The recently re-elected Mayor John Lonjacquee decided to take a more municipal approach to his leisure time. The people of Inner Station, who had seen fit to return him to office despite his being from Alabama, deserved a mayor who would give them 110 percent.
In his mind he saw the legacy he would leave to the people of this town. He wanted to leave behind a legend, basically, of a man who knew how to lead -- how to be a good leader. A Role Model! Of course! And even in a small town like Inner Station, Mississippi, population 3,742, being that kind of leader was a full-time job.
John Lonjacquee was not afraid of those who would laugh at this, or criticize him for working too hard, taking his position too seriously; the trust that the good people of Inner Station chose to place in him must not be degraded by anything less. Go ahead, call me crazy, he thought. I'm doing all this for you.
In keeping with his second-term civic-mindedness, Mayor Lonjacquee decided to have dinner once a week with Reverend Tourette, the Episcopal minister who presided over the largest congregation in town. (Inner Station, being close to the Mississippi River, was not as fervently Baptist as towns further inland. There was a joke that the Baptists lost their congregations when they took them down to the Mississippi to be baptized -- they got swept away in the current. Since baptism was the defining act of their faith, they tended to move where the rivers weren't quite so dangerous.)
Their delicious dinner was followed by comfortable, friendly conversation. Mrs. Lonjacquee and Mrs. Tourette compared notes on getting the help to do just the right thing with sweet potatoes, then continued their ongoing analysis of the stock market while the Mayor and the Reverend retired to the porch. Lonjacquee and Tourette had become fast friends during the Mayor's first term, when the Mayor brought his troubles about the trials of leadership to the Reverend. Each found that the other's worldview dovetailed nicely with his own -- a kind of micro-political synergy.
In the course of developing their working relationship and their friendship, one interest both were pleased to find they shared was bourbon. They took their regular seats on the porch and Mayor Lonjacquee reached behind his wicker chair and pulled out a brand-new bottle of Maker's Mark. Two glasses appeared, and as the night settled in, stars coming out and the bugs quietly announcing the early spring, the two most trusted men in Inner Station (by their own estimation at least) began one of their favorite pastimes.
Only now, thought the Mayor, it's civic business. He blinked back a tear after swallowing his first sip, and realized that civic pride, doing one's job, and most of all leadership never tasted so good.
-----
Mayor Lonjacquee was truly loved by his constituents. Anyone looking for proof might consider the old platitude that love means never having to say you're sorry.
Because the Mayor, in his first term, had given the people of Inner Station ample opportunity for forgiveness. There had been several incidents where the Mayor had been seen in a festive, decidedly un-mayoral state. But the people always found it in their hearts to forgive, even up to the point of re-electing him (though he had never publicly acknowledged any of these embarrassing instances). The Reverend had encouraged the people's forgiveness, of course, but neither Mayor L. or Rev. T. realized that the primary reason for the people's forgiveness was that Lonjacquee gave them something to talk about.
On this particular evening, though, with the world so quietly full of possibility, the Mayor's private zeal for civic responsibility and action (in the form of taking a meeting with the Reverend) and the Reverend's eagerness to strengthen their working relationship and their friendship by matching the Mayor drink for drink and toast for toast got a little out of hand. Perhaps, with so much enthusiasm and whiskey on the porch it was inevitable.
At roughly the half-way point of the bottle, when they really could have called it an evening and been comfortable, the Mayor remembered that someone, maybe old Hattie Carroll, had complained of raccoons getting into her garbage.
"So I said I'll tell ya what I'm goin' ta do about it," cried Lonjacquee as he burst from the creaking wicker chair. He disappeared into the house for a few minutes, and returned, bumbling into furniture here and there and cursing under his breath, carrying a .22 rifle.
"Hooh, Lordy, Jawn, that'll take care of 'em," exclaimed the Reverend, laughing. They were careful not to refer to the raccoons as "varmints" or "critters," both knowing how ridiculous they would sound. This was not "Hee-Haw," after all. And the animals were ABSOLUTELY not referred to as "'coons" no matter how drunk they got. Both men intuitively understood this.
"I tell you, Lou," said the Mayor, setting the gun down against the railing, "this is what I've been saying about true dedication. Working for the people -- goin' the extra, extra, uhhp, extra mile. I ain't no typical do-nothing Southern po-, politico."
The Mayor's enthusiasm was no longer coming out ahead of the bourbon. The last word, as he said it, sounded like a couple of consonants were missing -- an extra suffix had been dropped, or so it seemed. It bothered him for a few seconds, almost making him dizzy. After a moment, though, a clarity rose from his confusion, and he felt suddenly focused.
"Lou, we gotta do something about this pressin' social concern," the Mayor announced. He emphasized the last few words, imagining as he spoke how they would look in the newspaper. There would doubtless be a glowing article about how he put himself at personal risk to grapple with the people's problems.
The Reverend was too far along to disagree with the Mayor. Even though they had not actually done anything yet, Reverend Tourette agreed in principle with the Mayor's philosophy of taking the bull by the horns, and to go against the logical conclusion of this idea would seem like an untoward criticism. In fact, the Reverend would agree with anything Mayor Lonjacquee said as long as they could continue drinking. Thus the opportunity for a cooler head, had one been available, to prevail, was lost.
