Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  So he advised the students not to back down. He had a law school classmate, a federal judge, whom he could turn to for a temporary injunction, at least to get the one kid back into college.

  In an ideal world, the whole thing might turn into a show trial, wall-to-wall coverage that would provide Richard with the chance to parade and shout, a full contingent of press outside waiting for a news conference on the courthouse steps.

  He knew that his histrionics could make good television. He’d started this phase of his career by writing amicus briefs to the Supreme Court in support of constitutional protection for even those types of free expression that he personally found to be in bad taste. He fancied himself an advocate, a watchdog of the state. This put his name out at the very edges of public consciousness; now, because he gave good television, the same arguments he once made on paper he now spouted on cable news programs, debating Tipper Gore–styled housewife activists or local prosecutors-cum-political aspirants who wanted to thin a library’s collection, put warning stickers on nearly everything, shut down the local porno shop. From these appearances Richard was on the record in support of medical marijuana, decriminalizing drugs and paroling drug offenders from overcrowded prisons, repealing three-strikes laws, protecting interstate commerce in adult videos and novelties, and the inalienable right to wear a diaper gathered from the stars and stripes of the American flag. Low crimes, all.

  In the past few years, Richard had made almost nothing from the practice of actual law; most of his money came from these appearances on television, or short trips to conventions of activists and attorneys where he defended what his sister called the indefensible. She didn’t much care for what he was selling, and most of their attempts at conversation ended in arguments. Now they talked only on birthdays and holidays, and it was the fault of his burgeoning career. That and the fact that now she was fucking her boss.

  With his head done up in a bonnet of foamy shampoo, Richard thought of who might play him in the motion picture, alternately dismissing Bruce Willis (too old) and Kevin Bacon (too skinny) before pausing to consider Kiefer Sutherland. A definite possibility. He was lathering up for his morning shave when the telephone rang.

  “I’ve managed to wake up one of those back-bencher congressmen you’re so fond of yelling at to be your sparring partner,” Toni White said, her Australian accent far stronger than Richard remembered. On the other end of the line, he heard a crunch that registered as celery stick.

  “You’re in early for a holiday,” Richard said. “I thought most Australians couldn’t resist the opportunity to hoist a few.”

  “Up late, actually. I took a twenty-four-hour shift. Lots of people on vacation, and since I wasn’t going home, I volunteered. I don’t have to be here today, so I’m hoping you’ll do me the professional courtesy of keeping the theatrics on ice and give me some serious debate this afternoon.” She produced almost all of the higher-profile dayparts that originated from the Washington bureau. Richard wasn’t really surprised that she would be working on a holiday.

  “I’m all about serious,” Richard answered, then missed about half of Toni’s reply as he wiped stray peaks of shaving foam from the mouthpiece.

  “No one who saw you yesterday thinks that. You’ve got to stay on message. Keep to facts, keep it tight, nothing longer than twenty seconds.”

  “So you’re just calling to make sure I’m up, on my way down, that sort of thing. You do realize it’s only ten o’clock? My call time is two p.m.”

  “Actually, I’m making sure you’re at the top of your game. A friend of mine is going to be here this morning. Scouting for new talent.”

  “America’s news channel gearing up for another line of layoffs?”

  “Richard,” Toni White said in a tone that reminded him of an exasperated high school teacher. “He’s coming to look at you. An anchor job, news at six and eleven. A small-town gig.”

  “I’m not a news guy or a small-town guy. I’m all opinion. If he’s coming to look at me, they must be pretty desperate.”

  “Don’t big-time me. I sent him a tape. Some tapes. A bunch of people, and you were on there, and you’re the guy they like. They’re looking to replace the news-and-comment guy with a brilliant curmudgeon. ‘Brilliant and young.’ His words, not mine.”

  “I have plenty of opinions,” Richard said, “but I didn’t know anyone did commentaries anymore.”

