Stone Rain (8 page)

“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.

“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.

Angie, who’d been coming down the stairs as Sarah was going up, appeared. “I don’t know what you did, Dad,” she said, “but it must have been bad, even by your standards.”

I was ready with something sarcastic, then said, “Yeah. It was.”

And as I sat in my new! desk! in! the! Home! section, I tried to sort out which was the worst of my crimes. It hadn’t been getting myself demoted to one of the paper’s soft sections, and it hadn’t been nixing Sarah’s chances at becoming foreign editor, although that one was up there.

It was the fact that I hadn’t been honest with her. I hadn’t told Sarah what Trixie had asked of me. I hadn’t told her I’d agreed to at least meet with Trixie and Martin Benson.

The way Sarah must have seen it was, if I hadn’t disclosed the details of that conversation with Trixie, what other conversations with her had I failed to fill her in on?

Once, a couple of years ago, when I’d made a joke that I was not having an affair with someone, Sarah had laughed. It was the one thing she knew she’d never have to worry about, she said. I could never pull it off, I’d have too guilty a conscience, my face would betray me when I attempted a lie.

Plus there was the part about my loving Sarah more than any other woman in the world.

But I’d crossed a line somewhere, and was over it before I’d realized it. My marriage to Sarah meant a lot more to me than my friendship with Trixie. And if that meant distancing myself from her, then that’s what I’d have to—

My phone rang.

Did the
Metropolitan
switchboard already know I was here, and not out in the newsroom?

“Walker,” I said, picking up.

“It’s happened,” Trixie said.

“What?”

“My picture. It’s in the paper. Fucking amazing picture too. Must have been shot with a telephoto. No camera phone shot.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Maybe you could tell me why your paper shot it?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“There’s this little line, under the picture.”

“A photo credit,” I said.

“Whatever. It says, ‘Special to the
Suburban
by Lesley Carroll, slash,
The Metropolitan
.’ She must have been parked up the street from the house, took my picture as I was going from the car to the house. I’m fucked.”

Lesley Carroll took the picture? One of our photogs? I thought about it for a moment, and it started to make sense. Magnuson tells his old buddy Blair,
Hey, our Walker guy messed with your guy over a picture of this woman? Leave it with us. We’ll get you a picture. We’ll send one of our people. We’ve got shooters who’ve been to Iraq and back. Think we can’t get a shot of this, what’s her name? Trixie Snelling? We’ve got this young intern, eager to make a name for herself as a photographer. You can bet she’ll get you your picture. Consider it our way of saying we’re sorry
.

That’s how it must have gone.

“I’m sorry, Trixie. I really am.”

“This couldn’t happen at a worse time. With those guys in town, trying to sell stun guns.”

“Trixie, I have to go.”

“Didn’t you check those guys out? Didn’t I tell you to?”

“Trixie, I’m sorry.”

And I ended the call.

For a while, Miranda was your basic street kid. Stopped going to school, gravitated to the big city, hung around teen drop-in shelters, slept someplace different every night, got a bucket and a squeegee and tried to make some money cleaning people’s windshields. Most of them, they pretended not to see you when you tried to make eye contact. If you could catch their eye, wave the squeegee, smile nice, make them realize you weren’t some crazy crackhead or something, they might give you the nod, let you clean their window, they’d give you a couple quarters, maybe a buck if you were lucky. But mostly they ignored you, or waved you away, or told you “Fuck off, you miserable cocksucking whore, go get a real job like everybody else.”

But she still made a good buck. She got to where she could guess who’d let her squeegee and who wouldn’t. She did better with men, not so good with lady drivers. She figured, maybe the men are less intimidated. “You dumb ass,” one of her coworkers said. “You wonder why you do okay with the guys? Look at you. Leaning over their window with those knockers? That one guy, he drove around the block, didn’t you notice you did his window twice in five minutes? Shit, you look like that, what are you cleaning fucking windshields for? You could be making a fortune doing something else.”

“I’m not hooking,” Miranda said.

“Who said anything about hooking? You’re like a dancer, leaping between those cars. Go on stage, dance around, shake ’em. Beats cleaning somebody’s windshield when it’s ten below.”

Miranda had never really thought of herself as good-looking. Compliments weren’t exactly handed out back home. Somebody told her there was a bar up in Canborough where they were looking for strippers. She should check it out, they said.

It wasn’t exactly what she wanted to do, but she was tired of working outside and freezing her ass off. She could have landed on Claire’s doorstep, but she had a decent life with Don. Miranda didn’t feel right barging in on it. They were living above a pizza place somewhere, sleeping on a pull-out couch in a one-room apartment. She had some secretary-type job, he’d lined up something at the Ford plant. You could make good money there. Someday, he said, they’d get a nice house out in the country.

Miranda was happy for Claire, happy that she had a boyfriend who loved her. They were probably going to get married, that’s what Claire had told her. Miranda didn’t want to mess that up. She had to try to make it on her own. She’d been put down all her life, but she still had pride. She wouldn’t allow her parents to steal that from her.

“You can stay with us,” Claire told her. “Really.”

But Miranda said no, don’t worry, she had plans.

Going to Canborough and trying out to be a stripper, that was her plan.