The Association

by Bentley Little

  "This is against the rules!" Barry yelled. "You can't shut me up just because you disagree with me! I refuse to be silenced!

  The C, C, and Rs don't allow this!"

  "The amended ones do," Calhoun said calmly.

  There was laughter all around.

  Barry tried to punch the sergeant at arms, tried to pry the vice like grip from his forearm, but the man was unbelievably strong, and he was pulled toward the exit.

  "Let's hear it for Paul Henri!" the president called.

  The audience joined him in a chant: "Hiphip hurray! Hiphip hurray!"

  Barry was shoved outside, the door slamming shut behind him. He turned around, pounding on the door, demanding to be let in, but to no avail.

  Looking up at the windowless building, he tried to hear what was going on inside, but the community center was soundproof.

  What was going on in there now? Almost everything of importance had been decided and only ten minutes had passed. What were they going to do for the next two hours?

  He wasn't able to find out because a moment after his eviction, Maureen was forced out of the meeting as well.

  "Jeremy?"

  "Dude!"

  Barry switched the phone to his other ear, looked grimly over at Maureen. "We're, uh, having a little problem here."

  "The same one we talked about?"

  "Yeah." He felt better already. Jeremy was automatically being circumspect, not mentioning anything directly in case the phone was bugged. His Mend might be paranoid and overcautious, but sometimes that was a good thing. He smiled reassuringly at Maureen. "Remember you offered to ... to come out here if I needed some help?"

  "I'm there, dude. We all are. When do you want us?"

  It was as if a great responsibility had just been taken from him. As a writer, as someone who sat by himself in a room all day and typed, he was by nature and necessity something of a loner, an individualist who preferred to handle problems on his own, who saw himself as a solitary warrior against stupidity, hypocrisy, and all of the usual abstract ideals that writers loved so well, a staunch defender of truth, justice, and the American way. He had never been a team player, had never liked committees or collectives. He would rather deal with adversity on his own. But sometimes, he had to admit, it was nice to be part of a group.

  Sometimes it was necessary.

  He told Jeremy the situation without spelling things out, promising details later, and his Mend said that he'd gather Dylan and Chuck and that the three of them would be on the road as soon as humanly possible.

  Sure enough, he and Maureen were eating breakfast the next morning when the phone rang. It was the guard at the gate. "Mr. Welch?" the guard said in an unctuous, disapproving voice. "I have detained the occupants of two vehicles at the gate who claim to be friends of yours--"

  "They are," Barry told him. "Let them in."

  "I have a Mister Jeremy--"

  "I know who they are, and I told you, let them in."

  "This is highly irregular at this--"

  "You are the guard," Barry interrupted, his voice equally disapproving, anger just below the surface. "You work for us. Now do your job and obey me."

  He pressed the Talk button on the phone, cutting off the conversation, smiling as he put it down on the kitchen table. "They're here," he told Maureen.

  Several minutes later there came the shave-and a-haircut honks of two distinctly different car horns. Barry shoved the last forkful of hash browns in his mouth, hurried downstairs, and found his friends getting out of their cars and stretching.

  "Long night!" Jeremy called out. "We've been driving since yesterday afternoon!"

  Dylan emerged from the Saturn's back seat. "With a short stop off in Vegas."

  Maureen had followed him downstairs, and she grinned when she saw that Jeremy and Chuck had brought their wives. She greeted both Lupe and Danna with warm, grateful hugs.

  Lupe glanced around at the house, the yard, the trees. "It doesn't look like hell," she said.

  "Seems like a beautiful place," Danna agreed.

  "Looks can be deceiving." Maureen led them into the house. "As I'm sure you've heard before."

  Dylan had come stag, hitching a ride with Jeremy and Lupe, and he walked over to the mailbox and back, stretching his legs. "Things have changed a bit since last I was here. Who was that dick wad guarding the castle?"

  Barry smiled. "You like that? That's the famous gate I told you about. And he's our personal twenty-four hour-a day guard, making sure that the great unwashed don't try to drive down our streets and look at our homes."

