Everybody's Fool

Karma

A BANNER WAS STRUNG across Main Street for the Memorial Day weekend. THE NEW NORTH BATH: PARTNERING FOR TOMORROW. This was the brainstorm of Gus Moynihan, the town’s new mayor, who’d been swept into power the previous year on a tidal wave of born-again optimism, more than a decade after the demise of the Ultimate Escape Fun Park, an economic catastrophe that had ushered in a golden age of self-loathing and fiscal pessimism deeply rooted in two centuries’ worth of invidious comparison with Schuyler Springs, its better-looking twin and age-old rival. Schuyler had long possessed everything to which Bath aspired — a vibrant local economy, an educated citizenry, visionary leadership, throngs of seasonal downstate visitors, an NPR affiliate radio station.

Okay, sure, there’d been some shitty luck involved. Bath’s mineral springs had mysteriously dried up over a century ago while Schuyler’s continued to percolate up enthusiastically from its shale. Schuyler also had a famous thoroughbred racetrack, an acclaimed writers’ retreat and a center for the performing arts, a high-toned liberal arts college (Bath had only a beleaguered two-year community college), as well as a dozen fancy restaurants that served exotic foods like ramps, whatever they were. On the restaurant front, all Bath could boast was its rundown roadhouse tavern, the White Horse, Hattie’s Lunch, a donut shop and a new Applebee’s out by the freeway exit. What all this amounted to, everyone agreed, was a complete economic and cultural rout. For a while the fun park had gotten people’s hopes up, but when they were dashed the collective despair was so profound that the town had even stopped stringing the buoyantly optimistic Main Street banners that had become its dubious trademark, the last of which had read: THINGS ARE LOOKING IN BATH. The gloom had lasted until Gus Moynihan, a retired college professor who was renovating one of the grand old Victorians on Upper Main Street, wrote a guest newspaper editorial decrying the town’s mordant defeatism and criticizing the current Republican administration’s unspoken policies, which could be summed up, he claimed, in nine words: No Spending. None. Ever. On Anything. Under Any Circumstances. Why not string one last banner across the street, he suggested: LET’S EAT DIRT.

The editorial had struck a chord and made a mayoral candidate of its author. Even his opponents had to admit that Gus and his cronies, many of them “from away,” had run a clever campaign. Let’s BE Schuyler Springs was the gist of it. Instead of competing with their obnoxious neighbor, why not take advantage of its proximity? Half the people who came to the racetrack and performing arts center in the summer had no place to stay and ended up in hotels as far away as Schenectady. Why shouldn’t they stay in Bath? Okay, the Sans Souci Hotel and Resort with its nearly three hundred rooms had run into legal difficulties fueled by local resentment when it became known that the new owners would be using downstate contractors and labor for almost everything. The old hotel’s lavish renovations had cost far more and taken much longer than expected, causing it to miss much of the summer-tourist trade that first season, and the locals had steadfastly rebelled against the prices at its fancy restaurant.

But that didn’t mean its basic concept was flawed, or so the Moynihan crowd had argued. Instead of throwing up roadblocks to entrepreneurship, the town should have offered tax breaks and other incentives. Same deal with restaurants. During the short summer season, desperate, hungry travelers even mobbed the Horse, so why not entice a young chef or two up from New York City. Find out what the hell ramps were and serve them, if that’s what people really craved. It wasn’t like Schuyler Springs had cornered the world ramps market and refused to share. Overnight, the new byword was “partnering.” Whenever possible, Bath would partner not only with odious Schuyler Springs and moneyed downstaters but also with local entrepreneurs in projects of exceptional merit.

One of these locals was Carl Roebuck, who most people were surprised to learn was an entrepreneur, having known him all their lives as a con man and an asshole. Carl’s father, Kenny, they’d liked. He’d built Tip Top Construction from nothing by working fourteen-hour days. Like so many men of his generation, he hoped his son wouldn’t have to work quite so hard. On that score he had no legitimate worries. In college Carl learned to drink and seduce women and spend his father’s money and loathe all things Carhartt, especially the brand’s connotations of hard, honest labor. Returning home, he gave no indication that he meant to work at all if he could help it.

After his father’s unexpected death, he couldn’t help it, but he was lazy and did shoddy work and nearly lost the company when the Ultimate Escape Fun Park went belly-up. He hadn’t been directly involved in that doomed venture, but he’d gotten wind of it early and purchased for virtually nothing a tract of adjacent land he figured would eventually be needed for parking. There, using federal dollars, he set about erecting a dozen low-income housing units and awaited the groundbreaking of the fun park, after which he intended to sell the parcel, improvements and all, at extortionary profit. But then, at the eleventh hour, financing for the park had fallen through, and Carl, who’d seen no reason to build his units to code, thinking nobody’d ever live in them, had been stranded with a dozen substandard duplexes whose brand-new roofs already leaked, whose porous basements sucked sulfurous moisture from the nearby wetlands every time it rained and whose moldy walls sported earthquake-sized fissures. It had taken most of the last decade to extricate Tip Top Construction from the resulting quagmire of litigation. To save it, Carl had to sell his house and half the heavy-construction equipment on his lot — the half, he privately lamented, that still worked. He hadn’t minded losing the house because at the time his wife, Toby, was divorcing him and would have ended up with it anyway, but still. It had been a decade of painful misfortune from which Carl had learned, as far as anyone could tell, exactly nothing.

