Удушье (Choke)

His Highness, he forbids tattoos. Nose rings have to stay in your locker while you're at work. You can't chew gum. You can't whistle any songs by the Beatles.

'Any violation of character,' he says, 'and you will be pun­ished.'

Punished?

'You'll be let go,' he says. 'Or you can spend two hours in the stocks.'

Stocks?

'In the village square,' he says.

He means bondage. Sadism. Role playing and public humili­ation. The governor himself, he makes you wear clocked stock­ings and tight wool breeches with no underwear and calls this authentic. This is who wants women bent over in the stocks for just wearing nail polish. Either that or you're fired with no unem­ployment checks, nothing. And a bad job reference to boot. And for sure, nobody wants it on their resume that they were a shitty candlemaker.

Being unmarried twenty-five-year-old guys in the eighteenth century, our options were pretty limited. Footman. Apprentice. Gravedigger. Cooper, whatever that is. Bootblack, whatever that is. Chimneysweep. Farmer. The minute they say town crier, Denny said, 'Yeah. Okay. I can do that. Really, I spend half my life crying.'

His Highness looks at Denny and says, 'Those glasses you're wearing, do you need them?'

'Only to see with,' Denny says.

I took the job because there are worse things than working with your best friend.

Sort-of best friend.

Still, you'd think this would be more fun, a fun job with a bunch of Drama Club types and community theater folks. Not this chain gang of throwbacks. These Puritan hypocrites.

If the Ye Old Town Council only knew Mistress Plain, the seamstress, is a needle freak. The miller is cooking crystal meth. The innkeeper deals acid to the busloads of bored teenagers who get dragged here on school field trips. These kids sit in rapt atten­tion watching while Mistress Halloway cards wool and spins it into yarn, the whole time she's lecturing them on sheep repro­duction and eating hashish johnnycake. These people, the potter on methadone, the glassblower on Percodans, and the silversmith popping Vicodins, they've found their niche. The stableboy, hiding his headphones under a tricorner hat, plugged in on Special K and twitching to his own private rave, they're all a bunch of hippie burnouts peddling their agrarian bullshit, but okay, that's just my opinion.

Even Farmer Reldon has his plot of prime weed out behind the corn and the pole beans and junk. Only he calls it hemp.

The only funny part about Colonial Dunsboro is maybe it's too authentic, but for all the wrong reasons. This whole crowd of losers and nutcases who hide out here because they can't make it in the real world, in real jobs—isn't this why we left England in the first place? To establish our own alternate reality. Weren't the Pilgrims pretty much the crackpots of their time? For sure, in­stead of just wanting to believe something different about God's love, the losers I work with want to find salvation through com­pulsive behaviors.

Or through little power and humiliation games. Witness His Lord High Charlie behind lace curtains, just some failed drama major. Here, he's the law, watching whoever gets bent over, yank­ing his dog with one white-gloved hand. For sure, they don't teach you this in history class, but in colonial times, the person who got left in the stocks overnight was nothing less than fair game for everybody to nail. Men or women, anybody bent over had no way of knowing who was doing the ram job, and this was the real reason you never wanted to end up here unless you had a family member or a friend who'd stand with you the whole time. To protect you. To watch your ass, for real.

'Dude,' Denny says. 'It's my pants, again.'

So I pull them back up.

The rain's wet Denny's shirt flat to his skinny back so the bones of his shoulders and the trail of his spine show through, even whiter than the unbleached cotton material. The mud's up around the tops of his wooden clogs and spilling in. Even with my hat on, my coat's getting soaked, and the damp makes my dog and dice all wadded up in the crotch of my wool breeches start to itch. Even the crippled chickens have clucked off to find somewhere dry.

'Dude,' Denny says, and sniffs. 'For serious, you don't have to stay.'

From what I remember about physical diagnosis, Denny's pallor could mean liver tumors.