  Toni laughed. “They don’t. No one outside of Paul Harvey, anyway. Like I said, this is a distinctly small-town operation. Small-town, small-time. You get the commentary, one minute, once a week, at the end of the Thursday-night news. But there is a catch.”

  “There would have to be. The opinions in this commentary do not necessarily represent those of the management of W-so-and-so TV,” Richard said in his best faux-announcer’s voice. “What happened to the last guy?”

  “The last guy has been there for eighteen years. He’s on his way out,” Toni said.

  “Retirement?”

  “Lung cancer. Last of the hard-drinking, hard-smoking news guys. Won an Emmy for his reports from Cambodia. Spent time in Lebanon. He was there when the barracks blew up. He’s seen some shit.” Richard heard the hint of admiration in her voice, wondered if he could ever live up to those standards. Before he could ask another question, Toni spoke up. “Look. He’s on his way out, but he’s still working. He can hand-hold you through the breaking-in period. You’d get to co-anchor with him for three months, work together on a series about his treatment, advances in medical science. Death, the final frontier.”

  “So what do I need to do?” Richard pictured animated graphics with Toni’s last words floating in, DEATH spelled out in yellow on the chyron.

  Toni said, “Today, you need to show up early, do a little gripping and grinning with the headhunter, and look like a guy who’s not out of his depth with hard news.”

  “That’s it? I don’t need to solve the crisis in the Middle East?”

  “Nope. Just wear a serious suit, and when the congressman yells at you, don’t stoop to his level. Come down early, and I’ll introduce you, pump you up a bit.”

  “Why the break to me? I’m not at all qualified for this.”

  Toni tsk-tsked. “Maybe, just maybe, in the twenty-two years I’ve worked in news, I’ve learned how to spot someone who has a feel for this shit. Someone who has a feel for the people.” Richard did the math. He’d figured Toni to be in her late thirties, but twenty-two years in the business probably put her closer to forty-five.

  “I really don’t have a feel for people. In fact, I generally don’t like them. Well, most of them, anyway.”

  “Which is why you’d be a great small-town newsman. You’d have to learn to treat them with respect. Give them dignity in a way that some kid who wants to make it to New York would never bother with.”

  “That’s a lot of faith,” Richard said before asking, “Just where is this dream job?”

  “Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.”

  The foothills of the Poconos, dead coal towns. Small cities with great granite buildings downtown, their facades chiseled with the names of banks that no longer existed, furniture and department stores that had long been bankrupted by the national chains. Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, they were all that way. That was all Richard knew. Pennsylvania was probably the worst. Wilkes-Barre, where they lopped the tops off mountains and blasted them hollow and carted away the rock and, when they were finished, left the trucks and the rail cars and the front-end loaders to rust at the bottom of an empty pit. That had been thirty years ago, but, to a man, everyone there was convinced that the mines would reopen, that someone could find the money, the ways around the blasting laws and the storm-water regulations. They could get those towns moving again. They could not fathom that the land might be like the people, ruined and empty.

  Still, being a local celebrity there didn’t seem like such a bad life—free beers from the bartender at the VFW or the American Legion, throwing out the first p
itch at a minor-league baseball game, riding in a vintage Cadillac in parades at St. Patrick’s Day, stuffing himself with sausages and pierogies at the annual Saint Mary’s Slavic-American picnic. Cadence’s father had grown up in that area, Luzerne County, and the only time Cadence had taken Richard home to visit, Curtis Willeford spent the afternoon sitting in an old Barcalounger he had moved onto the front porch, throwing crabapples out onto the reddish macadam of the highway and rewarding himself with a stiff pull off a pony bottle of Rolling Rock each time a car ran over one of them. Curtis Willeford thought the mines were coming back too.

  Richard made careful work of choosing a tie for today’s television appearance; under the overhead lighting sometimes even the most luxuriant red silk looked flat, something out of J. C. Penney’s. Anything garish became a costume, an affectation. It took him five minutes of scrolling through his tie rack before he settled on an egg-yolk yellow tie with woven burgundy pin dots, a bit of color to pop against the background of his navy chalk-stripe suit. The tie had been a gift from his nephew, and Richard extracted a notepad from his suit jacket and wrote a reminder, another temporary resolution: Call G and wish him happy New Year.

