The Association

by Bentley Little

  All of the regulars were there, in place and eating. They were unusually quiet when he walked in, and he had the unsettling feeling that they had halted their conversations as a result of his presence.

  "Howdy, all!" he called out, smiling too broadly as he passed by the tables nearest the door.

  Hank offered a curt "Hello," not bothering to look up from his plate.

  Behind the counter, Bert merely nodded, and Barry sat down at his usual table, ordering his usual lunch from an uncharacteristically silent Lurlene.

  He sipped his water and tried to catch the eye of one of his buddies, but no one was looking in his direction and they seemed to be making a concerted effort to ignore him. He felt the way he had that first day--unwanted and out of place--and it was all he could do to remain in his seat and not tell Bert to wrap up his food to go.

  Gradually, conversation started up again, first over on the opposite side of the room, then at the tables closer to his wall seat. He wasn't listening exactly, didn't want to eavesdrop on other people's business, but when he heard Joe mention the phrase "Bonita Vista," his ears pricked up.

  "This time they've gone too far," Lyle was saying.

  Someone else agreed.

  "And you know they're not going to be held responsible," Joe said loudly. "Nothing's going to happen to them. No one's going to get punished."

  Lurlene brought over Barry's order. "His sister found him," she said, ignoring him and addressing Lyle's table. "She was going out to feed the dog, and he was next to the doggie bowl."

  Hank cleared his throat. "You guys're talkin ' like he's dead. I thought they didn't know if he was going to be okay yet or not."

  "They don't," Joe said. "But it don't look good. A chopper airlifted him to the Cedar City hospital. They got a good poison unit there. But last I heard, he was in a coma and they don't expect him to come out of it."

  Ralph spoke loudly. "That homeowners' association killed him just as surely as if they'd put a gun to his head."

  Barry focused on his food. The conversation had obviously been pitched at such a level for his benefit, but he was at a loss and didn't know how he was supposed to respond. Or if he was supposed to respond. He finished his lunch in silence, paid his bill, then nodded good-bye and headed back out to the office.

  What was that about? he wondered. They knew about his hatred of the homeowners' association. Hank did, at least. And there was no way they could think he'd be involved in any poisoning scheme. So why the cold shoulder?

  He didn't know, but it bothered him, and after sitting in front of his computer for the next two hours and hacking out only a single paragraph, he shut everything off, closed up shop, and went home.

  He was watching TV when Maureen arrived home from a meeting with her newest client, some bigwig at the bank, and she gave him a disgusted look as she put down her briefcase. "Afternoon talk shows?"

  "How else am I going to keep up with popular slang? I'm isolated out here. This helps me learn what people are talking about and the way they talk about it. This is research." He grinned. "I can take this off my taxes, right?"

  "Try to be a person," she said.

  He followed her upstairs to the kitchen, where she poured herself a Diet Coke. "I'm not used to all this ... selling," she admitted. "Back in California, I just had to convince people that I was the best accountant for the job.

  I didn't have to convince them that they needed an accountant, period.

  People are so backward here."

  "Yeah, but the scenery's beautiful." Barry pointed out the sliding glass door.

  Maureen laughed. "Yes, the scenery's beautiful."

  They decided to go for a late afternoon walk, and Barry waited downstairs on the couch, watching two gorgeous women fight over a grotesquely overweight bigamist on TV while Maureen changed her shoes and filled up her sports bottle.

  They walked out to the street, and Barry stopped. "Which way?" he asked, looking in both directions. "Up or down?"

  "Let's go down the hill," Maureen suggested. "We'll save the hard stuff for last."

  They descended the steeply sloping street, walking slowly and holding hands so as not to accelerate unwantedly . They passed a handful of houses set back among the trees and some heavily forested lots before the road finally leveled off. Suddenly, the trees opened up and they were confronted on the right by what looked like nearly half an acre of denuded land.

  "Jesus," Barry said. He stopped short to take it all in. "Look at that." He pointed to the edge of the open space, where a group of shirtless men were lined up before a ditch, digging. An incongruously well-dressed man holding a black whip was standing behind the ditch on a raised section of ground, barking orders. It reminded him of a scene from some low-budget biblical epic or a revisionist in die film about the Old South.

  But there were no cameras rolling here.

  "What the hell's going on?"

  "They're digging a pool," Maureen said. "And laying a foundation for a community center. Audrey said they're volunteers."

  The man with the whip cracked it. "Faster!" he ordered. "We're falling behind!"

  "It doesn't look like they're doing this voluntarily to me."

  He realized that they were both talking low, as if afraid of being overheard, and Barry made a conscious effort to raise his voice. "This must be a joke. This can't be real."

  "I don't know, they were doing the same thing yesterday, although without the whip hand. And they've sure done a lot of clearing and digging since then. That's a lot of work for a joke."

  "I thought the association had all sorts of brush and tree cutting prohibitions."

  "Not for themselves," Maureen said dryly.

  They walked slowly past the open area, watching the men work.

  Maureen stopped and frowned. "Is that Greg David son?"