  Jeremy walked up. "Things are getting bad, huh?"

  "You don't know the half of it."

  Barry spent the next half hour describing the situation to them in detail, from the moment he returned from his California trip and saw the board president force the Jimmy driver off the road to the surreal annual meeting and his ceremonious expulsion. More than once, Maureen called for them to come inside, get something to drink, but as sexist as it was, he felt more comfortable talking outside here, away from the wives, and he laid things out in a blunter, more honest way than he would have if the women were present.

  Chuck shook his head. "What the hell have you gotten yourself into?"

  "This is kind of cool in a way." Dylan looked sheepish as all eyes turned disapprovingly toward him. "Well, not cool maybe, but..." His voice trailed off.

  "Trust me," Barry said. "It's not 'cool' at all if you have to live here."

  "But do you have to?" Chuck asked. "Can't you just move back?"

  "We wanted to," he admitted.

  "So what's the problem?"

  He explained about the fines and the frozen assets and the very real possibility of bankruptcy. "Besides," he said, "I can't let those bastards think they ran me off. I can't let them win."

  "They won't win," Jeremy told him. "We're here."

  Dylan grinned "All right!" he said, pumping a fist into the air.

  "Time to kick some ass!"

  They went inside finally, joining the women, and talk turned to other things, personal things: work, families, lives. Both Barry and Maureen found that they were hungry for news of the outside world, happy to lose themselves in the minutiae of their friends' existence, to receive updates on the southern California lifestyle they'd given up and left behind. All seven of them crammed into the Suburban, and Barry took them on a tour of Bonita Vista and then the town of Corban , including his teapot museum office. They had a greasy and unsatisfying lunch at Dairy King--Chuck had suggested the coffee shop, but Barry vetoed that idea, reminding them why--then did a little touristy sightseeing, taking in nearby Pinetop Lake and walking off a few calories with a short hike along the lake's nature trail.

  They returned home between two and three, the hottest part of the day, and continued to catch up on gossip, moving from the living room to the upper deck and then back into the living room when the sun started to go down and the bugs came out.

  Lupe suggested that they go get a pizza, but Barry said dryly that they weren't really leaving the house after dark these days, and Maureen said that she'd planned on making tacos.

  "That's even better," Lupe said.

  Maureen cut tomatoes and onions, while Lupe shredded the lettuce. Danna grated cheese. Maureen sent everyone out of the kitchen while she cooked the meat and fried the tortillas, and then it was time to eat.

  Talk of the association was banned at the dinner table, and to Barry it felt almost as though none of that insanity had ever happened. They were cocooned in their own little world here, safe from the harsh and twisted realities of Bonita Vista, and for the first time in a long while he went for over an hour without thinking once about the homeowners' association.

  They had wine with dinner and a few beers afterward, and they noisily talked politics and celebrity scandal as they made their way down to the living room. Barry sat down on the floor, motioning for the two couples to take the couch. Maureen settled into the chair, and after
looking around and ascertaining that there was no other place to sit, Dylan plopped down on the floor by the fireplace.

  "So what about sleeping arrangements?" Danna asked. "I saw only one guest room."

  "Two of you take the room," Maureen explained. "Two of you can sleep up here; the couch turns into a bed." She smiled. "Dylan? I'm afraid you're stuck with a feather mattress on the floor of my office."

  "That's okay. Can I look up porn on the Internet while the rest of you are asleep?"

  Maureen heaved a throw pillow at him.

  "That'll be fine." Dylan chuckled. "No problem."

  They'd caught each other up on almost everything, and for the first time since their friends had arrived this morning, there was a protracted silence.

  "It's too quiet here," Dylan said. "All this nature and stuff. I find it very disturbing. Don't you have some tunes or something?" He pointed toward the television. "You guys got cable or satellite?"

  Barry reached up to the TV table and tossed him the remote. "Go wild.

  Make yourself happy."

  There was nothing decent on any of the broadcast or cable channels, so Barry read through his list of videotapes until they found one they all could agree on: Young Frankenstein.

