The Truth about Small Towns

1. THE TRUTH ABOUT SMALL TOWNS It never stops raining. The water tower’s tarnished as cutlery left damp in the widower’s hutch. If you walk slow (but don’t stop), you’re not from nearby. All you can eat for a buck at the diner is cream gravy on sourdough, blood sausage, and coffee. Never lie. The preacher before this one dropped bombs in the war and walked with a limp at parade time. Until it burned, the old depot was a disco. A café. A card shoppe. A parts place for combines. Randy + Rhonda shows up each spring on the bridge. If you walk fast you did it. Nothing’s more lonesome than money. (Who says shoppe?) It never rains. 2. GRAVEYARD Heat in the short field and dust scuffed up, glare off the guard-tower glass where the three pickets lean on their guns. The score is one to one. Everybody’s nervous but the inmates, who joke around—they jostle, they hassle the team of boys in trouble and their dads. It’s all in sport. The warden is the ump. The flat bleachers are dotted with guards; no one can recall the last time they got one over the wall. The cons play hard, then lose. And the warden springs for drinks all around— something he calls graveyard, which is five kinds of soda pop poured over ice into each one’s cup, until the cup overflows. 3. COUNCIL MEETING The latest uproar: to allow Wendy’s to build another fast-food burger shack on two acres of wetlands near Raccoon Creek, or to permit the conservationist well-to-do citizenry to keep their green space and thus assure long, unsullied views from their redwood decks, picture windows, and backyards chemically rich as golf greens. The paper’s rife with spats, accusations, pieties both ways. Wendy’s promises flowers, jobs. The citizens want this, too, but want it five miles away where people don’t care about egrets, willows, good views. Oh, it’s going to be a long night: call out for pizza, somebody brew some tea. Then we’ll all stand up for what we believe. 4. CHARMING The remnant industry of a dying town’s itself. Faux charm, flaked paint, innuendo in a nasal twang. Now the hardware store’s got how-to kits to make mushrooms out of plywood for the yard, and the corner grocery’s specialty this week is mango chutney, good with rabbit, duck, or spread for breakfast on a whole-wheat bagel fresh each morning at the small patisserie across the way from the red hotel. Which reminds me. Legend has it that the five chipped divots in the hotel wall—local lime and mortar— are what remains of the town’s last bad man. His fiery death’s renowned, but don’t look now Someone with a camera’s drawing down on you.