Everybody's Fool

Spinmatics

FOR A WEEKDAY NIGHT, the White Horse was busy, its booths all occupied by out-of-towners, half of whom were talking on cellular telephones. Where most were headed — Lakes George, Placid, Schroon and Champlain — they’d have no service. Those headed up the interstate to Montreal wouldn’t have reception for a good three hours. So many downstaters heading north this early in the season should’ve been good news for Birdie, whose sweat equity made her co-owner of the establishment, but in fact she looked like someone who was about to burn her half to the ground. Weird how every single woman Sully knew — Ruth, Janey, Bootsie and now Birdie — was on the warpath, as if they’d all received the same gender-coded message on the wind. “Perfect,” Birdie said, glancing up and watching Sully and the two Rubs come inside. “Now my night is complete.”

Sully slid onto the only vacant stool, right next to Jocko, who was still wearing his Rexall pharmacy smock, and slapped a couple twenties on the bar to ensure his welcome. “Is it me,” Sully said, “or is she happier to see us in the winter, after all the rich tourists have split?”

“Actually,” Jocko said, “I’ve never felt particularly welcome here in any season.”

“Sit, Rub,” Sully said, and the dog curled up beneath his stool.

“Where?” said Rub, realizing as he did that he had fallen for the joke yet again.

“What can I get you, Rub?” Birdie asked.

He sighed. In the two decades he’d been drinking at the Horse, his order had never varied even once. Why couldn’t she just bring him what she knew he wanted?

“A buh-buh-buh—”

“Beer,” Sully translated.

“What kind?”

“Buh-buh—”

“Budweiser,” Sully said.

“Anything else?”

Rub looked at Sully, who’d sometimes spring for a burger, sometimes not. “Go ahead,” he told him. “You’ve had a hard day.” Which meant it wouldn’t be long before he launched into the story he’d promised driving over not to tell.

“A buh-buh-buh—”

“Burger,” Sully said.

“Anything on it?”

“Buh—”

“Bacon.”

Jocko’s shoulders were shaking now. “Jesus, you people are cruel,” he said.

“And cheese,” Rub added, since he liked cheese and the word was easy to say.

Birdie turned to Sully. “You?”

“Just a draft.”

“You should eat something. You look terrible.”

“No appetite,” he confessed, which was strange, because he’d been hungry earlier. Probably Bootsie and her syringe. Otherwise, he was actually feeling better, his chest less heavy, his breathing easier than it had been all day. “What’s got your knickers all in a twist?”

Birdie shot him a don’t-get-me-started look and then got started. “Buddy called in drunk again, an hour before his shift, so I had to scramble to find a cook.”

A waitress emerged from the kitchen just then, a silver tray balanced on her shoulder, and before the door swung shut behind her Sully caught a glimpse of Janey working the grill.

“Then I broke a glass in the ice and did this cleaning it up.” She held up her left hand, swaddled with half-a-dozen overlapping Band-Aids between thumb and forefinger.

“I wondered why my pinot grigio was pink,” Jocko said, holding his glass up to the light.

“Yeah, sure,” Sully said, “but what kind of man drinks that to begin with?”

“A confident man? A man with no need to demonstrate his masculinity?”

Sully rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that must be it.”

“Then Bridget lets a table of eight skip out on steak dinners and five bottles of wine.”

The guilty waitress just then happened by on her way to the kitchen. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “I’ve got twice the number of tables I should, and you know it.”

Birdie ignored her. “It’s still two full weeks before my summer staff shows up, half of which probably found other jobs and never bothered to tell me.”

Rub, who disliked standing when everybody else had a seat, was eyeing a four-top booth that two couples were getting ready to vacate. He’d been hoping to find the Horse deserted, so he could have Sully all to himself. If he could convince him to move to the booth, he could tell him about Raymer fainting in the heat and falling headfirst into the judge’s grave. The story would appeal to Sully, who’d probably commandeer it as his own immediately. By this time tomorrow night he’d have told half the town. But he was an inspired storyteller, so Rub wouldn’t mind the theft. In fact, he enjoyed watching one of his stories evolve in Sully’s hands until he himself, its source, had disappeared completely. These days his own storytelling was undermined by his stammer, as well as by his conviction that a story had to be true. Sully was hampered by neither Rub’s condition nor his strictness. He shamelessly embellished, invented, reshaped and tailored every narrative, emphasizing with each new version the elements that provoked the most laughs or stunned disbelief in previous tellings, eliminating other elements that unexpectedly fell flat. At first he might credit Rub as his source, but as he grew more confident, he’d relate the story as if he himself had been the sole eyewitness. With Sully’s best efforts, Rub sometimes wished he’d been there to enjoy the events his friend was describing, until he remembered he actually had been.

