Cry Wilderness

by Frank Capra

  “Like the flowers need the rain, boy…”

  “Well…shall I get some big guy from Beverly Hills?”

  “A foreigner? Up here in the woods? Don’t be silly…”

  “Well, who, then?” I asked, beginning to feel like Linus without his blanket… “Not you? Would you want to, Steve…?”

  He was lighting his pipe, but he paused to look at me.

  “Frank… I wouldn’t touch your case for the deed to the Taj Mahal. A show-off Hollywood director insults and slanders an upright small-town sheriff, with no evidence? It’s loaded against you. A million dollars couldn’t buy you one cent of sympathy.”

  He relit his pipe; then, very casual-like, he added: “But Lefty…Lefty’s different. If he were to ask for me as a public defender…” He hung back a moment or two, pulling at his ear, then casually sat down again and talked to Hoppy face-to-face.

  “Hoppy…are you game? I mean…as game as old Gruber? Because that’s what it’s going to take.”

  “Steve, I’ve told you. You can afford to lose your rich clients, but my papers can’t afford to lose their advertising. Simple as that.”

  “Hoppy, it’s the break we’ve been waiting for. A gift from heaven. If I become public defender for Lefty, Wonder Boy will have to talk for my rich clients. See what that means? It puts the rich and the DA’s crowd together. A rich mob against two little people. Get it?”

  “Call Lefty and Frank, here, little people?”

  “No, no! To hell with them. I mean Bear Bait and Dry Rot. They’re the gimmick. Through them we make unmerciful tyrants out of the DA and the sheriff’s henchmen, and a hero out of Lefty. That’ll clear him, and,” pointing to me, “it might even get this guy off the hook.”

  Somehow these gentlemen were taking my ball and running away with it. Besides, I wasn’t quite sure what they were talking about. “Look, fellas,” I said, trying to make my presence felt again, “All Lefty wants is to—to—”

  The words expired in my mouth. So absorbed were they in their own thoughts, I just wasn’t there. I turned to Jake the reporter—the fifth Beatle—and poked his arm. “Jake… What’s with all the heavy thinking?”

  “Who, me? Oh. The election, of course.”

  “What election?” I asked.

  But Boatcourt had suddenly become aware of the young reporter’s presence. “Hey, Hoppy! Your boy here…I mean…”

  “Gotta trust him now, Steve,” said Hoppy. “He knows too much. Jake? What’s your reaction to this clambake?”

  “Boss, I’m drooling! Biggest thing that—”

  “Then drool over your typewriter,” urged Steve. “Pour it on. Feature the secrecy. Where there’s secrecy there’s got to be chicanery.”

  “Steve!” I butted in proudly. “I made that same speech today—”

  “Who hasn’t?” he said without even looking at me. “Hoppy…you know as well as I do what they’re incubating in that little old courthouse across the street. A premature little monster!”

  Surprisingly, the words “little monster” came out of Boatcourt with unexpected heat. He pushed his misshapen, fly-spangled skimmer forward over his smoldering eyes and clamped his jaws so hard the veins swelled in his neck. Odd bloke, this Steve “Boatcourt” Gorski. He had the wit and certain mannerisms of a Will Rogers, but all similarity ended there. His body had the shape of a lumpy carrot—wide bottom, narrow shoulders, and an almost pointed head. The great George Randolph Hearst had somewhat the same shape. But Boatcourt’s face puzzled you most. It was not suntanned like a fisherman’s, but pallid; as if it might have been grown in a cellar like a mushroom. But his skin did have a slight color—the age-old yellowish color of ancient parchment. In fact, his face looked like a Dead Sea scroll with eyes.

  And his social life was also unusual enough to nourish rumors. Rich (nobody knew how rich), unmarried, he lived alone in a magnificent chalet high above June Lake. Yet he entertained lavishly—as if he wanted to share it all with everybody. And everybody thought that was a fine idea and helped him out.

  “Be a lot of fun plowing up this county a bit, Hoppy,” said Boatcourt, resuming his pitch to the publisher. “You yourself said in one of your editorials that there was a hardpan forming just below the surface that needed breaking up and airing.”

  “I wrote that line, Mr. Gorski,” interjected Jake the Beatle.

  “Good line, son.”

