Deadline (12 page)

Yes, he’d stay here a few minutes more. If for no other reason, he knew the world awaiting him outside was harsher and a good deal less hopeful than this one. And he also knew this unexpected “ring of truth” feeling that had descended on him the last two hours would abruptly disappear when tomorrow, Monday, he reentered what was for him the real world.

CHAPTER SIX

J
ake Woods pulled up to his favorite row of parking meters on Morrison, two blocks from the front door of the
Tribune.
He hadn’t been here since a week ago Friday. It was now the eighth day since the accident.

He popped in six quarters, buying himself three hours. He could pay for all day parking at one of the drive in structures, but enjoyed this mandatory break from his desk every three hours. The fresh air and sights and sounds invigorated him, rewarding him with fresh perspective. Sometimes he moved the car a space or two, but if no space was available he’d leave it where it was. The parking patrol knew his car and rarely enforced the “new space” rule as long as he kept the meter fed.

Jake walked pensively to the old brownish marble archway defining the front door of the
Tribune
, stepping gingerly because of his sore back, neck, and midsection. Much as he wanted to bury himself in his work once again, he dreaded this day. He hated special attention, and above all he hated pity. He prepared himself for sympathetic looks and understanding nods.

Jake took a deep breath and walked in the door. The first eyes to meet him were Joe’s. Loud mouthed, cocky Joe, the security guard, who was also friendly Joe, proud to work at the
Tribune
, proud to call Jake by his first name.

“Hello, Mr. Woods,” Joe said in a kind and respectful voice, totally unlike his real one.

Here we go.
“Hi, Joe. What’s up?”

Jake didn’t want an answer, and Joe didn’t offer one. He pulled his security pass out of his front right pants pocket and clipped it to his shirt pocket. Only visitors had to wear passes until three years ago, but after a series of threatening incidents everyone had to now, still another concession to the social deterioration of a city once considered safe and honest. The face on the pass was three years younger and a lot less worn than the face Jake wore today.

Elaine, the receptionist, caught his eye and said, “Good to have you back, Jake.” She hesitated, then added, “I’m so sorry about your friends.”

“Yeah, me too,” Jake said, with a bitter edge that cut the air like a scalpel. Elaine bit her lip, wishing she’d said the right thing. She didn’t realize there was no right thing to say to Jake Woods this moment.

Jake walked the thirty feet to the elevator, people stepping out of his way as if he were a leper.
It’s like the parting of the Red Sea in that Cecil B. DeMille movie.
It bothered him when people spoke to him and it bothered him when they didn’t.

Two other reporters waited outside the elevator. Doug Jarmer from sports, the other guy a business reporter. Jake couldn’t remember his name and didn’t care to try. Back in the old days, before the
Tribune
bought out the
Herald
, he knew every-body. But when the
Herald
reporters got assimilated, Jake gave up. He knew most of the faces, and from reading bylines, a lot of the names. He just didn’t bother trying to match them up any more. The larger newspaper permitted a selective anonymity that suited Jake.

Mr. Business was the first to talk. “Jake. How are your friends’ families?”

“They’re fine,” Jake said, lying. He knew how stupid it sounded, so he added, “Obviously it’s tough on them. But they’ll make it.”

“How ’bout you? I guess you got beat up pretty bad, huh?”

“Just some cuts and bruises. I’m fine.”

Why should I be fine, when Doc and Finney are dead?
It made him think of Vietnam.

The elevator ride, usually quick, was interminable.

When they reached the third floor, the others stepped out quickly. Jake emerged slowly, scanning and soaking in the closest thing to home he’d had the last few years. The newsroom.

The excited buzz of this place at once comforted and exhilarated him. It burst with activity and motion, some serious and urgent, some casual and playful, all weaving together into an unequaled rhythm. Paper dominated the landscape and scented the air. Not just newspaper, but notepads, fax paper, copy paper, magazines, letters, brown wrapping paper, manila envelopes, small paper packages. Pieces of paper thumbtacked to corkboard, taped to computers, hung on walls. Blue, green, red, and gold paper desperately trying to get attention by their contrast to the ubiquitous white. Yellow phone books, Rosetta Stones unlocking the outside world, punctuated the horizon. It was a world of words and ideas and contacts and deadlines and production and influence and impact. It was Jake’s world. He was glad to be back. He had only to get through this day, he thought, and things would be normal again.