Tonight, of course, he had a vested interest in Sully taking up the story of the police chief keeling over into that grave, because if Sully wasn’t regaling everybody in the Horse with the police chief’s idiocy, he’d be reporting Rub’s humiliating afternoon in the tree. His only hope was to replace the story he didn’t want told with a better one. “There’s a buh-buh-booth over there,” he said, pointing to it.

“Hang on,” Sully told him, his voice lowered. “I think a barstool’s gonna open up here in a minute.”

Because on the other side of Jocko sat none other than Spinmatics Joe, who’d been Sully’s least favorite person in all of Bath until Roy Purdy made his triumphant return. Joe usually drank at Gert’s, where a beer and a bump was a buck cheaper and only stumbling distance from the Morrison Arms. What’s more, a man could freely express the most dim-witted opinions there without fear of ridicule. The Horse, not exactly highbrow itself, was generally tolerant of stupidity, but on any given night it was possible to cross an invisible line and find yourself an object of scorn and derision when you’d been counting on, if not approval, a little forbearance.

“Oh, Jesus Lord, Birdie,” Jocko said, having overheard what Sully whispered to Rub. “Here we go again.”

She shrugged. “I can’t run him, Sully, not until he actually does something.”

“You could eighty-six him on general principle.”

Jocko snorted at this. “If that rubric were indiscriminately applied, who would remain?”

“Only people who use words like ‘rubric,’ ” Sully conceded, “and drink pinot grigio.”

“If he misbehaves,” Birdie assured him, “it’ll be my pleasure.”

“He’s about to,” Sully assured her.

“Ah, fuck,” said Jocko under his breath.

“That you, Joe?” Sully said, leaning forward for a direct line of sight. Jocko leaned back obligingly.

“You know it is, Sully,” replied the man in question, nodding at him in the mirror that ran along the backbar. “You don’t gotta ask.”

“I thought it was you,” Sully went on, nodding genially. “I left my glasses at home and haven’t seen you for a while. I thought you might be your brother.”

“I don’t have no goddamn brother.”

“Well, your parents probably thought you were enough. So, how are things down at the Arms these days?”

“It’s a fuckin’ shithole,” Joe said. “Course I didn’t have no crazy old woman kick off and leave me millions so I could live someplace nice.”

Sully ignored him. “Well, at least none of those people you don’t like are living there, right?”

“Ah, shit,” Jocko grunted, knowing full well where this seemingly innocuous conversation was bound. He hadn’t been present the night Joe got his nickname, but everyone in town knew the story. Angered by something he’d seen on the TV hung above the bar, he’d launched into a diatribe about how the fuckin’ Spinmatics were taking over the whole fuckin’ country. How, he wanted to know, could a white man get ahead when all the jobs went to the fuckin’ Spinmatics. “They already took over Amsterdam,” he said, when somebody asked what manner of redneck bullshit he was spouting now. “Y’all better wake the fuck up. They’ll be over here next.” At some point somebody had guessed what he was going on about: Hispanics. The man was talking about Hispanics. So far as Sully knew, Joe had not returned to the Horse once since getting his nickname.

“I always forget,” Sully was saying. “Who are those folks you don’t like?”

“Niggers?”

“Joe,” Birdie warned.

“No, not them,” Sully said. “The other ones.”

“Fuck you, Sully,” Joe said.

From underneath Sully’s stool came a growl.

“Joe,” Birdie warned again.

“You know the ones I’m talking about,” Sully said, as if he weren’t really listening. To judge by his tone, anyone would’ve sworn the two men were on the friendliest of terms and that Sully was merely trying to jog his pal’s memory. “Help me out here. It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

There was considerable tittering up and down the bar now, and Joe stiffened at the sound. “You really are a cunt,” he said to Sully’s reflection in the mirror, sending most heads swiveling to look at Birdie. Now here was a word you never heard at the Horse, certainly not when she was tending bar. Rub got to his feet, walked in a tight circle and growled a little louder, his ears stiff.

