The highway connected the town to the superhighway, and to the world beyond. At the junction of the highway and the superhighway there was a donut shop. The residents denied the donut shop existed, but secretly patronized it when they wanted a taste of the outside world. It was about as far as most of them ever got.

Lil believed the parking lot at the donut shop should be signed Faculty Parking. She believed that’s where most people parked their faculties before venturing into town.

At the town end of the highway there was a roundabout. Each summer the roundabout was planted with flowers by the town’s parks superintendent. The radiating streets lead to several key destinations. In one direction a street lead to the former common pasture that was now a municipal golf course/croquet pitch. Another street lead to a tent theatre that was erected each summer and re-created bizarrely-scripted vaudeville acts that were played out by the local little theatre group. The third street lead to the shopping street.

The shopping street, which was the town’s Main Street, was lined with exclusive boutiques that sold a wildly popular local handicraft. The handicraft was a set of leather clad figurines that depicted various patriotic and mythological beings native to the town. They were known affectionately as “lederhosers”. Production of the little figures had grown into quite a cottage industry that fed most of the townspeople during the long winter months when the tent theatre was closed.

Lil had garnered instant cred in the small town real estate circles by selling Mother Teresa the farm her first day on the job. Her broker, a young outsider named Revin O’Donnel, figured that he’d landed a winner. Lil had also got a nice little business going doing relationship retreats in her wartime house on the side street. She installed a hot tub on a new deck behind the single guest room, and created a climate-controlled room in the basement for massage and other therapies. News of this business spread quickly over the back fences throughout town.

Revin O’Donnel was a bit of a mystery. No-one knew for sure where he was from, or the nature of his parentage. But he was well-known for an injury he sustained one summer evening on the croquet pitch. A head came flying unexpectedly off a well-wielded mallet, and struck Revin with great force on his Adam’s apple. The impact significantly reorganized the inner alignment of his throat, including his larynx. As a result, whenever he spoke he first made a protracted gurgling sound as his throat muscles struggled to rearrange his larynx and dispose of any fluids that had accumulated there since his most recent previous pronouncement. Most listeners found this quite off-putting. Then when he did speak, he was given to imitating the mellifluous tones and peculiar accents of a former and universally despised prime minister. For example, he would pronounce the word “issue” without the “sh” sound. It drove people to distraction.

He was also well-known for his special hair. He combed it in a special way in what was otherwise a crew-cut town. He also treated it regularly with a special toner that he ordered over the telephone from an 800 number that appeared at the bottom of his television screen. Revin figured it was a convenient way to shop because an operator was always standing by to take his order. And the hair figured prominently in his marketing campaign, appearing in the weekly real estate supplement and on several generally disliked billboards on the highway into town.

His hair became such a fixture that one afternoon at a board of trade meeting Billy Hillyard openly referred to him in terms of one of the varieties of flowers planted in the roundabout. Billy was called on it, and made to pay a fine roughly equivalent to 12 minutes at a parking meter on Main Street. But the point had been made.

Revin drove one of those imported cars made by its maker in “the relentless pursuit of perfection”. The pursuit of perfection almost drove the manufacturer to the brink of bankruptcy. That slogan pretty much summed up Revin’s approach to the brokerage. He drove himself relentlessly. To maintain momentum he listened constantly to motivational tapes on the car’s tape deck. That is, until the tape deck quit, and the manufacturer, pursuing perfection elsewhere, found it was backordered at the warehouse. Revin had to drive around for a while without his tapes. His self-esteem started to slide. House sales dropped off, and new listings dried up completely. His croquet game started to suffer, and he was having trouble holding his own in the post-match booze ups.

Revin decided that what he needed was a conquest. He called on Lil.

Revin showed up that evening, unannounced, at Lil’s front door. He was carrying chocolates and a bottle of wine. The chocolates were from the chocolate factory in the town’s industrial park. They were made to order and provided as complimentary samples in the VIP rooms at the strip club out at the superhighway. The wine came from a local vintner who had been frequently cited for content violations by the provincial licensing agency, and code violations by the town’s new hard-ass chief building inspector. But the townspeople were proud because the label showed a more than somewhat impressionist rendering of Main Street lined with the lederhoser shops. The label alone had made the vintage famous at romantic candle-lit dinners all across town.

