Knowing the new Jimmy Brown, I don’t think there would be a man alive who would walk into a bowls club and announce, “I’ve just fucked Jimmy Brown’s wife”.
Not unless he had a death wish.
—oooBJSooo—
Epilogue
Jimmy Brown might have lived a life of quiet anonymity during his first thirty-seven years in Uranus. But no-one could have possibly imagined the size of the hole he would leave in the fabric of the community when he departed.
In addition to the council having to find another tradesman carpenter, the local farmers and graziers found that they had to bring tradesmen in from further afield to do many of the jobs that Jimmy Brown had done for them. Not only did that create problems for them in terms of having things like wool presses repaired and meeting new sheering shed construction deadlines, it meant that they had to pay through the nose to have tradesmen travel more than one-hundred kilometres to undertake relatively small jobs.
One of the tasks that Jimmy Brown used to undertake was fencing jobs such as repairs to sheep and cattle yards and small, paddock sub-division projects; jobs that most fencing contractors found uneconomical to tackle. Jobs that property owner now found were costing them more than double — sometimes triple — the prices he used to charge.
Jimmy Brown might have been almost invisible, but it was only after his total disappearance that people began to understand just how much he contributed to the local community.
The incident at the Uranus Lawn Bowls Club occurred on a Friday in early April. Jimmy Brown had been gone almost a month when the first cold snap arrived, and the people of Uranus started picking up their phones to call him to arrange for the delivery of their first load of firewood. A typical winter would usually require three $70 trailer-loads. This winter turned out to be a particularly long and particularly cold one, requiring at least one extra load.
The wood-burning residents of Uranus ended up having to pay twice the normal rate for their firewood.
Once the reason for Jimmy Brown’s disappearance became known, neither Scottie McFadden nor any of the ten other men who had sat listening to how he had fucked Jimmy Brown’s wife that night were very popular.
The CEO’s contract came up for review in September. It wasn’t renewed.
The local government elections were held in the early part of the new year. Despite the warning I had given them, the councillors who were in attendance in the club that night threw their hats into the ring. Both of them were soundly defeated.
Of the remaining seven men, three ended up losing their jobs and relocating to warmer, hopefully, more friendly climes, and the remaining four — all of them businessmen — found that the people of the town and the surrounding area took their business elsewhere.
Even Scottie McFadden couldn’t avoid the repercussions of that night. He found that he wasn’t getting anywhere near as much horse-breaking, cattle and farm work as he had in the past. Mind you, the breaking work had been falling off, anyway, after Jimmy Brown had told everyone that he would no longer try to fix horses that Scottie had broken.