“Let’s stop at The Horse,” Rub said when they’d dropped off the last load of blocks and Sully’d paid him. Rub didn’t like to keep money lying around. He liked it to get up and work. To buy big ole double cheeseburgers and draft beers. He liked to spend it before his wife discovered he had it.
“Not me, Rub,” Sully said. “I’m tired and filthy and I stink almost as bad as you.”
“So?” Rub said. It was impossible to insult him with references to the way he smelled. “It’s just The Horse. Ain’t you hungry?”
“Too tired to chew, actually.” All of Sully’s earlier enthusiasm for going back to work had fallen victim to fatigue. He couldn’t imagine the optimism that had led him to believe he’d be able to do the job without Rub’s help.
“Anybody’s got enough strength to chew,” Rub said.
“Maybe later I’ll feel like it,” Sully said. “Say hi to Bootsie for me. Tell her I’m sorry she married such a dummy.”
“I wisht I didn’t have to go home and see her,” Rub admitted, getting into his wife’s Pontiac. “She’s gonna whack my peenie.”
“Bob and weave,” Sully advised. “It’s a small target.”
Sully’s flat was identical in floor plan to Miss Beryl’s below. The floor plan was the only similarity. Where the downstairs flat was crowded with Miss Beryl’s heavy oak furniture, terra-cotta pots and wicker elephants, its walls freshly papered and hung with framed prints and museum posters under glass, its tables covered with ghostly spirit boats and ornate vases, the various mementoes of her travels, Sully’s flat was wide open, pastoral. In fact, it didn’t look dramatically different from the way it had looked before he moved in with his furniture so many years ago. That morning, it had taken him just under an hour to complete the move, and the few things he brought with him only served to emphasize the flat’s high ceilings, its terrible spaciousness, the echoing sounds he made moving from room to room over the hardwood floors. He’d been forty-eight then and had lived almost his entire adult life in dark, cramped, furnished quarters, which he’d found pretty much to his liking. Ruth had been urging him for a long time to find a decent place to live, claiming that what ailed Sully was his morbid surroundings. He hadn’t argued with her, but he hadn’t moved, either. He hadn’t had any idea, then or now, what ailed him, but he suspected it wasn’t his surroundings. In fact, about the only thing that could have induced him to move was the thing that had happened. He’d left the old flat one afternoon to go buy a pack of cigarettes. The last cigarette of his last pack he left half smoked in an ashtray perched on the arm of his battered sofa.
The corner grocery was only two blocks away, so Sully had walked. He was between jobs and in no particular hurry. When he ran into a couple of guys he knew, he stopped to shoot the breeze. At the store he bought cigarettes and talked with a cop who was loitering near the register. When a fire alarm sounded, the cop left, so Sully took the opportunity to bet a daily double with Ray, the sad, fatalistic store owner who was in his last year of competition with the IGA supermarket. The OTB would open the following year, officially burying Bath’s three neighborhood groceries. “Looks like we got us some midday excitement,” Ray said when the fire engine roared by.
“We could probably stand a little,” Sully’d said absently, lighting a cigarette and trying to account for the vague, distant unease, a sense of menace almost, that he’d become aware of at the edge of his consciousness. He said good-bye to Ray and started home. The fire engine had careened around the corner onto Sully’s street and for some reason turned its siren off. People were running through the intersection, and Sully saw there was a black plume of smoke ascending into the sky above the rooftops. There were more sirens in the distance. A police car flew by.
By the time Sully arrived a large crowd had gathered to watch the house burn. Flames were shooting out of the windows and into the low gray sky. The firemen had already given up combating the blaze and were using their hoses to wet down the houses on either side, trying to prevent them from bursting into sympathetic flame. Losing a house was one thing, but they didn’t want to lose the whole block. There didn’t seem to be anything to do but join the crowd and watch, so Sully did.
After he’d been there awhile, a man he knew noticed him and said hello. “You live around here somewheres, don’t you?” the man added. “I live right there,” Sully pointed at the inferno. “Or I used to.” This admission attracted considerable attention. “Hey!” somebody yelled. “There’s Sully. He’s not dead, he’s right here.” Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetically at the crowd.
Kenny Roebuck, Carl’s father, who owned the building, arrived finally and came over to where Sully was standing. “I heard you were dead,” he said. “Burned alive.”
“I hope they don’t put it in the paper,” Sully said.
Kenny Roebuck agreed. “I wonder how the hell it started.”
“The rumor or the fire?”
“The fire.”
“That would be me, probably,” Sully admitted. He told his landlord and sometime employer about the cigarette he vaguely remembered leaving when he went out to buy more cigarettes. “I hope to Christ there wasn’t anybody inside,” he added. The house had been divided into three flats. In the middle of the afternoon there was probably nobody home, but he wasn’t sure.
“I don’t think there was,” Kenny said, adding, “according to a cop I just talked to, you were the only one killed.”
The roof fell then, shooting red embers high into the afternoon sky and down into the crowd.
“You’re taking this well,” Sully observed.
Kenny Roebuck leaned toward him confidentially and lowered his voice. “Just between us, I’ve been thinking about burning the son of a bitch down myself. Costs me more to fix what goes wrong every month than I collect in rent. I guess I wasn’t cut out to be a slumlord.”
The two men watched until the fire burned itself out.
“Well,” Kenny Roebuck said. “That’s about it, and I should get back to work. I don’t know how to thank you.”
Sully was still mulling over what his landlord had said before in light of Ruth’s constant pestering him to find a decent place to live. “I never thought of it as a slum,” he admitted.
“You’re the only one that didn’t, then,” Kenny Roebuck said. “Somebody said old Beryl Peoples has a flat for rent on Upper Main.”
This rumor turned out to be true. Kenny Roebuck also wasn’t kidding about being grateful. The next day he gave Sully five hundred dollars for new clothes and some furniture, since Miss Beryl’s flat wasn’t furnished. That made the whole episode pretty much of a bonanza as far as Sully was concerned. He spent two hundred on underwear, socks, shirts, pants and shoes. Two hundred went a considerable distance at the Army-Navy store, which had a used clothing outlet around back. He spent another two hundred on some well-broken-in furniture — a double bed and rickety nightstand, a lamp in the shape of a naked woman, a small chest of drawers, a metal dinette and chairs with plastic seats, a huge sofa for the living room and a coffee table that came with only three legs. The other leg was around somewhere, the man at the used furniture store said. To show his appreciation for Sully’s business he threw in a used toaster. When Sully got all these new worldly goods set up in Miss Beryl’s flat, he plugged in the toaster to see if it worked, without much in the way of expectation. The inner coils glowed angry red though, so he unplugged it again. Since then he hadn’t found an occasion to use the toaster. The only place he ever ate toast was at Hattie’s, as part of the breakfast special.