Читать книгу Grievances - Mark Ethridge - Страница 10

Walker Burns was waiting for me when I returned from Windrow. “I got a good one for you today, Big Shooter,” he drawled, true to his Texas roots. Walker called all reporters Big Shooter when he was in a good mood, which is to say when news had broken out. “I guarantee you it’s a ‘Holy Shit, Mabel.’”

A “Holy Shit, Mabel” story was, by Walker’s definition, a story good enough that it would theoretically cause a woman to lean over her fence and say to her neighbor, “Holy shit, Mabel, did you see that story in the Charlotte Times today?”

I had intended to bring up the Wallace Sampson story with Walker first thing. I needed time—company time—to go back down and really investigate. I had spent the drive back from Windrow thinking how to get Walker to buy into the idea. Convincing him wasn’t going to be easy. I had a few lingering doubts myself.

Hirtsboro was a long way away, Wallace Sampson had been killed years ago and the only thing we had to go on was a rich guy’s suspicion and a vague promise of help from a local preacher. I had prepared a pretty good argument that, at worst, we could get a feature on an unsolved killing and a rich Yankee’s unlikely quest. In the very best case, I would argue, the Charlotte Times could solve a murder. And a newspaper which published either one could hardly be portrayed as racist. But for now, the Wallace Sampson story pitch would have to wait.

When news breaks out, the newsroom is my favorite place in the world. It is a place where the job changes in an instant, where a plane crash or a press conference or a document hidden in city hall determines what you do that day—and you seldom know in advance what that’s going to be. It’s a place where you get information before anyone else and then get paid to tell everyone. But more than anything, it’s a place of fascinating people—writers, a few of them tortured; photographers, many of them off-the-wall; graphic designers, including the artistically temperamental; and copy editors, stern custodians of the purity of the Mother Tongue, some of them zealots.

As the managing editor, Walker is the ringmaster of our little circus. He has several assistants, but at the end of the day it is Walker who decides what stories will be covered and who will cover them. It is Walker who, as the final editor, ultimately determines how the stories will read when they finally go to press. His desk sits smack in the middle of the newsroom, police scanners on one side, radios to communicate with reporters and photographers in the field on the other, a bank of phone lines in the middle, and, of course, Colonel Sanders. But Walker spends much of his time moving from reporter’s desk to reporter’s desk in the newsroom assigning, cajoling, joking and editing.

“Let’s hear it,” I said to him.

“Last night, a commercial jet on a flight from New York to Charlotte comes in so low at the airport that it hits a telephone pole short of the runway. The pilot pulls up in a hurry, makes a safe landing and doesn’t tell anyone. Just moseys along to the hotel and hopes no one notices.”

“Holy shit!”

“Exactly.”

“How’d we find out?”

“Maintenance guy is getting the plane ready this morning and notices there’s a hole in one of the wings. He happens to bunk with a local flight attendant who came in on the plane. She tells him there was a huge bang on board, that there’s no way the pilot couldn’t have known what happened. The maintenance guy doesn’t fully trust the airline or the FAA. So he calls us. I got Jeffries chasing the airline. Keating in the Washington bureau is thrashing through the bureaucracy at the FAA. Bullock’s working the phones trying to find passengers—one hundred twenty-one of them, plus crew. I need you to find the pole. Take a photographer and get a picture of it. How tall is it? What’s it look like? We got an artist working on a re-creation. I want to know exactly how high that plane was and how far away it was from the end of the runway.”

“Got it.” I hesitated. Bringing up the Sampson case now, even indirectly, had its risks. Approached at the wrong time, when his mind was elsewhere, Walker was likely to shoot down, at least in the short-term, any idea, no matter how good. But I decided to plunge ahead. “Walker, after deadline, I need to talk to you about something.”

“I know. You want a raise.”

“Yeah, but that’s not it. It’s about a story.”

“Fine. Now grab Drake and get going. I need you back by seven o’ clock.”

