The Deadline

by Ron Franscell

  “If we did, they’d start to expect it every week,” she said, pressing her ruby lips into a sorry smile. Morgan truly believed she was the only one of his employees making a game effort to help him.

  Morgan thumbed through the messages as he sat at his desk. He started with the first one and worked his way through the pile.

  The mayor, a clammy, retired schoolteacher who tolerated no heat in his political kitchen, chided him for being too negative.

  “You media guys are all alike, always focusing on the negative just to sell your papers,” he said, then hung up abruptly.

  The next four messages came from parents of 4-H kids who were convinced Morgan hated ranchers because he’d omitted the weekly club report. Morgan tried to explain calmly that he’d never received it and he had no such animosity toward ranchers, but they didn’t believe him. Three of them hung up on him.

  The next message was from Claire, who called to see if he’d like to come home for a late lunch. Too late. It was already after four o’clock, so he set it aside and called the car dealer Bob Buck instead.

  “I pay you a lot of money to make me look good. I can’t believe you’d put such a terrible picture of me in the paper and expect to get paid for it. You’d better get your act together, mister, and realize who’s butterin’ your bread. I won’t pay a thin dime for that atrocity and I expect this will teach you a lesson to take better care of your customers.”

  Then Bob Buck, who was, in fact, fat and wore a bad toupee to boot, hung up.

  Morgan had owned The Bullet for only six weeks, and Bob Buck had refused to pay for his ads — the biggest in the paper — four times. Morgan decided it was true what he’d heard from his friends on the Tribune’s sales staff: Car dealers are, at the same time, the best advertisers and the worst clients.

  According to Crystal’s other messages, three angry ex-readers only wanted him to know they had canceled their subscriptions for various reasons (one didn’t like a particular letter to the editor, one believed the photographs were too dull, and the third was canceling on behalf of his Uncle Gerve, who died and wouldn’t be needing his paper anymore).

  The next pink slip was from an anonymous caller, who gleefully pointed out a minor typographical error in a headline.

  The last message was from Hamilton Tasker, the president of the First Wyoming Bank who’d signed off on the Morgans’ loan for The Bullet. He had been genial enough back then, a little too obsequious for Claire, but far more pleasant than one expected a banker to be.

  Morgan glanced at the newsroom clock. It was after four, but he dialed anyway. A bank secretary answered.

  “Hello. This is Jefferson Morgan, returning Mr. Tasker’s call,” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, a note of recognition in her voice. “He’s been expecting you to call all afternoon.”

  Ham Tasker got on the line, his deep baritone voice immediately foreshadowing serious news. It was clear this was no social call. Tasker was all business and he got directly to the point.

  “Jeff, thank you for calling. I just wanted to let you know that we’ve had a little trouble on your payment. You have insufficient funds to cover it.”

  “That’s impossible,” Morgan said, feeling his face grow hot. “I deposited ten thousand dollars earlier this week.”

  “That’s the other problem, Jeff. There were no funds to cover that check. All of your mother’s accounts together have less than two thousand dollars in them. I’m sorry you had to hear it from me, but we need to clear this up rather quickly.”

  “Could there be some mistake? Jesus, Ham, a mother wouldn’t write a bad check to her son.”

  “Look, Jeff, I don’t know all the circumstances, but I’m sure you understand our predicament and would like to settle any little problems before they become big ones. I’d sure hate to see you get started out on the wrong foot because of a little misunderstanding. We’ll need exactly five thousand, eight hundred and twenty-seven dollars by the close of business tomorrow, Jeff. Can I expect to see you here at the bank by that time?”

  Morgan didn’t know what to say. He had no hope of scraping together that much money in less than twenty-four hours.

  “Can I have a couple days?”

  Tasker got the job of collecting late debts because he was good at it. He wouldn’t budge.

  “Really, I’d like to get this cleared up as quickly as possible.”

  “That’ll be damn near impossible, Ham. This first month has just been a nightmare. Old Bell got all the receivables, and the cash flow just hasn’t started yet.”

