“We been meaning to say thank you,” Otis said.
“I heard on the news an alligator made off with another one,” Sully said. Otis, a big, soft man with a florid face, was particularly susceptible to alligator stories, and Sully, as part of a running gag, had been for years warning Otis not to go to a wild place like Florida without a tough, experienced guide, someone not afraid to wrestle gators. Someone like Sully. To Sully’s delight, at the mention of alligators Otis’s face drained. “If I was you I’d get a second-floor condo. Alligators hate stairs.”
“Get away from me,” Otis said when Sully joined his elbows together to make alligator jaws. “Go on now, git!” Otis parried Sully’s thrusts nervously. “Go play your damn sucker triple and leave smart people alone.”
“There are no smart people within a block of here,” Sully told him. “The OTB is a tax on stupidity.”
“How many stupid people you paying taxes for beside yourself?” somebody wanted to know.
“I’m smart enough not to move someplace where I’m going to get eaten by an alligator,” Sully said.
“Go bet that fool’s triple,” Otis said.
“All right, I will,” Sully said, heading for the window. For the last year or so he’d been playing 1-2-3 trifectas regardless of the horses or jockeys involved. Never much of a handicapper, he’d given up on trying to figure triples, which, he’d concluded, were invented to drive you crazy. Anymore he bet 1-2-3 and explained, when people wanted to know why, that the horses running around the inside of the track didn’t have as far to go as those running around the outside, which would have been true if there were lanes. “If my triple runs I’ll buy Hilda one of those video cameras to take with you to Florida,” he called back to Otis. “That way she can get it on film. We can show it over at The Horse. Charge admission to see Otis get dragged off into the swamp.”
Sully bet his triple and was about to leave when through the front window he saw Carl Roebuck round the corner a block away and head up the other side of the street in Sully’s direction. Sully couldn’t help but smile at Carl’s jaunty stride, which wouldn’t have been so jaunty had he known that his wife had changed the locks.
In front of the savings and loan, Clive Peoples, who’d just come out, was studying with satisfaction the new banner recently hung across Main Street. Clive Jr., a study in self-importance, was one of the few apples Sully knew that had fallen miles from the tree. True, his father, whom Clive Jr. had grown to greatly resemble, had been proud of his local celebrity as the football coach, but he’d been good-natured too, and Miss Beryl’s gentle mockery shamed him when he got too puffed up. Not so Clive Jr., who lacked, among other things, a sense of humor. That he took himself seriously was proof positive, in Sully’s view. In fact, Sully had little use for his landlady’s son and would have actively disliked him were it not for Miss Beryl, who, Sully sensed, was disappointed in her son, his having become a big shot in town notwithstanding.
Before Clive Jr. could get into his car, a long, sleek black affair that he always parked out front of the savings and loan, Carl Roebuck collared him for one of their thirty-second conversations. Sully didn’t have to be there to know how it would go. “Tell me we’re still in business,” Carl Roebuck would urge, conspiratorially. Clive Jr. would assure him that they were, and then Carl would say, “If this thing ever goes south, don’t tell me. Just come out to the house and shoot me in the head.” Talk that made Clive Jr., a nervous-looking man, even more nervous looking. Clive couldn’t get into his car and away from Carl Roebuck fast enough.
When Carl crossed the street and headed right for the OTB, Sully got ready to slip out the back, but Carl continued right on by, heading Sully couldn’t imagine where. A heavy gambler, Carl seldom bet at the OTB, preferring bookies who didn’t siphon the state’s percentage and who took action all day and most of the night over the phone. Actually, Carl preferred betting sporting events to betting horses. Sully watched Carl out of sight and was about to venture back into the street when he noticed the man at his elbow was Rub.
“I was just looking for you,” Sully said.
“You wasn’t looking very hard,” Rub pointed out. “I been standing right next to you for five minutes.”
“You get your turkey?”
Rub looked blank.
“I thought maybe you were shopping for a turkey here at the OTB,” Sully said.
Still blank.
“Let’s go,” Sully said. “I got us some work.”
“Who for?”
“Carl Roebuck.”
“Wasn’t that Carl you was just hiding from?”
Sully admitted this was true, without offering explanation.
“You said you was never going to work for him again.”
“You want to work or not?”
“I hate that Carl.”
“You hate his money?”
“No,” Rub admitted. “Just Carl.”
Out in the street it felt colder, and Sully noticed that the temperature on the bank clock had fallen several degrees since morning.
“That wife of his I like, though,” Rub said after they’d walked a block. “I wisht she’d take an interest in me. I’d let her be on top.”
Where women were concerned, Rub knew no higher compliment.
“How come women like her are never interested in guys like us?” Rub asked seriously. His innocence regarding women was comprehensive. Rub honestly saw no reason why Toby Roebuck would not be interested in any man who’d let her be on top.
“I only know why they don’t like you,” Sully said. “Why they don’t like me is a mystery.”
“How come they don’t like me?”
“They just don’t.”
Rub accepted this. “Where’s your truck?”
“Out at the job,” Sully told him. Partial explanations always satisfied Rub. It would not occur to him to wonder how Sully and his truck had come to be separated. “Where’s your car?”
“Bootsie’s got it,” Rub said. “She always parks out back of Woolworth’s.”
They turned down the narrow alley that led to the Woohvorth’s lot, walking single file. The morning’s snow remained untrampled there in the dark, narrow alley, and Rub walked backward so he could watch the footprints he left.
“I hope she won’t be too bent out of shape when she finds the car’s gone,” Sully said. He made a mental note to return Bootsie’s car once they got the truck unstuck. That way Rub wouldn’t take a beating.
“She’s been bent out of shape for ten years,” observed Rub, who was generally brave in his wife’s absence.
“How long you been married?”
“Ten years.”
Sully nodded. “See any connection?”
“Shit,” Rub said, turning and surveying the parking lot. “It ain’t here.”
“Let’s take this one then,” Sully suggested, since they happened to be standing right next to Rub’s and Bootsie’s old Pontiac. “You don’t even recognize your own car?”
Rub unlocked the Pontiac and got in, leaning over to unlock the passenger side door for Sully. “At least I recognize my own best friend when he’s standing right next to me,” he said, pulling out of the lot.
It only took them about ten minutes to drive back out to the site. Sully used the time to consider how Rub ever got the idea they were best friends.
“You know what I wisht?” Rub said.
Since he and Sully left the OTB, Rub had already wished for a new car, a raise for himself and a raise for Bootsie, who worked as a cashier at Woolworth’s and hadn’t had a raise in over a year. He’d also wished some big ole company would build a big ole plant right in Bath and make him a foreman at about fifteen dollars an hour. He’d wished it was spring already and not Thanksgiving, that California would just go ahead and fall into the ocean if it was going to, that the climate in upstate New York was more tropical, that someone would die and leave him a big ole boat he could sail down to Mexico, that the Royal Palm Company would start making that red cream soda again. And he’d wished ole Toby Roebuck would sit on his face, just once.