The Locals

by Jonathan Dee

  He’d been spending most of his time lately on the blog, which of course was not a moneymaking venture, at least not yet. He’d heard of instances where it had become that. The Little Green Footballs guy had ads all over his blog now. Of course, that site’s concerns were national, not local, so its audience was national too. Gerry stuck mostly to local politics, for now—not that he was afraid to call out other figures in Washington and elsewhere when necessary, but you had to distinguish yourself somehow, and if you went after, say, Michael Moore, or Dan Rather, you were one of a million people saying the same thing. You wanted that—to be part of a movement—but you also had to be distinct from it. It wasn’t simple. You had to find a niche and try to make it yours, a basic principle of business, even though this was not a business. It occupied some sort of strange netherworld between journalism and diary. It was cathartic but you couldn’t let it get too cathartic. It was hard, sometimes, to decide whom you were speaking to. Gerry was anonymous—he went by the alias PC Barnum, and he called the blog Workingman’s Dread, which was a Grateful Dead reference he kind of regretted now, but you couldn’t just go changing your blog’s name if you wanted people to be able to find it in the vast steppes of the internet. More than once, he’d deleted entire posts because they’d morphed into angry rants so fringed with personal detail that a savvy local reader might have deduced who PC Barnum was. Personal exposure was something he did not want, at least not yet. Part of it was simple internet convention, but part of it was his feeling that if you didn’t have a name, to which people could attach their various judgments and preconceptions, then you were more credible as a voice, a voice of the people.

  The town government’s job was so simple that nobody even paid it enough attention to notice how badly their elected representatives were fucking things up, simple things. That was the paradox Gerry wanted to address. And if it was Gerry Firth versus Maeve Brennan, then everybody just treated it like gossip, but if it was Maeve Brennan versus the voice of the citizenry, that was a more substantial matter. That’s why he kept his name out of it. Not cowardice, as some of his commenters had it. A few of his blog’s twenty or so regular visitors were such internet novices that they used their real names; he had to fight the urge to say something to them, or to ding their car or commit some other form of petty retribution, when he ran into them in town.

  Calling himself PC Barnum gave him license to go a little overboard, sometimes, in his personal attacks on various Howland officials. But why shouldn’t he go overboard? The white noise of people’s indifference was itself loud enough that you had to shout over it in order to make yourself heard. Besides, Maeve Brennan really got under his skin. He knew her, but only in the way everyone knew everyone in Howland. He’d never really forgiven the unscheduled bump in his property taxes, which came at the worst possible time. It just seemed like organized crime to him. And taxes were thievery, in a sense: you paid whatever you were told to pay, in response to threats, to implied muscle. Somehow it was more humiliating when there was less muscle. He paid more to Uncle Sam than to the town of Howland, way more. But the Howland taxes were what made him feel like a weakling, like a man who would put up with anything.

  First he checked the comments on his previous post. It had only been up two days. Still, four comments was an embarrassing number, especially when one of them was some robot urging people to make money by working at home and another was from his sister Renee, out in Colorado Springs. She was a loyal reader, that was for sure, and she was also the only member of his family he’d told about the blog’s existence. Their politics were similar—though she was way more caught up in what he considered Anita Bryant–style bullshit about NAMBLA and other phantom nonsense—but more than that, it was just easier to deal with her via email and blog posting; because she lived far away, because he hadn’t seen her in almost five years, she was more like the idea of a sister.

  Tell it! she wrote in her comment. Lack of border protection is the shame of the nation, all the more so now with the constant terrorist threat. But liberals would rather risk our lives than stop recruiting future voters. Fast-tracking citizenship is next—you watch. He’d never had to ask her not to out herself, on his site, as his relative; she knew instinctively that he was trying to be taken seriously. Still, reading it, he knew that this support came not from some stranger whom his words had inspired but from his sister who loved him, and it made him feel frustratingly small-time. He would tell it, god damn it. If people didn’t hear you then you weren’t speaking loud enough.

  Threat Level Red! he wrote. That’s pretty much the situation right now in Howland, as this fall’s pseudo-election approaches. Oh, I know, the whole Threat Level color wheel thing is a classic piece of governmental fear-mongering in the first place. It’s a ploy they will use to keep us docile whenever they want to take another one of our freedoms away from us. Hey PC, you’ve written about that before! you’re saying. True. But that’s the irony I’m trying to wake you up to: they get you into such a lather over the supposed Muslim hordes with bombs in their underwear that they blind you to the real threat, the actual threat, right in front of you, and that threat is them.

  It was a little convoluted, but when he read it over again it made sense to him, so he pressed on. He tried not to revise too much. Correcting yourself, apart from things like misspelling, was just a manifestation of fear. Everything came out most honestly the first time.

