Blown Away

by G. M. Ford

  Nationally, the story had been chewed up and spit out in just under a week. Locally, it had seemed as if the story would surely have had more legs…and it did…for a while. Long enough for the byline to change from Carl Letzo to somebody named Mary Anne Guidry.

  What first caught Corso’s ear was the quality of the writing. How out of the blue it seemed like Carl Letzo’s flinty prose had been replaced by the breathless meanderings of somebody from the society pages, which, in fact, was precisely what had happened, although Corso didn’t know that at the time. All he knew was that he was having so much trouble reading the article, he turned back to the front page to make sure he was reading the same guy, only to find he wasn’t.

  The switch was sufficiently radical and ill conceived as to get Corso’s antennae twitching. He thumbed his way through the remaining collection of news stories. All Mary Anne Guidry. No Carl Letzo.

  After several moments of thought, Corso reached back atop the stack of newsprint at his elbow and began to reread what had apparently been Carl’s last piece on the Nathan Marino story. He read it twice. Wasn’t until he was right down at the end of it on the second pass that he picked it up. A brief mention of the discrepancy regarding the time line for the arrival of the bomb squad and a promise that he’d have more to reveal tomorrow, a promise circumstances had apparently made impossible for Carl to keep.

  Corso levered himself to his feet and stretched. He wondered whether he should leave the news articles on the desk or return them to somebody upstairs. Before he was able to make up his mind, the sound of approaching voices pried the question from his mind. Sounded like Claudia Cantrell and somebody who’d sandpapered his larynx. A third voice entered the chorus as the approaching footsteps rounded the final corner.

  Claudia Cantrell and Carl Letzo hung back along his flanks like pilot fish on a shark, alert for scraps, but keeping well away from the mouth. He was about sixty, going bald slowly but all over; he moved awkwardly, like a man with bad knees. He walked right up to Corso, a foot or so inside the normal space people reserve for themselves. His breath smelled of Certs and stale coffee. The expression in his eyes said nobody’d told him “no” in years. Apparently, introductions were not required.

  “Get your ass out of here,” he said.

  Corso eyed him with amusement. “Just my ass? Does that mean the rest of me can stay?” he asked with mock gravity.

  In the shadows behind the guy, both pilot fish winced.

  “Do you know who I am?” the guy demanded.

  “No, but I’ll bet you’re going to tell me.”

  “I own this newspaper, and I don’t want you here.”

  Corso started to reach for his hip pocket. “I’ve got a valid press credential. Access to the files is generally considered a professional courtesy. I don’t see…”

  The guy cut him off. “Not to you,” he said. “You’re a disgrace to the profession. I know all about you. The New York Times…the lawsuit and all of that.”

  The timbre of Corso’s voice rose. “First off, you don’t know one damn thing about what happened to me in New York. You and everybody else are just talking out of your collective asses.” The guy opened his mouth to speak. Corso poked him in the chest with a long finger. The mouth stayed open in disbelief. “Secondly…” Corso finished, “…the only thing you and the chief of police and the local criminals are accomplishing with your ‘get outta Dodge’ crap is you’re starting to get my attention.”

  The older man closed his mouth and swallowed. Corso kept at him. “Yesterday all I wanted to do was to get back to my boat. As far as I was concerned, this jerkwater town had absolutely nothing to offer in the way of a story. Now I’m starting to wonder. I’m starting to wonder what kind of bone you all are so damned determined to keep buried.” Corso threw an angry hand in the direction of the paper’s archives. “It’s not like any of this stuff is a mystery or anything. It was all over the evening news there for a while. It’s one of those odd stories half the people in the country can recall with a little prodding and”—he stretched the word out—“being warned off so repeatedly just piques my interest, Mr. Dithers…just piques my interest.”

