Table of contents | Previous chapter Introduction | Cast of characters   Playing with Fire A novel by Scott Lazenby   Chapter 22 rixie had carried the flu home from school, and I was feverish, but I had to go to the meeting. I should have let Betty Sue handle the staff support, but with as much as I had invested in the issue, I couldn’t just lie at home and watch it unfold on cable TV.       As I expected, the council members unanimously voted to place the City/County contract on the ballot for the voters to decide. It seemed to be a small victory for the opposition, but it wasn’t enough to avert another speech from Todd Pritchard.       “We see this as a transparent attempt to undercut our charter change initiative,” he said. “Your scheme won’t work, because we will continue our signature drive, even if it means placing the measure on the September ballot. You may have come to your senses on this, but what’s to stop future councils from going down the same path? We need to put a stop to it.”       I felt like my body was on fire, and all I wanted to do was go home and crawl into bed, but Pritchard droned on.       “Other petitions are circulating, and they take a lot less signatures, so don’t be surprised if you see them on the May ballot. This council and staff have been reckless in pursuing courses that would endanger the lives and quality of life of Trillium citizens, and we can’t let that go unchallenged. You have made the right decision to place these issues before the voters, but it is one of the few good decisions I have seen you make.”       Mayor McTavish had put on her reading glasses and was skimming through a stack of correspondence as Pritchard spoke. She let the silence hang until he had got back to his seat, then slowly took off her glasses and looked up. “Thank you Mr. Pritchard,” she said, without expression. “Any other comments from the audience? Okay then, next item.”       “Excuse me, madam mayor,” Rob Titus blurted out, “but I have an issue to bring up related to this, and we must discuss it in executive session.”       McTavish gave him a skeptical look. He had clearly taken her by surprise. She rubbed her temples.       “All right. But I hope you’ve got a good reason for doing this.”       “Yes, you will see that I do.”       The mayor announced that the next part of the meeting would be closed to the public. There was an awkward pause as the council waited for the audience to file out. Reporters were allowed to remain, along with staff who were involved in the issue being discussed, but everyone else had to leave the room. I noticed Rob Titus whispering to the mayor. She in turn motioned for the city attorney to come up and talk to her. After a couple minutes of conversation, Pete Koenig returned to the staff desk. “Uh, this is sort of strange, but apparently the council doesn’t want you to be in the executive session.”       “Huh?” The only time I had ever been excluded was when they were discussing my performance review. That wasn’t scheduled for another six months.       “Yes,” Pete said. “I’m not sure why. But that’s the way it looks.”       “Okay,” I said, trying to sound stoical but in fact feeling like an outcast. I looked at the mayor, but she was studiously avoiding me. I pulled together my files and notebook. “I’ll be in my office,” I told Betty Sue on my way out.       In fact, my fever was raging and I would have rather gone home, but I had the feeling that something worse than the flu was about to happen to me. I went upstairs to my office, trying to avoid the looks of the crowd in the lobby, and started to read one of my professional journals, but I couldn’t concentrate. I drank a glass of water and loosened my tie. My shirt was damp with sweat.       The executive session seemed to take forever. I thought about going back downstairs to see if they had somehow started the regular meeting without me, but I didn’t want to have to face the public. I just sat at my desk with my head in my hands.       I heard the elevator doors open and sat up, pretending to be reading a memo. Diane McTavish and Seth Rosenberg walked in. They pulled up chairs gingerly, like they had arrived late for a funeral service.       McTavish pressed her lips into a thin line. “Ben, this is very difficult for me to say, but I suppose someone has to. Titus told us about the deal that Oakley has been working out with the Willamette Valley Fire District. He said that it should have been brought to us as an option, and that you intentionally withheld the information. He was pretty adamant about it, actually. Chief Oakley confirmed that he had shared the information with you and that you directed him to sit on it.”       She paused, looking uncomfortable. She clenched her jaw and continued. “I guess I’m not allowed to give the specifics of what took place in the session, but the upshot was that the council voted to put you on administrative leave, effective immediately.”       She squirmed a little in her chair, but met my eyes.       “It was a three-two vote, for what it’s worth,” Seth said softly.       I was speechless. I could feel that my face was red, and not just from the fever.       “How could you take a vote in executive session?”       “Okay, it was a straw poll,” McTavish said.       “And my contract doesn’t have any provision for ’administrative leave.’ Where did that come from?”       “It was a compromise, actually. Your contract does have a termination clause. Do you want to push the issue?”       I couldn’t think of anything to say.       “I’m sorry to have to give you this news,” Seth said. “It really is a rotten deal for you. You may feel you’re being made a scapegoat, and I don’t think you would be far from the mark on that. But it’s just the way it goes, I guess.”       