Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos

"Get tough on crime!" the voice went on. "Fenniman for Sheriff!"

"Hello, Mrs. Fenniman," I said, turning to greet Mother's best friend. "How's the campaign going?"

"Oh, it's you two," Mrs. Fenniman said. "Can't recognize anyone in these fool costumes."

She was dressed all in black, as usual, and looked more at home in her colonial clothes than most of the veteran reenactors. She was in her early sixties, like Mother, but while Mother could easily pass for ten or fifteen years younger, Mrs. Fenniman, with her pointy chin and sharp, beady eyes, had looked like an old crone as long as I'd known her. She was wearing some kind of oversized black bonnet, which she pushed back so she could peer up at our faces – the top of her head only came to my shoulder.

"You're running for sheriff?" Michael asked.

"You're not registered voters," Mrs. Fenniman said, frowning.

"I am in Caerphilly," Michael pointed out.

"Fat lot of good that does me here," Mrs. Fenniman said. "And you, young lady – why the devil do you insist on living up there in the middle of that horrible druginfested city?"

"Good question," Michael murmured.

"Actually, I'm pretty far out in the suburbs, you know," I said. "We have more trouble with possums than pushers."

"We could use more enlightened voters in this county," Mrs. Fenniman said. "Well, if you can't vote here, at least make yourselves useful. Pass these out."

She thrust a wad of campaign pamphlets at each of us.

"Oh, and Meg," she added. "You did bring the flamingos, didn't you?"

"Yes, of course I brought them," I said, wincing.

"Flamingos?" Michael echoed. "You never did tell me what that was all about."

"Campaign's keeping me so busy I almost forgot to ask about them," Mrs. Fenniman said. "And when I went by your booth a little while ago, you weren't there, and neither were the birds."

"I don't have them out in the booth," I said. "They're not period. But I've got them, don't worry. I was planning on bringing them by your house while I was here."

"That won't work," Mrs. Fenniman said. "I'm so busy campaigning this weekend I'm hardly ever home."

"After the festival's over, then," I suggested.

"Don't be silly," she said. "I'll pick them up at your booth later."

"What's the deal with the flamingos, anyway?" Michael asked.

"Mrs. Fenniman commissioned me to make a dozen wrought-iron lawn flamingos," I said.

"Okay," he said, in a tone that suggested he was hoping for a slightly more detailed explanation. With my family, there usually was a more detailed explanation, although he hadn't yet realized that sometimes he was better off not hearing it.

"It's to get back at the damned yard Nazis," Mrs. Fenniman said.

"She means the landscaping subcommittee of the Visual Enhancement and Aesthetics Committee of the neighborhood association."

"Whatever they call themselves," Mrs. Fenniman fumed. "Bunch of meddling busybodies if you ask me. What business is it of theirs what I have on my lawn? I own the place, don't I?"

"They passed a rule outlawing plastic lawn ornaments," I explained. "Mrs. Fenniman feels they were targeting her plastic flamingo herd."

"I know they were," she said. "I've filed suit to have the rule overturned, but meanwhile they've gotten an injunction against my flamingos. And that damned idiot of a sheriff is backing them."

"So you're escalating to wrought-iron flamingos?" Michael asked.

"The rule specifically permits both iron and stone ornaments," she said. "So it doesn't matter how much they hate 'em; they won't have a leg to stand on. Speaking of legs: you figured out a way to anchor them? I wouldn't put it past the yard police to steal them."

"Each one has a base," I said. "If you want to set them on the ground, they'll stand up just fine. If you want them anchored, all you have to do is set the base in concrete, and they'd need a backhoe to steal them."

"But are they pink enough? They have to be bright, bright pink."

"The enamel matches the last sample I showed you," I said. "I'm not sure it's possible to make them any brighter than that. As it is, they glow in the dark."

"Really?" Mrs. Fenniman said, brightening. "That's outstanding! The plastic ones never did that."

"You don't mean mat literally," Michael said.

"Just wait and see," I said.

"I'll come by your booth tomorrow to pick them up, then," Mrs. Fenniman said.

"Just bring your checkbook," I said.

"Pink, glow-in-the-dark flamingos," Michael mused, as Mrs. Fenniman stumped off, raising a cloud of dust in her wake as her long skirts trailed on the ground.

"I just hope she comes by early, before there's much of a crowd," I said. "I do not want a whole lot of people to see the damned things."

"Are they that bad?"

"Wait till you see them, gently glowing in the twilight," I said. "Or maybe not so gently. They rather remind me of the special effects they use in bad sci-fi movies to indicate lethal levels of radiation."

"They sound perfectly charming to me," Michael said. "I bet you could sell a lot of those."

"Quite apart from being glaring anachronisms, they're perfectly hideous, and I have no intention of selling a single one after Mrs. Fenniman claims her collection," I said. "It's hard enough for a woman to get people to take her seriously as a blacksmith; the last thing I want is for people to start thinking of me as that lady blacksmith who makes those cute pink flamingos."

