by Jonathan Dee
Constable, who was standing in the driveway, was startled to hear and then see Mark emerge from the woods—startled and a little offended, because how did people know he wouldn’t reflexively reach for his sidearm in a situation like that? “Sorry,” Mark said, raising his hands, “sorry, I’m his neighbor, I saw the lights, it was just the quickest way.” He knew Constable’s first name, had used it many times, but was self-conscious about using it now, when there was apparently some official business going on. Neither, though, could he bring himself to address him as “Trooper,” or “Officer.” It would have sounded almost sarcastic. “What’s happened?” he said. “Is everyone all right?”
“They’re not here,” Constable said. “They’re traveling, in Europe or somewhere. I called the First Selectman’s cell and they’re all fine.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Alarm went off.”
“Which one?” Mark said, and Constable looked at him. “I mean, I actually installed some of the alarms here. He hired me to. Years ago. Did somebody break in?”
Constable started to walk around to the front of the house and waited for Mark to follow him. They turned the corner and Mark felt the gravel of the driveway underneath his feet. Constable’s cruiser, its roof lights flashing, was parked there, but it wasn’t until Constable reached through his driver’s-side window and flicked on his headlights that Mark could see someone had vandalized the front door and the wall surrounding it. Across the facade of the house, in black paint, were the words LEAVE US ALONE.
Mark’s face flushed the way it always did when he saw someone mistreating something of value. He thought instantly of his brother: not that he had done this, but that he was somehow responsible for it nonetheless.
“There are security cameras,” he said to Constable. “They record.”
They recorded directly onto Hadi’s own hard drive, and they wiped every twenty-four hours. Constable explained this to the First Selectman and asked permission, in light of the situation, to gain entry to his home, and to access his hard drive. Hadi said no. Constable stated the obvious: that this meant whoever had vandalized Hadi’s home would not be caught, and Hadi said that was okay, in the end they were just talking about a new coat of paint. Constable hung up the phone in his little cubby of a Town Hall office. He’d come there in the first place because he figured Anne Marie might have a key to Hadi’s house. He considered driving to Pittsfield to find a judge who might issue him a warrant. But that was an impulse, he knew, born of pride rather than pursuit of justice. In the end he would lose his job over that, and for what? For the arrest of some kid, who would do community service for it anyway. He let the twenty-four hours elapse, and he wound up acceding to Hadi’s other request as well, which was that Constable leave the incident off of the official weekly police blotter.
—
It had all worked out better than Allerton could have hoped. The proposed tobacco ban was public, which meant that he could cast the vote to kill it and look like a hero. They had their monthly BOS meeting in the Town Hall conference room—the three of them and Hadi’s secretary, Anne Marie. Even after the meeting was called to order, she sat patiently with her pen raised half an inch above her steno pad as they talked about nothing—mostly about where Waltz wanted to order food. Tom tried not to let his impatience show. He was determined not to bring up the ban before Hadi did. After a half hour or so in which they mostly discussed repainting the bandstand, his patience was rewarded.
“If there’s no new business,” Hadi said, “there’s one other important piece of news we need to discuss.”
“The no-tobacco thing,” Waltz said. “You know, I know you’d like a unanimous yes on that, but frankly anyone who knows me in this town would know that there’s no way I’d go for it. I’d be voting for having to drive to Great Barrington every time I want a pack of cigarettes. Plus putting Hank’s newsstand on Main out of business, basically.”
“Or you could just quit smoking,” Hadi said, “but in any case, that’s all moot, because I’m not bringing that one to a vote.”
“You’re not?” Tom said.
“No. As I said, a piece of news. I’ve already given to Anne Marie, and I’ll give to you two now, a letter to be read into the minutes of this meeting.”
He slid two copies down the polished table, and Allerton read it, his face flushing. It was a letter of resignation. Afraid of making the wrong move, somehow, Allerton kept his head down, face still, and read the letter again.
“What the hell is this?” Waltz said.
Allerton looked up at Anne Marie, still with her pen held just above the paper, waiting for someone to say something that counted. Her face betrayed nothing. Yet she had known before any of them, for days maybe. She knows where the bodies are buried, was the phrase that went through his head, he didn’t know why. She was probably out of a job now herself—no way she’d work for him, that was for damn sure—yet whatever she was feeling, if she was feeling anything at all, was entombed in her. He did not understand people like that. Creepy.
“It’s what it says,” Hadi said evenly. “I think the time has come, both for me, professionally speaking, and for the town. It’s been a grand experiment, and I think for the most part it’s worked really well, but now it’s time for new challenges.”
—
“Are you staying here?” Allerton said. “I mean, to live?”
“No.”
“Where are you going?”
“Back to New York. So my family is happy about that. And I owe them that much, really.”
A silence fell on the room, a silence with which Hadi grew quickly and visibly impatient.
“This is effective when?” Waltz said.
“Effective immediately, John. It says right there in the first sentence.”
“Oh yeah,” Waltz said.
