Who but Carl Roebuck, the little twerp, wouldn’t be satisfied with such a woman, Sully wondered as he limped up the driveway of the Roebuck house. Well, most men wouldn’t be, he had to admit, because most men were never satisfied. Still, he couldn’t help thinking he’d be satisfied, now, at age sixty. Of course, he was nearly twice Carl’s age and over the years he’d grown sentimental where women were concerned and had gradually developed the older man’s confidence that he’d know how to treat a woman like Toby, confidence born of the fact that there was now no chance he’d ever have one.
Toby Roebuck’s Bronco, a vehicle Sully had long coveted along with its owner, was in one of the open stalls of the Roebuck garage. The bay where Carl’s red Camaro usually sat when he was at home stood empty, which was good. Sometimes Carl came home for the lunch hour for a little afternoon delight. Most days, though, he went someplace else for the same thing. Sully had been hoping that would be the case today, because he didn’t want to run into Carl just yet. Alongside the back porch a shiny new snowblower was parked. The machine looked like it probably cost about what Carl Roebuck owed him. Maybe more. Probably more. Sully made a mental note to price them.
Since the back door was unlocked, he knocked on his way in, calling, “Hi, dolly. You aren’t naked or anything, are you?” Once last summer he’d come upon Toby Roebuck sunbathing topless in the back yard, a happenstance that had apparently embarrassed him far more than her. She’d hooked her bikini top quickly, chortling at his stunned confusion, his having flushed crimson.
“No, but I can be in about two minutes,” her voice, light and girlish, came down from somewhere upstairs.
“Take your time,” Sully called, pulling out a chair at the kitchen table and collapsing into it, his knee still humming from Wacker’s assault. This was one of the things he’d missed during these last four months, he realized. There were few places he enjoyed more than Toby Roebuck’s kitchen, where, miraculously, a pot of drip coffee, which Sully located by smell, was now brewing on the counter. “I need a cup of coffee first, as soon as I can find the energy to get up and get it.”
It was at this point that Sully noticed a man in gray work clothes on one knee at the front door, two rooms away. “That you, Horace?” Sully squinted, recalling now that he’d seen Horace Yancy’s green van parked at the curb outside, without drawing any inferences.
“Hi, Sully,” Horace said over his shoulder. “I ain’t naked either.”
“Thank God for that,” Sully said. “What are you up to?”
“I’m tightening these screws,” Horace grunted, twisting his screwdriver. “Then I’m all done.”
Since the coffeepot had gurgled twice and stopped dripping, Sully got up, found his favorite mug in the cupboard, the one bearing a poetic inscription on its side:
Here’s to you, as good as you are,
And here’s to me, as bad as I am,
But as good as you are,
And as bad as I am,
I’m as good as you are,
As bad as I am.
Sully was not a man who cared much for material possessions, nor was he particularly envious of what other people had. How odd, Sully thought, that so many of the things he coveted were Carl Roebuck’s. For starters there were Carl’s wife and Carl’s wife’s Bronco. Big-ticket items, these. And now there was the new snowblower. But there were little things too. One day he’d come in when Toby was doing laundry, stacking Carl’s underwear and socks on the kitchen table. Sully had counted over twenty-five pairs of underwear and an equal number of socks. To Sully, a man who did his wash in laundromats and who was forced to go more often than he would have liked when he ran out of socks and shorts, the idea of having twenty-five pairs of underwear seemed a very great luxury. That Carl Roebuck should have so many pairs didn’t seem quite fair. The fact that he also had the prettiest girl in the county to wash them for him didn’t seem even remotely fair. Sully tried his best not to think about these things. He was pretty sure coveting was wrong in general, and he was certain it was not a good thing to covet another man’s undershorts. And of course there was the specific injunction, etched in stone, against coveting another man’s wife. But what about his favorite mug? Toby Roebuck probably would have made him a present of it if she’d known how fond he was of it. Then again, he wasn’t sure he wanted it, exactly. If he brought it home with him, he’d never use it, would probably forget all about it. Here, in Toby’s cupboard, he got to use it occasionally and regret that he didn’t have one like it.