  Hamilton Tasker paused for a long, uncomfortable moment.

  “Yes, well, maybe it’s just a little time management problem.”

  “Meaning what?” Morgan asked.

  “Some people tell me you’ve been spending a lot of time picking at some old scabs that are better left alone. Maybe there are, shall we say, ‘more productive’ things you could be working on. I’m sure you understand. Tomorrow then?”

  “Hold on, Ham,” Morgan said, suddenly confused and a little angry. “What wounds would those be?”

  “We try to focus on the future, not the past. Progress is good for a town, and progress looks forward. Looking back is bad for business. Why bring up something awful and painful for no good reason? Maybe it sells a few papers, but what does it really accomplish?”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Do I need to spell it out, Jeff? You might find it easier to do business if you saw things our way.”

  “Your way? What’s your way?”

  “At the moment, there’s more of our money at risk than yours. We need to come to ... an understanding about this story you’re working on. As your new partners in this newspaper, we’d prefer that you spent your time of more positive news.”

  “Jesus, Ham, are you suggesting I drop a story or lose my newspaper? It sure sounds like you are, and that’s not a choice I’m willing to make. And I resent your implication that by loaning me money you assume some editorial privilege at my newspaper. Pardon me, but that’s pure bullshit.”

  His message delivered, Hamilton Tasker remained cool and unruffled.

  “Why, I’m saying nothing of the kind, Jeff. I’m only telling you what people are saying. And some of my bank officers are watching your operation quite closely. They might be a little more understanding if you merely ‘re-arranged’ your priorities. Right now, I need to know you’ll be here tomorrow to put this little problem behind us.”

  “Sure, Ham,” Morgan said through clenched teeth. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Incensed, he hung up.

  “No money at all?”

  Claire was incredulous. The corners of her mouth fell and she closed her eyes as they rocked gently on the porch swing. Children were playing in the street in front of the house, but their laughter drifted off in another direction.

  “Nothing,” Morgan said. “She’s got nothing. A couple thousand bucks. That’s it.”

  “Maybe she’s got some stock or a retirement fund someplace,” Claire said. “Maybe there’s a fund transfer that’s been delayed.”

  “Dad didn’t believe in the stock market and after he died, we checked everywhere for any money he might have stashed away for retirement. There wasn’t any.”

  “How has she been supporting herself then?”

  “The house was paid off, so she doesn’t need much. She leases out most of the land to a neighbor, who runs a few cows and horses on it. Mom was so eager to get out from under the hardware store, she sold it cheap. She made a little money, but not much. I guess I thought she was doing better. That’s a whole different problem.”

  “Have you talked to her yet?”

  “I don’t know what I’d say. ‘Mom, your check bounced and you’re damn near broke’?”

  “God, Jeff, she needs your help. You don’t want your mom to be a bag lady, do you?”

  Frustrated, Morgan raised his hands to stop the conversation about his mother�
��s finances.

  “One thing at a time, Claire. I’ll take care of my mother. She won’t be homeless. Right now, I’m worried about us being homeless. I won’t be much help to my mother if I’m on welfare myself.”

  Claire braved a smile and touched her husband’s forearm.

  “Okay, so we have a little problem. Let’s not panic. We have exactly one hundred and fifty-two dollars in the bank, Jeff,” she said. “Tomorrow you need to come up with almost six thousand dollars. No sweat. Any ideas?”

  Morgan shrugged. He watched two little girls from next door drawing endless hopscotch boxes on their sidewalk with colorful chalk. They were circumscribing the entire block, earnestly working their way back home in a big circle.

  “The paper’s payroll account has a couple thousand, but if I raid it, I can’t pay anybody next week,” he said. “We could sell one of the cars, but that’s only two or three thousand, at best, and we can’t do it by tomorrow.”

  “How about your computer? Could we get anything for that?” Claire asked.

