Everybody's Fool

Grave Doings

WHEN SULLY ARRIVED HOME, a car he didn’t recognize was parked at the curb. There were no lights on in Miss Beryl’s house, at least none that was visible from the street. Standing on the front seat, his paws on the dash, Rub had also noted the unfamiliar vehicle, barked at it, then turned to regard Sully. “I see it,” Sully told him. “Shut up before I whack you one.” The dog cocked his head, puzzled. Sully’d never laid a hand on him, but his threats, always delivered with conviction, were hard to ignore completely. The strain of not barking caused him to let loose a short burst of urine on the glove box.

“Let’s go,” Sully said, getting out, but Rub had already scrabbled past him.

Strange that after so many years Sully still thought of the house as Miss Beryl’s. He’d lived in the apartment upstairs so long that he still forgot sometimes and went up the back stairs only to find the door locked. If Carl, who lived there now, was home and heard his approach, he’d holler, You don’t fucking live up here, you idiot. And though Peter and Will had been living in the downstairs flat for the last seven years, at times Sully was still surprised to see one of them emerge instead of his former landlady. Lately, the house filled him with unease, and that was even stranger. It was a fine property, one of the best on the street, which in turn was one of the best streets in Bath. Had he any wish to sell it, the place was worth a small fortune. This was in part due to his grandson, who kept the lawn mowed and edged, the hedges neatly trimmed. Since moving in, he and his father had painted the place twice and undertaken repairs and improvements in return for reduced rent. Sully hadn’t wanted to charge them anything at all, but Peter wouldn’t hear of it. As a result, the house looked better now than when Miss Beryl was alive and depending on Sully to keep it spruced up.

If he’d had any inkling of her intention to leave him the house, he’d have done his best to talk her out of it. He’d never before owned anything more valuable than a motor vehicle, and that suited him to a T. The old woman must’ve known he had little desire to become a property owner so late in the overall scheme of things, that it might well prove a burden. Had she hoped it would force him to accept a long-overdue and entirely unwelcome new role as a responsible adult? Possibly. More likely, though, she’d just meant to thank him for the moral support he’d offered when her son, Clive Jr., skipped town in the wake of the Ultimate Escape Fun Park fiasco. His unseemly departure, together with the small strokes she was suffering, had left her fragile, ashamed and disengaged, as well as increasingly housebound. Hearing Sully’s footfalls upstairs had comforted her. She also knew Sully’s son and grandson had unexpectedly returned to his life and that down the road the house might provide them with a place to live. Which meant that in due course the house would become Peter’s. It probably pleased her to think that Sully, who would have had nothing to leave his son, now had something tangible to pass on. She could never have predicted Peter’s disinterest in any such inheritance or that eventually Sully would see her gift as a regrettable psychic turning point.

Though to be fair, Sully’s luck had already begun to turn before this inheritance. It was Peter who bet that first winning triple. Until his son’s arrival, things had been going more or less according to form. Badly, in other words. In fact, Sully had been in the middle of one of those exhilarating stupid streaks that had characterized so much of his adult life. This one had culminated with a straight right hand, delivered right on the button, to then officer Raymer’s nose, dropping him like a sack of potatoes in the middle of Main Street and resulting in a warrant for Sully’s arrest. He’d spent most of that holiday season in jail. While he was incarcerated, the 1-2-3 trifecta he’d been playing every day for decades — what Carl Roebuck called his bonehead triple — had finally run. Missing out on it would have been about par for Sully’s course, but Peter, on Sully’s drunken instructions, had continued to make the wager at the OTB, so the winnings were waiting for him when he got out. Not exactly a fortune, but enough to return him to the economic knife edge he’d been teetering on for as long as he could remember, the most he could reasonably hope for. But then a month later the same trifecta hit again, its payoff even bigger, and at age sixty-one Sully had done something so completely out of character that he’d wondered, even at the time, if cosmic repercussions might follow: he’d opened a savings account. After all, he had a grandson now (three, actually, though the other two lived with their mother, Peter’s ex-wife, in West Virginia), and one day Will would need money for college. Sully hadn’t contributed a penny to Peter’s own education, so this was the least he could do.

Even after that second windfall, he’d continued to cling stubbornly to his conviction that his newfound luck couldn’t last. After all, his stupid streaks had always run with the regularity of European trains. Another was bound to heave into view momentarily, after which he’d be back in the soup, broke and busted up and without prospects, his natural condition. But no. Later that year, his landlady died and left him the house.

Nor was even this the end. The final stroke of good fortune — or at least Sully had hoped it would be — was more unnerving than all the others combined, because its ultimate source was Big Jim Sullivan, Sully’s drunk, abusive, long-dead father. As a final fuck you to the old man, Sully had intentionally let the family house on Bowdon Street, the scene of so many painful memories, fall into ruin until the town finally had no choice but to condemn and raze it; that, Sully had imagined, would finish things off. He’d given exactly no thought to the weedy, unattractive half acre the house sat on, assuming the land itself, awkwardly situated, would be next to worthless. But one of Gus Moynihan’s campaign promises had been to build a bike path through the town of Bath and out through sprawling Sans Souci Park, on the other side of which it would hook up with the Schuyler Springs path, the idea being to link their unlucky community to Schuyler’s historically more fortunate one. The proposed route, the only one that made any sense, ran straight through Sully’s half acre, which the town planned to spruce up with park benches and a marble water fountain. Sensing Sully’s reluctance to sell, but not its source, the mayor had sweetened the deal by promising Rub Squeers a custodial job out at Hilldale. And when even that didn’t produce the desired effect, he offered to void all of Sully’s parking violations, which he’d been collecting for years and which were now the equivalent of a small line item in the town’s annual budget.

