Correcting the Landscape
Page 9
I ordered a pot of gumbo from the Palate to celebrate. “Timber Bill Dies in House,” we headlined in a last triumphant story; and set one citizen’s testimony up inside a box, in fourteen-point boldface: “Veneer plant a shortsighted use for this great forest. We’d be cutting Sampson’s hair and giving it away.”
The whole episode fascinated me; for once, there was no “party line” of attack on this bill. It truly was a case of citizens leaping to the microphone with a variety of reasons why it should die. I did not see a mob of greens vs. a mob of developers: it was a crowd of individuals, some of whom saw eye to eye on nothing else. Their testimony brought out the complications hidden in a proposal that had initially seemed so simple to its author.
“We’ve learned a lot, we’ve woken up to the value of what’s around us,” I announced as I ladled gumbo to my writers and partners. “Well, to an extent, anyway.”
“Everybody’s learned something, including the guys who wrote this bill,” Noreen said. “They won’t be so blatant next time. They’ll be a little more subtle. Watch ’em like a hawk, Gus. Mark my words.”
“And what do you mean by that?” I asked her in private. “You talk like you’re going somewhere.”
“Are you eager to get rid of me?”
“Hell no, but you always said this was temporary.”
“Eventually I have to make some money again, Gus. And try to find…you know. I’m not getting any younger. Maybe I’d like a family someday.” She shrugged and turned away. A hole in her world. She covered it over with drama.
As for me, perhaps I had all the family I wanted, with the Mercury, its partners, its underpaid staff, and Gayle Kenneally in the newsroom from time to time, and I wanted to savor the completion of a story we had really stuck to. It gives you a boost, I thought, for the next time you need it, the next raging controversy, oil spill, or colossal moral regression on the part of this same community, like objecting to Southside Cleanup Day or damning a sexy book or voting down a school bond.
Every July the Visitors Bureau puts on a show, during our annual parade, to dramatize the founding of Fairbanks in 1901. Grown men shoot cap guns at each other for no historical reason whatever, and agile women line up to do the cancan. A few saloons in town join the fun and try to attract tourists to their versions of the story. With different embellishments all these shows include the same kernel of truth: ninety years ago a man with a handlebar mustache and a shady past came up this way by river steamer, hauling 135 tons of goods and hoping to build a trading post on the trail to the Klondike. But as the steamer ventured deeper into Alaska’s interior, the water level in the smaller tributaries to the Yukon fell lower and lower.
Finally the captain of the steamer, terrified of grounding, stopped at a high bank with a stand of good trees and refused to go back downstream with such a heavy load. He’d run aground for sure, be stuck for the winter. “This is as far as I can go with your goods,” he announced, and hustled the man and his wife ashore. The crew began unloading boxes; the trader protested; his wife, dumped without ceremony in the wilderness, wept into her shawl, though now there are streets named after her. The trader stalked around wondering what to do, when, even before the steamer had pulled away—a miracle!—out from the forest stepped a hungry prospector, an Italian immigrant, carrying the secret of a recent find.
And so, within weeks, the trees on that well-timbered riverbank came down. It took a lot of wood to fuel this town and the riverboats that supplied it in those early years. Photographs show a skinned floodplain, log cabins set amid the stumps, vertical plumes of smoke from woodstoves rising instead of trees. Cords of fuelwood are stacked literally to the horizon. But eventually Fairbanks built a coal-fired power plant; bush planes and the Alaska Railroad replaced sternwheelers. When the gold rush ended and the creeks were abandoned, the woods grew back in a jungly way over collapsing mine shafts and abandoned narrow-gauge railroad beds.
