MaxwellDB It's me. I am the product.

Taxjammer

The aura of the village had drawn him there; like a moth to a candle’s flame he had been drawn closer and closer to it from the time it had first caught his attention. One of its youngest, a white haired little girl that looked to be perhaps eight, maybe nine years old pointed him out to her mother. Will tried to duck back into the tall grass, but the glint of the sun off of his binoculars gave him away. Soon the young men of the village, under the command of their testosterone more than anything else, began to descend the hill. All were armed-- scythes, knives, a few even had shovels in their hands. They surrounded Will, having moved quicker than their strides should’ve allowed, and held him hostage at the tips and edges of a thoroughly intimidating array of sharp things.

A man and woman, mature and sharply dressed, exited the village. They looked to be leaders; how Will’s captors moved out of their way reinforced this idea. The woman, bespectacled and with soft eyes, was the first to speak.

“Why have you come here, outsider? Why do you disturb us?” she asked in a mellifluous voice that reminded Will of music. He remained silent. The elder male villager put his hand on his captive’s shoulder.

“It’s a simple question, stranger,” he spoke, his voice thin and weak, “can you not answer it?”

“My name is Will Rogers, sir. Ma’am.” He tilted his farmer’s cap cordially but slowly to them, smiling throughout the motion like a car salesman or a politician. “I’m but a simple man, I live off the land, just as you all do. I have a farm a few miles southwest of here, in fact. I grow potatoes and raise cattle, mostly.”

“That still doesn’t quite answer my question, Mister Rogers,” responded the woman, a look of amusement briefly betraying her dispassionate visage.

“Well, I was just getting’ to that, really. See, y’all up here make the finest blackberry jam in the hemisphere, far as I know. My cousin bought me a jar of it from a market in Camden, and I licked that jar cleaner than clean, really. I asked him to look for more of it. He couldn’t. I went on a search all through New England. I couldn’t. No one had every heard of a ‘Boothbay Village,’ but it said it right on the jar—I was certain that this place existed. I ended up checking the town archives for near every town in the whole region, and, for all my hard work, I found it. This wonderful place y’all have here, it’s Boothbay Village! Now, where’s that jam y’all make? I’ll pay whatever you want for it, really.”

The villagers looked to one another, then to the woman. She smiled, and sighed out of pure relief.

“My, is that all? You aren’t part of the Fish and Game Commission?”

“Nope.”

“The ATF? DEA?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Are you a United States Postal Service special agent?”

“Naw, I gotta bum knee!”
“Are you hooked on anything? Are you a machine or a cabbage or something?”

“What? No, don’t think so.”

“Alright, alright. You’ll get your jam. Come up the hill with us.”

The journey into the village was uneventful. There wasn't much to see-- a rustic shack here, a aged stump there. The entire time, the matriarch and her right hand man whispered back and forth to each other. Will couldn’t make out but a few words, like “bond,” “sugar,” and “mash.” In concert, they meant nothing to him.

The shack into which Will stepped was poorly lit and it had a bit of a rusty smell to it, but those were things he was willing to ignore. On the back wall were hundreds and hundreds of jars.

“You can help yourself, Will. I’ll leave you and Felix here to talk.”

As the matriarch left, Felix, the unusually named but probably most senior man in the village hierarchy, faced Will and gave him the once over.

“This place is heaven, friend. We have all the blackberries we need to make our wonderful jam; y’know, and we can sell it in any market in any state in the union for a hefty profit, as you’re no doubt aware. People can’t get enough of it.”

Will had his right hand wrist-deep into a jar of jam; he nodded and sloppily shoved it into his mouth. Here and there, a globule of fruit would fall onto his plaid shirt. The pattern hid most of the stains.

“Best of all, Will, is the taxes. No one here pays any taxes. No one knows about us! Sure, they know the jam, but not the jam-makers! It’s great. Y’know, we’ve taken in three million dollars—all cash—over the past three years alone! When we get bored with this rural, communal living thing, we’ll be able to retire to some beautiful islands in the Caribbean, all of our assets intact.” He chuckled and picked up a jar for himself. “Want to join us, by any chance? We could use another berry picker.”

Will was busy licking his hand clean of berry residue when he heard this. He grinned ear to ear at Felix.

“My, that’d be wonderful, sir! The thing is…”

“What? What’s the problem, Will?”

“The thing is,” he said, whipping out a well-polished badge from his back pocket, “I’m a special agent for the Internal Revenue Service.” He hiked up his pants, pulled a toothpick out of nowhere and began to chew on it. “Tax avoidance is something we do not look well upon in the Service, sir. Everyone in your village, I’m afraid, is under arrest. Look out the window. My people are already taking your accomplices into custody.”

A look of panic took to Felix face.

“Damnit! She forgot to ask the IRS question! You can’t do that! We were doing so well! How could you abandon the jam? You can’t do that!”

“I’m afraid I can, sir, under the powers vested unto me by Uncle Sam. You’re up the creek without a paddle, pal. I’ve gotta say, Felix, you do look to be in a pretty sticky situation!”

Both men began to laugh uproariously, and for a whole day they continued to do so. Later, they would spend a few more hours eating a couple dozen jars of jam. Then, Felix and his accomplices would each be arrested and sentenced to serve five years in prison and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for their crimes against the state.

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