By the time he sat back down, Horace was snapping his toolbox shut and struggling to his feet. He was a few years older than Sully and had about as much trouble getting up and down. Toby Roebuck skipped down the stairs then, dressed in her usual getup: tight, faded jeans, a sweatshirt, running shoes. She’d been a two- or three-sport athlete in college, and she still jogged, every day in warm weather, her blond ponytail bouncing youthfully down the tree-lined streets of Bath. Sully noticed she’d cut her hair short since he’d last seen her, though. It was styled rather mannishly, he thought, and he regretted there’d be no more bouncing ponytail come spring. Fortunately, other things still bounced delightfully, Sully noted when Toby Roebuck reached the bottom step.
“All done, Mr. Yancy?” she sang.
“All done, Mrs. Roebuck.” Horace sighed, presenting her the bill. “I wish I hadn’t let you talk me into it.”
“I’ll write you a check,” she said, taking the bill and disappearing into the den.
“I’m the one he’s going to be mad at, not you,” Horace said, setting his toolbox down to wait, glancing at Sully as if to suggest that Sully at least would understand his position, even if this crazy, beautiful young woman didn’t.
“Men are such cowards,” came Toby Roebuck’s voice from the den. A minute later she emerged with a check and handed it to the sad-faced locksmith, who studied it with the expression of a man who’s just realized he’s going broke by centimeters, having made a wrong career move thirty years ago. Sully knew the feeling.
“I wouldn’t wait to cash that, though,” Toby advised.
“Okay,” Horace stuffed the check into his shirt pocket. “Here’s the extra keys.”
She took these and slid them into her jeans. Sully could see the perfect outline they made.
When Horace was gone, Toby Roebuck turned to face Sully, who, until that moment, she’d not looked at. “Tell me,” she said, “how does a man—even a man like you—get that dirty?”
“Working for your husband,” Sully informed her, since it was true.
“Ah,” she nodded, as if it all made perfect sense now. “He makes you look like he makes me feel.”
“He’s a beaut’,” Sully conceded. “Listen. While you got your checkbook handy, how about writing me a check for the work I did this summer? Dummy and I have ironed things out, but all he had down at the office was the company checkbook.”
Toby Roebuck grinned at him. “Nice try, Sully.”
“What?”
“He called this morning and warned me you’d probably be by. He told me what you’d say almost word for word.”
Sully grinned sheepishly. “He does owe me, you know.”
“Get in line,” she advised. “He owes everybody.”
“Good thing he’s got all that money,” Sully observed.
“All what money?”
“Don’t kid a kidder,” Sully said.
“I tell you what, Sully. You take a big pile of money and then go have quadruple-bypass surgery and see how much money is left by the time you get back to the pile.”
Sully decided he wouldn’t argue the point, but he didn’t buy what Toby Roebuck was telling him either. In his experience, people who had Carl’s kind of money had few real duties, and about the only one they took seriously was convincing other people they didn’t have all that money you knew they had. Toby Roebuck seemed sincere enough, and Sully didn’t doubt the hospital had been expensive, but he doubted she knew much about her
husband’s finances. Carl was shifty and probably had money stashed in places nobody knew about. It was probably hid so well it would stay hid when Carl finally keeled over in the middle of some nooner. “So … you going to tell me what’s going on with the new locks?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said. “I decided just this morning that my husband no longer lives here. In fact, I don’t see him living here in the immediate future.”
Sully nodded. “Well, it’s a bold move. It won’t work, but it might get his attention.”
“We’ll see,” Toby Roebuck sang. She didn’t sound that worried. “So … you’re no longer a college student. The old dog couldn’t learn the new tricks.”
“I wish there were some new tricks for an old dog to learn, dolly.”
“And you’re back working for Carl?”
“For a while,” Sully admitted, unwilling to concede a permanent arrangement. “We’ll see.”
Neither said anything for a moment, neither wanting, apparently, to admit that their lives were in any meaningful way tied to a man like Carl Roebuck. “You want to see our new hot tub?” Toby Roebuck finally said.
