by Ira Wood
In my own work at this time I was fielding a string of rejections for a novel I had begun with the wildest, most entertaining twenty-five pages I had ever written but that, like a fart, began with a bang and progressively diminished in intensity until it left the reader with the faint redolence of cheese. But who needed fiction? I was in the thick of real life drama. If gossipy telephone trysts gave me the opportunity to harmlessly roast people in private, selectmen’s meetings were an opportunity to do serious damage. Town employees were routinely reduced to sputtering rages and occasionally tears as Mrs. Hammer used a sublimely sadistic method of attack she had perfected during her years as a religious educator. At one meeting she blandly began questioning Doug Toomy, an ex-heavyweight college wrestler now on the rescue squad. “You were driving down Route Six last night in a town-owned vehicle, weren’t you, Doug?”
“I suppose I was, Missus.”
“Well, I saw you, Douglas, so there is no need to suppose is there?” Then, with the bashful falsetto of a child hiding behind a curtain, “Why were you breaking the law?”
He slid to the edge of his chair. “I wasn’t breaking any law.”
“Do we want to tell a lie, Douglas?” She glanced briefly at the ceiling as if to remind him he was standing before an authority even more important than the Board of Selectmen. “I know you were breaking the law because you passed me while I was driving at the posted speed limit.” But she was hardly finished. “What if there had been a child in the road, Douglas?”
Speechless, the large man dropped his eyes to his size thirteen boots.
After Columbus Day the restaurants closed and the boats were pulled from the water. People boarded up their summer businesses and began reading the local newspapers again, delighted with weekly reports of a juicy auto-da-fé. My phone rang constantly with calls from people anxious to tell me stories of municipal waste and gross misconduct. At happy hour I could count on Mrs. Flay’s latest cocktail gossip.
To put this in perspective, my most popular novel, The Kitchen Man, came out to rave reviews, sold mass market and foreign rights, and was optioned to Universal Pictures. Of the number of people I interacted with on a daily basis, only a handful knew I had even written a book and the rest viewed it as less interesting than an angry letter to the editor. As a selectman I was in the news every week. Decisions I made were immediately enacted by staff as opposed to novels that took years to write before moving glacially through one editorial committee after another. I was the boss, not a petitioner at the mercy of an agent or editor. I got paid regularly; a pittance, but no publisher ever kept up my health insurance. The truth was that I was happier as a small town politician than I had ever been as a writer. Before long I had the friendships that had eluded me when I first moved to town, almost all of them made through town government.
Porter Dudley, the new Town Administrator, hired in my third year of office, was the closest. After we reduced his predecessor to a quaking mass of facial tics, we earned a reputation as a town without pity, the kind of quaint New England village described in stories like “The Lottery.” Although our advertisement offered a competitive salary, few applicants wanted a job that would end in a Moscow show trial. Dudley was the best of the crop. He was not experienced but worked the job night and day to get up to speed, offering a sympathetic ear to people who felt they’d never had a voice.
He spoke incessantly about his kids and his wife—to whom he wrote rhymed verse, which he insisted on showing me when he discovered my wife was a poet. His family still lived in Ohio until he could afford to bring them east. Therefore most evenings found him at the local pub where he was nicknamed Old Port and played darts with the fishermen, many of whom I had barely known until Dudley introduced us.
A short rubber-faced man with loose jowls and a flat, misshapen nose, Dudley was a great storyteller, a compassionate listener, and a mimic who did impressions. He did a police sergeant pulling up his pants as he chased after a skate boarder. He did the recreation director, pumping his fist after beating a 9-year-old in tennis. He did me, the way I got bored and sleepy at meetings and slouched, my legs splayed, my butt slipping so far down the chair that I might have been doing the limbo. He did Mrs. Flay and her breathy, patronizing voice: his fatal mistake and one that reached her with viral speed.
The Chairwoman had never liked Porter Dudley. He was a begrudging choice from a poor pool of applicants and from the beginning she had dubbed him “Any Port in a Storm.” She preferred professionals with impressive degrees and crisp wool suits. Dudley was just too common a man for her to respect but more to the point, too well liked. He replaced her in the eyes of the people as the most important person in town. Even when a letter appeared in the newspaper praising him, she called him Dudley Do-right. In time she began to repeat rumors in our nightly cocktail conversations. “Oh, Ira, I hear that he returns from lunch at the pub quite tipsy every day.”
The Board of Selectman’s meetings became a star chamber in which his petty oversights were exaggerated to enormous proportion. One night Eulalia Hammer cross-examined him about a light bulb. “Mr. Dudley, I happened to drive down to the harbor the other night and I was shocked to find it dark in front of the harbormaster’s building.”
“Probably a bulb needs changing. I’ll see to it.”
In her most angelic voice: “What if a child had been down there?”
“That was how late, Ma’am? In the off-season? What would a child be doing down at the harbor?”
“Well, what if a little boy was in the car with his grandfather? And what if his grandfather had a heart attack? And what if a violent pedophile had escaped from the state prison for the criminally insane that day?”