“This isn’t how it works,” Allerton said sharply. He wasn’t at all sure, in the moment, what he was feeling, whether what was happening was good or bad for him, and it was that sense of being outflanked that made him mad. “We have elections. We just had one. It’s a commitment. You can’t just walk out on it.”
“It was an orderly transition when Marty Solomon died,” Hadi said, “and it’ll be orderly now. I helped this town through a rough patch. You and John are capable of running things just fine without me. I don’t imagine you’d disagree with that, Tom?”
“Marty Solomon died,” Allerton said. “He didn’t just get bored.”
“Oh, I haven’t lost interest. This area will always have a special place in my heart.”
“Is it because you don’t feel sufficiently appreciated? We don’t kiss your ass or act grateful enough, is that it?”
Anne Marie, he realized, had no intention of taking down a single word. She would write what she would write, and that would be the record.
“You’re looking at it backwards, Tom,” Hadi said. “Listen, I’m well aware that the sentiment of the town is turning against me a little bit. I think that’s inevitable, actually, which is why it’s important that people not hang on to power for too long. Now, the election, and the charter of the town, technically empower me not to give a damn about any of that. I’m entitled to continue to govern until the end of my term. But why would I want to do that? I’m not some tyrant. I have no desire to govern without the full consent of the governed.”
“How will,” Waltz began, and then he seemed to be groping for a word or phrase. “How will we let the people know?”
“Tomorrow I will give it to the Gazette and ask them, or ask her I guess, to just run it as is. Reproduce it. No interview or anything like that. I don’t want to do anything to make it seem like a bigger deal than it is. Which is, as I’ve said, in the grand scheme of this town’s history not a very big deal.”
“So the Gazette comes out tomorrow,” Allerton said, “so this won’t be in there for another week. In the meantime we should just, what?”
“In the meantime I think you
should just sit on this news if you can. I know the timing is awkward, but the only way around that would have been to give the letter to the Gazette before I gave it to you, and I didn’t think that would be right.”
He glanced around the table at each of them, including Anne Marie, whose eyes were now on him as well.
“In fact,” he said, “I’ll bet you a lot of people will be happy about it. I’m happy too. Win-win. Now, if there’s no other new business?”
—
Allerton thought it unrealistic that the news of Hadi’s resignation wouldn’t get out somehow before it appeared in the newspaper. Gone were the days when anyone learned actual news, even local news, from a weekly paper. He didn’t necessarily trust himself to keep a secret like that. But he did keep it, and so did the others. It was less about honoring Hadi’s last request than about fear of the news’s consequences, and reluctance to bring them on.
For even though he knew it on some not entirely conscious level, he did not fully understand how much of Howland’s funding came out of Hadi’s own pocket until he sat with the treasurer and the mostly useless Waltz and went through the books.
Hadi had given the town’s two school bus drivers a raise, in the form of yearly bonuses. He’d paid all of last year’s groundskeeping expenses for the town green, the war memorial, and the Babe Ruth League field. He paid the Animal Control officer’s entire salary, despite the fact that the Animal Control officer, as far as Tom could remember, had not been called upon to actually do anything, other than fill out government forms, for a few years. He paid for the flowers in the flower boxes on Main Street every Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day. He’d written a personal check to the fireworks company. He’d paid for septic repairs at the high school, a problem Allerton had never even heard about.
As for whatever small personal checks he might have written to tide over local businesses, charities, and even individual homeowners, that was not considered official town business and so there was no record of it anywhere.
He’d done all this, of course, while actually lowering the town’s tax rate to levels not seen since before any of them had lived there. Which meant—as Allerton kept trying to impress upon his new co-chief officer of the government—they were going to have to raise those property tax levels again, soon, sharply, and a reassessment of every commercial and residential property in the town limits would have to follow.
“No effing way,” Waltz said. “They’ll kill us.”
“Okay, well, the money has to come from somewhere. What do you suggest we do?”
“Pull a Hadi?” he said, and laughed.
—
Mark was so angry he didn’t even feel he could call his brother on the phone. Instead he sent him an email: Nice work, jackass, it said. Happy now?
Just pay me what you owe me, Gerry wrote back. If everybody in this town would just pay each other what they owed, instead of looking for excuses not to, then things would straighten themselves out pretty quick.
—
Two weeks after the letter was published, in facsimile form as Hadi had wanted, on the front page of the Gazette, the monthly town meeting was scheduled to take place. Allerton sat in his chair in his office and watched the parking lot fill. He tried to think of some pretext for canceling, even now as he could hear the footsteps in the hallways, but that would only have led to more adversarial feeling. These meetings, pointless though they usually were, were a tradition. Anyway, even if he waited until the last citizen had arrived, snuck out to the lot, and drove home, that would only have left Waltz in charge, and God knew what might emerge from a meeting like that.
He entered the auditorium and took his seat at the folding table just in front of the old stage. There weren’t enough chairs to seat everyone. The cookies were already gone. Belatedly it occurred to him that there was no longer anyone to take the minutes. Anne Marie had decamped along with her boss. There would be no official record of whatever was discussed.
