The Association Read online

  The remaining boxes and furniture they took to the storage unit Barry had rented in town. Maureen stayed home since there wasn't enough room in the truck cab for all of them. A sour old man in a Deer-o paint cap let them in the gate of the storage facility, and they pulled the truck in front of the dented metal door marked space 21, unloading everything fairly quickly. As Barry closed and locked the door, he could feel a dull soreness in his leg and arm muscles that he knew would explode into full fledged pain by tomorrow. It had been a long time since he'd done any heavy manual labor, and between last week's packing and today's unloading, his neck and back already hurt.

  "Miller time!" Jeremy announced. He'd brought his ice chest, placing it by his feet in the cab, and he reached up and opened it, then started tossing out beers.

  Barry popped open the can he caught and took a long swig. The four of them stood in front of the storage unit, drinking, celebrating the end of a long and tiring day.

  Chuck looked around at the surrounding scenery. "Why Utah?" he asked Barry. "I mean, it's beautiful and all, but, shit, it's so far away from everything. What are you going to do out here in the middle of nowhere?"

  "The same thing I did back in California: write."

  "You know what I mean."

  Barry shrugged. "I never did all that much to begin with. I mean, hell, a big night out for us is dinner and a movie."

  "But there's no movie theater here." "There's a video store. And we can always drive over to Cedar City if we have to. It's only two hours away and it has movie theaters, a college, a Shakespeare festival, pretty much anything you could want." He finished downing the last of his beer. "But that's small stuff, that's not important. The reason we're out here is because this is where we want to live, this is the type of environment we want to spend the rest of our lives in. We're not getting any younger, you know. It's time to start talking permanence, it's time to start setting down some roots."

  "Your roots are in California."

  "We want a transplant."

  Jeremy shuffled his feet awkwardly. "How are you guys set for money?

  Your books pulling in enough?"

  "Yeah. AndMo'll be working, too."

  Dylan snorted. "In this town? Where, the gas station?"

  "She can pretty much hang out her shingle anywhere and get tax work.

  And a lot of her old clients are staying with her, so she won't exactly have to start from scratch."

  "Staying with her? How's that? They're going to drive through three states just for an accountant? I know she's good, but..."

  "Fax. E-mail. Telephone. She doesn't have to actually meet with her clients to get their financial information." He grinned. "It's the age of the tele commuter dude. Get with the program."

  Chuck shook his head. "You really think you're going to like living in a small town?"

  Barry laughed. "It's the yuppie dream."

  They had dinner that night at a steakhouse in Corban where they were the only customers and the waitress looked like Flo from the old TV

  series Alice. They drank a lot and talked politics and culture, Maureen admonishing Jeremy and Chuck for abandoning their wives at home and depriving her of some much-needed female allies.

  Back at home, they tried to figure out the sleeping arrangements. The old beds had been dismantled, and only their bed in the master bedroom had been set up. It was decided that Dylan, Chuck, and Jeremy would sleep on the floor in the dining room area--the only part of the house that wasn't completely overrun with unpacked junk.

  Jeremy, always prepared, had brought along a sleeping bag, but Chuck and Dylan hadn't, and they spent twenty minutes pushing cartons and furniture aside, digging through boxes looking for blankets and pillows.

  "Sleep tight," Maureen said after they were all settled. "Don't let the bed bugs bite."

  "Are there bed bugs here?" Chuck asked.

  "We don't know -what kind of critters there are," Maureen said cheerfully. "Good night."

  "You're vicious," Barry told her as they walked down to the master bedroom. "Vicious."

  In the morning, he was awakened by the sounds of movement from upstairs. He got out of bed without waking Maureen, quickly slipped on his jeans, and went up to the dining room, where Jeremy was rolling up his sleeping bag, and Chuck and Dylan were putting on their shoes.

  Barry yawned, looking toward the kitchen. "I'm sorry we don't have any breakfast for you. I should've gone to the store yesterday and picked up some doughnuts or bagels or something."