“Rub,” Sully snapped.

“What,” said his friend, still standing patiently behind him.

As his pet lay down again, Sully said, “Oh, I remember,” as if he just that second had. “The Spinmatics.”

“And a cocksucker, too,” Joe added, draining off half his beer.

“Drink up,” Birdie told him. “You’re out of here.”

“It’s a shame you don’t like them better,” Sully said. “Otherwise, you could get together with three or four and cut some records. Joey and the Spinmatics.”

Joe apparently suffered from a limited range of invective, because instead of trying out any other names, he took a different tack, raising his glass high in the air, and slowly poured the beer onto the bar. Just as he’d feared, Jocko got the worst of the splatter.

“You still gotta pay for that,” Birdie said, once this performance was over.

“Nah, I got it,” Sully said, pushing one of the twenties at her.

“The whole tab?” She clearly disapproved of this largesse.

“Why not?” he told her. “Joe and I go way back, don’t we, Spin? No need for hard feelings.”

Joe, having slid off his stool, stood stock-still, deeply and visibly conflicted. Did they go way back, he and Sully? Was this asshole actually apologizing?

“Though the truth is,” Sully continued, “I do prefer his brother.”

At this Joe’s face became a thundercloud, and he balled his right hand into a fist. Rub was on his feet again, and from somewhere deep within his rib cage came a low, guttural rumble that made Joe take note of him for the first time. Though Rub wasn’t a large animal, he appeared fully committed. Joe was anything but, so he relaxed his fist.

“Rub,” Sully said.

“Wh-wh-which?” said his impatient friend.

“Sit!” Sully told him.

The dog did as instructed.

“That’s what I’ve been wanting to do,” said his namesake.

When the door closed behind Joe, Sully turned to face Rub and indicated the now-vacant stool. “Well? What’re you waiting for?”

Rub wasn’t sure. He had wanted a stool, except this one was next to Jocko, who wasn’t his friend, instead of Sully, who was. He’d go from standing alone to sitting alone. As with most of what he felt deeply, he couldn’t begin to express it, so he just pointed at the puddle on the bar. “It’s all wet.”

“True,” Sully said, “but Birdie’ll wipe it up.”

“How about if I move over one?” Jocko suggested, sliding down simultaneously.

This, of course, was exactly what Rub had been hoping for. Yet as he stood regarding it, all he could do was reflect bitterly, as he had occasion to do each and every day, on the terrible disappointment of getting what you thought you wanted, only to discover it wasn’t, that you’d been cheated out of something you couldn’t even name.

“Everything all right now?” Sully said when he climbed aboard.

Rub shrugged. Everything was not all right, though he would’ve been hard-pressed to explain exactly what was wrong. Part of it was his terrible, almost visceral need for Sully. It was this, together with the knowledge that yet again his friend had forgotten him, that had driven him up into the tree that afternoon, half hoping he’d have an accident with the chain saw. If instead of the tree’s limb he managed to prune one of his own, Sully would blame himself, wouldn’t he? If he was the one to find Rub’s severed leg at the base of the tree? Surely then he’d realize it was all his fault. Eager to atone, he’d toss Carl Roebuck out of the old lady’s house and move Rub in, so he could be sure his friend had everything he needed. They’d eat meals and watch TV together. Over time Bootsie would come to regret how mean she’d been to him, and she, too, would want to move in, but Sully would draw the line at that. It would be just the two of them. Their days would be full of long hours, plenty of time for Rub to tell Sully whatever he wanted, and Sully, chastened, would be devoted to getting him back on his feet. Well…foot. Okay, Rub wasn’t crazy about the idea of losing a leg, but if that was the price of friendship, what choice did he have but to pay it? Sully’s pal Wirf had gotten along fine on one leg, and if he could be happy on just the one, then Rub supposed he could, too.

