“Might,” Sully admitted. “I had a half-day job today and it took all day and half the night. Rub did most of it.”
“Your first day back. What’d you expect?”
“More.”
“Maybe tomorrow will be better.”
“Tomorrow will be worse,” he told her honestly. “That much I’m sure of. The day after that might be better. I can’t work at the old pace, that much I know already. I might not be able to manage at all.”
“Want some advice?”
“Not really.”
“Go back to school.”
Sully didn’t respond immediately, hoping to create through silence the impression that he was actually considering her wisdom. “I can’t make any money at school, Ruth,” he said finally.
“You need some money?”
He shook his head. “Not right this very minute. I might someday, though. I’m for sure going to need a new truck, probably by the first of the year. The back and forth to school has just about finished mine. I’ve half planned for that, but if there are any surprises …”
“Rolling with the punches is what you’re good at,” Ruth reminded him. “It’s what we’re both good at.”
Sully nodded, because he knew it was true and because it heartened him to have Ruth say so. Sitting across the table from her this way brought home to him how much he had indeed missed her. There were times when he wondered if perhaps they couldn’t continue in just this way, content with each other’s companionship, with the memory of shared intimacy, the assurance of continued friendship. He knew better than to suggest this to Ruth, though. She was twelve years younger than he, and their lovemaking, however infrequent, was more important to her than to him. “I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t mind slipping a few punches this round.”
He was trying to find a way to bring up the subject of Jane and her visit, which Ruth might or might not know about, when they heard a throaty rumble outside. Ruth stood quickly to peer out the window. “Well, I’m glad you’re in a peaceful mood because Guess Who just pulled up. It’s a good thing he’s too cheap to fix that muffler.”
“Go. I can handle Zack,” Sully said without much confidence, but Ruth had already disappeared into the kitchen. A second later, when the front door to the restaurant swung open, Sully didn’t turn around.
It took Ruth’s husband, Zack, a minute to realize who it was sitting down there in the closed section of the restaurant and another minute to decide what to do about it. What he’d come in for was to borrow some money from Ruth, since Wednesday was the night Vince paid her. Any public altercation with Sully would compromise this modest plan, and so Zack gave deep and careful consideration to just turning around and slipping outside again and waiting for Ruth to come out, which she’d have to do eventually. And he might have adopted this strategy if he could have been sure that nobody would see him slinking away. Zack was frequently accused of cowardice. People kept telling him they couldn’t understand why Zack didn’t just shoot Sully or at least club him a good one with a baseball bat. He disliked being called a coward, so he took a deep breath and attempted to summon an indignation he didn’t really feel at Sully’s presence.
“What do you know?” Zack said when he arrived at Sully’s booth, Sully still seated, his back to Zack. “Look who’s here. Sully, of all people.”
“Zachary,” Sully said, motioning to the empty bench opposite.
Zack considered this genial offer. Except for the rumors that persisted about his wife and Sully, Zack didn’t object to Sully personally. He had no hard evidence that Sully and Ruth were lovers (he himself did not love Ruth and couldn’t sec why anyone would), and this lack of evidence prevented him from building up a good head of righteous steam. Every time he tried, usually at someone else’s instigation, he ended up being made a fool. Sully had a way of besting him at prefight verbal sparring, and when Sully landed a good one, Zack took the mandatory eight count, trying to think of a retort. Sometimes, failing to think of one, he just threw in the towel right there.
The last time, this summer, had been the worst, and the confrontation was still fresh in Zack’s mind. He and his cousin Paulie had gone to find Sully at The Horse. Somebody had called to say he was there with Ruth, but when they arrived it was just Sully seated at the bar. At Paulie’s insistence they’d slid onto the two vacant stools next to him. “See this guy here?” Zack had announced in a stage whisper to his cousin. “He thinks he’s a real ladies’ man.”
Sully’d swiveled on his stool then and examined Zack so patiently and with so little concern that Zack’s confidence first eroded, then crumbled. “I am, too, compared to some people,” Sully finally said, a remark that struck Zack as neither confirmation nor denial and therefore impossible to act upon.