Well over a hundred low-partitioned cubicles were linked together, cookie cutter workspaces that took on individualized looks by various knickknacks, photos and degrees of disorder. Over three hundred reporters shared the newsroom, many occupying the same desk on different shifts or different days. Some, like Jake, commanded sole ownership of their work spaces. To the uninitiated the newsroom was a hopeless maze. You had to take careful bearings to make it back to where you started. To Jake it was as familiar as the home he grew up in.

He walked past the hallway leading to the main editorial offices, which provided the only real privacy on the floor. Most reporters were surrounded with people sitting less than six feet to their right and left, four feet directly across from them, and seven feet behind them, across the aisle. As he walked through the maze to his own desk, he passed Seth Harper, a columnist holed up in what was called a private cubicle. “Private” was relative. It wasn’t a separate office like some of the editors had, just a self-contained space enclosed on three sides, with partitions rising three feet above the desktop, rather than eighteen inches, and adjacent to but not buried in the main partition maze. People could see Harper’s back side, but he could pretend it was private, and it was easier to ignore the hum of the office. Jake smiled as he noted the green foam ear plugs hanging out Seth’s ears, reminiscent of the neck plugs in Frankenstein’s monster, a desperate tactic Jake rarely used. Deadline loomed, and Harper was trying to shut out the world. It was a pressure Jake knew well.

The
Trib
awarded Jake his own cubicle five years ago, but after six weeks he gave it up and asked to go back to the ordered chaos of the central newsroom. He found he played off the stimulation around him, drawing energy from it. He craved the action, the forward motion creating the wake that pulled him along when he needed it. Sitting out there in the center of breaking stories, Jake always knew what was hot, what was happening, what would be the lead stories in the evening
Tribune
and on the evening news. It gave him an edge over the more reclusive and elite columnists, including Harper, who could easily lose touch.

He paused a moment, bracing himself to make the left turn into the aisle leading to his desk. It was so familiar to him, perfectly etched in his mind’s eye. Facing him from the other side of the partition would be Jerry, the human thesaurus, who always knew just the right word Jake groped for. To Jake’s right would be Sandy, her terminal within arm’s reach, inviting him to fool with the adjustments on the back, just to freak her out and make her think she’d lost data. Sandy was a gem, a perpetual source of helpful information. One of his thickest files was labeled, “Column Ideas from Sandy.”

He stepped out around the corner. Jerry saw him first, his eyes immediately connecting with Sandy’s, whose back was to Jake. She turned around tentatively. Jake knew they’d been talking about him, waiting for him, and he hated it. He decided to set the tone before he lost control to a wave of sentimentality.

“Okay, reporters number 183 and 197, columnist number 3 is back, and there’ll be no more goofing off.” Jerry stood and leaned over the partition, which came to his waist, and reached out his hand to Jake.

Sandy rose, hesitated, then hugged him. “Welcome back, Jake. We really missed you.”

“Yeah, well it’s good to be back. I was afraid they were going to get desperate and ask Jerry to write my columns for me.”

“At least they’d be spelled right,” Jerry came back, relieved Jake was his old self, which is exactly what Jake wanted them to think. Sandy knew better, in the way women do.

“Guess I better dive in. Don’t let me distract you guys.” Jake looked at Sandy out of the corner of his eye and saw her teary eyes. He turned away.

Jake surveyed his desk. His in-box overflowed. He leafed through dozens of handwritten personal notes mixed in with the standard fare of memos and photocopies and smelly faxes. The rest of his desktop had been cleaned and organized. He’d left it an archaeological dig, with older artifacts buried deep and younger near the top layers. The order was Sandy’s work, he knew. She did this for him every once in a while, knowing to stay clear of the vital area closest to his terminal, where he knew just which note on what color and size paper buried ten inches down the pile was what he needed, unless someone ruined the arrangement by cleaning it up.

Jake gazed at the monitor, already turned on, the green cursor blinking at him, welcoming him home. He typed in his six-letter handle, JHWOOD, and immediately got the “Messages Pending:” notation, followed by a short delay and the number 64. Jake groaned. Usually he’d have six or seven of these E-mail interoffice memos that had become so popular between reporters and editors the last few years. And why not? They couldn’t be lost, copied incorrectly, or picked up by the wrong person, as paper messages left on a desk invariably were. Jake vividly recounted that infamous pre-E-mail message to call the governor’s office immediately if he wanted a hot story, a message he bumped into five days after someone had left it on his desk, somewhere down in the bronze age layer. E-mail had another benefit reporters loved—it was easier to send your editor a message without having to wait for him to get off the phone, or having to look him in the eye. Especially if you were asking for some time off.