Within minutes, photographer Fred Drake and I were headed for the airport. Coming from New York, I figured the plane had landed from the north to the south on Runway 36. We parked at a chain link fence a quarter mile off the end of the runway and started walking in a straight line away from the airport through the low brush, counting steps and avoiding broken beer bottles as we went. We found the telephone pole fifteen minutes later, next to an aircraft radio beacon installation. It was shorter than normal, leaning to the side and shattered at the top. Splinters littered the ground and on some of them I could see gray paint. I had taken five hundred twenty-five steps. I figured my stride averaged thirty inches. That meant we were a quarter of a mile from where we’d parked and that the pole was just a half-mile from the end of the runway.

Drake scrambled around the site like a monkey, shooting close-ups of the splinters on the ground; then telephoto shots of the top of the pole; then wide-angle shots of the whole scene, which showed the relationship of the pole to its surroundings. He extracted a tape measure that he used for precise focusing of studio shots, shimmied up the pole to the top and dangled the fully extended tape.

I was imagining a 737 roaring over, its unknowing passengers only a few feet above my ahead with another half mile to go before touchdown, when a voice commanded, “Hold it right there! Hands in the air!”

My first thought was that we were being robbed. There were some tough neighborhoods not far from the Charlotte airport. But I looked up to see a county policeman walking through the brush toward us.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” he demanded.

“We’re from the Times,” I said. “I’m Matt Harper. This is Fred Drake. We’re on a story.”

“You need to get outta here now or I’m going to arrest both your asses.” The officer grabbed me by the elbow. Drake shimmied down the pole, raised his camera and snapped a picture.

Infuriated, the cop charged Drake and grabbed for the camera.

“Hands off the equipment, officer!” Drake yelled, whirling away. The camera flew from his hand, smashed into the concrete slab that supported the airport beacon and popped open, exposing the film in the back.

The cop smirked. “It looks like I don’t need that camera after all.”

I thought of telling him how airports belong to the citizens and not to the government. That as long as we weren’t a danger to aviation, no one should be hassling us because no harm can come from the people simply knowing the facts. But I kept quiet. An argument with a cop over the public’s right to know wasn’t an argument I was likely to win. Accompanied by the officer, Drake and I made our way back to the car. We were back in the newsroom, as instructed, by 7:00 p.m.

Walker Burns sat at a computer keyboard flanked by reporters Ronnie Bullock, Rich Keating and Julie Jeffries, the Times’s newest staffer and the first recruited from a television station. I joined the huddle over Walker’s shoulder. The reporters had typed their notes into the system and Walker was crafting them into a story. The first-edition deadline was looming.

“Was it one hundred twenty-one passengers including crew or one hundred twenty-one passengers plus crew?” he demanded of Jeffries.

She flipped her perfect brown hair from her face, consulted her notes and answered crisply, “One hundred twenty-one total. Five crew and one hundred sixteen other passengers.” With her pouty mouth, bedroom eyes, and gym-honed body, Jeffries was TV-gorgeous. Rumors that she’d been hired on orders from the publisher were certainly plausible. But I had to admit she knew what she was doing.

Walker banged out a few more paragraphs. “What’s the FAA say?”

Keating read him the agency’s boilerplate response and Walker typed it.

“The FAA. What horseshit. Bullock, give me your best quote from a passenger.”

“I got a lady from Rock Hill who says it was as if an occult hand reached down and . . .”

“Cut the shit,” Walker barked. It was a time-honored Charlotte Times tradition that Walker would give you the day off if you could manage to get the phrase “it was as if an occult hand had . . .” into the newspaper. Walker had to pay off so infrequently that reporters had taken to asking questions this way (as in the case of a tornado): “Would you say it was as if an occult hand had reached down and tore through the trailer park?” Sometimes the puzzled interviewee would say, “Yeah, I guess so,” and the quote would be written up and submitted, only to be caught and edited out by Walker.

