“I’ll take your word for it,” Oswald said. “I didn’t move here until last year.”
“Why?”
“I’m asking myself that every day. But people are always telling me how it was wonderful in the old days. Probably not so wonderful for black folk, though.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Wouldn’t you love to come home to a shack out back of a white man’s plantation and sing some Negro spirituals after a hard day of picking cotton? Kind of kick back to let your whip lashes cool?”
That actually got a snicker out of him. “The only thing I’ve ever picked is my nose. I heard you were in the military.”
“That’s been a little while back. I had an accident and they had to let me leave.”
“You look fine now.” He said that like I had never been hurt.
“Accident was bad then, but I healed quicker than they expected. I haven’t made a big point of telling the military that.”
“I heard you got some medals,” he said.
“They were passing them out that day,” I said. “See you, Oswald.”
I saw Belinda putting down the phone, and as I walked away from Oswald’s desk, she rose from hers and intercepted me.
“That was Mrs. Timpson. She said I should show you your desk.”
She led me over to it and I was chauvinistic enough to watch her walk and decide she really was more than cute. She was a major looker, a little out of style in the hair and makeup department, but she dressed all right and I liked the way her skirt fit; it was tight enough and right enough to make the world seem like a happy place for at least a few moments.
“This is it,” she said.
It looked like everyone else’s desk. There was a computer on it and there was a drawer in the center and drawers on the sides. I opened them. The ones on the sides were empty. The one in the center had pencils and pens and paper clips and half a pack of Winterfresh gum. I took a stick, peeled it and put it in my mouth. It was like trying to chew a Band-Aid.
Belinda showed me her braces. “Good, huh?”
I took the gum out of my mouth, wadded it up inside the wrapper, dropped it in the trash can. “Not so much.”
“It’s been in there since the creation of gum.”
“I believe that.”
“So, how did you like our fearless editor?” Belinda asked.
“Very colorful.”
Belinda smiled her mouthful of braces at me. “That’s not what the others here call her.”
“No?”
“No.” She looked over her shoulder at Oswald, who had returned to his seat behind his desk. “What about the assassin of John F. Kennedy?”
“I can’t decide if he’s just testy or an asshole.”
She smiled. “Actually, Cason, he’s a testy asshole.”
I went around and met some of the reporters, folks in the advertising office, and was told a lot of them were out on assignments and I would meet them later. I made a few promises of lunch, went over to my desk and sat for a while and moved a pencil around.
It wasn’t as good as the desk I had in Houston. It wasn’t as good a newspaper. The pencil was even cheap. But here I was. I had screwed things up so I could arrive at just this spot. I was deep into having myself a pity party when Oswald, the testy asshole, came over. I had hoped me and him were through for the day. But no such luck.
“Timpson just called me,” he said. “She wants me to help you get your feet wet.”
“Go ahead, dampen me.”
“Well, Francine, the previous columnist, had a bunch of ideas she was working on, and Timpson thought you might want to look over those, see if you could get a running start before you had to come up with your own. You’re not obligated to use any of them, but she told me to tell you to take a look…You know, I thought I was going to get this job.”
“I was beginning to suspect that,” I said.
“But no, she wanted a certain cachet. She thought it would be nice PR having someone who had been nominated for the Pulitzer.”
“If it’s any consolation, a nomination eats your heart out.”
“No. No consolation. I’m used to getting screwed.”
“I hope you don’t think this is some kind of racial thing, because if you do, I just want you to know, sincerely, and I say this pleasantly and from the bottom of my heart, you are full of shit.”
Oswald sat on the edge of my desk. “I don’t. I’m just one of those people born to be screwed and to be bitter about it, but with a slight and engaging sense of humor, of course.”
“You really believe that?”
Oswald nodded. “I believe some of us are born with a target on our butt, and dead center of it is a slot with a sign above it that says: Insert dick here.”
“Do you look both ways when you cross the street?”
“I see this coming,” Oswald said.
“That’s what you can say if you look both ways…Do you?”
“Of course.”
“Then you believe your destiny is at least partly up to you, otherwise you wouldn’t be worried about being a hood ornament. It would be pre-ordained. So I suggest you remove the target from your ass.” Oswald gave me an irritated look. I said, “Let’s change the subject. What happened to Francine?”
“She was either fired, or she died. I don’t quite remember. Does it matter?”
“Suppose not. Where do I find those ideas of Francine’s?”
Oswald patted my computer. “In yon machine. Francine’s codes and information are on a pad in the desk drawer. So now my duty is done, and I go back to work.”
The testy asshole went back to his desk. For all his talk, I had a feeling Oswald really felt more entitled than ambitious. I figured, you got right down to it, his greatest ambition was teaching his dog to lick peanut butter off his balls.
I looked in the drawer and found the little notebook with the information I needed, went to work. Most of the stuff I found in Francine’s computer notes was about as exciting as counting the hairs in an armpit. There were terse investigations into the ingredients for Snickers Bar Pie, the major ingredients being the Snickers themselves and lots of butter. I was surprised the recipe didn’t come with a funeral plan. There were bits on flower arranging and how to get stains out of damn near anything. Nothing that really grabbed me by the lapels, but I persevered.
And then I came across it. A six-month-old mystery.
Caroline Allison. A university student. History major. Age twenty-three. She disappeared on a late-night run to a fast-food place, Taco Bell. A week later her car was found just outside of town, near the old rail station, not far downhill from the Siegel home. It was a creepy place to disappear.
The Siegel home had been a kind of legend for years. It had belonged to two sisters. Story was they had been high-tone in the 1920s. They were in their teens at the time. Then came the Great Depression, and their family lost money when the stock market fell. As the sisters grew into their fifties, their parents died, and the ladies knew nothing about how to survive. Soon people saw them digging in trash cans, and since they wouldn’t take charity, folks put food in the cans for them to find. Finally, the ladies sold their home place and moved into another house where they lived upstairs. That place caught on fire and the firemen put a ladder up to the window, but the women, in their sixties now, were in their nightgowns and wouldn’t come out the window dressed that way. It was not what ladies did. What ladies did was burn up like cotton wicks; death by fire and modesty.
The house the sisters had originally lived in had been bought, but nothing was done with it. It stayed abandoned, sitting on top of a hill spotted with trees, the yard a wad of greenery maybe three feet deep. The house was almost consumed by the vines until the whole thing looked like a large clump of vegetation with a couple of
