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  Sully had been overhearing parts of this serial conversation for years but doubted he’d ever engage in it even if he made it to retirement. He had no house to contemplate the increasing value of, unless he counted his father’s place on Bowdon Street, at the edge of the Sans Souci property, the legal status of which was no longer clear, at least to Sully. Wirf had informed him when his father died that he’d inherited the house, but Sully had told Wirf he not only didn’t want it, he wouldn’t take it. When Sully had been seventeen and enlisted in the army he’d promised his father he’d have nothing further to do with him, in life or in death, and except for one afternoon shortly before the old man died when Ruth had talked him into visiting the nursing home, he’d kept his pledge. His father’s long-neglected house was falling down, its windows boarded up, the grounds overrun with tall weeds. Unless Sully missed his guess, the accumulated back taxes were probably more than the house would bring on the market. Definitely not the sort of house that would gain Sully entry into the Florida/Arizona condo conversation, even if he had wanted to be included, which he didn’t.

  The only thing Sully envied these men was that they were finished, like ballplayers in an old-timers game who could look back on an episode in their lives that had a particular shape. Having completed it, they could move on to something else. Their lives were full of dates. They could tell you when they married, when their children were born, the date they retired from their jobs. In Sully’s life the years (never mind days) elided gracefully without dividers, and he was always surprised by the endings and new beginnings other people saw, or thought they saw, in their existences. One day thirty-odd years before, he’d run into Vera on the street, and she’d smiled sadly and said, well, at least it was finally over, a chapter of their lives behind them. Sully had looked at her blankly, wondering what she was talking about. It turned out her reference was to their divorce, which had become final a few days before, the fact of which he had not been notified. Either that or he’d trashed the notification along with the other mail he wasn’t interested in. He’d known Vera was relieved not to be married to him anymore (she would marry her second husband, Ralph, within the year), but the finality of the divorce had impressed her, and Sully could tell she was feeling a little melancholy about the failure of their marriage. For her, the divorce had drawn a line that Sully had missed altogether.

  The graceful merging of his days was either depressing or reassuring, depending upon his mood. Even now, at age sixty, he couldn’t imagine feeling finished in the way that the OTB men were, or of being on the brink of anything new. Maybe that’s what had gotten to him about taking classes at the community college, about talk of a new career. That was the point of the philosophy class, he’d come to understand. It was the young professor’s intention to make everything disappear, one thing at a time, and then replace all of it with something new, a new kind of thought or existence maybe. Out with the old, in with the new. And maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea if you were talking to twenty-year-olds. Hell, at twenty, he’d been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more months. He wanted to keep going forward, not stop and turn around and analyze the validity of decisions made and courses charted long ago. He wasn’t even sure he wanted Wirf, his lawyer, to succeed in the various litigations he was pursuing in Sully’s behalf. If Wirf got Sully his total disability, that would be the end of life as he knew it, the beginning of something new, not necessarily good news to a man who didn’t believe in new beginnings any more than he believed in new knees.

  “You’re looking especially well this morning,” Otis Wilson observed, in reference, no doubt, to Sully’s crust of mud. Otis claimed every summer that come winter he was Florida bound.

  Sully turned a circle so all the windbreaker men could see. “Somebody’s got to work in this country,” he said. “Wasn’t for guys like me, guys like you’d have to get your hands dirty occasionally.”

  “We been meaning to say thank you,” Otis said.

  “I heard on the news an alligator made off with another one,” Sully said. Otis, a big, soft man with a florid face, was particularly susceptible to alligator stories, and Sully, as part of a running gag, had been for years warning Otis not to go to a wild place like Florida without a tough, experienced guide, someone not afraid to wrestle gators. Someone like Sully. To Sully’s delight, at the mention of alligators Otis’s face drained. “If I was you I’d get a second-floor condo. Alligators hate stairs.”

  “Get away from me,” Otis said when Sully joined his elbows together to make alligator jaws. “Go on now, git!” Otis parried Sully’s thrusts nervously. “Go play your damn sucker triple and leave smart people alone.”

  “There are no smart people within a block of here,” Sully told him. “The OTB is a tax on stupidity.”

  “How many stupid people you paying taxes for beside yourself?” somebody wanted to know.

  “I’m smart enough not to move someplace where I’m going to get eaten by an alligator,” Sully said.

  “Go bet that fool’s triple,” Otis said.

  “All right, I will,” Sully said, heading for the window. For the last year or so he’d been playing 1-2-3 trifectas regardless of the horses or jockeys involved. Never much of a handicapper, he’d given up on trying to figure triples, which, he’d concluded, were invented to drive you crazy. Anymore he bet 1-2-3 and explained, when people wanted to know why, that the horses running around the inside of the track didn’t have as far to go as those running around the outside, which would have been true if there were lanes. “If my triple runs I’ll buy Hilda one of those video cameras to take with you to Florida,” he called back to Otis. “That way she can get it on film. We can show it over at The Horse. Charge admission to see Otis get dragged off into the swamp.”