“Bullock, what I’m looking for is something that says there’s no way the pilot could have not known that he hit something. There’s two great angles here: that the plane hit something close to the ground and that the pilot covered it up.”

“Use this,” said Bullock. “It’s from a Charlotte businessman. He said, “It was a very loud thump and the plane shuddered. The only way anyone wouldn’t have felt it is if they were dead.”

“Perfect,” Walker said. “Harper, how high was he? How much of the pole is left?”

“Twenty feet, nine inches.”

Walker looked up from his computer. “How do you know?”

“We measured it with a tape measure.”

“Excellent. How thick was the pole?”

“The same as a normal telephone pole, I assume.” I regretted saying it as soon as it left my lips. “Actually,” I admitted, “we didn’t check. You didn’t mention you needed to know how thick it was.”

“Pardner, do I have to tell you every question to ask or can you think for yourself? Now get your ass back out there and find out how thick it was. We’ll leave it for the first edition and fill in the hole in the second.” He removed his glasses, cocked his left eyebrow and stared at me. It was a familiar gesture and I grimaced. “Now, hustle.”

I grabbed Drake’s tape, jumped in the staff car and beat it back to the airport. When I got to where we had parked, my heart sank. The area between the road and the pole had been cordoned off with yellow police tape. Where there had been one cop, now there were at least a dozen.

I spotted the officer we had encountered earlier and hoped he wouldn’t hold Drake against me. “Sir, I’m sorry to have to bother you but I need to get back in there just for thirty seconds.”

“You ain’t goin’ nowhere. Feds are here now.”

“I just need to measure the pole.”

He walked away.

They say nothing focuses the attention like an impending execution and maybe that’s what suddenly inspired me. I approached two crew-cut men sitting in a dark sedan with government plates and a seal on the door that said Federal Aviation Administration.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said to the driver. “I’m Matt Harper from the Charlotte Times. I’m hoping you can help me. I need to get into the site. I’m doing a story about what happened.”

“Comment has to come from Washington.” He turned away.

“I don’t need comment,” I persisted. “I just need to get to the pole that got hit.”

“Why?”

“To measure how thick it is.”

“How thick? You mean how tall.”

“No, I mean thick.” I wasn’t going to tell them I already knew how tall and get into a whole controversy about how I’d been trespassing earlier.

For the first time the FAA guys looked interested, as if I had some theory about the incident that they hadn’t thought of, a theory that somehow related to the pole’s thickness. “Why?” he asked.

“To tell you the truth, I really don’t know,” I confessed. “My editor wants it in the story we got going in the morning. He wants to know something, my job is to find it out. You ever have a boss that asks you to do stupid stuff you don’t understand?” I was trust-building. After all, these were government workers and knew about stupid bosses. “You know how for a while you fight it and then you figure out the path of least resistance is best because in the end, you’re gonna end up doing it anyway?”

“Every day,” the driver said.

“Every day,” his colleague agreed.

“That’s what this is.”

“Hop in,” the driver said.

I jumped in the back seat. As we drove through the security perimeter, I gave a thumbs-up to the cop who had threatened to arrest us. When it comes to freedom of information prevailing, I am not exactly a gracious winner.

When I returned to the newsroom, Walker was still at the terminal. The first edition hadn’t yet gone to press but Walker was already hard at work doing a rewrite for the second edition.

“It was right at forty inches around,” I reported.

“What was?” he said without looking up

“The pole.”

“The pole. Oh, good,” he said it as if the information were no longer relevant. “How do you know?”

“I measured it.”

“Good. So that makes it how thick—about a foot?”

“Using sixth grade math, which is as far as I got, yes.”

“About like a normal telephone pole,” Walker concluded.

“That’s what I first said.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t know. There’s a difference between what you think and what you know. Now you know.”