His current project, snakebit from the start, was the conversion of the long-abandoned shoe factory on Limerock Street. The concept of the Old Mill Lofts was so dumb — or so the conventional wisdom had it — that it took your breath away. Ever since it was announced, people had been writing in to the North Bath Weekly Journal pretty much nonstop, decrying its abject lunacy and its complete and utter waste of taxpayer (“partnered”) dollars. Even assuming you could accomplish the planned renovations — a point no one conceded — and could also drive out the army of rats that reportedly had taken up residence in the building’s nether regions, and then could fix the roof that’d been leaking for forty years, who in Bath could afford to live there? The cheapest units on the ground floor were supposed to start at around a quarter of a million dollars, the larger units on the top floor going for three times that. Those were Schuyler prices.

But according to Mayor Moynihan, who himself had a down payment on one of the units, the high price tag was precisely the point. The Old Mill Lofts signaled that Bath was back in the game, a town with much to offer. Sure, the project was ambitious, the new administration conceded, but it was hardly unprecedented. Decrepit, abandoned factories were being converted into living and retail spaces all over the country. In fact lofts, like ramps, were all the rage. Better yet, Schuyler Springs, which had never engaged in anything as grubby as manufacturing, had no decrepit old mills to retrofit, so in this respect Bath had a clear advantage. (Yes, the habit of invidious comparison was hard to surrender.)

The real problem with the Old Mill Lofts, according to others, wasn’t so much the concept as Carl Roebuck himself. The units were being billed as upscale urban-style dwellings, but woven deeply into his character and experience was the desire to do things on the cheap and pocket the difference. Old-guard pessimists grumbled that the town wasn’t so much partnering for tomorrow with a gifted entrepreneur as fronting for yesterday’s known swindler. Some even wondered if Carl might be up to his old tricks, having purchased something seemingly worthless on insider information in hopes of flipping it when its true value became apparent. Maybe the work being done on the mill was just for show. Carl, who was widely rumored to be distracted by health problems, was seldom at the mill when important decisions needed to be made, and when he happened to be on hand, he didn’t seem to care much whether they zigged or zagged. Even those who gave him the benefit of the doubt when it came to his motives still worried that Tip Top Construction, impaired by relentless court judgments and harsh penalties, simply lacked the working capital necessary for a project of this scope. What was left of Carl’s heavy machinery sat rusting out at the yard, fritzed beyond repair. At present he employed only a dozen workers and kept most of them under forty hours a week so he wouldn’t have to pay benefits. Every week rumors circulated that this would be the one where he failed to make payroll.

The other problem with the new Bath, at least at the moment, was that it stank. Literally. In the Schuyler Springs Democrat—known in Bath as the Dumbocrat—it had been dubbed “the Great Bath Stench,” a phrase that had been picked up in the Albany Times Union. For the last two summers, whenever the thermometer hit eighty-five, a thick, putrid odor blanketed the town, everywhere at once, so you couldn’t even tell where it was coming from. Bath, visitors remarked, wrinkling their noses and quickly getting back in their cars, needed a long one itself. Some argued that the stench originated in the fetid wetlands adjacent to Hilldale Cemetery and was borne into town on summer breezes. Except that the odor was less powerful out there. One local fundamentalist minister thought the problem might be moral in nature. Nearby Schuyler Springs had a substantial and growing gay community, and he wondered from the pulpit if God wasn’t sending a message — an idea that failed to get much traction, begging as it did the fairly obvious question of why God wouldn’t visit olfactory retribution on the actual offenders and not their innocent neighbors. This summer, as if Carl Roebuck didn’t have enough problems, people who lived nearby claimed the stench was emanating from the old mill. But how could that be? The building had been boarded up for decades. There was nothing in it to stink.

Then yesterday, more bad news. After two straight days of drenching rain, the Tip Top crew discovered a foul, viscous, yellow goo oozing out of a crack in the basement’s concrete floor. Carl, true to form, was for sealing up the crack and forgetting about it, but a Bath selectman insisted on consulting a state inspector, who demanded that Carl jackhammer out a section of concrete and find out what the hell was down there. The town’s sewer line paralleled the front wall of the factory, and while the ooze didn’t look or smell like raw sewage — it in fact was far, far worse — the inspector speculated that maybe the pipe had been invaded at the seam by tree roots. Once inside and fed a steady diet of sewage, roots could grow like tumors and cause the pipe to rupture. At which point whatever was in the line had to go somewhere. Who knew? Maybe there was a reservoir of really awful shit under the mill. Only after the concrete was ripped up would they know what they were dealing with, and how much of it. And whatever was down there would have to be mucked out.