  Sully bet his triple and was about to leave when through the front window he saw Carl Roebuck round the corner a block away and head up the other side of the street in Sully’s direction. Sully couldn’t help but smile at Carl’s jaunty stride, which wouldn’t have been so jaunty had he known that his wife had changed the locks.

  In front of the savings and loan, Clive Peoples, who’d just come out, was studying with satisfaction the new banner recently hung across Main Street. Clive Jr., a study in self-importance, was one of the few apples Sully knew that had fallen miles from the tree. True, his father, whom Clive Jr. had grown to greatly resemble, had been proud of his local celebrity as the football coach, but he’d been good-natured too, and Miss Beryl’s gentle mockery shamed him when he got too puffed up. Not so Clive Jr., who lacked, among other things, a sense of humor. That he took himself seriously was proof positive, in Sully’s view. In fact, Sully had little use for his landlady’s son and would have actively disliked him were it not for Miss Beryl, who, Sully sensed, was disappointed in her son, his having become a big shot in town notwithstanding.

  Before Clive Jr. could get into his car, a long, sleek black affair that he always parked out front of the savings and loan, Carl Roebuck collared him for one of their thirty-second conversations. Sully didn’t have to be there to know how it would go. “Tell me we’re still in business,” Carl Roebuck would urge, conspiratorially. Clive Jr. would assure him that they were, and then Carl would say, “If this thing ever goes south, don’t tell me. Just come out to the house and shoot me in the head.” Talk that made Clive Jr., a nervous-looking man, even more nervous looking. Clive couldn’t get into his car and away from Carl Roebuck fast enough.

  When Carl crossed the street and headed right for the OTB, Sully got ready to slip out the back, but Carl continued right on by, heading Sully couldn’t imagine where. A heavy gambler, Carl seldom bet at the OTB, preferring bookies who didn’t siphon the state’s percentage and who took action all day and most of the night over the phone. Actually, Carl preferred betting sporting events to betting horses. Sully watched Carl out of sight and was
about to venture back into the street when he noticed the man at his elbow was Rub.

  “I was just looking for you,” Sully said.

  “You wasn’t looking very hard,” Rub pointed out. “I been standing right next to you for five minutes.”

  “You get your turkey?”

  Rub looked blank.

  “I thought maybe you were shopping for a turkey here at the OTB,” Sully said.

  Still blank.

  “Let’s go,” Sully said. “I got us some work.”

  “Who for?”

  “Carl Roebuck.”

  “Wasn’t that Carl you was just hiding from?”

  Sully admitted this was true, without offering explanation.

  “You said you was never going to work for him again.”

  “You want to work or not?”

  “I hate that Carl.”

  “You hate his money?”

  “No,” Rub admitted. “Just Carl.”

  Out in the street it felt colder, and Sully noticed that the temperature on the bank clock had fallen several degrees since morning.

  “That wife of his I like, though,” Rub said after they’d walked a block. “I wisht she’d take an interest in me. I’d let her be on top.”

  Where women were concerned, Rub knew no higher compliment.

  “How come women like her are never interested in guys like us?” Rub asked seriously. His innocence regarding women was comprehensive. Rub honestly saw no reason why Toby Roebuck would not be interested in any man who’d let her be on top.

  “I only know why they don’t like you,” Sully said. “Why they don’t like me is a mystery.”

  “How come they don’t like me?”

  “They just don’t.”

  Rub accepted this. “Where’s your truck?”

  “Out at the job,” Sully told him. Partial explanations always satisfied Rub. It would not occur to him to wonder how Sully and his truck had come to be separated. “Where’s your car?”

  “Bootsie’s got it,” Rub said. “She always parks out back of Woolworth’s.”

  They turned down the narrow alley that led to the Woohvorth’s lot, walking single file. The morning’s snow remained untrampled there in the dark, narrow alley, and Rub walked backward so he could watch the footprints he left.

  “I hope she won’t be too bent out of shape when she finds the car’s gone,” Sully said. He made a mental note to return Bootsie’s car once they got the truck unstuck. That way Rub wouldn’t take a beating.

  “She’s been bent out of shape for ten years,” observed Rub, who was generally brave in his wife’s absence.

  “How long you been married?”

  “Ten years.”

  Sully nodded. “See any connection?”

  “Shit,” Rub said, turning and surveying the parking lot. “It ain’t here.”

  “Let’s take this one then,” Sully suggested, since they happened to be standing right next to Rub’s and Bootsie’s old Pontiac. “You don’t even recognize your own car?”

  Rub unlocked the Pontiac and got in, leaning over to unlock the passenger side door for Sully. “At least I recognize my own best friend when he’s standing right next to me,” he said, pulling out of the lot.

  It only took them about ten minutes to drive back out to the site. Sully used the time to consider how Rub ever got the idea they were best friends.

  “You know what I wisht?” Rub said.

  Since he and Sully left the OTB, Rub had already wished for a new car, a raise for himself and a raise for Bootsie, who worked as a cashier at Woolworth’s and hadn’t had a raise in over a year. He’d also wished some big ole company would build a big ole plant right in Bath and make him a foreman at about fifteen dollars an hour. He’d wished it was spring already and not Thanksgiving, that California would just go ahead and fall into the ocean if it was going to, that the climate in upstate New York was more tropical, that someone would die and leave him a big ole boat he could sail down to Mexico, that the Royal Palm Company would start making that red cream soda again. And he’d wished ole Toby Roebuck would sit on his face, just once.

