“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?”