“Raymer’ll have a cow,” the mayor confided smugly, confident that Sully wouldn’t be able to resist putting it to his old nemesis, whose first investment as chief of police had been a wheel boot that he’d used on Sully’s car the same day it was delivered. Later, after Sully and Carl Roebuck figured out how to unlock and steal the boot, he’d purchased two more, only to have these stolen as well. So despite his misgivings, Sully had sold the town his father’s land and put the money into his savings account, the balance of which had now swollen to the point where, despite heroic resolve, he couldn’t possibly hope to drink it up at the Horse during what remained of his life.

What all this amounted to, in Sully’s estimation, was a cosmic joke. As a poor man he’d always suspected that life’s deck was stacked in favor of those with means. Was it possible that, without intending to, he’d actually become one of them? Was he now and forevermore insulated against adversity? How, exactly, should he feel about that? Other people rose to the challenge and learned to live with good fortune. Why not him?

The problem was that from the moment that first bonehead triple ran, bad things started happening to people in his immediate circle. First, Miss Beryl had been felled by that final stroke she’d known was coming, and then a year later Wirf had succumbed to renal failure, no surprise there, either. It wasn’t like Sully felt responsible for these sad events, but he’d have gladly returned the money for the pleasure of their continued company, and so a false equivalency was established in his mind between their loss and his gain. Since then, his ex-wife had come loose from her moorings and been institutionalized, and Carl Roebuck, so long a symbol of undeserved good fortune, had lost his wife, his house and, most recently, his prostate gland. If Carl was to be believed, Tip Top Construction had about one swirl around the drain left, after which he’d be officially wiped out. The more bad things that happened to people in Sully’s inner orbit, the more karmically responsible he felt. There was never a causal linkage, of course, but that didn’t alter his sense of complicity. He couldn’t help thinking that he wasn’t meant to have money, that when his luck changed some invisible mechanism of destiny had been knocked out of alignment.

At least until he’d gone to the VA and gotten his two years, but probably one diagnosis, which had restored order with a vengeance.

As he and Rub started down the dark driveway, the dog began to emit a low growl that probably meant the neighborhood raccoon was back. Sully’d been meaning to put some skirting around the base of the trailer, knowing how much the creature liked it under there, but when it rained Rub was partial to the space as well, so he’d let it go. “You better come inside tonight,” he said, and Rub, somehow understanding this, trotted up the steps in front of him, still grumbling.

Inside, Sully turned on the kitchen light and tossed his keys onto the dinette next to the stopwatch Will had returned to him before leaving. It had belonged to Miss Beryl’s husband, the high school’s longtime football and track coach. Sully had given it to the boy when he and his father first arrived in Bath over a decade ago. Poor kid. For months he’d been listening to his parents’ bitter quarrels. Peter’s affair with an academic colleague back home had recently come to light and turned everything in the marriage toxic. Will had understood just enough about what was going on to be terrified about what came next. Having no idea what that might be, he’d become frightened of everything, including his own little brother. With the watch, Sully told him, he could time himself being brave. A minute today, a minute and a half tomorrow and so on. This would make him braver all the time, with the proof right there in the palm of his hand. For some reason it worked. For years the boy took the watch with him everywhere and slept with it on his nightstand. Sully had forgotten all about it. “So what’s this, then?” he asked his grandson, amazed, as he often was in the boy’s presence, at how big he’d grown while somehow remaining the boy he’d been.

Will had shrugged, embarrassed. “I don’t really need it anymore, I guess.”

“Nothing scares you these days?”

“Girls,” he’d admitted.

“Yeah, but that’s because you’re smart.”

Another shrug, this time accompanied by a grin. “I thought maybe you could use it.”

Sully was moved by the gift, but also curious. “What do I have to be scared about?” After his visit to the VA, had his behavior betrayed something? Did his grandson have an inkling of his illness?

“I guess I just thought it was time to give it back,” Will said, with shrug number three.

When Sully depressed the watch’s stem, the second hand lurched into motion, still anxious to perform after so many years. “You think it’d work for somebody my age?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you believe it will, I guess.”

No doubt about it. He was going to miss the boy. No longer a boy, but…

Rub was growling again, low and deep in his chest, a sound that usually preceded by a matter of seconds a knock on the trailer’s door, but none came. Nor was the dog standing with his nose to the door, like he usually did when they had a visitor. Instead he was facing the far end of the trailer, his ears flat against his skull. “Hey, Dummy,” Sully said. “What’s wrong with you?”

Rub glanced up at him guiltily, as if to concede that something might be, but then went back to growling, the hair up on the back of his neck now. A lamp was burning in the living room, one Sully didn’t remember leaving on. The narrow corridor leading to the single bedroom was dark, but looking more closely he noticed a thin crease of light under the bathroom door. Sully, who had nothing any self-respecting thief would want to steal, never locked the trailer, so anyone could’ve walked in. Carl? Possibly, but Sully’d just left him twenty minutes earlier. Ruth? It’d been a hell of a while since she’d paid him an unannounced visit. Peter, returning unexpectedly from the city? No, his car would’ve been in the driveway. The owner of the strange car parked at the curb? It was possible, of course, that nobody was in there, that Sully himself had left the light on that morning. Rub seemed to think otherwise, though, and Sully doubted the little dickweed would be growling if the bathroom was empty or the occupant someone he knew.

