Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo Page B

through the outer office.
    â€œWhat?” the girl wanted to know in her best bored-to-death voice.
    â€œDon’t take your love to town.”
    One thing was for sure: compared to some of the other guys Carl Roebuck hired, Sully himself was a genius. Apparently one of Carl’s regulars had loaded up about ten tons of concrete basement blocks on the company flatbed and dropped them off at the wrong site. Sully found them in a sloppy pyramid next to a small, two-bedroom ranch home that was already half built. The unexpected snow, together with the fact that tomorrow was a holiday, had apparently sent the guys working on the house back home. In fact, they’d probably never left their homes this morning. Carl didn’t hire union men when he could help it, but even the guys who worked for Tip Top Construction didn’t work in the snow.
    Most of the overnight snow had already melted, and the uneven ground was a quagmire of patchy brown slush. The bank sign had said forty-two degrees when Sully drove by. It felt colder now.
    There was only one sensible way to approach this, and that was to go fetch Rub, who was surefooted and didn’t mind working in slop of any description. Something was terribly wrong with Rub’s nose, Sully was certain. Rub could stand hip deep in the overflow of a ruptured septic tank as pleasantly as if he were in the middle of a field of daisies. This made him invaluable to Sully who, while not overly fastidious, could distinguish between the smell of shit and that of daisies. The downside was that Rub couldn’t smell himself either, and when he was ripe his own personal odor greatly resembled what he stood in. Still, the smart thing to do would be to go get Rub, station him in the muck. That way Sully could stay up in the dry bed of the pickup and stack the blocks as Rub handed them up to him. He guessed four or five loads would do the trick, and with Rub’s help they could be finished by early afternoon.
    Since this was the only sensible way to proceed, Sully decided against it. Rub wasn’t expecting work so soon, and it might take Sully an hour to find him if he wasn’t home or at Hattie’s or the donut shop or the OTB. Then he’d have to listen to Rub chatter all day, and later they’d split the money. Sully didn’t mind splitting the money, but he hadn’t worked in three months, and he wanted to see how things went. Alone, he could work at his own pace, and if his knee couldn’t take it, he could just quit and not owe anybody any explanations. Next week he’d just go back to school.
    So he backed the truck up close to the pile of concrete blocks, got out, lowered the tailgate and tested the footing, which wasn’t good. I should definitely go get Rub, he thought. Instead he planted half a dozen blocks in the mud for a makeshift walkway between the pyramid and the truck. Then he began, carrying blocks in each hand at first, then a stack of four balanced against his chest, piling them in rows on the truck bed. The hard part was climbing up onto the truck. The only way was to sit on the tailgate, swing his legs aboard, get his good leg under him, then the bad one. Surprisingly, his knee didn’t feel too bad. In fact, it felt pretty good. If it held up, maybe he’d use the money he earned today to buy a couple new radials for the truck, whose tires were bald from running back and forth to Schuyler Springs every day to study philosophy. It was as if the young professor had disproved the tread on Sully’s tires along with everything else.
    It was when he thought of all the things the truck was going to needthat he got mad about the money Carl Roebuck wouldn’t pay him. The pickup had been pretty long in the tooth when Sully bought it. It had needed new tires a month ago, along with a rebuilt carburetor. The valves needed grinding too. In another month the truck would need all of these repairs even worse, and the month