The Association

by Bentley Little

  After some obligatory introductory chitchat, Liz brought glasses of wine, and Ray led them all on a tour of the house.

  Which was spectacular.

  The Dysons’ place was like something out of a home decorating magazine.

  Maureen thought their house had quite a view, but it was nothing compared to their hosts'. The sun had still not set completely, and the fire-red sky illuminated hundreds of miles of forests and canyons, little opalescent glints in the landscape marking tin-roofed ranch houses, miner's shacks, and windmills. Below them, the town of Corban was shrouded in shadow from the surrounding hills and mountains, and lights were blinking on in downtown buildings. It was a breathtaking panorama that put to shame any postcard shot she'd ever seen, and the line of windows that made up the south-facing wall of the Dysons’ living room and overlooked this magnificent vista curved gracefully in an almost perfect half-circle. The room itself was furnished rustically with lodgepole-pine tables and chairs, a southwestern print couch, and a glass-topped coffee table with a tree stump base.

  They went from there to the kitchen. It was huge, with an indoor grill built into the Mexican-tiled island between the refrigerator and sink.

  A greenhouse window faced the side of the property and a terraced garden. There was a gigantic pot of spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove, and the entire room smelled deliciously of garlic and onion and spices.

  The master bedroom, guest bedroom, and den were sparsely and tastefully furnished, and Maureen found herself wondering where Ray and Liz kept all their... stuff. Where were the photographs of friends and family, the collected knicknacks , the tangible personal effects that represented their past? Had the two of them simply thrown out the accumulations of their East Coast life when they moved out here? It didn't make any sense, but it seemed so. She and Barry had more junk in one room than the Dysons seemed to have in then- entire house, and it was hard to believe that two such homey old people were so completely unsentimental.

  But it was not her place to wonder, and as they walked back out to the living room, she complimented their hosts on having such a beautiful house.

  Liz smiled graciously. "Thank you."

  Ray grinned. "Sure beats Hackensack." He patted Maureen's arm, motioned for Barry to come and look at his new wide screen TV, and as the two men started talking electronics, Maureen followed Liz into the kitchen.

  The older woman removed a checkered apron from a hook on the pantry door and put it on, and Maureen had to smile. She'd never seen anyone actually wear an apron outside of movies and early television programs, and the gesture seemed quaint and endearingly old-fashioned.

  Liz stirred the spaghetti sauce and looked over at her. "So do you have a job outside the house, or are you a full time homemaker?"

  "I'm an accountant."

  Liz's face lit up. "Really? Me too! I was an auditor back in New Jersey. Doyle, Bell, and McCammon . Thirty years. What's your specialty?"

  "Taxes, primarily, although I handle some payroll and related accounts.

  I'm an EA, although that's not something that often comes up."

  "I bet it helps to lure in the clients, though."

  Maureen laughed. "It doesn't hurt."

  "Well, well, well. Another accountant." The older woman shook her head, smiling. "It'll be nice to have someone to talk to who speaks the same language."

  Maureen had been thinking exactly the same thing. She liked Liz, and it was a load off her shoulders that the first woman she met in Utah was not some backward small town hick but worldly, smart, and sophisticated. She'd had visions of having to condescend to her companions, feigning interest in church bingo games and soap operas in order to have someone to talk with, and the fact that she'd met someone who was not only intelligent but had a background similar to her own filled her with relief.

  The older woman walked over to the refrigerator, took out a head of lettuce and several plastic bags filled with vegetables, and Maureen asked if she could help. She was assigned the job of peeling cucumbers, and the two of them stood side-by-side in front of the long counter, preparing salad to accompany dinner--or "supper," as Liz called it.

  They talked of trivialities, the safe subjects broached tentatively by two people just starting to get to know each other and not wanting to offend unfamiliar sensibilities. Despite the difference in age, they were more alike than not, both of them gardeners, both avid readers, both hardcore fans of the Home & Garden channel, and Maureen found herself opening up. She asked Liz about their predecessors, the people who had lived in the house before she and Barry moved in, but Liz said she hadn't known the couple very well.

