Bentley Little - The Association

"You? What about me?"

"Us," he amended.

"No, I mean what about me? Do I get to speak, too?"

He was surprised. "Do you want to?"

"No. But is it three minutes for me and three minutes for you, or three minutes total? If we can stretch our time out to six, I'll take up where you leave off and keep talking."

"It's three minutes per lot."

"Then the floor's all yours."

"I have to start working on this now, time myself, try to cram in as much as I can. The annual meeting is the one time a year they even make the pretext that this is a democracy. It's our only shot. We've got to make it count."

A lone skyrocket exploded in the air above the community center, purple sparkles falling down on the trees. A loud cheer went up.

"What do you think will happen?" Maureen asked.

Barry was silent for a moment. "I don't know," he said finally. "I

don't know."

The painters returned in the morning. This time, Barry and Maureen were both in the driveway before the men had emerged from their truck.

"What do you think you're doing here?" Maureen demanded as the painters got out of the cab and walked around to the rear of the vehicle.

They ignored her.

"You just painted our house a week ago."

The three younger men pulled out their tarp and started spreading it on the driveway.

Barry walked up to the old man. "Let me guess," he said. "This color is no longer acceptable. They want you to paint it a different shade."

The painter pulled a roll of masking tape from the bed of the truck.

"Yep."

"Have you done this before? Painted the same house over and over again until the owners go bankrupt?"

He paused for a moment, as if hesitant to answer, then nodded his head. "Yep." He pushed past Barry and started taping up the nearest window.

They left before the painting started, closing up the house and driving out to the lake, where they spent the day hiking and picnicking and pretending that they were a normal couple having a normal day. When they arrived home late in the afternoon, the painters were gone, but their tarp remained draped over bushes on the south side of the house and only half of the building was completed.

"I guess they're coming back tomorrow," Maureen said.

Barry nodded.

They'd slept with the windows closed last time and that hadn't worked, so this time they left the windows open and the fan on, but the smell of paint still permeated everything, and they both awoke in the morning with headaches.

The job took two days. The painters were clearly being more thorough than before, which made Barry think that this sequence had been thoroughly planned in advance. This would turn out to be a more expensive job, he was sure, and while a part of him wanted to physically throw the painters off his property and burn then- truck, he knew they were only following orders and would merely be replaced by someone else.

He thought of another idea, though, and he talked to Maureen, told her of his plan. To his surprise, she agreed.

They waited until the painters were done. After they left, he and Maureen took the white interior latex left over from their remodeling and painted a gigantic happy face on the wall of the house facing the street. On the north wall of the house, they painted a frowning face.

The next day, the workers were back. This time, they were not merely uncommunicative, they were openly hostile. When Barry met them in the driveway, drinking his morning coffee and offering them a hearty hello, they gave him dirty looks and muttered obscenities. "Who does he think he is?" one of the younger painters asked another.

"Stupid fuck," the old man muttered..

His plan had worked. He and Maureen had thrown a monkey-wrench into the association's schedule, had reset the agenda on their terms.

The painters taped off the windows, put down their dropcloth , hooked up the sprayers, and obliterated the left half of the happy face. After they moved to another section of wall, Barry put down his coffee, took out his white paint and started brushing it on the recently completed area, making a series of X's in a random pattern.

The old man stormed over to him. "Just what do you think you're doing?"

"It's my house," Barry told him. "And I'm painting it."

"You can't--"

"It's my house. I can do anything I damn well please, and if you don't get out of my face, I'm going to kick your fucking ass, strip you naked, and paint you yellow like the coward you are."

He expected the old man to threaten him, to tell him that there were four of them and only one of him. He was even prepared for a fight right then and there should the bald asshole rush him. But the painter turned and walked away, spoke to his coworkers, and a few minutes later the four of them packed up their gear and left.

A victory.

The painters did not return, no others took their place, and there was not even any sign of Neil Campbell and his ubiquitous clipboard. No one called, no notices were left in their mailbox or on their door. The half a happy face and random Xs remained on the wall.

That night they made love, and in the middle of it, the phone rang. He wanted to let it ring, but Maureen insisted that he answer, it might be important, so he reached over to the nightstand, picked up the phone, and pressed the Talk button. "Hello?"

The voice on the line was harsh yet whispery. "Throw her another hump for me!"

Click.

Someone was watching them. They were being monitored. He pulled the sheets over their bodies and looked frantically around the room, searching for a hidden camera.

"What are you doing?" Maureen demanded, squirming uncomfortably beneath him.

He rolled off her. His erection was gone. Still hidden by the blanket, he reached down to the floor for his underwear. He pulled on his briefs and ran over to the television, turning it on.

On BVTV was a video of him and Maureen making love. Maureen was on top, and the camera zoomed in on her buttocks as his hand slid down and into her crack.

"Sons of bitches!" Barry yelled. "Sons of bitches!"

The phone rang again, but this time neither of them answered it.

In the morning their house had been painted black.

The Bonita Vista Homeowners' Association Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions Article V, Security and Control, Section 9, Paragraph A:

The Association and any of its committees or subcommittees has the right to monitor residents on any section of the Community properties or on any jointly owned right of-way in any manner it deems appropriate using any means at its disposal. Residents whose dues are in arrears or who are involved in disputes with the Board may be monitored anywhere at any time including in their private residences.

It was hard writing a speech. He was used to creating dialogue, having two characters express ideas and points of view through conversation, but coming up with a stirring, rabble-rousing address in the real world was quite a bit different from doing so within the boundaries of a fictional universe in which he controlled all of the variables and all of the reactions. He was not and never had been a public speaker, so the fact that he would be performing this himself --and before a hostile audience no less--brought additional pressure.

His first draft clocked in at a whopping fifteen minutes. He pared it down as much as he could, read it to Maureen, and it still came in at twelve.

He would have to be selective, and he would have to be merciless. It was impossible to fit in everything he wanted to say, so he would be able to address only his most important concerns and use the most egregious examples of the association's transgressions.

But he was having a hard time figuring out what those were.

He scrolled down the computer screen, reread his words for the hundredth time.