Nobody's Fool

noticed that the dark sedan that had been parked along the road by the job site yesterday was parked a ways down the street. There was a man at the wheel who appeared to be closely inspecting some sort of black box. Sully waved. The man did not wave back. Only when the snowball exploded on his windshield did he lower the electric window and poke his head partially out.
    â€œYou get a good shot of all that?” Sully said, indicating the window above.
    â€œI don’t follow you,” the man said evenly.
    â€œI thought that’s all you guys did.”
    â€œI think you have an imperfect understanding of the situation,” the man said in the kind of voice that Sully despised. It reminded him of the way the insurance company lawyers talked at his disability hearings.
    â€œI’d be careful just the same,” Sully said. Carl, he knew, owned a handgun.
    â€œAre you threatening me?” the man wanted to know.
    â€œNot unless you’re afraid of snowballs.”
    â€œGood,” the man said, and the window hummed up.
    Rub was dancing back and forth on the balls of his feet when Sully arrived at Hattie’s.
    â€œI wisht Hattie’s was open,” he said. He had dried donut cream in both corners of his mouth.
    â€œHow come, Rub?”
    â€œSo I could’ve gone inside and waited for you where it was warm,” he explained seriously.
    Sully just stood there and grinned at him until Rub got embarrassed and studied his shoes. “You’re going to rag me all day, aren’t you,” he said sadly.
    They walked up the street to where Sully’s pickup was parked. Miss Beryl, clutching her thick robe to her throat, was standing on the side porch, peering down at the snowblower. Which gave Sully an idea. Taking the chain he always kept in the toolbox and the Yale lock he used to secure the box, he limped up the drive to where his landlady was standing. “That’s so you can start doing the driveway yourself when you feel like it,” Sully told her.
    â€œI couldn’t, even with that,” Miss Beryl said. She was staring at the machine suspiciously. “It’d probably get going along and just drag me down the street. The neighbors would look out their windows and say, ‘There goes old Beryl.’ ”
    â€œDon’t be silly,” Sully kidded her. “It’d be good exercise.”
    â€œI don’t want exercise. These are my golden years. What are you going to do with that chain?”
    Sully already had the snowblower secured to the railing. He could have just hidden the machine in the garage, but he liked the idea of showing Carl right where it was. “Keeping the man I stole this from stealing it back. If he comes by, call the cops.”
    It took Miss Beryl a minute to digest this. She was an old woman who’d lived a schoolteacher’s life, but she was also a good
sport
, Sully knew. “As I said, you’re a cur, sir.”
    Then she grew serious. “Tell me something, Donald,” she said. “Does it ever bother you that you haven’t done more with the life God gave you?”
    Sully had decided years ago not to take offense at Miss Beryl’s more personal observations. “Not often,” he admitted, rattling the chain to make sure it was secure. “Now and then.”
    Maybe sheetrocking wasn’t one of Sully’s favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm it’d get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years—that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it. This morning, in fact, it moved right along. The temperature rose steadily, and Sully and Rub, who had figured to be frozen by midmorning, still had feeling in their fingers. The two men fell naturally into a smooth, moderate pace that would probably get them finished more quickly than hurrying.
    Carl Roebuck wondered how Sully could stand to work with Rub, but in truth, Rub was one of the few people he’d ever been able to work with. Rub was the perfect dance partner, always content to let Sully, or whoever he was working with, lead. The beauty of Rub was that he had no agenda of his own. If Sully was in a hurry or had somewhere to go, another job to do when this one