It was this necessity that caused Carl to think of Rub Squeers, whose sense of smell had been compromised, people said, by adolescent glue-sniffing, as a consequence of which he could stand hip deep in ripe manure without complaint. Rub lived on the outskirts of Bath with his harridan of a wife, Bootsie, but this time of day he was likely out at Hilldale, where he served as the cemetery’s caretaker. The person who would know was Donald Sullivan, Carl’s friend and, since losing his house, his landlord. Since busting Sully’s balls invariably improved Carl’s spirits, which happened just then to be at low ebb, he decided to pay him a visit.

—

SULLY WAS PERCHED on his usual stool at the end of Hattie’s lunch counter. He’d been there since six-thirty, as he was most mornings, helping Ruth through the breakfast rush, though today he’d been pretty much useless, his chest tight as a drum, his breathing shallow. Since then the place had emptied out. Come noon it would be busy again, but that was an hour away. On the counter next to Sully’s empty coffee mug was this week’s North Bath Weekly Journal, folded so that his former landlady’s photo smiled up at him knowingly. Legendary middle-school teacher Beryl Peoples, read the caption. To her many students, Miss Beryl. The “Miss” had hurt the old woman’s feelings, Sully knew. She might’ve been tiny and gnomelike, but she was also a married woman, whether or not her eighth graders could imagine her with a husband. Sully had mostly called her Mrs. Peoples, which she seemed to appreciate, and in return she’d called him Mr. Sullivan, which he didn’t know how to feel about. “Does it ever trouble you,” she once asked him, “that you haven’t done more with the life God gave you?” “Not often,” he replied at the time. “Now and then.” Something about her expression in this newspaper photo suggested that even today, nearly a decade after her death, she was still waiting for a more honest answer. Sorry, old girl, he thought.

He couldn’t help wondering what she’d think of the weekend’s festivities. She’d always taken a dim view of pomp and circumstance, and he suspected she’d be ambivalent at best about the middle school being renamed in her honor. Nobody’s fool, she would recognize the gesture as politically motivated, another of the new mayor’s dubious initiatives—“Unsung Heroes,” this one had been dubbed — calculated to instill pride in a community long accustomed to self-hatred. The idea was that each Memorial Day someone who’d made valuable contributions to the community would be celebrated. Apparently Miss Beryl had been a unanimous choice for this the inaugural award, which indicated to Sully — and he was confident his old landlady would agree — that the pickin’s were slim. Who would they tab next year?

It was entirely possible he’d never learn. Two years, the VA cardiologist had given him. Probably closer to one. He’d suspected something was wrong for a while. The shortness of breath, at first on steep stairs, then on any sort of incline, and lately whenever he tried to move even a little fast. Why had he waited so long, the doctors wanted to know. Because, well…admit it, he had no satisfactory answer. Because in the beginning the symptoms came and went? Because he’d be fine for weeks at a stretch, during which he could tell himself it was nothing? Sure, but deep down he’d known, and when the symptoms returned he wasn’t surprised. Even then he probably wouldn’t have gone in if Ruth hadn’t noticed him struggling and badgered him to get it checked out. After two minutes on the treadmill, they’d shut down the stress trial.

“So what’s the deal?” she’d asked the minute he got back.

“They think I should quit smoking,” he told her. Which was true, just not the whole truth and nothing but.

“Really?” she said. “Imagine that. Cigarettes aren’t good for you? Who knew?” She seemed satisfied with the explanation, though. Didn’t grill him like she usually did when she thought he was bullshitting her. Lately, though, he’d caught her staring at him quizzically, so maybe in the intervening two weeks she’d become suspicious.

The whole truth and nothing but the truth went more like this: A-Fib. Arrhythmia. A racing heart. Brought on by physical exertion. By stress. By nothing at all. Leading to: congestive heart failure. Solution: Open-heart surgery. Quadruple bypass. Not particularly recommended for men his age, whose condition was so far advanced and whose arteries were so obstructed from years of smoking. Any other possibility? A procedure to insert an internal defibrillator to tell the heart when to beat, when not to. Routine process, an hour tops. Small incision. A couple hours later you’re up walking around. The next day you go home. Cured? No. Most likely you’ll still die of congestive heart failure, just not so soon. The other possibility, given your age and physical condition, is that you die on the operating table. If you do nothing? Two years, but probably closer to one. “Your heart could fail at any time,” the cardiologist admitted. “You could die in your sleep.”

This scenario, Sully gathered, was supposed to scare him into the procedure, but it hadn’t. “Wake up dead?” he said. “That doesn’t sound so bad, actually.”

Nor had the cardiologist disagreed. But given his age and condition, there was also a distinct chance he could have a major stroke and not die. Spend the rest of his days unable to talk, feed himself or shit of his own volition. Though this could also happen if he didn’t have the surgery, the man had added.

