Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“We know your view, Mr. Wirfly,” the judge said, holding up his hand like a traffic cop. “How’s school going, Mr. Sullivan?”

“Great,” Sully said. “Terrific, in fact. The classes I needed were full, so I’m taking philosophy. The hundred bucks I spent on textbooks in September I haven’t been reimbursed for yet. They don’t like to pay for my pain pills either.”

The judge took all this in and processed it quickly. “Register early next term,” he advised. “Don’t blame other people for the way things are. Keep that up and you’ll end up a lawyer like Mr. Wirfly here. Then where will you be?”

Where indeed? Sully had wondered. In truth, he wouldn’t trade places with Wirf.

“So, arc you going to keep after them?” Cass wanted to know.

Sully stood up, tested his knee with some weight, rocked on it. “Wirf wants to.”

“What do you want?”

Sully thought about it. “A night’s sleep’d be good.”

When he started for the door, Cass motioned him back with a secretive index finger and they moved farther down the counter. “Why don’t you come to work here at the restaurant?” she said, her voice lowered.

“I don’t think so,” Sully said. “Thanks, though.”

“Why not?” she insisted. “It’s warm and safe and you’re in here half the time anyway.”

This was true, and even though Sully had half a dozen reasons for not wanting to work at Hattie’s, he wasn’t sure any of them would make sense to Cass. For one thing, if he worked at Hattie’s he wouldn’t be able to wander in off the street when he felt like it because he’d already be there. And he much preferred the side of the counter he was on to the side Cass was on. “You don’t need me, for one thing,” he pointed out.

“Roof’s talking about moving back to North Carolina,” she said without looking at the cook, who had taken a stool around the other side of the counter to enjoy the lull and was studying them.

“And has been for twenty years,” Sully reminded her.

“I think he means it.”

“He’s meant it all along. Half the town’s been meaning to leave. They don’t, though, most of them.”

“I know one person who’s going to,” Cass said, and she sounded like she meant it. “The day after the funeral.”

They both glanced at old Hattie, who was leaning forward intently and grinning, as if she were in an arm-wrestling match with Death himself, an opponent she was confident of whipping. “Maybe the day before.”

Something of the desperation in her voice got through to Sully, who said, “Listen. You want to get out some night, let me know. I’ll baby-sit.”

Cass smiled dubiously. “And where would I go?”

Sully shrugged. “How the hell should I know? A movie? I can’t figure out everything for you.”

Cass smiled, didn’t say anything immediately. “I should take you up on it. Just to find out what you’d do when she wet her pants and asked you to change her.”

Sully tried to suppress a shudder and failed.

“Right.” Cass nodded knowingly.

“I better go shovel my landlady out,” he said. “How’d this town get so full of old women, is what I’d like to know.”

“We’re closed tomorrow, remember.”

“How come?” Sully said.

“Thanksgiving, Sully.”

“Oh, yeah.”

At the door Sully noticed Hattie was beginning to list slightly to starboard, so he took her by the shoulders and righted her. “Sit straight,” he said. “Bad posture, you’ll grow up crooked.”

Hattie nodded and nodded at no external referent. Sully made a mental note to shoot himself before he got like that.

A block down the street from Hattie’s, two city workers were taking down the banner that had been strung across Main Street since September, where it had become the object of much discussion and derision, THINGS ARE LOOKING ↑ IN BATH, it said. Some of the town’s residents claimed that the banner made no sense because of the arrow. Had a word been left out? Was the missing word hovering in midair above the arrow? Clive Peoples, whose idea the slogan had been, was deeply offended by these criticisms and remarked publicly that this had to be the dumbest town in the world if the people who lived there couldn’t figure out that the arrow was a symbol for the word “up.” It worked, he explained, on the same principle as I ♥ NEW YORK, which everybody knew was the cleverest promotional campaign in the entire history of promotional campaigns, turning a place nobody even wanted to hear about into a place everybody wanted to visit. Anybody could see that the slogan was supposed to read “I Love New York,” not “I Heart New York.” The heart was a symbol, a shortcut.

The citizenry of Bath were not fetched by this argument. To most people it didn’t seem that the word “up” needed to be symbolically abbreviated, brevity being the word’s most obvious characteristic to begin with. After all, the banner stretched all the way across the street, and there was plenty of room for a two-letter word in the center of it. In fact, many of Clive Jr.’s opponents on the banner issue confessed to being less than taken with the “I Heart New York” campaign as well. They remained to be convinced that upstate was much better off for it, and now, after three months of this new banner, the local merchants along Main still remained to be convinced that things were looking ↑ in Bath either. They were waiting for something tangible, like the reopening of the Sans Souci, or groundbreaking on The Ultimate Escape Fun Park.

The new banner (GO SABERTOOTHS! TROUNCE SCHUYLER SPRINGS!) was even more optimistic. The choice of the word “trounce” was more indicative of the town’s mounting frustration with the basketball team’s losing streak to Schuyler Springs than of a realistic goal. The more traditional “beat” had been rejected as mundane and unsatisfying. The real debate had been between “trounce” and “annihilate.” The proponents of “annihilate” had surrendered the field when they were reminded that it was a ten-letter word, and Bath was a town that had recently established a precedent when it abbreviated the word “up.”

The banner also promised to revive another controversy, this one turning on a point of grammar. Nearly three decades earlier, when football had to be dropped due to the postwar decline in the region’s population and the high school’s other sports began to show signs that they could no longer compete successfully against archrival Schuyler Springs, the high school’s principal had decided it was time to change the school’s nickname (the Antelopes) to something more ferocious in the hopes of spurring Bath’s young athletes to greater ferocity. After all, there weren’t any antelope within fifteen hundred miles of Bath, and all those animals were famous for was running anyway. So there had been a Name the Team contest and the Sabertooth Tigers were born, all the antelope logos repainted at town expense. Predictably, the whole thing had not turned out well. The fans had immediately shortened the name to the Tigers, which the high school principal thought common and uninspiring and a violation of the contest rules. The best thing about the sabertooth tiger was its saber teeth, which ordinary tigers didn’t have, and the principal insisted that the name not be corrupted, even in casual conversation. He’d spent good money repainting all the logos, even if the saber teeth had turned out looking like walrus tusks.

If all this weren’t enough, a controversy had erupted on the editorial page of the North Bath Weekly Journal over whether the plural of Sabertooth should be Sabertooths or Saberteeth. When the cheerleaders led the spell cheer, how should it go? The principal said Saberteeth sounded elitist and silly and dental. The chair of the high school’s English department disagreed, claiming this latest outrage was yet another symptom of the erosion of the English language, and he threatened to resign if he and his staff were expected to sanction tooths as the plural of tooth. Why not? the public librarian had asked in the next letter to the editor. Wasn’t this, after all, the same English department that had sanctioned “antelopes” as the plural of “antelope”? The letters continued to pour in for weeks. Beryl Peoples, who’d nursed a twenty-year grudge against the principal for caving in and allowing history courses in the junior and senior high school to be redesignated “social studies,” had the last editorial word, reminding her fellow citizens that the sabertooth tiger was an extinct animal. Food, she suggested, for thought.