Resurrection Day

by Brendan DuBois

  ‘Yep, he called and nope, there’s no pics. They took the body out the rear, to avoid all the attention.’

  Something seemed to tickle the back of his hands. ‘That sounds strange, George.’

  ‘Strange? Yeah, the whole world is strange. And now you’ve got nine minutes, Landry.’

  ‘On my way,’ he said, looking up again, as he always did, to the framed Globe front page from October 31, 1962, that hung on the pillar just behind George’s chair. REDS BOMB DC, NYC; MILLIONS FEARED DEAD. A smaller subhead read: ‘Kennedy, First Family Perishes.’ And the first paragraph of the story: ‘The horrors of this past weekend’s invasion of Cuba to attack Soviet missile sites struck home with an apocalyptic vengeance yesterday, with news that atomic bombs had struck Washington, D.C., and the outskirts of New York City, killing millions of Americans and destroying the upper reaches of the federal government. Military sources confirm that President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson perished in the attack. The whereabouts of Speaker of the House John McCormack—the next in line to the presidency—are not known at this time.’

  After his first six months here, shuddering every time he’d passed it, he eventually asked George why that particular front page was in such a prominent place. George had replied in that gravelly voice of his, ‘Why the hell not? It’s news, ain’t it?’

  Carl turned and headed to his desk.

  ~ * ~

  TWO

  Carl hung his coat on the back of his chair and made some room on the cluttered desktop. Somewhere in that mess was the piece of paper with the list of names that the old vet—Merl—had passed on to him. He’d look for it, soon enough, but for now he had a deadline to meet, and quick. He propped his notebook on his telephone and rolled a book into the Olympia typewriter. The book was three sheets of 8½-by-11-inch paper with carbon between each sheet. He looked at his notebook, and then started typing:

  LANDRY/EAST BOSTON HOMICIDE

  * * *

  Boston police are investigating the apparent murder of Merl Sawson, 60, of Winthrop Street in East Boston. Sawson, a retired serviceman, was found in his bed, with a gunshot wound to the back of the head.

  Police said neighbors heard noise in the apartment early Wednesday morning, and one neighbor called police when Sawson did not show up for an expected lunch meeting.

  Carl paused. It was pretty thin, but that’s what happens when you’re just a few minutes before deadline. Again, he started tapping at the dirty keys of his typewriter.

  While no suspects have been identified, police are investigating whether Sawson was murdered during the course of a burglary. The apartment was in disarray and police are checking to see what may have been stolen.

  A few more seconds of paper shuffling on his desk, and Carl typed some more.

  The death of Sawson marks the seventy-third homicide this year in Boston, four homicides ahead of 1971’s record year.

  He rolled the papers out from his typewriter and walked over to the metro desk.

  ‘Here you are, George,’ he said. ‘Ninety seconds ahead of schedule.’

  ‘Well, there you go,’ George said. ‘You want a candy bar or somethin’?’

  ‘How about a raise?’

  ‘How about leaving me alone?’

  ~ * ~

  After some digging he found the notebook page with Merl’s list of names and he slid that into the top drawer of his desk.

  He was tired and it was late, and he knew he couldn’t do much about the names right now. Tomorrow, first thing, he’d take another look at it. They had to have meant something to Merl Sawson, since he had passed it over to Carl. But then again, they could have just been names lifted from magazines or books for no good reason. Lots of things happened in this city and country for no good reason.

  On this afternoon George didn’t yell over at him with questions about the Sawson story, so it looked like it was going in golden. A few minutes after he had passed in the story, the door to the oversight editor’s office opened up and a slim man walked out wearing gray dress pants and a matching vest. Cullen Devane, the current oversight editor and a major in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He stopped at each of the editorial desks, picked up copy for tomorrow’s newspaper and then, with a chilly smile, he went back to his office.

  Carl looked around. Everybody was studiously ignoring Major Devane’s appearance, and there was a general sigh of relief in the newsroom when he went back to his office. Usually Devane only came out to talk to the editors about the next day’s stories, but on very rare occasions, he chatted with a reporter. On extremely rare occasions, he would invite a reporter back to his office and close the door. That experience was known in the newsroom as the Killer C; shorthand for killing one’s career, and also for being sent someplace where an eventual death from cancer was fairly likely, since Devane had the power to have someone detained or re-upped into the service.

  Two months ago a features writer—Laura Dobson, if Carl remembered correctly—had emerged from Major Devane’s office in tears, hands trembling, and later that day she was gone. Despite earlier warnings, she had continued to submit stories about the antidraft movement to her editors. A month after her departure, the newsroom had received a postcard from her from a decontamination work camp outside of Miami. And that had been that.

  After Devane’s door shut the noise level in the newsroom rose and there were looks cast Carl’s way. Even though he had been out of the Army for four years, some people still thought he and Cullen Devane worked together, though he had shared maybe a fistful of words with the major during his time at the Globe. Irrational, he knew, but it still made for a lot of solitary lunches, muttered greetings in the morning, and break-room conversations that dribbled off whenever he went in to get a cup of coffee.

