Bentley Little: The Association

But despite it all, Maureen still wasn't sure she liked Bonita Vista.

Barry felt guilty. He had never gone this long before without writing, and while moving in and fixing up the house could be blamed for the first month of literary inactivity, this last week was entirely his own fault. He'd read, watched C-Span and CNN, viewed a couple of old horror flicks that he'd taped but had never gotten around to watching and he didn't write.

There was no fear of writer's block, no worry that he'd run out of ideas, but the rhythm just wasn't there, that routine he'd established since becoming a full-time author, and he found it hard to simply jump back into the grind after so much time off. He would have to get busy soon, he knew-the next book was due in six months and he hadn't even started on it yet--but for now, he seemed compelled to slack off. It was as if he was still in vacation mode, as though either his brain or his body had not adjusted to the fact that this was their new home and was waiting for him to return to California before once again settling down to work.

He sorted through the mail, separating the bills, tossing the ads and credit offers without even bothering to open the envelopes. There were no royalty checks, though they should be coming in any day now, but he had received one small press magazine and two postcards advertising up coming horror novels. He glanced over the postcards before throwing them in the trash pile, then perused the magazine. There were several short stories, some out-of-date movie reviews, and numerous letters to the editor from other writers either defending or attacking an up-and-coming author who had apparently made disparaging remarks on the Internet about one of the horror field's old guard. The letters were uniformly vitriolic, and Barry shook his head at such petty infighting.

It was why he didn't socialize much with other writers, why he assiduously avoided workshops and conventions and professional get-tog ethers The only author with whom he had any sort of relationship was Phillip Emmons, a suspense writer who had specifically looked him up at the lone horror convention he had attended because he had so enjoyed Barry's debut novel The Leaving. The two of them still corresponded, and Phillip had been sort of a mentor to him over the years: helping him choose a new agent; letting him know he was getting ripped off in a multi book contract; suggesting that he start retaining electronic as well as audio and movie rights to his work. Barry not only admired Phillip's fiction, he admired the man himself, and in many ways he was still trying to emulate the other author's personal style.

He remembered the way Phillip had handled hostile criticism the one time the two of them had done a signing together. It was at a bookstore in downtown L.A. soon after the convention. There was a lull in the crowd, and a middle aged, morbidly obese woman with a bitter, disappointed face confronted Phillip at the table and demanded to know why he wrote about such disgusting topics in such graphic detail. He was going to hell, she informed him, and he should cease writing such filth because it was corrupting his readers and society. God did not approve of what he was doing.

Phillip looked at her calmly. "The Good Lord has seen fit to make me rich, happy, and successful," he told her. "He has made you ugly, grotesquely overweight, and miserably unhappy. It seems to me that He has smiled upon me and shit right in your face. Maybe if you were a nicer person, He would have treated you better, but from where I sit, God has made His displeasure with you pretty plain. So fuck off and quit bothering me." He smiled at her and turned to Barry. "The Lord works in mysterious ways, my friend. The Lord works in mysterious ways."

Barry himself could never have reacted in such a manner. But, damn it, it was cool. And he admired Phillip all the more for how he handled the woman.

Afterward, they had talked of God, and Phillip said seriously that he believed in God but disbelieved in religion. "The Bible is God's word.

Why can't I just read it for myself and let Him speak directly to me?

Why do I have to have an interpreter between us? That's all organized religion is: a buffer between me and God. I'm sorry, but my faith doesn't need a bureaucracy to administrate it. Besides, every time you confront one of these fundamentalist wackos with a real question, they can't answer it. Ask a preacher why your mama died of cancer or why your little boy was hit by a car, and you'll get an "It's God's will,"

or "The Lord works in mysterious ways." In other words, they don't know. But they do know that God wants you to vote Republican and He's against raising taxes and for raising the defense budget and, despite the fact that it's His own creation, he desperately hates marijuana."

Phillip made a lot of sense. He was an intelligent guy. He was also very giving of his time, helping out quite a few other young authors besides Barry, and Barry had often thought that if other writers were as real and unpretentious and unconcerned with image, the horror field would be a hell of a lot better off.

He tossed the magazine aside. Maureen came up from downstairs, holding a stack of papers. "I'm done. The computer's all yours."

Barry shook his head. "That's okay. I think I'm just going to read this afternoon. You can have the computer."

"I thought you were going to start writing again," Maureen said.

"Maybe tomorrow," he said. "Maybe I'll start tomorrow."

He awoke to the sound of Maureen's fax. machine.

Barry squinted over at the clock and was surprised to see that it was almost eight. The light outside, seeping between the cracks of the miniblinds, looked too dark for eight, looked more like six, and he nudged Maureen next to him. "Get up. It's eight o'clock."

"What?" She opened one sleepy eye.

"It's late."

They'd both overslept, and it was the sound of the fax machine more than his prodding that made Maureen get out of bed and face the day. He turned onto his side and watched her bare buttocks as she padded naked over to the bathroom. Even after all these years, she still looked damn good, and if she didn't have so much work to do this morning and the fax wasn't prompting her to get started on it, he would've lured her back to bed and spent the next hour engaged in some dirty, nasty sex that was more than likely illegal here in the state of Utah.

But instead, he got up, slipped into his jeans, and went upstairs to put on the coffee. He took out the Friskies box and pulled open the shades on the sliding glass door, intending to feed Barney breakfast on the top deck, but the cat was nowhere to be seen. Barry walked back downstairs to the bedroom, where Maureen was already dressed and making the bed, but when he pulled the drapes open, there was again no sign of the cat.

"Huh," he said.

"What?"

"I can't find Barney."

"I told you we should make that cat sleep inside. There are coyotes, skunks, and who-knows-what out there. You'd better make sure he's okay."

Barry slid open the door, slid open the screen, and walked outside, shaking the Friskies box.

"Barney!" he called.

Nothing.

"Barney?" He shook the box again.

There were no noises in the bushes or in the tree that the cat used as a ladder between the upper and lower decks, and, frowning, Barry walked down the wooden steps off the deck and around to the front of the house.

Where he stopped.

The flowers they'd planted had been ripped out and thrown into the driveway between the Suburban and the Toyota. Uprooted rosebushes lay littered on the asphalt. Geraniums and impatiens, clods of dirt still sticking to their roots, draped the Suburban's white hood. Ms bulbs were strewn about like golf balls on a driving range.

Someone had sneaked onto their property in the middle of the night and destroyed their fledgling garden, had negated all of their hard work, and his first reaction was one of anger. He wanted to beat the shit out of whoever had done this. But there was unease mixed in there as well, and while it was probably just kids Pretty sick kids --he couldn't help feeling slightly disturbed by the fact that their house was the target of this vandalism, that they had been specifically chosen to be the recipients of this attack. His gaze shifted to the various areas they'd landscaped, and he saw that every last plant they'd put in had been pulled out of the ground or trampled. Their property looked as though a mini hurricane had hit it, and only pine trees and manzanitas seemed to remain standing.