In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [88]
“They sure throw their dough around, don’t they?”
Flick polished a glass as he said:
“The mills are workin’. They get plenty of Tonnage these days.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
“Well, they work their ass off for it.” Flick defended them.
“Don’t I know it! Flick, my back still aches from my days in the mill!”
Flick went on in his Wise Old Bartender manner:
“Once you been there, you never forget it.”
The change from the twenty, fives and singles and silver, lay spread out on the bar in a pool of beer. I idly shoved a half-dollar around with my forefinger, making larger and larger concentric circles.
“This dough means a lot of sweat,” I said reflectively. “Flick, do you ever get nervous when you look at cash? Like you figure it’s going to all of a sudden disappear?”
I smoothed out a beer-soaked five. He leaned forward confidentially and spoke in a low voice to me:
“Don’t tell anybody. It is.”
“You got that same fear, too?”
There was no doubt that we were now getting close to Home Base. Flick was no longer a Bowler. My credit card had dissolved in my pocket; my English flannel had magically somehow become worn denim; my well-cut sport coat a zippered canvas work jacket. I spoke in a low, tense voice:
“I wonder what those three guys would say if we told ’em about the Kissels?”
The jukebox roared into another polka disk; the three open-faced Simple Toilers in the booth downed their beer merrily as they told their dirty jokes. Flick looked over his shoulder at them in a long, piercing way, turned back to me, and, leaning even closer to my ear, said in a flat voice:
“Not one of ’em would believe it. They’d think we made it up.”
XXVIII “NEVERMORE,” QUOTH THE ASSESSOR, “NEVERMORE. …”
Mister Poe’s sinister, beady-eyed raven has always been a figure of great speculation and conjecture among literary analysts. How did Poe come up with such an eerie apparition? What did it mean? What was the source of this evil bird? In what dark, cluttered, moldy recess of Poe’s mind did it live? Why?
It said little; just bleakly stared, a hooded angel of death and destruction and God knows what.
Any resident of Northern Indiana, of a certain benighted period in history, could tell you in spades where Poe got his raven. The banshee wind rattling the eaves, murky shapes lurking in the gathering gloom; those gleaming inhuman, all-seeing eyes could only mean one thing. Unquestionably, somewhere along the line, Poe must have run afoul of an Indiana Personal Property Tax Assessor.
Even at this remove the very word “assessor” sends thin, jangling squeaks of fear through many a Hoosier nervous system. One sure way to clear the street of random Mankind in an Indiana hamlet is simply to bellow at the top of the voice:
“The Assessor is coming!”
Instantly a palpable wave of chill dread causes doors to slam, windows to darken, and souls to quake.
The Indiana Personal Property Tax was very personal. In theory it was also very basic and simple. All personal property was evaluated and taxed. All personal property: footstools, footballs, fielders’ mitts, and eggbeaters. Everything. The evaluating was done by a specter called the Assessor, who came to call, like the raven, and stared with bleak unblinking eyes. What was even more deadly was that the Assessor was appointed from among the neighborhood itself. Brother against brother, hand to hand, the eternal war of State versus Man was waged. Every two years or so the lines were drawn.
Very few people actually paid the taxes, and there were always rumors of impending doom. Brown envelopes arrived in mailboxes periodically, throwing panic into murky kitchens, but few actually paid. Nonetheless, the Assessor came, with clipboard and ruthless eye.
Year after year the forms were filled; the arid, flat envelopes hidden away in dresser drawers unopened, while the tiny cancer of fear grew heavier and heavier and then waned as no lightning bolts from the State House appeared and life went on.
The Assessor, however, produced some stark moments of