"How about a skyline, Huck? 'Special Bicentennial Issue,' something like that. What do you think? Too modern?"
"Shoot, no, Hildy. Charity said she'd like to start up a roto-something but she said you'd think it was too modern."
"Rotogravure, and I don't give a hoot about modern, but that's big-city stuff, and it'd be too dang expensive right now. If she had her way she'd have me buying a four-color web."
"Ain't she something?" he said.
"Huck, have you thought about learning to read?" It's not something I would normally have asked, but I was concerned about him, he was such a likable goof. I couldn't see Charity ever hooking up with an illit.
"If I did, then I couldn't ask Miss Charity to read to me, could I?" he asked, reasonably. "Besides, I'm picking up stuff here and there, I watch when she reads. I know a bunch of words now." So maybe there was method in his madness, and love would conquer all.
I left him to his job case and composing stick. Taking a sheet of paper and a pen from my center desk drawer, I dipped the nib in the inkwell and began to write, printing in block letters.
HEAD: Prize-winning Journalist Visits Town
STORY: The streets of New Austin were recently graced by the presence of Miss Brenda Starr, winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for her reporting of the late unpleasantness within the Latitudinarian Church in King City. Miss Starr is employed by the News N--e, a daily paper in that town. Many a young bachelor's head was turned as Miss Starr promenaded Congress Street and dined on the excellent food at Foo's Celestial Peace with this reporter. According to our sources, love might be in the air for the comely young scribe, so to the eligible gents out there, be on the lookout for her return! H.J.
(CHARITY: run this in the "MONSTER")
The "Gila Monster," named for a vicious little reptile that lurks under rocks and presumably hears everything, was my very own gossip column, and by far the most eagerly-awaited part of the paper. Not for little fillers like the above, but for the really nasty tittles so often tattled there. It's true that everyone in a small town knows what everyone else is doing, but they don't all know it at the same time. There is a window of opportunity between the event and the dissemination, even as the news is spreading at about the speed of sound, that a top-notch reporter can exploit.
I'm not talking of myself. I'd begun the "Monster," but Charity was the venom in the critter's tooth. My teaching tied me down too much, I never had the time to range around getting the scent. Charity never seemed to sleep. She lived and breathed news. You could rely on her for two scandals per week, really remarkable when you consider that she didn't drink and hardly ever visited the Alamo, that ever-flowing gusher of gossip, that Delphi of Dirt.
The correspondent herself breezed into the office around sundown, just back from Whiz-bang, a town that aspired to become our freshly-minted Disneyland Capital in a referendum to be held in three month's time, with a good story about bribery and barratry amongst our elected representatives, a quite juicy one that would have prompted me to tear up the front page if I hadn't owned the paper and known what it would cost me. The economic facts of the Texian were quite simply that I'd sell as many copies with or without that particular story, since everyone in Texas read it anyway, so I had to tell her I'd be running it below the fold. I mollified her somewhat with a promise of a two-column head, and a by-line.
Sweeteners like that were necessary because of the second bit of news she brought in, of a job offer from the Daily Planet, a good second-string pad in Arkytown. She basked in the glow of our admiration, oblivious to my chagrin at the thought of losing her, and then announced she wasn't about to leave the Texian until she could go to a really good newspad, like the Nipple. Charity was about 350 picas tall, according to Huck-call it six-tenths of a Brenda, and still growing-but made up for her size with enthusiasm and energy. She was cute as lace bloomers, and so self-involved as to notice neither Huck's tongue hanging out when she was around nor my choked cough at her reference to my old place of employment. Sounds awful, I know, but somehow you forgave her. If she knew you were hurting, no one could have been more concerned.
I went around lighting the kerosene lamps as she chattered on, Huck continuing to set type while seldom taking his eyes from her. Typos would be multiplying, but I had to put up with it.
When I left it was full dark with a moon on the rise. Charity had fallen asleep in her chair and Huck was still stolidly pulling the handle on the magnificent old Columbian. The town was quiet but for the chirping of crickets and the tinkle of the piano around the corner in the Alamo. My hands were stained with ink and my back hurt and the first breath of cool night air only served to remind me how sweaty I was around the collar and under the arms and… well, you know. I mounted a lantern on the front of my bicycle, swung aboard and, with a tinkle of the bell which brought twin howls of desolation from the firehouse, I started pedaling the long road home.
How much happiness could one person stand?
I do believe in God, I do, I do, I do, because so many times in my life I've seen that He's out there, watching, keeping score. When you've just about reached a Zen state of pure acceptance-and the beauty of that night combined with the pleasant aches of work well-done and friends well-met and even the little fillip of two dogs you knew would be waiting for you the next morning… when that state approaches He sends a little rock down to fall in the road of your life.
This was a literal rock, and I hit it just outside of town and it caused two spokes to break and the rim to buckle on my front wheel. I just missed a painful tumble into a patch of cactus. That was God again: it would have been too much, this was just to serve as a reminder.
I thought about returning to town and waking the blacksmith, who I know would have been happy to work on the newfangled invention that was the talk of the town. But he'd be long abed, with his good wife and three children, and I decided not to bother him. I left it there beside the road. You can't steal a thing like that in a small town, how would you explain riding around on Hildy's bike? I walked the rest of the way and arrived not depressed, not really out of sorts, just a little deflated.
I had stepped onto the front porch before the lamplight revealed a man sitting in the rocker there, not ten feet away from me.
"Goodness," I said. Well, I'd taken to talking like that. "You gave me a start." I was a little nervous, but not frightened. Rape is rare, not unknown, in Luna, but in Texas…? He'd have to be a fool. All the exits are too well controlled, and hanging is legal. I held the lantern up to get a better look at him.
He was a dapper fellow, about my height, with a nice face, twinkling eyes, a mustache. He wore a tweed double-breasted suit with a high wing collar and red silk cravat. On his feet were black and white canvas and leather Balmorals. A cane and a derby hat rested on the floor beside him. I didn't think I'd ever seen him before, but there was something in the way he sat.
"How are you, Hildy?" he said. "Working late again?"
"That's either Cricket, or her identical twin brother," I said. "What have you done to yourself?"