"Carolyn Ives Gilman - Okanoggan Falls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gilman Carolyn Ives)

OKANOGGAN FALLS, by Carolyn Ives Gilman
The town of Okanoggan Falls lay in the folded hills of southwestern Wisconsin—dairy country, marbled
with deciduous groves and pastureland that looked soft as a sable's fur. It was an old sawmill town,
hidden down in the steep river valley, shaded by elderly trees. Downtown was a double row of brick and
ironwork storefronts running parallel to the river. Somehow, the town had steered between the Scylla
and Charybdis of the franchise and the boutique. If you wanted to buy a hamburger on Main Street, you
had to go to Earl's Cafe, and for scented soap there was just Meyer's Drugstore. In the park where the
Civil War soldier stood, in front of the old Town Hall infested with pigeons, Mr. Woodward still defiantly
raised the United States flag, as if the world on cable news were illusion, and the nation were still reality.

American small towns had changed since the days when Sinclair Lewis savaged them as backwaters of
conformist complacency. All of that had moved to the suburbs. The people left in the rural towns had a
high kook component. There were more welders-turned-sculptors per capita than elsewhere, more
self-employed dollmakers, more wildly painted cars, more people with pronounced opinions, and more
tolerance for all the above.

Like most of the Midwest, Okanoggan Falls had been relatively unaffected by the conquest and
occupation. Few there had even seen one of the invading Wattesoons, except on television. At first, there
had been some stirrings of grassroots defiance, born of wounded national pride; but when the
Wattesoons had actually lowered taxes and reduced regulation, the volume of complaint had gone down.
People still didn't love the occupiers, but as long as the Wattesoons minded their own business and left
the populace alone, they were tolerated.

All of that changed one Saturday morning when Margie Silengo, who lived in a mobile home on Highway
14, came racing into town with her shockless Chevy bouncing like a rocking horse, telling everyone she
met that a Wattesoon army convoy had gone rolling past her house and turned into the old mill grounds
north of town as if they meant to stay. Almost simultaneously, the mayor's home phone rang, and Tom
Abernathy found himself standing barefoot in his kitchen, for the first time in his life talking to a
Wattesoon captain, who in precise, formal English informed him that Okanoggan Falls was slated for
demolition.

Tom's wife Susan, who hadn't quite gotten the hang of this “occupation” thing, stopped making peanut
butter sandwiches for the boys to say, “They can't say that! Who do they think they are?"

Tom was a lanky, easygoing fellow, all knobby joints and bony jaw. Mayor wasn't his full-time job; he
ran one of the more successful businesses in town, a wholesale construction-goods supplier. He had
become mayor the way most otherwise sensible people end up in charge: out of self-defense. Fed up
having to deal with the calcified fossil who had run the town since the 1980s, Tom had stood for office on
the same impulse he occasionally swore—and woke to find himself elected in a landslide, 374 to 123.

Now he rubbed the back of his head, as he did whenever perplexed, and said, “I think the Wattesoons
can do pretty much anything they want."

"Then we've got to make them stop wanting to mess with us,” Susan said.

That, in a nutshell, was what made Tom and Susan's marriage work. In seventeen years, whenever he
had said something couldn't be done, she had taken it as a challenge to do it.

But he had never expected her to take on alien invaders.
****