Leaving the Comfort Cafe (24 page)

“Yeah.”
Where is this headed? Someplace prickly and unpleasant?

“Well, the other day, the mayor got some wild idea there was a town ordinance somewhere that could prevent Jane from bringing in her hippie colony. He’s convinced you’re favoring Jane. You know, Blythe supports Jane, and you and Blythe are together.”

“Go on.”

“So he got someone to unlock your office, said it was on official town business and the taxpayers paid for it and all. It wasn’t me. I came out of the ladies room and found the mayor going through the papers in your office.”

Oh dear Lord.

“And he unlocked your second desk drawer and found your drawings.”

All of the feeling left Austin’s body. He wanted to slow down and pull to the side of the road and throw up, but his legs felt as though they were asleep, a thousand tiny pricks and needles keeping him from feeling how much pressure to apply to the gas or the brakes. He had to move his fingers to be sure they were still connected to his hands, and then his hands to be sure they were still connected to his arms, and then his arms—he couldn’t move his arms—they just hung limply associated with his shoulders, like two sighs just shaking hands.

“I said he found your drawings.”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time.”

“Now, Austin, I really don’t care what you draw. You could draw naked ladies in there for all I care. In fact, I really liked the drawings, especially the mayor as that—I don’t know what you’d call him—I guess a Colonel Sanders from hell.”

“Yeah, from hell.” He had no moisture in his throat; he was amazed he was able to keep his voice from squeaking.

“I mean, as far as talent and what I can see of the storyline, it looks pretty good, but you know where I’m going with this.”

“Yeah.”

“The mayor wants you back pronto. A special called meeting. I think he wants to fire you. Of course, you have Jane on the board, who is on your side, she thought the whole thing was wonderful, of course. But I don’t know how the others are going to face it.”

“Well, if I get fired, I guess, well…”
Maybe it will be okay. Pull into the Zen frame of mind. This could be the sign you’re looking for. This could be evidence that you need to move on and—

“Now, don’t take this too seriously, you know how the mayor shoots off at the mouth all the time, but you might want to get an attorney. The mayor is talking about libel and slander and misuse of town property and all this kind of junk. Mind you, I don’t think he has a case, but you know how these things go.”

“Yeah.”

But Austin didn’t know how these things went.

He would soon find out.

****

When he came into town, it was as if he had grown a second head, or an additional arm, or some other type of grotesque malformation that caused him to be a freak of nature, an oddity, a genetic experiment gone terribly, terribly wrong. Being a pariah in the South is particularly uncomfortable. One of the few charming and inspirational elements of Conyers was the community mentality, the fact that everyone knew everyone else’s neighbor. The fact that some people still left their doors unlocked.

But all that changes when you are no longer recognized as a part of the community.

Queen tried to make him as comfortable as possible. She ran interference for him and even screened his calls without his asking. The town board was having a meeting in one week to determine the extent of humiliation and damage his drawings had done to the town—never mind the fact that he was probably doing them while on the job. Never mind the fact that no one would have even seen them if he had been at his post, instead of enjoying a love romp down to Charleston with some wild New York woman. That alone would cause the town to ask for reimbursement of the salary Austin had so mercilessly and deliberately cheated the taxpayers out of. The week’s grace period was presumably to allow Austin time to find a good lawyer. The weekly newspaper ran some of the cartoons; obviously they only selected the least flattering cartoons to display.

But he didn’t want a lawyer. He wanted to run away. He wanted to delve into the pages of his comic books and not return. He wanted to be like Thor and throw a thunder-hammer into the skies and vanish in a cloud of smoke. He wanted to fly above the town so high that all the petty politics and inconsistencies looked like small streams of vapor that would only last briefly before dissolving into the bigger universe. He would have even settled for relocating to Ocracoke Island and renting jet skis to tourists.

And for the first time he had an idea—not the knowledge, but just a small trickle of the idea—of why Blythe might want to run away.

Sometimes it was so much easier to just disappear than to fight.