  Jeremy cleared his throat, spoke up. "Bare? Do you have a copy of those famous C, C, and Rs ?"

  "Sure. Hold on a sec." Barry went downstairs, grabbed the massive book from Maureen's computer desk, and hurried back up, handing it to Jeremy. "Here you go."

  While the rest of them watched the movie, Jeremy pored through the document. "Jesus!" he'd exclaim periodically, but when anyone asked what he'd found, he waved them away.

  Finally, he put the book down. The movie had ended some time ago, and they were watching a Dennis Miller rerun on HBO. "I can't believe this is real," he said.

  "Tell me about it."

  "Did you know that homosexual couples are banned from your little Utopia here? And unmarried couples?" He looked over at Lupe. "And minorities. Which I assume means anyone who isn't white."

  Dylan laughed. "I guess you two won't be retiring here in bee-yoo-tee-full Utah then, huh?"

  "I need to go through this with a highlighter. I'm not even halfway through it, and I can't even remember all of the craziness I read." He shook his head. "This is one densely shit-packed document."

  Barry grimaced. "I'll bet you believe me now, don't your'

  "I always believed you. I just didn't think they'd be so obvious about it. They're not only trying to impose their values on the membership, to legislate morality in a blatant way that no federal or local government would even attempt to do, but they're codifying shit that isn't even legal, apparently intending to use the courts' previous up holdings of homeowners' association bylaws as a shield."

  "I was hoping you'd say that. I thought so myself, but you're the lawyer, and I figured you could make an informed judgment."

  "Jesus."

  Using the remote, Dylan had been flipping through channels. "Hey," he said. "What's this? Some kind of community access station?"

  "BVTV," Barry and Maureen said in unison.

  On the screen, a young woman was jogging on one of the bridle trails.

  The camera zoomed in on her jiggling breasts.

  "BVTV?"

  "Bonita Vista Television," Barry explained. "I guess I forgot to tell you about that. There are security cameras all over this place. They use them to videotape people and broadcast it on their station."

  "Sometimes," Maureen added quietly, "they tape people in their own homes."

  "My God."

  "Don't worry," Barry said. "I've gone over this place with a fine-tooth comb. We're safe in here."

  "In here, maybe," Jeremy said. "But outside this house, we all have to be on our guard, watch what we say, put on a happy face. The streets, the green belts the empty lots-it's all theirs, enemy territory."

  That cast a pall on the evening, and they broke up soon after, Maureen bringing out fresh linen to make up the sofa bed for Chuck and Danna, then taking Jeremy and Lupe to the guest bedroom. Barry pulled the feather mattress out of the closet and set it up on the office floor for Dylan, tossing him a blanket. He went into their bedroom, closed the door, took off his clothes, and got under the covers to wait for Maureen, but he was more tired than he thought because by the time she returned he was dead asleep.

  Liz called during breakfast, It would have been a minor blip on the day's radar under normal circumstances, but considering the present state of affairs, it was a big deal and a cause for celebration. Maureen answered the phone and took the call, and she motioned frantically for Barry to take over the pancakes while she went downstairs to the master bedroom to talk in private.

  She hadn't spoken to Liz since the meeting, and the few words they'd exchanged at that time had been stilted and impersonal, but Liz sounded stronger than she had at any time since Ray's funeral.

  There was a renewed feistiness in her attitude and a welcome wryness in the older woman's voice as she said, "Sorry I haven't called lately, but I was temporarily overcome with grief, despair, and unbearable self-pity."

  "How are you?" Maureen asked, sitting down on the bed.

  "As well as can be expected, I suppose. Nothing's ever going to be the way it was, but I think I'm learning to accept that. I'm sorry I've been so out of it lately."

  "That's okay. I understand."

  "Part of it is lack of sleep. They've been keeping me up every night, trying to break me down, calling me at all hours with weird threatening phone calls, turning my power on and off, throwing things at my house.

