Rub appeared to, because he commenced leaping with joy, his skull encountering the cab’s roof with a bang, which had to hurt, though apparently not enough to prevent further leaps with the same results.
“Stop, before you kill yourself,” Sully said, leaning across him to open the passenger door. “Twenty minutes!” he called as Rub disappeared around the corner of the hotel, with the whole of Sans Souci Park to race around in.
Alone now, he turned the engine off and let the past wash over him. Strange, when he thought about it. The park was no more than a hundred yards from Miss Beryl’s house, but it had been years since he’d been on the grounds. As a boy, at least for a time, there’d been no place he loved more.
After an earlier incarnation of the hotel closed, his father had been hired by the estate as its principal custodian and caretaker. It was his job to make sure that the weather wasn’t blowing in through some broken window, that burst pipes and other problems were promptly reported, the damage contained. The most valuable furniture and fixtures had been put in storage or sold off when the hotel closed, but there was still plenty of stuff worth stealing, and it was Big Jim’s job to provide a visible presence to discourage thieves and late-night partiers out in the woods, where they left their empty whiskey bottles behind. It was also his job, or so he told Sully and Patrick, his older brother, to run off local boys who, if they were allowed to, would scale the wrought-iron fence and chew up the elegant lawns with their football games. There was no part of his job that Big Jim took more seriously than putting the fear of God into those lawless little bastards.
Sully and his brother, on the other hand, were given the run of the property. Mostly that meant exploring the woods, pretending, as boys will, to get lost, though in reality this was impossible. The park’s many trails eventually wound through the trees and back to the hotel, and you couldn’t walk more than half a mile in any direction without encountering the stone wall or a perimeter fence that in turn would lead you to either the Schuyler entrance at one end or the Bath entrance at the other. In foul weather, though, if their father was in an expansive mood, he allowed them indoors and gave them more or less free rein to explore the hotel, so long as they didn’t break anything. In the ballroom, where the remnant furniture was gathered into one corner and draped with sheets, their favorite activity was to get a running start and slide in their socks across the burnished floor, until one day Patrick caught a nail that gashed his foot from toe to heel, earning him thirty-some stitches. The library sported a massive pool table with leather pockets, useless to them until one day they managed to pick the lock on a nearby closet containing several cue sticks, a rack, a bridge and a set of balls minus, for some reason, the eight. Because the floor had a slight slope, over time the table’s surface had gone several bubbles off of plumb, which Sully and his brother learned to accommodate and even enjoy. Hit your shots with just the right speed and touch, and you could actually bend your ball around another inconveniently in its path and let gravity pull it into the corner pocket. Because he learned to play on this table, Sully imagined that the incline was part of the game’s design, and years later, when he took it up again, he had to relearn the game completely. He never did love playing on a level surface nearly as much, minus the thrilling element of gravity.
So vast and wondrous a property would have been any boy’s dream, but for Sully and his brother it was also a refuge from their unhappy home on Bowdon Street, where their poor mother was a virtual prisoner, too ashamed to leave the house because she often sported a black eye or a fat, busted lip. Big Jim, who gave her these, was by contrast hail-fellow-well-met in all the neighborhood taverns, where, as unofficial lord of the Sans Souci, he held court and dispensed his not-terribly-secret largesse. Given his numerous and varied responsibilities, he considered himself poorly compensated, which in his view justified his lucrative sideline. Despite not offering many amenities — the water and electricity having been turned off in all but a handful of the rooms — he was still able to rent them out by the hour at very reasonable rates, more than doubling his custodial salary. Indeed, on occasion he was said to take women there himself.
People warned him, of course, that it was just a matter of time before his high jinks were discovered and he got fired, but Big Jim refused to listen. After all, the men he reported to lived in Albany and New York City. Having lived his entire life in Bath, he had a distorted sense of distance. The former, thirty-five minutes away by car since the completion of the Northway, seemed to him well out of range, and the latter might’ve been on the other side of the moon. How could men living so far away know what he was up to? They had their hands full dealing with the warring factions of the family that held a majority stake in the property and couldn’t agree on what to do with it. Better yet, when these same men visited the Sans Souci with a prospective buyer, they always announced their intention many days in advance so Big Jim could make sure everything was shipshape.
What eluded Sully’s father was that not much ever happened here that they didn’t hear about eventually. What protected him wasn’t so much their cluelessness as the fact that they themselves didn’t own the place. If he had a modest concession going on the side, what did they care? If he acted like a big shot around town, if he was a loudmouth and a braggart and a bore who exaggerated his own importance to the Sans Souci and sometimes treated the hotel as if he owned it, well, it was no skin off their asses. They were either lawyers or in the employ of lawyers, which meant their primary concern was liability. Yes, they wanted Big Jim to keep unauthorized people off the property, but mostly to prevent the possibility of a lawsuit if they got injured. Did they know he was a drunk? Sure. Did they mind? Not particularly. Caretakers of large estates generally ran to alcoholism.
They did, however, mind that he was a smoker, especially since he’d assured them he wasn’t in his job interview. A century earlier the original Sans Souci had burned to the ground, and while the current owners could agree on little else, they were absolutely determined that their hotel should not burn down until they decided to do it themselves and collect the insurance. Discovering cigarette scorch marks on the furniture, the owners’ representatives repeatedly reminded him that smoking was a firing offense, and each time Big Jim promised to quit, claiming he’d been meaning to anyway and this was the very incentive he needed. And, yeah, sometimes he’d actually try to quit for a week or two. By the time they visited again, though, he’d have relapsed. The pack of Camels would be visible through his thin shirt pocket, and a full ashtray that he’d forgotten to hide would be sitting there in the library, and there were fresh burn marks on the oak bar where he liked to entertain women before leading them off to a room with a bed. Then, yet again, they’d read him the riot act and say this was positively his last warning, that next time he’d be replaced. Plenty of men in Schuyler County were looking for work.
Why did they give him so many final chances? Well, groveling before men in suits was one of Big Jim’s few real skills. And of course these men were anxious to return to Albany and New York City, so he never had to grovel for long. Though they threatened to check up on him more regularly, he knew they hated visiting the Sans Souci and wouldn’t unless they were forced to. True, this abasement left a bad taste in his mouth, and Sully and his brother knew to steer clear after he’d been dressed down, but the humiliation lasted for only a week or two, after which their father’s sense of well-being and self-worth always returned, along with his boastful arrogance. “Where the hell do they think they’re gonna find somebody who doesn’t smoke?” he would ask rhetorically. “For the kind of money they pay?”