“Where is it?”
“Upstairs.”
“Then I don’t want to see it,” Sully said, not wanting to add another item to the growing list of things to covet.
Toby poured herself a cup of coffee, doctored it over at the counter. “Is it the knee still, or have you done something else to yourself since I saw you last.”
“Nope. Same old thing, dolly,” he said, staring at her close-cropped hair. “While we’re on the subject of doing things to ourselves …”
“I got a part in this play in Schuyler,” she explained happily. “Shakespeare, only modernized. I’m disguised as a boy.”
Sully leered at her appreciatively. “Good luck.”
Toby Roebuck ignored this. She joined him at the table, sitting in one chair, putting her feet up on another. “So you’re going back to work. You and Carl deserve each other. You’re both self-destructive. He just has more fun. You come home with broken knees, he comes home with the clap.”
Sully flexed his knee. “I have to admit, I wouldn’t mind trading places for a while.”
Toby grinned at him. “I wish you would. Broken knees aren’t contagious.”
Sully frowned and considered this, unsure whether Toby Roebuck was issuing him an invitation or wishing her husband a painfully broken knee. The latter, he decided, since it made more sense. “He’s given you the clap?”
“Only three times,” she said.
“Jesus,” Sully said, genuinely surprised. He’d always been amazed that Toby Roebuck managed to take her husband’s myriad infidelities in stride. Even this latest outrage she reported matter-of-factly, as if venereal disease were part of an equation she understood, or should have understood, when she married Carl Roebuck. As if this third dose of the clap was beginning to strain her tolerance. To Sully it was spooky. Tolerance of male misbehavior had not been prominently in evidence with any of the women Sully’d ever found himself involved. In fact, they identified, judged and exacted punishment for his misdeeds in one swift, efficient motion. It didn’t make any kind of sense, Sully recognized, that this young woman, who could have any man in the county for the asking, would stick with one who kept giving her the clap.
“I warned him last week to fire that little tramp at the office. She’s a walking incubator.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Sully said, though there was nothing to worry about. The only thing Ruby had ever offered him was her contempt.
“You tell me, Sully,” she said, studying him seriously. “What does it mean that he won’t fire her?”
Sully shrugged. “I don’t think he’s in love with her, if that’s what you mean.”
Toby considered this, as if she wasn’t sure what she’d meant.
“To be honest,” Sully admitted, “I have no idea why he does what he does. Most of the time I don’t even know why I do what I do, much less anybody else.” He’d finished his cup of coffee, pushed it toward the center of the table. “Thanks for the coffee. Hang in there.”
“That’s the sum of your wisdom on the subject?” she said, pretending outrage. “Hang in there?”
“I hate to tell you, dolly, but that’s the sum of my wisdom on all subjects. You sure you don’t want to write me that check while you’re feeling rebellious?”
“That he’d never forgive me for.”
Sully got to his feet, flexed at the knee. “Okay,” he said. “I guess I’ll settle for a lift downtown.”
“Where’s your sad-ass truck?”
“Stuck in the mud,” he admitted reluctantly.
“Old stick-in-the-mud Sully,” she grinned at him in a way that made him wonder if he had been given an invitation earlier. “That’s one thing I have to say about Carl”—pulling her parka off the hook by the door—“he never settles.”
The “even for me” she left unspoken.
Sully had Toby Roebuck drop him off in front of the OTB, which was a good place to look for somebody who probably wasn’t there. “You didn’t see me today, in case anybody asks,” he reminded her as he got out.
“See who?” Toby said.
Sully started to answer, then realized she was making a joke.
“Come see me in my play,” she suggested.
“You got any nude scenes?”
“Tell me something,” she said, before he closed the door. “What were you like when you were young?”
“Just like this,” he said. “Only more.”
