Everybody bellowed it out:
Grinning, winking, Ray Jones side-talked the mike:
Everybody:
Ray Jones:
There ain’t nothin else to do—
Everybody, including (to her utter astonishment) Sara:
Cheering, rousing, standing ovation. Openmouthed, amazed, Sara turned to stare at Yosemite Sam, and he grinned at her and winked.
9
Dear Jack,
Herewith, a preliminary report and a suggested approach:
The exhilaration of finding oneself in the very heart of the American ethos is hard to describe. Despite the complications and sophistication of 200 years of history, Americans are still essentially the same rugged, simple people who first braved the unknown to carve a civilization from this new continent’s wilderness. The process of taming that wild and beautiful land continues, here in Branson, Missouri, among these rugged rocks and sandy scrubs, where the eternal verities of family, honesty, and valor now unexpectedly find themselves confronted by many of our postmodern ills: murder, rape, dark passions, and a complex, cynical, uncaring legal system.
Branson is country-western star Ray Jones’s spiritual home, as exciting as Atlantic City, as clean as Disneyland, as fresh and new as wet paint. And these people are Ray Jones’s people, honest, simple, slow to anger or judgment. In this confrontation between Ray Jones and the citizens of his soul, the presence of the world’s press, eager for a kind of meaning they can understand, seems almost irrelevant.
Jack Ingersoll showed the fax to his boss, Hiram Farley. “I think I’d better go down there,” he said.
“Go now,” Farley said.
10
Upon sending her initial fax to New York, the morning after attending the Ray Jones show — she’d actually written it last night but still thought it a good, evocative first draft this morning, and so sent it — Sara decided to do some legwork, which actually meant carwork, which meant that awful traffic outside. But there was no way to avoid it; Sara joined the hordes searching for the world’s cheapest pancakes, struggled through them at last, and pointed the nose of the trusty rental east.
Forsyth seemed weird at first, until Sara realized that what made it so odd, after Branson, was its normality. This is what small towns actually look like — sleepy, quiet, a bit dusty. Low buildings flanking wide empty streets. Lots of cars and pickup trucks parked at the curbs, but little traffic moving.
The county courthouse was a neat two-story building, modern, beige, with unnecessary horizontal gray stripes to show an architect had been around, the whole surrounded by trim lawn and plantings. The rear facade featured a tall oval-topped two-story window surmounted by a functioning clock, and the front facade consisted of some sort of Mayan arched entrance, plus a bit of grammatic confusion: Taney County Courthouse it said over the door, but in larger letters above that were the words TANEY COUNTY COURT HOUSE. So apparently, there were two factions in Taney County: those who thought courthouse was one word and those who thought court house were two words, and both factions, this being a democracy, had been satisfied.
Sara wandered for a while in the neat fluorescent interior of the building, unchallenged. It was almost empty, particularly upstairs, where the courtroom waited, untenanted and unlocked. Sara took a few pictures of the simple bare space with its fuzzy blue-seated wooden armchairs, long dark brown attorneys’ table, Missouri state seal like a huge bronze Roman coin over the judge’s bench, gaudier Taney County seal on the side wall, four rows of spectators’ pews in dark wood, and the drooped flags of both nation and state standing upright to flank the banc like a pair of colorful lances.
Downstairs again, Sara opened doors and asked questions of the few but friendly clerks she encountered until she reached the office suite of prosecutor Buford Delray, whose friendly secretary smiled with real regret as she said, “I’m sorry, but Mr. Delray’s awfully busy right now.”
“I realize, with the trial coming up,” Sara agreed, “but surely he can spare just a few minutes for the press.”
“As a matter of fact,” the secretary said, her smile now bubbling with excited pride, “Mr. Delray’s meeting right at this moment with a reporter from The Economist. That’s an English magazine, you know.”
“I know,” Sara said. It surprised her that The Economist would be here in Taney County this soon. What would be their angle on a story like this? “I could wait,” she offered.
“You could, I suppose,” the secretary said, sounding doubtful. “With jury selection tomorrow, you know, there are many demands on Mr. Delray’s time.”
“I’m sure there are.”
“It all depends, I suppose, how long the other gentleman is in there.”
How long could The Economist legman talk to a rural Missouri prosecutor?“ I’ll wait,” Sara decided, and sat in the only available chair.
“Up to you,” the secretary said. She showed Sara one last smile, then turned back to her typing, of which she had an unending supply.
Sara waited. She waited for thirty-five minutes, with increasing impatience and disbelief, and then at last the inner door opened and out walked Louis B. Urbiton.
Louis B. Urbiton! The oldest and drunkest of the Down Under Trio!
The Economist! Louis B. Urbiton of The Economist! Why, that snake in the grass! Waiting thirty-five minutes for Louis B. Urbiton and some Weekly Galaxy scheme! Steam curled from Sara’s ears. Her split ends resplit.
Behind Louis came a hearty butterball in his mid-forties, a round-bodied, roundheaded, well-packed man with a politician’s smile and big open politician gestures and shiny beads of politician perspiration on his gleaming high forehead. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Fernit-Branca,” he was saying to Louis, patting the horrid man on his horrid shoulder. “Dew drop in anytime.”
“Than kew,” Louis responded, with a dignified nod. He gave the secretary an equally dignified but somehow more chummy nod, then laid upon Sara a blank, bland stare and departed.
Blow his cover? Blow that pompous ass — both of these pompous asses — right out of the water? “How would you like to know, Mr. Prosecuting Attorney, that you just spent the last hour with a famously drunken Australian — not even English, Mr. Prosecuting Attorney, as anyone with the slightest sophistication would have realized at once — famously false reporter for the Weekly Galaxy?”
He wouldn’t like to know it. It would be bad for Louis B., of course, but it would also be bad for Buford Delray’s self-esteem, and that would be bad for the person who’d blown the whistle/cover/them out of the water. One of the first things every professional reporter learns is that killing the messenger is the rule in this life, not the exception.
So there was nothing to be done about Louis, at least not now and not directly. There would be nothing gained, unfortunately, were she to stand as tall as one can possibly stand in flats, point the forefinger admonitory, and cry out, “J’accuse!” No; to admit even knowing a Weekly Galaxy reporter would open a whole nother can of worms, wouldn’t it? It would.