Free Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo Page A

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, afterall, 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.
    Nevertheless, this new banner read GO SABERTOOTHS! TROUNCE SCHUYLER SPRINGS! and the men whose job it was to string the banner across the street were more concerned with it than with the old banner, which had become gray and tattered in the wind and would not be restrung after the weekend’s big game. On the Monday following Thanksgiving the Christmas lights always got strung. And so, as the new banner was being attended to—the workers and onlookers shouting instructions to one another to make sure the new banner was centered and straight, as if a botched job might affect the outcome of the game—the old banner was allowed to lie stretched across the street in the slush. When the workers were satisfied that the new banner was secure and had climbed down from their ladders, one of them picked up one end of the old banner just as a car drove by and hooked the cord with one of its rear wheels, dragging the banner all the way up Main and finally out of sight. Sully, shoveling Miss Beryl’s driveway as promised, looked up and saw the banner trail by, though he had no idea what it was.
    As much as Sully hated the idea, he was going to have to go find Carl Roebuck, who owed him money and refused to pay it. Sully was pretty sure what the result of this visit would be, too. He’d end up going back to work for Carl, something he’d sworn back in August he’d never do. Even worse, he’d sworn it to Carl, who’d looked smug and said, “We’ll see.”
    Carl Roebuck was all of thirty-five and, the way Sully saw it, was threatening to use up, singlehandedly, all the luck there was left in an unlucky town. Just this year he’d won two church raffles and the daily number (on three separate occasions). Five years before that, just as Bath real estate had begun to appreciate, Carl, using part of the money he’d inherited when his father keeled over, bought an old three-story Victorian house on Glendale, getting it for back taxes and the resumption of a tiny 1940 mortgage when the elderly owner died intestate and without relatives. That wasn’t enough. The first thing Carl did was to go up into the attic,where he’d found a box of old coins worth forty thousand dollars. The man could shit in a swinging bucket.
    Carl’s red Camaro was parked at the curb below his