Jim Brown slowly munched at his sandwich.
“I want it stopped and I am going to make sure it is,” Carter said. “I am having these chairs and couches taken out.”
“Ah, Tom,” Richard Ferguson moaned. “It’s the only place we have to sit around and eat lunch.”
“I don’t give a damn about your lunches, buddy. I am not going to have that filth going on in here.”
Richard Ferguson put up a hand as though to hold back the words. It didn’t really matter to him one way or another.
“Turn those goddamn things off,” Carter yelled as the charter and squawks of the police and fire scanners broke through his audio time. “I can’t hear myself think.”
“So, what else is new?” came Charles Adkins’s stage whisper.
“Ah, Tom,” George Harding looked up from his desk, “the problem is if we turn them off we miss the stories.”
“What we need is a dispatcher,” a voice came out of the photographers’ row.
“We aren’t going to have any goddamn dispatcher,” Carter spat out.
“And that’s why we miss the stories,” another voice called out from the line of men.
“What Tom means,” Jim Brown cut in smoothly, “is that the people Back East don’t think we need that right now. After all,” he smiled, “we never miss the big stories.”
“And there’s something else,” Carter jumped on the silence Brown’s statement created. “About these flash flood warnings or alerts. What the hell are they, Art?”
Art Novak took a step forward.
“Flash flood warnings, Tom. That’s different from flash flood watches,” he said happily.
“Don’t tell me. Tell them,” Carter ordered.
“Well, you see we live in a desert and with heavy rain desert areas are prone to flash floods.”
“They know that,” Carter snapped. “What about the warnings?”
“So,” Art Novak continued without losing his smile, “the National Weather Bureau sends out a watch when this sort of thing could happen. It comes across the wire and we are supposed to get the message to the audience.”
“Which we didn’t do on Saturday,” Carter said with a sneer. “If you recall.”
Weekend producer Nancy Patterson flinched.
“You’ve got to get that on the air,” Jim Brown added.
“It’s a regulation or something,” Carter said.
“What do we do, Tom?” Chuck shouted from behind his eye-high wall. “Do we interrupt programming or run a crawl or what?”
“You get it on the air,” Carter yelled.
“What you do, Chuck,” Jim Brown’s voice soothed, “is run a crawl as soon as you can. When you get a chance, you can cut some audio, but that’s not the real problem, is it?” He nodded to the weatherman. “The problem is the flash flood warning.”
“You bet your ass,” Carter cut it. “On Saturday we had a flash flood warning and everybody else had it on the air before we did. If you see that thing come across the wire you break your ass to get it on.”
Nancy Patterson stared at the floor. She had already heard the speech.
“That has to go on the air almost immediately after we get it,” Jim Brown continued as though he had not been interrupted.
Ellen watched the faces around her for signs of her own boredom. Once again, she caught Chuck’s wink.
He called out, “So, what you mean, Tom, is that we get it on as a crawl and then, as soon as we can, we interrupt programming with somebody on-set with the info?”
“That’s what I mean,” Carter said. “And you sure as hell do it fast. I don’t want the goddamn FCC crawling down my neck on this one. We’re talking about saving lives here, boy, lives.”
He paused for the effect and smiled the smile the viewers so loved.
“A few minutes could mean somebody’s life. We could and should be saving lives. That’s our job. Right, Jim?”
Jim Brown nodded.
“What if there is a commercial on, Tom?” came Chuck’s happy voice. “Should we interrupt a commercial, Tom?”
“Well…well…,” Carter hesitated. He didn’t know the answer. “No,” he said firmly. “We don’t interrupt a commercial. I mean, a minute or two isn’t going to make that much different. Right, Jim?”
Ellen sighed and stared across the room. Beside her Debbie stiffened. Day One.
5
“I was in Albuquerque before this and before that I was in Jacksonville, Florida,” Ellen told Debbie that night over drinks at a bar near the station. “I also spent a year in Paris after college which has nothing to do with anything,” she added with a laugh.
“Wow, I would love to go to Paris, to Europe, anywhere,” Debbie said.
“It was a good time,” Ellen said. “Learned some French, among other things.”
“The farthest I’ve ever been beside Canada, and I was once in Alaska when I was little, but the farthest I’ve ever been was Baja and that’s not really so far.” Debbie sighed.
“Baja? Huh. Vacation?”
“Ah, no, well,” Debbie stammered. “I lived down there for about six months.”
It was more like two months but that now seemed a sadly short period of time, not enough for someone like Ellen.
“We went down there to see some friends,” she said.
“Who we?”
“Ah,” Debbie laughed nervously, “me and this guy. He was okay. Michael, his name was Michael. We went together for a couple of years.”
“What happened to him?” Ellen’s hazel eyes looked almost golden in the flare of the table’s yellow candle.
“Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him in a long time. We split up after Baja. I don’t know where he went.”
She reached for Ellen’s cigarettes.
“May I?”
“Sure.”
“I haven’t smoked in a while,” she said and her hands trembled slightly as she lit the cigarette.