It was as if the gold rush was a natural disturbance that swept through the forest, cleaned out thousands of acres, and then receded. The forest grew back in its usual stages, as it does today after a fire. The black spruce trees in the shadier places are thick as platoons, the kind of woods you fight your way through. On the south slopes of hills grow the woods you stroll through, aspen and birch and white spruce. Prime stuff, in comparison to the low-lying bogs. When you grade parts of the forest as if you’re harvesting beef, you call the white spruce prime. And that’s what the timber companies wanted, a lock on the white spruce. Not just yet, the people said. Or so it seemed to me.
THAT WONDERFUL SMELL OF A NEWSPAPER COMING TOGETHER isn’t completely a thing of the past. Some pages come together nicely on the computer, but some require a little handicraft, a little hot wax. I walked into the office one afternoon and saw Gayle bent over the light table, building a page. She wore a bright yellow cotton parka, like a dress, and black jeans, and she had her shoes off. The sole of her left foot in a thin black sock curved provocatively over her right heel. I studied it for a second. My hand imagined the shape of her footpads and that slim ankle, the curve of muscle in her calf, the smooth valley behind her knee.
My palms were warm. I stuck them into my armpits and walked into my office. Startled and pleased.
I turned on my computer and brought up a near-complete story and sat there in front of my own sentences, daydreaming.
Patter and bold assertions did not impress her, I had noticed. Well, my own didn’t, but come to think of it she must have been impressionable from time to time. She’d been married four times, was it, and switched careers a few times already. She must have her impulses.
And she drew her strength from a place I had neglected in my own life. The quiet connections that she had, with this land, with this country. Too quiet to survive, almost. “With proper management the forest can be bigger and better than ever,” a legislator had trumpeted at one hearing. “If we don’t harvest we will lose trees to butt rot,” another said, also no poet. When Gayle showed me these quotes she looked, well, hurt and puzzled at the same time. “They don’t know what they are talking about,” she said, “or what a forest is, how it works. What do I do?”
“Write about the hearing you attended,” I said, after a minute. “Not so much the forest. It’s a different subject.” You have to do a little violence to yourself, I thought, separate the parts of your brain. “In our pages people in the community talk to each other. They do the talking, we are neutral. At least on page one and page five. They rant and rave, we’re Switzerland.” And she understood me.
Too soon today, Noreen’s ferretlike visage came around the door.
“Gus, why don’t you ever have your radio on? They found a body under the Cushman Street Bridge. One of us should take a little trip downtown.”
“Or we could wait for the police blotter,” I said. “Why are you knocking yourself out? You need to take a few days, think about your options. It would be okay.”
“Something needs doing. I see that and so does Gayle.”
“Go on, then.”
“Gayle wants to come.”
Whoa; where’d this disappointment come from?
“She’s got her camera. Do you mind?” Noreen looked at me funny.
“Why should I?”
“I don’t know. How about it?”
“Yeah, if she wants.”
They organized themselves and were out the door. I returned to my office with a restive feeling and after a few minutes more of fiddling with that editorial, deserted it in order to take over the copyediting that No had set aside. Felix came in and took over the page that Gayle had been building. As soon as this one is put to bed, I thought, I’ll have time to follow up this problem with our display ads. We’ve got to build the revenue up. Judy Finch said we must do the important tasks and let the universe provide. Get busy, universe. Provide, provide.
A graduate student from the theater department brought in a review of Macbeth, the current show at the city playhouse. This was an assignmen
t he had arranged with Noreen. He slid into a chair near Felix while I read and touched up his piece and trimmed it to fit on page 7. He’d probably expect money for this, but right now the sensation of authorship sufficed, put on his face that childlike glow I have come to recognize in freelance writers.
He and Felix slouched low in chairs and muttered softly to each other while I worked. When I turned around from the computer I was taken aback to see how the two of them almost formed a circle, curved spines at opposite ends, long legs bent toward each other. Bruce, the graduate student, listened to Felix with parted lips. Felix spoke in his softest voice, like fog moving against a rock. At times I didn’t understand a word Felix said to me, his voice was that soft, the inflections so different from casual American speech. But this afternoon I heard him clearly.