  Jeremy waved him away. "Don't worry about it. We'll grab something to eat on the road. We have a long trip today, and we need to get started early anyway."

  It occurred to Barry for the first time that it might be a while before he had a chance to see his friends again. He felt sad all of a sudden, but it was a strange sadness, one tempered by a sense that though his old life was over, a new one was beginning.

  "You guys want to take a shower or something first?"

  Chuck shook his head, grinning. "No reason to. It's just us."

  Jeremy picked up his sleeping bag. "Say good-bye to Mo."

  "Say good-bye yourselves."

  Barry turned around to see Maureen standing at the bottom of the stairs, bundled up in her bathrobe.

  "Bastard," she said with a smile. "You weren't even going to wake me up."

  "Sorry."

  She stepped aside while Jeremy, Chuck, and Dylan walked down the steps to the living room. "See you guys," she said. "Thanks so much for all your help. We really appreciate it."

  "No problem," Jeremy told her.

  "You're welcome to come and visit anytime." She smiled. "Even you, Dylan."

  He laughed. "A little out of the way for me, but thanks. It's the thought that counts."

  "You got everything?" Barry asked.

  "Didn't bring anything in," Chuck said. "It's still in the van."

  Barry followed Jeremy, Chuck, and Dylan outside, while Maureen remained in the doorway. "Good-bye!" she called. "Have a safe trip! Drive carefully!"

  "Always do," Dylan said.

  "You planning to drive all the way back to Brea today?" Barry asked.

  Dylan shook his head. "I think we're going to take an extra day. I

  want to stop off in Vegas on our way back. Pull a Willie Nelson."

  "Electric Horseman”

  Dylan grinned. "You got it."

  Barry reached into the right front pocket of his jeans, found the wadded five that he'd shoved in there after getting the change from dinner last night. "Well, while you're kicking back, why don't you actually play some of that Keno. I'll split the take with you."

  "Deal."

  Jeremy tossed his sleeping bag in the back of the van and closed the tailgate. None of them were buggers or touchy feely kinds of guys, but this seemed to call for more than a mere wave and a quick "Good-bye,"

  and they stood around awkwardly, not ready to part but not willing to make that leap and share a genuinely emotional moment.

  "Well," Chuck said, shuffling his feet, "I guess we'd better shove off."

  "Yeah," Jeremy said.

  Dylan nodded.

  "Thanks again, guys. I really appreciate it." Barry looked back at Maureen, still standing in the doorway. "Both of us do."

  Jeremy smiled. "What are friends for?"

  Friends.

  Barry realized that he would have to start from scratch and make new friends here. Neither he nor Maureen knew anyone within a five-hundred-mile radius or had relatives in any of the Four Corners states.

  Jeremy and Dylan got into the van, and Chuck climbed into the U-Haul's cab. Barry had given Chuck the track's keys last night, as well as the rental paperwork, and he poked his head into the window of the cab.

  "It's not due back until Thursday, and it's unlimited mileage, so if there's anything you need to haul or you need a truck for anything, feel free to keep it."

  Chuck grinned. "Don't worry. I will."

  "Call and let me know when it's
back safe. And send me the receipt so I can double-check and make sure they're not ripping me off."

  "You got it, chief."

  Jeremy started the van, stuck his head out the window, and waved. "Good luck!"

  "You're going to need it!" Dylan shouted and cackled.

  Barry glanced over at the mailbox, and thought of the dead cat still shoved in there. He walked out to the edge of the driveway, waving, as Maureen yelled "Goodbye!" from the porch.

  He watched the truck and van head down the hill, and he continued to stare down the street long after Jeremy's van was gone and the whine of the U-Haul's engine had faded into nothingness.