Which gave Sully a chill. What was it Roy Purdy had said at Hattie’s? That he’d stop by some night for the apology he seemed to think he had coming? But that didn’t make much sense, either. Roy’s car had been crushed when the mill collapsed into the street, and Roy himself had been injured.

There was a heavy flashlight on the countertop. Not the best weapon, but it would have to do. Crossing the living room on tiptoe, Sully put his ear to the bathroom door. From inside came a voice he didn’t recognize. “Fuck her,” it said.

Sully straightened. Who would be muttering obscenities in his bathroom in the middle of the night? The voice sounded strange. Not exactly human. Had someone stopped by with a gift of a foul-mouthed parrot?

He turned the knob and pushed the door open.

At first Sully didn’t recognize the large man slumped forward on the toilet seat, chin on his chest, pants down around his ankles, fast asleep. “Fuck her,” he repeated, then sighed deeply, as if in profound regret.

“Fuck who?” Sully said, louder than he meant to, causing his visitor to jolt awake and blink up at him.

“Sully,” said Raymer, his voice sounding completely different now.

“You’re lucky I didn’t brain you with this,” Sully said, showing him the flashlight.

“Wow,” Raymer said, blinking up at him. “I was really out. This is kind of embarrassing.”

Earlier in the evening, Rub had told Sully about Raymer fainting into the judge’s grave, but sitting there on Sully’s commode, covered with dried mud, his eyes blackened and swollen, his hair matted, he looked like something far worse had befallen him. Such as being beaten senseless with a cudgel or dragged behind a car by his feet. “Kind of?” Sully said.

“Okay, very.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Because the only reason he could think of for Raymer to be in his trailer was that he was searching for the stolen wheel boots.

But Raymer just cocked his head at this. “Sorry?”

“What are you doing in my bathroom at three in the morning?” he said, pointing the flashlight at him for emphasis. “And don’t say taking a shit.”

Raymer shifted his weight on the commode, causing the trailer to groan. “I stopped by to ask a favor,” he said.

“Of me?” Sully replied.

Raymer seemed to understand that this explanation might be hard for Sully to credit, given their personal history. “I guess I didn’t know who else to ask,” he said, adding, “Would it be all right I finished up in here?”

This seemed a reasonable request. “Sometimes you have to flush twice,” Sully warned before closing the door on him.

He emerged thirty seconds later with wet hands. Sully, who’d retreated to the kitchen, tossed him a hand towel. He’d been meaning to put one in the bathroom but kept forgetting — the sort of oversight that made Ruth homicidal back when she was still paying him nocturnal visits.

“The front door wasn’t locked,” Raymer said, drying his hands, then handing the towel back.

“It never is.”

“We knocked.”

“We?”

“I meant ‘I.’ ”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“And I really, really needed to pee.”

“Most men can do that standing up.”

Raymer shook his head sadly, the picture of dejection. He’d begun absentmindedly scratching the palm of his right hand, Sully noticed. “Have you ever been so exhausted you just…” He let the thought trail off.

Sully pushed a dinette chair toward him with his foot. “Have a seat.”

Raymer did, the trailer again groaning and shifting under his weight. “This is like being on a boat,” Raymer observed.

The two men regarded each other, the air between them heavy with the strangeness of a middle-of-the-night moment that neither could ever have predicted.

“You know you talk in your sleep?” Sully said.

Raymer winced. “Really? Just now? What did I say?”

Lying seemed easiest, so Sully did. “I couldn’t make it out. You sounded like a parrot.”

Sully expected the other man to be surprised by this detail, but for some reason he wasn’t. Instead he just hung his head, utterly despondent. “Earlier tonight?” he said. “I may have been struck by lightning.”

“May have been?”

“I only mention it because there’s a real possibility that I’m fucked up.” Adding, when Sully raised an eyebrow, “More fucked up. Okay, insane.”

“I’m not sure that would occur to someone who really is,” Sully said, and Raymer looked grateful for his opinion but dubious as to its accuracy.

“Now I’ve got this voice in my head.”

Good God, Sully thought. The man really was off the rails. “What’s it say?”

“Mostly stuff I don’t want to hear. It suggested I come see you. It said you’d help.”

“Help what?”

The other man took a deep breath. “Do you know how to operate a backhoe?”

“It’s not difficult.”

Raymer nodded. “Where do you stand on unauthorized exhumations conducted under the cover of darkness?”

“It’s never come up,” Sully admitted. “Let me take a wild guess. Are we talking about Judge Flatt’s grave? The one you fell into this morning?”

Raymer sighed, clearly dismayed by how far and fast the news of all that had traveled. “I lost something down there.”

Sully frowned. “Your wallet?” Because, really.

To judge by the other man’s expression, this was the very question he had been hoping Sully wouldn’t ask. “Uh…something else, actually.” When Sully didn’t respond, he reluctantly continued. “Okay, a garage-door opener.”

“Those can be replaced, you know. You don’t have to dig up dead people.”

“My wife…,” Raymer began, then stalled.

Sully vaguely remembered the story. How the woman had fallen down the stairs and broken her neck. That Raymer had found her.

“Before she died…she was seeing somebody.” His eyes had filled. “She was about to run off with him.”

“Who?”

“I never found out,” he admitted. “I figured he left town, but apparently not. This weekend he put a dozen red roses on her grave.” He handed Sully the crumpled florist’s card.

Sully squinted at it. “Always, huh?”

Raymer nodded.

“Okay, but how do you know he didn’t call in the order and get the flowers delivered? He could be in California for all you know.”

