“You’re lucky I need the money, friend,” Sully said.
“You always need the money,” Carl pointed out. “Which is why I always have you by the balls.”
That smile again. How could you hate the man?
“Does this mean you’re through with higher education?” Carl wondered as Sully prepared to leave.
Sully said he supposed it did.
“I wonder who won the pool,” Carl said absently.
“Ruby,” Sully said, without looking at Carl’s secretary on his way through the outer office.
“What?” the girl wanted to know in her best bored-to-death voice.
“Don’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 need that 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 after that it would need them so bad he’d have to make them. And pay for them. New shocks, too, Sully thought, as the truck groaned beneath the weight of the concrete. The three hundred Carl Roebuck owed him would have paid for the tires or the valves or the shocks, whichever Sully decided to fix first. Not that he would necessarily have used the money on the truck if he had it in his pocket that very minute. Sometimes when he got money ahead he gave some to Miss Beryl as advance rent, a hedge against the scarcity of winter work. Sometimes he’d give Cass a hundred so that if things got skinny he’d be able to eat on account for a while. Other times he gave money to Ruth to hold on to for him, which was one way of ensuring that the OTB or the poker table wouldn’t get it. The trouble with Ruth was that once he instructed her not to give it back to him unless he really needed it, then it was up to her to decide his need, and sometimes her judgment was a little too refined. And one time her no-good husband Zack had stumbled onto her stash and spent Sully’s money, thinking it was his wife’s. The more Sully thought about it, the more it didn’t seem like such a bad idea to be owed the three hundred. Letting Carl hang on to the money for a while might actually be the safest thing. When Sully needed it most, money had a way of first liquefying, then evaporating, and finally leaving just a filmy residue of vague memory.
And so, as Sully fell deeply into the rhythm of his work, he had the luxury of knowing that his money was safe without in any way diminishing his righteous anger at Carl Roebuck for refusing to pay up, anger that swelled like music in his chest to the distant beat of his throbbing knee. Smiling, he imagined Carl Roebuck tossed out his office window, his arms flapping frantically, his legs wildly pedaling an invisible bicycle as he fell. Sully didn’t allow him to hit the ground. He just tossed Carl from the window again and again, so that the other man tumbled and pedaled and screamed.
It was so much fun tossing Carl Roebuck out of his office window that Sully had the truck over half loaded before he noticed it was starting to tilt slightly, like old Hattie in her booth. At first he thought it might be an optical illusion, so he stood back away from the truck and looked at it. There was no reason the truck should be tipping. Off to the side Sully noticed some sheets of plywood, and he wished he’d seen them before so he could have lined the bed of the truck and cushioned the load. Probably it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to separate every other layer too, not that the plywood would have distributed the weight differently. It was too late now, in any case. That was the bad news. The good news was he’d worked hard for an hour and his knee didn’t feel any worse. In fact, by working and contemplating Carl Roebuck tumbling from his office window, he’d forgotten all about his knee. It wasn’t strictly logical, but maybe his injured knee actually was encouraging him to work. Either that or it was telling him to murder Carl Roebuck.
He knew one thing for sure. It was more satisfying to be mad at Carl than to be mad at the courts. Over the last nine months that Wirf had been trying to get him total disability, Sully’d come to understand that all his trips to Albany, even the hearings themselves, were only tangentially related to his deteriorating knee. Maybe the knee wasn’t quite as bad as Wirf portrayed it. Maybe. But Sully’s growing sense of these legal proceedings was that they were taking place independent of reality. The question wasn’t his injury, or whether or not it allowed him to work, or how an injured man might fairly be compensated. At issue was whether the insurance company and the state could be forced to pay. Sully hadn’t seen the same insurance company lawyer twice, but they were all sharp and their sheer numbers suggested that he and Wirf, who referred to them as “the Windmills” and insisted that you just had to keep tilting at them, were fighting a losing battle. You couldn’t even get good and angry and entertain yourself by imagining that the next time you saw that smug son of a bitch of a lawyer you’d throw him out the window, because the next time there’d be a different guy altogether. You didn’t even get the same judge all the time, though all the judges seemed to have pretty much the same attitude toward Sully’s claim. They all lectured Wirf and, when the hearing was over, kidded cozily with the insurance company lawyers. Sully himself was generally ignored, and lately he’d come to suspect that if his leg just went ahead and fell off, this (to him) significant event probably wouldn’t change anything. Nobody would admit they’d been wrong. They’d use the old X rays to prove he still had a leg. It’d be a philosophical argument.