  It's psychological warfare, and it obviously worked. It cut me off from my friends and made me so nervous and jumpy I was afraid to answer the phone or step out of the house."

  Anyplace else, at any other time, Maureen would have thought that, far from the crisis being over, it had kicked into high gear, Liz exhibiting alarming signs of acute paranoia. But she had no doubt that her friend's feelings were justified. "You lost your husband. We didn't expect you to be the life of the party."

  "Yes, but we both know my behavior went a little beyond that. And I

  want to thank you, all of you, for not giving up on me, for being there when I needed you even if I didn't take advantage of it."

  "We're your friends," Maureen said.

  "Well, I'm grateful, and I'm sorry for the way I acted. I thought I

  could try and make it up to you. I thought maybe you and Tina and Audrey could come up this afternoon for drinks and ... well, just to talk."

  "I'd love to," Maureen said. "We have some friends up from California, though." She hesitated, not wanting to de-j cline the invitation for fear of throwing a wet towel on I friend's tentative efforts to pull her life back together, but not sure she'd feel right about abandoning Lupe and Danna] for half the day. "If it wouldn't be too much of an imposition and if you felt you were up to it--"

  "Sure," Liz said, and she sounded like her old self. "Bring them along."

  "And, uh, Audrey ..." Maureen let the words trail off. She didn't want to burden Liz with additional problems, not; now.

  "You had a falling out," the older woman said intuitively .

  "Yeah, kind of."

  "Consider her uninvited."

  "But that's not fair. You've known Audrey a lot longer than you've known me."

  "I trust you," Liz said.

  It was a vote of confidence that made her feel happy and privileged.

  "What time do you want us there?" she asked.

  A wry chuckle. "Whenever's convenient for you. I'm certainly not going anywhere. I'll be here all day."

  "One o'clock?"

  "One o'clock would be fine."

  Maureen walked back upstairs and saw that Barry had given Danna and Lupe the two pancakes that had been cooking and now had two others on the frying pan. He greeted her with a quizzical raising of eyebrows.

  "Liz," she explained.

  "Everything's okay, isn't it?"


  "Yeah. She invited me over this afternoon." Maureen's glance took in Lupe and Danna. "All three of us. Seems she's feeling better."

  "A friend of yours?" Danna asked, sipping orange juice.

  "One of our only friends up here. Her husband was the one who was killed."

  "Oh."

  Barry nodded. "She's one of us."

  "Their house has a really spectacular view," Maureen couldn't help adding. "It's worth a trip up there just to see that."

  Barry handed her the spatula, relinquishing his role as cook. "So you think she's okay?"

  "I think so. I hope so." There was a pause. "She disinvited Audrey, but I think Tina's going to be there."

  "Are you okay with that?"

  "I don't know. We'll see." The seven of them spent the morning walking the neighborhood, Barry and Maureen pointing out the pool and community center as well as the home of the association president.

  Chuck brought along his palm corder videotaping everything they saw, zooming in on the president's house in particular and recording it in detail. "We need to find out where the other board members live," he said. "Then we tape their houses and go over everything with a fine-tooth comb, make sure they're not breaking even minor rules. Any infraction and we'll nail their asses to the wall, sue them for singling out some people and not others."

  Maureen laughed. "I'm glad you guys are here."

  "Seven heads are better than two."

  After a lunch of sandwiches and salad, Maureen charged Barry with cleaning the dishes and went downstairs to comb her hair and put on some lipstick.

  "You sure you want us to go?" Danna asked. "We could just stay here ..."

  "It'll be fun. And we won't stay too long. Don't worry."

  "But we're going to walk again?"

  "This is like a spa vacation," Lupe told her. "Sun and exercise.

  We'll return home to California tanned and fit."

  "That's one way to look at it."

  They kissed their husbands good-bye, Barry told Maureen to say hello for him, and they started off. All three were breathing heavily by the time they reached the crest of the hill, where Tina was waiting, standing in the intermittent shadows of Liz's willow tree in a vain effort to stay out of the hot sun. "I saw you walking up," she said.