In his fat vinyl chair, Jim Brown dreamed of how he would handle the day when it happened. He pondered it, sent the thought meandering pleasantly through his brain, tasting it, feeling it, the day when it finally happened.
“Well, Tom,” he would say when the moment came. “Well, Tom, what can I say?” And, likely as not, Carter would spit back at him.
“Eat my ass,” he’d say or something like that. Brown smiled with the thought. Carter would look like a mean, ugly dog and he’d say, “Eat my ass.”
Now, if he did his Well-Tom-what-can-I-say? standing at the door of Carter’s office so everyone could see and stretch to hear, there would be a different response. They would shake hands and pat at each other’s shoulders.
“Yeah, I know,” Carter would say. “Not your fault.”
Carter would leave right away, no matter how it was done. He’d be out the door, coming back later for his boxes. There would be no good-bye to the newsroom and certainly not one to the audience. You didn’t do it that way. You disappeared. By the next day, the television critic for the morning paper might have the story and he might run with it for a few days, adding quotes, opinions. It didn’t matter. Neither would the phone calls.
Oh, they’d come, hundreds that first week. Some would be shrill with indignation, the How-could-you-do-this-terrible-thing-I’ll-never-watch-your-station-again calls. Letters would be written to the newspapers. A radio show would open the phone lines to listeners.
“We’ve watched that man for years,” they would say. “We’re never going to watch that station again.”
The callers would be women, usually, in their fifties and sixties. The important men, the men who sat with Tom Carter at the front tables, might try to get through to the men Back East, thinking they would listen and rethink the decision.
Even the old hands in the newsroom, the ones who had been through this at other stations, would stoop to the temptation of wondering when they would give in to the pressure. Even Carter, as well as he knew the business, would be there waiting, relishing the dream of that moment when he got the call with the Hey-guy-look-we-want-you-back.
There would be no phone call, no gloating return. There would be no sneering glance across the newsroom before going into the glass office and slamming the door. There would be no more three-camera nights and knowing snickers to the audience. It didn’t happen, anywhere.
Station powers and their minions knew you waited it out. The phone calls eventually stopped and the audience would forget the men and women they loved every night. Months later there would be that stray call from someone who had moved away and come back.
“I was wondering where he was,” they would say. “On vacation or something?”
There would be short laughs in the newsroom as the words were passed around. That was all.
Brown could taste every second of it. Carter would disappear one night and that would be it. When you disappear from television, you are almost immediately forgotten.
Poor Carter, Brown nodded to himself, he wasn’t such a bad guy. He’d say goodbye to him when the day came and he’d make Carter say goodbye. It would be done in the glass office with an open door. They would both shake hands and put their free hand on the other man’s shoulder. Brown knew there would be a tear in that old guy’s eyes. Yeah, there would be. His too, probably. When all was said and done, they had been through it together. They were men of The Best.
18
Ellen parked her car in the middle of the empty library parking lot as she had been told to by her phone contact, a Klan leader named Harry.
“That way we will be able to tell if we’re being followed,” he explained.
She shook her head at his stupidity. If she wanted, if Brown insisted, it would have been easy to follow the car that picked her up, too easy.
The big green Buick pulled into the lot.
“You Ellen Peters?” the driver asked, leaning out of the window.
“Hi.” She tried to keep her voice friendly and young.
“I’m Ken. That’s Bruce,” he said, nodding to the shadows of the backseat.
“Hi,” she said again.
His eyes darted from her face to the parking lot to the few cars passing on the street.
“Did Harry warn you about anybody following us?”
“Yes, and nobody is,” she told him. She walked around the car and got into the front seat.
“Yeah, well, we’ll see,” he said and threw the car into gear.
“It’s a nice night,” she tried. “Not too hot.”
He said nothing. There was no movement in the back.
“Where are you from?” she finally asked.
“A lot of places,” he snapped.
“I’m from Boston,” she said and smiled again.
“Lots of nigger trouble up there. Lots of it everywhere,” he said and laughed over his shoulder to the man in the dark. A snicker came back.
The driver’s hair was cut short to the skull. He wore a white T-shirt and jeans.
“Take this down, hurry,” he ordered, passing a small pad and pencil across the seat. A hand reached for it.
“BGT,” he read out. “Zero, zero, six.”
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Taking down that guy’s license.” He pointed to the car in front of them. “He’s been acting strange. First he was in front of us. Then he was behind us and now he’s in front of us again.”
“It’s nobody from the station.”
“That’s what you say.”
The car in front of them made a right turn.
“It’s okay for now,” Ken said to the backseat. “We’ll check it out later.”
He sighed in disgust.
“Probably one of those fucking Jews, those JDL kikes. They blew up a Klan office down in Mississippi. Christ. Could be the FBI too. You know?” He looked at her.
“They’re really with us,” he went on, “but they give us problems. We had a G-man in our klavern once.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, he told