“A real ladies’ man,” Zack had repeated lamely. Then he decided on a veiled accusation. “Some people says he likes my wife, but Sully says no.”
Sully, who had swung back around on his stool, rotated again. He ran his fingers through the stubble on his chin thoughtfully. “I never said I didn’t like your wife, Zack,” he said. “I think she’s terrific, in fact. I probably like her better than you do.”
And Sully’d paused there, apparently confident that it would be a while before Zack would be able to take this in, analyze the data, arrive at a conclusion. Zack too was aware that he was slow, which was why he sometimes practiced verbal sparring with Sully when he was alone, trying to anticipate how the conversation might go, preparing a snappy rejoinder or two. Except that the conversation never did go that way, and it wasn’t going that way this time, either. In fact, Zack could feel desperation already seeping in. He was about to say, for the third time, “Some ladies’ man,” when Sully lowered the boom.
“I never said I didn’t like your wife, Zack. I just said I wasn’t screwing your wife.”
“That makes two of you,” somebody piped in from down the bar, and Zack had felt the whole room go out of focus. He had to be led out of The Horse by his cousin Paulie, who, out in the bright sunlight of the street, finally got him to quit muttering “Some ladies’ man.” When he was finally able to shake the cobwebs, he’d made a resolution. There’d be no more talk. Next time he’d either leave Sully alone or sucker-punch him as a solution to prefight jitters.
Unfortunately, the present circumstance conspired against him. He couldn’t very well sucker-punch Sully in his wife’s place of employment. Truth be told, he was a little afraid to, anyway. Sully might be an old fart, but he’d been a tough customer when he was younger, and Zack, who had never been a tough customer, was afraid that at sixty, Sully might still have a few tricks up his sleeve, and Zack did not want to get beat up by an old cripple. On the other hand, he couldn’t very well ignore Sully’s presence here in the restaurant, especially seated down here in the dark part, which seemed significant somehow. As usual, Zack found himself kind of in between. He had to engage Sully in another conversation. “What’re you up to, need I ask?”
With his dishes all bussed, the only evidence of Sully’s having eaten dinner was his coffee cup and a tiny dice of Bermuda onion on the formica tabletop. And the cherrystone clam, still clamped tightly shut. Sully hoped Ruth’s husband would notice these and draw the correct inference, but he wasn’t optimistic. Zack had already drawn one inference in the last minute or so, and that would be it for a while. “I was just sitting here wondering how things could get worse,” Sully told him.
“Oh,” Zack said, feeling the jab land. As usual, he hadn’t seen it coming.
“I must have been thinking out loud,” Sully went on, “because here you are.” He didn’t much care for the idea of being wedged into a tight booth when the man blocking his exit might summon the necessary conviction to punch him. Zack would probably get in a half-dozen good licks before Sully could get to his feet. And if Zack ever kicked Sully in the knee there’d be nothing to do but just sit back down in the booth and cry. The good news was that if Zack was going to start a fight,
he probably would have by now. In fact, he had the look of a man who’d already decided to cut his losses. “Take a load off your feet, why don’t you?” Sully suggested again. “Your wife’ll be out in a minute. You can give her a lift home. She looks beat.”
Zack wasn’t ready to sit down. “I’m not sure I like walking in here and finding you,” he complained.
Sully shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s one of three restaurants in town.” He thumbed the sliver of Bermuda onion and flicked it into the rubber plant with his forefinger.
“How come you’re sitting way down here in the dark?”
“I don’t know, Zachary.” Sully sighed. “Do I need a reason? Do I follow you around and ask you how come you sit in one chair and not another one?”
Zack didn’t have an answer.
“Pretty funny, you sitting here in the dark,” Zack managed, though he’d clearly lost the edge, somehow. He couldn’t help thinking he should have had Sully in some kind of corner, that the other man had a hell of a lot of explaining to do. But here they were arguing pleasantly over whether Sully had a right to sit in here by himself in the dark if he felt like it. Which he did, Zack had to admit.