  The State is Washington, sure, but the State won’t rest until it reaches all the way down into our lives, and the way they do that is on the local level. And let’s face it, readers: we are not going to take some bus down to Washington and march around in a circle on the National Mall and accomplish anything, except maybe giving ourselves the illusion of having fought back. No: the fight back begins on the local level, right here. So let’s look at this election. We only elect six officials in this little town: the Town Clerk, the Treasurer, the Tax Collector, and the three selectmen (no, I will not say “selectpersons,” thank you very much), including our Dear Leader, the First Selectman of Howland. And folks, though it beggars belief to say it, in all six of those “races,” the incumbent is running unopposed. No, wait—five, not six; we will be allowed to elect one brand new dummy Selectman, but that’s only because the other incumbent died. Lucky us!

  They’re running un-opposed because nobody else in town really wants those jobs, and who can blame them? I mean, who in their right mind would want to stop working for a living in order to become the Tax Collector? Who loves the State so much they want to devote their labor to supporting it, to becoming part of it? Not me! This is why we get the incompetent stiffs we get. It’s a vicious circle: the worse job our government does, the shallower the pool of morons that wants to go to work for it.

  But the time has come, people of Howland! This is a call to arms! We have to get ourselves inside the machine in order to start sabotaging and dismantling it from within. And the place to start is with the current First Selectman, that old pile of incompetence, that hag-bride of the State, that schoolmarm who has spent her life bearing out the truth of the maxim: those who can’t do, teach! In less than half a term, this matron saint of incompetence has run the town’s modest finances into the ground, and has responded in the only way her ilk knows how: by raising your taxes. She let Caldwell House escape through some government loophole, so that they don’t have to pay to be here even though we have to pay to go there, and that cut the revenue that goes to the town’s few simple, basic services, like snow removal or elder care, not that elder care should really be the province of the State but that’s a subject for another post. In fact, plowing too would work much more efficiently and cheaply in private hands…But anyway! She secures her salary and makes up for her financial mistakes by arbitrarily revaluing your homes. Where do you think that one is going, citizens? They will revalue your home until you can’t afford it anymore, and then they will take it from you and maybe consent to rent it back to you.

  Out
with her! Send her to the old folks’ home where she belongs! She can run the Social Committee there, maybe overspend on Bingo, in a place where her constituency is too demented to notice what her mistakes are costing them.

  Citizens, literally a Driver’s Ed dummy would have done a less destructive job this past year. We need someone to step up and oust her, just for one term, because surely one term is long enough to start dismantling the useless, self-justifying apparatus these apparatchiks continue to build and to solidify. Then let the state, the nation, the world take notice of the fact that we can, indeed, survive without it! Let Howland be the bathtub in which it drowns!

  He read it over quickly, shaking his cramped fingers, and hit Post. Two weeks later a link to the blog post was forwarded to the tax collector by a buddy of his, with the subject line “this isn’t you, is it? Tom Paine in the ass lol”; and the tax collector, after reading the post once quickly and then a second time more carefully, reforwarded the link to Maeve Brennan, whom he did not like. Maeve read it at her desk in Town Hall, got up, closed the door to her office, and sat down to read it again, dabbing her eyes.

  It was a small town, and everybody was constantly in everybody’s business despite a deep Yankee presumption of self-sufficiency. Surely it was possible to find out who was writing this hateful drivel without even the courage to sign their name to it. But she didn’t really have the urge to pursue it, to seek out and confront her enemies or even to know who they were. The truth was, she agreed she wasn’t doing a particularly great job. It was hard. It was hard to apportion the town’s budget to everybody’s satisfaction, to provide services and also pay for them, even in good times, and these were not especially good times. The job required bonhomie and ruthlessness, neither of which she possessed. She knew this. What hurt her feelings was the level of invective. She’d thought her neighbors, regarding her struggles in a job she’d never sought, might actually have sympathized with her a little bit. But tough times brought out the bad side of people, it seemed, and this internet was like some giant bathroom wall where you could just scrawl whatever hate you liked.

  The election was three weeks and change away. If she was voted out of office she’d be disappointed but also, in her heart of hearts, a tad relieved. There was no actual campaign, of course. There were, to her embarrassment, lawn signs with her name and face on them, a box of which had shown up unbidden from some party-affiliated headquarters in Boston. Half a dozen of them were brought home by Town Hall employees and stuck in the grass on the streets where they lived, but most of the signs remained in the box. After Maeve saw one of them vandalized, she refused to let anyone take another. She stayed in her office when she could. She had to negotiate the road-salt contract for the coming winter, with a really unpleasant, red-faced old bully from Pittsfield who hadn’t even heard that Marty was dead, and he left Town Hall with a smirk on his face suggesting he’d ripped her off, which he probably had. She didn’t even like going across the street to the Undermountain anymore, because while the cook and the waitress still smiled at her, their smiles weren’t the same.

  “You know,” the tax collector said to her one sunny, freezing morning in late October, standing in her office doorway chewing a breakfast sandwich from the Dunkin’ Donuts on 7, “you don’t even have to do this job if you don’t want to.”

  “Why would you say that to me?” Maeve asked him.

  “It’s just I’ve never seen anybody who dislikes her job quite so much,” he said. “And here you have an opportunity to get out of it. If you’re not careful, you’ll be on the hook for another four years.”

  But who would take my place? she thought, and then all of a sudden she got it. “You want to do it,” she said. He shrugged, and grinned, his teeth full of egg.

