“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yes. Long story short: revenues are way behind budget, and the budget was conservative to begin with.” Philo looked nervously around the room. “I don’t know where else to cut.”
I recalled him on his first day at the Pilot. A week before Christmas, he bustled around the newsroom like a kid about to open his presents: just twenty-eight years old and the managing editor of a real newspaper. A tiny newspaper, an obscure newspaper, a newspaper that didn’t report much news that anybody outside of Starvation Lake cared about, but a newspaper nonetheless.
He had told me then how he had decided to eschew the route taken by his grad-school peers, which was to turn summer internships at the big dailies into full-time jobs that would someday have them covering the White House or Wall Street or wars in foreign hells. “I want nothing to do with the Washington media mob and the whole backstabbing New York scene,” he’d said. “I want to learn this from the ground up, get the ink in my veins, if you know what I mean.” Part of me found his purity and naivete endearing. Another part wondered if Philo had failed to land any internships and had fallen back on his uncle.
Either way, I couldn’t help but feel for him now as his eyes darted around our wretched little newsroom, looking for ways to clip a few pennies off our monthly outlay. There in the corner was the desk of our old photographer, who had worked on and off at the Pilot longer than Philo had been alive; Philo had had to call him up and fire him on New Year’s Day. There on Philo’s desk was the mug jammed with ballpoint pens Philo had sneaked one by one out of the Pine County State Bank. There on a shelf were the last three legal pads in a package that had to last until the end of the month.
“Philo,” I said. “You went to journalism school.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
He laced his fingers together in front of his argyle sweater. “Because I like the way newspapers can knit communities together.”
He must have read that somewhere, I thought.
“And you understand how newspapers do that, right? They do it by telling people things they don’t want to hear.”
“Please,” Philo said.
“Well, why aren’t you doing journalism then, however you want it?”
“I’m the managing editor of this newspaper.”
“You’re the Bob Cratchit of this newspaper.”
“You must mean Scrooge.”
“Nope. Scrooge was the boss. You aren’t the boss by a long shot.”
I saw him look at the thermostat on the wall near the back door.
“Go ahead,” I said.
He couldn’t help himself. He slipped off the desk and walked to the thermostat and actually turned the heat down. I laughed.
“It’s not funny,” Philo said. He came back to where I was sitting and stood over me. “We could let you go. Would that be funny?”
It didn’t hit me as hard as he might have hoped, because I didn’t think he was serious. After all, who would actually put stories in the paper if I was gone? Philo spent most of his time writing e-mails and going to meetings about all the other businesses Media North was now in, cell phones and television and the Internet and billboards and video rentals.
“Hilarious,” I said. “Tell you what, why don’t you just fire yourself? Get the hell out of here and see the world, get drunk, get laid, do the things you really want to do. What’s that you always say? ‘Earth’s turning faster on its axis.’ What are you waiting around here for?”
“What makes you so high and mighty? What are you, thirty-seven, and you’re still messing around in Starvation Lake?”
“Thirty-five. And, hey, it pays the bills. I don’t have a trust fund, pal.”
“Pardon me?”
“Come on.”
“What do you know about me? You know nothing about me.”
“No offense,” I said, “but you’re miserable and you know it.” I felt Mrs. B move into the newsroom doorway. “You came here thinking you were going to run this little empire and knit these nice little towns together and take over for Uncle Jimbo. But it’s not working out, is it? You fire me and you won’t have time to worry about the Internet anymore. You’ll have to go to things like drain commission meetings. Ever go to a drain commission meeting? It’s actually even worse than it sounds.”
“Well, let me tell you something, pal,” he said. “I just might do that. But you know what that means? Huh? It means we’re all goners.”
“Right, right, we’re all goners. But the Internet, that’s going to save us.”
“That’s right. Print’s kaput, my friend.”
“I’m not your friend.”
He pointed at me. “Our biggest cost? Those big damn presses that print the paper. And the trucks that have to haul it around. When we’re rid of those, we’ll have-”
“Squat,” I said.
“We’ll be in the money. You’ll see. I’m going to make them see.”
Although Media North had an Internet business, it did not yet have the Pilot itself on the Internet. Philo had stood before Kerasopoulos and the other directors of Media North and patiently delivered his Internet-is-our-future speech. They had listened politely, as if they were indulging a boy asking the company to sponsor his Little League team, then moved to the next order of business. They wouldn’t even let us have our own experimental website. Kerasopoulos said we couldn’t be handing our stories over for nothing; that would be the death of us. He would also have a harder time controlling the news if the Pilot had an instant pipeline.
“All they can see is their 401(k)s and their pensions and their long-term bonuses. They’re not about to piss all of that away on your-”
“Excuse me.”
It was Mrs. B. Philo turned. “Yes, Phyllis?”
“I’m sorry, I thought you two might like to know. Channel Eight just had a bulletin. The River Rats have a new coach.”
I jumped out of my chair. “You’re kidding.”
It hadn’t taken Haskell but two hours to burn me.
“No,” she said. “It’s Jason Esper.”
“And what do you think about that, Mrs. B?”
“What do you think I think?”
She wasn’t her daughter’s estranged husband’s biggest fan.
“Who cares?” Philo said.
”There’s something else,” she said. She drew her reindeer sweater around herself. “They said the police are going to charge Alden in Gracie’s death.”
“Impossible. Charge him with what?”
“Alden who?” Philo said.
“They didn’t say,” Mrs. B said. “They just said he’d be charged.”
“There’s a difference between being charged and being taken in for questioning.”
“I’m just telling you what was on TV.”
I felt Philo staring at me. My heart was in my belly, partly for Soupy, partly because I’d just been scooped. Twice. In about thirty seconds. On the two biggest stories to hit Starvation in a year.
I could blame Haskell for the first one; he’d obviously turned around after our meeting and leaked it to Channel Eight. Or maybe Jason himself had, I thought, maybe while I was in bed with his wife. On the other, I had no one but myself to blame. Then again, even if I knew the cops were going to charge Soupy, what the hell was I going to do with it? The Pilot wouldn’t be out till the next morning.
Excuses, I thought. It felt lousy.