If grace was available, the town of Conyers was in short supply. Austin wanted to call Blythe, but he told himself she had family issues to settle, greater issues than he to sort through, and after all, if no one in the town knew her brother was alive, they certainly wouldn’t know his phone number or where to reach them.

Austin didn’t get a lawyer, though the town’s attorney strongly advised him to procure one. Citizens rarely attended town board meetings, but the gallery was full, despite the fact that, if Austin was going to be fired, this was a personnel issue that would be handled in closed session. Austin felt this pre-show audience was just a chance for the mayor to flex his theatrical muscles, to show how artists will humiliate the town if given a chance to reside in a colony at Jane’s hippie retreat, and of course, despite the fact that the town’s infrastructure needed repair, that the town employees were grossly overdue for a raise, and the landfill was in dire straights, it was Austin’s artwork that had been primarily placed on the agenda as the most important feature facing the town.

Queen placed the mayor’s gavel at its regular spot and gave her crooked half-smile to Austin. The half-pity smile. Well, maybe tonight it was mostly pity.

“Queen, I just want to say, no matter what happens after the meeting…thanks.”

“Thanks for what?”

“For looking out for me. For making me feel welcome. I don’t know, for just being in my corner.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way. Besides you might be in for a few surprises tonight.”

“I don’t think I can handle any more surprises.”

Queen leaned down to his ear and whispered. “Good surprises. I didn’t want to tell you before, but just hold on, things may work out better than you think.”

The Comfort Café didn’t cater the meeting—everyone was too wound up to enjoy a treat of turkey and cheese on wheat with sweet tea. The mayor appeared diminutive, replacing his cowboy hat and John Wayne swagger with a slight, unassuming shuffle. He wanted to appear just the opposite of the horrific mind-bending villain depicted in Austin’s fairly tale. He wanted to appeal to the common man. Austin could see through his charade, but many of the Conyers citizens there just simply nodded a sign of approval at the mayor, sending sympathetic eyes to his poor, maligned and misunderstood character. Perhaps the mayor was really better at bending minds than anyone initially suspected. Talk about life imitating art.

“I hate that we have to have this kind of meeting,” the mayor said, pounding the gavel with a half-hearted tap instead of the forceful pounding he previously had taken so much pleasure in. “Now, as far as Mr. Parker, much of this would be a personnel issue so our attorney says we have to go into the closed session for that. But I think we are all aware of the embarrassment that’s been going on. We’ve found these drawings.” He put a strange emphasis on “these,” and emphatically waved the illustrations around, as if they were plans for a nuclear warhead or something infinitely more sinister. “I’ll be the first to admit when I hired Austy, I felt he knew what this town was about. But this town has been nothing but fodder for his stupid teenager art that isn’t even worth the paper it’s written on. And I want to apologize for everything that has gone on and the embarrassment this has caused the town and all of its wonderful citizens.”

Queen stood up. “I have an announcement.”

The board looked at her. No one on the board had ever stood up during the meetings. She was the clerk. Her job was to take the minutes, not contribute to them.

“We have a citizen who would like to be recognized. She is on the agenda to speak.”

“I didn’t get a listing of anyone who wanted to address the board,” the mayor said.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I placed it in the mail to you earlier. Must have gotten misplaced. Anyway, I know you believe in the right of citizens to address the board, and I knew you would not have nay problem with allowing a citizen to express her very strong feelings on the town’s cartoon issue.”

What’s going on?

The doors to the meeting room flung open, and Blythe entered dressed in a homemade version of her comic-book namesake’s costume. Behind her was a small boy wearing a Superman Halloween costume. Austin saw the circular scar on the boy’s cheek and knew it was Chas.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the board!” She squealed.

“Blythe?” The mayor asked. “Blythe, what in the hell?”

“Silence. I am not Blythe tonight. I am Shelley. I am the waitress who defends you from apathy and the horrors of cold coffee. I am the hero each of you want to become. Well, okay, I really am Blythe. You see, I couldn’t quite get the costume right. You know, all those comic book women have the huge boobies and tiny waists.”