  He looked over at the clock. Past 5 P.M. His stomach grumbled and he was in the middle of wondering where in hell he was going to eat dinner when Jack Burns came over to his desk, pulling a leather coat over his thin shoulders. Jack was a few years younger than Carl; wore loud shirts with wide-bottomed pants, and was a music critic for the Globe. His wavy brown hair touched the rear of his shirt collar and his sideburns were the style still popular with Elvis Presley—who was on tour this fall for refugee relief. Carl thought it was incredibly funny that someone could write for the Globe and get paid for writing about music, but he kept that thought to himself. Jack was a good sort and one of the few people in the newsroom who treated him nicely.

  ‘Some of us are going over to the Old Sod for a newsroom meeting,’ Jack said, buttoning his coat. ‘Want to join us?’

  ‘Newsroom meeting? Isn’t that just another excuse for getting drunk?’

  Jack smiled. ‘Who needs an excuse? Besides, it gives you a chance to see your colleagues drooling and slobbering over each other. Makes for a good week of wicked gossip. So that’s the kind of meeting we’re having. Are you in?’

  Going home, which was an apartment, meant dinner from a can or an old field ration from his Army reserve days. The alternative was an overpriced beer, cheeseburgers, and smoky conversation at the Old Sod.

  ‘In,’ Carl said. ‘I’m very in.’

  Jack smiled again. ‘Of course you are, but I’m not telling.’

  ~ * ~

  A cheeseburger and fries later, Carl was working on his second beer of the evening and doing fine. He had a corner stool at the bar and could keep an eye on most everything in the pub, which gave him a bit of a warm feeling. Something from his Army days, he realized, about assessing the territory and keeping your options open. The fries had been tasty and the burger was a good sign of how well recovery was going. Even just a few years ago, hamburgers were stretched with all kinds of filler—and the wise consumer never asked too many questions—but tonight’s had tasted like 100 percent beef.

  Someone with a taste for old Irish music kept pumping quarters into the jukebox, and he had shared his mealtime with Jack Burns. Jack talked about rumors of an upcoming Led Zeppelin tour
of the United States and Carl talked about that afternoon’s murder. After a while Jack shook his head at him. ‘My dear Carl, I want to talk about the wonders of rock and roll, and all you want to talk about is some poor old man, murdered in his bed.’

  ‘Because it’s news,’ he said.

  ‘Bah,’ Jack said, raising up a glass. ‘My stories, that’s the news people care about. Whether they’ll have some entertainment in their gray lives over the next few months, get their minds off this awful election. Not another story about a corpse. Hell, that dead British general, the Sheffield guy who was found dead in bed with a hooker a couple of weeks ago, even that only made a few paragraphs in the metro. Who cares about another dead old man?’

  ‘I do,’ Carl said, remembering the earnest look on the lined and nervous face, and those old boots, carefully kept together with duct tape. ‘And so should you.’

  Jack laughed. ‘You should bottle some of that excess idealism you have, sell it on the street corners. I hear it’s still quite rare.’

  Carl kicked him and Jack laughed again and wandered off.

  The Old Sod was near the Globe and filled mostly with people from the paper. Jack was now with some of his friends from the living page. Even here, in a bar, the people from the newspaper automatically segregated themselves into groups. Some of the ad reps were over in a corner, overdressed and laughing hard, and some of the print shop boys, with their ink-stained hands and their blue work clothes, were at the other end of the bar.

  Nearby a couple of sports reporters were talking about the World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Detroit Tigers, and Carl tuned them out. Unless the Red Sox were in it, he wasn’t interested, and the Sox hadn’t been in anything since the ‘48 series, a lifetime ago.

  At the far end of the bar, a few reporters were laughing, talking about State House and city council shenanigans. There was Kathy Proulx, a State House reporter, and Jeremiah King, who knew the city council in and out, and Bobby Munson, a general-assignment reporter like Carl who worked the court system. Every ten minutes or so, Jeremiah would shout, ‘Beer trivia!’ and bet a drink he could outsmart anyone at the bar, and for the most part he did, with Kathy and Bobby groaning and forking over money.

  For a while Carl just quietly observed, letting the second beer wash away the taste of the burger and fries. Except for Jack, he never really connected with anyone else in the newsroom, but he understood why. He’d gotten his job through his veteran’s benefits. Day one on the job, someone had put a toy soldier on his desk, with a little handmade sign that said ‘student killer.’ He’d kept his mouth shut and tossed the toy soldier away—he knew some in the newsroom were hoping for an outburst, to reaffirm the stories of the crazy 1960s vet—but he hadn’t given them that satisfaction. He had done his job and had remained quiet, just like tonight.

  Office politics—who was in, who was out, who was back-stabbing whom—bored him. He liked talking about things that mattered. Like the residency laws in the cities and how long they would last. Or stories about the outlying towns in western Massachusetts. Were there really pockets of hunger out there, ten years after the war? And the rumors about the British. Now that would be a story to report. Last week he had listened to two pressmen talking in line in the cafeteria, guys who were in the Air Force Reserve. They had come back from a tour of duty up North, near Minnesota, and the radar stations there had seen a lot of transport traffic flying into Canadian bases. ‘I tell ya, it’s like a regular train schedule up North, all these Brit planes coming in. Makes you wonder what they’re up to.’ And the other pressman had said, ‘Maybe it’s just kippers and beans, more relief food,’ and the other had snorted. ‘Not hardly. Them transports were carrying Brit troops, that’s what, and the officers I talked to, they don’t think all those Brits are up there for a training exercise.’ But these stories would never get reported.

