Nobody's Fool

Roebuck had slung over his shoulder was his golf clubs. At that moment, for Sully, the whole world took on the aspect of feces. Golf was not a game he’d ever particularly wanted to take up. Nobody he liked had ever played golf, and a lot of the people he disliked intensely played all the time. But the moment he looked up and saw that Carl Roebuck had been playing golf while he and Rub were busting their balls in the heat (it seemed to him at that moment that they
had
been busting their balls all day), it occurred to Sully that golf was one of a great number of fine things in life that had been denied him. And he could have listed all the others, had anyone asked him what they were. No one did.
    So, before Carl Roebuck could say a word, Sully had held up a grimy index finger in warning and told his employer that if he said one word he was going to take one of those golf clubs and shove it up Carl Roebuck’s ass until he could hit high “C.”
    Then Carl Roebuck made an error in judgment. He set his golf bag down on the lawn, sat down on top of it and laughed. By laughing, of course, he was doing as he was told. He was not saying a word, and this fact kept Sully in the trench, from which he’d been prepared, bum leg or no bum leg, to climb out and make good on his threat. Instead, he stayed where he was and waited for Carl to stop laughing, which, eventually, he did.
    â€œYou think this is funny?” Sully had said weakly.
    Carl nodded, still not saying a word.
    â€œWell, wait till you get the bill.”
    Carl grunted to his feet, shouldered the golf bag. “Sully, Sully, Sully,” he said. “You’re right. That will be funny too. Not as funny as the look on your face when you try to cash the check I’m going to pay you with, but definitely funny.”
    Sully hadn’t thought Carl Roebuck would follow through on his threat, and that had been his fifth mistake. He and Rub had run into more trouble, all of it legitimate, and he’d thought Carl understood this. The pipes they’d exposed were old, as old as the house probably, and they disintegrated like papyrus to the touch, which was fine until Sully managed to break the last section off at the elbow joint where the pipe connectedto the main line under the street. The old pipe was rusted and frozen there, impossible to remove, impossible to install the new plastic pipe around. It was terrible luck, but the only decent piece of metal in the whole line was the six-inch joint, frozen there at the elbow. If it could have been removed by banging on or swearing at, Sully would have managed it, because he swore at the pipe and banged on it until it was too dark to see anymore. Then Carl Roebuck called the County Water and Sewer and was told they’d send a man out in the morning. Which meant that the Roebucks would have to spend the night without water. Fortunately, Toby had already taken her cool bath, and when she came out to say an embarrassed good-bye she looked fresh and cool in a thin blouse that was even looser than the one she’d been wearing earlier. Sully had to lead Rub back to the truck.
    Today, months later, as they sheetrocked, the only breasts around were those in the obscene jingle Sully was trying to teach Rub, who always worked happily when he had something to distract him. Almost anything distracted Rub. Several times, after he’d recited it perfectly, they’d congratulated themselves that Rub had mastered its intricacies:
    I like Carnation best of all
.
No tits to pull

No shit to haul
.

No shit to haul,

No hay to pitch
.
Just pop a hole in that son of a bitch
.
    But ten minutes later Rub would forget how it began. He kept wanting to start it “I like tits best of all.” Which rendered the second line inaccessible. “It’s because I
do
like tits best of all,” Rub explained. “I like pussy too, as long as I don’t have to look at it. It kind of scares me to look at.”
    What scared Sully was the pain in his knee. It’d been growing steadily worse all morning, pain shooting all the way down into his ankle and up almost to his groin. Until a few weeks ago he’d been able to ignore it. He’d always prided himself on a high threshold of pain. Pain, he’d learned as a kid, would peak, and from that point forward it would get no worse. What you looked for was the moment when the pain peaked and you realized you could stand it, that it