Mayor of Twisted Roots

At least, no one was trying to cut Charlie's nuts off. Charley, could be aloof and particular about certain things that no one else in his barber shop or elsewhere seemed to care about, but still he was respected. Some folks even liked him in a lukewarm sort of way.



On the other hand, Gil, the mayor, was always in anticipation of being castigated. Despite his best efforts, he couldn't please some of the people all the time and none of the people some of the time. What got him re-elected over and over again was that he was the mayor in a population of really lazy folks.



It wasn't a physical kind of lazy; unemployment was actually very low in Twisted Roots, unlike most of the rest of the Midwest. There were some folks that held jobs that shouldn't have been working in the first place. One example is Peg-leg Porticia who worked at the lumber yard. You got to give her some credit, not meaning to be disrespectful to the physically-challenged. If a man wanted a twelve foot two-by-four, Porticia would hobble all the way out to the back building to fetch it. But once she was out there, she had to radio back for some assistance because she couldn't climb the ladder, let alone bring the wood back down with her. Anyone within fifty feet of the radio base, if they could make it out over the scratchy static, could hear her call for "customer assistance." It wasn't the customer that needed assistance at all; most folks with both legs could have got their own wood. Still, Porticia insisted on making the attempt explaining that "laws and statues" wouldn't permit customers to fetch their own lumber. No one questioned what statue she might be referring to and what the aforementioned piece of stone might have to do with fetching a piece of wood.



So, there it was. Most of the citizens of Twisted Roots were a lot like Peg-leg Portia except that their disability didn't extend itself to the physical. This, in turn, made Gil's perpetual re-elections likely to continue.



Gil probably got his intelligence passed down to him from the owners of the now-defunct coal mines that originally settled in and developed the area. Most the investors in the coal mines had made their money there and then moved to Chicago to build their homes along the lake. Only Gil's great-grandfather, Albert Garrison, had felt it his civic duty to stay in Twisted Roots. Besides, Grandpa Garrison had invested a lot of his coal money in cattle and a meat-packing plant that employed the surviving coal miners and then their descendants.



Those descendants built their modest homes on the ground above the coal mines, drank the river water despite the runoff of the the waste products from the meat-packing plant. They weren't any new families moving in so most of the ones that lived there had a really close relationship that replenished the town's population.



Not much else needs to be said to explain the nature of the citizen's laziness.