But unfortunately there’d been no accident. The tree surgery had gone off without a hitch, unless you counted Rub’s being stranded in the tree for hours, thirty feet off the ground with no hope of getting down, as a hitch. At some point, though, certain facts, as hard and uncomfortable as the severed nub of tree limb he was sitting on, began to intrude on his pleasant dismemberment fantasy. For instance, if Rub had managed to sever his own limb, he’d likely have bled out long before Sully showed up and discovered his leg at the base of the tree. In fact, the leg probably would’ve disappeared. That close to the dump there were plenty of feral animals around, and one of them would likely have dragged this prized discovery off into the woods. In all probability what Sully would find at the base of the tree was Rub himself, because when he passed out, from pain or loss of blood, he’d almost certainly tumble from his perch onto the hard ground below, and if he wasn’t dead already, the fall would kill him. In the wake of such real-world considerations came equally cruel psychological realities. When, for instance, had he ever known Sully to blame himself for anything? If Rub had maimed himself, Sully would place the blame squarely on him for being an idiot. Nor would he kick Carl Roebuck out of the old lady’s house. It wouldn’t be Sully who nursed Rub back to health but a resentful Bootsie, who’d probably grow tired of her duties after a few days and smother him with a pillow so she could go back to reading her romance novels. And even if he somehow avoided this fate and recovered, he’d be chasing Sully all over Bath on one leg instead of two.

“Well?” Sully was saying. “You good now, or do you need some other fucking thing to make you happy?”

Rub sighed. “I just wisht they’d hurry up with my burger.”

Sully nudged him, like he always did when attempting to improve Rub’s mood.

“What?” said Rub, who didn’t necessarily want his mood improved until he improved it himself.

“You said ‘burger.’ ”

“So?”

“Usually, you say ‘buh-buh-burger.’ ”

Rub didn’t want to, but he could feel himself giving in, and when Sully nudged him a second time he smiled sheepishly. Because it was good to have a barstool, and not just any stool but the one he’d been coveting. And he had said “burger,” without stumbling. There was no word that gave him more trouble, probably because he loved burgers and would’ve been content to eat nothing else for the remainder of his days. For some reason he recalled his father’s question all those years ago: Why don’t you just give up? That, he realized, was what he’d been feeling up in the tree that afternoon. That maybe he should just give up.

“Here comes your burger now,” Sully said as the door to the kitchen swung open and Janey emerged. She set Rub’s plate of food in front of him, along with a fork and knife wrapped in a paper napkin.

“You again,” she said, regarding Sully.

“Me again,” Sully agreed.

“Spreading cheer wherever you go.”

Which meant she’d been privy to the whole business with Spinmatics Joe. By the time he arrived at Hattie’s in the morning, Ruth would know all about it. On the other hand, there was no law that he had to go there. Hadn’t Ruth given him full permission to stay away just a few hours ago? “I try,” he told Janey weakly, but she was already bustling back into the kitchen.

“Try harder,” she suggested, the kitchen door swinging shut behind her.

She had a point. Today, he’d goaded two profoundly ignorant men to within an inch of violence. Both dickheads but the point remained: for what? Had he succeeded in getting them to lose their tempers, they’d have made short work of him. He was too old for bar fights, but even if he weren’t, what had he been trying to accomplish? Each time the urge had been pressing enough to suggest a purpose, but now, once his dander settled, he couldn’t imagine what it might’ve been.

Next to him, Rub sighed. His burger sat before him untouched.

“What’s the matter now?” Sully said.

“There’s no buh-buh-buh—”

“Bacon?”

“Bacon,” Rub repeated flawlessly.

Next to Rub, Jocko was chuckling. “Weird,” he said. “He’s really got a thing about that word.”

“ ‘Bacon’?” Sully said, assuming he must be talking about Rub.

“No, Joe,” he explained. “ ‘Hispanics.’ Poor bastard just can’t say it.”

“Hispanics,” Rub repeated clearly, even though he’d decided, as he always did in the end, to make the best of things and taken a big bite of burger. “That’s not so fuh-fuh-fuh—”

“So fuckin’ hard to say?” Sully suggested.

“Fuckin’ hard to say,” Rub agreed.

Sully couldn’t help smiling. For some reason, when Rub’s mood improved, Sully’s often did, too, as if their emotions were wired in parallel.

“Because he could just say ‘spics,’ ” Jocko continued. “That would solve the problem.”

“Or one of them,” Sully offered.

Rub apparently agreed, too, because he thumped his tail on the floor.