  At least he was making progress. For the first time in seven or eight years, Richard would not spend New Year’s Day recounting the half-baked resolutions of the night before. His days as a smoker were years past, yet his morning wasn’t ninety minutes old before he broke a New Year’s resolution—to get more exercise—and decided to plunge into a cab for the crosstown trip to the television studios. He knew the medical and anecdotal reasons that he needed to spend some time patrolling his neighborhood on foot, lingering in the natural foods aisle as much as he did at happy hours, trying one of those brunches with Gospel music on Sunday mornings or lurking among the Impressionists at the National Gallery on Sunday afternoons; all in all, he ought to try to get out more, avoid what faced him, avoid the hard truths he was starting to see in the mirror, stay away from his empty apartment, his empty bed.

  He had seen every random event a big city had to offer—a trio of street fights, a bank robbery, a hit-and-run car wreck—and had learned to be attuned to the city’s mild ejaculations of violence, the fender benders between cabdrivers screaming heavily accented profanities that morphed into comical shoving matches (the Hindustani man he’d seen pounding on a stoned Rastaman, shouting, I am looking pissed!), bicycle messengers who serpentined the wrong way through traffic, the occasional liquor-store robbery or purse snatcher who tore down Eighteenth Street in the midafternoon rush of the luncheon crowd. He’d even witnessed the beginning of a riot, a lifetime ago, watched it start in the streets and then watched the rest of it on Eyewitness News at 6 and again on Eyewitness News at 11.

  But he was not prepared for what greeted him on New Year’s morning, the streets of his sometimes overly festive neighborhood littered with broken beer bottles and empty plastic cups, all smothering in a stench he could not place until he stepped over a huge pile of curbside vomit baking in the lukewarm January sun, and the correlation came to him: New Orleans, the French Quarter in the false dawn light of a Sunday, just as foul and deserted. He headed down his small street, then right on Eighteenth and south a block to the corner of Florida Avenue. He was waiting to hail a taxi when he wandered into another of these random scenes, a drunk staggering out of the corner bodega, followed by the white-aproned owner, wielding a straw broom.

  That’s when the drunk excused himself from the scene, setting down an unopened pint of Velikov, the cheapest available vodka, and raised his hands, wiping them on his pants, Pilate erasing his troubles, and backed away in surrender. This drunk still had enough firepower for his addled mind to know that somehow four-dollar vodka just wasn’t worth all this trouble, getting beaten for it here and probably again at the mission dinner on Fourteenth Street and again later as he shuffled through the line of the shelter at Third and D Streets.

  The drunk said only, “Fuck you, Chico,” before the owner headed back into the store, then reemerged carrying an abruptly shortened Louisville Slugger. He removed his apron, taking the time to fold it in quarters before picking up the bat and waving it around, shouting, “It’s on, it’s on!”

  The drunk disappeared into the alley behind a long-abandoned auto-parts store, and the bodega owner pulled his apron overhead, tied it neatly back into place, and swiped his hands together as if brushing off dried mud. He picked up the broom again and waved as Richard climbed into the only cab around.

  14

  AFTER JUST five hours of a spasmodic, champagne-addled sleep, Mary Beth’s optimism for the New Year was a remnant of the night before, replaced by the usual morning-after remorse. The empty feeling had to be a result of the drinks, the drinks her excuse for getting carried away in the imperfect moment of that midnight kiss. Her first waking thought of the New Year: Go home.

  She stretched in the tub, then tried to work the kinks out of her neck. She moved back to the bedroom and reached for the light nearest her bedside table, and as Mike shielded his forehead with a spare pillow, Mary Beth found herself making a quick phone call to check on Gabriel.

  The answer came after five rings, a muffled and bleary, “Hello?”

