A warning shot was what Officer Raymer had in mind when the truck kept coming. He fired over the cab so there could be no mistake. The explosion ripped through the quiet street, however, like thunder, reverberating so loudly that Officer Raymer was not sure whether or not he heard a distant tinkling of glass up the street. When the echoes died, he was still listening in the hope of hearing that tinkling sound again. Probably wind chimes, he told himself. Anyhow, the truck had stopped.
Inside, Sully looked over at his son, who was shielding his face with his elbow, as if against the glare of the sun. The concussion had been so loud that it had penetrated Sully’s furious trance. “Did he actually shoot?” Sully asked Peter, wanting to be sure of his facts before proceeding.
“I believe that was a gunshot, yes,” Peter said. “I vote we surrender. If I have a vote.”
“That’s goddamn irresponsible,” Sully said, glaring at the policeman. He rolled down the window again. “You stupid prick,” he called. Then, to Peter, “Do you believe that?”
“Dad—” Peter began again, but Sully had already gotten out of the truck and was limping over to the policeman, who was looking at the revolver in his hand as if he were surprised to discover it there. Or as if, now that he knew it would fire when he pulled the trigger, he’d discovered its uselessness. Holding it didn’t even slow the advance of the man coming toward him. He might as well have been holding his dick, just as Sully always accused him of doing. Never, Peter thought, had a man looked so helpless. Peter rolled down his own window and called out to his father. “Dad—”
He said it just as his father delivered a short right that caught the policeman flush on the nose. Officer Raymer didn’t even raise an arm to block the blow. His head went backward and returned red, his hat landing topside down on the roof of the cruiser. Then his knees gave and he slumped gracefully against the side of the car. Sully stood over the man for a second, then looked back at Peter, whose head was still out the window. “What?” Sully said.
Peter shook his head, rolled the window back up.
Sully opened the cruiser’s door then and turned the key in the ignition to off. The car shuddered and was still. Then Sully returned to the truck and got back in. “There,” he said. “Where’d Rub go?” he wondered, scanning the street. Rub was gone.
Peter was staring at his father.
“What?” Sully asked again.
Peter shook his head in disbelief. “Nothing,” he said, throwing up his hands.
“Good,” Sully said. “For a minute there, I thought you were going to be critical.”
“You were right about one thing,” Peter said as they passed the IGA and through the intersection, heading out of town toward the lake in pursuit of Toby Roebuck’s Bronco. “She’s the prettiest woman in Bath.”
They’d pulled up in front of Tip Top Construction just as Toby was locking the street door. She hadn’t the slightest idea where her husband was, but she was willing to show them where the camp was located so they could unload the wood. “Won’t your husband be suspicious if you come home late?” Sully’d asked, flirtatious in such safe circumstances.
“I’ll just tell him I was with you,” she replied, “since that’s always such a chaste experience. Who’s this?”
Sully introduced Peter, who leaned across the front seat to shake her hand. Sully noticed the ease of his son’s gesture, the way Peter was able to convey through it his admiration of Toby Roebuck’s beauty without suggesting he was in awe of it, and Sully wondered where he’d learned such easy confidence. Not from Ralph, certainly. Nor even himself.
“Your son, huh?” Toby had observed. “I guess that means there was a time when you weren’t such a chaste experience.”
“I wouldn’t be now if I had more energy,” Sully assured her, adding, “Let’s hit the road, dolly, before the cops find me by accident and my son has to do this whole job by himself.”
She looked at him quizzically.
“You know an Officer Raymer?”
She made a face. “He’s the one they’re trying to fire, right?”
“He and I just had a little difference of opinion,” Sully said. “He should be just about coming to.”
Toby studied first Sully, then Peter, who nodded at her ruefully that this was true. “Sully, Sully, Sully,” she observed.
And so now they were racing through the dusk toward the lake where the Roebucks’ camp was located, their load of hardwood rattling so noisily in the back that they practically had to shout to be heard above the racket.