  He would have liked to have gone nose to nose with Corso but found himself a good eight inches short of the task. “Hargrove,” he said in a shaky voice. “My name is Grant Hargrove and don’t you forget it, mister.” The sound of his own voice seemed to revitalize him. He reached out to return the favor…to poke a finger into Corso’s chest, but something in Corso’s steady gaze suggested he think better of it. He hesitated, finger stiff in the dusty air and instead, he took a short step backward before jamming the hand into his pants pocket. “Carl,” he barked. “Show this smart-ass the door.”

  Carl didn’t move. His eyes were the size of saucers as they bounced back and forth between Corso and the older man. When obedience was not immediately forthcoming, Hargrove turned his back to Corso and his attention toward Carl Letzo, whose face fell into a wearied expression of resignation, suggesting this wasn’t the first time Carl had played the role of Hargrove’s whipping boy.

  The air was alive with emotional electricity. It occurred to Corso that he was quite possibly witnessing Carl’s last moments as a reporter for the Edgewater Ledger. Behind Hargrove’s back, he nodded and pointed at the stairs, telling Carl he’d go along peaceably. Making it easy for him.

  “Well?” Hargrove bellowed.

  Carl kept his eyes locked on Corso. “We better go, Mr. Corso,” he said, hoping he’d interpreted Corso’s acquiescent gesture correctly. Hargrove had twisted his gaze back to Corso, so he missed Carl’s sigh of relief as Corso turned to the desk and began to gather his things.

  Hargrove’s confidence was on the rise. “Miss Cantrell…check the clippings. Make sure everything you gave him is there.”

  Corso let the aspersion slide. As he snapped his notebook closed and dropped it in his jacket pocket, Claudia Cantrell came clomping down the last few stairs and did as she was told. Her hands shook as she rifled through the pile of yellowing newsprint. She kept her eyes straight down like a frightened mouse in the shadow of the cat.

  Corso headed for Carl and the stairs. Hargrove couldn’t resist. “Make sure he’s completely off the premises,” he said as they started up. Carl said he would.

  6

  S now was falling, coming straight down, thick and puffy like inside a paperweight. Corso pulled the collar of his coat up around his ears. Carl Letzo rubbed his hands together. His cheeks were red with embarrassment.

  “Thanks for helping me out in there,” he said to Corso.

  Corso felt his discomfort and changed the subject. “You’re a good writer,” he said to Carl. “I just spent most of the past two hours reading your work. Your prose is economical. It’s transparent…just like it’s supposed to be in a reporter. You could write for any paper I’ve ever worked at.”

  Carl Letzo nodded his thanks but kept his eyes averted. “Yeah,” he muttered under his breath. “Yeah, well thanks again.”

  The tinkle of tire chains reminded Corso of sleigh bells. The snow was coming harder now, spilling from the sky as if heaven had sprung a leak. Corso held out his hand, watching the snowflakes land in his palm and slowly turn to water. He shifted his weight as he tried to come up with the right words. “You could…you know…New York really isn’t that far from here. I’d bet you could…”

  A bitter laugh cut him off. “Sure didn’t work out too good for you,” Letzo said.

  This time it was Corso who turned away, looking out at the street through a plume of frozen breath, out where the ceiling had fallen below the tops of the buildings, out where noise of traffic had been muffled by the accumulating snow, where most of the cars had their headlights on in broad daylight as they moved slowly about, poking their noses here and there like blind moles.

  “Hey…sorry,” Carl Letzo said. “I didn’t mean…I…”

  “No problem,” Corso said, wincing at the sound of the phrase.
<
br />   Carl’s shoes squeaked in the freshly fallen snow as he walked around to face Corso again. He shook his head in disgust. “Shows you how screwed up I am right now,” he said. “Somebody does me a favor and I say stuff like that to him.”

  Corso waved him off. “You were right,” he said with a wry grin. “Taking journalism advice from me is kinda like trading cooking tips with Jeffrey Dahmer.”

