“What am I going to do with you?” Carl wondered out loud, as if it really were his decision.
“Pay me the money you owe, and I’ll let you alone,” Sully offered.
Carl ignored this. “Is your truck running?”
“At the moment.”
“Then I got a job for you.”
“Not till you pay me for the last one.”
Carl stood up. “We’ve been through this. I’m not paying you and that moron Rub Squeers for that half-ass job. You dug a goddamn hole, stood around in it all afternoon, drank a case of beer, filled the hole, and left my lawn all tore up. And we don’t have an ounce more water pressure now than we did before.”
“I never said you would,” Sully reminded him. Carl became instantly red-faced, and this pleased Sully. “Don’t get all bent out of whack, now,” he added, knowing full well that nothing was more likely to bend Carl Roebuck out of whack than to be instructed by Sully to calm down. Along with Tip Top Construction, Carl had inherited from his father a heart condition that had already required bypass surgery.
“You know the trouble with guys like you?” Carl stood, glowing red now, even though he hadn’t raised his voice. “You figure you got a right to steal from anybody that’s got a few bucks. I’m supposed to assume the position because you got a busted knee and no prospects, like this is some kind of Feel-Sorry-for-Sully Week. Well, it ain’t, my friend. This is Fuck-You Week.”
Carl was pacing back and forth behind his desk as he spoke, and for some reason his speech had a soothing effect on Sully, who put his feet up on Carl’s desk. “That was last week, actually. And the week before.”
“Then go away. You did shoddy work, and I’m not paying you for it. You think I got where I am doing shoddy work?”
Sully couldn’t help but smile at this. Maybe later in the day when he remembered it, this line of bullshit would piss him off, but right now, watching Carl Roebuck, beet red with trumped-up self-righteousness, constituted something like partial payment for the debt. And when Sully finally spoke, his voice was even lower than Carl’s.
“No, Carl,” he admitted. “You didn’t get where you are by doing shoddy work. You didn’t get where you are by doing any work. You got where you are because your father worked himself into an early grave so you could piss away everything he worked for on ski trips and sports cars.”
Sully let this much sink in before continuing. “Now personally, I don’t care about the ski trips and the sports cars. I don’t even care if you wind up broke, which you probably will. But before you do, you’re going to pay me the three hundred bucks you owe me, because I dug a fifty-foot trench under your terrace in ninety-degree heat and busted my balls tugging on hundred-year-old pipes that snapped off in my hands every two feet. That’s why you’re going to pay me.”
He got to his feet then, facing Carl Roebuck across his big desk. “I’ll tell you another thing. You’re going to pay for the beer. I just decided. It was only a six-pack, but since you think it was a case, you can pay for a case. Call it a tax on being a prick.”
That seemed like a pretty good exit line to Sully, and he slammed the door on the way out. The glass hadn’t stopped reverberating, however, before he thought of an even better way to leave, so he went back in. Carl was still standing there behind the desk, so Sully picked up right where he left off. “The other reason you’re going to pay me is that someday you’re going to catch me in a really bad mood. My knee’s going to be throbbing so bad that even Feel-Sorry-for-Sully Week won’t make any difference. The only thing that’ll make it feel better will be seeing your sorry ass go flying out that window. About two seconds before you hit the bricks, it’ll dawn on you that I wasn’t kidding.”
Instead of slamming the door again, Sully stood in the open doorway to witness the full effect of his verbal assault. Almost immediately he wished he had slammed the door. Carl’s color, instead of deepening, actually began to return to its normal shade, and with its return came the grin that made it impossible for people to stay mad at Carl Roebuck. Instead of storming out from behind the desk and taking a swing at Sully, as Sully half hoped he would, Carl returned to his swivel chair, sat down and put his own soft-loafered feet up. “Sully,” he said finally. “You’re right. I’m not going to pay you, but you’re right. I am lucky. Most of the time I remember, but sometimes I forget. Anyway, since we’re friends, I’ll give you a tip. When you leave, stop outside there on the landing for about five minutes before you go down. That’ll save you having to walk back up here when it occurs to you.”
“When what occurs to me?”
Carl Roebuck wagged an index finger maddeningly. “If I told you, it would ruin the surprise, schmucko.”
Ruby was also grinning at Sully when he left, which probably meant that whatever the surprise was, she’d already figured it out. Outside on the landing, where he’d been told to wait, where the cold air of reality tunneled up from the street, Sully still couldn’t think what the surprise was, but he stood there buttoning his coat and pondering his visible breath in the hallway. Things had gone pretty much the way Sully had envisioned. Naturally, they’d argue over the money Carl refused to pay, and naturally he’d tell Carl where to get off and storm out of his office. Then later Carl would come looking for him at The Horse and offer some shitty job as a peace offering, which Sully would tell him he could stuff, and then Carl would offer him something else, probably just as shitty, but Sully would accept this offer because at least he’d gotten some satisfaction out of telling Carl off, not once but twice. By the end of the week he and Rub would be back on the Tip Top payroll.
Except that Carl had thrown him a curve by offering him work right away, which meant that Sully was not only storming out on Carl but the work he’d really come for. On the other hand, Carl hadn’t crowed. That was what Sully had dreaded most, Carl smiling smugly and saying, I told you you’d be back. Sully knew from experience that “I told you so” were the four most satisfying words in the English language. He couldn’t remember ever passing up the opportunity to say them, and he had to admit it was pretty decent of Carl not to gloat. And he was definitely right about the stairs.
Carl Roebuck was swiveling and grinning when Sully came back in.
“I’ll take the money up front,” Sully said. “Since I’m working for a man who can’t be trusted.”
“Half now, half when I’ve inspected the job,” Carl insisted, their standard arrangement. “Since I’m employing Don Sullivan.”
Sully took the money, counted it while Carl explained the job. As he listened, it occurred to Sully that he was relieved, glad to be back working for a man he wanted to kill half the time, glad he wasn’t driving every day to the community college where he didn’t belong, glad to be taking the judge’s advice about not blaming people for the way things were, glad not to be placing his trust in lawyers and courts. He’d been afraid that a job working for Carl might be one of the real things that had disappeared while he was taking philosophy.
“I should let one of my regular guys do this,” Carl was saying. “But I know you need the money, and besides, we’re friends, right?”