In the distance, we could see Mrs. Fenniman, haranguing people and shoving campaign flyers into their hands.

"Odd," I said. "On her, that outfit makes me think more of Salem than Yorktown."

"Or the Wicked Witch of the West," Michael said, as we resumed walking. "I keep looking over my shoulder for falling farmhouses. So is that why she's running for sheriff? Because they outlawed her flamingos?"

"Yes," I said. "That and the fact that she thinks the incumbent sheriff is an incompetent fool and it's time for a change."

"Well, she may have a point there," Michael said. "But does Mrs. Fenniman have any relevant experience?"

"According to her, after raising two children and keeping her no-good rascal of a husband in line for forty-five years, policing the county should be a piece of cake."

"And what do the county voters think about that?"

"The sheriff's running scared," I said. "His campaign platform seems to be that he's hired a new deputy with big-city police experience and we don't need a new sheriff."

"So who's your mother's family supporting?" Michael said, showing his keen grasp of the realities of small town politics.

"Undecided, so far, since they're both relatives," I said. "Which is why they're both campaigning so hard. See, there's the sheriff now."

We were passing the town square. where the sheriff was just easing himself into the stocks and Cousin Horace was placing a board across two ramshackle sawhorses to make a crude table. As the sheriff settled in, shifting his arms and head in the holes to find a comfortable spot, Horace made a big show out of locking him in with an enormous reproduction padlock Mrs. Waterston had commissioned Faulk to make. Only a show, of course, since the padlock was the old-fashioned kind that needed a key to lock or unlock it, as Wesley had found out to his surprise the night before, when, during his tour of the fair, he'd tried to lock me in the stocks as a joke and I'd easily shaken the padlock open and then off the hasp. For that matter, I could probably have shaken the stocks themselves to pieces in time. They were never designed to be moved fourteen times to suit Mrs. Waterson's evolving notions of how the fair should be arranged, and I hoped Horace had remembered to bring a wrench to tighten the bolts periodically. Still, it looked impressive, and a crowd had already started to gather by the time Horace put out a sign saying, TEN PENCE A THROW and began carefully unloading a bushel basket of rotten tomatoes onto the table.

"Interesting method of campaigning," Michael remarked.

"Meg?"

I looked down to see my nephew Eric tugging at my dress.

"Can I have a dime? Huh?"

"I can probably find a few dimes to fund Eric's participation in the electoral process," Michael said. "We can finish this later."

Preferably after the craft fair is over, I thought, but I smiled and waved as Eric tugged Michael down the lane.

"Damn that man!"

Mrs. Fenniman stood beside me, frowning at the crowd that was starting to gather around the sheriff.

"Who the hell do you think gave him that idea?" she muttered. "Know damn well he didn't think of it himself."

She fixed me with her sternest glance.

"I need something to top that," she said. "Think of something, will you? And don't just stand there; pass the damned flyers out."

With that, she turned on her heels and strode off, passing out flyers with such force that she nearly knocked one poor woman down.

"Mrs. Fenniman a good friend of yours?" came a voice at my elbow.

Wesley.

"She's a good friend of Mother's," I said, handing him a flyer as I headed back toward my booth. "And a relative, of course."

"Yeah," he said, trotting to keep up with me. "Kind of tough, having two of our relatives running against each other for sheriff, isn't it?"

"Very tough," I said. "I was so hoping someone sane would join the race, but no such luck."

Wesley laughed as if he thought I was joking. Obviously he'd been out of touch with the rest of the family for quite some time. I walked on, shoving flyers into the hands of startled tourists along the way.

As I reached my booth, I heard a cheer go up from the town square. Wesley snickered.

"I could swing that election," he boasted.

"Yes, isn't the power of the press a wonderful thing?"

"I could," he said. "I've got the dirt right here."

He was holding up something. Deja vu all over again – yet another shiny CD in a paper envelope, although characteristically Wesley had managed to mar his envelope with a number of grease stains and what looked like a smear of ketchup.

"Put it away before the Town Watch see it," I said, wishing he'd leave. Two women were examining a candelabrum on the outer edge of my booth. I was trying to overhear their conversation without looking too obvious.

"Don't you want to see it?" Wesley said.

"Why should I care?" I asked. "I don't live here anymore. Why should I care which of our crazy relatives gets elected sheriff?"

"You'll never guess what's on it," Wesley said.

"No, I won't even try," I said.

"But if you knew what was on here – "

"Then you wouldn't have a secret to tantalize me with, now would you? You're welcome to come back later and wave your anachronism around to torture me some more, Wesley; right now I'm a little busy. Here, go and pass these out," I said, shoving the rest of the flyers into his hands.

"Your mother said you were going to help me with my story," he complained as he slouched out.

"Later," I muttered, and strolled a little nearer to the customers who were examining a fireplace set – a new design that I was particularly proud of, with a delicate metal vine motif that had been fiendishly difficult to do. I'd been working on getting it just right for over a year, and only in the last couple of months had I produced pieces I thought were good enough to sell. I drifted a little closer, in the hope of overhearing what they said about it.