“If you’re telling me what I should do,” Sully said, “I’m not hearing it.”

The doctor shrugged. “Most people want the defibrillator. Or their kids do. Or their wives. Are you married, Mr. Sullivan?”

No. An ex-wife, Vera, no longer in the picture. No longer even in her own picture, really. Poor woman, her grip on sanity had always been relaxed. A couple years ago she’d slipped into dementia and now resided in the county home. Her second husband, Ralph, already lived there, having suffered a catastrophic nervous breakdown years earlier, so it would have been a reunion of sorts had Vera recognized him, but she swore she’d never laid eyes on the man before and certainly wouldn’t have married anyone who looked like that. Afterward her decline had been swift. In a matter of months she no longer recognized Peter, her son, or Will, her grandson. Confident she wouldn’t recognize him either, Sully’d paid her a visit, but when she saw him her eyes immediately narrowed, and she began muttering profanities under her breath, looking right at him the whole time. According to the nurses, this was a whole new madness, one he shouldn’t take personally. “You probably just remind her of someone,” one nurse speculated, to which Sully replied, “Yeah, but the person I remind her of is me.”

So, no. No wife to please.

His son, then? His grandson? the cardiologist had inquired. Wouldn’t they want him to do the procedure?

“You’re going to tell them?”

“You’re not?”

Probably not. He hadn’t made up his mind completely, but no, he doubted he would. Definitely not Will. No reason to burden the boy, who was off to college in the fall. His son? No real reason to burden him either. If he told anyone it would be Ruth. He’d started to half-a-dozen times, then decided against it. Studying his landlady’s newspaper photo, he wondered if he’d have told her if she were still around.

“Question,” said a familiar voice at his elbow, making Sully just about jump out of his skin. Attired in his customary Ralph Lauren polo shirt — pink today — and light cotton slacks and cream-colored canvas shoes, Carl Roebuck looked, as always, like the owner of an automobile dealership who was late for his tee time. That Sully had been so deep in thought that a man like Carl could sneak up on him was unnerving, and he quickly scanned the room for other potential threats. Carl himself wasn’t dangerous, but whenever he entered the room you did well to check if his appearance had tipped over the edge some otherwise rational person — a woman he’d recently jilted, perhaps, or that woman’s husband, or somebody he owed money to, or maybe just somebody who’d gotten fed up with his never-ending bullshit. With this latter group Sully felt particular sympathy.

“On average,” Carl said, fixing Sully seriously, “how often would you say you think about sex?”

Ruth was on her way down the counter now, coffeepot in hand. “I’m curious how he’ll answer this myself,” she admitted, putting a mug in front of Carl. She and Sully had been lovers on and off for more than twenty years, but for the last decade just friends, an arrangement Ruth seemed to resent, even though it had been her idea. His mistake, as near as Sully could make out, was that he hadn’t put up enough of a fight at the time or expressed sufficient regret since. Though she was unlikely to scald him until he answered the question, Ruth, armed with a hot coffeepot, inspired caution, and he instinctively leaned back until she finished filling Carl’s cup and set the pot down on the counter. Only then did he give the other man his complete attention. “He’s not here,” Sully said.

“Who’s not here?” Carl said.

“Rub,” Sully said. “The person you’re looking for.”

“Says who?”

“Fine,” Sully said. “We’ll change the subject. What’s this yellow slime I’m hearing about over at the mill?”

“What yellow slime?” Carl said, and anyone who didn’t know better would have testified his innocence was genuine.

Sully did know better. “The lake of gunk you found yesterday. On top of which all those rich assholes are going to be living.”

At this Carl released a deep sigh. “You shouldn’t listen to rumors.”

“Okay,” Sully said agreeably. “But I have no idea where Rub is.” Actually Sully expected him any minute now. Fridays were half days out at Hilldale, and he generally hitched a ride into town and came looking for Sully, hoping to get him to spring for a cheeseburger, then listen to him talk well into the evening, tough duty, given his worsening stammer.

“Forget Rub,” Carl insisted. “I didn’t even mention him. I asked you a simple question.”

“Ruth,” Sully said, pointing at the clock above the counter, “it’s 11:07. Let’s see how long it is before he wants to know where Rub is.”

“A simple question you haven’t answered.”

The bell over the door jingled then as Roy Purdy, Sully’s least-favorite person in all of Bath, came in. Unlike Carl, Roy Purdy looked exactly like what he was. Newly released from a downstate medium-security prison, Roy was a poster-boy ex-con: skinny, cheaply tattooed, sallow skinned, stubbled, fidgety, stupid. To hear him tell it, good behavior was the reason given for not making him serve his full sentence, which made Sully wonder what that standard must be in the joint if Roy, who’d proven incapable of good behavior his entire life, could qualify. “What question was that?” he asked Carl.