Six desks over and one aisle across perched Hector, with his three radio scanners, eavesdropping for breaking news. His goal was to get a reporter to the scene of the crime before the police got there, and sometimes he succeeded. The scanners squawked incessantly, and to an outsider it seemed impossible that anyone within fifty feet of Hector could get anything done. But in the newsroom you learned to filter the noise and pick out the sounds that could help you. While reporters occasionally barked at Hector to turn down the volume, once or twice a day they’d crowd around him to hear a breaking story, and he always reminded them if he hadn’t been tuned in, the whole newsroom would be in the dark.

A row beyond Hector, still in Jake’s standard landscape, sat two of his favorite studies in contrast—Art, the classical music critic, and Kurt, the rock and pop music critic. Each had a music lover’s dream job, going to concerts for free and getting paid for it, meeting the artists back stage. Every day they unwrapped an assortment of the latest releases from studios, then plugged in their headphones and listened, sometimes for hours. Art sported one of the classiest suits in the newsroom, and still wore a tie every day without failure, as did a third of the reporters and most of the editors, even though as of five years ago the
Trib
dress code no longer required it. (Jake regarded that decree on the level of the Emancipation Proclamation and hadn’t worn a tie since except on big-name-in-their-office interview days.) Art’s workspace was neat and tidy and ordered, creatively enhanced, like a Beethoven concerto. Kurt, his long hair held together in a pony tail reaching half way down his back, wore worn Adidas, faded jeans, and T-shirts plugging old rock band tours. Jake smiled as he watched Art the connoisseur swaying melodically to his music, while Kurt drummed his hands on the desk, mouthing out words and gyrating to the beat.

“Woods!” The familiar voice boomed from the corner office fifty feet away. “Get in here!”

Winston. He’d seen him once in the hospital, but that didn’t count because it wasn’t Winston to be hanging about in a hospital. Some body-snatching alien posed as Winston, Jake told himself.
This
was Winston, perpetually gruff, bellowing, harried and hurried, a walking ulcer. In short, an editor. It felt good to be treated normally.
I should have known I could count on Winston
.

As he walked what they called the “gauntlet” between his desk and Winston’s office, he passed by a half dozen reporters on both sides, catching a number of nods, smiles, pensive looks, and a few tears. There were some “Good to see you’s” and “Welcome back, Jake’s.”

Good people. They mean well.
He felt himself losing his edge of defensiveness.

Jake opened the door to see Winston holding a big box that originally contained ten reams of paper. “Woods, this is yours. I want it out of my office.”

Jake didn’t get it, even when Winston shoved the box at him.

“It’s your fan mail. Don’t let it go to your head. It’s not going to get you a raise either. And read it on your own time.”

“Thanks, Winston. Jealous because you don’t get any mail?”

Winston looked at him sternly, waving him off as if to say “I don’t have time for this. I’m an editor; I’ve got dozens of reporters whose messes I have to clean up.”

As Jake, box in hand, turned around to walk out Winston said, “Look, this is just a catch up day for you. Don’t work too hard. Maybe you should just read your mail.”

“I know what you meant, Winston. And I was going to read my mail anyway.”

Winston moved his hand as if swatting a pesky fly. “Get out.”

Jake walked out to the sea of eyes. You were always on display when you emerged from Winston’s office. Several smiled, knowing what was in the box. Jake announced, “Look, if anybody sent cookies, I’ll share them, okay?” There was a ripple of laughter, too much laughter, Jake thought.

Back at his desk he opened the Fed-X and overnight mail and UPS shipments first, some of them now over a week old. Back when he was an investigative reporter, if he was out of the office more than a day his editor would open all these, because you never knew when something story-breaking could come in. But the columnist’s life was different. Some of the overnight mail was books, even though he didn’t do book reviews, and cassette tapes of radio programs or lectures or magazines. He could never understand why they were sending them in the first place, much less paying so much to get it to him a few days sooner.