“Dog and God, for instance,” Felix was saying.
“They have the same internal vowel,” said Bruce. “The sound itself carries the meaning over to the next line, like an echo.”
“Honesty,” said Felix, and they both turned the word over in their minds, gazing at each other.
This is how poets talk to each other—fog and nonsense, god and dog?
But evidently they were hearing just the right thing. Their words fell into ears long denied the pleasure of another poet’s company. Felix’s face lit up, if you can imagine cold marble lighting up. They eyed each other in a shy, off-guard way that almost embarrassed me, it was that touching. Bruce had short dark hair and a very neat mustache and goatee; his skin had a slight caramel cast. He was as tall as Felix, and slouched in their chairs they looked like illustrations from a book called How to Ruin Your Spine.
I didn’t say anything, but they seemed to become aware that my face had turned in their direction. Felix shifted his body upright and ran his fingers over the mess on his desk, as if feeling out what needed to be accomplished next. Bruce didn’t move. I got up and went back to my office. I’m not completely insensitive. I didn’t know why I felt extraneous at that moment, but so I did.
I turned on my radio and, standing next to its ludicrous blare, wondered what I had just witnessed. The two boys were spellbinding to each other, somehow. They had let me see vulnerability. Then they reined it in.
They didn’t know me well enough to be simple with me.
Well, son of a gun. The secrets people live with.
I went through the weekly checklist: we had everything now, except whatever Gayle and Noreen showed up with, and if they weren’t here in half an hour, I’d plug the cartoonist’s art into that spot and put the Mercury to bed. And head downtown to touch a few new prospects for display ads. What were the two boys in the other room doing now?
Aw, come on Noreen, I muttered. We want to go home. But I had to wait for her arrival. We hadn’t donned the winged sandals of the twenty-first century yet, here at the Mercury.
“Will I be off, then, Gus?” Felix appeared in my doorway. In his face something slightly goofy. He didn’t need my permission. Why was he asking me?
“See you later, then, and thanks for the extra help,” I said, and looked out at Bruce. “And thanks for the review. Great to have it.” The theater critic was now lounging in a standing position against the front door. He stepped suddenly to one side as No charged through.
“Oh, sorry,” she said, and, “Gus!” She went straight over to the light table with a folder of fresh black-and-white photos and spilled them out for me. Emergency medical technicians were climbing the riprap on the downtown riverbank, across from the Unknown First Family. There was a covered stretcher in the background.
“The dead woman was Gayle’s own cousin,” Noreen said.
“Cathy?”
“You knew her?”
“I met her once. Gayle still went ahead and took pictures?”
“She didn’t know at first. She was snapping away, I interviewed the trooper. We found out just as we were leaving. The poor woman had nothing on, Gus, but a windbreaker.”
That pale youngster with the sleepy face and the slow smile in my direction, wrapping herself around the door frame at Gayle’s house? I looked down at the photos.
“Oh damn,” I said. “You’re going to write something up? Or wait—what do you suppose Gayle wants us to do?”
“We went straight from downtown up to the university, where she developed the pictures. She wanted to do this job, that’s what she said.”
“Okay. Well, shit. How about this photo with a six-line caption. Let’s put a box around it. We need a small headline. Let me think.”
“Can I help?” said Felix.
“Do you think we have everything under control, No?”
“Oh, Felix, you should have seen the poor girl.”
“No, can you do a paragraph on this?”
“Yes, yes, I composed it in the car.”
“Why didn’t you call me before she developed the pictures, I mean she didn’t have to do this.”
“She wanted to do this job, she said. She seems fine, Gus—I mean stunned and sad but fine.”
“That girl was living with her.”
“Well, not lately.”
“What?”
“I asked her if Cathy had been missing for a while.”
“And?”
“She looked really, well, stricken. And she said, ‘I guess so.’”
So Cathy had moved out, as Gayle wanted her to do.