  People and their ambitions made her weary, too weary to take much offense. “I’ll think about it,” she said to him. “Still time, legally, to get your name on the ballot?”

  “Oh yeah, plenty,” he said. “The charter says we can accept nominees right through the town meeting.” The town meeting was held the Thursday before the election, in the auditorium right down the hall from where she sat and he stood. Maeve went home that night and watched Survivor, without much caring, for once, about the outcome. The shame of it was that she knew she was hesitating only because she needed the salary. She was sixty-one and there was nothing to take its place. Damn Marty Solomon for dropping dead anyway. A little more restraint in the fried-food department and her problems would all still be his. The next day she phoned Abigail Bogert, who edited the Howland Gazette and also wrote at least two of its front-page articles every week, and said that if Abigail would buy her lunch at that fancy place that had just opened up where the Benihana used to be, Maeve would have a scoop for her.

  Abigail was more worried than excited. Scoops, generally, were not what she was looking for; she ran the Gazette, which had published weekly since 1887, in a fragile coalition with the town and its steadier businesses. She was a booster—the Gazette existed to promote the town, to stimulate it, to fuel it, rather than to criticize it. Still, the paper itself survived on the thinnest of margins. Abigail’s imperative was to please her audience, enough so to hold off the doomsday withdrawal of one or more regular advertisers. But while all this was stressful for her, it was in no way ethically difficult. She wanted the town to do well, and she wanted to show it to itself in the best possible light. She had no taste whatsoever for confrontation, neither on the page nor in person.

  So her heart raced a bit as Maeve shared with her, a little tearfully, her decision to throw the town’s government into relative chaos. The election was two weeks away—twelve days away once the next issue of the Gazette came out, which was how the news would reach almost everyone. Abigail would have to finesse it, so as not to alarm people.

  “I never ran for the job in the first place, Abby, you know that,” Maeve said. Abigail put down her pen and her notebook, and tried to eat whatever it was they had been served. It had ferns in it. “I never said I was best qualified. I was just the one who volunteered. I did the best job I could. I don’t deserve to have everybody mad at me. It’s not my fault the town’s finances are going to hell in a handbasket.”

  Abigail looked around to be sure no one had overheard. The dining room was about half full, but she didn’t recognize a soul. “How is your soup?” she said helpfully. “Or not soup, right, they had some other name for it.”

  “People are good at complaining,” Maeve said. The two women had been comfortable acquaintances for more than ten years; neither had grown up in the area, but both their late husbands had. “I mean, it’s affecting me too. Here I made you take me to this hoity-toity restaurant just because I wanted to try it, but the bill will probably be outrageous.”

  “The paper can afford it,” Abigail said, even though the paper, effectively, was her, and she had made a point of ordering the second-cheapest item on the menu.

  “Anyway, I was saying people love to complain, but you don’t see any of them volunteering to serve. They want to cut my salary. Twenty-four thousand dollars a year! Hardly extravagant. I don’t sleep in the Town Hall, you know, I have heating bills just like anyone else.”

  “So there’s no one else running?” Abigail said. This was going to be the hardest story she ever wrote.

  “Well, no, of course there’s always one ambitious person. Tom Allerton. He says he’ll run. Nobody seems to like him that much, is my impression. But then who likes the tax collector? I’m sure he’ll do fine.”

  “Can I say that you’re endorsing him? That you’re, what’s the expression, handing over the reins to him?”

  “Say whatever you need to say, Abby. I’m not looking to make your life any harder.”

  That calmed Abigail a little bit, and she went back to the office and wrote the story in a manner that was truthful but calibrated not to excite. She fretted over the front-page layout—she wanted not to treat the story like some catastrophe, but also to give Maeve
the respectful sendoff that was her due—and in the end she went with a three-column headline, but not a banner. Four days later the paper was in every subscriber’s mailbox. Even Gerry Firth had a subscription, because the Gazette, twenty years out of date in all ways, had no website. When he spread the paper out flat on the kitchen table, his face flushed, because his first thought was that he’d made this happen. But he quickly got ahold of himself. Just because you write down your thoughts and hit Post doesn’t make you Thomas Jefferson, he thought. You’re just a guy with no job trying to get his thoughts together. Gerry was trying, as part of a general campaign of self-improvement calculated to bring his own life in line with his political principles, to be humbler. The problem wasn’t excessive pride, though—it was that the distinction between humility and self-loathing was, in practice, a slippery one. He read the story again. Tom Allerton, he thought. I sold him his house. He’s a moron too. Change doesn’t come all that easy.

  He resolved to go to that town meeting on Thursday, the meeting that was usually a pro forma adoption of the slate of candidates for the election five days later, but that promised to be more lively this time. A lot of other people in Howland resolved the same—among them his brother Mark, who kept thinking about something the Gazette story didn’t even mention: this was the first election since Marty Solomon’s death, so if Maeve Brennan was quitting, and this Tom Allerton was running to take her place, that still left one selectman position open. Mark wouldn’t even let the thought fully formulate, but it seemed logical that those in attendance would have to nominate someone for that third spot on the board, someone, very likely, present at the meeting itself.