It was ironic that in a flat so remarkable for its wide-open spaces Sully should be cramped in the kitchen, but he was. The room was tiny, like kitchens in most old houses that had formal dining rooms, so there wasn’t much room for the dinette. Sully finally wedged it into the corner anyway so he’d have something to bang into and swear at. He’d originally set it up in the dining room, but it looked like a joke there, so small and bent and metallic in the middle of such a large room. He couldn’t imagine sitting down and eating anything in there, not even a bowl of cereal. So he ended up shutting the floor register to save on heat and closed the room. He did the same with the second bedroom, which also stood empty.
He was glad the sofa he bought was huge because it at least displaced some air in the cavernous living room. He set it and the tippy, three-legged coffee table against the long wall facing the television he planned to get as soon as he could afford one. He made a mental note that the television had better be a good-size one if he was going to be able to see it from all the way across the room. He made another mental note to do something about the floral pink wallpaper. And he’d need a rug or two to cut down on the constant reminders of his own presence as he tapped across the hardwood floors. He still had a hundred dollars of Kenny Roebuck’s money, so he went out in search of bargain rugs.
As luck would have it, he found Kenny Roebuck instead, and Kenny was on his way to the track. He forced Sully into accompanying him there by asking him if he wanted to. On the way back Sully decided he hadn’t needed the rugs anyway. They stopped at Ray’s corner market for a six-pack of beer and from there went to the new flat so Kenny could see how Sully was making out. Sully took the six-pack and put it in the refrigerator while Kenny Roebuck laughed. In fact, Kenny stood in the middle of the living room and howled. He couldn’t stop. He went from room to room, each room striking him as funnier than the last. In the two empty, closed-off rooms he laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. Finally he joined Sully in the tiny kitchen and collapsed into one of the plastic dinette chairs, his face beet red with exertion. “How long do you figure before you’ll fill it up?”
Sully took two beers out of the refrigerator. He felt the metal shelf before handing one to Kenny Roebuck. “I’m not sure the refrigerator works too well,” he said, which started Kenny in all over again.
It didn’t seem possible to Sully that Kenny Roebuck had been dead for most of the dozen years since he got that first look at Sully’s new flat. One thing was certain. If Kenny were there now he’d get just as good a laugh. Except for a throw rug and a big white-cabineted television with a small screen, the flat looked pretty much as it had the day he moved in. What he’d decided to do about the floral wallpaper was to let it peel off.
Tonight, like most nights, he was too tired to care. Regulating the water as hot as he could stand it, Sully stripped, climbed into the shower and let the water beat down on his shoulders and lower back. In a few minutes the rising steam brought with it a childhood memory he’d not thought of in forty years. It was a Saturday afternoon, and his father had taken Sully and his older brother, Patrick, to the new YMCA in Schuyler Springs for the free swim, a monthly event intended to drum up membership. Sully’s father had no intention of letting his sons join, but as long as it was free, well.… Also, he’d discovered there was a Saturday afternoon poker game in back. When Sully and his brother were buzzed downstairs, his father remained above to play cards. The locker room was cold and uncarpeted, and the pool lifeguards had made all the boys shower and then stand, shivering, at the side of the pool while each boy was inspected for head lice and read the rules about no running, no pushing, no diving in the shallow end. Several boys were found to be dirty and required to go take another shower. The clean ones, including Sully and his brother, had to wait for them.
Sully, who had been eight at the time, couldn’t stop shivering, even when they were finally allowed to jump into the pool. The water felt cold, and he was one of the youngest boys there. All the rules frightened him, and he was afraid he’d violate one unintentionally and be expelled while his brother, four years older, was allowed to stay. The building’s subterranean corridors were confusing, and Sully wasn’t sure he could find his locker again, much less his father. Also permitted to join the boys’ free swim were two old men who lived at the Y, and they swam without bathing suits, which also frightened Sully, even after his brother explained that it was okay since they were all men and there weren’t any girls around to see your equipment. Sully’s own equipment had withdrawn almost into his body cavity. He tried to have a good time, but his lips were blue and he couldn’t stop shivering. One of the lifeguards noticed and ordered him back into the showers until he warmed up.
In the tiled shower room he’d stood beneath the powerful spray, the hot water beating down on him until it began to cool, whereupon he moved to another on the opposite side of the room. Every time the hot water ran out, he moved. Soon the room was thick and comfortable with steam, and Sully had allowed himself to drift into its moist warmth, mindless of the passage of time, coming out of his reverie only when the hot water ran cool, necessitating another change. He spent the entire two-hour free swim in the showers, listening to the distant shrieks of the other boys in the pool, not wanting to get out of the steam, or to return to the cold pool water, or to venture back into the locker room on the cold concrete floor to search for the locker where he and his brother had put their clothes.
“See if I ever take you again,” his father said later, his breath boozy in the front seat of the car he had borrowed to make the trip, when Patrick told on him. Sully was shivering in the backseat of the car as they returned to Bath. He was sick the entire week that followed. “Just see if I do.”
It didn’t take nearly as long to run out of hot water in Sully’s flat, and when he stepped out of the shower, he wondered if he was going to be sick, if that was why he’d suddenly remembered the YMCA episode after so many years in the limbo of his memory. He doubted it could be that he needed another reason to bear a grudge against his father, whose ghost, for some reason, seemed to be visiting him more often and vividly of late, starting right around the time he’d fallen from the ladder.
The good news was that his knee didn’t feel too bad, and Sully considered for the umpteenth time the illogic of his own body. Immediately after hard work, the knee felt pretty good. Tomorrow morning, he knew from experience, he would pay.
Which meant that he would have to go see Jocko first thing. He was almost out of Tylenol 3s, or whatever it was he was taking. Jocko did not always dispense his relief in labeled bottles. At least not to Sully. When Sully needed something for pain, Jocko didn’t stand on formalities like a physician’s prescription. When he got samples he thought Sully might be interested in, he slipped a bright plastic tube full of pills into Sully’s coat pocket and whispered verbal instructions for their use: “Here. Eat these.”
Downstairs, Miss Beryl was waiting for him in the hall, dressed in her robe and slippers. She always looked tinier and even more gnomelike when she stood in the large doorway to her flat. She was holding a fistful of mail, most of it, Sully could tell at a glance, junk. He often went weeks at a time without checking his mailbox and then, after a cursory glance, tossed whatever had accumulated there in the trash. People who wanted to contact him left messages for him at The Horse. People who didn’t know him well enough to do that were probably people he didn’t want to hear from anyway. Sully had no credit cards, and since his utilities were included in the rent he paid Miss Beryl, he didn’t have to worry about bills. To his way of thinking, he had no real relationship with the postal service. He didn’t even have his name on the mailbox, refused to put it there, in fact, not wanting to encourage the mailman. Now and then Miss Beryl would gather what collected there and thrust it at him, as she was doing now, with communications she judged to be of possible importance on top. The envelope on top of this particular fistful of mail looked to be a tax document from the Town of North Bath, no doubt reminding him of his obligations on the property his father left him when he died. Sully did not bother to open it to be sure. He leafed through the rest to make sure his disability check was not in the stash. He’d already thrown that away once in his rush to dispose of all the junk.