  He had about a swallow left of his beer and then Jeremiah raised a hand and again challenged, ‘Beer trivia!’ Kathy raised her hands mockingly to her face and said, ‘Enough, already,’ and Bobby said, ‘Jesus, I thought you’d be done by now.’

  Jeremiah waved his hand. His brown hair was combed back and even when he smiled, his sharp face looked unpleasant, like he was a guy who enjoyed being a reporter because it gave him an excuse to be a nosy bastard and get paid for it.

  ‘C’mon, one more, and a special one,’ he announced. ‘Winner of this one gets a free drink from me each night for a week. All right? Ready?’

  Some moans and groans, and Jeremiah plowed ahead. ‘All right, here we go. Last beer trivia question of the night. All you have to do is name the last American in space. Pretty simple, eh?’

  Bobby just shook his head and made a motion of going through his wallet to pay for another beer, while Kathy rolled her eyes. Jeremiah was laughing, looking so confident and cocky and full of himself, and Carl couldn’t stand it.

  ‘Schirra,’ he said.

  Bobby and Kathy looked over at him, and Jeremiah said, ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Schirra,’ he repeated, feeling a grin spread over his face. ‘Wally Schirra, flew a Mercury capsule he called Sigma Seven. Back in October ‘62. Just before the war.’

  A few shouts and laughs from people who had been watching, and Kathy eyed him and Bobby sort of nodded in a ‘good for you’ look. But then Jeremiah shut it down.

  ‘Forget it, Landry,’ he said. ‘This was private, among us. Your answer doesn’t count.’

  Their part of the bar got quiet. He guessed he shouldn’t have had the second beer. He leaned a bit toward Jeremiah. ‘Sure it counts. It’s correct, and you don’t like losing. Right?’

  Kathy and Bobby were staring into their drinks. Jeremiah picked up his beer, face red, and started to turn to Bobby, muttering something that only a few people, Carl included, could hear.

  ‘Goddam quota baby.’

  Carl started to get up from the bar, to head over and talk to Jeremiah face-to-face, when one of the copy boys came in with a fistful of the next day’s Globes. ‘Still warm, still warm, still warm,’ he chanted. Carl grabbed a copy of tomorrow’s paper and decided to go home. Why not? He threw a dollar bill on the bar and pushed through the crowd of newspaper people. No one asked him to stay, no one asked him how he was doing. He stood outside in the cold night, letting the air clear his head, knowing he’d soon be sober but that the bad taste in his mouth would be there for a long while.

  After four years, he was still an outsider.

  ~ * ~

  Home was a second-floor apartment in a brownstone on Commonwealth Avenue, which everyone in Boston called Comm Ave. The neighborhood had become pricey over the years, and fancy shops had opened up on nearby Newbury Street. A lot of people coming into wealth—mostly bankers and shippers working for the increasingly busy port—but his veteran’s benefits kept the place rent-controlled and he was comfortable. As he walked around from the rear alley he looked for Two-Tone, the neighborhood homeless guy, who kept an eye on the cars at night, but Carl didn’t see him. It wasn’t that unusual though, since Two-Tone always kept his own hours.

  On the floor of the apartment was the day’s mail, which consisted of a bill from New England Bell and an envelope with an American Red Cross return address. The envelope was thin, which meant it wasn’t good news. He opened it and quickly scanned the form letter. Handwritten notes filled the blank spots:

  Dear Carl Landry

  We regret to inform you there is no news regarding the whereabouts of

  your sister, Sarah Landry,

  Newburyport, Massachusetts

  whose last known address in 1962 was

  the University of Nebraska, Omaha, Nebraska.

  We will next contact you in

  six months

  Please use the reverse of this form to report any additional information that will assist us in locating the above-referenced individual. A self-addressed envelope is enclosed for your convenience.

  Sincerely,

  J
. J. McCain

  Bureau of Missing Persons

  American Red Cross

  Sorry, sis, he thought, putting the envelope and letter down on the counter. He thought about throwing the letter away but didn’t. In the morning, he’d put it in the thick file that had similar letters and postcards from the Red Cross and the Salvation Army and Searchers, Inc. and Catholic Charities. He knew that she was probably dead, killed in one of a half dozen ways in the awful chaos after the war, but still... there was always that one chance. Just the other day, the Herald had run a heartwarming story of some young man being reunited with his family after spending ten years walking home from a Peace Corps posting in Bolivia.

  He closed his eyes, just for a moment, seeing her pug nose and bright blue eyes and the dark brown hair that she kept long and unpermed, much to their mother’s dismay. She had listened to strange records, stuff she called folk music, and she had even stranger opinions. When he had announced that he was joining the Army, she could not believe him.