Carl sighed mightily. “I know it’s hard, but try to pay attention. I’m asking how often you think about sex. Once a day? Once a month?”

“Not as often as I think about murder,” Sully admitted, regarding Carl meaningfully before allowing Roy, who’d settled onto a stool at the far end of the counter, to come into focus. Though he hadn’t looked in his direction, Sully felt certain that Roy was keenly aware of his presence. Ruth, who had even less use for Roy than Sully, nevertheless grabbed the coffeepot and a clean mug, then headed back toward him.

“How’s our girl?” Roy asked as she poured the coffee they both knew he wouldn’t pay for.

“You mean my daughter?”

“I mean my wife.”

“Your ex-wife. She didn’t marry you again, did she?”

“Not yet,” Roy said.

“No, I imagine not,” Ruth went on. “Especially if it’s true what we heard.”

“What you heard?”

“That you’re shacked up with a woman named Cora over at the Morrison Arms?”

“I’m sleeping on her couch is all. Till I got the scratch for my own place. She ain’t nothing to me, Cora ain’t.”

“You tell her that, Roy? Is that how she understands it?”

“I can’t help what other people think,” he said, eyeing the pastries on the back counter. Ruth wouldn’t offer him free food, but before long he’d figure out how to ask her for some. She’d give him a hard time at first, though in the end she’d cave. Where her ex-son-in-law was concerned, Ruth seemed committed to a doomed policy of appeasement, which was why, since Roy reappeared in Bath two weeks earlier, Sully’d been mulling over an alternative course of action modeled more on George Patton than Neville Chamberlain.

When she returned to their end of the counter, Ruth noted where Sully’s dark gaze had settled and snapped her fingers in front of his face, causing him to lean back on his stool again. “I hope you don’t think what’s going on down there is any business of yours,” she noted.

“I’m glad it’s not,” Sully told her. “If it was, I’d know how to deal with it, though.”

“I ask,” Carl was saying, still single-minded, “because I think about it every ten seconds or so. It’s worse now than before.” By this he meant before the recent prostate surgery that had left him, for the time being at least, both impotent and incontinent without — he maintained — diminishing in the slightest either his sex addiction or his ability to pleasure women. The existence of said addiction was something Sully had yet to concede, though he and Carl had been debating it since the night almost a decade earlier when Carl had come into the Horse with a rolled-up magazine and swatted Sully on the back of the head with it by way of hello. Climbing onto an adjacent barstool, he’d opened the magazine to the article he wanted him to read, smoothing it out for him on the bar. “You know what I am?” he said, his usual smug expression amplified.

“Yes, I do,” Sully said, without looking at the magazine. “In fact, I’ve told you what you are on several occasions. You must not’ve been listening.”

“According to this,” Carl said, stabbing the magazine with his forefinger, “I’m a sex addict. It’s a medical condition.”

“What you are,” Sully assured him, “is an anatomical description.”

Sully’s friend Wirf, who happened just then to occupy the stool on Sully’s other side, was apparently intrigued, though, because he took the magazine and began reading.

“And I’ll tell you something else,” Carl continued. “According to medical experts, what I deserve is sympathy.”

“Wirf,” Sully said, rotating on his barstool to better observe his friend, who continued to read carefully. “What do you think Carl deserves?”

That rare lawyer who was less interested in law than justice, Wirf took even joking references to the latter seriously and could always be counted on for both perspective and sound judgment. “A dose of the clap,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “Also, perhaps, the grudging admiration of men like me and you.”

Carl and Wirf then clinked beer bottles across Sully, leading Sully to regret, as he often did, drawing his unpredictable companion into barroom arguments.

“Sully’s just jealous,” Carl observed when Wirf went back to reading the sex-addiction article, “because stupidity isn’t classified as a medical condition.”

“Actually, I believe it is,” said Wirf, not looking up.

“But not one worthy of sympathy.”

“No.”

“Or respect.”

“Certainly not.”

Poor Wirf. To Sully’s mind, the world had been less just and true since he left it. Also less fun. “When I’m gone,” he’d told Sully more than once, “you’re going to discover how hard it is to find another one-legged lawyer who’s always in a good mood,” and this had proven true.

“Of course you think about sex every ten seconds,” Sully told Carl now. “You stay up all night watching porn.” Since losing his house, Carl had been living in Sully’s old apartment over Miss Beryl’s. When Sully, who now lived in the trailer out back, got up to pee in the middle of the night, he could see lewd images reflected in Carl’s upstairs window.

“I like porn,” Carl said, with the resigned air of a man who’d long ago given up trying to even understand his own behavior, much less modify it.

Sully didn’t doubt that he did enjoy porn, but he guessed there was more to it. Carl’s urologist had warned him it could be anywhere from six months to a year before he could achieve erections again, and there was no guarantee even then. He suspected it was mostly fear that drove Carl to sit up half the night watching smut, ever on alert for a stirring in his boxers.