  He followed her pointing finger, saw a young man on the edge of the group who was half-hidden by a still extant manzanita bush. It did look like Greg, and Barry squinted at the man, trying to get a better view. "I thought he and his wife were moving out:"

  "So did I."

  "Greg!" he called out, but the man did not turn to look at him, did not respond at all, simply kept digging.

  "Maybe it's not him," Barry said. But he knew better. Obscured sight line or not, he recognized the man, and his gut confirmed what his eyes could not.

  There was something wrong here. Greg Davidson was not only supposed to have sold his house and moved to Arizona, but he had been as fiercely anti-association as Ray or Barry himself--and had more of a reason to be so than either of them. So why was he still here, volunteering his time to help the association build a swimming pool?

  He wasn't volunteering, Barry thought, and the idea made him shiver.

  The overseer cracked the whip once again.

  One of the other men looked familiar as well, a skinny guy with short brown hair, but Barry could not seem to place him.

  There was no reason they could not walk onto the property and look around, find out if it really was Greg David son, ask the man with the whip what the hell he was doing. This was association land, owned jointly by all, and they had as much right to be on it as anyone else.

  But they kept walking. Rights were different from reality, and without speaking they each knew that they were not welcome here, that there was something odd and decidedly threatening about this supposedly benign and communally beneficial volunteer effort.

  They did not talk until they were well past the site and the road had rounded a copse of tall trees, and even then it was only to say, "That was weird," and "Yeah." What they had seen, what they'd felt, was not something that lent itself to casual discussion, and to say any more than that would invest it with a power neither of them wanted it to have.

  Barry filed away the entire experience, as well as their reactions, in his mind, knowing that, like his introduction to Stumpy, it would one day come out in his fiction.

  They continued walking, spotting a deer eati
ng the azaleas that lined someone's driveway, seeing some sort of bright orange bird land on the dead limb of a juniper. It was like a different world, a perfect place where everyone and everything lived in harmony, and only the far-off pi inking of shovels behind them told him otherwise.

  They took a cross-street to the section of Bonita Vista on the other side of their hill, and met Mike halfway up Sycamore Drive. He was standing by the side of the road, bent over and holding his side, breathing deeply. He smiled sheepishly when he saw them. "That slope's a mother."

  Maureen laughed. "Come on! If Barry can do it, anyone can do it."

  "I resent that," Barry said. He looked over at Mike, who was still breathing hard. "I thought you were supposed to be in shape. You said you played tennis."

  "Well, I stand there and hit the ball over the net. I don't run or anything. That's why Tina has me exercising out here. She doesn't think I do enough physical activity. By the way, if she asks, you saw me jogging out here, not gasping for air by the side of the road."

  Maureen laughed. "Your secret's safe with us."

  "Where're you guys headed?"

  Barry shrugged. "Around the loop and back home."

  "Mind if I join you?"

  "Be our guest."

  They continued up the street. Like Mike, Barry could already feel himself getting winded, but he refused to acknowledge it or let on, and he took long, slow, deep breaths in order to keep himself from panting.

  The road came down the side of a small rise before sloping up again, and at the low point of the depression another street snaked off to the left.

  "Shortcut," Mike said, pointing.

  Barry read the sign as they approached. "Ponderosa Circle?"

  "It's misnamed. It's not really a circle. Halfway through, it turns into Pinion, which opens onto your street."

  Barry took one look at the steep road before them. "We'll take it."

  "Cowards," Maureen told them.

  "I don't see you objecting."

  They turned left. The narrow street hugged the side of the hill before dipping into a hollow. There weren't many houses in this section of Bonita Vista, only occasional dirt driveways on the right that led up to stilted vacation homes. The flat ground to their left remained heavily wooded and wildly overgrown, small metal stakes with lot numbers on them the only indication that the land had been subdivided at all.

  And then they saw the house.

  It was the biggest home Barry had seen in Bonita Vista, and it sat on an immaculately groomed lot, surrounded on three sides by a virtual wall of dense vegetation. Two, possibly three stories high, it was painted gray, with black trim and a black slate roof. The walls were solid save for two small slits to either side of the door. There were no windows. A wraparound porch seemed an afterthought, an effort to humanize the house, but there was something off-putting about the iron-gray structure, with its lack of windows and its intimidating bulk, something that resisted any and all attempts to soften its appearance.

  In the adjacent carport was a silver Lexus.

  A localized breeze sprang up, ruffling his hair, blowing cold against his sweaty skin, but leaving the trees and bushes untouched. Barry suddenly knew where'd he'd seen that other volunteer before. He was the nameless Jimmy driver who'd been forced off the road by the Lexus on his way home from Salt Lake City, the fellow Bonita Vista resident whom he'd given a ride.

  "Remember I told you about that accident on my way back from Salt Lake City, the Lexus that ran the guy off the road?"

  Maureen nodded. "Yeah."

  He pointed toward the carport. "That's it," he told her. "That's the car." He turned toward Mike. "Whose house is that? Who lives there?"

  "Calhoun," Mike said, and there was something in his voice that made Barry feel cold.

  The world was suddenly silent save for the rustle of the breeze and the sound of a metal pulley banging against the empty flagpole in the center of the grassy lawn.

