the creek and started floating away. I chased it down the bank until it snagged in a fallen tree and I was able to dislodge it and bring it back. I found Darlene sitting on the bank, crying. She had a bloody cut on one cheek and had torn her new one-piece lavender bathing suit. Being a nine-year-old, naturally I considered teasing her, but thought better of it and instead solemnly informed her that the front wheel on her bike was badly bent and would need repair. Later we told her mother Darlene had slammed into a picnic table at the public access. Darlene hated to lie, so I did most of the talking while she stood next to me sobbing. Her mother bought it. Or at least we thought so.
“So what am I supposed to do, Gus?”
“Let’s see. Forget you ever saw me here?”
“Hmm-I don’t know.”
I’d never seen her in her uniform. She’d wanted to be a cop since she was in high school, but I realized, kneeling there in the janitor’s closet, that I’d never really taken it seriously until now. It seemed to suit her. Which made me feel glad, despite my predicament. There she was doing what she wanted to do with her life. I smiled.
“Are you really going to arrest me?”
Now she smiled, too. “I might.” She leaned back against the door until it closed.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t know. A citizen’s arrest?”
We didn’t say anything for a while. We just looked at each other, me on my knee, Darlene in her uniform, the flashlight beam playing across my chest. My heart was pounding now from something other than fear. Darlene and I had gone on a few dates and gotten into a few clinches, but one of us had always stopped things before they went too far. I think we knew we really liked each other, and we knew I wasn’t going to stay in Starvation Lake, and we knew that those two things could only come to pain. But there in the humming silence of the Pine County courthouse, with the town asleep around us and my stupid little secret hanging on the air, I guess it was easier for both of us to say the hell with it, this is our place, for now.
I sat back on the floor. She snatched her hat off and tossed it at me. I caught it against my chest and set it down next to the bucket I’d upended. Darlene locked the door and snapped off her flashlight.
I got my story. Bubba Baumgarten wasn’t the only slugger on Perfect-O-Screw’s payroll. I called some of the guys whose names I’d found in the courthouse records. As it turned out, there were six Perfect-O-Screw employees who hadn’t done anything more for the company than catch fly balls and swing bats. Henry was so delighted that he never asked why I hadn’t come in until noon.
“Christ,” he said, “it’s a double play. You nailed ’em screwing the city and the softball league.”
More like a triple play, I thought.
Henry wanted to publish the story on the day the town council was scheduled to finalize Perfect-O-Screw’s newest tax break. The day before the meeting, my phone rang just after 9:00 a.m. “Gus Carpenter,” I said.
“What the fuck are you?” came the voice. I knew it from the softball field. I looked around for Henry. He’d gone for doughnuts.
“Mr. Vidigan?” I said.
“What the hell have I ever done to you? Did I strike you out or something? Will ruining me be a feather in your fucking cap? Will you be able to go to your bosses and say, ‘Stop the fucking presses, I’m about to destroy Cecil Vidigan’?”
“Actually, Mr. Vidigan-”
“By the way, print a word of this and I’ll come down and cave your goddamn skull in.”
Then he hung up. My hands were trembling. What if I had the story all wrong? I wished Henry were there.
The phone rang again.
“Gus?”
“Yes, Mr. Vidigan. Sir, I had fully-”
“No, no, Gus, please.” He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said all that sh-, all those things. You’re just doing your job. As you can imagine, Gus, this company, I’ve built it from the ground up. I’ve sweat blood, Gus. Cried tears, friend, real tears. And I think I’ve contributed a hell of a lot to this community.”
“I understand,” I said. “Do you think you could tell me-”
“Listen,” he said. “Why don’t you come out to the shop in the morning? I’ll lay it all out, how this grimy little joint-I’m pretty damn proud of it-how it makes a big difference around here. What do you say?”
My hands still hadn’t stopped shaking. “Well,” I said, “I actually need to do this now.”
“Now? Like today?”
“Yeah.”
He cleared his throat, a little too loudly. “Look, Gus, today’s just impossible. I got a huge shipment to get out of here.”
“We can do it over the phone. What I’m working on is this tax abatement-”
“No. I can’t do it now. Tomorrow.”
Now that I’d heard his anger turn to feigned calm and finally to desperation, my initial fear of Vidigan began leaching away. I’d worried for a second or two that maybe he had a perfectly reasonable explanation for hiring softball ringers, that maybe my story wasn’t a story after all, maybe I’d wasted my time breaking the law with Darlene at the courthouse. But now I was sure, without even hearing what he had to say, that I really did have a story.
“Mr. Vidigan,” I said. “We plan to run this story in tomorrow’s paper. If you want to comment, now is the time.”
There was another long pause before he said, “OK. I get it. You want to fuck me at the town council.”
“I just want to report-”
“Don’t give me that happy horseshit. You just want a feather in your fucking cap.”
“Mr. Vidigan, everything you say now is on the record.”
“Oh, ho, ho, fuck you,” he said. He sounded like he was choking. “Put this in your piece-of-shit paper: I will cave your goddamn-”
“If I don’t hear from you or your lawyers, I’ll assume you didn’t want to comment. Thanks.”
Now I hung up.
Henry went through the story with me line by line, asking what I knew, how I knew it, whether I’d double-and triple-checked all my facts. When we’d finished, he gave me one of his big, crinkly smiles and said, “Goddamn headline ought to be, ‘College Kid Raises Hometown Hell.’” The actual headline, bannered across the top of the front page, read, “Town Strikes Out on Perfect-O-Screw Abatement.”
That evening, the town council rejected the company’s application for a new tax break, canceled the original abatement, and authorized the town attorney to sue Perfect-O-Screw for $83,174.98 in back property taxes. Cecil Vidigan didn’t attend, but eighty-seven citizens did, quite a turnout for an August council meeting. I counted every one. For a few hours, people talked about something I’d done that had nothing to do with that state title game.
After the meeting, I went back to the Pilot. Deadlines had passed, the newsroom was empty, and I didn’t have to file a story on the meeting until the next morning. But I didn’t want to go home yet. On my desk I found a copy of that day’s paper with a note scrawled across it in black Magic Marker. “Here’s how you know you had a helluva scoop,” Henry had written. “The mayor called to complain about not being quoted.” I took it into Henry’s office and grabbed a Bud out of the mini-fridge beneath his desk. I propped my feet up on the desk and reread my story about twenty times. I kept thinking, This is just what my professors taught: Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable. I had exposed a cheat and saved the town money. That’s what real journalists did.
But there was something else, too, that kept me sitting there reading my story again and again into the middle of the night. I was a short, skinny college kid who’d gone toe-to-toe with a captain of industry, or at least what passed for one in Starvation Lake, a man of means and stature and raw, purposeful anger. And I’d beaten him.
Two years later, after I’d graduated from college, the scissored-out clips of my Perfect-O-Screw stories would impress a Detroit Times editor enough that she’d hire me as a general assignment reporter for the business section. By then Perfect-O-Screw would be out of business, and Cecil Vidigan would be rumored to be running a golf