  After putting papers to bed for forty years, Hoppy Hopkins had become too hard-boiled and cynical to be stampeded into emotional causes. He listened to Boatcourt, but wasn’t buying. “Steve!” he said, blowing out some air. “I’ll lay it on the line. Everything’s fine with me right now. My family, my papers—all fine. And I’m too old to enjoy being seduced by you, and too damned tired to want to reform the world. So unless you’ve got a better idea than knocking off Wonder Boy…”

  “I have, Hoppy. Every man, and I mean every man, should experience the holy catharsis of being on the side of the angels at least once in his lifetime before he dies. I mean, lash the moneychangers! I mean a go-for-broke, gung-ho fight for some lost cause for the downtrodden, if you will!”

  Well, after that I was ready to sign up, carry the torch, wave the flag—anything!

  “The downtrodden don’t buy ads,” shot back Hoppy, throwing a bucket of ice water on my enthusiasm.

  “Aw, come off, Hoppy!” said Boatcourt heatedly. “After forty years yet. Nobody buys ads. Ads are sold! By circulation. Sure you’ll get cancellations. So you publicize them by printing: ‘The ad in this space was cancelled by so-and-so because of lack of human compassion.’ You’ll murder them—Oh, what, the hell… Anyway, Hoppy. I wouldn’t dare take it on without your help.”

  There was an awkward pause. Hoppy broke it up by kicking his chair back and pacing up a minor storm. Stopping suddenly, he poked an angry finger under Boatcourt’s nose and said:

  “Look, Mister Big Rich Lawyer, I played up the bastard as big as Lindbergh in my papers. Remember that. So let’s pull the chain on this downtrodden stuff and talk turkey. You’re running against your own protégé because the eagle you thought you were nursing turned into a cobra. Right? And you know I hate the son of a bitch as much as you do. But I can’t see how in Christ’s world you, or me, or anybody else can blow up a penny-ante case of two dirty old bums into a lost cause that’ll keep Mister America out of Sacramento. It’s too crazy! Too screwy to even talk about.”

  Another pause. Something new had been added. Politics was rearing its ugly head. Who needed politics? I tried to formulate a sentence that would tell them that all Lefty wanted was to let Mono County know why he disobeyed his orders. Boatcourt got in ahead of me.

  “Hoppy,” he drawled, pushing back his fly-studded hat. “Wasn’t it you who told me the yarn about how Hitler’s uncle said he could have saved thirty million lives if only he had shot down the little monster before…”

  “I know, I know,” interrupted the annoyed Hoppy. “If he’d have stepped on young Adolf the first time he got out of line, and all that. But Tony Caldwell’s no paranoiac house painter. He’s a brilliant political genius. Smart. Tough. Popular. He’s bound to plow a helluva row in Sacramento, and maybe a deeper one in Congress. Stop Tony with Bear Bait and Dry Rot? You’re out of your mind. That guy can make political hay out of—”

  Hoppy was interrupted by a deputy sheriff approaching our table. It was the door deputy at the hearing.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said. “But we are ready to resume the hearing. With a court stenographer present, as per your request, Mr. Capra.”

  “Oh, yes…thank you…I’ll…I’ll be right there.”

  “Yes, sir.” And the deputy left. In the excitement of meeting Boatcourt and Hoppy, I’d forgotten all about the hearing and my grandstand demand for a court reporter. “Now what, Steve?” I asked plaintively.

  “Frank, go bac
k and make a sincere apology to the sheriff for the record. Maybe they’ll forget your silly remarks.”

  “What about Lefty? You mentioned something about being his public defender?”

  “Tell Lefty to accept the commission’s ruling and go to work for the highway.”

  “But, Steve… You know he won’t accept it. He’s going for broke—like you said…”

  “I’m sure Saint Peter will take note of it.”

  “Then you won’t defend him?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. Well, I thought it was a good idea. But I’m glad Hoppy, here, wised me up to how screwy the whole thing is. Forget it, Frank.”

  “Forget it? But Steve… Bear Bait and Dry Rot…you said…”

  “Can’t you Hollywood guys take a hint?” he said, losing patience. “Who gives a damn about two worthless derelicts…unless you can make it pay off?”

  My confusion turned to anger. I’d been had. I felt a great sense of betrayal; a great shame of men in general…and I wanted to hurt somebody. Anybody.