  Morgan looked as if she’d suggested selling the family scrapbook. He’d used his IBM 760ED laptop, one of the most powerful portable computers on the market when he bought it, and a database search program called Paradox to help find the serial killer P.D. Comeaux. There was no way in hell he’d sell it to some pimply kid to use as a souped-up GameBoy.

  “No, Claire. Not that. It wouldn’t bring much either, but I wouldn’t sell it.”

  Claire took a deep breath.

  “What if I called my dad and asked for a loan?” she said. “He could wire it to the bank tomorrow. He’d be happy to help.”

  Claire’s parents, especially her father, hadn’t been pleased to hear their daughter would be moving to Wyoming. To them, it was a wild place where few people except cowboys and prospectors could scratch out a living. They also hated the idea of Claire being so far away. Of course, they blamed Morgan, although they were too kind to ever say it out loud.

  Morgan considered the possibility — then dismissed it.

  “Let’s keep that as a last resort, Claire,” he said. “The bank won’t foreclose just because the first payment is a little late. They just want to be sure it’s not going to be a habit. Maybe we can work something out without cutting holes in our safety net.”

  Claire watched some children playing kick the can in the dying light on the shaded street. She was frightened, Morgan could tell, but she tried not to let it show at times like this. She always said something hopeful just when the outlook seemed nearly hopeless.

  “Someday, we’ll be sitting here watching our own child play,” she said. “And all this will be behind us.”

  Later that night, after Claire had gone to bed, Morgan sat in his attic room. He couldn’t sleep, and his thoughts bounced from The Bullet’s financial straits to Neeley Gilmartin to Aimee Little Spotted Horse to the night’s unyielding heat. They all smothered him.

  After midnight, still no closer to sleep, he put on his shorts and running shoes and slipped out of the house into the impenetrable night air of August. He hated running, so he did it infrequently, when he needed to be distracted or tired.

  Morgan stretched on the freshly sprinkled lawn. As he lay back in the cool grass to stretch his taut quadriceps, he tried to remember when he last ran, but couldn’t.

  The pulsing chirp of crickets surrounded him in the darkness. The sky was infinitely deep, its stars burning like sparks from a campfire. A ring around the moon meant rain was coming, but it wasn’t here yet, just the suffocating heat.

  Morgan jogged into the middle of Rockwood Street and followed the hazy, yellow hum of the streetlights toward downtown. The darkness swallowed him.

  After a few blocks, his footsteps fell in rhythm with the crickets, beating flatly against the still-warm asphalt. He heard himself breathing, felt the dull ache in his chest as he passed from the sleeping sidestreets onto Main Street. He was out of shape, and already his underused muscles and aching joints were demanding his attention, stealing it away from his problems.

  Except for the railyard at the end of the avenue, Main Street was deserted. Morgan ran down the middle of it, where the surface was smooth, unlike the buckled sidewalks the city had postponed fixing. The hot air filled him, pumped through his veins and seeped through his skin. Sweat dripped off his chin.

  As he passed The Bullet, he noticed a sliver of unexpected light from the backshop. Someone had forgotten to turn it off, and the light bill came due at the end of the month. As a reporter, he’d never had to worry about leaving the lights on; as a publisher, especially a publisher on the verge of a financial debacle, he did. He circled around the next block and came up the alley behind the newspaper building, where a key had always been hidden in the drain pipe.

  The key was gone. In the dark, cursing between breaths, Morgan felt around in the weeds below the spout, but without light he couldn’t find it. When he jiggled the back door’s knob to make sure it was locked, he was startled to find it wasn’t.

  There wasn’t much to steal inside, maybe a few old computers and some antiquated office equipment. Certainly there was no money. No, it was likely someone had left without turning off the lights, but he’d been the last one to leave the office that night, and he was certain he’d locked the back door when he went home.

  His heart pounded as he eased the balky door open. Just inside, the storage room was dark, no bigger than a two-car suburban garage with a rank of newsprint rolls stacked three high just inside the overhead door. He walked through the darkness with one hand ahead of him, waist-high, should he encounter an unexpected dolly handle or table edge at groin level.