  "Calhoun,” Mike nodded. "Jasper Calhoun. The president of the homeowners' association."

  Saturday.

  They spent the morning puttering around the yard: Barry scraping from the driveway dirt and debris that had been washed onto their property from yesterday's storm, Maureen trimming, feeding, and watering the plants in her garden.

  In the afternoon, Maureen concentrated on building a web page, sitting in front of a blank screen on her computer as she pored through the twin textbooks she'd recently received in the mail. Although she had picked up a few clients, her search for local business wasn't going quite as well as she'd hoped, and if she couldn't take over the town of Corban, then she was bound and determined to become a cyber-accountant and turn her business into an online global corporation.

  "E-accounting," she told Barry. "It's the wave of the future, and I'm on the ground floor."

  "That's a mixed metaphor," he told her.

  "I guess I'll let you proofread my prospectus when I take my corporation public."

  Barry was at loose ends. He'd been cheating the past week, writing at home--as though anyone would be able to prove he hadn't composed certain paragraphs at his office-but he didn't feel like writing today, and he didn't feel much like doing anything else. He tried to get into a book, but found himself daydreaming and reading the same sentence over and over. He turned on the television but there was nothing good on, and when he perused the video titles in their library he could not find anything that looked interesting.

  Maureen finally got tired of his restlessness and gave him an assignment.

  "Audrey put together her and Frank's tax returns for the past four years, and I promised I'd go over them. They've had to pay twice now, and she wants to make sure there aren't any surprises coming up in the immediate future. She's afraid they're red-flagged and the IRS will go back and get them for other years. Why don't you walk over to their place and pick them up for me."

  "Am I being that annoying?"

  "Yes. Now go make yourself useful."

  Despite his token protest, he was grateful to have something to do, and he went into the bedroom, where he kicked off his thongs and put on tennis shoes. The logical thing to do would have been to call first and make sure Audrey or Frank was home, but he wanted to walk, and he kissed the top of Maureen's head before heading out. "Be back soon, boss."

  The weather was hot and muggy. There would be no storm this afternoon but the air carried enough moisture that it upped the humidity to swamp conditions. Theirs was not the only house that had been deluged by runoff from yesterday's monsoon, and as he walked down the hill he saw several empty vacation homes with driveways full of mud and branches.

  He found himself wondering what Stumpy did when it rained. Did the limbless man hide under someone's porch or huddle beneath the branches of a tree? Did he have some sort of lean-to out there in the woods? Or was he so brain-damaged that he didn't notice and didn't care, sitting out in the torrential downpour and howling into the wind, wiggling through the mud, oblivious?

  Barry walked around the curve of the road and saw the site of the pool and community center. There'd been no one working either this morning or now, but the volunteers had already made significant strides toward their goal, and on the cleared land he could see the partially dug building foundation and the Olympic-sized pit that would be the pool.

  He was glad no one was working now. It was broad daylight and he was a grown man, but he was a grown man with a dark and overactive imagination, and the thought of seeing those zombie like diggers and their harsh taskmaster scared him.

  He reached the Hodges' house. Frank's pickup was not in the driveway, which meant that he and Audrey were probably in town shopping or something, but he walked between the tall pines and up the porch nonetheless, and rang the bell. To his surprise, Audrey answered the door. "Hi, Barry."

  "I didn't think anyone was home."

  "I'm here, but Frank's out fishing. Once a month, I let him out of my sight and allow him to spend the day at his secret spot o
n the creek.

  He never catches anything, but it seems to lighten his load a bit. If you're looking for him, he should be back around three or four."

  "Actually, I came to see you. Mo sent me over to pick up some tax forms."

  "That's right! Come in, come in." She stepped aside to allow him entrance, and he walked into the living room.

  She motioned him toward the couch. "You in a hurry or do you have time to stay and chat a little?"

  He shrugged, looked at his watch. "There's nothing pressing. I can stay a while."

  "Good. I want to talk to you about Liz. Frank and I are both worried sick about her."

  "So are we."

  "I stopped by yesterday afternoon to invite her over for lunch today, and she wouldn't even open the door. Just shouted at me from inside the house."

  "The same thing happened to us. We paid her a visit this morning after tennis, and she wouldn't come out. She told us she wasn't feeling well and would call on us when she felt better."

  "We have to do something. I know Ray's death was a big blow, but she has to try and get on with her life. I was thinking we could do some sort of intervention, gather all her friends together and march over there en masse, camp out if we have to and not leave until we have a chance to sit down and talk to her."

  Barry nodded. "It's worth a try."

  Audrey shook her head as though she'd just remembered something. "Oh, where are my manners! Do you want something to drink? Coffee? A

  beer?"

  "No thank you," Barry said.

  Audrey stood anyway. "Well, make yourself at home," she said. "I'll be back in a sec. I have to tinkle." She smiled sweetly at him, holding his gaze for a beat longer than was comfortable, and he looked away, embarrassed.

  She walked down the hall to the back of the house, and he leaned forward, sorting through the magazines on the coffee table: Bondage, Rough Sex, S&M Quarterly, Contemporary Torture Play. Hair prickled on the back of his neck.