"Yes," I heard one say. "It's very nice. But much too expensive."

I gritted my teeth and ignored them, pretending to straighten something on the table. I hoped they wouldn't come and tell me to my face that my fireplace set was too expensive. I'd have a hard time saying something polite and noncommittal. And if they tried to bargain the price down – well, did they know how much work it took to make it? How few blacksmiths could have done something that delicate looking and yet that sturdy?

"The other blacksmith had something just like it, and the price was much more reasonable," her friend said. "Let's go back there."

Other blacksmith?

"Eileen," I said, as the two left the booth. "Can you hold things down here? I'll be back in a few minutes."

"Of course," she said.

"Meg, do you have any change?" Michael said, reappearing in my booth. "Your cousin Horace is – what's the matter?"

"A sneak thief," I said, slipping into the lane to follow the two women.

Michael ran after me.

"Who?" he asked. "Those two women?"

"Keep your voice down," I said. "They're not thieves, but I think they're leading me to one."

"Right," Michael said. "Here, take my arm. We'll try to look inconspicuous, as if we're just out for a stroll."

Of course, in his white-and-gold uniform, Michael had never looked less inconspicuous in his Me, but we fit in. Every few steps Michael would salute a squad of soldiers or we'd exchange good morrows with some costumed civilians, but luckily we didn't run into anyone who wanted us to stop and talk. And, as I suspected, the two women headed straight for the far end of the fair, where I'd assigned the less-accomplished craftspeople.

"Bingo," I muttered, as they entered a blacksmith's booth in the last aisle.

"What is it?" Michael said.

"Tony Grimes," I said. "Fancies himself a blacksmith, the louse."

"He's not very good?" Michael asked.

"He's not half bad at running a hardware store, which is his day job," I said. "As a blacksmith – well, he should stick to selling nails, not making them."

"That bad, huh."

"Take a look at his stuff sometime," I said. "In fact, take a look right now; I think we'll pay old Tony a visit."

"Meg," Michael said. "You're pretty upset. Why don't we – "

But I was already striding toward Tony's booth.

"It's amazing, Tony," I said, sweeping my glance around booth. "Absolutely amazing."

Tony flinched at my voice, dropped the book he was reading, and hunched his shoulders defensively. He'd have been about my height, if not for that familiar protective stoop, as if he were constantly expecting someone he'd cheated or defrauded to strike him. Apart from that, he was a singularly unremarkable figure, with features so bland even his mother probably had a hard time recalling them when he wasn't around.

The two women I'd followed looked up from the fireplace set they'd been examining. As I suspected, it was a cheap knockoff of the one they'd passed over in my booth.

"Very nice," I said, picking up the tongs from a similar set and eyeing them critically. "You've almost got the shape right – a little lopsided, but most people wouldn't notice. Of course, if I were you, I'd paint it; hide all those nasty weld spatters. I doubt if those welds will hold up in the long run, but then, most people aren't looking to use a fancy set like that, are they? It's just for decoration."

I could see the women looking more closely at the poker and tongs they were holding, and frowning.

"In fact, the only thing I can see really wrong with it is that it's an exact copy of a design I introduced this spring," I said.

"You'd better watch it," Tony snapped. "You could get into trouble, making accusations like that."

"No, you watch it," I said. "What you're doing is a flagrant violation of the copyright laws. I've been talking to a lawyer about what you're doing, and I know a couple of other people have, too."

Tony swallowed nervously at this remark. And it wasn't exactly a lie. After the last time I'd seen Tony at a craft fair, hawking his badly made imitations, I'd spent a long time bending my brother Rob's ear about the problem. Not that Rob knew anything useful about copyrights – after squeaking through the Virginia bar exam last year, he'd spent most of his waking hours working on his role-playing game and supporting himself by what he called "legal scut work" for various lawyer uncles.

"There's only so many ways of shaping iron," Tony said, defensively. "You get all upset whenever I do anything that's the least bit like what you do, and I keep telling you, it's an example of parallel development."

Parallel development? Odd turn of phrase for Tony – where had I heard that before?

"Yeah, right," I said, aloud. "Come on, Michael, let's get back to my booth." And we strode out of Tony's booth – now, for some odd reason, much emptier. Not, alas, completely empty. As we reached the end of the lane, I glanced back and saw that Wesley Hatcher had insinuated himself into the booth.

"Damn," I said. "Now I'll have to talk to that little weasel to make sure Tony doesn't sell him a phony version of the story."

"Tony doesn't look too happy," Michael remarked. "And look, Wesley's taking pictures. I should think the pictures would speak for themselves."

"Yes, definitely," I said. "Good for Wesley; he's finally found something useful to do with himself. I want to warn Faulk. From the looks of it, Tony has ripped off some of his designs, too. I hope he doesn't explode when he hears."

"Maybe someone's already told him," Michael said, as we neared Faulk's booth. "Sounds like an explosion to me."