“No,” Raymer said, far too confidently, it seemed to Sully, because how could he be so sure? “He’s here. I can feel him.”

All this time he’d been digging at the palm of his right hand with the thumbnail of his left. “What’s wrong with your hand?”

The question seemed to take him by surprise. He looked at the hand he’d been scratching as if it belonged to somebody else. “It’s nothing,” he said quickly, shoving it into his pocket.

“Okay, say you find out who the guy is. What then?”

He shrugged. “Probably nothing. I just want to know.”

“That’s what you say now. What if you change your mind?”

“I won’t,” he promised. “Look, I understand if you don’t want to help. No hard feelings. I know what I’m asking sounds kind of crazy.”

Kind of? Well, yeah. And teaming up with a lifelong adversary, who’d just confessed he was hearing voices? What kind of sense did that make? Still, the idea wasn’t without appeal. Just ten minutes earlier he’d been lamenting how long it had been since his last stupid streak. Was it possible that what Raymer was proposing might just jump-start a new one? Maybe he only needed to forget about two years, but probably closer to one and start acting like the man he’d been for his entire adult life, until good fortune — like Raymer’s lightning strike? — fucked up his circuitry. His grandson had already left, and by the end of the summer his son would be gone as well. What further use had he for model citizenship? “You’re thinking of doing this now? Tonight?”

“It’s not going to seem like a very good idea in the morning,” Raymer admitted.

Sully couldn’t remember ever seeing another human being look more utterly abject. And given his friendship with Rub Squeers, that was saying something.

Sully consulted his watch. Three forty-seven. He repocketed his keys and tested the flashlight to make sure the batteries weren’t dead. Taking a deep breath of his own, he was surprised to discover that it went right down to his stomach. The heaviness in his chest had miraculously vanished. Maybe the two years but probably closer to one was bullshit. These were VA doctors, after all. Not the sharpest knives in the drawer. He’d told Ruth he was just in a funk. A lie, he’d thought in the moment. But what if it was true?

“Well,” he said, getting to his feet, “we don’t have much time.”

Raymer looked stunned. “You’ll do it?”

Sully shrugged. “Hey, if anything goes wrong, I’m with the chief of police.”

“I’m resigning tomorrow.”

“How come?”

“I guess because I’m kind of…unfit?”

Sully had long thought so, so he was surprised to hear himself demur. “Do you take bribes?” he asked.

“No,” Raymer said, clearly offended by the suggestion.

“Do you look the other way when the right people ask you to?”

“Of course not.”

“Then you’ve got my vote.”

Raymer looked surprised. “You vote?”

“That was more a figure of speech,” Sully conceded, though he did vote in general elections. “Hey, Dummy,” he said to Rub, who’d been lying quietly under the table, gnawing away. “You want to stay here chewing your dick or go dig up a judge?”

The dog hopped up and went over to the door, his tail wagging enthusiastically. So maybe the idea wasn’t so dumb after all.

—

OUTSIDE, Sully noticed the blue light of Carl’s television reflecting in the windows of his apartment, first a close-up of a woman’s crotch, then a midrange shot of a skinny man with an impressive hard-on. Sully picked up a small handful of pebbles and rattled them off the glass.

“What are you doing?” Raymer said.

“This is a three-man job,” Sully said. “I’ll dig the hole, but I’m not climbing down into it on my bum knee.” Also, though his breathing was okay now, that might change. Better safe than sorry.

Carl appeared at the window, squinting out into the darkness. He must’ve recognized Sully’s silhouette below, because he said, “What do you want now? You already took my last bent farthing.”

“Get dressed,” Sully told him.

“You decided to evict me after all?”

“Not tonight.”

“Because that would be just like you.”

“What are you, hard of hearing? Get dressed. Old clothes.”

“Who’s that with you? Because it looks like Raymer.”

“It is,” said Raymer, who’d gone back to absentmindedly digging at his palm.

“Okay,” Carl said, “but only because I’m curious. The sight of you two together beggars the imagination. Give me five minutes.”

“Two,” Sully said.

He and Raymer went out to the curb to wait, Rub panting along with them. Sully lowered the truck’s tailgate. “Jump in,” Sully said, and Rub, a talented leaper, did as instructed.

“He understands you?” Raymer said, clearly impressed.

“Seems to,” Sully said, raising and latching the tailgate. “You can sometimes lose him with abstract concepts.”

“When I was a kid we had a dog who chewed himself like that,” he said sadly.

“What happened to him?”

“He got hit by a car.”

“Hey, Dummy,” Sully said, and the dog perked up. “You hear that?”

—

CARL, noticing the dried streaks on the windshield, ran his index finger through one, verifying his suspicion that, yes, it was on the inside of the glass.

“I wouldn’t,” Sully warned him.

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Lick that finger.”

Carl sniffed it instead, then shot Sully a look of unadulterated disgust before rolling down the passenger window. “Who was the last human being to ride in this vehicle besides you?”

“Rub, I think,” Sully told him. The outside air smelled clean and fresh but still thick with ozone from the storms.

“Rub’s a dog.”

“The other Rub.”

“In this vehicle,” Carl continued, “we witness the sad demise of fundamental Western values. Pride. Order. Personal responsibility. Rudimentary hygiene.”

“This from a man who pisses himself.”

“See, that’s the difference between us. I was embarrassed this morning. You, by contrast, think this truck’s normal.”

