Nobody's Fool

wouldn’t kill you. As a boy, Sully had learned to accommodate his father’s drunken whuppings by waiting for Big Jim’s fury to hit its apex, then slide away, spent, leaving Sully full of pride and, yes,love. You could feel good in pain, and that was something not everybody knew. One of his father’s favorite jokes had been the one that went “Why did the moron beat his head against the wall? Because it felt so good when he stopped.” Sully understood that the reason his father liked the joke was not so much that it was funny as because it was literally true. There was pleasure to be taken from the diminishment of pain. It
did
feel good when you stopped.
    What frightened Sully about this new, more intense pain in his knee was its relentlessness. As a boy, he had not realized what his father must have known, that pain could have a cumulative effect. Your ability to withstand it had much to do with your ability to catch your breath between its assaults. The pain in Sully’s knee had not truly worried him as long as bad days alternated with good ones. But now he was beginning to suspect that the periods of respite, the troughs in the wave that had so far allowed him to prepare for the peaks, were beginning to disappear. Anymore, it was rare for him to sleep more than four hours a night, and even these hours were tinged with dream pain. Even the self of his dreams was hobbled now, and when he awoke it was with the sensation that he hadn’t really been asleep.
    If this weren’t enough, Jocko’s pills made him feel dreamy even when he was awake, and Sully’d begun to fear that he was slowly migrating toward a state that was somewhere in between sleep and consciousness where the only constant was pain, and this to Sully was more frightening than the specific shooting pains he felt on bad days like today. Shooting pains were human, like the whuppings he got from his father. He’d endured such pain by remembering that his father had only so much strength, so much meanness, in him. At some point Big Jim always saw what he was doing and would be satisfied and the pain would stop. What Sully feared now was that he was facing a new kind of pain, one that wouldn’t know or care when he’d had all he could take. It might never be satisfied.
    This morning Sully’d resisted taking one of Jocko’s pills, fearing that it would render him useless. It didn’t take a lot of mental agility to sheetrock, but it did take some. You couldn’t do it and sleep too, and some of Jocko’s better painkillers worked like Mickey Finns, with about as much warning. And Rub required supervision at all tasks. Rub’s cousins, none of whom would themselves be mistaken for theoretical mathematicians, complained that he couldn’t even collect garbage right, and Sully didn’t want to be doped up and in the immediate vicinity of a grown man who couldn’tlearn a short bawdy jingle after three hours of practice. No pills until they finished.
    â€œDoesn’t pussy kind of scare you to look at?” Rub wanted to know.
    â€œI don’t remember,” Sully told him.
    â€œHow can you forget pussy?” Rub said.
    â€œHow can you forget the Carnation jingle?”
    â€œWell,” Rub said, ignoring this. “I don’t like how it looks.”
    It was nearly two in the afternoon when they finished. Rub was disappointed at not mastering the jingle but able to console himself that at least they were done working on Thanksgiving and therefore no longer in need of the jingle’s distraction. He was also pleased to contemplate the big ole turkey Bootsie had browning in the oven, getting all crispy. “I like that big ole flap of skin over the turkey’s asshole,” he told Sully as they stashed their hammers and belts in Sully’s toolbox.
    Sully suspected that Rub’s understanding of a turkey’s anatomy was imperfect. The “asshole” he was referring to was probably the turkey’s neck cavity, which Rub couldn’t visualize with the head missing, the neck detached. “I don’t know, Rub,” Sully said as they climbed into the pickup. “The sight of pussy scares you, but you can’t wait to eat the asshole out of a turkey.” He extracted one of Jocko’s pills from its bright pink tube, made the sign of the cross, and swallowed it dry.
    â€œSay la vee,” Rub said.
    Sully, who had been half