“The production values are getting better,” Carl continued. “Ruth? Tell him I’m right.”

“Hey, Ma?” Roy Purdy called from down the counter. “If it’s between me and the garbage can, I’d eat that last piece of day-old.”

This was in reference to the single slice of cherry left in yesterday’s pie dish. Sully couldn’t help smiling at Roy’s tactic. Begging for something even as you establish that it’s of no value means you’re not only more likely to get it but also — and here was the real beauty — you wouldn’t owe much of a debt of gratitude to the person who gave it to you.

“Throw it away,” Sully advised, loud enough for Ruth, and maybe Roy, to hear.

The effect of this was both predictable and immediate. Ruth slid the pie onto a saucer and banged it down in front of her son-in-law, arching her eyebrow at Sully so there’d be no mistaking the consequence of his opening his big fat mouth. “I’d eat that dry ole piece of crust too,” Roy told her, pointing a yellow finger at the shard of pastry burned to the dish.

“They didn’t feed you downstate?” Ruth said, prying it loose with a knife.

Roy dug in, using his fork like a small shovel. “Not well,” he said around a mouthful of pie, “and that’s for true.”

Carl leaned toward Sully and lowered his voice confidentially. “Earlier? I couldn’t help noticing that when I explained how it’s worse now than before, Ruth didn’t say before what? Don’t you find that strange?”

“I find you strange,” said Sully, who knew where this was heading.

“Because that would’ve been the obvious question, unless she already knew what I was talking about.”

“Hey, Dummy. Look at me. I never told anybody. You did.”

The night before his procedure Carl had come into the Horse and told Sully about it, swearing him to secrecy. After Sully went home, though, Carl had gotten drunk and told a dozen other men, as well as Birdie, the bartender, which meant that the next day, even before the anesthesia wore off, Carl Roebuck’s broke-dick plight was common knowledge, the talk of the town.

Not that Sully hadn’t been tempted to tell. After all, Carl’s legendary inability to keep his dick in his pants had ruined several marriages, including his own. Sully’d told him as much that night at the Horse. “Half the married men in Schuyler County are going to see this as simple justice. You do know that, right? You’ve heard of karma?”

“Like when bad things happen to good people?”

“No, like when what goes around comes around.”

“Yeah?” Carl shrugged. “Well, I hope I’m there when it comes around for you.”

“It already has,” Sully assured him. “What you’re looking at is the result.”

Though in truth, he hadn’t been sure then and still wasn’t now, even after the VA diagnosis. Had he gotten off easy? During the war he’d somehow managed to be standing in the exact right place while more talented men and better soldiers happened to be standing in the exact wrong one. Often that was right next to Sully. For a while there on Omaha Beach there’d been a new, utterly lethal lottery every few seconds. Through diligence and judgment and skill you could improve your odds of survival, but not by much. All the way to Berlin, the calculus of pure dumb luck had ruled, Sully its undeniable beneficiary.

But that had been war. When the shooting finally stopped and the world returned to something like sanity and he again had the leisure to reflect, things felt different. There were days he couldn’t help feeling fucked with. If there was a God, his primary source of amusement seemed to be toying with all the poor little bastards he’d without invitation created. Carl himself was a case in point. Give a man a dick, arrange things so that it rules his life, then poison the little gland that makes the dick work and watch what he does. Seen from God’s point of view, maybe this was just good sport, a fleeting release from the monotony of omnipotence. Because if you were God, it stood to reason your real enemy would be boredom. Sully remembered as a kid studying ants on the sidewalk out front of the family house on Bowdon Street after he’d finished eating a melting Popsicle. Hundreds of the little fuckers, maybe thousands, all programmed to perform in unison a task Sully couldn’t fathom. From their well-ordered ranks, he’d select a single ant and prevent it from doing the one thing it clearly wanted to, forcing it left or right with his Popsicle stick, farther and farther away from the moving current of its fellows, marveling that its tiny brain was incapable of processing what was happening. The only sensible play would be to abandon the struggle until the giant who was thwarting its purpose became disinterested and moved on, probably to torment some other poor creature, but clearly the ant was not programmed to desist. It wanted what it wanted. So maybe God was just a kid with a stick — vaguely curious but incapable of empathy for anything so small and insignificant. From Carl Roebuck he’d stolen a tiny gland. From Wirf, he’d first demanded a leg and then, finding the man undiminished, had taken his life. That’d teach him.

Now it was Sully’s turn. Two years. But probably closer to one. Fine, Sully thought. Does it ever trouble you that you haven’t done more with the life God gave you? Not often. Now and then.

“Okay, fuck you, then,” Carl was saying. “If you don’t want to talk about sex, I better get back to work. For which — okay, I admit it — I am going to need your smelly dwarf. I’ve got a job he’s perfect for.”

“Ruth,” Sully called down the counter, again pointing to the clock. “Ten after eleven. Three whole minutes it took him.” Then, to Carl, “So tell me about it, this job.” He already had a pretty good idea, but he was interested to hear Carl characterize it.