  “Sarah? It’s me. Just calling to say happy New Year.”

  “MB?” Sarah’s voice sounded scratchy, heavy with sleep. “Yeah, you too. Happy New Year. Fuck. What time is it?”

  “About ten o’clock your time. How’s Gabriel? Did he behave last night?” Mary Beth pictured Sarah padding down the long hallway nearest Mike’s bedroom, headed for the guest room to check on Gabriel.

  “The kid was most excellent. Seriously, he’s been great. We threw a junior version of a New Year’s Eve party, complete with pizza and sparkling cider. Then we watched some movie about a boy who builds a robot dog. In bed by ten o’clock. At least, he was. Wish I could say the same.”

  “That movie has been in heavy rotation for a while. Sorry about that.”

  Sarah yawned. “It’s fine. I had a few people over. We dug it. It makes sense on so many levels, like there’s something there for the kids and for the parents too. Though it probably would be better if you were high.”

  Mary Beth found Sarah’s laughter alarming. This sense of responsibility revealed itself in surprising ways; since Gabriel’s birth, Mary Beth had come to realize that it had been there all along. Her feelings were inconsistent, since she’d sat through Fantasia and Fantastic Voyage and even 101 Dalmatians under the influence, but that was years ago, when she was a high school student worried about getting caught. She hadn’t even seen weed in fifteen years, knew that Sarah and her friends probably didn’t even call it weed anymore. She wasn’t clued in on the vocabulary, and she took pride in that. She was as aware of the changes in her attitudes as she was of the changes in her body, even though she noticed them slowly, as if she were translating secrets from some ancient text.

  “MB? Do you want to talk to Gabe?” Sarah asked.

  “Sorry. I kind of drifted there for a minute. It’s always Gabriel. Never Gabe. But don’t bother him. Just say that I love him and that I’ll be home tonight.”

  “Are you going to need someone to meet you at the airport?”

  Mary Beth gripped a ballpoint pen, tapping it on the notepad next to the phone. “I’ll grab a cab. You’ve already done enough.”

  With the phone safely back in its cradle, Mary Beth thought it might have been a mistake not to tell Sarah of her early arrival. She’d already made the decision to march in there straight from the airport. She couldn’t help but fear that her child had been neglected, hadn’t been properly supervised, all weekend; from the moment she awoke in the hotel bathtub, she’d found herself morose and sluggish, the stink of cigarettes still in her hair and the accumulation of last night’s alcohol muddying her thoughts, but the pictures of Gabriel she conjured were crystal clear: her child playing with matches in Mike’s kitchen, her child being coaxed into a waiting van, her child—unwashed, no shirt—si
tting amid a pile of broken glass.

  Irrational, she knew. But she was changing her plans for her son, and she did not expect Mike Renfro or Sarah or anyone who did not have a child of their own to understand her need to hurry home. Gabriel would be happy, or happier, and that was all that was important. She pictured him on the floor of Mike’s den, enthralled with his Christmas toys; he had the typical six-year-old’s fascination with all forms of motorized transportation—passenger cars, over-the-road trucks, construction equipment, jumbo-jet aircraft. Gabriel collected these vehicles in miniature, carrying them from Mary Beth’s apartment to Mike Renfro’s house and all destinations in between in a blue plastic case he referred to, aping Mike, as his attaché.

  Mary Beth hoped she might have time to fetch Gabriel a souvenir on the way home, another model plane or even a miniature Utah license plate that spelled out his first name. He owned seventeen of the fifty states now.

  Mike raised himself to his elbows and asked, “How are things at the old homestead?”

  “She was still in bed, dammit. Who knows what that kid is getting into. He hasn’t slept past seven a.m. in his life. Could have burned the house down by now.”

  Mike reached for Mary Beth’s nearest shoulder before he said, “He’s probably sitting in the game room watching Bugs Bunny.”

  “I don’t know. I clearly woke her up.”

  “Last night was New Year’s Eve.”