  “Great feet of clay, I salute you!” I said and bowed mockingly to Steve. “But I tell you what, you big respectable people. I’m not apologizing to anybody. And if Lefty refuses to wave the white flag, I’m sticking with him—even if it lands me in the clink. And Jake! If you want to write up this little meeting, you’ve got my permission to quote me verbatim. You’ll find somebody to print it.”

  I flung my chair aside and started to leave. I was stopped suddenly, by a leg that shot out from below the table, barring my way—Steve Gorski’s leg. I angrily turned on him but he was innocently lighting his pipe. Then I noticed that Hoppy was pacing the floor again—this time yanking and releasing great handfuls of his mop of iron-gray hair and mumbling to himself. “How?…How?… Jesus!… It would be a helluva service to America to stop big ‘I AM’ right here in Bridgeport. But how?… How?… We go to press tomorrow,” he said, still talking to himself. “But I could delay it a day…a special issue…screamers on the front page…inside, whole-page petitions…asking for a public hearing before the whole Board of Supervisors… My correspondents in each little town will ‘get signatures… It’s crazy…a fifty-to-one shot…that handsome DA plays ugly…and they’re organized in that courthouse… Take a shot at one and they all fight back like kamikazes.” He stopped ruminating. “Okay, Boatcourt. If you aren’t just beating your gums, be at my office at eight o’clock tonight. I’ll have some copy. You, too, Frank. I’ll need some quotes. Come on, Jake. You can forget about sleeping…”

  “Geronimo!” shouted Jake the Beatle as he gathered notes and knocked over chairs trying to keep up with his long-striding boss heading out the door.

  I didn’t sit—I collapsed in a chair. And there was Boatcourt puffing his pipe and grinning like—it was his own expression, the Felix Domestica that ate the Serinus Canarius.

  “Frank, we’re in. That’s a great fighting fool just went out of here—when he gets hooked on a principle.” Then the professional took over, the gleam of battle in his eyes. “Now you! Capra, go back to that hearing, quick! Get hold of Lefty privately. Say you want a private conference. Tell Lefty to neither accept nor reject the commission’s ruling, but to say that he would like to consult an attorney. And having no funds, he asks them for a public defender. That’s all. Nothing else. Just that, and not another word! Tell Lefty I’ll do the rest. I’m on call this week, understand? Now go!” Then he added a compliment of sorts, “Feet of clay…you stinker! Right out of one of your terrible movies, I’ll bet.”

  About ten that night, I called my wife from Hoppy’s press office in Bishop. She hadn’t heard from me all day.

  “Darling! Where are you?”

  “In Bishop, honey. Don’t worry.”

  “Don’t worry? Are you in jail?”

  “Naw. Little private poker game, sweetie. We may play all night…so go to bed, honey. I love you.”

  “But, Frank. You haven’t told me anything—” I hung up. I was quite sure she banged the phone and said, “All men are idiots!” And the point is, I think we love being idiots.

  Chapter Five

  Dawn. Wednesday morning, November 3, 1960. A light snow was failing as Hoppy and I flung the last bagful of individually wrapped Mono Heralds into a mail truck—the weekly delivery to be stuffed into subscribers’ PO Boxes. “Get going!” shouted Hoppy hoarsely. We hadn’t slept. My arms hung like lead, my tail sagged like a sandbag, my legs were concrete that wouldn’t harden. But ink-stained Hoppy was a roaring, driving Simon Legree. “Bring up those Volkswagens. Come on! Come on!” he shouted to some sleepy high school boys. Hoppy had hired three Volkswagen panel trucks and boy drivers to deliver stacks and stacks of extra tied-up bundles of Heralds to restaurants, stores, bars, hotels, motels, trailer parks, and pack stations for delivery into the high country. Not five regional editions this time. Everybody got the same paper. And not the usual 7,500 copies. No, sir, Wild Man Hoppy had shoved 21,572 copies through his old rickety flatbed press before it bucked, rattled, gasped, and came to a grinding halt from exhaustion. And no amount of extra foot-kicking by Hoppy could make it roll out another copy.