“I felt terrible,” said Noreen. “I meant it to be an innocent question, like to fill in the blanks.”
“They were close, I think,” I said, “but Cathy was an adult, it wasn’t Gayle’s job to babysit her. What is the cause of death?”
“I’m quoting the trooper here—a likely drowning, not determined yet. ‘I guess so…’ What do you think she meant, Gus?”
“She meant she hadn’t seen her cousin lately, that’s all. First things first. Come on, we’ve got to get this paper downtown.”
I went into my office and shut the door and took several deep breaths, realizing that I was profoundly testy. Irritated. All right, disturbed. One thing I could do well was pull many strings at once, I thought, but the afternoon which I had outlined for myself, to which I had committed myself, was now fractured. Something pulled at me, like a wire inside me had come loose, important connections were threatened. This demanded attention. And I couldn’t give it. I had things to do.
You coldhearted son of a bitch, I thought.
This is almost an everyday, or every-spring, occurrence in Fairbanks. People shouldn’t mix drinking and waterside activities. Or not. This is an everyday occurrence, or it isn’t. It depends on what I decide right now: how do we treat this?
Calling it everyday dismisses the life of the unknown woman, dismisses the crime or preventable accident. Preventable, I thought, or inevitable, given this kid’s way of life. Which is it?
And Noreen’s going to have a take on this, she’s going to sink her teeth in it and start to worry and shake this story for all it’s worth. What is the story?
Noreen came into the office with her paragraph. I took the paper from her and scanned it. The bare facts and a quote from the state trooper.
“Let’s go with it,” I said.
She sat down with a sigh.
“What’s next?” she said.
“We put the paper to bed. We take a breath and do it all over again.”
“What’s going to happen, Gus, will everyone in town go about their business and accept this as something that just happened again, one more time. One more life that’s overlooked and slips away?”
What we pay attention to—I know that dilemma, too, Noreen.
“Are you asking me if we’re going to follow up on this?” I said. “We have to wait and see, don’t we? I don’t know. I’m not sure how much we can take on.”
“A picture and caption this week, then nothing?”
“You move too fast. People have the right to expect narrative, not opinion, in the news pages. There have to be facts.”
“A clean, complete story.”
“Well, yeah, of course. Look around, though. Do you see a staff of investigative reporters? I see a bunch of columnists with personal axes to grind and you and me and an illegal Irish immigrant, and oh yes, a journalism student who now has to deal with a death in the family. Don’t set your sights so high. Talk to the police, if you want. Go ahead and follow it up, you’re free to do that, but I don’t know how.”
“Gus,” called Felix. “Any changes?” He had pasted Noreen’s copy in place and laid out a ten-point black line around the whole thing. He was ready to box up the dummies.
“We’re ready to go,” I said.
“If there’s anything more I can do,” said Felix. “If Gayle can’t come in for a while…”
“Thanks, Felix,” I said. “You have a good weekend.”
The way he trotted out with his bicycle I thought he just might do that. The tragedy had not taken the life out of his face.
I drove downtown pulled apart by the crossed desires inside me—I wanted to deliver the paper, I wanted to hustle some ads, I wanted to get to Gayle’s house and do something for her.
I parked at the big daily, where the Mercury was printed, and carried my box of dummies in the rear door. In the past few weeks, since my payments had become habitually overdue, I’d been slipping in and slipping out; I didn’t hang around and glad-hand, I didn’t feel like their best customer anymore. I wanted to drop off these pasteups and escape, avoiding the orange-overalled pressmen. Too late; the foreman caught sight of me. He blocked the hallway and said, “Gus, my man.” Then he crooked his finger at me. “C’mere, I want to show you something.” He stood back at the door of his office and waved me in, a bulky guy in stained coveralls, earphones around his massive neck. Hard to find shirt collars to fit this guy. Big, inky fingers.
“How’s it going?” I said.
“I’ve been told you’re having trouble meeting the bill for twenty-four pages.”