The two men, cloaked in the deep night, set about to procure anti-raccoon
ordnance and more whiskey.
-----
Sheriff Walt Miller was awakened at four a.m. by a shrill phone call. It wasn't often that he was awakened this way, or at this time, but when it happened he knew that the Mayor was involved. The sheriff of a town like Inner Station shouldn't be getting calls this time of night more than once or twice in a lifetime, he thought.
The satisfaction of being right was not very comforting for the Sheriff. As he wearily got dressed, he had to remind himself that this was an actual emergency, not some complaint about Lonjacquee singing at the top of his lungs or cavorting with a stripper across the river in Louisiana. This crisis featured live ammo. Miller realized that nobody would get hurt, though, since he knew Lonjacquee would run out of bullets before he hit anything.
As he made his way to his car, he thought about how he had ended up in Inner Station. His great ambition had been to get into the FBI academy, and he still hung on to that dream. He had assumed that some public service in real-world law enforcement would bolster an otherwise lackluster resume. Having grown up in Jackson, he was something of a city boy compared to the folks here, but they liked him well enough. It was a shame that they re-elected Lonjacquee. Walt Miller was gripped with a sinking feeling, every time he had to answer a call like this, that his life was becoming more and more like a re-run of "The Dukes of Hazzard."
When he pulled up to the Carroll estate, he saw two clumsy figures scramble into the brush. The poor woman was inside the house, he knew, since she had cried on the phone about being huddled on the floor of her kitchen, petrified after the first sounds of gunfire.
"Mr. Mayor?" Miller called. "It's all right, you can come out now. I think we need to talk." He sighed to himself. The Secret Service never had to put up with anything like this.
"Hush! Yer scarin' them rat bastards away," hissed a voice from the woods.
Suddenly a strange, hissing "pish" came from the undergrowth, followed by the scream of a cat. The Sheriff could hear the cat scrabbling away on the far side of the roof.
"Hold your fire!" the Sheriff yelled. "Let's go, gentlemen, the game is over!" He was frightened now, because he wasn't sure how many of them were in there with Lonjacquee and he had never really had to deal with the Mayor when he was armed. Miller knew that the Mayor couldn't hit the side of a barn. But the other guy had just hit a cat on the roof. Was that some kind of silencer on the gun? What made it sound like that? Was Lonjacquee out carousing with some international spy?
The Sheriff had to smirk at the idea that John Lonjacquee was out shooting cats with James Bond.
Just then, there was a rustling in the darkness, and the two most trusted
men in Inner Station came out of the bushes, hanging their heads like guilty
schoolboys.
-----
It took a while for the Sheriff and the two pillars of the community to piece together the whole story. Apparently, once they had found purpose to their drinking, they had set out in search of raccoons to kill. The Mayor had his .22 rifle and wore a camouflage vest and floppy field hat. The Reverend, not much of an outdoorsman, followed with his street clothes and his son's BB gun. In retrospect, of course, both men realized that no earthly good could possibly have come of an campaign that started so inauspiciously.
The Sheriff, the Mayor and the Reverend were sitting together in the police station, discussing what had to be done next. It was 10:30 in the morning, and the office was filled with mocking springtime sunshine.
"Look, John, I don't like it any more than you, but we can't exactly go back on it now." The Reverend was too exhausted to be angry anymore. "She's bound to tell somebody and you won't be able to look anyone in the face for at least three days." The Reverend had spent the morning with Hattie Carroll, after some sleep at his house. He had sat with her, explaining the kinds of stress that men in power have to cope with, and that the incident would be blown out of proportion if people were to start chatting about it, and that his own attempts to try to keep the Mayor in line had not worked well. (The Reverend had also proffered a plausible explanation for his own benign involvement in the mayhem, and it looked like Hattie was buying it.) Despite much earnest eye contact and a quick prayer (replete with hand-holding) at the end of their little meeting, he was unsure whether Hattie would agree to keep the whole incident out of the rumor mill.
"Damn. What can I do?" The Mayor's fleshy face was flushed and splotchy. He sipped tentatively at a styrofoam cup of coffee.
"A couple of days out of town may not be such a bad idea," suggested Sheriff Miller. He had seen this sort of thing happen before.
After previous incidents, the Mayor would try to go about his business in town, quickly realizing that everyone was talking about him behind his back. He began to drink as a form of penance, a sort of begging for reconciliation. Of course, no one would understand his actions, and he would feel more isolated and guilty. Inevitably, the one incident would be compounded into several, a bourbon-soaked snowball effect. The Mayor spent the night in jail on more than one occasion, in an attempt to put a stop to the cycle. The Sheriff hated this because it meant that he had to sit in there guarding him, since the Mayor would not allow a mere deputy to see him in such a degraded state.
The night in the klink always worked on Lonjacquee, but the Sheriff had his doubts every time the cycle repeated and he found himself listening to the Mayor's slurred, teary promises that this would be the last time.
Thus, the pattern was pre-empted with a trip out of town, and not directly across the river to Louisiana (where Miller had picked up Lonjacquee in the past), but to Natchez, ending as always in New Orleans. There, everyone hoped, the Mayor would get whatever it was out of his system; this was easier than admitting that it was his system.