Walker returned to the terminal and I returned to my desk. Sometimes one of the most frustrating parts of being a reporter is waiting on all the people who have to work with your copy. After Walker, there’s the editor for the part of the paper where the story is headed—local or front page. Then it’s off to those sticklers on the copy desk who feel compelled to justify their professional existence by asking irrelevant questions and suggesting inelegant changes. If it’s big enough, the top editor will read the story and maybe even the publisher. All the while, the reporter waits with two things in mind—be available in case there’s a need to answer questions; be vigilant in case idiots fresh from journalism school start trying to butcher the copy or write an off-base headline. Two things are guaranteed: if you stick around, no one will have questions and no one will mess too much with your copy. If you don’t, there will be questions and changes galore.

Walker kept writing and editing. I knew he would have to be done soon because final deadline was approaching. Except for me, Walker, and a front page editor to handle the last edition airplane story rewrite, the rest of the newsroom had headed home. Except for sports. Because sports got the latest deadlines to accommodate news of West Coast night games, it was still fully staffed.

But no one in sports or anywhere else, including me, even looked up when the sound of human suffering, an anguished, frustrated scream, erupted from the middle of that department. “You pathetic mess!”

The sound came from Henry Garrows, one of the greatest sports writers in the history of the newspaper. Garrows attended sporting events but he didn’t write about games. Instead, he wrote about universal human themes like struggle and sacrifice and failure. Sports writing was cerebral for Garrows. It was creative and imaginative. Garrows wrote to make people see and he believed every story could be a masterpiece, every insight or turn of phrase a work of art. And Garrows was every bit the tortured artist.

As deadline approached, Garrows would prepare to create art by placing a liter bottle of diet cola just to the left of the computer screen, donning yellow noise-canceling headphones, belting himself to his chair and draping a large black shroud over the computer terminal and his head to create a light-proof tunnel between his eyes and the screen. Eliminating distraction and creating focus, Garrows believed, was the only way all of his genius could emerge in the short period of writing time mandated by covering sports news for newspapers on deadline.

The system was not foolproof, however, and Garrows, increasingly anguished as deadline closed in, would resort to verbal self-abuse, as in “you pathetic mess” and much worse. It happened frequently enough that no one commented or even looked up anymore. Staffers would, however, look up when the abuse escalated to include the physical. “You piece of worthless shit!” Garrows would howl and then pop himself in the jaw, hard, with his own clenched first. “You total screw-up!” Once, still belted to the chair, he knocked himself over and struggled like a turtle flipped on its back for several minutes before remembering to unlatch himself from the chair.

But tonight the muse was kinder and “you pathetic mess” apparently got the job done. There were no more explosions from Garrows.

Finally, Walker summoned me. “I think we’re ready to roll.” I scanned the story on the screen. It included lots of the detail I had gathered in pretty much the form I had given it to Walker.

“A pilot neglected to notify authorities that his airliner hit a telephone pole a half mile short of a Charlotte airport runway Tuesday night, bringing 121 people 20 feet from near-certain death,” the lead said. It was classic Walker: the story was good; an attempted cover-up was even better.

Walker hit the “send” button on the computer and the story went to the front-page editor on its way to the copy desk and then production. At this stage in the evening, this close to deadline, there would be no questions.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

“I need to talk to you about that other story.”

“Sure,” he said with an enthusiasm that surprised me. It had been a long day for him. I hadn’t come in until afternoon. He started at 9:30 every morning, which meant he was due back at his desk in nine hours. But Walker loved a story. And if you had one, he wanted to know about it. I followed him to the conference room with the Famous Front Pages. Walker slouched in an easy chair with his feet on the coffee table. He leaned his head back against the pillows, balanced a Ticonderoga #2 pencil between his lip and his nose and closed his eyes.

“So watcha got?” he said, straining not to move his upper lip and upset the pencil.

I told him about Bradford Hall showing up in the newsroom, a reminder that the whole situation started with me just doing my normal nightshift job. I explained the basics of the Wallace Sampson story: a thirteen-year-old boy shot in the head with a deer rifle shortly after midnight following minor civil unrest, a murder apparently uninvestigated and unsolved despite widespread suspicions in the black community; a crusade by a wealthy Yankee plantation owner to solve the killing which had aroused opposition in his family.