  No one had. They weren't there long, less than nine months, and they kept pretty much to themselves. They'd come and gone without making a ripple, and the house had been empty for over a year since then.

  The family before that was something else entirely. The Haslams --a husband, wife, and two sons--had been one of the first families in Bonita Vista, well known and well liked, and their departure had caused a stir. The family had practically disappeared, moving out suddenly in the middle of the night. They'd never returned, never called, never communicated with anyone else in the neighborhood again, something entirely out of character for them, particularly for the mother, Kelli, whom Liz knew quite well. Maureen thought to herself that it was a scenario consistent with the panic and paranoia of the note they'd discovered in the closet, and she told Liz about the warning, describing the way Barry had come upon it while cleaning and the creepy feeling she'd gotten reading the hyperbolic words. Ray walked in at that moment to refresh his and Barry's drinks, and he frowned as he listened to Maureen's description.

  "That doesn't sound like Ted or Kelli."

  "No, it doesn't," Liz said. "But Maureen's right. It fits in with their disappearance. Or at least it sounds like something that people fleeing in the middle of the night would write." She turned back toward Maureen. "You didn't save the note?"

  "No. It was over a week ago, and I had Barry throw it away. I didn't want it in the house."

  "You think Ted was doing something ... illegal?" Ray asked his wife.

  Liz shrugged. "You knew him better than I did. I was close to Kelli and the kids, but I didn't know Ted that well."

  "He was into computers," Ray explained. "He had some type of job with a defense contractor, debugging systems. Wasn't home that much. Spent a lot of time in Salt Lake City." He finished pouring the drinks and picked up the glasses. "I suppose that kind of job would make anyone paranoid. It just... doesn't sound like Ted."

  "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you."

  "Maybe they were out to get him."

  "Who?"

  "I don't know. The government? Maybe he was selling secrets or something. Who knows?"

  Maureen turned toward Liz as Ray left the kitchen and returned to the living room. "But why would Ted or his wife try to warn us? If he'd done something wrong and the authorities were after him, it doesn't follow that the next residents of the house would be in danger."

  "None of it makes any sense. The whole thing's strange."

  Maureen recalled the spooky feeling she'd had reading the fervent words of the note. "Yes," she said, "it is."

  They finished making the salad, Liz put a pot of water on the stove to boil, and the two of them walked back out to the living room to join the men.

  "How would you feel about a party?" Liz asked, sitting down on the couch. "Sort of a 'get acquainted' get-together with some of our neighbors. Some of our more normal neighbors."

  Maureen looked over at Barry. "That would be fun. We don't know anyone here, except you and Ray, and it'd be nice to meet people."

  Barry nodded.

  "Good. We'll set it up."

  The rest of the evening passed by quickly, and Liz called the next day to find out if the following night was too short notice for the party.

  "We're kind of informal here, and nearly everyone has their evenings free--
I don't know whether you've noticed, but Utah is not exactly a hub of exciting nightlife--so if you don't mind, we could have a potluck tomorrow night to welcome you two to Bonita Vista."

  "That would be fine."

  Maureen volunteered to bring soft drinks, and Liz said that she'd work the rest of the details out with the other guests; all they had to do was show up at six.

  The next night, Maureen and Barry were once again walking up the road to the Dysons’, this time carrying plastic grocery sacks filled with Coke and Sprite and Diet Pepsi. There were several cars in the driveway and on the street, and Barry, as she'd known he would, began making noises about ducking out early and leaving the party as soon as possible.

  Maureen stopped in her tracks. "We're staying," she said simply, "until / say it's time to go. We have a chance to start out on the right foot here, to make some friends and get to know our neighbors, and I don't want you being your usual boorish antisocial self. There's time enough for that later. Next time you can bail. But right now we're going to make a good impression."

