Nobody's Fool

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.
    â€œRight.” Cass nodded knowingly.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œWe’re closed tomorrow, remember.”
    â€œHow come?” Sully said.
    â€œThanksgiving, Sully.”
    â€œOh, 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 werewaiting 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