What I didn’t get into is the personal commitment I had begun to feel. Some think reporters are supposed to be objective, to chronicle the events of life and not get involved in them. There is no question reporters can and must be fair and that a reporter has to take pains to ensure that all sides in a story are conveyed completely and accurately. That is a standard of the profession. But objectivity is impossible. Everyone, journalists included, has an opinion. Everyone is a product of their past.

“Walker,” I said, “the uninvestigated murder and Bradford Hall’s search for justice is the minimum we get. That in itself is a helluva story. And the maximum story we get is that we solve the murder.”

Walker sat upright. The Ticonderoga went flying. “Here’s what we need to do,” he said. “We’ll get all the great investigative reporters and line them up at the South Carolina border and we’ll have them ride high in the saddle through the state from the mountains to the sea. They’ll write stories they flush out as they go. It’ll be like hunters flushing out birds. My God! There’ll be Holy Shit, Mabel story after Holy Shit, Mabel story. Pulitzer Prize after Pulitzer Prize. There’s probably a million Sampson cases down there.”

“Let’s just start with this one.”

Walker sighed. “It is a good story. There’s just one problem. Hirtsboro isn’t in our circulation area. There are a lot of good stories out there. A lot of them. The Middle East. That’s a good story. The ferry crash in the Phillipines. That’s a good story. But we won’t be staffing them either because they are not in our circulation area.”

It was true. The Charlotte Times billed itself as the newspaper that covered the Carolinas from the Appalachians to the Atlantic and at one time that had been the case. But over the years, maintaining outlying circulation proved expensive. Charlotte-area advertisers had been reluctant to pay for distribution to people who would seldom travel to Charlotte to shop in their stores. So distribution to far-flung areas of the Carolinas like Hirtsboro had been cut back, at first restricted to single copy sales from racks and then eliminated entirely.

“Maybe there’s a local angle,” I pressed. “We won’t know unless we investigate.”

“What kind of local angle? Bradford Hall passes through Charlotte on the way to the plantation?”

“Walker, sometimes you have to do a story because it’s a good story. Hirtsboro isn’t in our circulation area but it isn’t in anyone else’s either. If we won’t do it, it won’t get done.”

“I’m not worried about stories in Hirtsboro not getting done. I’m worried about stories not getting done in Charlotte. Matt, in case you hadn’t noticed, we have six empty desks in the newsroom. Six reporting jobs I can’t fill. Why? Because the publisher has decided we’re in a hiring freeze. No hires until ad lineage improves and circulation starts going up again.”

“Uh, maybe we could improve the circulation numbers by not cutting back in places like Hirtsboro.”

Walker laughed. We both knew the newspaper’s business and marketing policies were suicidal. Cut back distribution, reduce the number of reporters and thereby stories in the paper, and then wring your hands wondering why fewer people are reading. Go figure. As managing editor, it was Walker’s job to represent management to the journalists. But Walker was enough of a journalist himself that he couldn’t pretend to defend top management’s decision-making when it was so obviously indefensible.

I felt an advantage and pressed ahead. “Walker, this is the kind of story that gets people reading wherever they live. It’s a Holy Shit, Mabel story. And it’s a story only a newspaper can give them, not TV or radio. It’s why we exist, for God’s sake.”

Walker closed his eyes and sighed. “Matt, it’s a tough time to argue that. I’m gonna have to bite the bullet and tell you something I was hopin’ I wouldn’t have to. The Jeffries hire kinda put us in the hole. The publisher’s makin’ noises about cullin’ the herd even more to make up for it.”

It took me a moment before I understood him. “You talking layoffs? To pay for Jeffries?”

“Pardner, it’s worse than that. You’re on his list.”