“She’s one of the nicest, too,” Sully observed in response to Peter’s observation about Toby’s being the prettiest woman in Bath. “Her husband treats her like shit, of course. He’s given her the clap three times this year. Can you imagine doing that to a girl like her?”
Peter didn’t answer the question right away, perhaps because he was trying to interpret it. After a moment Sully noticed his son was grinning at him in the near dark. “What?” he said.
“How long have you had this crush on her?”
Sully frowned at him. “She’s a little young for me.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Peter pointed out, still grinning at him slyly.
“I just hate to see such a nice girl treated like that, is all,” he explained.
Again Peter delayed answering for a meaningful beat, then finally said, “Okay.”
“You don’t believe me, wise ass?”
“Whatever you say,” Peter agreed, looking ahead at the Bronco’s taillights. “You’d probably have better luck if you thought of her as a woman. Women don’t like to be referred to as ‘girls’ anymore.”
“They don’t?”
“Nope.”
“You learn that at the university?”
“Among other things.”
“And now you know all the right things to say?”
“Nope,” he said. “Just some of the wrong ones.”
“What happened to the shy kid you used to be?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“I liked him.”
“Really?” Peter said. “You should have said something.”
The Roebucks’ camp was located on the far end of the lake, accessible via a rutted, unpaved road that wound in and out of the trees along the water’s edge. The water was a sheet of glass reflecting the quarter moon. They’d left all the other camps behind when Toby finally pulled off the road and down a steep embankment, parking on a narrow ledge just wide enough for one car. Sully pulled in behind her diagonally and turned off the engine, then the headlights, which illuminated the large roof of the camp still farther down the bank. When they got out, they could hear the waves lapping against the shore below.
“Nice hideout, sweetheart,” Peter said, doing Humphrey Bogart. “The cops’ll never find us here.”
“They’re not after you” Sully pointed out.
“With my luck I’ll be nabbed as your accomplice.”
“I’ll tell them you were no help,” Sully said. “As usual.”
“Don Sullivan, the last of the tough guys,” Toby Roebuck said, her voice near in the dark. Also her perfume, which mingled with the crisp air off the lake below, creating an intoxicating mixture of damp earth and leaves and water and girl. Not woman, in Sully’s opinion. Girl. “I better have the goddamn key,” she said. They could hear her rummaging through her purse.
“We could probably get in anyhow,” Sully said, getting out.
“Right,” Toby snorted. “I heard all about you and your crowbar. There!” she held up the key triumphantly, a glint of silver in the moonlight. “Watch the Weps.”
“Okay,” Sully said. “What steps?”
She took his hand then, placing it on a railing he hadn’t noticed. “Four, then level, then three more,” she said, leading the way, her hand on his elbow now in much the same fashion, he noted, to his embarrassment, that he led old Hattie from the apartment into the diner each morning.
“Ouch,” he s
aid, finding a patch of unlevel ground where his ankle turned, shooting pain from his knee to his groin.
“Why don’t you wait here,” she suggested. “Let me go unlock and turn the kitchen light on.”
As she said this, a light came on, not from below and ahead, but rather from above and behind. There was now enough light for Sully to see that Peter was no longer with them. His voice came to them from above, where they’d left the vehicles. “That help?”
“Hey,” Toby said. “A Sullivan with a brain.” In truth, the headlights helped only marginally, illuminating the trees and the camp’s roof but not the path. “Wait, okay?” she whispered.
Sully decided he would. A moment later Peter joined him, watching dubiously as Sully flexed his knee.
“You okay?”
“Fine,” Sully said. “Terrific.”
“Listen,” Peter said, his voice low and confidential. “Let me do the unloading.”
“I’m fine,” Sully insisted. “I’ll go slow.”
Several lights came on inside the camp and they could see Toby Roebuck moving swiftly from room to room, her hair bouncing.
“Why not just let me?” Peter said.
