Sully took an apprehensive swig of beer. He’d seen Carl Roebuck behave like this before. It meant he was about to drop some sort of bombshell. Or what he considered to be a bombshell. Sully studied Carl warily before answering. “Well, I don’t know how hard the question is,” he said, “but I notice you haven’t answered it.”
“Then I will,” Carl said. “All that happy horseshit? You want to know where all the happy horseshit went? I’ll tell you. All that happy horseshit was before somebody named Sullivan managed to fuck up my marriage, before somebody named Sullivan started fucking up my life.”
Sully blinked at him, speechless, feeling vaguely guilty. True, he’d had a crush on Toby Roebuck for a long time and probably would have fucked up their marriage if he had the opportunity. But he hadn’t had the opportunity. Was somebody spreading rumors? “You know what?” Sully said, when he located his voice.
“No, what?” Carl said, still grinning.
“There are too many people saying things like that to me today. My ex-wife just got done telling me I’m to blame for everything wrong in her life. I expect to hear that shit from her, because she’s nuts. But not you. If you think I’ve fucked up your life, then you’re even crazier than she is.”
“Sully,” Jeff called from down the bar. He made a motion with his hand for Sully to keep his voice down. Several people at the table of eight that contained Ollie Quinn and Satch Henry were looking in his direction.
“Sully, Sully, Sully,” Carl Roebuck shook his head sadly. “Who said anything about you?”
Again Sully had the feeling that he was on the fringes of the conversation. “You did. About two seconds ago.”
“No I didn’t, schmucko,” Carl held up one finger, as if to call a point of order. “Scroll back. What did Carl say?”
“You said I fucked up your marriage and your life,” Sully said, getting more and more exasperated.
Carl Roebuck made a loud honking noise. “Wrong-o! That was Beulah the buzzer, and you don’t win a prize. Tell schmucko here what Carl said, Don Pardo!” Then, in a TV game show announcer’s voice, he continued, “What Mr. Roebuck actually said was that somebody named Sullivan had fucked up his life and marriage. Those were his exact words.”
The young woman named Didi returned then, sliding onto the stool next to Carl’s and running her hand along the inside of his thigh.
“Watch this,” Carl told her excitedly, pointing at Sully. “This is always exciting. He’s about to grasp something. There! See it? Truth is beginning to dawn! By Jove, I think he’s got it! We’ve struck brain!”
Both of them were grinning at him now, the girl rather lewdly, Sully thought, Carl Roebuck maddeningly, and then suddenly Carl was on his back on the floor, the bar stool across his legs. Wirf, who had that moment returned, helped Carl to his feet and stood the bar stool back upright. “I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?” Wirf said, wedging his big, soft body in between Sully’s and Carl Roebuck’s stools.
Carl Roebuck, feeling the back of his head where he had landed, climbed tentatively back onto his bar stool. “You’ve hurt me, Sully,” he said. “I’m wounded. You’ve busted my lip, and you’ve hurt my feelings. I try to be your friend, and what do I get? Heartache.”
“I didn’t bust your lip,” Sully said. “I hit you in the jaw. You bit your own lip.”
Carl tasted the blood with his tongue. “Oh,” he said. “Then I guess it’s my own fault.”
Ollie Quinn came up to the bar with a fistful of bills to pay for lunch. From the register he studied the knot of people at the end of the bar — Carl Roebuck fingering his lip, the girl Didi examining Carl’s scalp, Wirf standing, Sully still seated, just as he had been when he delivered the blow, flexing his right hand incriminatingly. “You’re still pretty quick for an old fart, Sully,” Ollie Quinn offered. He took a toothpick from the shot glass next to the register, lodged it between his front teeth with his tongue and made a sucking noise. “You should’ve seen his old man, though. Now there was a brawler.”
“A legend,” Satch Henry agreed from across the room. “Quick hands,” he remembered. “Smarter too. He would’ve waited till the chief of police left the room.”
“Don’t say a fuckin’ word,” Wirf advised under his breath.
“You want to press charges, Mr. Roebuck?” Ollie Quinn said.
“I sure do,” Carl said. “But not against him.”
The chief of police nodded at Sully. “This is your lucky day,” he said.
At noon Miss Beryl fired up the Ford, backed out of the garage, pointed the car in the direction of Schuyler Springs and drove up Main Street past Mrs. Gruber’s house, where her heartbroken friend stood at the window, waving at her pathetically. This was the first time in recent memory that Miss Beryl had gone anywhere in the Ford and not taken Mrs. Gruber, who never cared where they were going as long as they went. And so Miss Beryl was not surprised when her friend was unable to understand this act of treachery. She wouldn’t have called Mrs. Gruber in the first place except she was afraid her friend would spy the Ford backing out of the driveway and bolt from her house and hurt herself when Miss Beryl drove by.
“I’m all ready,” Mrs. Gruber had pleaded. “I’ll just throw on my coat and kerchief.”
But Miss Beryl had said no. “I’m not fit for human companionship today,” she’d explained as patiently as she could, hoping that under the circumstances this explanation would suffice and knowing it wouldn’t.
“You’re fit for me,” Mrs. Gruber had assured her stubbornly.
“If I’m not back by five, send out a search party,” Miss Beryl told her friend, half wondering if this might indeed prove necessary if she became lost again or, worse, if she had one of her spells in the car.
“You’re all discombobulated,” Mrs. Gruber said. “I can tell.”
“I’ll be fine,” Miss Beryl assured her, adding cruelly, “And if I’m not fine, that’s fine too.”
Which was the way she felt. The phone had been ringing off the hook all morning, people wanting to know where Clive Jr. might be. Actually, the phone calls had begun yesterday, a series of them from the dreadful Joyce woman who’d been waiting, her suitcases packed, for Clive Jr. to pick her up for their long-planned weekend in the Bahamas. The calls had gone from anxious (“I wonder where he could be? Something awful must have happened!”) to vengeful (“He may think he can get away with this, but he can’t. He’s made promises!”). Vengeful was the result of Miss Beryl, who had taken pity on the woman and told her the most likely scenario — that Clive Jr. had simply run away. A story had appeared that morning in the Schuyler Springs Sentinel hinting at the possibility of an investigation into the North Bath Savings and Loan, particularly its connection to several other savings institutions in Florida and Texas. The story also suggested that some of the Bath institution’s considerable assets might have been inflated through a scheme of buying and selling tracts of land and other properties, transactions that existed on paper without any actual money ever changing hands. This story had prompted a call from a reporter in Albany and even an inquiry from the often inebriated, always scooped editor of the North Bath Weekly Journal, a longtime acquaintance of Miss Beryl’s who’d started to ask her the same questions as his colleagues, then said to hell with it, apologized for intruding and advised her, “Don’t give the bloodsuckers so much as a syllable.” In addition to calls from the newspapers, there’d also been several agitated calls from the junior vice president of the savings and loan, wanting to know if Clive Jr. had been in touch with her. He had not taken his flight to the Bahamas, the woman said. He was not at home. She wanted to impress upon Miss Beryl that she needed to speak to Clive Jr. immediately, as in yesterday, if not before. “ASAP,” the woman said. Miss Beryl, who understood none of this, nevertheless had a pretty good idea of what it all added up to. Her son was a ruined man.