That wasn’t entirely true. Every now and then Sully considered giving the cab a good scouring but always decided against it. For one thing, a clean vehicle would only encourage his Upper Main Street ladies to take further advantage of him. Elderly widows, they already relied on him for small handyman jobs, as well as snowblowing their sidewalks and driveways in winter. When their middle-aged children, who mostly lived in Schuyler or the Albany suburbs, weren’t available to take them to the doctor or the supermarket or the hairdresser or out to the new Applebee’s for lunch, it was Sully they turned to. After all, cabs cost money, whereas he could be paid in banana bread. They always began by saying how grateful they were, and what would they ever do without him, but once this pro forma gratitude was entered into the record, they commenced complaining about the condition of his truck, the springs poking up through the truck’s passenger seat and goosing their withered flanks, the floor strewn with sloshing Styrofoam coffee cups, the crowbar on the dash — how did that get there? — that would vibrate and inch toward them menacingly whenever he accelerated.

Mostly Sully didn’t mind being at their beck and call, as his long afternoons were hard to fill. But the old women chattered at him incessantly, and when he dropped them back home they always wanted to know if he’d be free the following Tuesday, as if that were the sort of thing a man like him would know offhand. They might be old — ancient, many of them — but they wanted what all women had demanded of Sully his entire life: commitment. His determination to remain uncommitted was strengthened with each new request. Besides, why clean the cab if Rub was just going to pee in it again?

“Okay,” he said. “I got one for you. What kind of man owns a construction company and no work clothes?” Despite Sully’s explicit instructions, Carl was wearing his usual outfit: polo shirt, chinos and what looked to be expensive Italian loafers.

Carl ignored him, distracted by the sound of Rub’s toenails scrabbling in the truck bed. “You shouldn’t let him ride back there.”

“He enjoys it,” Sully said weakly, because of course Carl was right. “He’s a dog.”

“Yeah, but what happens if you have to jam on the brakes? How are you going to feel when he goes flying and gets dead?”

“You’re right,” Sully said. “On the drive home you can ride back there.”

When they came to a stop sign, Carl adjusted his side-view mirror so he could study Raymer’s Jetta as it pulled up behind them. “Who the hell is he talking to?”

Sure enough, when Sully glanced at his rearview, Raymer did appear to be in an animated conversation with somebody. “He must have a police-band radio in there,” Sully ventured. But then he remembered the parrotlike voice on the other side of the bathroom door. So maybe not.

“Does he seem right to you?” Carl said. “Because to me he looks unhinged. And this business about the garage-door thingy? How does that make any sense?”

“He seems adamant.”

“Or just batshit.”

“He’s had a rough day.”

Carl snorted at this. “No, I’ve had a rough day.”

“He fainted into a grave this morning,” Sully said. “Tonight he got struck by lightning.”

Carl considered this, then shrugged. “Okay, I stand corrected.”

In good weather the cemetery’s backhoe was kept under the sloping metal awning attached to the maintenance shed. The shed itself was locked, but Sully knew where Rub hid the key. As he inserted it into the lock, he remembered something. “Wait here,” he told his companions, then went quickly inside, shutting the door behind him. It took only a minute to locate the backhoe’s ignition key dangling by a cord from its peg. What he’d remembered just in time was that Raymer’s three missing wheel boots were stashed in here under a tarp. Sully had originally hidden them out at Harold Proxmire’s auto yard in the trunk of a rusted-out Crown Victoria, but such contraband made Harold nervous, so when Rub got the job at Hilldale, Sully’d moved them here, then promptly forgot all about them. He raised one corner of the tarp, and sure enough, there they were, good as new. Tomorrow, he told himself, after he and Rub hauled that tree branch away, he’d transfer them out to Zack’s shed, where it was unlikely anyone would come across them by accident.

The eastern horizon was graying, which meant they didn’t have much time. Tossing Carl the keys to the pickup, he climbed aboard the backhoe, and Rub leaped up beside him. “Don’t get too far ahead,” he told the other two. “I don’t know where we’re going, and top speed on this thing’s about two miles an hour.”

As they crept slowly through the cemetery, Sully found himself wishing that Peter was here. His son’s default mode was disapproval, at least where Sully was concerned, but there were also occasions when he let his guard down and surrendered to the madcap spirit of the moment. Once, years earlier, Sully had conscripted him to help steal the Roebuck snowblower. Every time it snowed, Sully would swipe it, only to have Carl steal it back. With each theft they increased their security measures to prevent further larceny. Finally Carl had brought it out to the yard and chained it to a pole. The property was surrounded by a high chain-link fence and patrolled at night by a Doberman named Rasputin. Sully’d knocked the dog out with a handful of sleeping pills inserted in a package of hamburger, but he still needed Peter to climb the fence and liberate the snowblower with the bolt cutters he’d also swiped from Carl. All had gone smoothly, the Doberman off sleeping somewhere (they assumed), until, just as Peter severed the chain, they heard a low growl, and there stood Rasputin within a yard of him, his feet wide apart, his teeth bared hideously. For a long minute he and Peter just stared at each other until the dog began to palsy and froth at the mouth. A moment later, the pills trumped his malice, and he just keeled over in the snow.

Later, at the Horse, his entire face lit up by an uncharacteristic joyful grin, Peter couldn’t get over it. “That,” he told Sully, “was more intense than sex.” Seeing his son so happy, Sully had wondered if it might represent some kind of turning point. Maybe Peter had finally given himself permission to enjoy life from a less ironic distance. But the next morning he was his old buttoned-up self, clearly ashamed about having allowed himself to be drawn into his father’s foolishness. Too bad, Sully couldn’t help thinking. Though he had no desire for a son made in his own image, he hated to see Peter refuse to acknowledge such a basic truth about himself: that he liked to have fun.

