Small Town Grievances 20: The death of Mayor
Small Town Grievances 20: The death of Mayor
Saturday some out-of-towners found Mayor’s body in the wetland about five miles out, where the river gets into the state park. Always strange when bad news arrives on a Saturday, a traditional day for television, and eating hotdogs by the river, and other quiet virtues.
The wetland is a popular spot for unfaithful married folks to conduct outlawed practices, and the out-of-towners likely had their minds set on some hideous congress (no clothes but hats and shoes still on, for example). Instead they found sodden, sunken Mayor. Lonely and swamp-dead. With little mushrooms growing out of his clothes and frog babies in his eye holes and everything. He had been gone for a vacation week of what he called “cave experience”, which we gathered to be mainly shadowed pervert stuff, and he must have found some misfortune in the wild. We gathered on the road as they brought him in and we thought: Mayor. He was grey. The rough weather had made him graceless; a woodland thing had spent some time on him. The night before this I’d had a strange dream where Mayor was thrown by masked figures from the open doorway of a light plane, of which I was the pilot.
The pool was closed due to malaise. The flags at Heavenly Beef Emperor were flown at half mast before being cut down and allowed to fly away on the wind. What to do with a moment this large? Townspeople sat in their heavy armchairs drinking glasses of water. Some of them watched TV with the sound down low, or sighed in the lanes of the bowling alley and took their hamburgers outside because nobody had it in them to clean the tables. Lorraine F., grief-crazy, danced violently for hours in front of town hall until the cops caught her up in a big white bed sheet and dragged her home. Alistair Y. of the mortuary spent a day and a night on Mayor to cover up nature’s efforts and by the end Mayor looked like a movie star who’d died during an intimate surgery. He was golden with preservative medicines. Dust settled on his bulbous eyelashes. If you lit him he’d burn like peat. You could shine a torch on him and the whole room would glow.
Mayor’s body lay in state at the police station for a week and we each visited to make peace or whisper our little vengeances to him; to give pity, to promise to eradicate whatever it was that had stolen him from us — be it beast or bird, or a murderer, or the devil berries that he so enjoyed picking, which were mostly tasteless but had a funny mouth feel, and which were deeply poisonous in the great quantities at which he enjoyed them. The coffin was poorly maintained and attracted birds, so we took turns keeping vigil overnight, lighting candles to cover the smell and keeping Mayor misty with balm. Forgive me, I told the unswept ground. Forgive me for what I let the men do to you. I mentioned my dream to Oscar F. and he agreed that I may have contributed to Mayor’s death.
Emergency session called at town hall to discuss Mayor’s replacement. Great distress. They could do this? With Mayor unburied, his body still warming under the lights of the police station foyer? A good deal of wailing and moaning as if from an ancient hospital. Those who stepped forward were spat upon as traitors — I was one of them. It was imperfect, but if this was to be my time then so be it. I’d sat for too long as the town’s miseries overflowed. I’d seen too many children eat batteries for sport. If historians wanted to make a dog of me then they could work that out amongst themselves later.
But then, of course, before we could go to ballots, at the very height of our grief, came the turn: multiple reports that Mayor had just been seen, alive. He was eating a big banana split at the expensive ice cream place over in Hindenberg, evidently spending the last of his pocket money on his way back from holiday. A quiet moment, utterly still, before a great ruckus broke out. We run to our cars and raced to Hindenberg to confirm the news. There he was, sap-mouthed and confused. And when we were sure it was really him, that he was alive, we broke him. We pulled him into the street and filled his shirt with trash. We dragged him through the mud and made him drink puddle water. We took out loans in his name as he watched, helpless, from the street outside. We shouted foul things never uttered before on Earth, things our minds had no way of processing. We warred through the sunset and into darkness, and then with nothing left in us but these animal-thoughts, we simply lay were we stood and slept until morning.
No one has yet come forth to claim the stranger’s body.
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