Ruth emerged from the kitchen drying her hands on a rag. She glared at Zack, who immediately fidgeted guiltily. “What’s the matter?” she said. “Can’t start a fight?”
“What’s he doing here?”
“Let’s you and me go home, sport,” Ruth said. “I’ll fight with you.”
Zack looked like he’d rather fight with Sully and was sorry now to have missed the opportunity.
Ruth turned to Sully. “I’d like to go home tonight,” she said. “Are you going to leave me a tip or what?”
“I’m half afraid to,” Sully said. “Some not-too-bright person might get the wrong idea.”
“Let him,” Ruth said. “Somebody’s got to make a living in this family.”
Zack watched his wife pick up the dollar and change Sully put on the table.
“Not the sort of tip that would make anybody suspicious, is it?” she said, stuffing the money into her husband’s shirt pocket. “Can I trust you to act like a grown-up for about two minutes while I get my coat?”
“Sure.” Zack shrugged, not looking up from the floor.
When Ruth was gone, Sully again motioned to the bench across from him, and this time Zack sighed and sat down. He looked so pitiful and unhappy that Sully had half a mind to tell him the truth and promise to reform. “I don’t know, Zachary,” he admitted instead.
Zack was studying his fingernails now. “Me neither, I guess,” he said.
Which made Sully laugh.
Which made Zack grin sheepishly. “I don’t know what I’m worried about even,” he admitted. “Hell, I’m a grandpa and she’s a grandma.”
“Me, too,” Sully said, his knee humming to the tune his grandson Wacker had taught it that morning. “A grandfather, that is.”
Zack shrugged. “We’re too old to get ourselves arrested for fighting in public, I guess.”
“That’s assuming that people would recognize it as fighting.”
Ruth came out with her coat on, stood by the door. “Well,” she barked. “Come on, dumbbell.”
Sully and Zack exchanged glances. “I think she means you,” Sully said.
Zack got up slowly. He knew who she meant without having to be told. “You drive,” Ruth told him as they headed out the door. “I want both my hands free.”
When the door swung shut behind them, Vince came out of the kitchen and started switching off the restaurant’s remaining lights and singing, “Hello, young lovers, wherever you are.” When he pulled the plug on the jukebox, it made a resentful sound before the light went out. “Tell the truth and shame the Devil,” he said. “Are you doing the two-step with young Mrs. Roebuck? Don’t tell me you’re too tired, either.”
Sully slid out of the booth. “I suppose I could find the energy if she’d have me,” he admitted. It was a question he had never seriously considered. “My guess is she loves her husband. Why is a mystery, but apparently she does.”
“What makes you think so?”
Sully didn’t know why he thought so exactly, but he did. Maybe because she was supposed to. Maybe because every other young woman in Bath seemed to.
“The reason I ask,” Vince said, “is that I keep hearing she’s involved with somebody in Schuyler.”
“I doubt it,” Sully said, perhaps too quickly.
“You do?” Vince grinned.
“I do.”
“I don’t.” Vince said. “Know why?”
“No, why.”
“Because I don’t want to go through life like that dumb bastard Zack. Twenty years you and Ruth have been giving him horns, and he still can’t make up his feeble mind if it’s true. I’d rather be suspicious than a damn fool.”
“He’s not too bright, is he?” Sully conceded.
“Not too.”
Feeling around in the dark for his keys, Sully located the clam and put it into his coat pocket. A clam, as Wirf pointed out, was a small thing, but you never knew when you might need one.
“Where the hell’s the door?” he said.
Vince lit his cigarette lighter up next to his face to show where he was. His huge good-natured face reminded Sully of the demonic clown on the billboard outside of town.
“If I bang my knee between here and there,” Sully warned, “your brother’s going to own two restaurants.”