Arriving at the judge’s grave site, Sully handed the dog down to Carl, who held him at arm’s length, penis facing outward. “Let’s lock him in the truck,” Sully suggested. Rub had a vivid imagination and didn’t always draw clear distinctions between what was alive and what wasn’t. When he saw the backhoe in action, its jaw gulping big mouthfuls of fresh earth, he might get into attack mode.

“Right,” Carl said, bearing the struggling animal away. “There might still be a surface in there that he hasn’t peed on.”

Sully was studying Raymer, whose whole demeanor had changed since they’d arrived at Hilldale. Having set these proceedings in motion, he now looked like a man who finally understood their gravity. He was staring at the grave they were about to desecrate, but his gaze, unless Sully was mistaken, was inward. “Hey?” Sully said, swinging the backhoe’s claw into position.

“What?” Raymer said, snapping out of it.

Testing the levers that lifted and lowered the inverted scoop, Sully said, “You sure about this? Because what we’re about to do here is—”

“Criminal?” Carl suggested, returning from the truck. “Deviant? Perverse? Imbecilic?”

Sully ignored this. “If we get caught,” he told Raymer, “it’s your reputation on the line.”

“What about mine?” Carl said.

“That’s hilarious,” Sully told him.

Raymer glanced around nervously. “Who’s going to catch us?”

“We won’t know until they show up.”

Raymer worked his jaw as if he was literally chewing on the problem, then finally stiffened into resolve. “All right. What the hell,” he said, his voice catching and producing that same parrotlike sound Sully’d heard on the other side of the bathroom door. Raymer himself must’ve heard its strangeness, because he immediately cleared his throat, like something foreign and perhaps nasty had gotten lodged in there and he needed to expel it. “We’ve come this far.”

At this Carl snorted.

“What?” Sully said.

“Nothing,” Carl said. “I was just thinking about Napoleon invading Russia.”

Both Sully and Raymer blinked at this.

“Also the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and the Vietnam War,” Carl continued. “Not one of those clusterfucks could truly commence until somebody said, What the hell. We’ve come this far.”

And on that note Sully pushed forward the lever that lowered the backhoe’s claw into the soft earth above the casket of Judge Barton Flatt, who likely would’ve received — had His Honor died in time to qualify for it — the inaugural Unsung Hero award that Sully’s landlady would be getting two days hence. Next year, unless Sully was mistaken, he’d be a shoo-in.

—

A FEW MINUTES LATER the backhoe’s steel teeth located Judge Barton Flatt’s casket with a fingernails-on-the-blackboard screech. All three men winced. “Relax, Your Honor,” Sully called down into the hole. “It’s just me, not God.”

After that, though, he worked more carefully. A backhoe wasn’t exactly a precision instrument, however, and it was still too dark to see very well, so a minute later when he managed to jostle the casket again he wasn’t surprised.

“Jesus,” Carl said. “Don’t rupture the fucking thing.”

Sully, who feared precisely this, paused the backhoe. “Let’s find the edges,” he suggested. He always kept a broom in the back of the truck, so Raymer went to fetch it. “Grab the rake while you’re at it,” Sully called after him. “And a couple shovels.”

Raymer answered in his parrot voice, saying something Sully couldn’t make out. Carl cocked his head at the sound and raised an eyebrow at Sully, who just shrugged.

Once the outline of the casket was exposed, Sully was able to work around it, deepening the hole and providing enough space for one man to stand at the foot and another along one side. When he switched the ignition off and the machine shuddered into silence, it was quiet except for Rub’s excited yipping in the pickup. “Okay, girls, in you go,” Sully said, climbing down and taking the flashlight from Carl.

“You’re not coming?” Carl said wryly, lowering himself into the hole.

“Yeah, that’d be great,” Sully said. “All three of us down there and nobody to pull us up.”

“I hope you’re not claustrophobic,” Carl said to Raymer when he, too, dropped into the hole.

To which Raymer replied, “I am, actually.”

Carl paused to regard him. “What the hell’s wrong with your voice?”

Raymer cleared his throat. “It’s a recent thing.”

“You sound like you should be testifying from behind a screen.”

Directing the flashlight’s beam down into the hole, Sully noted that the casket’s burnished surface now bore two deep parallel scratches, and when Carl grabbed on to one of the ornate handles, it came off in his hand. “Nice work,” he said, handing it up to Sully, who tossed it onto the pile of excavated dirt.

At first, even with Carl and Raymer tugging on it, the casket refused to budge, as if it contained not the body of a man wasted away to nothing by radiation and chemotherapy but a cache of gold bullion. Then all at once it came loose with a sucking sound, its contents shifting audibly inside. “You know what?” Carl said. “I just decided I want to be cremated.”

“I’ll try to remember,” Sully told him.

“So what’s the plan, boss?” Carl said. “Haul it out?”

“Nah, just stand him up,” Sully said.

“Which end would you guess is his head?” Carl wondered, scratching his own.

“The narrow end should be the feet,” Sully offered.

“It’s a perfect rectangle, dimwit.”

“Then I couldn’t tell you.”

When the two of them, grunting and muttering, succeeded in wrestling the casket into an upright position, Sully handed Carl the flashlight, and he directed its beam at the section of earth below on which the box had lain. “Okay,” Raymer said, dropping to his knees. “It should be right here.”

“Which is more than could be said for us,” Carl replied. “What I don’t get is what makes you so sure the fucking thing’s even down here.”

“It has to be,” Raymer said, running the flat of his hand over the dirt. “I’m almost sure it was in my pocket when I passed out.”