“Before we open the floor to new motions,” Allerton said into the microphone, “as is traditional at these gatherings, let me briefly go over a few basic facts.” They were already looking at him angrily. “The former First Selectman was, as per his campaign promise, funding some of the town’s essential operations personally. More, probably, than you, or we for that matter, were aware.”
“So he’s going to stop doing that?” somebody shouted. “Do we know that for sure?”
Allerton closed his eyes, trying to stay patient. “Yes, obviously, he is going to stop doing that. He’s left office, he’s left town, he will find something else to get interested in, presumably. But Howland ran just fine for a long time before he got here, and it will run just fine after. He was a blip. He did some damage that we will have to undo”—there was a scary, throaty noise of discord in the crowd—“but fundamentally, big-picture-wise, nothing has really changed.”
He paused. Hands were raised, but in the interest of procedure, he ignored them.
“In concert with the treasurer and the tax collector, we have made some calculations that might help you to see the nature of the challenge in front of us,” he went on. “Were we to continue to fund all of the town’s current government operations—”
“He’s not asking for any of the money back, is he?” someone said.
“No. He never said any such thing. And I think he would have, if that was his intent. Anyway, if we continued spending at its current levels, and revenue also at its current levels, in one year’s time we would have run up a deficit of approximately four hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars.”
Consternation in the hall.
“You mean we’re in debt four hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars?”
“No, that’s not what I said.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that if we want to continue providing certain services, then the money for those services, which previously came from a private source, is going to have to come from somewhere else.”
“Like from where?”
“From all of us, together. The way it’s always been.”
“You can’t say the actual word, can you?”
“From me, just as from you. I live in this town too.”
“Yeah, but we pay your salary! Hadi didn’t even have a salary!”
“You’ll be paying me the same salary you have all along. Unlike my predecessor, I am not able to work for free. I have a family.”
“Oh, excuse me, you have a family!”
“Really we’re only talking about restoring things to their previous level. We’re not actually raising anything.”
“Things! Just say the word. You can’t even say it.”
“There will be some pain, but we’ll all share the burden equally.”
“Oh my God, Tom, you should be working in Washington. You’re a natural. I’ve never heard such silver-tongued bullshit in my entire life. How can you raise taxes on us? We didn’t even elect you!”
“Now, yes you did! You think I want to be in this position right now? I had no choice.”
He glanced over in hatred at the town clerk, who sat with his eyes wide. “Jesus,” Allerton whispered, not quite softly enough, “are you just going to sit there? Isn’t there some kind of procedural something you can invoke? Let’s move on!”
The clerk looked at his gavel for a moment as if afraid of it, as if it had been left there menacingly for him like a fish in a newspaper, then he picked it up and hammered away with it until the room was mostly silent. “Open the floor for new motions,” he called hoarsely.
In anticipation of this there was already a man standing patiently at the microphone, his hands clasped in front of him, and Allerton saw that it was Gerry Firth. Good, he thought, let that asshole bear the brunt of this for a while; directly or indirectly, he deserved it. Allerton pointed a finger at him to permit him to speak.
“Everybody’s pretty upset,” Gerry said. Allerton scanned the other faces in
the crowd; his understanding, well before tonight, was that people didn’t like Gerry particularly, nor his brother. “But I think we should look at this instead as an opportunity. The Hadi regime was kind of a fool’s paradise all along, right? I mean it was fun while it lasted, but if we really assumed it was going to last forever, that’s on us.
“But it did one constructive thing, even if by accident. It broke this town’s government. I think we can all agree that the government of Howland, of Massachusetts, of the United States, has grown much, much too powerful and arrogant, has grown out of control? I see you nodding. I see most people nodding. Okay, so, here is a golden opportunity, in our own backyard, to start over. The town’s tax structure is gone. So let’s think hard for a minute before we just vote to put it back the way it was. Did we really like the way it was? The system of services—things like a youth center, shuttle bus service, flowers on Main Street—a lot of which was pretty much invented just in order to justify the taxes being there in the first place: that’s gone too. There was a kind of image, a projection, of these things for the last five years, but now the projector has been turned off and we see what’s really there, which is rubble, basically. And I say good. We have become too dependent on power. Now there’s nobody left to depend on. If we fail, we fail, but if we succeed, we do it the only way it’s worth doing.”
No one else had risen to wait a turn to speak, so Allerton didn’t see how he could justify telling Gerry his time was up. While he was thinking this, their eyes met.
“Tom Allerton is a good man,” Gerry said, “and I think he appreciates that it’s a series of accidents that put him where he is today, and I think he wants to be responsive, to carry out our will rather than try to ignore or overrule it. So let’s ask for his pledge today, and that of Mr. Waltz too: No new taxes without a direct referendum to approve those taxes. No new spending without the money on hand. No debt. We will take care of ourselves by not asking anyone else to take care of us. First comes the money, and only then comes the decision about how to spend it. Just the way each of us does it in our own lives. We will get along just fine. We will put our own house in order. We will shovel our own damn snow and drive our own kids to school. It is time for self-reliance. And if we succeed here, we’ll send a message to the rest of the Berkshires and beyond.”
