Main Street was dead -- no cars, no pedestrians -- and as he walked along the dirty sidewalk toward the electronics store, he could not help thinking that if the town council had been made up primarily of merchants instead of real estate and construction people, the situation would be completely different.
A couple of merchants _had_ run last time, he thought, but he was pretty sure he'd voted against them.
Why hadn't he gotten involved in politics earlier?
He reached the electronics store, walked in. Street was playing Tetris on a green-screened Gameboy, leaning against the register, facing the door. There were no customers, and Street looked up hopefully as Bill entered the shop. 'Oh, it's you,' he said, disappointed.
'Fooled you. You thought I was a real customer, didn't you?'
'Don't rub it in.' Street finished his game, then put down the device. 'On your way to the farmer's market?' he asked.
'Very funny.'
'Just came down for a little shopping spree in beautiful downtown Juniper, then, huh?'
Bill walked around the counter, pulled out a folding chair, sat down.
'Whatever happened to that recall effort?' he asked. 'Weren't you guys going to get together and start circulating petitions?'
'Last I heard.'
'What happened?'
'I don't know. Nothing ever came of it. Pete was supposed to be in charge, but then he decided to sell his place, and it all sort of fell apart.'
'Maybe we should get it going again.'
'I was thinking the same thing,' Street admitted.
Street brought out a pen and notepad from the back room, and Bill began writing the text of a petition to recall the mayor and all four council members.
They were on the second draft when the phone rang. Street went to answer it.
'Hello? . . . It's Ben!' he announced.
Bill stopped writing.
'Bill's here . . . Yeah . . . Okay . . . See you in a minute.' He hung up the receiver, looked at Bill with raised eyebrows. 'He's corning right over.
Important news, he says. Wouldn't tell me over the phone.'
Bill stood, walked to the door, saw Ben hurrying across the street. 'It must be important.'
'Big news,' Ben said, walking up.
'What is it?'
'The mayor's resigned.'
Bill was stunned. He glanced over at Street, who shook his head in disbelief. 'You're serious?'
Ben nodded. 'The council, too. All of them.'
'_All_ of them?'
'What happened?' Street asked.
'No one knows. Or, rather, no one's talking. But it's effective immediately. We're without a local government at the moment.' He chuckled. 'Not that I'm complaining.'
'So, is there going to be a special election?'
'Of course. But candidates have to file, the logistics have to be worked out. It'll be at least a month or so.'
'Weird coincidence,' Street said. 'We were just working on a recall petition.'
'Well, you won't need that puppy anymore. They're gone, they're out, they're history.'
'I don't understand why they'd resign,' Bill said. 'Especially all of them at once.'
'It's a strange world.'
'You think pressure was put on them?'
'By The Store?'
'Who else?'
Ben thought for a moment. 'I'd say that's a good possibility.'
'But why? The council was a rubber stamp for everything The Store wanted.'
'Maybe they didn't go far enough,' Street suggested. 'Maybe The Store wanted them to do even more.'
It was a scary thought, and they were all silent, thinking about it.
'You think they'll run their own people?' Street asked.
'Probably,' Ben said. 'But this gives us a chance we didn't have before.
We can run _our_ own people. And the paper can get behind candidates who'll put the town's interests before those of The Store. I think we have a chance here to put this place back on track.'
'We might have the paper,' Bill said. 'But they have the radio station.'
'True enough. But I still think we have a fighting chance.'
'They have more money.'
'Money isn't everything.'
'Isn't it?'
'Remember those television commercials in the seventies? Those beautiful scenes of wildlife and natural beauty that were sponsored by oil companies? We were supposed to think that the oil companies were not hurting the environment, but helping it. Nature was getting itself into all sorts of trouble and the oil companies were fixing it and cleaning it up. They spent millions of dollars on that ad campaign because they not only wanted us to buy their products, they wanted us to love them.' He paused. 'Did anyone buy into that crap? After all that money and propaganda and airtime, is there a human being in this country who thinks that drilling for oil is good for the environment?'
'And you think the same thing applies here?'
'Why not?'
'I guess you're not as cynical as you pretend.'
Ben smiled. 'It's all a facade. Underneath this gruff exterior, I'm Pollyanna.'
Bill stared out the doorway. 'The Store still has a lot of supporters, though. It did bring jobs to Juniper.'
'And it took away just as many.'
A pickup truck sped by, a dented red Ford filled with teenagers that burnt rubber as it zoomed toward Granite. 'Fuck The Store!' a boy screamed at the top of his lungs, middle finger held high in the air.
Bill smiled. He turned back toward Ben. 'Maybe you're right,' he said.
He should've finished the documentation a week ago, but he'd been stretching it out. Ordinarily, he liked to complete his assignments as quickly as possible, but this time he intended to wait until his actual deadline.
He didn't want to help The Store any more than he had to.
Bill closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair. He had one humongous headache. He didn't know if he was actually getting sick or if it was simply stress, but for the past hour, he'd been concentrating more on the thumping in his head than on the work in front of him.
It was getting dark. The ponderosas outside his window had long since coalesced into a single jaggedly irregular wall of blackness, and the text on his screen had grown increasingly brighter as light drained out of the world around it. From the kitchen, he could hear Ginny taking plates out of the cupboard, and beyond that, the sound of the nightly news from the television in the living room.
He saved his afternoon's work on a diskette and was about to turn off his PC when the phone rang. The sharp sound of the ring intensified the pain in his forehead, and he closed his eyes against the noise, waiting for Ginny to answer the phone, hoping it wasn't for him.
'Bill!' she called a beat later.
Damn. He picked up the phone on his desk. 'Hello?'
'It's me,' Ben said.
'Yeah?'
'The mayor and the council. They're dead,' Ben said. 'All of them.' There was a pause, and Bill could hear him exhale. 'I've never seen anything like it.'
'Back up. Where are you? What happened? Were they killed?'