Lil was curled up on her aubergine leather sofa with a cup of herbal tea and was brushing up on her Margo Anand when Revin came bounding up the steps onto her porch. She let him in and they exchanged pleasantries before settling into a conversation on the sofa. The conversation was essentially Revin’s idea of a seduction. He went on and on in great detail about sales and listings, and his long years spent making tendentious arguments on behalf of clients at the variance board. He boasted without reservation about his ability to “make things happen.” Lil did her best to be sociable, but after a while got bored. She didn’t find the real estate agent’s stories as engaging as her book. Besides, she had a heavy encounter coming up that weekend in the retreat, and needed to be ready.

Lil bided her time. Finally there was a break in the monologue when Revin went to “hang the rat”, as Revin put it. While he was gone Lil reached into her gris-gris bag and sprinkled some of its contents into Revin’s glass.

The next morning the chairman of the board of trade was driving to open his lederhoser boutique on Main Street. He was chairman of the board because he had the largest boutique, and because he was prepared to attend every meeting of town council, serve on every town committee, and be in the face of the town clerk on a daily basis to make sure Main Street was kept just the way the boutique owners wanted. This included everything from sidewalk sweeping to watering the flower pots to enforcement of subtle rules and regulations designed to keep out outside competition.

On his way past the roundabout the chairman did a double take. Staked out in the middle of the roundabout was Revin O’Donnel. Revin was still wearing his gold necklace, his gold bracelet, and his gold watch. But he was mostly naked, except for stunning bikini briefs in pink with a dainty red embroidered heart.

The chairman drove straight to the boutique and phoned the town clerk. The town clerk phoned the parks supervisor and told him to investigate. The parks super went to the roundabout and did a thorough visual inspection. For several minutes he stood over the tethered body of Revin O’Donnel, who by now was awake and struggling to free himself, alternately gurgling and cursing out loud. The parks super confirmed the facts, considered his options, then reached for his cell-phone. The first person he called was Billy Hillyard.

[Miller]. . . the Avanti is real but everything else is total fiction . . .

Billy just happened to be testing his new John Deere Golf/Turf buggy along the old river front when he took the call. He spun the ATV around and gunned it up the bank where, sure enough, he could see the commotion on the opposite side of the golf course. As the name Revin came over his cell Billy Hillyard sensed a feeling in his gut that payback day may have finally come at last. With a pop of the clutch the Golf/Turf peeled a neat double rut across the seventh green as Billy rushed to the scene laughing out loud as he skidded to a stop in a cloud of dust noting that Revin had failed to free himself from a very embarassing predicament. Billy harboured a hatred for Revin that went back to their school days when the realtor had locked him in gym locker and allowed the now much larger Billy to remain trapped overnight. Billy had messed himself in the locker and made a vow to kill Revin someday if the opportunity presented itself.

"Well well well, what do we have here? A gurgling pervert." Billy had visions of Revin doing a demo in the fort stocks, complete with pink bikini gotchies and barrages of rotten fruit but the image was shattered as the 8am watering system began popping dozens of underground sprinkler heads. As they finished clicking up into position, there was an eerie moment of silence before Billy screamed "run!!!" and Revin gurgled "augh phoyck".

Lil rolled up in her new Avanti just in time to see Revin perform a particularly creative slip and roll in the mud. "Does anybody know where the valve is?" asked the chairman of the board of trade. Lil lit a black cheroot, tossed her head back in a smile and called to the crowd "who the fuck cares?" As the laughter died down, the sprinklers mysteriously stopped and Revin finally made it to his feet. "Yaugh phoyckers". Billy cut him loose and tip toed out of the mud towards the Avanti. "See you tomorrow" he said to Lil as the sleek Studebaker glided away down Main Street.