Bad News, Page 6

  I said nothing.

  ‘Well, I may work for a small neighborhood rag, Mr Walker, but when I hear that a woman is running some sort of sex dungeon in the middle of our community, I think that’s a story, and I’m not going to let some smartass hot-shit city writer try to warn me off it.’

  ‘What have I said?’ I said. ‘Have I threatened you? Have I tried to get you off this story?’

  ‘Here’s what I don’t get. Why aren’t you writing about Trixie Snelling? Any reporter worth his salt would be taking a run at this.’

  ‘She’s a friend,’ I said. ‘She—’

  Benson pushed his coffee cup aside. ‘We’re done here,’ he said, shifting his weight across the seat and getting out. ‘See ya later.’

  My cell rang as he walked out the door. I reached into my pocket, flipped it open.

  ‘Zack,’ Trixie said, ‘I’m reading this story of yours in the paper, about these guys trying to get the cops to buy stun guns. Jesus Christ, Zack, do you have any idea who these guys are?’

  ‘Trixie,’ I said, ‘I don’t give a rat’s ass who they are. The meeting here is finished. Benson’s walked out. You set me up. Thanks a fuck of a lot.’ I slapped the phone shut and went back downtown.

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  One day he went too far.

  Miranda was in the kitchen, making an after-school snack. It hadn’t been a good day. The guidance counselor wanted a word with her. Brought her in for a meeting. He said he’d tried to reach her mother, to discuss her school performance, but wasn’t having any luck when he phoned the house.

  Miranda thought, Good luck. Mom’s there, but she’s probably watching Family Feud and getting smashed.

  ‘Then I tried calling your father at work,’ he said.

  Oh no, Miranda thought.

  ‘And he was very helpful. Good to talk to. Says you just haven’t been pulling your weight. He knows you could do better if you just put in some effort. You stand to lose your year,’ the guidance counselor told her. ‘You’re failing all of your subjects, with the exception of math. You’re a natural at math. Why can’t you bring that sort of effort to your other subjects, huh, Miranda? What’s the problem? Is it drugs? Are you getting into drugs, Miranda?’

  No, she wanted to tell him. My mom’s a drunk and my dad wants to get into my pants. And you think I should give a flying fuck about how I’m doing at school?

  Except for math. I like numbers, Miranda thought. At least there’s some order there. Some predictability. You don’t wake up someday and fìnd out that somebody decided fuck it, we’re making two plus two equal five.

  So she went home, dumped her backpack at the door, opened the cupboard and looked for something to eat. Her mother was sitting in the living room, a Camel in one hand and a scotch in the other, watching One Miserable Life to Live or As the Fucking World Turns. Didn’t say anything when Miranda came in the door. It was nothing short of a miracle that there was some peanut butter. The Wonder bread was probably a week old, but Miranda managed to find a slice or two without green spots on them, and dropped them into the toaster.

  That’s when he came in the door. He was early. He didn’t usually get home from the plant until after six.

  ‘Well, look who’s here,’ he said. ‘I got a call about you today.’

  Miranda ignored him, stared at the toaster, watched the tiny elements inside glow red as they browned her slices of stale, white bread.

  ‘Your guidance counselor says you’re flunking everything except math. Here’s what I don’t get. Why do you even try at math? Why don’t you be a total fuckup, instead of a 95 per cent fuckup? It’s like you can’t even get that right.’

  No wonder he was angry. She’d been blocking her door with a chair every night for weeks. Sometimes, during the day, he’d take the chair out, and she’d have to find one and take it to her room right before bedtime.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, slapping her ass, but not too hard, so it was almost a pat. ‘I’m talking to you here.’

  She didn’t know she was going to do it. It just happened. She doesn’t even know how she had the presence of mind to first yank the plug from the wall. But once she’d done that, she reached her fingers into the two slots of the toaster. Her fingers would have been burned worse than they were had the two slices of bread not been there. She jammed her fingers in, almost like it was a rectangular bowling ball, and came around swinging.