Dudley began to sweat. “Is this a likely scenario, Madame Chair?” But Mrs. Flay sat at military attention, her shoulders as square as the uprights of a guillotine, her gaze looming over him like a blade.
It is a cold and soggy night in early December and except for the spinning tires of an occasional pickup, the distant yelps of a coyote pack in the marsh, there isn’t a hint of life on Main Street. Even the teenagers have abandoned the bench in front of Town Hall. Through the tall windows in the conference room a fluorescent lamp casts its wan blue light over five tired people sitting at an old oak table, four of them determined to end a man’s career, me opposed. There is no audience tonight. There are no reporters. An executive session has been called, closed to the public, for the alleged purpose of discussing contract negotiations, but there is very little discussion and no negotiating, only accusations of Dudley’s ineptitude without Dudley present to defend himself—in my eyes a violation of the Open Meeting Law. Although Hammer and Flay and the other two Selectmen have the votes they need to refuse to extend Dudley’s contract, they know he is popular and they crave a unanimous decision. My negative vote is the one pitiful claim to power I have left. It is fifteen minutes to midnight and we have been inhaling each other’s rancid breath since six. Mrs. Flay makes a last tired plea, “Oh, Ira, admit it, he’s a loser.” Once again she reads off the litany of his offenses. “You have to admit he’s incompetent.”
I didn’t think he was anything of the kind. The snow got plowed. The garbage got collected. The rescue squad got people to the hospital. Were we selling off mineral rights? Bombing innocent civilians? Sending indigent teenage soldiers off to fight and die? In comparison to the federal government this little town was the kingdom of heaven.
The vote was taken at five minutes past midnight. It was decided that Dudley’s contract would not be renewed and that no announcement need be given the press. Once advised that he was about to be canned, Dudley would have no option that would save his reputation but to quietly resign.
Mrs. Flay waved a friendly good-bye as we hustled to our cars, the moist air cooling to hoar frost, the parking lot slippery with black ice, and I was confronted with one of those movie moments, when the sound track gives way to the slow beating of the heart and there is an important decision to be
made, usually in tight close-up, a choice in which true character is tested. For instance, I could admit my loss, make peace with the others on the board, or back over her with my truck. An easy decision. I returned her wave. But the choices kept presenting themselves.
I could either discuss the situation with my wife when I returned home, take the opportunity to calmly face the fact that I was powerless to save my friend’s job—or close myself off with the TV on and a bottle of scotch. I filled a glass with ice.
I could come up with a strategy that would work for the benefit of the town, leverage my role as the Board’s conscience to negotiate a good settlement package for Dudley. Or, I could call the reporters and blow the whistle, expose their covert little cabal to the light of day.
This was the most difficult decision to make and one that, in my addled state of mind at least, was strangely paralleled by a bizarre story unfolding on CNN Newsroom. A Midwestern teenager, an honor student, had been caught cheating for his final exams. As punishment, his father, a minister, decreed that he was barred from attending the senior prom. Unaccountably identifying with the kid, I imagined the choices running through his mind. He could try to talk with his father and work out an alternate punishment. He could beg for mercy. He could run away from home. Instead, according to Wolf Blitzer, he calmly broke into the living room gun cabinet, loaded a pump action shot gun, and blew the old man’s face off at close range.
Why this story resonated was a mystery to me. Only a psychopath would be driven to murder because he was docked from the prom, only an unstable, catastrophic mind unable to accept a decision he could not control. Certainly no normal person could be driven to this extreme. Unless you found yourself in a situation in which you were thoroughly convinced there is no alternative; that a malicious injury has taken place; that if the people responsible are not stopped they will simply do it again, to you and to others, forever more, with impunity. Once you begin to think this way you may very well be prone to making a decision you will regret.
I called the reporters.
Two hundred people crammed into a meeting room built for half that number. Those who couldn’t find chairs crowded the aisles. An angry mob gathered in back. Many more stamped their feet in the cold, watching through the windows thrown open in spite of the Chairwoman’s order to close them. The town was at war. Dudley’s supporters, some of whom had never been to a meeting before, and others who knew him as a fine dart player but were surprised to discover he was the Town Administrator, pumped their fists and demanded answers.
The Chairwoman shuffled her papers, afraid to face the crowd. “We request that due to the impossibility of addressing everyone’s concerns here tonight people will please frame their questions in the form of a letter.”
“Yeah, and you’ll find it through your window tomorrow morning wrapped around a rock!” The outburst was affirmed by a loud series of rhythmic hoots. The old wooden floor shook. Meetings, the newcomers in the audience discovered, could be fun.
Now frightened for her safety, Mrs. Flay requested a side meeting with the police chief who duly radioed for backup. My decision to alert the press had fomented the show of support for Dudley and frankly it was difficult not to gloat. But I had decided to exercise magnanimity. I raised my hand to read aloud a call for healing. The Chairwoman looked straight through me and duly recognized a friend of hers from the audience, who stood up to read a letter she had posted to the district attorney.
