Tommy said he was glad she was working for the West Condon NOW consortium and told her more about his dad’s battles with the governor, the city manager, and Charlie Bonali, who had formed a kind of unholy alliance, the police chief part of it, his dad the common enemy. With the mayor absconded, there was a vacuum in town and Minicozzi and Bonali, both seen as heroes of a sort, were filling it. The governor was dumping money into the town, but it was all going through Minicozzi, and there were probably kickbacks. Bonali’s building company got the big city hall restoration job without any competitive bids, Minicozzi claiming some kind of emergency powers. Already there were serious cost overruns, yet nothing seemed actually to have been done beyond fencing it off. The bank was robbed that day of the dynamite and the bikers were blamed, but his dad was pretty sure it was the bank lawyer. “Dad’s determined to bring the governor down. He’s putting his money in the next elections on the hotshot D.A. who nailed the Brunists.” Tommy said he had no problem with that guy pushing for all those executions in order to make his name. “Look at how many people got killed because of those rabid freaks.” Sally said that if they were freaks, then most of the rest of the country was, too, because a recent poll suggested over eighty percent of all Americans believe pretty much the same apocalyptic fantasies, it’s only that not many have put a particular date on them. As for the absentee biker gang being the ones who terrorized the town, not those who had been arrested and charged, Tommy shrugged and said they were all part of the same family and the same fanatical cult. “They all wore Brunist shit on their leathers. Their tattoos. Their minds were fucked by their religious leaders, who have to be held responsible.” The media often spoke now of the Baxter clan, referencing famous criminal families of the past. Old black-and-white photos of group hangings of captured bandit gangs were shown on television. Paul Baxter was on the original list of indictments until his head was found in the state park, whereupon he was replaced by Nathan, known now to be the masked gan-gleader advertising himself as “Kid Rivers.” There were countrywide “Dead or Alive” posters up for him and he was number one on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list, the mug shots showing a mean-looking kid about fourteen years old.
A honey blonde in a red shirt and skirt with white fringes coordinating with Will Henry’s red-fringed white suit had joined him to reprise the early L’Heureux-Rendine hits, “The Night My Daddy Loved Me Too Much,” “A Toybox of Tears,” “She’ll Let Me Know When It’s Time to Go,” and “I Thought I Knew Too Much about Love,” and then, by popular demand, for at least the fourth time that night, “The Blue Moon Motel,” with its rowdy appeal to get it on. “So listen up, cowboy, it ain’t never too soon,” they sang, “to pop your cork at the ole Blue Moon!” Tommy cleared his throat and said he was really sorry about his stupid badass behavior at the highway motel that night, he was out of control, a total jerk, and he hoped she could understand what he was going through and forgive him for it. She smiled and said sure (everybody in the joint was singing along now, bellowing out the lines, it was like church at its best), but when he told her he’d booked a room here as a kind of peace gesture—“It wasn’t easy, there were no vacancies,” he shouted over the raucous crowd, “but there was a last-minute cancellation!”—she smiled again and said no thanks. “Still holding a grudge?” “No, never did. But you’re not as cute without your funny nose guard.” He grinned and took her hand and said, “C’mon,” but she shook her head. She realized she felt nothing at all for this young man, which surprised her. She placed her other hand over his. “I’ve moved on, Tommy. Don’t take offense. But what can I say? You don’t really interest me any longer.” He seemed hurt by that and pulled his hand back, looking like he might revert to his badass jerk mode. Men are such sentimentalists.
And then, that winter, Sally’s life took a surprise turn. Her workshop story, “Jan,” was accepted by a prestigious national magazine. She hadn’t even sent it to them; her old workshop teacher had. To show he was open-minded, he had also submitted one of her “Against the Cretins” fragments to an eccentric avant-garde literary magazine, whose only literary criterion, he told her when she called, was dirty language, and that one, too, was taken. It seemed forever before “Jan” appeared, but within days of its publication (her prof had made a few cuts and moved a couple of paragraphs about, so she was torn between gratitude and fury, elation and frustration, though never mind, it was only a workshop exercise anyway), she was getting calls from agents and publishers, asking to see more. She was sure she could bowl them over with her more imaginative writing, so she rushed some of it off special delivery, though with each submission, just in case, she also mentioned what she might do with “Jan” if she ever developed it further. One of these letters got her both a literary agent and then a book offer from a big New York publisher. The publishers were not interested in the experimental work. They wanted a further expansion of the published story along the more conventional reportage lines she had suggested in her letter with the events clearly linked to the Brunist cult and the Mine Hill Massacre, which, with all the scheduled executions, were still in the national headlines, and they wanted it more or less immediately so that the book could appear while the subject was still topical.
To the dismay of her new agent who had negotiated the contract, she turned it down. She regretted her cowardly cover letter. She wasn’t a journalist. Breaking conventions is what she did. The agent said she was passing up an opportunity to launch her writing career, if the book was successful she could write how and what she wished thereafter, but Sally said that any book she wrote that she didn’t want to write was unlikely to be successful. Her agent was not very enthusiastic about the more imaginative work either, so she sent her stories around on her own, having been bitten somewhat by the publishing bug. After some time, the little vanguard magazine appeared with her “Cretins” story and they took a second, a “Big Mary” fragment, but the others all came back, and the “Big Mary” piece never got published because the magazine folded. With a little inside push from her agent and her former workshop teacher, however, her two published stories and the book interest did win her a fellowship that fall at a writers’ colony located in a mountain retreat far from West Condon, so she was able to give up her job with the construction firm. The architect friend of Tommy’s dad, also using that unsettling word “career,” offered her a full-time position at much higher wages either in West Condon or in the city if she wanted it, saying they were just about to break into big money, and she was tempted, but took a rain check, which she knew, unless devoid of writing ideas and utterly desperate, she’d never call in. He was a good-looking guy and, if he had come on to her, she probably, feeling lonely, would have accepted the offer and lived a completely different life, but he treated her more as one of the boys.
All of this had little impact back home. No one in West Condon was much interested writers who weren’t on television or in the news-paper — which was rare, since the town didn’t have a news station or paper of its own. Her only brush with fame was during the midsummer first-anniversary tourist surge when she spied a torn oil-stained copy of the magazine with her story in it on the floor of Rico’s Pizza Palace, probably dropped by a disappointed visitor — the editors had referenced the Brunist cult in their authors’ notes. She rescued it, has it still. The “big money” the architect spoke of was in anticipation of the imminent collapse of their local competitors. The year-long city hall ripoff erupted eventually into a full-blown scandal, due mostly to the relentless perseverance of Tommy’s dad. Minicozzi was indicted, his mob connections exposed (the governor did not escape the implications), and the president of Bonali Family Builders — who was not Charlie Bonali, but his dad — was sent to prison. Charlie disappeared into the city, along with Moron Moroni and some of the other so-called Dagotown Devil Dogs. His sister lost her job at city hall and got married. The police chief was demoted and a new chief was hired in from upstate. The town had neither mayor nor city manager for a while and was run largely by the city council. The town had not had much luck with mayors and there was little appetite to elect a new one, nor did anyone seem interested in the job. Most of that happened after Sally had left town, but her mom kept her informed.