  Swinging hard.

  The toaster caught him just above the right eye, and the connection of metal against bone made a hell of a noise. The move was so unexpected, so out of the blue, he didn’t have time to bring his arms up, but he had them up when she came at him a second time. The toaster bounced off his arm, and Miranda was thrown slightly off balance, staggered up against the counter.

  The blood was pouring out of her father’s head and through his fingers as he put his hand up to the wound.

  ‘Jesus!’ he shouted, staggering back himself. ‘Jesus!’

  Miranda’s mother came into the room, looked at her husband, at the bloody toaster still in her daughter’s hand, and shouted, ‘He’s your father! How dare you! This man is your father!’

  She ran out of the kitchen. She ran out of the house. She didn’t even have time to pack her things in a paper bag.

  SEVEN

  Three times on my way back into the city, Trixie tried to phone me on her cell. When I got back to my desk at the paper, the light on my phone was flashing. I hadn’t even checked the message yet when the phone rang. I picked up.

  ‘Zack,’ Trixie said, ‘I’m sorry about what happened with Benson. Really, I’m sorry about that. But forget about that for now. Those guys, those two in your story. They didn’t always sell stun guns, these guys. They—’

  I felt Sarah standing behind me. ‘I gotta go,’ I said, and hung up. I turned around. ‘’Sup?’

  She nodded her head toward Magnuson’s office. ‘He wants to see us,’ she said, and she didn’t look happy.

  ‘Both of us?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘What’s it about? Is he going to apologize for dragging me off the Wickens story and giving it to that asshole Colby?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Sarah said. ‘I don’t think that “sorry” is part of Magnuson’s vocabulary.’

  I got up, made sure my shirt was well tucked in, and followed Sarah to the far corner of the newsroom, where the managing editor’s corner office looked out over the city.

  Even though we could see him in there, sitting at his desk, we didn’t walk right in. Sarah told his secretary we had arrived, as if that were not immediately evident, and she buzzed him. Through the door, we watched him watching us as he picked up his phone. ‘Send them in,’ we heard him say into the phone.

  His secretary said, ‘He’ll see you now.’

  We went in. I had a bad feeling.

  ‘Ah, the Walkers,’ he said, not getting up to greet us. That seemed like a bad sign to me. ‘Take a seat,’ he said. I would have felt better had he said, ‘Please, be seated.’

  We sat down. Magnuson said, ‘I didn’t bring you in here because you happen to be married to one another. I brought both of you in because I wanted to speak with you, Mr Walker, and seeing as how Sarah is your editor, this will impact her as well.’ He stared at both of us for a while, but mostly at me.

  ‘I have an old friend,’ he said suddenly, ‘name of Blair Wentworth. We used to work together, as reporters, long ago. Used to get drunk together on a regular basis too. Once, when he’d had a little bit too much one night in the bar, we got into a heated debate about whether Jimmy Carter really had a peanut farm, or whether it was just a load of bullshit, so we walked out, got in a cab, and asked to be taken to Plains, Georgia. Well, that was several hundred, if not thousands, of miles away, and the cabby had some reservations, but we said not to worry, we were newspapermen, and we had expense accounts. Instead of driving us to Georgia, he drove us back to our paper and dropped us off at the front door before we
made complete asses of ourselves. If I could find that cabby today, I’d give him a job here. Doing what, I don’t know, but he clearly had more sense than some of the people who work for me here now.’

  I blinked.

  ‘Anyway, Blair decided to go off in another direction. He was a pretty business-minded individual, got into community newspapers, worked his way up to publisher of one of them. The Suburban, out in Oakwood. You might have heard of it.’

  Oh God.

  ‘We keep in touch, Blair and I, so when something comes across his desk that troubles him, he gives me a call. And I just now got off the phone with him. It was a very interesting call, the most amazing thing. Do you have any idea, Mr Walker, what it might have been about?’

  Sarah turned to look at me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said as evenly as I could. ‘I have a pretty good idea.’

