Mark K. Kauffman
2003
This was across the street from the Incident:
“There were these guys over there with their fancy-schmancy big deal bandannas, showin’ off to the gals outside Gilbert’s ice cream parlor.”
“Yeah, ’n Charlie here struts on over there ’n gives them a good dressin’ down, ‘e did!”
“Weren’t nothin’, really. But it’s how I got this scorch mark on my backahand, see?”
The kid showed me the back of his left hand. Right below the knuckle of his middle finger was a raised, charred welt. It looked like someone had blow-torched a black Life Saver right into his skin.
What struck me most odd was how taciturn was Charlie.
After all, this was only fifteen minutes after the Incident.
Police Chief Bob Parsley sauntered over to us.
He is the only openly gay policeman I know.
He wore pink lace crotchless panties beneath his official uniform, but I only knew this because we were members of the same workout club.
“Hey, Simons, you pick up any dirt for me on this one?”
“Not a speck, Chief. Just a couple grifters passin’ through, I guess. Chatting up the local chickery,” I said.
Charlie burst out, “The one guy burned me!” And he thrust his left hand at Parsley who took the boy’s hand in his and looked at the odd burn mark and said, “Hmmph, beats me.”
Parsley dropped the hand and turned to me. “They leave in a car?”
“Nope,” I said. “Spaceship.”
“Oh,” said Parsley, “Which way they head?”
I pointed North. “Up toward Canada,” I said.
“Well, let them deal with it,” Parsley concluded the scene.
It was still three weeks to Labor Day.
Labor Day weekend, Mrs. Tuttle’s black Lab puppy threw up a plastic crocodile. That was Friday afternoon.
Saturday morning, as Chip Hazleton was scrubbing his Weber grill with a wire brush, prepping for a last blowout barbecue hoohah in his back yard, his daughter, Teresa, erupted from the house clutching Fluffers, the family dog, and screaming madly, “Fluffer’s on fire! She’s burning up!” And right there in front of Chip Hazleton, standing bedazzled beside his Weber grill, his $890 Bedlington terrier shrieked one final, tortured scream and quite simply exploded in Teresa’s chubby arms, spewing dog fur and brain matter and guts all over the patio and Chip and Teresa and the Weber grill.
And that was only Saturday morning.
By Sunday, when most of Bedlamb was gathered in the churches, mosque, or synagogue, it was so evident something had gone terribly wrong in the town that the holy men failed to control their congregants, because everyone was huddled with those around them in the pews and aisles, whispering rumor, truth, and imaginings. And it was all news of fresh disaster.
Elmer Codder’s milk cows’ udders shrank to pencil points.
Madge Perkins’ kale withered a week after planting, Ruben Michael’s hydraulic lift at his service station got stuck in the ‘up’ position with Mayor Freedman’s Cadillac astride. The lift wouldn’t come down for no expert anybody could find.
Faith McAdam’s mother fainted on the steps of the Odeon Theater, emerging from the matinee, claiming, when she awoke, that the “Star Chasers” had zapped her.
Everyone was in a tizzy.
Everyone except Martha Brimley, the sassy blonde ingénue junior prom queen from last spring, who had turned down Thad Merrick’s invitation to be his date at the Senior Prom.
Big mistake.
Thad was a computer genius at Bedlamb High. And handsome and suave to boot.
But Martha was a stuck-up hussy who thought she was better than everyone else in Bedlamb. Everyone but Chaz Hamilton, the football captain, and president of the Student Council and slated for early admission to Harvard.
Thad had said to Martha that balmy spring night in late April, “I don’t take ‘no’ lightly, Martha. Especially from a dame I thought I wanted.”
Martha had turned to Thad on the glider on her parents’ front porch and swiveled her pert nose to and fro and said, “You’re from the wrong side of town, Thad. Chaz is my hero!”
Now, on this Sunday morning before Labor Day, Martha is alone in her bathroom at home. Her parents are at church. She sits on a stool before a mirror in the tiled room. Her image is as discouraging as her visage. She’s punch-drunk and tired beyond words and only wanting for it all to end.
There’s a little piece of something at the back of her memory, some wisp of a look from Thad, that April night she spurned him.
And Thad had said, as he turned his back on her and departed, “Come fall, my dear, will come the Fall.”
And now Martha was beginning to understand what Thad had meant.
And she knew for the first time the power of her sexuality. And how she used it to hurt Thad, who wasn’t Chaz Hamilton.
She’s plum bejesus scared to shit. She runs for the toilet, but not soon enough, and spends all the time until her parents return from church cleaning up her mess and spraying the bath and bedroom with Febreeze.
In the ensuing week, Bedlamb shut down. The electricity wobbled and browned-out and finally flickered and went away on Sunday night. There was no reason for any business to open its doors on Monday. Without electricity, the computer-based commercial structure of the town ceased to exist. No markets, no food, no gas, no ATM.
No City Hall, either.
No government.
In short, Bedlam.
And without ‘juice,’ the Bedlamb homes and its citizens were deprived of air conditioning and music and television and radio. And laundry and soap operas and video games and net surfing. And if you lived on the outskirts of Bedlamb, and relied on a well and a septic system to support your waste habits, well, frankly, you were up the creek.
Fair to say the citizenry was nearly amok.
By Wednesday, people had consumed their reserves, their pantries bare, their kids banshees, and they all gathered in the town square and yelled at Mayor Castnor Freedman, the first black mayor ever in these parts, and he yelled back at them, “I don’t know what’s goin’ on here, folks, any more’n you do.
“I’ll say this though, I think this town’s come under a wicked spell,” and with that old man Freedman cast his wild white eyes up to the heavens and waved his long arms in the air and said, “If there’s someone here among us who knows what calamity has befallen us, let her speak now!”
And, of course, with that, everyone in the town square looked at themselves, if they were a woman, or, if they were a man, looked at the woman beside them, and the entire community erupted in speculative gossip about who amongst them might be responsible for all the disasters befallen them.
And Martha Brimley takes to the stage in the town square and shunts aside Mayor Freedman and says to the throng, “It’s my fault you’ve all been arrested in your daily lives.
“I spurned Thad Merrick’s lovey-dovey and he paid aliens to visit Bedlamb and create havoc.
“I’m sorry for my transgression, but I’m really pissed off at Thad and I wonder if he’s losing any sleep in his dorm room at MIT.”
And with that, all of Bedlamb rose up in a gathering cheer, and, though it was nearly a week past Labor Day, the town barbecued its celebratory way the next four days, straight through the weekend, like no town near here’s known.
Ever.