  They shared a guilty laugh before Carl spoke again. “You’re right too, man. I’ve sunk down about as low as a body can get.” He peered out through the wall of falling snow, as if he were expecting a sail to show on the horizon. “Seems like just the other day it was all so full of promise.” He looked straight up for a moment, allowing the snowflakes to fall on his crimson cheeks. “Fresh out of the university. Engaged to the girl of my dreams. Landed a job on a small daily paper in upstate Pennsylvania.” He lifted his hands in an exaggerated movement, then let them fall to his sides with a slap. “Look out world, here I come,” he intoned with far too little joy.

  “What university?”

  “Penn State.”

  “Hell of a good school.”

  “I had it all worked out in my mind, man. Start out here. Rise in the ranks. Couple more small towns, then on to the major markets. Big time, big city, win the Pulitzer, retire to writing my memoirs on Martha’s Vineyard.” He snapped his fingers, but they made no sound. “All planned out. One, two, three like birds on a wire.”

  “What happened?” Corso asked.

  Carl made a world-weary face. “What happens to people’s lives?” he asked. “They go by. What was it John Lennon said? ‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making plans.’”

  “Something like that.”

  “Seemed like it was just yesterday I walked into that newsroom for the first time.”

  “How long has it been?”

  Carl thought about it. “Thirteen years,” he said after a moment. He heaved a deep sigh. Snow was beginning to collect in his hair.

  “What brought you here to begin with.”

  “My wife…” He stopped himself. “…my ex-wife Nancy. She came from here. Her parents owned McClendon’s Home Store. Her brothers run it now.” He nodded toward the newspaper building. A bitterness crept into his voice. “She’s Hargrove’s niece.” He waved a hand in the air. “It’s all very inbred around here. Everybody’s on the payroll. Everybody knows everybody else’s business.” He looked north toward the lake. “Funny thing is…Nancy and her parents moved away and I’m still stuck here.”

  “Where’d they move to?”

  “Pensacola, Florida.” He looked over at Corso who was bent at the waist brushing the snow from his hair. “Couldn’t take the weather anymore.”

  “What’s she doing in Pensacola?”

  “Going to school.” Carl shook his head in disbelief. “Oceanography.”

  “Divorce is rough,” Corso said. “Never been through one myself, but I used to work with a guy whose first wife died back when they were still in grad school. Few years later, he got remarried, had a coupla kids. House with a picket fence and all that. Everything under control until he gets served with papers…he told me the divorce was way harder to deal with than the death. At least death is final. You may have some issues about what happened, but at least they’re not walking around the same sidewalks you are. They’re not suing you for the kids. He said there was a sense of closure to death that divorce doesn’t have.”

  “We couldn’t have kids,” Carl said. “That was a big part of the trouble between Nancy and me. She really wanted kids.” He flicked a gaze over at Corso as if daring Corso to disagree. “Turns out, I’m shooting blanks. Only thing lower than my current stock with Hargrove is my sperm count.”

  Corso wondered if it was true and decided to change the subject. “How come Hargrove took you off the Marino story?” he asked.

  Carl stamped his feet on the snow-covered sidewalk. “The whole timing thing with the bomb squad. He told me to leave it alone. When I didn’t, he pulled me off the story.” His eyes, which up until that moment had expressed mostly sorrow, were now narrowed in anger. “Had me in the doghouse ever since. He’d have fired me if he could, but we’ve got a professional association…you know…run by the same organization runs the pressman’s union…I’ve got what amounts to tenure…firing me would be a problem, so he’s just going to keep feeding me garbage work until I either move on or die from boredom.”

  “What’s in it for him? Why’s he squashing the story?”

  “One hand washing the other. Nobody wants to look bad around here. Nobody wants to look like a bunch of hicks who can’t take care of their own business.” He looked around, as if making sure he wasn’t going to be overheard. “This is a tightfisted little community,” Carl said. “Lots of older folks, living on fixed incomes. They’re the only ones still here. Younger folk move out as soon as they’re able. Come back and visit on the holidays.” He looked around again. “You don’t want these people getting wind of their public officials failing to provide the kind of services they paid for. That happens, it’ll be back like it was in the nineties…school bond elections failing…sewer levies going down by four-to-one margins. This place damn near shut down.”