  ‘What is it, Zack?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Why don’t you tell her, Mr Walker.’

  I cleared my throat. ‘I was out to Oakwood for lunch – well, actually, I never had any lunch, come to think of it, only a coffee. Which probably explains why I’m feeling a little light-headed all of a sudden. Edgy. I could use a bite to eat.’

  ‘Zack.’

  ‘I had lunch with Martin Benson, who writes a column for the Suburban. I think he may have been left with the impression that I was trying to get him to scrap doing a story on Trixie, which is not at all the case.’

  Sarah was speechless. Magnuson was good enough to fill the silence.

  ‘Blair says this Benson fellow told him that you wanted him to surrender his camera phone so he wouldn’t take a picture of this, this woman known as Trixie, who, I understand, has a rather unorthodox line of work.’

  ‘She was, yes, that’s sort of true, but she was very frightened that he was going to take her picture and run it in the paper.’

  ‘That’s what journalists do,’ Magnuson said. ‘We take pictures of people we want to do stories on, and we put them in the paper, whether they like it much or not. I’ll bet you Sarah could explain the whole concept to you if you’re not all that familiar with it.’

  ‘That’s who called you, isn’t it?’ Sarah said. ‘There was no call about a Star Trek convention.’

  Magnuson’s bushy eyebrows went up a notch.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean, no, there was no call about a Star Trek convention.’ I was starting to feel that I’d be lucky to cover anything as newsworthy as a Star Trek convention in the future.

  ‘It’s one thing to try to outsmart the competition when we’re trying to get a story that we want just as much as they do,’ Magnuson said. ‘One time, when I was based in Washington, there was this little runt-nosed jackass from the paper out on the coast, doesn’t matter which one, kept shadowing me, figuring he had a better chance snooping on me and my sources than trying to cultivate any of his own. So I’m on a pay phone, and I know he’s just around the corner, but he doesn’t know that I know, and I ask for Rewrite, tell them I got a hell of a story about a particular congressman who was found dressed in women’s clothes in a whorehouse, and off he dashed. Then I told Rewrite we had to start again. Our paper didn’t have a story about a congressman found dressed in women’s clothes in a whorehouse, but his did.’ He sniffed. ‘Never followed me around again after that.’

  I laughed.

  ‘Shut up,’ Magnuson said. ‘You’ve got nothing to laugh about. What you did isn’t the same as what I did. You tried to steer Benson off a story to protect a friend.’

  ‘I didn’t—’

  ‘I can’t fire you outright,’ Magnuson said. ‘That would involve the newspaper guild, and hearings, and back and forth and who needs that shit anyway. So instead, you can remain a reporter.’

  I knew it was too soon to think I’d dodged a bullet.

  ‘But not for city. Tomorrow, you start in the homes section.’

  I was dumbstruck. Surely, firing would have been more humane.

  Sarah, as well, could find no words. She looked back and forth between me and the managing editor.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do about getting someone else for you,’ Magnuson told her. ‘I don’t want you to have to run that department shorthanded, because, I can tell you right now, you’re going to be running that department for the foreseeable future.’

  He turned back to look at something on his computer, and it was clear that we were being dismissed.

  I’d been busted down to the homes section.

  Sarah wasn’t going to become the foreign editor.

  It didn’t matter anymore what Myanmar used to be.

  EIGHT

  ‘Actually, we’re not the “homes” section,’ the ‘not-the-homes’ section editor told me. ‘We’re “Home!” That’s the way we did the masthead when the paper had its redesign a few years ago.’

  The Home! editor was a short woman named Frieda, and as she stood next to me while I sat at my new desk, we were almost at eye level. She wore a bright orange dress that seemed to be humming, like a transformer. She was pointing to the masthead on a copy of the Home! section spread out on my desk. The letters H-O-M-E, in brilliant blue, followed by an equally bold exclamation mark.

