“Yeah. All she wanted to talk about was how I was wasting every minute of my life that wasn’t spent evangelizing for Jesus.”
“The captain asked her one time, trying to be friendly, how much time she spent reading her Bible every day. She gave him a horrified look and said, ‘Think of the souls I might save in the time I’d waste reading.’”
“Good thing she broke into a Catholic mass and demanded they all convert to ‘real Christianity.’ Losing the Catholic vote cost her the election, particularly since the mass was on TV and on the internet—and then network news.”
Joe smiled to himself, thinking he had escaped.
“Okay then, what the hell is wrong with people?” Serenity turned on Joe like it was still his fault.
“You’re asking a cop that? Too much leniency for repeat offenders. No criminal penalties for citizens who don’t report crimes. A system that’s inherently corrupt and won’t touch the powerful. Too—”
“All right, Dirty Harry, it was a rhetorical question. You know what I mean. Can’t this council see good sense? If they approve this budget tonight with almost no library funding, I don’t know how to keep our doors open. I’ve told them and told them and they just smile and say, ‘You’ll find a way, Serenity.’ And I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut and say ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir’ and make chicken salad out of chicken shit?”
“In fairness, you can’t keep your mouth shut and at the same time say ‘Yes, sir.’ For the record, I don’t see you doing much of either. And we’re on our way to speak at the council meeting where you will probably say a lot more than that.”
She glared. “You know what I mean. I’m tired of making something out of nothing.” She paused. “And I’m scared shitless to have to stand up and give a speech tonight with this city’s future riding on it.”
“You’ll be fine. Finding a way to make things work is what you do best.”
She thrust herself across the computer at him. “Do you know what a piece of bullshit that is? It’s like one of those things from Joy’s nice-to-real translation book. What it really means is, ‘Don’t expect any help from us. We’ll dump problems on you any way we see fit, and expect you to clean up the mess.’ I don’t know which is worse: my friends who are sure that I can fix this quietly so they won’t have to stand up to Bentley, or Bentley’s gang who will be happy when I can’t, and the library goes out of business.”
Joe thought about asking about that translation book but said nothing.
She poked a finger into the side of his face. “Is that what you want? Law-and-order Joe is going to sit there and watch people get away with practically murdering his own wife?”
She looked at Joe cowering in his seat. He reminded her of a cartoon elephant who was afraid of a mouse. “Just don’t leave me tonight, babe.”
“You know I won’t,” he said.
“I know. Just keep your gun handy if things get out of hand.”
“Do I need to shoot them, or you?”
“Doesn’t matter, so long as one of us gets some relief. Probably do me a favor if you just shoot me now. I’m so scared of speaking in front of everybody, I’m shaking and afraid I’m going to throw up.”
“Just pretend you’re talking to me. Besides, you’ve got your notes.”
She looked at the stack of index cards in her hand. “I’m sweating so much I’ll probably soak the cards too much to be able to read them.”
They pulled into the municipal complex and parked. She cracked the door open and hesitated on the edge of her seat. “Joe, this has got to work. They can’t have my library.”
“You’ll find a way,” he said. Then he smiled. “Just don’t rob a bank or I’ll have to arrest you.”
She tried to smile back, but it faded. “Yeah. Do things the nice, right way.”
He reached over and touched her thigh and she pushed away and looked out into the still-humid Alabama air. The Maddington Municipal Center was a modern brick building that tried to combine a spire with traditional Southern architecture. The results looked good if you squinted at it in the right way, not so good if you didn’t. Serenity usually was able to find the harmony in the building, but tonight she just saw a war between the two themes.
Maddington had been both a high-tech center with businesses built on genetics research and NASA contracts, and a deeply conservative old Southern country town. The former mayor had forged a partnership between the two cultures and grown jobs and services. But he moved to California and the council appointed Mayor Johnson, and he was… well, charitably, he was not the same, and the city spent more time fighting than progressing. The high-tech jobs and businesses and workers were drifting back to the larger city of Jericho next door, leaving Maddington increasingly filled with empty storefronts and hollow-eyed people coming into the library for help.
Serenity stared at a small knot of people marching into the building from the other side of the parking lot, all of them two steps behind Bentley, like warriors following their chief.
“Honey,” said Joe, coming out of the car, “Don’t be afraid of them. Politicians get to strut and pose and pretend, but they don’t run anything.”
Serenity waved her hands at Bentley’s entourage. “I sure as hell don’t see anybody telling them what to do.”
“You won’t see the people who tell them what to do here. Wouldn’t recognize them if you did. It’s the big companies and the crooks. No, scratch that. It’s what’s behind the corporations and the crooks. Even here in little Maddington, it’s like Vegas with its big hotels and showoffs strutting around, all for show. Somewhere in a back room in Vegas is a little man who takes a trivial one percent from every bet, every drug deal, every hamburger sold—and takes it every day. Those guys sit back and laugh at the rest of the world. There’s less glitter in Maddington, but the same spiders exist here. And, you never know who they are until their names come up in a police investigation and someone high up taps you on the shoulder and says, ‘you don’t need to look at him.’”
“You and Joy ought to get together and form a Paranoids Anonymous chapter,” Serenity said. “And maybe I should go to your shadow bosses for money.”
“Those guys take, they don’t give. And they set up useless politicians to keep people like you and me from getting to them.”
“Well, tell them to stop trampling my library.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Serenity quick-stepped to get ahead of Bentley’s group and Joe hurried to catch up. She marched in and claimed two seats in the front row, sitting with her back straight and her eyes straight ahead. She would get it right this time.
Then she felt a tap on her arm. Joe said, “Just don’t overreact this time, honey.”
She gave him a nasty look and he slumped down in the chair and pulled his hat down over his eyes. From under the hat came the words, “Please, Jesus.”
eleven
gone with the windbags
THE LOCAL big-haired Baptist minister opened the council meeting with a prayer while Serenity said her own silent one. The mayor started to read the agenda but Bentley leaned into his microphone so his voice boomed with the authority of God.
“We don’t need all that, Weatherford. We’re just here to approve the budget we talked about last time.” He smiled at his crowd and leaned back into the mic. “Let’s get this government business over so we can get home in time for the Braves game on TV tonight.” There was polite applause from a few of his people.
“Well.” Mayor Johnson looked around to the other council members. All were seated behind a walnut dais set three feet higher than the common people. He got no objection and heard a couple of “C’mon, c’mons.” The mayor looked out at the crowd. “I guess that’d be all right. I guess, if there’s no objections, we can vote.”