Reelection Day

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your …

—Plato

The Arrival of the First Voter stirred the poll workers that late morning Election Day, as it would, the regular trio of friendly local lady volunteers, jolly underemployed or retired civic do-gooders waiting for representative democracy to show up at the canyon’s Parks and Rec trailer, though it stirred them only gently at first. The voter was an attractive and familiarseeming woman in her midthirties whose uncomfortable resemblance to a dead ex-soldier—a local single woman raped and beaten to death in her home outside the canyon and then buried, sloppily, a hundred yards from the bike lane of the rural road—was passing, as they say.

Except that it did not pass, it arrived and then remained there at the polling place with her, with the three clerks and the official county precinct inspector in the modular prefab community center and its welcome station, cardboard voter booths, large topographic map of the outlying canyons area, the ancient wide-open-faced clock on the wall, and the faded plaque commemorating the nation’s long-forgotten bicentennial.

Anyway, thought the inspector, what was it with these macho killers of girls and women, that they could bludgeon and fist and cut and shoot but could not take just a little extra time, please, to dig an only slightly deeper, safer grave? Was it that they wanted to be found and found out, discovered and punished that much more quickly, buying or selling or trading some time in a minutes-per-inches equation, and of course in the meantime exposing the body to animals, the sun, insects?

She strolled in, this first voter, wearing a camo uniform and high boots, and stood there, resembling herself. Dark hair wisped from under her cap, her posture straight. None of the crew of old-lady poll workers or the inspector did much—theirs was a slow and deliberate routine which always seemed to portend more, if elsewhere, and in a vaguely if confidently imagined democratic future—and so they did the same just now.

The inspector, an overweight and generally resigned but otherwise happily retired high school principal, puzzled momentarily over her arrival, and then hesitated before speaking. It was a habit born of three decades of careful, tempered nonreaction. He was a conscientious, lonely man with a mostly forgotten ex-wife and no children of his own, worn to easy complicity and gentle, humane acceptance after a career spent looking for so long after other people’s kids—an effort that had required, always, reconciling the compulsory and the unanticipated.

There was mild confusion at her appearance, some little electrical-level reflexive flinching, as when wasps or bees occasionally find their way into a room, and then relief—as almost immediately following the lady soldier were four bikers, easy to identify with their middle-aged masculine girth and black leather vests, flag bandannas, shiny chaps, beards, and tattoos. Playing dress-up as cowboys or Indians or Nordic sci-fi road warriors, all dreamy revisionist heroics and self-mocking bravado, except who could be sure it wasn’t totally sincere? They were happy each weekend to burn fossil fuel for no good reason, to drive too fast, to pass cars on a blind curve. Proud to exercise their privilege and poor judgment. Meaty fellows with straight day jobs, ex-wives, children. Or drug dealers and genuinely dangerous criminals, who knew? They were old and fat, and yet in their costumes they were somehow elevated or transformed, immortal even, and so proud and oblivious in their childishly happy self-regard, too. Helmets? Required by law, but resisted on principle. They favored the spiked Kaiser Wilhelm, the World War II Nazi, or sleek, streamlined robot wear. So, death, regardless!

Then, after the biker dudes, one by one, underneath the American flag hung above the front double doors, right there into the official polling place entered a dozen bicyclists, road racers, tap-tap-tapping in their special cleats, peeling off their tiny cycling gloves...