NOVEL WEB A Digression On The Influence Of Exurban Elements On The Politics Of Rural America
Waiting for the Triangle people to show up was excruciating.
Danny paced behind the counter and played games on his phone, the magazine now in the trash (where it belonged from the start). Only a trickle of people had come in since Lavender and that was two whole hours ago. He thought about texting some of his friends at Emporia to see if any of them knew about the project, but fear of sending a weird text out of the blue after 3 years of radio silence freaked him out too much.
Suddenly he heard a loud honk from out behind the store. He quietly thanked the lord.
The “loading dock” had been his dad’s idea. Their family had already owned the land behind the store, and when the house that was there got leveled in 2011, his dad had just enough to buy a large prefab garage that he dumped on the old house’s above ground foundation.
All that work so he could start selling fertilizer, T posts, concrete and other bulky items that a normal general store couldn’t carry, but were hot commodities for rural folks. It looked like crap, and they didn’t even own a forklift, so it felt like someone had just turned selling shit out of their massive triple car garage into a profession.
He slipped out the back door, and waved at the three people all sitting in the back bed of the truck that had just pulled up to the stores back lot. He stopped for a second to admire their truck. It was one of those old flatbeds where the back was just wooden surface and the front carriage was beveled in a charming retro way. They weren't impossible to find out here, but as the farms began to get larger the need for something as quaint as one of these had reduced significantly. The cab was a bright red with a freshly painted pink triangle on the door.
He scanned the the group for familiar faces, noting that they were all women. He didn’t see Lavender (all for the best probably), but he immediately locked eyes with another: Joan. She had a bob now instead of the lush long hair he had spent hours helping her style as a kid, so it took him a second, but when it finally computed, his brain lit on fire.
What the fuck was she doing here? She was supposed to be having a future, getting as fuicking far away from this place as humanly possible! She waved at him, and he responded by the ever awkward ‘one hand kinda up but not really wave’ that he tended to default to.
One look at the driver confirmed that the Lavender wasn’t there, but the driver waved the receipt out the window, and that was enough. He ran out to unhook the chain that blocked off the dock from the road. And motioned them to come in.
As the three 20-somethings began hopping off the truck, he ran back to the dock and unlocked the relevant garage door to push it up. Doing so revealed all sorts of garbage that a farmer at any time could have ordered too few of on a bulk catalog, and, needing it as soon as possible, would mosey down to Kenton General and buy it local.
That was the plan at least, but it had worked much better before Pa had a lung removed. Danny could admit to himself that he was never very good at hauling giant bags of fertilizer mix in a timely fashion, it made keeping good inventory a huge chore.
He turned to face the flatbed as it backed toward the edge of the foundation, and with the help of the ecovillagers began to haul the two pallets of bagged concrete onto the truck. It was grueling work, hand dragging the pallet with a large rope, so they didn’t speak much beyond greetings and quick introductions by Joan that Danny assumed he would forget.
Everyone ended up focused on the job, settling into the quiet work silence of extreme concentration, punctuated by grunts and shouted commands. Playing tug of war with a stack of 60lb bags wrapped together in plastic was no laughing matter. Still, while he was sweaty and out of breath by the second pallet, it all only took about 10 minutes. He offered Joan and the other ecovillagers water, but they were just hasty to get back to the site.
As they were getting ready to leave Joan approached him. She said “It was nice seeing you!”
Danny smiled genuinely for the first time in what felt like years but was really just two hours. “Yeah! You running with these folks full time?”
Joan grinned back at him. “Yup! Too bad I gotta scoot. Lets catch up soon, ok? Seeya!” and then ran off toward the truck without waiting for his goodbye.
He stood there with his thoughts for a good few minutes watching the dust of the lot settle, long after the truck was out of view. He really didn’t know how to feel about this whole thing. He and Joan had promised each other as kids to escape this nothing hamlet and make it in a city somewhere. They discussed the merits and draw backs of Denver, LA, New York, and SF all the time, comparing what they dreamt of doing in each city, always with the understanding that wherever they went they went together.
Too bad in middle school they had begun drifting apart as the enforced gender norms of the culture began to teach that a guy could only be a girls boyfriend, never just her friend. While he was able to make guy friends, he was never as close as he was with Joan, and often he found himself wishing he’d been born a girl so they could still be besties without societies judgment.
Danny began locking down the loading dock again, still reflective. He had been the one to break the promise first. When his dad got lung cancer there was nothing he could do but take up the family business to support the exorbitant medical costs. On top of payments, Pa couldn’t run the store, and so he was trapped as long as he wanted his father to live.
She had gone to Emporia State, telling him that she intended to move to SF when she graduated. Now she had dropped out and moved to a local hippie commune project, apparently? Danny shook his head as he puled the chain across the loading dock again.
He wondered what made her change her mind so drastically? It was all a bitter pill for him to swallow. He mourned the failure of their childhood dreams in the way that only those who have resigned themselves to living through others can.
Danny kicked the dirt on his way back into the store. Arriving at the counter he could barely contain his dismay as he saw a man in a blue suit-vest, white collared shirt, bolo tie and a cowboy hat waiting at the counter with a basket full of groceries. Vince Darrow, moved from the Atlanta suburbs to the Topeka suburbs, and then bought out an old-timer rancher when he had made enough on his banking job to be set. All in order to achieve his real dream: to rollplay as a cowboy.
