He left Dune and got into his car. Stationary, he turned the dial and fished out a college radio station. The song was one of the Stevie Wonder numbers from back when he was called “Little Stevie.” The crackle of an old record like fat in a pan. The instruments made noise first and the singers followed. The tune featured gospel-style call and response. Little Stevie lets go an outrageous howl that sends the piano jumping. The engine turned over and purred. He put the car in reverse and swung it to the left real easy. He started to navigate his way through the parking lot. The call comes like it deserves an answer; the singer pleads for assurances. He edged forward at a slow pace and the gravel went crunch underneath. He pulled into the long line waiting to leave the lot. Shifting the vehicle into neutral, he hopped out and rolled the canvas top down. The interior was flooded with light. He pushed the car forward. The response comes: six women, six women with thighs like hams sing a chorus. Finally at the front of the line, he turned his head left to address the attendant. A lanky boy with pimples and a bowl haircut told him that it was five dollars. He went to his wallet and handed over the first thing that his fingers found, producing an enormous tip. He wanted to congratulate himself for this, for having made this kid’s day. The song slows now, not with an abrupt bang but with one of those old-school Detroit fades. Turning right out of the lot, he gathered speed as he crossed over Glenside. The outdoors was all around him. With few cars on the street he felt alone. Then something timidly pulled out on his right-hand side. His foot just could not find the brake, and then the sound of metal going through itself. He had crushed her.
The road is closed and the cops’ lights blaze brightly. Shrill whistles direct traffic elsewhere. The ticket boy says the man slurred, “Good afternoon,” and the Italian is rabid and gesticulating wildly. He is sweating and looks like a tortured, bleeding child. A helicopter makes awful noise overhead. A man with aviator shades looks down and tells the city how to crawl around the accident. There are so many people crying that it is like a wake. But the woman is newly dead and her body is still warm. Three newspapermen drive up in town cars and all smoke cigarettes in the same deliberate way. And the corner of East Broad and Willow Lawn has now become the city center.
In his office miles away, Harry dreams of making love to his secretary, which he has lately had the pleasure of doing. She peeks her head through the door and raises an eyebrow. She’s too young, and her come-hither gestures are unschooled, sophomoric. But she gently rubs her calf against the door and Harry feels like he is breathing pure air, like everything and everyone outside this room is as dour and sluggish as church. She has long bangs and a porcelain face. Her lips are red and easy. But she hasn’t come here to give him satisfaction. She says in a voice that is mock professional that he should go to the newsroom right away, that there is something coming off the wires that needs to make the 6 o’clock feed.
Harry walks over to the wires and sees what is there. There is one scroll of paper, bright yellow. The ink is applied by a machine that runs back and forth over the paper like a cross-cut saw. The effect is that these stories come in line by line, inadvertently making revelations tortuous, overly long. He sees that there has been a car crash. A man and a woman, and the woman is dead. An idea begins to form but tears start to swell in his eyes like blisters and the water washes the page. It is very sunny outside and he suddenly becomes aware of the immense noise of the tiny newsroom. His neck cranes and he looks toward heaven, but all he sees is a coffee-stained ceiling.
Harry gnaws his fingers, says the name of God, and all at once realizes his dirty, fitful prayers have been answered.
Part IV
Nonsuch
But ere we had sailed a league our shippe grounding, gave us once more libertie to summon them to a parlie. Where we found them all so stranglie amazed with this poore simple assault as they submitted themselves upon anie tearmes to the Presidents mercie: who presentlie put by the heeles 6 or 7 of the chiefe offenders. The rest he seated gallantlie at Powhatan in their Salvage fort, they built and pretilie fortified with poles and barkes of trees sufficient to have defended them from all the Salvages in Virginia, drie houses for lodgings, 300 acres of grounde readie to plant; and no place so strong, so pleasant and delightful in Virginia, for which we called it Nonsuch.
The Thirteenth Floor
by Howard Owen
Monroe Park
Jackson is what you’d call a lackey. He’d been at the paper longer than I had, and he wanted to stay there, which was a problem, because Jackson and I were part of what the new broom apparently meant to sweep clean. We were the Old Guard, and experience wouldn’t get you a cup of coffee around here.
Jackson and I, we’d drunk plenty together, hung out. He’d gone to two of my weddings. But if he had one butt to hang out to dry, and it was mine or his... You get the picture.
I’d been covering the legislature for the last fifteen years. It was a sweet deal, with nobody really watching over me down at the Capitol. More was known than was ever reported. I always thought some of those country boys got themselves elected just so they could come to Richmond and party. And what was said and done at the parties, it was understood, stayed at the parties.
The new broom was being wielded by Hanford. Hanford the Hangman, they called him. Probably still do. He’s a forty-something ex-jarhead and seems to be under the mistaken belief that he stormed Iwo Jima. They’d brought him in from some place where grace is considered a liability. He’s the kind of stiff who’s necessary so the guys at the top, the real money, don’t have to get their hands dirty with firings and demotions and such. He’d been there a month when Jackson called me aside and told me, off the record, that Hanford had informed all the department heads that he wanted them to “work ’em till they drop.”
Maybe Hanford thought I was too old, although he put me on a beat that would wear even a young guy down. Maybe he’s prejudiced against smokers. Or so-called heavy drinkers.
Maybe it was because I flat out refused to slip into our former lieutenant governor’s hospital room and get a damn deathbed story from a poor sap who was dying of AIDS. Who can say?
At any rate, Jackson called me in to tell me there was a reorganization. Night cops. The night police beat.
“I do it to you,” he told me, not quite looking at me with those tired, bloodshot eyes, “or he does it to you, after he fires me.” I appreciated his honesty. And I figured Jackson would probably be gone before me. He made more money. Everybody around that sinking ship knew the bottom line. The publisher’s favorite saying was, “It is what it is,” code for, Shut up and keep rearranging those deck chairs...
So, it was a Friday night. We knew it was Pearl Harbor Day because, in a private e-mail sent to everyone who worked at the paper, from receptionists to pressmen, Hanford reamed out the poor night guy who’d failed to run a story on A1 to that effect.
Around 10:30 I heard, over the cop radio, turned up just loud enough so it didn’t disturb the copy desk watching an NBA game on one of the overhead TVs, that there’d been a shooting at 612 West Franklin.
I stopped playing solitaire on the computer.