“I’ll explain it to him.”

“Tell me first.”

“And you’re what? His father?”

Actually, that was pretty much how Rub thought of Sully, which might be why he felt a kind of paternal responsibility for him that he’d never managed to summon for his own son, who mostly treated Sully like an inexplicable but undeniable genetic fact. “What if that shit you want him to clean up is toxic?”

“Toxic? It’s a ruptured sewer. Disgusting, I’ll grant you, but hardly toxic.”

“If you don’t know what it is, then you don’t know what it isn’t.”

Carl rubbed his temples. “I liked you better before you came into money.”

“No kidding? You liked it back when you had me over a barrel, Sheetrocking sixty hours a week in subzero temperatures?”

“Forty. You invoiced for sixty. God, those were good times,” Carl sighed, with a far-off, mock-nostalgic expression. “Seeing you Chester into the Horse, caked head to toe with mud and all manner of shit, smelling like Mother Teresa’s pussy? Just looking at you was all I needed to be happy.”

The weird part was that Sully missed those same days himself, not that he’d ever admit any such thing to Carl.

“Anyhow,” Carl said, lowering his voice significantly. “The shit’s not toxic, okay?”

“And you know this how?”

“Think about it. What’s uphill of the factory?”

“Nothing,” Sully said, tracing the sewer line up Limerock Street in his mind. “Except the old—”

“Right,” Carl said. “The rendering plant. Remember why they closed? No, of course you don’t. You can’t remember yesterday. But if you had a memory, you’d recall they got into a spat with the town over back taxes and moved the operation to Mohawk. Gus thinks they flooded that sewer line intentionally. Kind of a parting gift.”

“Except that was, what? Two years ago? Three?”

“That’s what threw us off. The theory is the mill needs repointing along the eaves. Every time it rains, water gets inside. Normally that wouldn’t matter, except it drains into the basement floor.”

Sully nodded, finally understanding. “And the drainage keeps whatever’s down there nice and ripe.”

“Under ideal conditions,” Carl went on, “say a heat wave after a week of rain…”

“Double time,” Sully said.

“Sorry?”

“Whatever you paid Rub for your last filthy job, he gets double for this.”

“Oh, sure. That you remember. Extort your old buddy Carl at every opportunity. Why do I even talk to you?”

“Triple, actually,” Sully said, upon further reflection.

“Fine, I’ll hire somebody else. You think Rub’s the only halfwit in Bath who needs work?”

He had a point there. “Okay, then double.”

“Deal,” Carl said, far too quickly.

Sully’d given in too soon, he realized.

“You think you can talk him into it?”

“I don’t know. He hates you.”

Carl rose to his feet. “Tell him you like me,” he suggested, heading for the men’s room. “He has no opinions that aren’t identical to yours.”

“But I don’t like you.”

“Sure you do, booby.”

When the bathroom door swung shut behind him, Sully went back to studying Roy Purdy, who was now thumbing up the last microscopic crumbs of piecrust from his plate. What he’d told Carl earlier was true. These days he did think of murder more often than sex. Roy had arrived back in Bath the same day Sully was given his diagnosis, the two events dovetailing in his mind and encouraging him to weigh his various options for the scumbag’s permanent removal. Running the little prick over with his pickup truck probably made the most sense, though it struck Sully as kind of impersonal. There was a strong possibility Roy wouldn’t fully comprehend what had hit him, and Sully wanted him to know. Sneaking up behind him and braining him with a shovel would probably be more rewarding. The sound of tempered steel encountering Roy’s skull — that melon softness underneath the fractured bone — would be satisfying. Since turning seventy, though, Sully wasn’t as good at sneaking up on people as he used to be, and here, too, Roy might die without knowing who killed him. Maybe the best guarantee that he would know exactly who was putting an end to his sorry existence would be to lace his coffee with rat poison. Some midmornings, after the breakfast rush, Ruth would ask Sully to watch the counter while she ran to the bank, so he could do it then. It’d be gratifying to watch Roy’s face spasm, the realization dawning, too late, that he’d been poisoned and by whom. The difficulty was in knowing how much poison to administer. Too little and he might not die, too much and he might taste it in the first sip, after which Sully might die. Sully’d never really been afraid of death and wasn’t even now that it was approaching on horseback, but he was fully committed to Roy dying first.

“I guess you liked that all right, then,” Ruth said, clearing Roy’s plate.

“Not bad for day-old,” he said, rubbing his small paunch. “We good here?”

“Aren’t we always?”

Roy evidently had no opinion on this subject. “Tell Janey I’m sorry I missed her.”

Sully saw his eyes settle on the door from the diner to the attached apartment where his ex-wife lived with Tina, their daughter.

“She doin’ okay, then?” he asked. “Everything all right?”

“She’s just fine, Roy,” Ruth said flatly. “So’s your daughter, if that’s of any interest.”

