Nobody's Fool

was finished, hauling ass was fine with Rub. If for some reason—like they were being paid by the hour—they needed to go slow, then Rub was even more of a marvel the way he was able to stay in motion without accomplishing anything. Rub was a perfect laborer, born to follow orders, not minding in the least when he was told to do things wrong, able to convey the impression of progress even as he ensured that the job wouldn’t get done today. If need be, you could rest easy that the job wouldn’t get done until there was another one to replace it. All of this without ever appearing to stall or even rest. Sully always maintained that if you had ten guys working on a rock pile, Rub would be the last you’d fire for laziness. Only when you’d fired all the others would you realize that Rub had not yet addressed his first rock.
    Truth be told, Sully and Rub had gone slow the day they dug up Carl Roebuck’s terrace and laid the new water pipe. It’d been a hot August day, and somehow they’d managed to talk Carl into an hourly wage arrangement, which meant there was no reason to bust their balls, especially with Toby Roebuck coming out every now and then to ask how it was coming and wonder how they could actually work in such heat. She gave them tall, cold glasses of lemonade to drink. Dressed in a thin, loose-fitting blouse,she’d bent over to hand the lemonade down into the trench they’d dug, and every time she did this Rub stared deep into her blouse, as if it afforded a glimpse of the promised land. Even when she went back into the house Rub continued to stare, slack-jawed, at the place in the air where Toby Roebuck’s full naked breasts had been, as if he could still see them there, like an afterimage burned in the dark. “They’re tan all over,” he kept saying, half admiring, half angry, perhaps at the fact that these breasts had so little to do with himself.
    Sully’d been guilty of five errors in judgment that day. Five that he knew of. There might have been more. First, he’d overestimated the amount of time the first part of the job would take. It had been raining all week and the ground was unexpectedly soft, and they dug most of the trench so quickly he feared they’d be finished by noon with a job they’d hoped to stretch into a full day. So they’d slowed down but good. If Rub was a master at looking busy above ground, he was an absolute artist in a ditch.
    Sully’s second error was in assuming that the last third of the job would go along at the same pace as the first two thirds. He knew better than to assume this, just as Carl Roebuck knew better than to hire him and Rub by the hour, but knowledge, as Sully’s young philosophy professor was fond of observing, often bore little relation to behavior. By the time he and Rub got up close to the house and encountered the roots of the old oak that had provided them with shade to drink their lemonade in during the long, pleasant afternoon, they’d slowed down so completely that it was hard to get started again. By then it was the hottest part of the day and they’d drunk too much sweet lemonade. Stirred by lust for Toby Roebuck, the lemonade had begun to churn in their stomachs. And so around four in the afternoon they talked her into going over to the IGA and getting them a six-pack of beer (Sully’s third error in judgment), which arrived ice cold. That first can, in conjunction with the terrific heat, pole-axed them. To make matters worse, Toby Roebuck drank one with them, and then another, and they all began to enjoy the heat. Toby sat at the edge of the ditch and dangled her long creamy legs down into the hole like the schoolgirl she so resembled.
    She’d finally gone inside, to draw a cool bath, she said, before they had to turn the water off, when Carl came home to a sight he found difficult to credit. He’d hoped, if not expected, that the job would be finished, the new pipe laid, the trench filled in, water pressure restored. Instead he found a trench extending from the street all the way up the lawn to the house,a trench that was about twice as wide and ugly as it needed to be, beer cans strewn along its edge, and Sully, half in the bag with heat and beer, flailing maniacally with his pickax at the stubborn tough roots of the recently encountered oak.
    Sully’s fourth error in judgment had been fated when he looked up and saw that what Carl