“I did hear from him for a while after I left Baja, but not much.” She tried to smile. It still wasn’t easy.
“I guess I really didn’t want this,” she said as she put out the cigarette.
“Good,” commented Ellen. “They’ll kill you.”
“It was really interesting in Baja,” Debbie continued, wanting to give this woman a bigger, better story. “We had these friends who lived there, college friends from Oregon and they were renting this house right in Ensenada. They let us have a room. You know, for a few dollars a week. It was a great vacation.”
“What were they doing down there, your friends?” Ellen asked. She figured it probably had something to do with drugs but it could be anything.
“Well, Eric, that was the guy, he was sort of building this boat, a ferro-cement boat.”
“A cement boat? You’re kidding?” Ellen laughed.
“No, really. It’s not new but a lot of people don’t know about it. Ferro-cement boats last forever and Eric was building one and Michael was really interested in building one too, so he was helping out.”
“What did you do while everyone was busy building boats?”
“Oh, I went to the beach and read a lot. There wasn’t much else to do.” She stared at her empty glass. It did sound stupid.
Ellen pulled back with an exaggerated look of surprise. “For six months?”
“Well, maybe it was more like four. Anyway, I shopped and did a lot of the cooking. Eric’s girlfriend Diana was a painter. That’s what she was doing down there. She was painting these Mexican kids with the big eyes. You know? A lot of people buy her paintings.”
Ellen shook her head.
“This guy would come down from LA and pick up some for his gallery. After he left, we’d rent a sailboat and sail down the coast. It was wonderful.” She smiled with the memory.
“She also had this loom.”
The words were falling around her, happy, good words.
“It was amazing, all these strings and things and at night, when s
he wasn’t painting, she would weave blankets.”
There had really been only one blanket. Debbie watched her weave it with amazement and a sadness at her own inability to create anything.
“I guess she was sort of like a hippy,” she said.
“A hippy? Why a hippy?”
“I don’t know. She was free, happy, like a hippy.” Debbie smiled softly.
“Huh.”
“The house was great,” Debbie went on. “They painted all the walls these strange colors. The living room was this deep forest green and their bedroom was lavender. It was very cool.”
Maybe someday she would tell Ellen that Michael had been her creative writing teacher, that he was thirty to her eighteen when they first met and that he was divorced and the father of a boy he never saw. She could tell her that Diana and Eric had been Michael’s friends, not hers. But, not tonight.
“Who was making a living?” Ellen asked. “I can understand the painter, but what about everyone else?”
Debbie lowered her gaze.
“That’s what happened. We didn’t know how strict the laws were about working in Mexico. Michael thought he could make money by chartering fishing boats and taking people out. He thought Eric was doing that. We found out Eric only did that a couple of times. He met some Americans at Hussong’s who wanted someone who spoke English to go with them.”
“What’s Hussong’s?”
“It’s this bar that’s famous for something. Some writer drank there or a movie star. A lot of Americans go there.”
“What finally happened?”
“We left.”
They sat in silence.
“Did he ever build the boat?” Ellen asked.
“What?”
“Did this Michael ever build his cement boat?”
“I don’t know,” Debbie shrugged. “I don’t know.”
*
Baja had been a nightmare. She still wondered why she didn’t get into the van much sooner and drive back home. Two or three days and she could have been safe in the house in Eugene. If she had done that perhaps there would have been no breakdown. But, by the time she locked her hands around the steering wheel, it was too late.
“Let’s not worry about money or time or anything,” Michael said as they drove to Baja. “Let’s have a good time in old Mexico.”
She agreed. A good time in old Mexico.
“A few months,” he said. “Relax, sit on the beach.”
“And help Eric build the boat,” she reminded him.
“God,” he said to Eric when they first walked along the murky bay, “what a life. Buy a boat, take the tourists out, that’s what I want to do.”
They met the Captain and his blond lady that first night.
“Dope,” Eric whispered. “Watch what you say.”
They sat on the deck of the Captain’s trawler as the Mexican crew worked around them and they all, except for the crew, smoked marijuana.
The Captain and Eric and Michael sat together, rolling joints and laughing as they smoked. Michael told her that you had to trust a guy after he shared his dope and smoked with you. That’s the way it was in the Sixties.
Diana painted in the mornings, Eric and Michael stayed out of the house, and Debbie read and waited for the night. In the evenings they would drink rum-and-Cokes and eat the dinner Debbie prepared. Sometimes the men smoked marijuana and chose cookies and candy over her salads and casseroles.
They would sit on the screened-in porch and Diana’s two Siamese cats, Tuptim and Yul, would stroll around them, touching, purring, slapping at them. Eric would sometimes reach for Diana’s hand as she sat drumming her long fingers on the wicker side table.
“He’s fucking around,” Michael told her in the dark of their bedroom. He laughed.
“He couldn’t be,” she argued.
“Sure as hell is. Didn’t you ever wonder why he never gets very far on the boat?”
She said nothing. Eric was still working on the wooden frame.
“He’s got this little Mexican chickie who goes down there every day. He’s balling her eyes out.” He snickered.