This last Roy appeared not to hear. “Tell her there wasn’t no need for that restraining order. I’m a changed man.”

“She’ll be glad to hear that. Keep your distance just the same.”

“Like I told the judge, it ain’t easy in a town this size.”

Ruth nodded. “That why you hang around the parking lot out at Applebee’s around closing time, waiting for her to get off?”

“I do that?”

“Somebody said they saw you.”

Roy swiveled on his stool to look at Sully now, acknowledging his presence for the first time, then swiveled back again. “Tell her soon as I find a job I’m gonna start making things up to her, and that’s for true.”

“Maybe you’d have better luck job hunting someplace else,” Ruth suggested. “Albany, maybe, or New York City. Someplace with more opportunities.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Roy said, getting to his feet and taking half-a-dozen toothpicks from the cup by the register. “I’ll find something right here in town one of these days.”

Sully opened up the paper to the classifieds and put on his reading glasses. “Here’s something that’d suit you to a T, Roy,” he offered.

“Sully,” Ruth said, with an edge in her voice that a wise man would have paid attention to.

“Wife beater needed,” Sully pretended to read. “Entry level. Minimum wage to start but plenty of opportunity for advancement. Only highly motivated self-starters need apply.”

“Sully,” Ruth repeated.

“Hey, that’s a good one,” Roy said. “You make that up on the spot or you been thinkin’ about it all morning, waitin’ for me to come in here so you could say it?”

Sully ignored both this and Ruth, who was glaring daggers at him as well. “Yeah, but here’s what I don’t understand,” he told Roy. “Carl Roebuck was just talking about needing somebody to clean up that ruptured sewer line. How come you didn’t speak up? Let him know you were looking for work?”

Roy rose from his stool. He’d removed a toothpick from its scarlet cellophane and was chewing on it thoughtfully. “How come you don’t like me, Sully?” he said. “I never done nothin’ to you.”

“Hold on, here’s another,” Sully said, as the other man moved toward the door. “Wanted. Experienced petty thief. Night shift. Ex-con preferred.”

“I guess you don’t think people can change, then,” Roy said, his hand on the doorknob, the bell above tinkling in anticipation.

“They do, sometimes,” Sully conceded, refolding the paper carefully, so his landlady was faceup again. Was it his imagination, or had her expression changed? Become ever so slightly more disapproving? “Mostly they get worse, though, is the problem.”

“Maybe I’ll surprise you,” he said. “I been meanin’ to ask, though. How you like livin’ in my trailer?”

Sully snorted, though he knew what Roy was getting at. “Your trailer?” Because it had once been Roy’s, or rather his and Janey’s, a gift from Ruth and her husband when Janey was pregnant and she and Roy were newly married and without a place to stay. They’d parked it out back of Ruth’s and lived there until Roy got arrested out at the Sans Souci with a truckload of stolen TVs and furniture. Later, after Roy was sent downstate that first time, Ruth bought the trailer back so Janey would have enough money to move to Albany and begin a new, improved Roy-free life. She’d been beyond incredulous when Sully offered to take it off her hands. “What do you mean you’re going to live in it?” she wanted to know. “You’ve got a nice big house on the prettiest street in Bath.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t want it back,” Roy assured him. “They say them things is firetraps. I been reading up. Fall asleep with a lit cigarette some night and up in smoke you’ll go.”

Sully met his stare and held it for a full beat before saying, “Is that for true?”

A muscle twitched on Roy’s cheek, and for a moment Sully thought Roy might barrel down the counter, but he stayed where he was. “That’s for true,” he repeated, smiling. “You know what I got up here, Sully?” Roy continued, pointing at his right temple.

“Well,” Sully replied, “thanks for teeing it up for me.”

Roy ignored this, the look on his face causing Sully to wonder what it must be like to go through life never getting the joke, to smile only when nothing was funny.

“A ledger,” Roy informed him seriously. “On one side’s all the people I owe. Other side’s the ones that owe me. This morning, right here, I added one piece of cherry pie and a cup of coffee on the side I owe. Some people forget their debts, but not me.”

Sully nodded. “I’m curious. Who’s on the side that owes you?”

“One day it’ll be you,” he said confidently. “When I make things right? On that day you’ll owe me an apology, and I mean to collect it. I’ll come by some night. I know right where you park my trailer. I’ll bring us a six-pack. We’ll drink a beer or two, you and me, and you can admit how you had me all wrong. If I was you I’d start practicing, ’cause it’s gonna happen.”

“Well, I’ve got just the one good leg, Roy, so I don’t think I’ll stand around on it waiting for that blessed day.”

“Oh, it’ll come, all right. Some night there’ll be a knock on your door and it’ll be me. And that’s for true, too.”

“Unless I fall asleep with that lit cigarette first.”

“Hey, there you go!” Roy said, pointing his index finger at Sully like he’d just guessed right in a game of charades. “That sure could happen, too.”