He too made a change in his name, a slight one, to fit the new world of big boxy cameras that was forced upon him. Thomas, with that long stretched out s, sounded lispy, like a sissy boy. Tom was better, short and tight, the same as his news. He liked to think he talked the way Hemingway wrote. He read a couple of his books. He liked old Papa, a gutsy guy.
Carter let his hair go gray at the temples, let the streaks move through the brown. He had gray, empty eyes. They gave no warmth, no joy, but when he smiled just right, the corners of his eyes would crinkle as though he was a good, kind man.
To Carter, smiling right meant a lift of the muscles at the corner of his lips. No full-toothed grin, he never had a need for that. Only a short, lip-curled, eye-crinkled smile with a quick nod to the side and move on. The audience, men and women, loved it. They loved the lift of an eyebrow that showed he knew and they knew the story was stupid or the reporter sounded dumb. That’s what he did so well. He shared the straight scoop with them and they loved it.
It wasn’t enough. He was still number two in the ratings. Real close. Across the Street, the name he gave them years ago, they had a silver-headed real Uncle Walter, Midwest variety with a couple of decades in the state. Boy, he pulled them in. He also had the head of a javelina mounted and hung on the wall behind his desk.
To Tom Carter, the white-haired man was the enemy, pure and simple. He seldom acknowledged his existence with even a glance much less a handshake unless forced to in a public setting. If the subject of the javelina came up, he would quip, “Shit, that’s not the part of a pig I’d have stuffed.”
His office was a glass square that looked across the newsroom until he lowered the blinds and closed them to brown slits. When they were set at the perfect angle, he could see out but no one could see in.
He had no family pictures on his desk, no blond wife smiling, no college graduation shots of post-pimpled big-faced boys or straight-haired, mortarboard-headed girls. Divorced was the consensus, divorced a long time ago.
However, there was one picture on the credenza that lined the wall behind his desk, a picture of an Asian child. Carter could not see it without turning almost a full one hundred and eighty degrees. Everyone sitting across from him, everyone standing anywhere in his office could see the picture.
“One of those Care kids,” he told visitors. “You know, the ones the blond with the big jugs tells you to rent.”
Most people would simply stare, thinking they had missed something, misunderstood.
The picture was carefully kept free of dust by the secretary, Mary, or by the never-ending work of the handyman, Augustino. Carter never thought about the picture until someone mentioned it or he caught them staring at it. The people in his newsroom tagged the kid, Tom’s One Fling Wong.
Someone gave him the picture at a speech or an award ceremony. Something was said about his support for the children of the state, something about a child of his own. They mentioned letters, something about sending money and him getting letters. All was going to be done in his name. He never read any letters and if replies were sent in his name he didn’t know about them. He certainly never sent any money. None of it mattered anyway. He only kept the picture because he liked that line about the blond with the big knockers.
He used it on Ellen Peters during her interview. It was his standard interview, questions about sex and marriage and when the babies would come. Nobody called him on it, never. Why should they? They all wanted a job.
“I guess you think you’re good enough to work here.”
“I’m good,” she said with a small smile.
“So says you, missy,” he snickered. “Everybody thinks they’re good enough. I’m telling you this, missy. They ain’t.”
He waved to the bookcase, the credenza, to the piles of tapes and résumés.
“See those?”
She nodded.
“Those are from one week. I get a hundred people a week applying here. Everybody in this country wants to work here. They want to work for The Best.
“There’s a man right here,” he thumped the pile of papers in front of him with a thick middle finger, “who’d leave his network job making seventy thousand to come here and we ain’t paying no seventy thousand dollars, missy.”
He leaned back in his chair and put his arms behind his head. There were no sweat stains on his shirt.
She nodded again.
“So?” he demanded, jerking forward, once again straight in his chair.
Her eyes widened.
“What do you have to say?”
“That I would like the job.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that.”
He didn’t like her. Right from the beginning he marked Ellen Peters as an uptight, smart-mouthed bitch. Right from the beginning he knew she was going to be trouble.
As she walked to the door, he called out, “You got good legs. I’ll say that.”
“Like Lincoln said, as long as they reach the ground.”
He didn’t bother with a comeback.
The way he figured it, the way she figured it, she’d be damn lucky to get the job.
3
They were all damn lucky to get their jobs. Carter wasn’t lying when he said there were a hundred people a week applying for work at the station. Okay, maybe it was only twenty or thirty, and maybe some of them were repeaters, the ones who wouldn’t stop trying. But, add the phone calls from around the country, the feelers, the friend asking a friend, and Carter’s figure was low. Hundreds of people a week were trying to get a job in his newsroom or talking about it. It was the same at every other station in the city