“Jesus, she’s about fourteen.”
Debbie lay in the darkness.
“So,” he poked at her, “what do you think?”
She thought at that moment that she didn’t love him and from that moment the thought never left her. She had been with him for two years, had followed him, sat waiting for him to come back from whatever dream he was on – forest ranger, farmer, any dream of a good, easy, close-to-the-land life. The way it should be, he said.
This trip was supposed to be the end of all that, the last vacation. That’s what she told herself as they drove down the coast to Ensenada. When the few hundred dollars they had was gone, they would begin their life.
Now, in the darkness, she knew they were in another useless dream and there would be another one after this one. And, so it began. It started with the shaking.
When she came back from the market the next day, Diana and Eric and Michael were gone, down at Hussong’s or on the never to be finished boat or at the wharf with the Captain. She cooked the meal, smoked a joint, and waited for their return.
The panic began with the cockroach that reached for her from the food. Filled with disgust, she ran to the porch. She sat with her knees drawn to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs. Even in the heat, she was cold.
She knew all she had to do was come down and she would feel better. It was only the marijuana and this shabby, empty house. She would come down and go find them and everything would be all right.
She could hear the roach scratching back in the kitchen, somewhere in the garbage, in the food. The disgust turned to fear. She was not coming down.
In the bathroom, another roach swam in the toilet, reaching for her with thin brown antennae. She gagged and vomited as the water moved around in a sluggish flush.
“Debbie,” said the voice. “Debbie.”
She turned to it, jerking her head.
“Debbie,” came the echo.
It was her own voice. The fear was in her.
“What’s the matter, Debbie?” it taunted. “What’s the matter with you?”
Bad dope, angel dust dope. It would all go away soon. It would. It didn’t.
By the time the others came in drunk and laughing, she was deep in the bed in the raspberry-walled room, shaking with the fear.
“Hi, baby.” Michael crawled in next to her. “Why didn’t you come down to Hussong’s? Didn’t you know we were there?”
“Please don’t touch me,” she cried. “Don’t touch me.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m sick, really sick. I think it was the grass. Michael, I have to go to the hospital. Please.” She was curled far from him.
“No, honey, it’s okay,” he reached for her. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m scared, really scared,” she whimpered.
From the tunnel of her mind, the voice called to her.
“And you don’t even love him. He’s all you’ve got and you don’t even love him.”
“Please, I need to go back to the border,” she begged. “I need to go home.”
“Honey,” he put his arms around her, “I can’t take you back tonight. Come on. Everything will be okay in the morning.” He smelled of tequila, his voice heavy and thick.
She said nothing. It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t protect her, couldn’t. She had no one to protect her. She wasn’t coming down now, not ever. The panic had moved to terror. She would sleep and wake up like this. Yes, she would.
“Take a Valium,” he said, his voice muffled by the approach of sleep. “That will help. It’s some bad dope. Happens to everybody once in a while.”
Oh, no, he wasn’t going to take her back, not now, and tomorrow would be too late. How to keep the terror away and the voice? She didn’t want the voice. Count, that was it. She would count. One, two, three, four. She concentrated on each number and
each number that followed.
Later in the bathroom, she vomited until she was empty and the dry heaves started. At least, and she was thankful for this, she felt sane enough to be sick. It wasn’t the dope. She knew that. This was the way she was going to be tomorrow and every day after and she hadn’t the strength to fight it for long.
Back in bed, she began counting again. One, two, three, four, five. She held onto each number, not letting another thought slip in, because if she did the tunnel would open up and the voice would start.
The fear tasted like a copper penny.
“Wait until tomorrow. It’ll be okay,” Michael mumbled to her from his sleep. “Don’t worry.”
She took a second Valium and began to count again.
Over the toilet she dug her nails into the inside of her thighs. The pain felt good. It was better than listening to her mind.
Wait till tomorrow, that’s what Michael said. It will be okay, he said.
It was better but not good. She could hold back the fear but she knew it was in her eyes. She was terrified they, anybody, would see it, see what she had become.
“God, sometimes I get so nervous,” the Captain’s blond lady said as they sat in the sun.
“I mean, I worry about him and what’s going to happen to him.” The bikini top barely covered the large, long breasts.
“I almost panic. I mean, jail in Mexico ain’t no kick.”
Diana and Debbie nodded over their rum-and-Cokes as they sat in the brown silence that came with any talk of the Captain.
Diana sighed.
“I get so tired of the smoking,” she said. “I mean, who needs that much dope?”
“I know, I know,” Debbie quickly agreed. “I’ve stopped. I mean, it is really frightening. I had a bad time a few weeks ago,” she said of the experience two nights before.
The other women looked at her.
“Yes. I think it was angel dust or something,” she rushed to tell them. There could be so much more if they understood.
“Bad shit,” said the Captain’s blond lady.
“It’s all a waste of time,” Diana said angrily. “I prefer a shot of booze anytime.”
She and the Captain’s lady raised their glasses. Debbie slowly raised hers.
After a small swallow, she tried again.
The Best in the West Page 4
