A Different Drummer: A gripping tail of the dog that never was

It was a bleak November in Hill Valley, a fictional town invented by a local columnist to begin a short story because he felt the oxymoronic ambiguity juxtaposed in the title would allow him to be open in how he described the town because he as yet did not know what to make of it.
Hill Valley was known far and wide for its beautiful campus at the universally known Center for Circumference Studies on the edge of town in Plum Bob Street. Scholars and hobos alike walked through its regal halls in search of that which they already possessed. Once they saw the truth within, many lined up for tuition refunds.
Down the street at the gas station, Blue Lou was pumping gas. He worked there in the flat desert as the only gas station attendant for 200 miles. Blue Lou was from Oregon. All the other stations were self-serve. Cars lined up and down the street for the novelty. To each customer as they drove up to the pump, Blue Lou would bend down and ask politely, “May I interest you in an all-electric vehicle?”
Many responded with, “Will you plug it in for me?”
The Sheriff, Bob M. Ishot, set up his office at Mabel’s Coffee and More Coffee Café because the county was renovating the jail after housing the notorious Stinkfoot Brothers who were apprehended trying to rob the local hydrogen sulfide plant when Luke fell in and Jasper jumped in to save him, setting off the alarm, causing the boys to hide out in a fish market until sewer gas forced them to jump the fence at the compost heap.
No one knew until they were locked up that the jail’s shower was broken, Jasper had doused himself in what he called Old Spice that he found in a half-empty Gatorade bottle along the roadside and Luke had a condition.
The Sheriff was in the middle of a big case. He set the 12th bottle down and reached for another. The deputy rushed in at that moment. “Sheriff Ishot, did you remember to shoot Tha, old Willy’s rabid dog like he asked? He’s got that dang dog chained to a tree in front of his house.”
“No,” said Ishot, the Sheriff, “I didn’t shoot Tha, Deputy.”
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Betsy Sue was still waiting on Joe, her beau, to return from the war on drugs. Betsy Sue was 340 years old.
The distinguished mayor of Hill Valley, the Honorable Ricky, was attending a ribbon cutting ceremony at the other edge of town on Center Street at the same time welcoming the new Just Arrived Antique Center to town in a strip mall next to the Clapping Hand Nail Salon.
A friend of Ricky’s mom owned it and he was doing her a favor. He had a helicopter hovering overhead equipped with massive speakers so Mayor Ricky’s voice could be heard by every citizen. Mayor Ricky took the microphone from his sound man. The sound man gave him the thumbs up.
“Can you hear me?” asked Mayor Ricky and his voice boomed across the Hill Valley plains like an auditory splash. He waited for a reply.
Lois refused to give up even though she’s been trapped underground since the New Year’s Eve Party. She keeps tapping on those pipes.
“I’m not trapped,” said Lois to the guy writing this story. “I told you that yesterday. I can’t afford a xylophone. It’s just a basement apartment. Look back there. See that door? That leads outside to the real world. I go to work out that door every day. You would know that if you paid better attention to your characters. How dare you invent me tapping on pipes without any idea of my background story?”
She seemed angry. “Seemed?! How shallow! How superficial you make me out to be. I have family. I need this job. If word gets out that I’m trapped underground, they might not call me in tomorrow.”
“Where do you work?” asked the writer of this dramatic tale.
She looked up off the page with a smirk and shook her head. “So, you don’t even know where I work and you created me? Pathetic.” She stepped in for an extreme close up. Eye to eye she said, “I work at the Clapping Hand.”
“Oh, did you know the mayor is over there right now cutting ribbons?” the writer asked.
She closed one eye. “Was that him I heard over the loud speakers? What does he want to say?”
“I don’t know,” wrote the writer. “I was about to invent that when I heard you tapping on those pipes.”
She threw a wooden spatula at the writer and missed, probably because the writer didn’t want to get hit with a spatula. “It wasn’t banging, it was Zappa.” With that, she disappeared into the back room and never returned. No. She never returned.
In the center of town crews were putting up a perimeter fence to keep out the insiders. Geese were brought in.