McTavish stood up, towering over me for a moment until she stepped back. “We’ve got to get back to the meeting,” she said. “I’ll try to make this as painless as possible for you. Take some time off, maybe get away for a few days. It might be good for you to get out of the hot seat for a while.”       Seth put his hand on my shoulder. “Hang in there, Ben.” •      •      •       The hardest person to face was Mary. I knew she would mirror and amplify all the emotions that I was feeling, and I really didn’t want to deal with that.       “Short meeting?” she asked when I dragged myself into the living room.       “No. They threw me out.”       “What?!”       I slumped onto the couch next to her and explained, trying to make it sound like an everyday occurrence. It was, after all, something almost all city managers faced eventually. But Mary grew more agitated the more I said, so I finally stopped talking.       “How could they do this?” she demanded.       “Sshh. Don’t wake up Trixie.”       “I can’t help it. I’m ... I’m pissed, that’s what I am.” She stood up and started pacing.       “Seth said it was a close vote. Three to two.”       “Oh?” She wheeled around, her blond hair flying. ” So who voted against you?”       “Titus and Maggie, I’m sure. I don’t know about the third. I know it wasn’t Seth, so it was either Hank or the mayor.”       “Well, I think you should make them take action in a regular meeting. Make them be up front about their ... chicken actions. You know that they can’t do that kind of thing in a closed session.”       “No, I’m not going to make a scene. I’ll just say I’m taking a leave of absence. I’ve got to stay professional about it.”       “But Ben, the word will get out. Think of how much Todd Pritchard is going to gloat. The kids at school will ask Trixie all sorts of questions. It’ll be —”       I stood up. “No, Trixie’s friends don’t have a clue what I do for a living. We’ll get through it. But I need you to give me support, not hysterics.”       I regretted it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. A tear came to Mary’s eye. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. She put her hand to my forehead. “You’re burning up! We’ve got to get you to bed.” •      •      •       I slept in the next morning, telling myself that I needed to take it easy to get over the flu. In fact, there was some psychological relief in being sick. I couldn’t go back to the office anyway, and it seemed to give me a different reason for staying home.       Over the next few days, I began to feel better physically but not emotionally. The house was quiet with Mary at work and Trixie at school, and I didn’t feel motivated to do anything. In the morning I sat in my bathrobe reading the newspaper and doing the crossword puzzle. I made a halfhearted attempt to check the Web for job openings in other cities, but none held any interest. I questioned whether I really still wanted to be in that business anyway.       Betty Sue stopped by on the excuse that she needed to get my signature on a few contracts, but I think she really just wanted to console me. It worked both ways. The council had named Ken Longstreet as acting city manager instead of her. I knew she couldn’t express any disappointment over that — it would have been like complaining about the inheritance while the corpse was still warm — but I could tell it upset her. She had never had line authority over any of the department heads, and I could understand why the council didn’t want to take a chance with that now. But I had often left the city in her hands when I was out of town, and I felt she was up to the task.       And she was genuinely bitter over the council’s treatment of me. She told me that if she had had any idea that would be the result when she first brought up her idea about the fire department, she would have dropped it right away like I had told her to. I reassured her that it wasn’t her fault, and that the real issue with the council had been my failure to inform them of the Willamette Valley Fire District proposal — a decision that had been mine alone. She didn’t stay long — I sensed she felt awkward being alone in the house with me, and in spite of my effort to be cheery, I was depressing company.       I thought about sneaking into city hall on a Saturday to gather my personal effects — framed photos of the family, the college textbooks that I kept on a shelf and never opened, my coffee mug — but decided not to. I didn’t want to face anyone who happened to be working, and it seemed like clearing out my desk would be a sign of surrender.       A few other Oregon city managers called me with words of encouragement. I appreciated it, but I felt some obligation to explain the circumstances of my downfall, and each time in the telling, I thought of more ways I should have avoided it. I should have spent more time with the council members, I should have at least tried to win Todd Pritchard and his followers over to my side, and above all, I should never have stirred up the fire union. I tried not to wallow in self-pity, but I couldn’t escape the fact that ten years of work had pretty much ended in failure.       At least I had provided plenty of material for the newspaper. Sabrina Chan had sat through the executive session when the council decided to remove me, and although she couldn’t report directly from it, she knew exactly what was going on. She might have been personally sympathetic, but the realities of modern journalism compelled her to get some juicy quotes from Rob Titus, who emphasized the key role he played in making tough personnel decisions as the protector and champion of the taxpaying public. Todd Pritchard could barely contain his glee, and he stated that now that I had been fired, it was time to switch to a strong-mayor form of government. I’m sure he imagined himself in that role, which filled me with revulsion. Diane McTavish had been a more effective leader of our community than most of the buffoons that I’d seen elected under the strong-mayor/weak-council form of government in other cities. The stupidity of his position made me especially concerned, since in the depths of my cynicism and bitterness, I figured that was the one criterion that would make his suggestion appealing to the voters.       