‘Finally!’ the Sikh said, and the Jolly Dingle cab began to move.
‘Did you see that?’ Wilson asked. His voice sounded flat and unsurprised. ‘That man. That man on the bus. The one with the woman.’
‘What is it, sir?’ the Sikh asked. The light on the corner turned yellow and the Sikh scooted through, ignoring a flourish of horns as he switched lanes. The Peter Pan bus was left behind. Ahead, Grand Central loomed in the rain, looking like a penitentiary.
It was only with the cab moving again that Wilson thought of his cell. He took it out of his coat pocket and looked at it. If he’d been a quick thinker (always his brother’s department, according to their mother), he could have snapped Raincoat Man’s picture. It was too late for that, but not too late to call 911. Of course he couldn’t make such a call anonymously; his name and number would flash on some official screen as soon as the call went through. They would call him back to make sure he wasn’t a prankster whiling away a rainy afternoon in New York City. Then they would want information, which he would have to give – no choice – at the nearest police station. They would want his story several times. What they would not want was his pitch.
The pitch was titled ‘Give us three years and we’ll prove it.’ Wilson thought of how it was supposed to go. He would begin by telling the gathered PR flaks and executives that the spill had to be faced directly. It was there; volunteers were still washing oil-coated birds in Dawn detergent; it couldn’t be swept under the rug. But, he would say, atonement doesn’t have to be ugly and sometimes the truth can be beautiful. People want to believe in you guys, he would say. They need you, after all. They need you to get from Point A to Point B, and that makes them unwilling to see themselves as accessories in the rape of the environment. At this point he would open his portfolio and display the first card: a photo of a boy and girl standing on a pristine beach, backs to the camera, looking out at water so blue it almost hurt. ENERGY AND BEAUTY CAN GO TOGETHER, the copy read. GIVE US THREE YEARS AND WE’LL PROVE IT.
Calling 911 was so simple a child could do it. In fact, children did. When someone broke in. When Little Sister fell downstairs. Or if Daddy was tuning up on Mommy.
Next came his storyboard for a proposed TV commercial that would run in all the states on the Gulf, emphasis on local news and the cable twenty-fours like FOX and MSNBC. In time-lapse photography, a dirty, oil-smeared beach would become clean again. ‘We have a responsibility to fix our mistakes,’ the narrator would say (with the slightest southern twang). ‘It’s how we do business and how we treat our neighbors. Give us three years and we’ll prove it.’
Next, the print ads. The radio ads. And in Phase Two—
‘Sir? You said what?’
I could call, Wilson thought, but the guy will probably be off the bus and long gone before the police can get there. Probably? Almost certainly.
He turned to look behind him. The bus was way back there now. Maybe, he thought, the woman cried out. Maybe the other passengers are already piling onto the guy, the way passengers piled onto the Shoe Bomber when they figured out what he was up to.
Then he thought of the way the man in the raincoat had smiled at him. Also of how he’d put his finger in the woman’s loose mouth.
Wilson thought, Speaking of pranks, it might not have been what I thought it was. It could have been a gag. One they played all the time. A flash-mob kind of thing.
The more he considered this, the more possible it seemed. Men cut women’s throats in alleys and on TV shows, not on Peter Pan buses in the middle of the afternoon. As for himself, he had put together a fine campaign. He was the right man in the right place at the right time, and you rarely got more than one chance in this world. That had never been one of his mother’s sayings, but it was a fact.
‘Sir?’
‘Let me out at the next light,’ Wilson said. ‘I can walk from there.’
For Hesh Kestin
I saw lots of horror films when I was a kid (you probably guessed that). I was an easy target, and most of them scared me to death. It was dark, the images were so much bigger than you were, and the sound was so loud that the scares continued even when you shut your eyes. On TV, the scare quotient tended to be lower. There were commercials to break the rhythm of the thing, and the worst parts were sometimes snipped out to avoid giving complexes to any little shavers who might be watching (alas, already too late for me; I’d seen the dead woman rising out of the tub in Diabolique). As a last resort, you could always go into the kitchen and grab a Hires out of the fridge, lingering until the scary music was replaced by some local huckster screaming, ‘Cars, cars, cars! No credit check! We’ll sell to ANYONE!’
One film I saw on TV did the job¸ however. At least the first hour or so of its seventy-seven-minute run did; the denouement wrecked the whole thing, and to this day I wish somebody would remake it and carry its hair-raising premise right through to the end. That film has perhaps the best horror-movie title of all time: I Bury the Living.
I was thinking of that movie when I wrote this story.
Obits
Keep it clear, and keep it in a straight line.
That was the gospel according to Vern Higgins, who headed up the journalism department at the University of Rhode Island, where I got my degree. A lot of what I heard at school went in one ear and out the other, but not that, because Professor Higgins hammered on it. He said that people need clarity and concision in order to start the process of understanding.
Your real job as journalists, he told his classes, is to give people the facts that allow them to make decisions and go forward. So don’t be fancy. Don’t go all twee and hifalutin. Start at the start, lay the middle out neatly, so the facts of each event lead logically to the next, and end at the end. Which, in reporting, he emphasized, is always the end for now. And don’t you ever sink to that lazy crap about how some people believe or the general consensus of opinion is. A source for each fact, that’s the rule. Then write it all in plain English, unadorned and unvarnished. Flights of rhetoric belong on the op-ed page.
I doubt if anyone will believe what follows, and my career at Neon Circus had very little to do with good writing, but I intend to do my best here: the facts of each event leading to the next. Beginning, middle, and end.
The end for now, at least.
Good reporting always begins with the five Ws: who, what, when, where, and why if you can find out. In my case, the why’s a tough one.
The who is easy enough, though; your less-than-fearless narrator is Michael Anderson. I was twenty-seven at the time these things happened. I graduated from URI with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. For two years after college I lived with my parents in Brooklyn and worked for one of those Daily Shopper freebies, rewriting newswire items to break up the ads and coupons. I kept my résumé (such as it was) in constant rotation, but none of the papers in New York, Connecticut, or New Jersey wanted me. This didn’t completely surprise my parents or me, not because my grades were lousy (they weren’t), and not because my clip folder – mostly stories from the URI student newspaper, The Good 5 Cent Cigar – were badly written (a couple of them won awards), but because newspapers weren’t hiring. Quite the opposite.
(If Professor Higgins saw all these parentheses, he’d kill me.)
My parents began urging me – gently, gently – to start looking for some other kind of job. ‘In a related field,’ my father said in his most diplomatic voice. ‘Maybe advertising.’