  As Morgan’s eyes adjusted better to the pure darkness of the storage area, he saw light seeping beneath the adjacent press room’s door. He crow-stepped carefully toward the paper-thin blade of light until his hand found the door’s brass knob.

  He pulled it gently toward him, trying not to wake its yowling hinges. The fluorescent lights on the other side hurt his eyes; all of them were on.

  The press was an inky hulk. It sat in the center of the room, surrounded by four mottled walls, dripping ink barrels and stacks of imperfectly printed papers waiting to be dumped. The pungent smell of ink, a familiar odor that Morgan had forgotten until he returned to Winchester, hung in the air.

  The light switch was on the opposite wall, behind the printing plate-burner. Morgan crossed the press room toward it, but even before a jolt of cold adrenaline speared through his veins, he sensed he wasn’t alone.

  “It’s the smell,” Old Bell said. “I miss it.”

  He was standing beneath the folder, where an unbroken sheet of flowing newsprint would course beneath razor-sharp knives and mechanical pinchers to be separated, pleated and dumped onto a conveyor. It was the critical point where steel, raw pulp, ink and words came together, at last, to make a newspaper.

  “Jesus Christ, Bell, you scared the shit out of me,” Morgan said, blood still pulsing in his ears. He mopped his face with his sweat-soaked gray athletic tee-shirt.

  “You should have knocked, kid. That would have saved us both the trouble of a surprise.”

  “Knocked on my own door? What the hell are you doing down here at this time of night anyway?”

  Old Bell wandered among the press’s four units, touching the cold iron frame the way an old man might stroke his loyal dog.

  “I guess I couldn’t walk away as easily as I thought. I thought I’d absorbed enough of this ink in my life to turn my bones black, but I guess not. I didn’t want you to know because it’s all yours now, even the smell of it. That’s what I missed the most, I think. The smell. God, how I love it.”

  “You’re welcome here, any time, and you know it,” Morgan said. “I’m always glad to see you. In fact, I’d like to see you down here more often. I could use your help. Lots of it.”

  Old Bell traced his fingers along the edge of an ink well. He looked at the black stain it left on them, and he smiled.
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  “A newspaper is printed here,” he said, extending his smudged fingers so Morgan could see. “Goddam if that isn’t a good thing.”

  Morgan leaned across a roll of newsprint, feeling the perfect, smooth curve of it under him. A droplet of sweat dribbled down his forearm and soaked into what would be next week’s Bullet.

  “When I was just a kid working for you, I wanted to know everything you knew. You always saw things I couldn’t see. You stood for something. You had this passion.”

  “A man in passion rides a mad horse, kid,” Old Bell said, sidestepping the sentimentality. “Press Delahanty was the editor here and he gave me my first job, right here in this shop. You know what I had to do on my first day? I had to muck out the puke bucket he hid back there behind the old flatbed press.”

  Old Bell hitched his thumb toward the darkened end of the pressroom, where all the obsolete presses were heaped in a deadfall of bygone iron.

  “Press was a drunken son of a bitch who watched ‘em hang Tom Horn and rode with the Johnson County Invaders. He’d hit the bottle, then write these editorials full of piss and vinegar and the damnedest beautiful prose you ever read. He was a classic storyteller who knew how to put the words down just so. And a goddam drunk, to boot. Years later, when old Press seemed bigger than life to me, I’d go get that old puke bucket and put it under my desk, just in case I ever got the kind of passion old Press had.”

  “Did it?”

  “That particular muse never called here. Not on Wednesdays, anyhow. Never missed a paper. Never. I always considered it a sort of sacred covenant with the folks. They trusted me to make a newspaper. That’s all. It was a simple relationship.”

  Every week for fifty years, a paper. Snowstorms, floods, illness, even deaths: Nothing stopped The Bullet. Morgan admired Old Bell even more.

  “Is there one story that you remember more than any other?” Morgan asked.