THE ASSOCIATION by Bentley Little

Author:Bentley Little [Little, Bentley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Signet / New American Library
Published: 2001-09-02T21:00:00+00:00

He was watching TV when Maureen arrived home from a meeting with her newest client, some bigwig at the bank, and she gave him a disgusted look as she put down her briefcase. “Afternoon talk shows?”

“How else am I going to keep up with popular slang? I’m isolated out here. This helps me learn what people are talking about and the way they talk about it. This is research.” He grinned. “I can take this off my taxes, right?”

“Try to be a person,” she said.

He followed her upstairs to the kitchen, where she poured herself a Diet Coke. “I’m not used to all this… selling,” she admitted. “Back in California, I just had to convince people that I was the best accountant for the job. I didn’t have to convince them that they needed an accountant, period. People are so backward here.”

“Yeah, but the scenery’s beautiful.” Barry pointed out the sliding glass door.

Maureen laughed. “Yes, the scenery’s beautiful.”

They decided to go for a late afternoon walk, and Barry waited downstairs on the couch, watching two gorgeous women fight over a grotesquely overweight bigamist on TV while Maureen changed her shoes and filled up her sports bottle.

They walked out to the street, and Barry stopped. “Which way?” he asked, looking in both directions. “Up or down?”

“Let’s go down the hill,” Maureen suggested. “We’ll save the hard stuff for last.”

They descended the steeply sloping street, walking slowly and holding hands so as not to accelerate unwantedly. They passed a handful of houses set back among the trees and some heavily forested lots before the road finally leveled off. Suddenly, the trees opened up and they were confronted on the right by what looked like nearly half an acre of denuded land.

“Jesus,” Barry said. He stopped short to take it all in. “Look at that.” He pointed to the edge of the open space, where a group of shirtless men were lined up before a ditch, digging. An incongruously well-dressed man holding a black whip was standing behind the ditch on a raised section of ground, barking orders. It reminded him of a scene from some low-budget biblical epic or a revisionist indie film about the Old South.

But there were no cameras rolling here.

“What the hell’s going on?”

“They’re digging a pool,” Maureen said. “And laying a foundation for a community center. Audrey said they’re volunteers.”

The man with the whip cracked it. “Faster!” he ordered. “We’re falling behind!”

“It doesn’t look like they’re doing this voluntarily to me.”

He realized that they were both talking low, as if afraid of being overheard, and Barry made a conscious effort to raise his voice. “This must be a joke. This can’t be real.”

“I don’t know, they were doing the same thing yesterday, although without the whip hand. And they’ve sure done a lot of clearing and digging since then. That’s a lot of work for a joke.”

“I thought the association had all sorts of brush and tree-cutting prohibitions.”

“Not for themselves,” Maureen said dryly.

They walked slowly past the open area, watching the men work.

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