country. Most didn’t call; maybe they’d heard I was damaged goods. For those who did inquire, I had a hard time explaining why I was leaving the Times. I found myself hiding out in my apartment, afraid to go outside where I might run into one of the other Times people. Eventually I ran out of money. With nowhere to work and nowhere to live, I figured I’d go back to Starvation Lake, spend a little time with Mom, maybe work with Soupy, regroup. After all, my problems really had begun there; I’d just carried them with me to Detroit. Besides, going home seemed fitting punishment for my mistakes in Detroit. Henry goaded me into coming back to the Pilot. “Just till you get your bearings again,” he said. At least I could make a living, or half a living, doing something I didn’t mind doing.
“Thanks, Henry.”
“Not a problem. You’ll get a little raise, and you’ll go into the bonus pool. Now, one other thing: What’s up with this story on the Bigfoot guy?”
I lowered my voice. “We’ve got a little more work to do.”
“Well, you might want to go slow, eh? Let them put your name on the masthead before you start stirring the pot.”
“Right.”
“And by the way, I like my steak medium rare.”
“You got it.”
“What do you got going for tomorrow?”
“Hang on,” I told him, hitting the hold button. Did I really want to tell him about the bullet hole? Would he tell me to hold off on that, too? Of course Henry had known Blackburn, had written some of the stories about his accident. But he didn’t know yet what was really going on. It was too late to hold Joanie’s stories. Better for Henry if he could tell his bosses he didn’t know about them.
I got back on the phone. “Henry, I gotta run,” I said.
“Be good.”
After editing Joanie’s bullet hole story, I ran down to Fortune Drug and picked up six Pabsts, a bag of nacho chips, and a container of cheese dip. I thought I’d treat Joanie. Over the years I’d learned that getting close to people I envied made me feel better, as if they could forgive my selfishness by sharing their success.
When I walked back into the Pilot, Joanie pointed at my phone, where the hold light was blinking. “Fleming?” I guessed.
“No,” Joanie said. “Somebody Trenton? From Detroit?”
“Get rid of him, please.”
“Does this have something to do with your, uh, situation down there?”
“Get rid of him and maybe I’ll tell you.”
Scott Trenton was the attorney I’d had to hire in my final days in Detroit. Joanie told him I was on deadline. There was a pause. Trenton was too scrupulous to say why he had called, but frustrated enough to use silence to express his displeasure. While she took down his number, I went up front and called Boynton’s lawyer, Fleming. I hadn’t done a thing with that dossier on Soupy. I didn’t expect him to be there on a Sunday night, and he didn’t answer. I left a message.
“So,” Joanie said when I returned. She had popped a beer. “Who’s Trenton and why does he keep calling you?”
I lifted her backpack off a chair next to her desk and set it on the floor.
“This thing weighs a ton,” I said. “What do you keep in here?”
“Everything,” she said. “You know, this Trenton dude left a bunch of messages on the machine yesterday.”
“Not when I checked.”
“Maybe they bounced to the Sound Off line.”
Every Tuesday in the Pilot, readers were invited to respond to the weekly Sound Off question: Should deer hunting season be extended? What are your favorite spring flowers? Do you prefer powdered sugar or syrup on your pancakes? The answering machine recorded their phoned-in responses. Answers ran on Saturdays with photographs of the readers quoted.
“What’s Till got for Sound Off this week?” I said.
“Something stupid about people shoveling off their roofs.”
“It’s always something stupid.”
“No kidding. My favorite was the one that asked if people thought it was wrong-like a sin or something-to leave their Christmas lights up past Easter.”
We both laughed.
“So what about Trenton?” Joanie said.
“No, no, wait,” I said, trying to keep the subject changed. “Let’s come up with something for Sound Off, something even funnier.”
“Tillie’ll be ticked.”
“Tillie will get over it. Come on. Here, stoke those creative fires.”
I opened two beers and handed Joanie one. She looked at her first beer, still nearly full. She shrugged. She set the fresh beer down, picked up the first, pulled her hair back from her face with one hand, and chugged the rest of the beer. Her hair tumbled back onto her shoulders as she loosed a guttural belch.
“Whoa,” I said.
“I’m such a pig,” she said, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth.
“I’m not sure you’ll be able to do that at the New York Times. ”
She grabbed the next beer. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” she said. “Listen. ‘Sound Off: How do you keep your kids from belching at the dinner table?’”
“Not bad,” I said. “But how about…” I looked around the room. “‘Sound Off: Should the county outlaw buzzing fluorescent lamps?’”
“Yes! And ‘Sound Off: Why does every darn door around here have those little bells?’ And ‘Is there one eligible man around here who doesn’t live in a trailer and start every morning with a tomato-juice-and-beer?’”
We laughed again and drank. “I don’t know,” I said. “I think maybe Tillie can out-stupid us any day.”
Joanie propped her boot heels against the edge of her desk. “Do you really think I could make it at the New York Times?” she said.
She has the chops, I thought, and she’s smart and usually solemn enough to fit in with those East Coast pinheads. But the evening’s flash of silliness made me wonder if she might be better off in Cleveland or Chicago. I’d never send her to Detroit.
“Honestly,” I said, “you really can’t expect to be a reporter of that caliber unless you can and will use profanity with remorseless abandon. Try this: ‘motherfucker.’ Go ahead. Say it.”
She stared at me blankly.
“OK. You might be able to handle New York,” I said. “Though you might need a little more experience than the Pilot. ”
“No, duh. Did you ever have a chance to work there?”
“The New York Times? Yeah, right, and the Pilot outbid them for my services. No, Joanie, in case you hadn’t noticed, my career has taken a slightly different direction. I’m thinking my next job will be covering volleyball for the Needle. ” The Needle was the paper at Pine County High School.
“Don’t sell yourself short. I know about those truck stories you wrote.”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m up here in shitsville rewriting Kiwanis Club announcements.”
“All right, all right. I got rid of Trenton. Now give it up.”
She’d probably read about my departure from the Detroit Times in the Columbia Journalism Review, which had run a short item saying I’d resigned amid an unspecified controversy over my truck stories. “Carpenter declined to comment,” the story said, “as did executives at the Detroit Times and Superior Motors, citing the possibility of litigation.” Rumors had bounced around the Times newsroom, but no one knew the truth. According to my severance agreement, I wasn’t supposed to talk about it. But who would know if I told Joanie?
“They want my source,” I said.
“Your what?”
“They want the name of someone who helped me on those stories. They want me to give up an anonymous source.”