“Yeah, but afterward you went to the hospital, right? Maybe it fell out of your pocket there.”

“There was no carpet on the floor of the examination room. I’d have heard it fall.”

“Unless it happened in the ambulance.”

That scenario had occurred to Sully as well, but Raymer seemed not to be listening. “Come on, come on!” he was saying, parrot voiced again, sifting handfuls of earth through his fingers now. Thanks to the rains, the dirt at the bottom of the hole was quickly turning to slop. “It’s got to be here.”

Carl shot Sully a look that indicated it not only didn’t have to be, it wasn’t.

“Raymer,” Sully said, “you’re only making matters worse. Use the rake.” Which he handed down.

The distinct possibility that they were on a fool’s errand with him the fool seemed finally to be dawning on Raymer, who went at the moist earth with the rake like a man possessed, but after a few minutes it was clear even to him that there was no such device in the hole. Carl took the rake from him and handed it back up to Sully. “I don’t understand,” Raymer said. “This makes no sense.”

“Here’s an idea,” Carl said. “We could dig up these other people. See if it’s under their caskets.”

Raymer regarded him blankly, as if this suggestion had been made in earnest.

“Are we done here?” Carl said, reaching a hand up to Sully, who grabbed it and pulled him out.

When Raymer made no move to follow suit, Sully said, “You just gonna stay down there?”

“I might as well,” he said miserably. “In fact, I might better. You should just cover me over. Put me out of my misery.”

“Raymer,” Sully said quietly. “Enough of this.”

He said something that Sully didn’t catch.

“Say again?”

“I said…now I’ll never know.”

When Sully glanced at Carl, he was surprised that his expression was closer to pity than exasperation.

“Go sit down,” Sully told Raymer, after he and Carl managed to haul him up and out. “You don’t look so hot.”

Taking a seat on the pile of excavated dirt, he put his head in his hands.

Sully and Carl returned their attention to the upright casket.

“Just tip him back down?” Carl said. “Or walk him?”

“If we tip him back he’ll be upside down for eternity.”

“You think that matters if you’re dead?” Carl said.

“It would to me.”

“Yeah,” Carl snorted. “Like you’ve ever known which end is up.”

Together they corner-walked the casket to the other end of the hole, then slowly lowered it as far as they could reach, after which they had no choice but to let the elevated end drop the last few feet. The resulting thud caused all three men to cringe.

“This is a terrible thing we’ve done,” Raymer said in his own voice now. He’d picked up the silver casket handle and was turning it over in his hands. “We violated a man’s grave. And for what?”

Sully understood how he felt. To this point his spirits had been relatively high, and if the remote had been there it might’ve justified, sort of, the madness of the entire endeavor. By the time they’d recounted the story at the Horse a few times, its lunacy would seem inspired. Whereas now…

Only Carl seemed unchastened. “Raymer,” he said. “His Honor didn’t mind. He was dead. Do you know what ‘dead’ means?”

“And in the meantime,” Sully said, climbing back aboard the backhoe, which he would now return to the shed, “we’re not done here. I’d rake that dirt,” he suggested to Carl, indicating the mound of earth Raymer was sitting on, “just in case it got scooped up somehow.”

Raymer shook his head. “It would’ve been under the casket.”

“You’d think,” Sully admitted. “Let me see that thing a minute,” he said, pointing at the silver casket handle Raymer was fondling.

He looked puzzled by the request but got to his feet and handed it up to Sully, who promptly tossed it into the hole, where it rattled off the casket. “Hey,” he said, pointing at the eastern sky. “New day.”

Raymer looked where Sully was pointing, but his blank expression suggested he was looking for something that just wasn’t there.

—

HE PULLED UP in front of Miss Beryl’s again just as the first rays of sunlight winked through the trees in Sans Souci Park. Carl, who’d removed his ruined loafers and muddy socks, seemed in no hurry to get out, so Sully turned the engine off and the two men sat there, confusing the hell out of Rub, who was doing frantic laps around the truck bed, loosing short bursts of urine all the while. Where did it all come from? Sully marveled. Wadding his socks up into a ball, Carl wiped away at the inside of the windshield, ostensibly to remove the streaks of dried dog piss, but in reality making an opaque brown hurricane pattern on the glass. “Look,” he said, clearly pleased with his effort, “a perfect shitstorm.”

“Thanks,” Sully said.

“Don’t mention it,” he replied, tossing his socks out the window, followed by his shoes. “Why don’t you firebomb this thing and get yourself a decent rig?”

Two years, but probably closer to one. What would Sully want with a vehicle that was in better shape than he was?

“You know,” Carl went on, “until tonight it never occurred to me that you and Raymer are actually brothers under the skin. Surely the chief of police can afford a better car than that beater of a Jetta he drives.”

“Maybe he likes it,” Sully said. “Could be there are a few things about you that he doesn’t understand, either. Did you ever think of that?”

“I know one thing. That man is seriously off the fucking rails.”

They’d parted company back at the cemetery, with Raymer promising to go home and get some sleep. Sully wasn’t sure he’d do any such thing. Carl was right. There was something manic and untethered about him. He’d seen men with that same look who, after prolonged battle, continued to function, sometimes at a high level, but in a more profound respect had simply abdicated. Lost men, not at all sure they even wanted to be found.

“And there’s no radio in that car,” Carl added. “I looked.”

“Yeah?” Sully said.

“Yeah.”