“Howdy” he said in a Georgia drawl practiced to sound exactly like Doc Holiday in an old western. The tone was pleasant, but his eyes betrayed a sharp anger at being ignored.
“Hey, Mr. Darrow.” Danny replied in as neutral tone as he could. “Sorry for the wait, I had to load something from the dock.”
The eyes did not change, but a thin smile appeared. “Not a problem my boy! Who were you loading up?” Darrow drawled.
Danny was caught flatfooted. Darrow was probably the worst person in all of Twin Crossings to hear about Triangle Ecovillage. He ran a hand through his greasy, brown, shoulder length hair. Whelp, he was going to find out sooner or later. “It was the people who bought out McDaniel's farm bouta week ago.”
“Right, right. Didn’t see them at church this Sunday, but that can be forgiven. Moving is hard work and all.” Darrow’s eyes locked with Danny’s who swallowed his comment about Twin Crossings having 3 churches. “Who’s the farmer? Does he have a family?” Danny flinched a bit at how intensely Darrow was starring him down.
Danny began ringing up his groceries to do something with his shaky hands. “Its a buncha Hippies from Emporia. Doing a back to the land thing.”
Danny would later swear he could hear the sound of glass breaking. Erupting in a much thinner middle class Atlantin accent Darrow screamed “What! Someone ought to do something about that!” Vince’s disposition had shifted from false smiles to outright aggression in less then a second. His fist landed on the checkout counter with a bang, bouncing his purchases and everything not nailed down. “We CANNOT have filth like that running around near our town.” It felt like smoke was pouring out of his ears. The atmosphere in the store had become stifling.
Danny decided to at least put up a token defense for his friend and a girl he was sweet on “It is a free country, sir.”
Darrow’s face shifted again, from fire and brimstone to a parent condescendingly explaining something to a child. “Be that as it may, we are a community, and communities get to choose who is worth admitting, and who is worth... removing.” His eyes bored holes in Danny’s face. “We did not agree to live with a bunch of.. pagan... anti-marriage.. freaks!” he was shouting again and his face had turned bright red.
Danny idly wondered if the mans passion for segregation had led him to move to Twin Crossings. There was a Latinx population here, sure, but they had mostly moved up in the late 00’s when the border crossing became insanely hard. He knew Darrow didn’t like them, but they went to church, kept to themselves, and did farm labor, so as a farmer himself he couldn’t really complain.
“By the way, I have not seen you in church in a month.” The Doc Holiday impression was back and thicker then ever. Danny had been tuning Darrow out while thinking about his politics, but the words cut like a knife through butter snapping him out of his reverie.
“I, uh..” He did NOT want to talk about his current crisis of faith with Vincent Darrow of all people. He deiced on a half truth “I’ve been taking some time to get right with the lord on my own. I gotta talk through some stuff that I’m not wholly certain about, before coming forward in the congregation.” There. Vague enough that it can’t be tracked back to his crisis, but close enough to the truth that it didn’t feel like a lie. Darrow nodded. “Anyway, that’ll be 67.83, thanks for stopping by!”
Danny hoped that the one, two of answering a question and completing the transaction he could shoo off Darrow, but alas. “Well, I will be praying for you to get though your tribulation as soon as possible.” He stopped and snapped his fingers a little too theatrically. “Oh! I should catch up with Joe. Him and I are organizing the potluck next month, and I want to talk to the man himself.”
Danny knew that he just wanted to gossip about the new people with his father. Darrow and his father had a weird relationship. A friendship and mutual respect founded on both being “Men Of God”, with a catty desire to see the other proved wrong about everything in creation just under the surface. He cursed internally, he had no clue what Pops would make of the situation, and Darrow getting the first word would make convincing all the harder.
Darrow left his bags on the counter and climbed the stairs to the top floor. Danny tried to tune out the banging, the loud greetings, and muttered conversation by thinking of anything else. He, of course, began to fantasize of Lavender. He imagined her pinning him to a wall. Her breath wet against his face. Her forcing her hand into his pants, and then further into…
“WELL GET YOUR GUN THEN! LETS ROUND UP A POSSE!” Darrow’s angry voice boomed out from above. That did not sound good.
“What? No. If we do this at all we do this this legally.” Pops’ rasp was just barley audible through the thin floorboards above Danny’s head. “This is why our great nation has laws, so we don’t do that anymore.” He was glad his father was nipping that cowboy nonsense in the bud, but the prospect of kicking them out via the sheriff's office still sounded grim. Sheriff John McCormick was another Evangelical Transplant, a la Darrow, with a very similar understanding of the world.
Danny buried his face in his hands. He probably should have mentioned they were armed. This whole situation was looking to become very ugly very fast.
Darrow stomped down the stairs glaring daggers into Danny as he snatched up his grocery bags and left. He said goodbye in a honey laced with arsenic. As the door banged shut Danny surveyed how much mud Darrow had tracked over the store and sighed deeply. “I guess the sins of the Father are sins of the Son too now, huh?” He whispered under his breath dejectedly, as he went for the broom.