“Because.”
“Oh,” Peter said. “Well. As long as you have a reason.”
“Look,” Sully said. “When I can’t work any more, I’ll quit, okay. Is that all right with you?”
“Anything you say, boss.”
Neither said anything for a moment then, and there was just the sound of the wind high in the trees and the tiny waves lapping against the shore and Toby Roebuck returning through the camp, all of its windows now streaming yellow and illuminating the treacherous footing between where they stood and the camp’s back porch.
“Well, I guess it’s true,” Peter observed. “Life is full of surprises. Who’d have thought you and I would ever argue over a woman?”
Sully stared at his son, whose eyes gleamed in the darkness like a cat’s. “Is that what you think we’re doing?”
Toby bounced back out onto the porch then and peered up the embankment toward her two male companions, who remained invisible in the dark midground between the light from above and that from below. She could see neither of them, though when Peter spoke, his voice was close enough to touch. “That’s what I think we’re doing,” she heard him say.
The job took about an hour, and in the end Sully let Peter and Toby Roebuck do most of the hauling up and down the bank. Even with the camp’s back door light on, the slope remained dark, the footing treacherous, and so Sully stayed with the truck, pulling the now tangled boards free and leaning them against the tailgate so Toby and his son could grab a convenient armful. Watching them work together, he decided that Peter had been right. They were arguing about a woman. He also had to admit that he was jealous of his son’s two good legs. Of course, Peter himself had to be a good ten years older than Toby Roebuck, and he too seemed slightly in awe of her energy going up and down the bank with an armful of hardwood. Peter went slower, carrying a far larger load over his shoulder.
They’d decided the best place to stack the wood was on the screened-in porch that wrapped around the camp, and once when Toby, who was making two bouncing trips to Peter’s one, caught up with him there on the porch, they took a short break. Sully could hear their voices borne up from the lake on the frigid wind, and once he heard Toby Roebuck laugh, a sound that made him wish Rub had come along. Rub would have been full of angry wishes. He’d have wanted to know how come guys like Peter and Carl had all the luck with women while they never had any. He’d have wished all this running up and down the hill would make ole Toby hot and sweaty so she’d take off her jacket and let them watch her tits jiggle. When Sully pointed out it was December and about ten degrees above zero, Rub would just wish it was summer. Rub’s wishes, when you totaled them up, meant simply that he’d have preferred a different sort of world, one where he got his share—of money, pussy, food, warmth, ease. Sully’s job, as he perceived it, was to defend the world they were stuck with, a task made infinitely easier by Rub’s presence.
In his absence, Sully, sitting on the tailgate of the pickup waiting for his son and the prettiest girl in Bath to climb the bank for the last few armloads of wood, found himself alone with a few wishes of his own. He didn’t waste much time on the big ones—that he was younger, less stubborn, more flexible, less in debt, more careful. He concentrated instead on the more specific and immediate things that had at one time been within the sphere of his influence to effect, or, failing that, were statistically probable. He wished he hadn’t tried to climb down the bank in the dark, causing his knee to scream at him now in protest. He wished that he and Ruth weren’t on the outs, because he would have enjoyed her company tonight, just as he always did after he’d done something foolish, as if she possessed the power of absolution. She’d tell him there was a new Sully, not just the old one, and he’d be free to choose between believing and resenting her. He also wished that he hadn’t been quite so mean to Rub, whom he’d now have to cajole into coming back to work, that he hadn’t assaulted a policeman in broad daylight on Main Street, that it would start snowing so he could make some money, that the bitter wind would stop blowing long enough for him to light a cigarette. Since a couple of these were in the nature of specific regrets of the sort he disliked indulging, he decided he’d write them all off as bad debts if he could just get a cigarette lit. And this was what he was attempting to do when a set of headlights cut through the trees some distance away and he became aware of the sound of a small car engine whining closer, which could mean only one thing. In another minute Carl Roebuck’s Camaro careened into view and skidded to a halt about a foot from where Sully sat on the tailgate.
