They were insulated against cold economic weather too. Having spent their working lives in North Bath, they were not rich, but they were comfortable, and they congratulated themselves that they’d be more comfortable still if Bath real estate would just go ahead and boom like everybody was predicting. Or like everybody in Bath was predicting. Albany had already spilled northward, and realtors were predicting excitedly that the entire interstate corridor would share in the boom. The best of the shabby old Victorian houses along Glendale, like the Roebucks’, had already been bought up and restored by young men and women, most of whom worked in Albany. They hopped on the interstate in the morning and returned in the evening, a twenty-five-minute drive. These OTB men were angry with themselves for having once considered the old Victorians mere dinosaurs. Thirty years ago such houses could have been bought for a song, but instead they had built well-insulated, new, split-level ranches with picture windows. These were also beginning to creep up in assessed value and taxes, but much more slowly. They all knew now they could have made their killing in the Victorians if they’d guessed that an entire generation of Vietnam draft protesters in torn, faded jeans would end up with money and spend it resuscitating decrepit old houses. Now all they could do was watch the value of their split-levels inch up and worry about timing. Higher taxes were eating into their pensions and Social Security and savings. They didn’t want to sell their split-levels too early, only to discover that the real boom in the market hadn’t come yet. The conventional wisdom seemed to be that things were just beginning to pick up momentum, what with the Sans Souci scheduled to reopen in the summer and the groundbreaking on the amusement park imminent.
But, of course, waiting was risky, too. What if the Ultimate Escape deal collapsed at the last minute? They didn’t want to wait too long and find themselves stuck with their dream homes of thirty years ago. They had new dream homes now — condos in warmer climes — and they spent the long mornings discussing these. Most favored condos on the Florida gulf, except these were getting expensive and there were disturbing reports of alligators lumbering out of the glades and devouring small children. The windbreaker men didn’t have any small children, but the alligator stories haunted them anyway, a single incident circulating so many times that you’d have thought there was an army of Florida alligators advancing against a defenseless line of condos all the way from the Everglades to St. Petersburg. Even the golf courses were rumored to be full of alligators. Talk about your hazards. For this reason an increasing number of these morning OTB men favored Arizona, where the condos were rumored to be cheaper and where there weren’t any alligators. There were rattlesnakes and scorpions and tarantulas and spiders and Gila monsters, but none of these were big enough to glom onto a man and drag him back into the swamp to eat. In the desert there weren’t even any swamps to drag you into.
Sully had been overhearing parts of this serial conversation for years but doubted he’d ever engage in it even if he made it to retirement. He had no house to contemplate the increasing value of, unless he counted his father’s place on Bowdon Street, at the edge of the Sans Souci property, the legal status of which was no longer clear, at least to Sully. Wirf had informed him when his father died that he’d inherited the house, but Sully had told Wirf he not only didn’t want it, he wouldn’t take it. When Sully had been seventeen and enlisted in the army he’d promised his father he’d have nothing further to do with him, in life or in death, and except for one afternoon shortly before the old man died when Ruth had talked him into visiting the nursing home, he’d kept his pledge. His father’s long-neglected house was falling down, its windows boarded up, the grounds overrun with tall weeds. Unless Sully missed his guess, the accumulated back taxes were probably more than the house would bring on the market. Definitely not the sort of house that would gain Sully entry into the Florida/Arizona condo conversation, even if he had wanted to be included, which he didn’t.
The only thing Sully envied these men was that they were finished, like ballplayers in an old-timers game who could look back on an episode in their lives that had a particular shape. Having completed it, they could move on to something else. Their lives were full of dates. They could tell you when they married, when their children were born, the date they retired from their jobs. In Sully’s life the years (never mind days) elided gracefully without dividers, and he was always surprised by the endings and new beginnings other people saw, or thought they saw, in their existences. One day thirty-odd years before, he’d run into Vera on the street, and she’d smiled sadly and said, well, at least it was finally over, a chapter of their lives behind them. Sully had looked at her blankly, wondering what she was talking about. It turned out her reference was to their divorce, which had become final a few days before, the fact of which he had not been notified. Either that or he’d trashed the notification along with the other mail he wasn’t interested in. He’d known Vera was relieved not to be married to him anymore (she would marry her second husband, Ralph, within the year), but the finality of the divorce had impressed her, and Sully could tell she was feeling a little melancholy about the failure of their marriage. For her, the divorce had drawn a line that Sully had missed altogether.
The graceful merging of his days was either depressing or reassuring, depending upon his mood. Even now, at age sixty, he couldn’t imagine feeling finished in the way that the OTB men were, or of being on the brink of anything new. Maybe that’s what had gotten to him about taking classes at the community college, about talk of a new career. That was the point of the philosophy class, he’d come to understand. It was the young professor’s intention to make everything disappear, one thing at a time, and then replace all of it with something new, a new kind of thought or existence maybe. Out with the old, in with the new. And maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea if you were talking to twenty-year-olds. Hell, at twenty, he’d been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more months. He wanted to keep going forward, not stop and turn around and analyze the validity of decisions made and courses charted long ago. He wasn’t even sure he wanted Wirf, his lawyer, to succeed in the various litigations he was pursuing in Sully’s behalf. If Wirf got Sully his total disability, that would be the end of life as he knew it, the beginning of something new, not necessarily good news to a man who didn’t believe in new beginnings any more than he believed in new knees.
“You’re looking especially well this morning,” Otis Wilson observed, in reference, no doubt, to Sully’s crust of mud. Otis claimed every summer that come winter he was Florida bound.
Sully turned a circle so all the windbreaker men could see. “Somebody’s got to work in this country,” he said. “Wasn’t for guys like me, guys like you’d have to get your hands dirty occasionally.”