When someone finally got around to remembering about the Mayor, her body was found on the balcony. She was missing her right arm, and something had been feeding on her plump carcass.
The face was almost unrecognizable, but it was her, all right. They say she bled to death, and that it was very quick.
Investigators found a green plastic Tupperware bowl beside her and a used piece of Blaran Wrap on the kitchen counter. Apparently the Mayor was trying to feed one of the creatures some leftovers, according to police; a home-made tuna salad consisting of elbow noodles, onions, celery, tuna and mayonnaise.
With a million dollar grant from the Scow Corporation, the Mayor Hope Pedlar Memorial Art Gallery and Public Library is under construction at the time of this writing.
No one begrudges her that.
Andy Bandy, inconsolable, read the eulogy at the funeral, a closed-coffin affair, and died six months later.
As some said, he died of a broken heart, or just plain loneliness.
* * *
The Guardian-Standard soldiers on. For a few days it was put together by guys like Bruce Lipshitz, brought back out of semi-retirement; and Les Purvis, who has been awful quiet lately; Ken Noble and others. Barnes is on sick leave for psychological problems. It is unclear when and if he will return to his duties.
Bill O’Keefe died of a heart attack, running up the stairs to the second-floor newsroom. Decades of easy living, two packs of regular smokes a day, and a litre-a-day whiskey habit finally caught up with him.
Mackenzie Schwartz was reassigned to the war in Afghanistan, where she reports daily though the written word, both for her News Service employers and as a free-lance journalist.
She’s probably more man than some will ever be, and more woman than some will ever have.
Les figured that out after a while, and has also applied for a transfer.
This writer wishes them well.
* * *
The Hot Dog Bandit was no more. Bru didn’t really care what happened to him; but from now on there were no sharp-fingered pinch marks in the buns. Hot dog buns, hamburger buns, any kind of buns, they were all good now.
Whether the Hot Dog bandit was killed by a giant mutant ninja salamander, as the media was now calling them; was unclear and in Bru’s mind irrelevant.
For all he cared, the guy got picked up by the Detroit Tigers.
Or perhaps it was just some construction worker, headed out to Calgary or Fort McMurray. Maybe some electrician, or a pipefitter gone home to Prince Edward Island, or somewhere on the east coast. Maybe it was the Mayor! Or some guy who worked in research at Buncor. Or maybe it was some simple-minded old foreign lady, or Chief William P. O’Shaughnessey; whose body was never found. It could have been anyone, but whoever it was, they were gone—perhaps picked up in a meth lab raid somewhere, or died with a needle in their arm in some alleyway.
Maybe they got eaten. No one could say for sure.
Who cared?
Certainly not Bru.
He still had plenty of problems of his own to deal with.
It really didn’t matter to Brubaker; although he occasionally wondered if somewhere in Canada, somewhere in the world for that matter, someone was even at that exact moment going through the rack. So fresh-smelling, all warm bread and plastic, pinching every damned one of the friggin’ things.
Some poor stock boy getting blamed for it. You would think the Hot Dog Bandit would notice after a while that there is a little plastic tag, and that it has a date on it.
For them it’s not about freshness. It’s just plain ignorance. A kind of mega-abuse on a nanoscopic scale. Totally random and arbitrary.
The fourth kind of stalker.
Certainly some people are stubborn; but there’s more to it than that.
Something sick, something evil, something menacing, something deep; and latent in their subconscious mind, deep in their very souls, something rubbing them the wrong way.
They know who they are. And life isn’t fair sometimes.
They say there is a kind of justice in the world, but sometimes you wonder.
As Chuck Brubaker once said in a letter to the editor, “You don’t need any training to be a philosopher.”
(But it might help.—ed.)
Ultimately Brubaker learned a lot about himself.
When things are going good, that is not the measure of a man. It’s when the chips are down, and the whole world seems to be against you; it’s what you do then.
That is the measure of a man.
* * *
Walter LaSally drove around and around and around, pushing snow across the parking lot at the Charity Casino, grateful to have won the bid for another season. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth he went.
With a pudgy little wife, three ill-behaved kids, a house, a business, people depending on him for their wages, he managed the stress by never being seen without a beer in his hand. Walter was aware that he was a little man, with a high-pitched obnoxious voice, no obvious skills, and no real education. He was trapped and he knew it. He would be cutting grass, plowing snow and drinking beer by the pool for the rest of his life.
He would be rooting for the Leafs for all of eternity, and hanging onto his own set of core values.
(And probably not getting much joy out of either one. — ed.)
He knew who he was.
In this writer’s opinion, a more perfect fate could not have befallen him.
Life has a way of taking care of all the little injustices, doesn’t it?
Epilogue: 3,150 A.D.