The OTB was busy as usual, though a quick scan of the premises did not turn up Rub among the crowd. Between eleven and twelve on weekdays the North Bath OTB was always occupied by a small army of retired men in pale yellow and powder blue windbreakers who would disappear by noon, heading home to lunches of tuna-fish sandwiches on white bread and steaming bowls of Campbell’s tomato soup, surrendering the field to the poorer, more desperate, more compulsive types who turned the state’s profit. This late in the year, the well-scrubbed, well-mannered windbreaker men all wore sweaters beneath their jackets, and many wore scarves at the insistence of their wives, who, since their husbands’ retirement, had come to treat them like school-bound children, making sure their scarves were wrapped high and snug about their wattled throats, jackets zipped up as far as they would go. Toasty was the word these wives used. Toasty warm. In response to being treated like children, these husbands retaliated by behaving like children, unzipping and unwrapping as soon as they were safely out of sight. They shared the child’s natural aversion to heavy winter wear and could not be induced to don bulky overcoats until it snowed and the snow stayed. It had snowed today, but the snow was melting.
“Sully!” they cheered when he came in, all doffing their baseball caps. Sully knew most of these men and liked them well enough, their comparative good fortune notwithstanding. Why shouldn’t they wear thin windbreakers in late November? They left warm houses at midmorning, got into cars with good heaters that had been sitting in warm, if not toasty warm, garages overnight, drove five minutes to the donut shop, dashed inside where it was warm, and there they stayed, gossiping over hot coffee refills, until it was time to visit the OTB and play their daily double. Then home again. When they wanted a change of pace, they visited the insurance office or the hardware store or the post office or the drugstore where they’d worked for thirty years before retiring. They were never outside long enough to find out what the temperature was, much less catch a cold, and so they all looked hale and hearty and weather resistant even in their out-of-season clothing.
They were insulated against cold economic weather too. Having spent their working lives in North Bath, they were not rich, but they were comfortable, and they congratulated themselves that they’d be more comfortable still if Bath real estate would just go ahead and boom like everybody was predicting. Or like everybody in Bath was predicting. Albany had already spilled northward, and realtors were
predicting excitedly that the entire interstate corridor would share in the boom. The best of the shabby old Victorian houses along Glendale, like the Roebucks’, had already been bought up and restored by young men and women, most of whom worked in Albany. They hopped on the interstate in the morning and returned in the evening, a twenty-five-minute drive. These OTB men were angry with themselves for having once considered the old Victorians mere dinosaurs. Thirty years ago such houses could have been bought for a song, but instead they had built well-insulated, new, split-level ranches with picture windows. These were also beginning to creep up in assessed value and taxes, but much more slowly. They all knew now they could have made their killing in the Victorians if they’d guessed that an entire generation of Vietnam draft protesters in torn, faded jeans would end up with money and spend it resuscitating decrepit old houses. Now all they could do was watch the value of their split-levels inch up and worry about timing. Higher taxes were eating into their pensions and Social Security and savings. They didn’t want to sell their split-levels too early, only to discover that the real boom in the market hadn’t come yet. The conventional wisdom seemed to be that things were just beginning to pick up momentum, what with the Sans Souci scheduled to reopen in the summer and the groundbreaking on the amusement park imminent.
But, of course, waiting was risky, too. What if the Ultimate Escape deal collapsed at the last minute? They didn’t want to wait too long and find themselves stuck with their dream homes of thirty years ago. They had new dream homes now—condos in warmer climes—and they spent the long mornings discussing these. Most favored condos on the Florida gulf, except these were getting expensive and there were disturbing reports of alligators lumbering out of the glades and devouring small children. The windbreaker men didn’t have any small children, but the alligator stories haunted them anyway, a single incident circulating so many times that you’d have thought there was an army of Florida alligators advancing against a defenseless line of condos all the way from the Everglades to St. Petersburg. Even the golf courses were rumored to be full of alligators. Talk about your hazards. For this reason an increasing number of these morning OTB men favored Arizona, where the condos were rumored to be cheaper and where there weren’t any alligators. There were rattlesnakes and scorpions and tarantulas and spiders and Gila monsters, but none of these were big enough to glom onto a man and drag him back into the swamp to eat. In the desert there weren’t even any swamps to drag you into.
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