  ‘I came up with that,’ she said proudly. ‘You know how, when someone comes into your house, a member of your family, they shout “I’m home!” Well, my thinking was, we take the last part of that sentence and turn it into the name of the section. It’s the punctuation at the end, that dramatic exclamation mark, that makes it, I think. It’s what separates our home section from home sections in other papers. It’s what gives this section its punch, its vitality. I think we have the best home section anywhere, and it sure is nice you’re going to be able to work for it.’

  She smiled.

  I thought, If I could find a home tall enough to get the job done, I’d throw myself off the roof and kill myself.

  ‘Of course,’ said Frieda, ‘I understand that coming here wasn’t totally your idea – Mr Magnuson explained that to me – but I think you’re going to find working here very fulfilling. We do a lot of important stories here, and you should know that Home! is one of the biggest revenue producers for the paper. We have advertisers lined up to get into our pages, and many weeks we have to turn them away. There simply isn’t any more space for them. The presses can’t handle a section that big. Did you know that?’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘I did not know that.’

  ‘I’ve had this story idea percolating for a while, and haven’t had anyone free to do it, but now that you’re here, I’d like to give it to you, because you have the kind of skills, I think, to run with it.’

  I steeled myself.

  ‘Linoleum,’ Frieda said. ‘There are so many angles, I’m thinking along the lines of a series, not just one article. What advances are being made, scuff resistance, design choices, whether the linoleum is being made here or whether we’re going overseas to get it. Is this country hanging on to its linoleum jobs, or giving them away to Mexico?’

  ‘So it would have a political angle,’ I said.

  Frieda nodded enthusiastically. ‘I can see you’re thinking already. That’s great. Listen, why don’t I leave you to it, if you have any questions you can ask, and don’t forget that at three, we traditionally have a little biscuit break.’

  I glanced up at the clock. ‘Gee, six hours,’ I said. ‘I may not be able to wait.’

  Frieda smiled and touched my arm before departing. I sighed and slumped in my chair. I was more than depressed. I was tired. I’d barely slept the night before. And not just because Sarah wasn’t speaking to me. There’d been a wild electrical storm around midnight. Flashes of lightning filled our bedroom with light, just long enough to see Sarah’s back turned to me. The wind came out, and I lay awake wondering whether any of the stately old oaks that surrounded the house would come crashing through the roof. Briefly, the power went out – the wired-in smoke detector chirped once, and when I glanced at the digital clock radio, it was flashing
12:00.

  According to the morning news, some parts of the city had lost power, some for several hours. A great many limbs and a few entire trees had come down, taking power lines with them. But when I looked out in the morning, all I saw were a few twigs and short branches scattered across the yard and the street.

  ‘That was some storm,’ I said in the morning, trying to make conversation while I poured Sarah her coffee. She said nothing.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I know I’ve fucked up, big-time, but it’s not like Magnuson made it out to be. I wasn’t trying to keep that guy from doing his story, I had no intention of doing that, and I’d said to Trixie that—’

  ‘Just what did you say to Trixie?’ Sarah said. It was the first time I’d heard her voice in maybe eighteen hours. ‘What do the two of you talk about? When you have your little lunches, your little meetings, your rendezvous?’

  ‘“Rendezvous”?’ I said. ‘Why not “tryst”? There’s a word we don’t hear much anymore.’

  ‘It’s a tryst?’

  ‘Listen, I had lunch with her the other day, she told me she had this problem, I told her I couldn’t help her out with it.’

  ‘Is that how you weren’t helping her out with it? Going back out there to talk to that reporter, to get him to give up his camera?’

  ‘All I did was tell him Trixie was afraid to come into the diner unless he gave up the camera. He’d been trying to sneak a pic of her and—’

  Sarah, screaming: ‘And what do you care! So what if he does! What is that to you? Since when did you become her protector?’

  Her voice echoed off the kitchen walls.

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, ‘You’re right. It’s her problem. It’s not my problem.’ I paused. ‘It’s not our problem.’

  Sarah took one last glaring look at me, then turned and went back upstairs to get ready for work. The coffee I’d poured for her sat neglected on the counter.