Bentley Little - The Association

"Go take your shower."

"Want to join me?"

"Tonight," she promised.

Barry had finished his shower and was up in the kitchen pouring himself some coffee when he heard a loud knock at the front door. Maureen, already downstairs, answered it and a moment later called his name.

He moved around the corner and looked over the railing to see Mike enter the living room, newspaper in hand. "Hey!" Barry called, walking downstairs. "How's it going?"

Mike held up a copy of the Standard. "I assume you saw this?"

Barry nodded.

"They're calling it a 'rally,"" Mike said angrily, "trying to make it sound like some sort of happy high school thing. It's a planned assault is what it is, an attack on us. They want to get enough people together so that they can storm the gates and ... I don't know what."

"That's why we're leaving," Barry said. "Mo wants us to spend the night in Cedar City just in case things get too hairy."

"I don't..." Mike shook his head, confused. "What are you talking about?"

"I have a bad feeling about this," Maureen said. "I don't claim to be psychic or anything, but I just think we need to get out of here.

Something's wrong. Something's going to happen."

"Yeah, something's going to happen. They're going to vandalize our property. You'll come back to smashed windows and shot-up car tires and ... who knows what all."

"Exactly. That's why we don't want to be here when it happens." Mike turned toward Barry. "What's the matter with you?" he asked. "This is your home. This is your property. You can't tell me you wouldn't stay and fight a fire to save your house. Hell, we'd all be up on our roofs with hoses, wetting down everything in sight."

Barry nodded reluctantly.

"Same thing here. I know the association is fucked up, but we have no choice but to back them on this. Besides, this is what the association is supposed to be doing. Protecting Bonita Vista, standing up for the residents."

"There wouldn't even be this rally if the association hadn't..." He looked into Mike's eyes. "If those kids hadn't been poisoned."

"It's a deal with the devil," Mike admitted. "But we have no choice.

Whether we like it or not, those Corbanites see this as an us-versus-them situation. And we're 'them.""

Barry tried to smile. ""What do you think they'll do? Burn down our houses?"

"Vigilante justice is not exactly unheard of in this part of the world, and, yes, that is something I think they might try to do."

"Me, too," Maureen said. "That's why I don't want to be here. You can't fight a mob, you can't reason with a horde of angry stirred-up people, particularly ones whose children have been killed."

"I understand your feelings," Mike said to her. He turned to Barry.

"But why are you going? Because you fear for your personal safety?

That's okay if it is; that's a legitimate reason. But if you're doing this to get back at the association, because you think it'll somehow hurt them, then you're wrong. You read that article. They blame us, all of us, not just the association, and I don't think the rest of us should suffer collateral damage because of it."

It was the fire analogy that had gotten to him. As much as Barry hated to admit it, as much as he wanted to stick with Maureen and the promise he'd made to her, Mike's argument made sense. He should stay with his house, make sure his home was safe. It was his duty.

And there was something else.

"We can't leave," he told her. "Not this macho bullshit!"

"Who's going to protect our house--"

"What, you're going to buy a gun and sit on the porch to shoot at intruders? Come on! This is craziness! If there is any damage, our homeowners' insurance will cover it. Half the homes here are unoccupied! They're vacation homes! What about those people? They're not rushing back for the last stand at the O.K. Corral." She looked into his eyes. "There's no reason to do this."

"What if it's a test?" he said quietly.

"What?"

"What if the association just wants to know who's willing to stay and fight?"

"Fight?" she practically screamed.

"Figuratively, not literally. What if they're just trying to gauge the mettle of their opponents? Us."

"I'll let you two discuss it," Mike said, backing off toward the door.

"I think you should stay, though. There's strength in numbers, and we need all the bodies we can get. Like she said, there aren't a lot of full-timers up here, and we don't have a newspaper recruiting people for our side like they do." He stepped outside, and carefully closed the screen. "It's something to think about."

She slammed the door behind him. "It's not something to think about."

"Mo..."

"You promised me we'd leave."

"I know."

"What is this? The great iconoclastic horror writer Barry Welch is afraid of what his neighbors will say about him? Fuck them! If you want to show someone that you have balls, show me, your wife, and stand down this peer pressure and get the hell out of here for the night."

That was the problem with being a writer, Barry thought. He could see things from both sides. It was his job to get into characters' heads, to articulate the thought processes behind opposing points of view.

Maureen was right, but Mike was right, too. He spent each day engaging in such schizophrenic empathy, and it was why he was always aware of the duality in any given situation.

But he'd never seen things from the association's side.

That was true. And that was why his logic broke down when it came to the homeowners' association.

It was still not inconceivable to him that the association wanted him to agonize over this choice, that they were behind this entire scenario and had placed him in this position in order to observe him and study his reaction, like scientists examining the behavior of a lab rat. Such Byzantine deviousness might seem absurd, the product of an overactive imagination, but when all of the events since their arrival here were viewed as part of a continuum, it was a conclusion that did not seem at all farfetched.

"What if this is all part of some elaborate scheme on the part of the association?" he asked. "I'm serious about this. What if it is a test?"

"Now you are being paranoid. Get real. They poisoned pets and children because they knew it would get the populace up in arms and they'd descend on Bonita Vista with baseball bats and guns and then Barry Welch would be forced to decide whether or not to remain home for the evening? You don't think that's being just a little egocentric and self-absorbed?"

He grimaced. "Well, when you put it that way ..."

"It's about time you came to your senses. Now let's get out of here before some other version of Satan tries to tempt you away from the path."

"Mike's Satan?"

"Just get ready to go."

Barry nodded. "Okay." He happened to glance over at the television^

"Wait a minute. Let's check out the Weather Channel, see what the weather's going to be like." He picked up the remote from the coffee table and started flipping through channels, trying to find the station.

"Hey," Maureen said. "What's ... what's that?"

"What?"

"Flip it back a few."

He pressed the down button and the channels reversed.

"There!"

Barry frowned. What was this, some kind of community access station? A fuzzy, nearly colorless videotape of a tennis match, seen from above, was being broadcast. There was no sound, only the bird's-eye view of an elderly couple in matching whites stumblingly attempting to dash about the court despite an obvious lack of athletic ability.

"That's the tennis court!" Maureen pointed. "Our tennis court!" She picked up the list of cable channels from the top of the television.

"Sixteen," she said, her finger running down the station lineup.