  “So…what now?”

  “If I could sell the house, I’d get the hell out of here.” His words came quicker now, as if they were being recited. “I wanted to make it easy for my…for Nancy, so I bought her out of the house. Used my 401(k) money to do it. Now I’m stuck in a dying town with no and I mean no real estate market whatsoever.” His voice rose. “I mean…who in hell is going to move to a place like this? Half the town is for sale. People are taking pennies on the dollar just to get out.”

  Corso shrugged the snow from his shoulders. “You’re a young man. Start over.”

  Carl started a retort but changed his mind. “You’d be the one to know, now wouldn’t you.”

  Corso nodded. “I was just about your age when the whole New York Times thing came tumbling down around my ears. I wasn’t just out of work; I was a pariah. The scourge of the entire newspaper business. I got turned down for a job writing a weekly newsletter for the meat packers’ union. My fiancée packed up and left without so much as a note. I was about to get evicted from my apartment.”

  “What happened?”

  “Some crazy lady who owned a newspaper in Seattle offered me a job. I’d like to say it was the best offer I had at the time, but, truth be told, it was the only offer I had, so I took it, packed up one suitcase of my stuff, trashed the rest, and headed out West.”

  “And now you’re on the cover of People magazine.”

  “I got lucky. We hit a couple of investigative stories right out of the gate.”

  “I need to get lucky.”

  “It’ll come.” Corso said it with more conviction than he felt.

  Carl Letzo noticed the disparity.

  “I gotta go,” he said.

  Corso nodded his understanding. “If Hargrove put you back on the story, where would you start?”

  “Two places,” Carl said without hesitation. “I still want to know what happened in the dispatch office. I want to know where the ten-minute gap came from.”

  “And?”

  “The Marino family. They’ve never said a word.”

  7

  C orso sat on the edge of the bed and removed his frozen shoes. He carried them across the room and spaced them out along the top of the heater…facedown for maximum drying efficiency. This snow kept up and he was going to have to give in and buy himself a pair of those clunky things the locals were clomping around in…men in those hideous moon boots, women in those fringed après siege units.

  He made a move to drape his coat over the back of the chair but changed his mind and crossed to the closet, pulling out a hanger and wiggling it into his jacket, which he then took into the bathroom and hung on the showerhead, allowing the collected snow and ice to melt and run down the drain rather than onto the carpet.<
br />
  As he smiled at his own prissy nature, an image passed before his inner eye, sending him back to his days at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Twenty-three years old, sent out on the road to cover a rock band named NOMAD as they thrashed their way across the South, opening for acts like Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath. Although his memory had divested itself of their names, Corso could vividly recall the casual manner in which they’d trashed and torched nearly everything close at hand, especially hotel rooms. Something about hotel rooms brought out the very worst in those lads.

  As witness to their trail of destruction, Corso had, for the first time, been forced to come to grips with the middle-class nature of his own values. Prior to the tour, he would have described himself as being as rebellious and taciturn as any other young man his age, which was, after all, precisely why the paper had given him the assignment. His two-week encounter with NOMAD had, however, made it plain to him that, regardless of his somewhat backward upbringing, somewhere in his heart he was pure bourgeoisie.

  And it wasn’t about niceties or legalities or respect for other people’s property. In his neck of the woods, such notions, when they weren’t being openly sneered at, were most often simply ignored. No…it was about waste. Where Corso came from, waste was the eighth deadly sin. And not for any highfalutin philosophical reason either but sinful simply because resources of any kind had always proven so terribly difficult to acquire and nearly impossible to retain, that people of Corso’s ilk considered wasting anything to be the zenith of disrespect and to border on insanity.

  To this day, Corso still heard his mother’s harumph of disgust every time he paid $150 for a silk shirt. He recalled how he’d seen her face on the yacht broker’s wall on the day he’d purchased Saltheart. The disapproval in her eyes had punctured his joy like a needle and had diminished the luster of the moment.