  They held their garage sale the next weekend, taking out an ad in the local newspaper, the Corban Weekly Standard, and spending all day Friday pricing furniture and household items stored in the small bedrooms. They kept a few things--a clock radio, a punch bowl, a kerosene lamp--but most of the stuff that had come with the house was ugly as sin, and they were happy to clear it out. Barry had originally wanted to wait a little longer, so they'd have a better chance to sift through it all and see if there was anything they could use, but Maureen correctly pointed out that they had no room in either their house or the storage unit for all this crap, and the sooner they dumped it the sooner they could start fixing the place up.

  "Nothing over ten dollars," she said as Barry placed a strip of masking tape on a hideous formica table and wrote down the price. "Our goal is to get rid of this junk, not make money."

  "Yes sir," he said.

  Saturday morning, they got up before dawn and started setting things up, laying out some of the smaller junk on metal folding tables that were also for sale, displaying the rest flat on the asphalt of the driveway. The furniture they arranged in such a way as to block off access to the lower deck and the steps that led up to the front door.

  The classified ad clearly stated that the garage sale did not start until seven, but cars and trucks were parked on the road in front of the house two hours beforehand, hunched shapes visible in the half-light of the dawning morning, looking at street maps, reading newspapers, sipping thermos coffee. One obese woman, smoking an ash-heavy cigarette and carrying a huge canvas sack, actually got out of her car and walked up the driveway, intending to look over the sale items, but Maureen, putting last-minute prices on an old mop and bucket she'd found in the kitchen closet, told the woman firmly that the garage sale was scheduled to start at seven and it would not open a minute earlier. She could either leave and come back later or go to her car and wait.

  It wasn't a garage sale really--they had no garage, not even a carport--but they were putting out quite a bit of stuff, and neither the woman nor any of the other early arrivals left. Instead, they waited patiently. Barry found it hard to believe that all of the ugly furniture and useless household goods that they wanted out of their home, this junk that they were willing to give away for free if necessary, could be of such interest to people.

  There was the sound of a high-pitched meow, and Barry looked down to see a black cat bumping against his leg, looking up at him.

  "Hey, Barney." He reached down to pet the cat. "How're you doing?"

  The animal purred.

  Barney had shown up on their lower deck midweek, yowling loudly, and Maureen had fed the cat milk and a can of tuna. The animal looked as though it was starving, and it was so grateful for the food that it had remained even after feeding, hanging around the porch, rubbing against their legs, purring whenever either of them walked out. Since then, it had spent each day hanging around, using the juniper tree next to the house as a ladder to climb from the lower to upper deck, sleeping on the welcome mat outside the front door. Barry had named it Barney, after Fred's best Mend in The Flintstones--a name to which it seemed to be responding.

  He guessed that meant the cat was their pet.

  He looked over at the mailbox, its metal glinting in the pink rays of the rising sun, and thought of the other cat.

  The dead one.

  He'd disposed of the body while Maureen was taking her shower last Sunday evening. Jeremy, Chuck, and Dylan had departed in the early morning, and he'd assumed he'd have time to himself during the day when he could take care of the problem, but he and Maureen had been together all morning and afternoon, and it wasn't until she took her shower before dinner that he had the opportunity to sneak out by himself.

  Necessity, as they said, was the mother of invention, and for all his worrying about how he was going to get the animal's body out of the mailbox, when the time came and he realized that he would have maybe ten minutes at most to solve the problem, he wrapped his hands in a Hefty garbage bag, shoved them in the mailbox, yanked out the dead cat and turned the bag inside out. He quickly scrubbed out the inside of the mailbox with a sponge drenched in Lysol, and tossed the sponge into the bag as well, leaving the mailbox door open to air out. He quickly tied the Hefty bag shut and dumped it in the metal garbage can beneath the bottom deck before hurrying back inside, washing his hands in the upstairs bathroom and sitting down on the couch. He turned on the TV

  just as Maureen emerged from downstairs to make dinner.

  Two days later, the new cat showed up.