  It looked like he was about to argue, but the expression on her face must have conveyed her seriousness, because he sighed. "You win,"

  Barry said, resigned. "I'll be on my best behavior and we'll stay to the bitter end."

  As it turned out, he had a fine time, and he wanted to stay until the bitter end. Ray and Liz had chosen their guest list wisely, and the house was filled with a variety of people: some old, some young, some middle-aged, some married some single. Nearly all of them had homeowners' association horror stories, tales of run-ins they'd had with bureaucratic members of the board of directors, and Barry was in his element, railing against authority and conformity and exhorting them all to band together into a single voting block in order to oust the association's current board.

  Afterward, they walked home tired, happy, and a little drunk. The night was moonless, and the black sky was filled with more stars than Maureen had ever seen in her life. Every so often, a meteor streaked across the heavens. She liked the Dysons . They were nice. And most of the other people seemed nice, too.

  But despite it all, Maureen still wasn't sure she liked Bonita Vista.

  Barry felt guilty. He had never gone this long before without writing, and while moving in and fixing up the house could be blamed for the first month of literary inactivity, this last week was entirely his own fault. He'd read, watched C-Span and CNN, viewed a couple of old horror flicks that he'd taped but had never gotten around to watching and he didn't write.

  There was no fear of writer's block, no worry that he'd run out of ideas, but the rhythm just wasn't there, that routine he'd established since becoming a full-time author, and he found it hard to simply jump back into the grind after so much time off. He would have to get busy soon, he knew-the next book was due in six months and he hadn't even started on it yet--but for now, he seemed compelled to slack off. It was as if he was still in vacation mode, as though either his brain or his body had not adjusted to the fact that this was their new home and was waiting for him to return to California before once again settling down to work.

  He sorted through the mail, separating the bills, tossing the ads and credit offers without even bothering to open the envelopes. There were no royalty checks, though they should be coming in any day now, but he had received one small press magazine and two postcards advertising up coming horror novels. He glanced over the postcards before throwing them in the trash pile, then perused the magazine. There were several short stories, some out-of-date movie reviews, and numerous letters to the editor from other writers either defending or attacking an up-and-coming author who had apparently made disparaging remarks on the Internet about one of the horror field's old guard. The letters were uniformly vitriolic, and Barry shook his head at such petty infighting.

  It was why he didn't socialize much with other writers, why he assiduously avoided workshops and conventions and professional get-tog ethers The only author with whom he had any sort of relationship was Phillip Emmons, a suspense writer who had specifically looked him up at the lone horror convention he had attended because he had so enjoyed Barry's debut novel The Leaving. The two of them still corresponded, and Phillip had been sort of a mentor to him over the years: helping him choose a new agent; letting him know he was getting ripped off in a multi book contract; suggesting that he start retaining electronic as well as audio and movie rights to his work. Barry not only admired Phillip's fiction, he admired the man himself, and in many ways he was still trying to emulate the other author's personal style.

  He remembered the way Phillip had handled hostile criticism the one time the two of them had done a signing together. It was at a bookstore in downtown L.A. soon after the convention. There was a lull in the crowd, and a middle aged, morbidly obese woman with a bitter, disappointed face confronted Phillip at the table and demanded to know why he wrote about such disgusting topics in such graphic detail. He was going to hell, she informed him, and he should cease writing such filth because it was corrupting his readers and society. God did not approve of what he was doing.

  Phillip looked at her calmly. "The Good Lord has seen fit to make me rich, happy, and successful," he told her. "He has made you ugly, grotesquely overweight, and miserably unhappy. It seems to me that He has smiled upon me and shit right in your face. Maybe if you were a nicer person, He would have treated you better, but from where I sit, God has made His displeasure with you pretty plain. So fuck off and quit bothering me." He smiled at her and turned to Barry. "The Lord works in mysterious ways, my friend. The Lord works in mysterious ways."

  Barry himself could never have reacted in such a manner. But, damn it, it was cool. And he admired Phillip all the more for how he handled the woman.