  A half hour later, three tail-heavy Volkswagen trucks labored up Sherwin Grade in low gear packed solid with tied-up bundles of Mono Heralds. I lay like a dog on top of the bundles in the leading truck. Hoppy had thrown me in. “Now get the hell home and get some sleep.” But now sleep was impossible. What had I gotten myself into? The top paper of each pile I laid on, exposed to handling and rubbing, was so smeared with barely dried ink it was hardly legible. But no amount of smudging could stifle the scream of the foot-high headline. You could hear it in the dark:

  SHAME! MONO!

  Now, before you can fully appreciate the power of a newspaper headline in Mono County, California, you must remember that the county has no local radio and very few telephones. The county newspaper is still the only mass medium of communication. The only other communication link worth mentioning is US Highway 395, which ties together nine-tenths of the locals as it snakes along at the foot of the great, two-mile-high Sierra Wall. This is the word-of-mouth road; the joke line; the gossip freeway, down which rumors, amplified from mile to mile, speed faster than the traffic.

  But these 150 miles of two-way chitchat, delectable though they may be, are still subject to the aberrations of word-of-mouth transmission. You can believe it, build on it, cut it in half, or call it hogwash as you pass it on.

  But the printed word in Mono County—Ah! That carries power and authority. Yes, siree. You read it in the paper and it’s there, hot off the press, firsthand, no in-betweens. Just you and the paper and the clout of the printed word.

  For we must remember that one can fly from San Francisco to New York in half the time San Franciscans can reach the Eastern Sierras. Boundaries may be shrinking all over the world, but the Inyo-Mono area is a holdout. And small wonder. It is incredibly isolated and insulated by boundaries that don’t shrink: On the west by the sheer granite Sierra Wall; on the east both by desolate mountain ranges and waterless valleys (Death Valley); on the south by one of the world’s great graveyards of bleached bones and withered hopes (Mojave Desert); and on the north by a harsh jumble of volcanic outpourings and dead inland seas (Carson Sink).

  And we must also remember that California, on the other (western) side of the Sierra Wall, had been a thriving, populous, “civilized” area for almost two hundred years before white men came to Mono. The great western migration routes of the Gold Rush and covered wagon years lay far to the north, where the Sierra Passes were lower. When the “reverse” Gold Rush did hit Mono, it came east from California, as a belated backwash of the 49er tide. So out-of-the-beaten path are these three thousand square miles of mountain and desert that even today, Mono’s population of Native Americans and whites is still less than ten thousand. And yet, in recent years, almost two million yearly vacationers come to camp, fish, hunt, hike
, or ski in its primitive wilderness.

  As mentioned before, there is no local radio in the county. The reception of outside radio is almost nil in the daytime, while at night so many stations “come in” it is almost impossible to separate them. And as for TV, one or two small districts have managed to arrange for weak signals to be relayed down from community aerials on high peaks. But that is all there is of modern electronic communications. The air lanes and airwaves still belong to the hawks and the eagles.

  But the press? That’s a different story. Here the country newspaper still plays the same important role it enjoyed in all rural areas fifty years ago.

  “Hoppy” Hopkins is the publisher and editor of five such county weeklies, three for Inyo County and two for Mono. All are continuous extensions of the rip-roaring “mining town” papers that once spread the heady news of rich strikes from the now ghost towns of Aurora, Bodie, Mammoth, and Lundy.

  These weeklies are truly provincial. If it has no Mono slant, no statewide, national, or world news is printed. But all local items (scenic, political, sports, social; births, deaths, marriages, lodge meetings) are covered fully and in detail—fifteen village correspondents contributing weekly columns about the comings, goings, and doings in their particular community under signed bylines. Editorials are rare, but names and photos are used, lavishly. To Hoppy’s weeklies, Mono County is a world all its own; a proud, provincial, primitive world. Nothing that happens on the “outside” is worth printing, but everything on the inside is. And for Hoppy Hopkins, that “local” formula, and the power of the printed word, had gained him prestige and a mighty good life.

  Now he was laying it all on the line in his go-for-broke crusade for the rights of two worthless derelicts against the pressures of the new vacationland.

  Unusual? No, not really unusual for the independent, fearless breed of frontier journalists. When America was a brawling, gangling, juvenile delinquent seeking fame, fortune, and meaning in the West, it was the journalists and their makeshift presses who guided, needled, wheedled, blasted, humored, inspired, and served as the “conscience” of America.