Spencerville

Street and sidewalk traffic was light, he noticed, and half the stores were vacant. The ones that remained open were discount clothing places, church thrift shops, video arcades, and other low-end enterprises. He recalled that Annie, in a few of her letters, mentioned that she managed the County Hospital Thrift Store located downtown, but he didn't see the shop.

The three big buildings in town were also closed — the movie house, the old hotel, and Carter's, the local department store. Missing, also, were the two hardware stores, the half dozen or so grocery stores, the three sweetshops with soda fountains, and Bob's Sporting Goods, where Keith had spent half his time and most of his money.

A few of the old places remained — Grove's Pharmacy, Miller's Restaurant, and two taverns called John's Place and the historic Posthouse. The courthouse crowd no doubt kept these places afloat.

Downtown Spencerville was surely not as Keith remembered it as a boy. It had been the center of his world, and without romanticizing it, it seemed to him that it had been the center of life and commerce in Spencer County, bursting with 1950s prosperity and baby-boomer families. Certainly, the movie theater, the sweetshops, and the sports store made it a good place for kids to hang out.

Even then, however, the social and economic conditions that were to change Main Street, USA, were at work. But he didn't know that then, and, to him, downtown Spencerville was the best and greatest place in the world, teeming with friends and things to do. He thought to himself, "The America that sent us to war no longer exists to welcome us home."

You didn't have to be born in a small town, Keith thought, to have a soft spot in your heart for America's small towns. It was, and to some extent it remained, the ideal, if only in an abstract and sentimental way. But beyond nostalgia, the small town dominated much of the history of the American experience; in thousands of Spencervilles across the nation, surrounded by endless farms, American ideas and culture formed, took hold, flourished, and nourished a nation. But now, he thought, the roots were dying, and no one noticed because the tree still looked so stately.

He approached the center of town and saw one building that had not changed: Across from Courthouse Square stood the impressive police headquarters, and, outside, among the parked police cars, a group of police officers stood, talking to a man who Keith instinctively knew was Police Chief Baxter. He also noticed now, a few buildings away from police headquarters, the County Hospital Thrift Store.

Keith drove around the massive courthouse, which was set on a few acres of public park. The administration of justice, civil and criminal, and the proliferation of bureaucratic agencies were still a growth business at the close of the American Century, even in Spencer County. The courthouse was once thought of as a boondoggle and a giant folly, but the visionaries who built it must have anticipated the kind of society that was to inherit the nation.

Aside from the courts, the building housed the prosecutor's office, the Welfare Department, a public law library, the county surveyor, the state agricultural office, the Board of Elections, and a dozen other acronymic government agencies; the Ministry of Everything, its sixteen-story clock tower rising in Orwellian fashion above the decaying city around it.

There were a number of people in the park surrounding the courthouse, kids on bikes, women with baby carriages and strollers, old people on benches, government workers on break, and the unemployed. For a moment, Keith could imagine that it was the summer of 1963 again, the summer he'd met Annie Prentis, and that the past three decades had not happened, or better yet, had happened differently.

He came full circle around the courthouse, turned back onto Main Street, and continued toward its western end, where grand old houses stood. This was once a prime residential street, but it was rundown now, the big places given over to boardinghouses, informal daycare centers, a few low-rent offices, and the occasional craft shop that hopefully paid the mortgage and taxes.

Main Street widened into four lanes at the sign that said, "City Limits," and became the highway that led to the Indiana border. But it was no longer rural, Keith saw, and had become a commercial strip of chain supermarkets, convenience stores, discount stores, and gas stations. Huge plastic signs stood atop tall stanchions as far as the eye could see: Wendy's, McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Roy Rogers, Domino's Pizza, Friendly's, and other fine and fast-dining spots, one after the other, all the way out to Indiana, for all he knew, maybe all the way to California — the real Main Street, USA.