Heads shot up. More wide-eyed looks were exchanged with exaggerated shrugs and grimaces.
“I know something is going on here at night. I know it. And, I want to know who the hell it is who thinks he or she can come down here for a little fun and games at night.” He turned quickly, including all of them in his glare.
Ellen looked across the room to Chuck Farrell who was pulled down low behind the chest-high partition of the producers’ area. All she could see of him was his tousled red hair and his brown eyes as they peeked over the cloth-covered panel. Suddenly one eye winked at her and she knew she was going to burst out laughing.
“You think it’s funny, missy?” Carter swung on her.
She shook her head, holding back the smile.
Jim Brown slowly munched at his sandwich.
“I want it stopped and I am going to make sure it is,” Carter said. “I am having these chairs and couches taken out.”
“Ah, Tom,” Richard Ferguson moaned. “It’s the only place we have to sit around and eat lunch.”
“I don’t give a damn about your lunches, buddy. I am not going to have that filth going on in here.”
Richard Ferguson put up a hand as though to hold back the words. It didn’t really matter to him one way or another.
“Turn those goddamn things off,” Carter yelled as the charter and squawks of the police and fire scanners broke through his audio time. “I can’t hear myself think.”
“So, what else is new?” came Charles Adkins’s stage whisper.
“Ah, Tom,” George Harding looked up from his desk, “the problem is if we turn them off we miss the stories.”
“What we need is a dispatcher,” a voice came out of the photographers’ row.
“We aren’t going to have any goddamn dispatcher,” Carter spat out.
“And that’s why we miss the stories,” another voice called out from the line of men.
“What Tom means,” Jim Brown cut in smoothly, “is that the people Back East don’t think we need that right now. After all,” he smiled, “we never miss the big stories.”
“And there’s something else,” Carter jumped on the silence Brown’s statement created. “About these flash flood warnings or alerts. What the hell are they, Art?”
Art Novak took a step forward.
“Flash flood warnings, Tom. That’s different from flash flood watches,” he said happily.
“Don’t tell me. Tell them,” Carter ordered.
“Well, you see we live in a desert and with heavy rain desert areas are prone to flash floods.”
“They know that,” Carter snapped. “What about the warnings?”
“So,” Art Novak continued without losing his smile, “the National Weather Bureau sends out a watch when this sort of thing could happen. It comes across the wire and we are supposed to get the message to the audience.”
“Which we didn’t do on Saturday,” Carter said with a sneer. “If you recall.”
Weekend producer Nancy Patterson flinched.
“You’ve got to get that on the air,” Jim Brown added.
“It’s a regulation or something,” Carter said.
“What do we do, Tom?” Chuck shouted from behind his eye-high wall. “Do we interrupt programming or run a crawl or what?”
“You get it on the air,” Carter yelled.
“What you do, Chuck,” Jim Brown’s voice soothed, “is run a crawl as soon as you can. When you get a chance, you can cut some audio, but that’s not the real problem, is it?” He nodded to the weatherman. “The problem is the flash flood warning.”
“You bet your ass,” Carter cut it. “On Saturday we had a flash flood warning and everybody else had it on the air before we did. If you see that thing come across the wire you break your ass to get it on.”
Nancy Patterson stared at the floor. She had already heard the speech.
“That has to go on the air almost immediately after we get it,” Jim Brown continued as though he had not been interrupted.
Ellen watched the faces around her for signs of her own boredom. Once again, she caught Chuck’s wink.
He called out, “So, what you mean, Tom, is that we get it on as a crawl and then, as soon as we can, we interrupt programming with somebody on-set with the info?”
“That’s what I mean,” Carter said. “And you sure as hell do it fast. I don’t want the goddamn FCC crawling down my neck on this one. We’re talking about saving lives here, boy, lives.”
He paused for the effect and smiled the smile the viewers so loved.
“A few minutes could mean somebody’s life. We could and should be saving lives. That’s our job. Right, Jim?”
Jim Brown nodded.
“What if there is a commercial on, Tom?” came Chuck’s happy voice. “Should we interrupt a commercial, Tom?”
“Well…well…,” Carter hesitated. He didn’t know the answer. “No,” he said firmly. “We don’t interrupt a commercial. I mean, a minute or two isn’t going to make that much different. Right, Jim?”
Ellen sighed and stared across the room. Beside her Debbie stiffened. Day One.
5
“I was in Albuquerque before this and before that I was in Jacksonville, Florida,” Ellen told Debbie that night over drinks at a bar near the station. “I also spent a year in Paris after college which has nothing to do with anything,” she added with a laugh.
“Wow, I would love to go to Paris, to Europe, anywhere,” Debbie said.
“It was a good time,” Ellen said. “Learned some French, among other things.”
“The farthest I’ve ever been beside Canada, and I was once in Alaska when I was little, but the farthest I’ve ever been was Baja and that’s not really so far.” Debbie sighed.
“Baja? Huh. Vacation?”
“Ah, no, well,” Debbie stammered. “I lived down there for about six months.”
It was more like two months but that now seemed a sadly short period of time, not enough for someone like Ellen.
“We went down there to see some friends,” she said.
“Who we?”
“Ah,” Debbie laughed nervously, “me and this guy. He was okay. Michael, his name was Michael. We went together for a couple of years.”
“What happened to him?”