Brian Gallagher had declined to comment on my demise, in spite of repeated attempts to provoke a statement by both the press and the TV stations. That puzzled me at first, but then it occurred to me that as long as I was no longer in a position to cause him any trouble, there was no reason for him to antagonize me. I caught myself admiring his professionalism, as much as I was angry about the dirty tricks he had played during the campaign.       The council had, of course, placed the Willamette Valley Fire annexation measure on the ballot, along with the City/County contract. They had washed their hands of the issue, willing to just stand by and let the public do the job that elected representatives were supposed to do. It gave me some satisfaction to see that Seth Rosenberg and Diane McTavish had voted against it, citing the unjustifiable cost to the taxpayers. I suspected that the mayor was astute enough to have counted the votes before she took her stand, knowing that the measure was going to go on the ballot anyway.       As much as I hated going out in public, I couldn’t avoid it. One evening, Mary and I had a parent-teacher conference at Trixie’s school. When I entered Trixie’s homeroom, her teacher gave me an icy look. I was taken aback, then remembered that her fiancée — husband, now — had been one of my firefighters. I wondered what kind of line she’d been fed, but steered clear of the subject.       To fill my days, I started taking on more of the domestic chores. I tried to time my trips to the supermarket so that I would run into as few people as possible. I kept an eye out for familiar faces, and if I saw someone I knew coming down an aisle, I would steer my shopping cart in the opposite direction. It made buying groceries a lengthy process, but time was something I now had in abundance.       This fact hadn’t escaped some of the men I knew at my church, and they kept urging me to join them at their weekly early morning Bible study group. I finally ran out of excuses and found myself eating doughnuts and drinking coffee with a group of people that I really didn’t know very well. But it was good therapy — they seemed to give me unconditional acceptance, and their frank sharing of their own experiences reminded me that, in the big picture, my own struggles were fairly insignificant. One of them was caring for a dying parent, another had gotten laid off after a twenty-five-year career in a metal fabrication shop, and another had been accused of sexual harassment by a female co-worker. They amazed me in their ability to shrug off their problems and dive cheerfully into the scripture study.       In one of the sessions, the discussion drifted to the topic of adultery. One of the women in the congregation, rumor had it, had caught her husband in an affair. When she confronted him, he had wanted to have it both ways — to stay with his wife but still see his lover from time to time. According to the story, he couldn’t understand why she didn’t go for that proposal. One of the wags in our group noted that Solomon had had plenty of concubines, and monogamy was probably no more natural for humans than it was for other primates. Another said that it was an inevitable result of our throw-away society: if nothing was permanent and people were encouraged to buy a new house and car every few years, who could blame them for going through a few mates in their lifetime? They were joking, but the conversation made me uncomfortable, even though I knew it didn’t apply to me.       Every day in the middle of the morning I would go for a jog through our neighborhood and compose in my mind long notes to Kate. I had realized that I could get to my new e-mail account through our home computer, and in my long hours of solitude and despair she had become a lifeline. She asked me to tell her everything about the events and politics that were taking place in Trillium, and her acerbic wit and occasional flashes of warmth were like a balm for my soul. We could even sneak in a few phone conversations, and as I ran under the trees that lined our street I could hear her sweet voice in my head and replay the sound of her carefree laughter.       At the same time, there was a potential problem with our relationship that I really didn’t want to face. We had achieved a kind of intimacy that I hardly thought was possible, but the relationship was platonic. I also knew it could take a different turn if Kate and I actually got together.       Mary had started talking about summer vacation plans with the Andersons, and I didn’t know how to respond. Spending a week close to Kate would be awkward for me no matter what happened, but I was like a moth drawn to a flame. I fed myself an illusion that I could just enjoy her company without any physical tension tugging at me. But at the same time, I thought about taking a shower with her in my dream, and sliding the bar of soap over her body, and I knew that that scene would be pretty easy to arrange if our families spent a week together in a couple of vacation cabins. I should have talked to Kate herself about it, but I didn’t — maybe because it was a problem I really didn’t want to resolve. Next chapter: days of civic ugliness Copyright © 2001, Scott D. Lazenby. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the author is prohibited. Illustration: Paul Salmon