“Madame Chair, we believe that Massachusetts General Law has been breached, and we cite Penalties for Violation of Confidentiality. May I go on?”
The color returned to Mrs. Flay’s cheeks. She suddenly looked hopeful. “Oh, yes, do go on.”
The letter reader detailed a significant penalty. “A fine of up to $100,000. . . .”
Did I hear one hundred thousand dollars? For violation of what?
“. . . and imprisonment of up to two years. . . .”
Imprisonment? For calling a couple of reporters?
“Madame Chair, we intend to take this to the highest levels.”
“Well, I would hope you would.” Mrs. Flay nodded sincere agreement. “A breach of the sanctity of the executive session is a serious offense, not to mention the privacy of Mr. Dudley who must certainly be considering a civil suit against whoever leaked the information.”
Dudley file a lawsuit? Suddenly he looked hopeful. But I had tried to help him.
“We will not rest until the mole is exposed and punished.” The letter reader looked directly at me. “One of you has disgraced this town in the eyes of the public and ruined the reputation of an innocent man.”
“Ira?” The voice was Mrs. Flay’s. “Ira?” Sweat was seeping from my hairline and collecting in my ears. “Ira?” she repeated sweetly. “Did you have something you wanted to read?”
I managed to shake my head in the negative and pocket my carefully crafted speech. My face was hot with fever. My arms and legs were numb. I had no idea if what I had done had any legal implications but my imagination played host to a catastrophic array of police interviews, cross examination, and criminal litigation. In a pique of rage I had compromised a legally constituted executive session. In the eyes of the dart players I might be a hero, a whistle-blower; but in the confident smiles of Hammer and Flay, I was the new target and my action the perfect decoy for theirs.
Newspaper reporters whom I had not called, angry at having been scooped by the ones I had, now worked to expose the rat. Dudley, having no idea where the leak had come from, hired counsel to pursue a civil action for disclosure of information relating to his employment. Passions were divided between Dudley loyalists and those who sought vindication for Hammer and Flay. Arguments broke out at the post office, businesses were boycotted subject to their owners’ opinions; someone claimed his tires were slashed. It was not uncommon for people who had known each other for years to push their supermarket carts straight past each other without a word. Mrs. Flay demanded police protection. Everyone, however, wanted to discover the identity of the snitch.
It is hard to disappear in a village but I tried. I shopped out of town. I went for my mail at five minutes before closing. I called in sick to meetings. I had dreams of my home being raided at 4 A.M. by surly federal agents in blue wind breakers, of shuffling to court in shackles and running a gauntlet of reporters and protestors who prodded me with signs and chanted slogans about the sanctity of executive session minutes.
Although it was months before I stopped jumping at the sound of the ringing telephone, no action was ever taken. Nonetheless, I had lost the stomach for politics and public life, even reading the local papers. On those rare nights when I could relax enough to sleep, it was only by visualizing the stagnant silence of a paper-strewn office, the innumerable trips to the bathroom, the futile search through the refrigerator for lunch, the mailbox full of rejections, the telephone that never rang, the dusty pile of old New Yorker magazines that beckoned from the rack beside the toilet; in effect, the tedious life of the mid-list writer and the sublime futility of knowing that as a novelist at the beginning of the twentieth-first century I was blissfully invisible and all but irrelevant to the world.
HEARTSONG OF THE WARRIOR, INC.
We were ordered to report on a Saturday morning at 8 A.M. By eight-thirty over a hundred men were stomping their feet in the mid-December cold, pounding on the gray metal doors and shouting curses at the red brick facade of the old school building. An argument over a parking space had already turned into a shoving match, a couple of guys were playing keep away with a shorter guy’s hat and I started to think that if they kept us out here much longer this was going to turn into something out of Lord of the Flies.
As the bitter wind gathered force over the playing fields, I pulled my watch cap low over my ears and turned my expression to stone, determined to appear tough and inscrutable.
Two faces peered at us through the wire mesh windows of the auditorium. Sporadic outbursts of grumbling grew into w
aves of rage and at 8:45 a rebellious spin-off group began kicking the doors. “Open up, you bastards.”
“It’s freezing out here! Let us in.”
“Let us in! Let us in!” A small crowd picked up the chant.
One guy took a running start with a trashcan and used it as a battering ram. A flurry of ice balls pelted the windows. A man in a leather jacket climbed on a concrete balustrade to address the crowd. “Is this what we’re paying for? To be treated like animals?” He threw his cigarette to the ground and stormed back to the parking lot, loudly announcing, “I am the fuck out of here!”
“Very smart,” said a man behind me. He was no more than five-foot-three and wore a Sherpa cap from Nepal with earflaps and a long red tassel.
“Not so smart,” I said. “The deposit’s not refundable.”
“Oh, he’ll just sit in his car with the heater on until they open the doors. I’m talking about Golden, the organizer. He’s brilliant. He trained with Werner. He’s already weeding out the leaders from the followers. In most workshops it takes hours.” Arms folded across his thick Guatemalan sweater, he did a little jig every few minutes to stay warm. “I think you’re going to get what you paid for.”