Nobody's Fool

hands,” the judge advised. “Take him to court.” Toby Roebuck, her face hard and unforgiving, her feet planted wide apart in a man’s stance, fired anyway, and it was Sully’s turn to scream.
    These screams had a strange sense of reality to them, perhaps because they were real. The first scream was not Rub’s. It belonged to Peter, Sully’s son, who was peering into the pickup’s window at his father. The second scream was Sully’s, starting awake. He was parked at the curb, in front of his ex-wife’s house, where he’d fallen asleep. It had been his intention merely to close his eyes for a minute, to gather himself and take a deep breath before going up the walk and knocking at the door of the house, where he expected a mixed reception. It was not immediately apparent how long he’d actually slept, but he suspected the sauna might have been only the last of a series of dreams. Also, it appeared that dusk was falling.
    â€œJesus Christ, Dad,” Peter kept saying. He was now walking up and down alongside the pickup, shaking his head, holding one hand over his heart. “You realize you sleep with your eyes open?”
    Sully understood this to be true, though it was a fairly recent phenomenon.Ruth had witnessed and reported it with considerable irritation. It couldn’t have been the case when he was married to Vera, because his wife had kept a careful, detailed list of the things he did of which she disapproved, and she was not the sort of woman to hold anything back. She surely would have mentioned it if he’d slept with his eyes open.
    Sully tried to shake off some of the deep grogginess. “I must have dozed off,” he said.
    â€œWith the motor running and door locked?”
    The motor
was
running. Sully turned it off. The door was not locked, but it was tricky. From the outside you had to pull up and out at the same time. Sully demonstrated for his son’s benefit. Way off he heard a siren, and, as he always did when he heard a siren, he tried to remember if he’d left a cigarette burning somewhere.
    Both men listened to the approach of the ambulance. “I knocked on the window, but I couldn’t get you to wake up,” Peter explained guiltily.
    Sully tried to make all this add up, but he still was too groggy from Jocko’s pills and the truck’s heater, and from breathing the pickup’s gasoline fumes. When the ambulance turned down their street and Peter flagged it, Sully looked at his ex-wife’s house and said, “Is somebody sick?”
    â€œYou,” Peter explained, looking embarrassed now. “We thought you were dead.”
    Sully just sat with the door open and let the cold air bring him back while Peter explained as best he could to the ambulance crew, who were reluctant to believe that this could be an honest mistake. They kept looking over at Sully suspiciously, as if the verdict was still out on whether or not he’d died, as originally reported. In their expression they reminded him of the people who’d been told he died in the fire he’d started twenty years ago. This was twice now he’d cheated people out of a tragedy, and even his own son looked conflicted on the point of his continued existence, though this was probably due to the fact that his not being dead after all made Peter, who’d called for the ambulance, look like a fool.
    When Ralph came out, Sully was delighted to see him. “You ain’t dead after all,” Ralph said, beaming at him. Sully and Vera’s second husband had always gotten on fine and would have gotten along even better had they not both understood that Vera considered their inclination to like each other a betrayal. It seemed not to bother Ralph in the least that his wife had been intimate with Sully, had borne him a son. Worse, it seemed not to bother Sully that what had once been his now belonged toanother man. It was as if they’d agreed she wasn’t worth fighting over. Indeed, it was more like they considered themselves fellow sufferers.
    â€œNo, not yet, Ralph,” Sully said. “You wouldn’t mind too much if I threw up here in your gutter, would you?”
    Ralph shrugged. “I’d offer you the bathroom, except the boys are in there to take a bath.”
    â€œI wouldn’t make it anyhow,” Sully said, feeling the vomit rise in his throat. “Besides, I may not have learned much married to