I was stunned and hot. “It’s not all about Jeffries, is it? The son of a bitch is gonna cave! He’s gonna sacrifice me because of the heat we’re taking!”

“It hasn’t been a fun time,” Walker admitted.

He was right about that. For the last two weeks the Charlotte Times had been the subject of vocal protests from some in the black community over a minor story I’d uncovered about supervisors in the Department of Public Works using city workers for their private projects like driveway paving and roof repairs. It ran on the front page of the local section along with photos of four of the seven supervisors. The problem came because the pictured supervisors happened to be black and the ones whose photos were not used happened to be white. An unfortunate headline referred to taxpayer money going to a “black hole.”

The Charlotte Times hit the streets, as always, by dawn. The first press conference to denounce the newspaper for racism occurred by noon. The local caucus of black officials—led by a city councilman running for mayor—threatened a subscriber boycott. Members of the black clergy denounced the newspaper from the pulpit, encouraged picketing of the Charlotte Times building and organized a letter-writing campaign. Because few in the public understood that the reporter doesn’t write the headlines or choose the photos that go with a story, the protesters focused their anger not just on the Charlotte Times but on the reporter who had produced the story—me. I’d received more than one hundred letters, some addressed by name, many addressed simply to “The Racist Reporter.” A handful had come to my home. Picketers marched for two days until the publisher agreed to their demands for a meeting and apologized for the newspaper’s unthinking mistake, as he should have.

“Walker, none of that’s my fault,” I argued. “The story was fair. It was the news desk that screwed it up. You know I’m no racist.”

Walker gave me a weak smile. “Of course. All along I’ve been thinking this is probably like a summer Texas thunderstorm—lots of dark clouds and lightning but no rain. And it still has a chance of blowin’ right by. But you have to figure that if the publisher’s lookin’ to make sure the posse has given up the chase, shootin’ you is one way to do it.”

“Walker, you can’t let him get away with that.”

Walker leaned forward. “Pardner, you need to know it ain’t the only ammo he’s got. He did a count of every reporter’s bylines for the last year. You didn’t rank so high. And no blockbusters, either.”

“Of course not. I spend most of my goddam time doing roundups and local inserts. To get a blockbuster, you need a real story.” I thought a moment. “Where’d I rank?”

“They way he tells it, dead last. Matt, here’s the deal. The publisher wants more obits in the paper and I can barely get Bullock to crank out one each night. I got six reporters in the newsroom who come to work every day disguised as empty desks and just as much newshole as ever to fill. The publisher’s lookin’ to cut even more to make up for Jeffries. You’re already on his Most Wanted list because of the public works story. This ain’t the time for you to be checkin’ on some long-shot investigation. Besides, the trail has been dead for years. People forget. People move on.”

“Not in Hirtsboro. In Hirtsboro, nothing changes.”

“Matt, you’re a good journalist. Someday, you might even be a great one. As good as your daddy or your granddaddy. But you’ve never done a big investigation before. I don’t know that you’re ready.”

“Walker, I’ve already done some work. I’ve been down there. If it’s there, I can get it.”

“You don’t seem to appreciate that we’re both already in hot water. You screw up and the publisher’s gonna nail your hide to the wall for sure. And I’m not all that inclined to break a habit I’ve gotten used to in order to save you. It’s called eating. Developed it as a kid.” He slouched back in the chair and rebalanced the Ticonderoga on his upper lip.

“Give me two weeks,” I pleaded. “Two weeks to go down, take a proper sniff. And then I’ll come back, we’ll look at what I’ve got and make a decision then.”

“If we have nothing, we stop.”

“Then, we stop,” I agreed.

He closed his eyes and I knew what he was thinking. Positives: good story, remote chance of a great one. Negatives: old story out of the circulation area, staff shortage, and crap from the publisher. “It’s risky, Matt,” he said. “Your career can’t take a failure.”

“Walker, two weeks.”

“I’ll think about it, Big Shooter.”

“Please. I need this story.”