  Afterward, they had talked of God, and Phillip said seriously that he believed in God but disbelieved in religion. "The Bible is God's word.

  Why can't I just read it for myself and let Him speak directly to me?

  Why do I have to have an interpreter between us? That's all organized religion is: a buffer between me and God. I'm sorry, but my faith doesn't need a bureaucracy to administrate it. Besides, every time you confront one of these fundamentalist wackos with a real question, they can't answer it. Ask a preacher why your mama died of cancer or why your little boy was hit by a car, and you'll get an "It's God's will,"

  or "The Lord works in mysterious ways." In other words, they don't know. But they do know that God wants you to vote Republican and He's against raising taxes and for raising the defense budget and, despite the fact that it's His own creation, he desperately hates marijuana."

  Phillip made a lot of sense. He was an intelligent guy. He was also very giving of his time, helping out quite a few other young authors besides Barry, and Barry had often thought that if other writers were as real and unpretentious and unconcerned with image, the horror field would be a hell of a lot better off.

  He tossed the magazine aside. Maureen came up from downstairs, holding a stack of papers. "I'm done. The computer's all yours."

  Barry shook his head. "That's okay. I think I'm just going to read this afternoon. You can have the computer."

  "I thought you were going to start writing again," Maureen said.

  "Maybe tomorrow," he said. "Maybe I'll start tomorrow."

  He awoke to the sound of Maureen's fax. machine.

  Barry squinted over at the clock and was surprised to see that it was almost eight. The light outside, seeping between the cracks of the miniblinds, looked too dark for eight, looked more like six, and he nudged Maureen next to him. "Get up. It's eight o'clock."

  "What?" She opened one sleepy eye.

  "It's late."

  They'd both overslept, and it was the sound of the fax machine more than his prodding that made Maureen get out of bed and face the day. He turned onto his side and watched her bare buttocks as she padded naked over to the bathroom. Even after all these years, she still looked damn good, and if she didn't have so much work
to do this morning and the fax wasn't prompting her to get started on it, he would've lured her back to bed and spent the next hour engaged in some dirty, nasty sex that was more than likely illegal here in the state of Utah.

  But instead, he got up, slipped into his jeans, and went upstairs to put on the coffee. He took out the Friskies box and pulled open the shades on the sliding glass door, intending to feed Barney breakfast on the top deck, but the cat was nowhere to be seen. Barry walked back downstairs to the bedroom, where Maureen was already dressed and making the bed, but when he pulled the drapes open, there was again no sign of the cat.

  "Huh," he said.

  "What?"

  "I can't find Barney."

  "I told you we should make that cat sleep inside. There are coyotes, skunks, and who-knows-what out there. You'd better make sure he's okay."

  Barry slid open the door, slid open the screen, and walked outside, shaking the Friskies box.

  "Barney!" he called.

  Nothing.

  "Barney?" He shook the box again.

  There were no noises in the bushes or in the tree that the cat used as a ladder between the upper and lower decks, and, frowning, Barry walked down the wooden steps off the deck and around to the front of the house.

  Where he stopped.

  The flowers they'd planted had been ripped out and thrown into the driveway between the Suburban and the Toyota. Uprooted rosebushes lay littered on the asphalt. Geraniums and impatiens, clods of dirt still sticking to their roots, draped the Suburban's white hood. Ms bulbs were strewn about like golf balls on a driving range.

  Someone had sneaked onto their property in the middle of the night and destroyed their fledgling garden, had negated all of their hard work, and his first reaction was one of anger. He wanted to beat the shit out of whoever had done this. But there was unease mixed in there as well, and while it was probably just kids Pretty sick kids --he couldn't help feeling slightly disturbed by the fact that their house was the target of this vandalism, that they had been specifically chosen to be the recipients of this attack. His gaze shifted to the various areas they'd landscaped, and he saw that every last plant they'd put in had been pulled out of the ground or trampled. Their property looked as though a mini hurricane had hit it, and only pine trees and manzanitas seemed to remain standing.