The White Horse Tavern had gone, in Sully’s lifetime, from a classy watering hole for the Albany young and well-to-do, a summer haunt of well-dressed New Yorkers upstate for the August Thoroughbred meet at Schuyler Springs, to a shabby local restaurant/pub. The completion of the interstate, which allowed New York and Albany direct access to Schuyler Springs, Lake George, Lake Placid and Montreal did the deed, effectively isolating Bath, Schuyler Springs’ onetime rival for healing waters. The old, winding, two-lane blacktop once invited half a dozen drunken stops and supported twice that many roadhouses. In the forties and fifties, on an average Saturday night, there were numerous accidents along the twenty-five-mile stretch of road between Albany and Schuyler Springs, though fatalities, even serious injuries, were relatively rare. On the dark, tree-lined curves it was difficult to generate deadly speed, and the roadhouse taverns were close together and enough alike when you got there to make speed unnecessary. It wasn’t unusual for drivers involved in head-on collisions to get out of their cars and fight drunkenly in the middle of the road over whose fault the accident had been. The occasional hot-rodding teen would kill himself, as Sully’s older brother, Patrick, had done, but everyone knew teenagers were going to kill themselves. You couldn’t blame the road or the roadhouses, really.
On the new interstate there were no head-on collisions. Most places, the median dividing north- and southbound traffic was fifty yards or more across. Drivers simply fell asleep on its straight, smooth surface, then left the pavement, flew through the air at eighty miles an hour and located the nearest tree. The drivers didn’t pick fights over whose fault it was. They were taken to the hospital as a formality, to be pronounced dead.
Of the two dozen taverns that once had flourished in the corridor before the interstate was completed, only a handful were still in existence, and of these only The Horse and one or two others weren’t seasonal. Most reopened, often under new ownership, during the summer, doing real business only during August, when the Schuyler Springs flat track opened and downstate headed north for the meet. Then every restaurant and bar within a twenty-mile radius of the track made a killing by raising its prices. Or as much of a killing as they could hope to make, knowing it’d have to last them the year. The owners of these local spots owed their marginal existence to the downstaters, who were used to being stolen from and who admired upstaters’ limited imaginations when it came to thievery.
The Horse, because it was located in the village of North Bath and was not technically a roadhouse a
t all, stayed open year round, though its character was dramatically different during racing season. In June, the whole place got a facelift. Stools and tables got repaired, the bar got varnished, the large back room was opened and cleaned, the light bulbs in its chandeliers replaced. A whole new staff, mostly college students imported from the Albany area, arrived wearing tennis shorts and polo shirts and began their drills (“Hi, I’m Todd, and I’ll be your server tonight”), and this was the sign for the locals to slink off into their seasonal exile. The new drink prices told them they weren’t welcome in July and August. So did the new bartenders, ponytailed girls in some instances, who didn’t have much to say to the likes of Sully and Wirf. Rub Squeers wasn’t even allowed in the door.
Come September, after the snotty New Yorkers went home, taking with them their insults and their downstate accents and what remained of their cash, the roadhouses closed up one by one. The air was again cool at night, and familiar faces began to reappear at The Horse to compare notes and assess the damages of the season. Tiny Duncan, who owned The Horse, often thought about trying to keep the big dining room open, then thought again and closed it. Business was always so good in August that he never quite believed it would shut off, like water from a new tap, after Labor Day. Intellectually he knew it would, because it always did, every year, without exception. But in August, when he surveyed the crowded dining room, the line at the door that snaked down the street, he simply was unable to credit what he knew to be true. He began to contemplate the laws of cause and effect, wondering if maybe, just maybe, he didn’t have things backwards. What if it was closing the dining room after Labor Day that caused the crowds to disappear, and not the disappearing crowds that caused him to close the dining room? But when the college-student waiters and bartenders said good-bye and returned to Albany and another semester at SUNY and RPI and Russell Sage, taking their bizarre, cheery optimism with them, Tiny knew that the gig was again up, and he allowed the establishment to slide again into gentle decline. For Tiny, the worst day of each year was the one when he let the regulars talk him into lugging the pool table back into the bar, where it stayed until the following July, when he would again need the space. The big round table in the dining room, the one he reserved for parties of eight to ten, got centered under a chandelier and became a poker table. It was all very depressing. For the winter holidays Tiny ran a single string of festive lights along the back bar, and each year the string contained fewer lights that worked. After New Year’s, nobody was able to summon the energy to take them down.