  There was nothing connecting the two. The dead one had been white, this one was black. But their new pet was a constant reminder to him, and when the mail started midweek and he began going out to collect it every afternoon, he found himself thinking about that bloody carcass, about the ants crawling in the empty eyesocket .

  He also found himself wondering why he hadn't told his wife about the dead animal. She wasn't a dainty flower, it wasn't anything she couldn't handle. Hell, she was the bug buster of the family, the one who killed every insect that crept into their house. She was the one who chopped up chicken fryers and gutted fish. She probably had a stronger constitution than he did.

  So why had he kept it from her?

  Why was he still keeping it from her?

  He didn't know.

  Barry sat down on a metal folding chair behind one of the tables and broke open the rolls of quarters, dimes, and nickels that he'd gotten Thursday from the bank, putting them in his cleaned-out tackle box.

  Barney curled around his feet, purring.

  Maureen went inside and made some coffee while he made last-minute adjustments, and she soon brought him out a doughnut and a cup of decaf.

  The sun was up now, and there was a crowd milling around in the street and at the foot of the driveway. Barry looked at his watch, glanced toward Maureen, then waved them in. He was taken aback by the sudden frenzy that greeted his simple invitation, and for the rest of the morning it was all he could do to keep up as garage salers came and went, most not buying anything, some picking up a few items, several trying to bargain him down from the marked price. One old man bought all of the tools for sale. One woman purchased all of the kitchenware.

  Another woman paid for the garish dining room set, told him that her husband would be by later to pick it up in his truck, then returned after a half hour and asked for her money back.

  The man with the clipboard showed up just after ten.

  It was a thick crowd, with cars parked on the street half a block in either direction and the yard filled with intense looking bargain hunters, but the man immediately distinguished himself from the pack by his utter lack of interest in the items for sale. Tall and thin, with a prim face and the brand-name casual clothes of a dyed-in-the-wool yuppie, he seemed more interested in the house, in their car, and in the people milling around.

  Barry glanced over at Maureen and caught her eye. She'd noticed, too, and he waited until the man had come near the table before calling out, "Hey there!" and motioning him over.

  There was no smile on the man's serious face as he stopped writing, looked up from his clipboard, and focused on Barry. "Is this your house?" the man asked.

  "Yeah. I'm Barry Welch. What can I do for you?"

  The man nodded. "My name is Neil Campbell. I'm from the Bonit
a Vista Homeowners' Association. I'm writing you up."

  Barry frowned. "Writing me up?"

  "Garage sales, yard sales, sales of any sort are prohibited within Bonita Vista. The guidelines are very clear on this point."

  "I didn't know," Barry said. "No one told me."

  "You have not gotten your copy of the C, C, and Rs ?"

  "I don't even know what that is."

  The man smiled thinly. "You can be excused this time, since you have not yet received our C, C, and Rs , but in the future you will have to abide by the same rules and regulations the rest of us follow." He made a little note on his clipboard. "I'll suggest to the board that you not be fined but merely issued a written reprimand. That should satisfy the requirements and the sticklers on the board." There was another thin smile, as if Campbell was trying to suggest that he was one of the more liberal and lenient members of the homeowners'

  association, but the smile suggested no such thing.

  Then a woman wanted to pay for a pair of pink pillows, and a teenage boy wanted to buy a beanbag chair, and by the time Barry had taken the money and counted out the change, Campbell was gone.

  "What was that all about?" Maureen asked.

  "Apparently, we're in violation of the homeowners' association's bylaws. That guy was here to write us up and issue a fine, but we got off with just a warning,"

  "A fine? What does that mean? Can they do that?"

  Barry shook his head. "I don't know. I guess we'll have to look into it."

  "I knew it was bad news when I heard there was a homeowners'

  association. Remember Donna and Ed in Irvine? They couldn't even put up a basketball backboard on their garage." Maureen frowned. "I was hoping it'd be different out here. Doris said that the association just paved the roads and did, like, maintenance work."