The town had grown too large, and so I decided to let some people go.

I spoke first to Mac Trueba, the founder of the town’s abstract realist photography collective. He was living with three friends and his wife in an apartment in the Colonia.
“San Expedito’s just grown too large, Mac,” I said. “We had the write-up in Coastal Homeowner’s, and then in Pacific Living, and it’s just gotten so popular that we’re too big for the zoning board.” I gave him two thousand dollars, a train ticket to Angangueo, and forty-eight hours to pack up. He was probably going to have to leave some of his bigger photos – the ones where he took pictures of bookshelves and stacks of things and then covered up bits with black cloth to just leave bands of color.
“You don’t like my photography?” he asked, and I explained that it was great, not really my thing, but great. “Is it because I married Clara?” was the next question, predictably, and although Clara was very beautiful (she had a small scar on her right cheek where her brother had shot her with a BB gun as a child that gave her a single, asymmetric dimple) and I had dated her in high school, that was not the reason, and I told him so. He said, “OK, Earl,” and was gone the next day.
That was good, I thought. That was very easy, and I checked back to see if Clara was there, but unfortunately and, in retrospect, predictably, it turned out she’d left with Mac. So I expelled his three friends as well and let the Valenzuelas next door expand into the vacant apartment. They had seven in an apartment that size, plus two seniors.
Then I spoke to Woods, out on Libertad and Hurley, and told him the same basic thing – Coastal Homeowner’s, Pacific Living, overpopulation, two thousand dollars, the whole deal – and he said, “Why do the yuppies get priority, Earl? I’ve been living here as long as anyone else.” Woods ran a kind of nude writers’ commune down there on the Crest, and it had gotten pretty popular in recent years, especially with the women.
“The yuppies aren’t the problem, Woods,” I said. “Hell, I hate the yuppies as much as the next man, but they aren’t exactly flocking to the city center, or San Expedito proper, even. The yuppies drop themselves out in the suburbs, and looks like Ralstonville and Boscovia’ll be absorbing most of them. The real issue these days is the city center, and what I would call an infrastructural problem.” Woods agreed that there was an infrastructural problem, but wanted to know what to do about the rest of the commune. I just kept staring at his eyes when he said this, because the rest of him was notably tan and I was having trouble taking that for too long at once. “Call them all together,” I said to Woods. “Offer them all the deal. Obviously the more we can take out the better.”
“Obviously,” he said. Forty-eight hours later, the commune was gone, and I was feeling so accomplished that I took a day off and watched a couple of ballgames I’d taped.
In the four days after that, I expelled two thousand three hundred and fifty four more, mainly from artists’ collectives where people were living five, six, seven to a room, and this, plus the eighty-seven in the colony and the four folks in the apartment and a reported death (old age), left San Expedito with a population of nine thousand eight hundred and ten. Nine thousand eight hundred and ten was just fine, and I called Vern at Coastal Homeowner’s to apologize about the message I’d left him when his article first came out, something about not looking forward to the attention this would bring us, we already knew we were a “nice little town with a creative spirit,” so we weren’t getting anything out of the write-up, something like that. I’ve known Vern since high school, and he’s always done right by me, but I think I lost my temper when I saw that article, thinking about the city center. Now that it was alright, I wanted him to know.
“Earl,” he said when I called. “I’ve already got a man on it.”
“Got a man on what?” I asked, and told him about the two thousand four hundred and forty or so folks I’d sent to Angangueo, saying I was sorry about that message.
“Well, it’s alright, but that’s just the thing, Earl,” he said. “They aren’t in Angangueo. As I understand it, they’re somewhere in Ralstonville, forming a kind of posse. We’ve got a writer on it now.” I told Vern I’d call him back, and walked over to Ted’s. Ted Saxton was chief of police, had been for years, and he told me more or less the same thing.
“They spent the two thousand on rifles and leaflets,” he said, and smoothed a poster advertising the school district’s Ceramicist of the Year award. “None of them went to Angangueo.”
“Is there any way we can call them?” I asked.
“I don’t see why not,” he said, and turned to the phone. He typed in two digits, then turned back. “Don’t you have Woods’s number?”
“I suppose I do,” I said, and called Woods.
“Woods,” he said.
“Woods,” I said. “How’s Angangueo.”
“Well, it’s fine, Earl,” he said. “How’s San Expedito?”
“Woods,” I said.
“Earl,” he said.
“Why did you all stay in Ralstonville and buy rifles?”
“Angangueo doesn’t want us,” Woods said. “So we’d like the nudist colony back, and so on.”
“What are the leaflets for, Woods?”
“Some of the boys put together some real nice protest poetry,” Woods said. “And a couple other folks threw some woodcut caricatures on there, too. The abstract realists have a photo series planned out.”
“And you got those rifles.”
“And we got those rifles.”
“Can I talk to Clara, please?” I asked.
“Who’s Clara?”
“Clara Trueba.” There was some shuffling on the other end of the line.
“Earl?” Clara said.
“How come you broke up with me?” I said.
“That was thirty years ago, Earl,” she said.
“Oh, OK,” I said, and I turned to Ted and told him we’d just have to let them back in. There was no way we could defend against two thousand hundred forty or so rifles and God knows how many leaflets.
I don’t expect them to make a statue of me when it’s over. We’ll have to apply for extra funds from the state if we don’t want to end up condemning some buildings, especially in the Colonia. Even if we aren’t going to get the yuppies’ tax dollars, they’ll want to visit, sure enough. So that’s a couple of difficult truths that doesn’t lead to popularity right there, plus I’m an ugly man on top of that. There always has been a bias against making statues of ugly men, and I can’t say I blame them. I have a weak chin and a paunch. Some biases make sense, is all. Maybe it isn’t the kind of town you’d want a statue of yourself in, anyway.