Austin hadn’t heard someone call them boobies since fourth grade.

“Well, I went online trying to find how I could order a super hero costume, and you know what, Mr. Mayor, cartoons are big business.”

“What?”

Blythe handed some papers to her nephew who proceeded to pass them out to everyone in attendance, starting with the board, as if his costume gave him a secret confidence, as if he possibly could believe that he could fly, given the right conditions.

“Mr. Mayor, and members of the board, your town manager realizes the importance of boosting your economy. After all, Conyers’ population has increased, how much was that Mr. Mayor?”

“Uh, well, a…”

“It has increased exactly thirty-point-five percent since last year,” Queen interjected. “Just don’t ask me who the point five was.”

“Mr. Mayor, the town is predicted, due to population studies at one of university departments that does population studies, to increase how much if all factors remain the same?” Blythe asked.

“I—I don’t have those figures with me.”

“That’s alright Mr. Mayor, I do.” Queen stood up and rattled a series of impressive numbers, along with the dismal statistics of towns of similar size that weren’t able to productively handle the growth that came from being a bedroom community to larger areas.

“Mr. Mayor, do you know how much the latest comic book convention brought in?”

“What?”

“Costumes, Mr. Mayor. You gotta get a gimmick. Now, Jane here has wanted to start an artist colony, and guess what? Comic book artists draw fans, and guess what? Fans come to town, spend their money, buy food, buy t-shirts, stimulate the local economy, and then leave and go back home. You get an economic shot in the arm without having to increase the support services like water, sewer and garbage services. Of course, that will help keep you from raising taxes, you don’t want to raise taxes.”

“Well, raising taxes is bad. Raising taxes is real bad.” The mayor said it twice, and slowly, so that any reporters in the room would be able to carefully record it verbatim.

“Do you believe imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?”

“I uh, what?”

“That imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? I present to you, the literary heroes of Conyers.”

And then, like a parade, they marched in, one by one, dressed as characters from Austin’s drawings: Grandma from the café, the paper boy who let Austin borrow his bike to see the Virgin Mary, the manager of the MegaShoppe who wanted to hire Blythe, two of the Latinos who frequented the café, and the star of the show, the Snake Lady. She came in with plastic snakes—the kind you find at the drugstore for a dollar—curled around her neck like a Medusa stole. She held in one hand the magical “touchstone” Blythe had given her to combat the rabid reptiles. The other hand held a snake sock puppet, argyle, even. She danced down the aisle and laughed. A hush fell over the gallery like a thick fog. No one had ever seen the Snake Lady smile. No one had ever seen her leave her front yard. No one had ever seen her without fear or loathing and complaining. Behind her, following in her footsteps, were two granddaughters dressed as Greek muses, with long fingernails and their own stuffed animal snakes (that were, in actuality, probably some type of caterpillar, but for the purposes of the parade, long red forked tongues of construction paper were attached to the animals’ mouths.) The young girls, who must have been no more than seven, moved their stuffed animals back and forth through the meeting gallery, laughing in silly schoolgirl glee when citizens pretended to get “bitten” or “frightened” by the furry friends.

“Mr. Mayor, by sponsoring a comic book hero festival, this town can rake in more money than you can shake a fist at. We’ve needed something unique; something we could claim was ours other than the fantastic pecan pie and small town charm. Just three days a year. An economic shot in the arm. I believe you’ll find Queen has done all the research into how other areas handle their festivals and the economic benefit it brings.”

“Now, this is all fine and dandy,” the mayor said. “I’m sure glad you enjoyed dressing up and having some fun, even though it’s long since past Halloween. I know we all enjoy these things, and we’d like to be kids again, but we just can’t. We just can’t. That’s just not the way things are meant to be.”

“Why not?” the Snake Lady asked.

The gallery gasped. She spoke. She smiled and she spoke on the same night. Surely a sign that Jesus was coming soon.

“Yeah, why not?” Queen asked.

“I don’t believe I asked for a comment from the town clerk,” the mayor said.