“Don Sullivan,” Carl said, getting out. Even in the dark Sully could see he was grinning. “Fugitive.”
“I’m not running, I’m working,” Sully explained, flicking the useless match away. “If you’d ever worked a day in your life you’d know the difference.”
“How come every time I see you, you’re sitting on that tailgate and claiming to be working?” Carl said, pulling out his lighter and cupping his hand around it.
Sully’s cigarette caught just as the wind blew out the flame. “I’m too tired to explain.”
“Well,” Carl said, locating Sully’s cigarettes in his shirt pocket and extracting one from the pack, “I have a feeling you’re going to get a few days off at county expense.”
“Nah.” Sully exhaled through his nose. “I’ve got the best one-legged Jewish lawyer in Bath.”
“That reminds me,” Carl said, inhaling his own cigarette rapturously. “Wirf said to give you this.”
“This” was a cocktail napkin. Sully unfolded and read the message Wirf had scrawled there by the light of Carl’s left head lamp. “Verily,” the note said, “this Time Thou Art Truly and Forever Fucked.”
Sully wadded up the napkin and gave it a toss. “He puts up a smooth defense, doesn’t he?”
“I’d like to see him on the Supreme Court. Legal opinions on cocktail napkins. What the hell ever possessed you to punch a cop?”
“It seemed like a hell of a fine idea at the time.” Sully sighed, then provided a short version of what had happened.
Carl was skeptical. “He drew his gun on you?”
“Pointed it at me too, the prick.”
“I don’t think anybody’d believe that unless you had a witness.”
“If there weren’t any witnesses, then I didn’t punch him,” Sully said. “My son was there, though.”
“That’s something, I suppose,” Carl said, “though it’d be better to have the sort of witness who wouldn’t lie to save you.”
“I don’t think he would, actually,” Sully admitted.
“An honorable man, huh?”
“I don’t know about that,” Sully said. “I just don’t think he likes me well enough to lie for me.”
Carl took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. “You know
why this is happening, don’t you?”
It occurred to Sully when Carl said this that Carl was seriously pissed. Which meant they were on the verge of a real argument. After the last one, Sully hadn’t spoken to him for four months. “Because I’m so lucky?”
“Bullshit,” Carl said. “You know why these things keep happening to you. It’s because you have to rag everybody twenty-four hours a day. It’s because you never, ever fucking let up.”
“Oh,” Sully said. “That’s why.”
“Why were you driving up the sidewalk, Sully?” Carl persisted. “You ragged Rub until even he couldn’t stand it any more, and you still couldn’t let it alone. You had to make it worse. You had to completely humiliate that poor simple little fuck.”
“I don’t believe I’m hearing this from you,” Sully said. “When have you ever done anything but insult him?”
“There’s a difference, Sully,” Carl said without the slightest hint of hypocrisy.
“What difference is that, Carl?” Sully said, flicking the remains of his cigarette. “Tell me why your ragging is okay and mine isn’t, because I want to hear this.”
“Because he’s not in love with me,” Carl said.
“Get the fuck away,” Sully said, genuinely furious now, sliding off the tailgate. “He’s no more queer than you.”
“I know it,” Carl said. “But he’d blow you on the four corners at high noon if you asked him to, and you know that, Sully.”
In fact, Sully did know it, or knew the power of Rub’s devotion. It was this knowledge, in fact, that had caused him to follow Rub up the sidewalk, hoping to joke him back into their friendship, something he’d always been able to do in the past. It had not been, as Carl had suggested, a desire to humiliate him further. Still, Sully had to admit, a simple apology would have done the trick. “I’ll make it up to him,” he heard himself say weakly.
“How?” Carl wanted to know. “You’ll buy him a jelly donut, right?”
Sully had to snort at this. “Unless I’m mistaken, I’ll end up buying him about ten thousand jelly donuts before I’m done.”
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