Every time the hot water ran out, he moved. Soon the room was thick and comfortable with steam, and Sully had allowed himself to drift into its moist warmth, mindless of the passage of time, coming out of his reverie only when the hot water ran cool, necessitating another change. He spent the entire two-hour free swim in the showers, listening to the distant shrieks of the other boys in the pool, not wanting to get out of the steam, or to return to the cold pool water, or to venture back into the locker room on the cold concrete floor to search for the locker where he and his brother