The Politicians

The Politicians lurked in the alley behind Broken Rock Butchers smoking cigarettes, spitting, throwing empty beer bottles against brick walls, appropriating government spending for localized projects in their respective districts. They told jokes about their mamas and carved the names of their wives and boyfriends into their arms with rusty nails. They snapped their fingers and sung songs in unison about knife fights, procedural rules in the House of Representatives, public polling, and some mythical tropical paradise where offshore accounts could hide their kick-backs.
The leader of the Politicians, Dave, carried brass knuckles and wore a blue blazer over a white camp collar seersucker shirt, with slacks and summer loafers. He was old, wrinkled, skinny, no more than a buck twenty-five, but when the horse-dealer limped down the alley-way with some drooping nag plodding behind him on a rope, Dave dreamt of starting a raw organ-meat diet, of hitting the Senate Gym on the first floor of the Russell Senate Office Building back in Washington, of getting a little buff to impress his wife, impress his twenty-three-year-old policy analyst. Dave saw a vision of himself he aspired to: a muscle man. In fact, that’s what he’d have the boys call him, as a little nickname, on the Senate Floor from now on: Muscles.
Here comes Muscles, they’d say.
Muscles is gonna filibuster the fuck outta this bill, they’d say.
Corporate American better cozy in deep with Muscles, they’d say.
The horse-dealer sat down at the weathered wooden card table the Politicians rigged up for negotiations. His horse let loose a withered wheeze as it leaned against the brick wall. The dealer got down to business.
“I need to revolutionarily engineer a society of crisis in Venezuela. I need five hundred dollars,” he said.
The Politicians exploded into laughed. They hooted. They roared. They giggled. Five hundred dollars for that fleabag? No way.
Dave took off his glasses, gingerly, and wiped them with the hem of his blazer, humming softly under his breath. Several minutes passed. The gang figured on what was coming.
At last Dave gazed into the amber eyes of the horse-dealer and pronounced, “Any man can make mistakes, but only the fool persists in his error.”
“I don’t understand,” the horse-dealer said. He was baffled. This wasn’t the way he intended it to go.
“You’ve been doing this a long time,” Dave said, plucking a strand of hair from his ear, “selling old horses to old men.”
The horse-dealer eyed Dave cautiously. “It was my father’s business, and his father’s before him. It is history itself I offer,” the dealer declared with ancestral pride.
“My friend, the foolish enterprise ends today,” Dave said, plucking a long hair from his right nostril. “Now!”
The Politicians took out their knives. They pulled the horse-dealer from his chair. Holding him down, they stabbed him to death as he screamed lamentations to god.
“And now the horse,” Dave commanded, as he rubbed from his left eye an accumulation of slime.
The Politicians pulled the horse to the back of the alley where Representative Trenton Doull perched on a wooden stool surrounded by cans of house paint. Trenton eyed the horse, first from this side, then from that. The Politicians peered on in tense silence. Trenton snapped his fingers, dipped a large brush into a can of black paint, and took some minutes to render a single word on the flank of the old horse.
“Turn it around, and let’s see what you’ve got there,” Dave ordered, removing a wad of gunk from between his incisors.
Trenton turned the horse allowing Dave and the rest of the gang to see his work. A single word, Boobs, was painted in large letters down the length of the horse. Dave smirked. The rest of the gang tumbled over in laughter.
“Let’s do it,” Dave said, picking at a crusty scab on his right hand.
Senator Gabriala McYonkers led the horse out of the alley and sent it wobbling on its own straight down Main Street. The Politicians, that rag tag gang of devious rascals, snickered around their cigarettes as the watched the town’s reaction. All the old ladies of the Tulips for Peace Committe fainted when they spotted the word painted on the horse; the old men of the League of Forsaken Grumbles all dropped their canes and had to be ushered into Red’s Tavern for a stiff sniff to set themselves right; the Youth Scouts, selling cookies and buttermilk in front of the Jasper Ankle Memorial Library, blushed a deep crimson when they noticed what was written; while the entire kindergarten class at Careworn Cattle Elementary School began crying, inconsolably, into their snot-soaked sleeves.
From his second-floor office window in the Von Scratchy Buidling, Lieutenant Dinkens, gripping his old sword, watched the calamity unfold. His soldierly brow slowly contracted into a stern, steely gaze, as he silently vowed to stamp out the scourge on polite society he knew hunkered, daily, behind the Butcher shop, scheming their unscrupulous machinations.
In the end, Dave did get buff. His wife was impressed, nightly massaging his muscular calves as he lay in bed scanning proposals for changes to the structure of the Senate Judiciary Committe. His twenty-three-year-old policy analyst too was impressed, and Dave and he began a sexual relationship, which ended only after a mysterious, pre-dawn car accident out on State Road 23 killed the analyst, who sat, on that inauspicious morning, crying in the passenger seat of a 1998 Jeep Cherokee driven by Richard Hammerclaw, also deceased, a greedy muckraker from Baltimore who should have known to keep his fucking nose out of other people’s business.