Sunlight streaked through the trees just then, its sudden glare making Sully squint. Leaning forward to peer at it from around his shitstorm, Carl said, “Amazing, isn’t it, when you think about it, how the world keeps on turning, no matter how fucked up things get?”

In Sully’s opinion it’d be more amazing if it stopped, but he understood his friend’s sentiment. Because it was something the way things kept grinding with no apparent reason or need, indifferent to life and death and all else, too. He thought about that stopwatch Will had now returned to him; its second hand just kept ticking away, seemingly content with its circular journey, forever in the same direction. That said, the mechanical world probably wasn’t so different from its living inhabitants, most of whom, Sully included, went about their lives, most days, taking it all for granted. His own happiness, such as it was, had always seemed rooted in his willingness to let each second, minute, hour and day predict the next, today no different from yesterday except in its particulars, which didn’t amount to much. Most mornings, he’d be rising about now, hauling himself out of bed, shaving and washing up, then heading downtown to help Ruth open the restaurant. Could something so fundamental, so ritualized, ever really be changed?

Maybe Ruth was right and the reason he showed up at Hattie’s every morning was that he didn’t know what else to do, where else to go. Naturally he would have liked to tell her that wasn’t true, that of course he still felt the old affection for her. Wasn’t the fact that there was no other woman in his life proof of that? He couldn’t imagine there ever would be, not at this late juncture. Surely that had to mean something. But then he thought of Raymer, wild eyed, out at Hilldale, repeating “It’s got to be here” over and over again, an expression of personal need that the world simply refused to validate.

So maybe it was time to try something different. Maybe his mornings at Hattie’s were, under the guise of being helpful, just selfish. If Ruth’s husband, for reasons known only to him, suddenly wanted her back, and if his wife was disposed to feel more tenderly about him than she had in the past, who was he to come between them? If Janey was sick of waking up every morning to the sound of Sully’s voice, no doubt a constant reminder of the damage his affair with her mother had done to their family, could he blame her? And though he would have liked to deny it, he had done damage. Ruth’s son Gregory, Janey’s brother, had left town right after high school, and he’d almost surely known what was going on. So if he was going to Hattie’s out of some old habit, wasn’t it his responsibility to break it? After all, Hattie’s wasn’t the only place in town where a man could order a plate of eggs and shoot the shit.

Except, well, it was. Sure, there were the franchise joints out by the interstate exits, but their counters were full of people on their way somewhere else. Which was what Ruth seemed to be suggesting that Sully become. A person headed to Aruba. Why not? was what she wanted to know. He had the money. As he did for a better truck. So why the hell not? Because, he would’ve liked to explain, like the second hand of Will’s stopwatch, his center was fixed, his motion circumscribed by gears he couldn’t see, much less alter.

Rub, tired of being confined in the back of the pickup for no good reason, gave a sharp yip and leaped out onto the terrace, where he rolled like a well-drilled soldier, regained his feet and darted off toward the trailer. Both men watched him go, feeling, unless Sully was mistaken, something like envy. Was it possible to be jealous of a dog with a half-chewed-through dick? Well, again, why not? Rub was nothing if not an optimist, and optimism, the older you got, became harder to summon and, once summoned, even harder to hold on to.

“You ever see Toby?” said Carl out of the blue.

“Why would I see her?” Sully asked, though he’d had a pretty serious crush on Carl’s ex-wife at one point, a decade or so ago.

“You tell me,” said Carl, who’d been all too aware of the infatuation.

“Come to think of it, I did one day last fall. Around the holidays, I think.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, she just stopped by.”

Carl straightened up. “Stopped by,” he repeated. “To see you.”

“She thought I might want to list this place,” he said, nodding at Miss Beryl’s house. “She’s in real estate now.”

Carl relaxed again. “Yeah. I heard she was doing okay. How’d she look?”

“Terrific,” Sully said, enjoying himself now. “Never better. Sex on a stick.”

“Fuck you,” Carl said, then sighed. “I can’t believe I drove her into the arms of a hairy-legged lesbian.”

“She must have something you don’t.”

“No, she doesn’t have something I do,” Carl corrected. “Or did, until recently.”

“Give it time.”

“I don’t know,” Carl mused. “What are men even good for anymore?”

Since that was precisely the sort of question Sully had studiously avoided asking for his entire life, he thought this might not be a bad time for a change of subject. So he decided to ask about what had been in the back of his mind since Raymer’s pitiful lament out at Hilldale, that without the garage-door opener he’d never know the identity of the supposed boyfriend. “Tell me it wasn’t you,” he said.

“What wasn’t me?”

“With Raymer’s wife.” Because if the opportunity had presented itself, Carl wouldn’t have hesitated. Sully didn’t doubt that for a moment. Still, the dozen roses on the grave? The card inscribed Always? For Carl Roebuck those gestures felt out of character, to say the least. On the other hand, you never knew.

“Fuck no,” he said.

“You’re sure?” Sully said, though it really wasn’t necessary to ask a second time. Carl might be full of more shit than a Christmas goose, but so far as he knew the man had never lied to him about anything important.

“What? You think I’m the only pussy hound in this town?”

“Good,” Sully said. Because maybe he and Raymer weren’t brothers under the skin, as Carl had just suggested, but his heart had gone out to the poor bastard.

Carl had spoken again, he realized. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I said it wasn’t me, but I know who it was.”

Carl was staring straight ahead, at the pee-streaked windshield, no doubt waiting for Sully to ask the obvious question. Which he had no intention of doing. Because, he told himself, it was none of his business, but that was a lie. He didn’t ask because he didn’t want to know the answer. Because he was afraid he already did.