Bentley Little - The Store

Ginny smiled as she finished her Cup O' Noodles. Meg Silva, who taught sixth grade and had been staring out the window as well, shook her head. "Those Douglas kids are all troublemakers. I had Billy Douglas last year. I heard he just got suspended from junior high for vandalizing school property."

"Larry's not a troublemaker," Ginny said. "A little overactive maybe, but he's not a bad kid."

Meg snorted. "You learn to spot 'em. Talk to me in another fifteen years."

The older woman crumpled up her sandwich wrapper and threw it in the trash can under the table before getting up from her seat and walking slowly over to the couch. Ginny watched Meg settle in, then looked back toward the playground. She wondered if she would be as burnt-out when she was Meg's age. She didn't think so.

It was possible.

But she didn't think so.

She liked teaching grammar school. Her father wondered why she didn't teach high school, thought she was wasting her talents here, but she enjoyed working with young children. She felt as though she had more of an influence on them at this age, that she could do more to help mold and shape the way they turned out. Besides, grammar school kids were nice. Junior high students were brats, and high school students were too involved in their own teenage world to pay any attention to adults. But students this age still listened to her, still respected her authority. And, most importantly, she genuinely liked working with them. Sure, there were a few bad apples. There always were. But overall, they were good kids.

Mark French, the principal, walked into the staff room and over to the coffee machine. "Looks like culture is finally coming to Juniper," he said.

Ginny looked over at him. "What?"

"The Store." He held up the newspaper in his hand. "It says they're going to have a cappuccino and sushi bar instead of a regular snack bar. And they're going to carry videotapes of foreign films. For sale and rental. Northern Arizona is finally entering the twentieth century."

"Just as it's ending," Meg said.

"Better late than never." The principal finished pouring his coffee and walked out of the lounge, nodding good-bye. "Ladies."

"Ladies?" Meg snorted.

Ginny laughed.

She stared back out the window at the playground, feeling good.

Cappuccino? Sushi? Foreign films? This was like a dream come true.

She couldn't wait to tell Bill.

He was going to be so happy.

THREE

1

He awoke to the sound of blasting.

At first, Bill thought it was part of his nightmare. He'd been battling creatures from an alien world, and when he heard the explosions, he thought they were merely a continuation of the dream. But Ginny was stirring next to him, and it was obvious that she'd heard the sounds, too.

She turned toward him, her eyes still half-closed. "What is it?"

"Blasting," he said.

"Blasting?" she said groggily. "Are they widening the highway or something? We would've heard about it if they were."

"No," Bill said. He pushed the covers off and rolled out of bed.

She shook her head. "What?"

"Nothing. Go back to sleep."

He slipped into his jogging suit as she silently snuggled back under the blankets. He knew what was happening, and it wasn't roadwork. There was only one major construction project in town this fall.

The Store.

His alarm wasn't set to ring for another fifteen minutes, so he turned it off on his way out of the bedroom. In the bathroom, he splashed water on his face to fully wake himself up, then went into the kitchen and downed a quick glass of orange juice before quietly sneaking out of the house.

Skipping his usual preliminary warm-up, he hurried down the drive to the road and started jogging.

Juniper seemed even more deserted than usual, and for once he found the lack of people oppressive rather than refreshing. He'd expected to see more lights in the houses, to see more people in the streets -- hadn't anyone else heard the explosions? -- but the town remained dark, dark and quiet, and he almost breathed a sigh of relief as he passed by the last of the downtown buildings and headed toward the highway.

Although the sun had not yet risen, there was a lightening of the sky behind the mountains as he approached his favorite stretch of highway. The forest was dark, the close-set trees still clinging to the blackness of night, but the open area ahead was clearly visible and bathed in a fading blue. He slowed down, not to savor the moment this time, but to see what was going on.

He stopped directly in front of the sign.

In the twenty-four hours since he'd last passed this spot, it had changed completely. The sign was still in place, but gone were the saplings and small bushes that had dotted the meadow. Gone was the meadow itself. The tall grass had been plowed under. Bare earth and surveyors' sticks marked the boundaries of the construction site. A portion of the hill had been blasted away, fallen timber and chunks of boulder fanning out onto the flat section of ground away from the remaining slope.

He stared at the scene, shocked. He'd seen pictures of rain forest destruction, the aftereffects of wanton slash-and-burn policies in underdeveloped countries, but even in his most pessimistic projections he had not expected to see anything like that here. Yet that was exactly what it looked like. The carefully planned and orderly executed clearing of the land that he would have thought a major chain like The Store would insist upon was nowhere in evidence. No trees had been saved, no effort had been made to preserve or protect the character of the area. The trees had been simply cut, the land gouged, the hillside blasted.

And they'd done it all in a day.

There was no sign of the workers, only the equipment -- bulldozers, Caterpillars, shovels, cranes -- parked side by side in the southeast corner of the site and set off by a chain-link fence. It had been only a half hour, maybe less, since he'd been awakened by the explosions, but the men who'd set off the blasts were nowhere to be seen. He looked carefully around, trying to spot someone, anyone, moving amidst the equipment. Nothing.

He frowned. Even if work was only performed at night, there was no way that there wouldn't be at least a few men still about -- unless they'd detonated the explosives and then immediately vacated the site.

But he'd seen no cars on the highway, had met no vehicles on the road.

He jumped the small ditch adjoining the highway and walked past the sign onto the property, his jogging shoes sinking into the newly turned dirt. As he walked over rocks and ruts, around branches and boulders, his puzzlement over the workers reverted back to anger over the destruction of the meadow. How had this been allowed to happen? Where were the building inspectors? The code enforcement people? Juniper's zoning laws didn't allow builders to just decimate the landscape. The town's master plan specifically required all new businesses to "conform to the spirit and style of the existing community and its buildings, and to make a concerted effort to retain all geologic formations and as much natural vegetation as is feasible." The plan had been drafted in the early 1980s by the then-town council in an attempt to preserve the unique character of Juniper and its environs, and every council since had reinforced the town's commitment to controlled growth, making sure the builder of an apartment house incorporated an existing stand of ponderosas in his landscaping plans, withholding approval for a gas station until the company agreed to shift its building fifteen feet to the north in order to accommodate a huge house-sized boulder that had become a local landmark in the years it had sat on the undeveloped land.

Now, in one day, The Store had managed to circumvent that entire process and single-handedly destroy the most beautiful stretch of road within the town limits.