  Rub had wished all of this in the space of roughly an hour, one wish gliding naturally into the next, unimpeded by plausibility. Since September, Sully had forgotten how full of wishes Rub’s life was. As fast as Sully’s professor explained things out of existence, Rub wished other things into being. It was not unusual for him to say, “You know what I wisht?” fifty times a day, and the worst part of it was he’d just keep repeating the question until Sully acknowledged it with a “What? What for sweet Jesus’ sake do you wish now?” The thing that always amazed Sully about Rub’s wishes was that most of them were so modest. After wishing a whole company into existence, Rub would settle for a forty-hour-a-week job at union scale, as if he feared some sort of cosmic retaliation for an arrogant imagination. Sully tried to explain from time to time that if he was going to wish an entire corporation into existence, he might as well wish he owned it and had somebody else to do the actual work. But Rub didn’t see it this way. He liked the smaller wishes and he liked to wish them one at a time. Out loud.

  “I wisht we were all through with this job and sitting in The Horse eating a big ole cheeseburger” was what Rub would have liked at this instant. He was as covered with mud as Sully, and his wish for warmth and a cheeseburger probably seemed as remote to him as the possibility that somebody would die and leave him a big ole boat. “Next time you find us work, I wisht you’d let me eat lunch first,” he added.

  They were now on their second load, and this time they were loading the blocks right, cushioning the bed of the truck with plywood. Half of the bottom two layers of the first load hadn’t made it. Having located Rub with so little trouble, Sully’d made up his mind to reload the truck, but fate had conspired against them. By the time they got back to the site the temperature had dropped and the sloppy ground had firmed up, and the truck, hopelessly mired an hour before, drove right out on the first try. This had looked to Sully like a sign, so he’d said screw the reloading, let’s go. His thinking was that even with the two of them working, they’d be lucky to finish before seven o’clock, which meant they’d have to do the last couple of loads in the dark. He was having all he could do to avoid disaster when he could see the ground.

  They’d just left the blocks that broke when Sully hit a pothole right there in the truck. The others they’d piled with extra care out at the new site, next to the shallow hole out of which one of Carl Roebuck’s no-frills government-subsidy two-bedroom ranches would grow in about a week, weather permitting. Carl was behind on the contract, just like he was behind on every contract, and his guys would have to work right through Christmas, probably, or until the ground froze. On the way back for the next load, they’d stopped and tossed the broken blocks behind the clown billboard. “What if somebody finds them?” Rub had wanted to know.

  “You didn’t write your name on them, did you?” Sully said.

  They were nearly finished with the second load when they heard a car coming and Carl Roebuck’s El Camino, with its TIP TOP CONSTRUCTION COMPANY: C. I. ROEBUCK logo on the door, careened into view. It bore down on them at such an unsafe speed that it could mean only one thing—that Carl Roebuck himself was at the wheel. Carl was careful never to take his Camaro onto a job site, but he considered it executive privilege to wreck at least one company car a year by bouncing it over rutted, unpaved roads at fifty miles an hour.

  “Uh-oh,” Rub said. “I bet he found them blocks already.”

  Sully just looked at him. “Pay attention a minute,” he said.

  Rub was paying attention, all right, but not to Sully. He was watching the approaching El Camino and looking scared.

  Sully reached down from the truck bed where he was standing and cuffed Rub, who was stationed in the mud below. “I don’t want you to say a word, understand? If you so much as open your mouth I’m going to brain you with one of these blocks and bury you in the woods. An
d I’m going to pile all those broken blocks on top of you.”

  “I wisht you wouldn’t say things like that,” Rub said. “You always sound like you mean it.”

  “Mean what?” Carl Roebuck said, getting out of the El Camino.

  Rub started to answer and Sully cuffed him again. Rub’s mouth closed with an audible click of his teeth.

  Carl surveyed the mound of remaining blocks, which had not diminished perceptibly. “I should apply for a federal grant,” he said, shaking his head. “When you hire the handicapped, you’re supposed to qualify.”

  Sully sat down on the tailgate of the pickup, took off his work gloves, lit a cigarette. “You could help. That way things’d go faster. Except then you’d break a sweat and your girlfriends’d all wrinkle their noses.”

  “Let’s not even talk about women,” Carl suggested. Indeed, the mere mention of the subject made him look even more morose. “You know what the C. I. in my name stands for?”

  “What?” Rub said, genuinely interested.

  “Coitus Interruptus,” Carl said sadly.

  “What?” Rub frowned.

  “That’s Latin, Rub,” Carl reassured him. “Don’t worry about it. Learn English first.”

  “If you’d use your lunch hour to eat lunch this wouldn’t happen,” Sully observed. “This used to be a nice, peaceful town. Now everybody has to go home between twelve and one to make sure your car isn’t in their driveway.”