The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

I sometimes read the story over because it’s quite long and it goes into great detail about someone called Lucifer Dye. According to the story, Lucifer Dye was the man who corrupted Swankerton. All by himself. He was, if one were to believe the story, a onetime spy, a hired gun, a crooked cop, a confidence man, a crime czar, and an agent provocateur for some unnamed foreign power. He was also a long list of other things, none of them fashionable, and The News-Calliope hated the man and urged its readers to hate him and to undo the evil that he had done by going to the polls in November and electing good men to office. If they didn’t, the newspaper implied in an editorial signed by Channing d’Arcy Phetwick III, they were fools. The editorial then thoughtfully listed a number of men who, it said, deserved the votes of all those citizens of Swankerton who weren’t absolute fools.

I like to reread the long article about Lucifer Dye because it promises to tell who he really is, but it never does. I keep hoping that it will. Clipped to the fading newsprint is a shorter article, only a couple of inches long, that was torn from a copy of the international edition of Time. It’s about how the citizens of Swankerton elected a last-minute, write-in slate to fill all of the major municipal offices. It has a kicker, of course, or Time wouldn’t have printed it. The kicker is that one of the new city councilmen is Buford Robineaux, only son of the city’s defeated mayor.

I live in Mexico now and I’ve quit smoking and I run a store in a seaport-resort town that sells books in English about Mexico to tourists who can’t read Spanish. There seem to be a lot of them. It doesn’t cost much to live in Mexico and the bookstore earns enough to support my wife and me. My wife’s name is Carol and her best friend is a twenty-three-year-old stunner from the Midwest whose husband runs a boat marina. Sometimes her husband and I go to a local cantina and drink beer with a redheaded Mexican who’s the chief of police. The Mexican feels that there’s nothing unusual about his hair, but he thinks that my friend has rare eyes because one is blue and one is brown.