Living Witness(8)

“Annie-Vic.”

“Ah,” Lyman said.

Alice made a face at him, behind his back. “It’s all well and good to say ‘ah,’ ” she said. “But that woman does real damage. We wouldn’t be in this lawsuit if it wasn’t for her.”

“It was Henry Wackford’s idea to file the lawsuit,” Lyman said. “He’d have done it whether she wanted to go along with it or not.”

“Still,” Alice said. “You know what I mean. She’s right in the middle of it. Who does she think she is, anyway? It was a vote. The majority won. The minority is supposed to shut up and like it.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” Lyman said. He started to pull big metal tubs out of the refrigerator: shredded lettuce; shredded cheddar cheese; black California olives; tomato slices; onion slices. It was the setup for lunch. Most of the people who came in for lunch wanted hamburgers of one kind or another.

“I think they make it all up anyway,” Alice said, taking two of the tubs from him and carrying them over to the sandwich counter. “I don’t think it has anything to do with science. How stupid do they think we are? Nobody could believe that stuff they’re saying, and then they throw in all those words—like you’re supposed to be scared of their words. ‘Allele,’ that was one of those words. Do you know what that word means? Nobody knows what that word means. They make it up. And then that fussy old maid just came right out and lied. Do you know what she said?”

“No,” Lyman said. He had brought out the big stack of American cheese slices for the grilled cheese sandwiches.

“She said that survival of the fittest had nothing to do with the theory of evolution. Can you believe that? Nothing to do with it! What’s the theory of evolution anyway, except survival of the fittest? Everybody knows that. Everybody always has known it. They think you’re going to be scared of them. They prance around with their noses in the air and they think you’re just going to curl up and die because they went to Vassar and they went to Wellesley and they have degrees and you’re just an ignorant moron who ought to shut up and stay in your place. Well, we didn’t shut up, did we? We’re not going to shut up.”

“It’s a good thing you’re doing,” Lyman said. “I liked the idea right off, right when Frank came and asked you to run for the school board. I’d have run myself except I knew it wouldn’t look good, because I didn’t graduate. But you graduated.”

“If it wasn’t for Annie-Vic, there wouldn’t be any lawsuit,” Alice said again. “The whole school board would be united. Henry Wackford wouldn’t have dared file a lawsuit then. He wouldn’t have dared. I don’t know what people in this town were thinking, voting for that old hag. She’s an out-and-out atheist. You watch.”

“Henry Wackford is an atheist,” Lyman said.

“They all think they’re so smart,” Alice said. “They all think they’re smarter than anybody else. Just you watch. Just you wait and see what happens when the television people get here. They’ll make us look like a bunch of hicks. But it won’t matter.” Alice suddenly stopped still. “Lyman?” she said. “It won’t matter, will it? We’re going to win this one. The judge is going to be just folks.”

“Appointed by George W. himself,” Lyman said.

“Yes,” Alice said, “I know.”

She tried to think it through, but it wouldn’t come. She didn’t trust the judge, even if he had been appointed by George W. George W. was just folks, but you couldn’t trust these people who had gone to fancy schools, and it seemed to Alice that everybody who ended up a judge had gone to some fancy school or the other. Oh, Lord. She couldn’t stand these people. She couldn’t stand the way they thought they were smarter than everybody else.

“It would have been better,” she said, but Lyman wasn’t listening to her. Lyman was getting out the big bag of hamburger rolls they kept in the freezer overnight.

Alice went to the narrow closet and got out the stack of lunch menus. Annie-Vic was probably still out there somewhere on Main Street, walking in that stupid heel-toe way and lording it over everybody else in town, all the people who hadn’t gone to fancy schools and didn’t buy the crap the liberal media was always trying to sell them. Those people always got everything they wanted. They got it and then they acted like they’d earned something. Alice wanted to wipe every one of them off the face of the earth.

“You got to ask yourself,” she said, “what’s keeping that woman alive. I mean, she’s older than dirt, isn’t she? Don’t people that age drop dead all the time?”