So the murder was shown again and again on every newscast in the country, probably in the world, especially after the coroner announced just how Wing had been poisoned.
“I’d sure like to Jack-and-the-beanstalk my way up those legs,” Eric Chen said, shaking the last drop of a Mountain Dew into his mouth. He’d returned from lunch just in time to watch Aubrey retreat to her desk with the Buddy Wing files.
“She is a pretty girl,” I agreed.
“And I hear a kick-ass reporter.”
Eric Chen has worked in the morgue since graduating from college, which makes him about thirty-three or thirty-four. Technically I’m still the head librarian, but Eric is really in charge. That’s because he understands how and why the computers do what they do. It’s all I can do to double-click my mouse.
The paper had figured I’d retire at sixty-five like everybody else. Then they’d move Eric up to my position, finally completing the modernization program that editor-in-chief Bob Averill initiated about a dozen years ago. But I had no intention of going peacefully. “Maddy-Maddy-Maddy,” Bob said to me after receiving the bad news about my intention to keep working, “don’t you want to enjoy life a little?”
“That’s why I’m staying,” I said.
And that’s why I’m going to stay just as long as I can. I love this paper. I love the morgue. And so the modernization program remains stalled, one Dolly Madison Sprowls shy of completion.
You’d think Eric would be pissed at me for hanging on, wouldn’t you? He stands to make at least $15,000 more a year if I retire. But he never says boo about it.
“I wonder if she likes Chinese?” Eric said when Aubrey sat down and propped her knees against the edge of her desk. He was referring to himself, of course, not won ton soup.
Eric Chen is always nurturing the stereotype that Asian-Americans are smarter than Other-Americans. But the only things Chinese about Eric Chen are his eyes and his last name. He was born in Youngstown, for goodness sake. And while he certainly knows what all the buttons on his keyboard are for, he’s a world-class doofus when it comes to things that really matter, like feeding his belt through all the loops in his pants, or making sure there’s enough antifreeze in his pickup truck, or having a relationship with a woman that goes beyond watching her carry an armful of files back to her desk. Still, I like Eric Chen. He’s funny and polite and honest. He’s one of the few people in the newsroom who isn’t afraid of me.
To tell you the truth, I’ve spent years perfecting my act as the newspaper’s rottweiler-in-residence. Every morning I come to work determined to be as cranky and uncooperative as I can. It keeps the reporters and editors from asking for information they really don’t need-which they’ll do every damn day, ten times a day, if you let them.
But Eric Chen saw through me the day he was hired. And Dale Marabout sure saw through me. And now I knew that Aubrey McGinty saw through me, too.
As soon as Eric wandered off, I went to my desk and dialed Dale Marabout’s extension. His desk was way over by the elevator but I could see him pick up the receiver and cradle it under his neck. “Hi, Mr. M,” I said.
He swiveled in his chair and smiled in my direction. “What’s shakin’?” he said.
“Up for lunch tomorrow?”
“Something interesting cooking?”
“Just lunch. Speckley’s at noon?”
“Noon it is.”
I watched him hang up and swivel back to his computer screen. So many stories to edit and so little time.
I came to Hannawa, Ohio, in 1953-the most timid eighteen-year-old on the face of the earth-to attend Hemphill College. Hemphill at that time had one of the best library science programs in this part of the country. I was going to get my degree and go back to New York, get a job in one of the big library systems in Albany or Syracuse or Utica, anywhere but my hometown of LaFargeville, a crossroads clutter of two hundred and eighty-five people surrounded by seven thousand dairy cows. Instead I fell in love with Lawrence Sprowls and after graduation stayed right here in Hannawa.
Lawrence was a journalism major and made the dean’s list every semester, and so while other J-grads went off to little piss-ant papers around the state, Lawrence went right to the Herald-Union. They assigned him to the business section, where he quickly made a name for himself covering a vicious three-month strike at the Ford plant. Like other big cities in the Midwest, the 1950s in Hannawa were boom years. Factories were popping up everywhere, outstripping the local supply of workers. Poor families by the thousand streamed out of the South to work twelve hours a day, six, seven days a week, making things they could not yet afford to buy for themselves. It wasn’t long before those workers, their feet now firmly planted in the middle class, got sick of the low wages and long hours. They joined unions and bargained as hard as they worked. Their strikes were long and often violent, and the times being as prosperous as they were, they almost always got what they wanted.
For the first couple of years after Lawrence and I married, I worked part time at the city library. Then Lawrence saw the posting for a job in the morgue. I found myself in the newspaper business, too, clipping stories, stuffing them in envelopes, feeding them to the file cabinets, every night trying to scrub the newsprint off my fingers with Boraxo.
In 1961, Lawrence was lured away from the paper by the local office of the United Auto Workers to handle their public relations. It was irresistible money and we bought the bungalow on Brambriar Court where I still live. In 1963, Lawrence was lured from our marriage by a secretary with irresistible tits.
So Lawrence got the irresistible money and the irresistible tits and I got the bungalow. Over the years Lawrence moved from city to city doing PR for unions and banks and phone companies and race tracks. He would divorce and marry three more times before dying of a heart attack at age fifty-seven. I stayed right here in Hannawa. Stayed divorced. Stayed in the morgue. I was named head librarian in May, 1970, the same week those four students were shot by National Guardsmen at Kent State University, not thirty miles down the road from here. Every time I run across those KENT, MAY 4 SHOOTINGS files I just boil inside.
Hannawa is a lot different today than it was in the Sixties. The good union jobs are pretty much gone. Almost anybody with money has fled to the suburbs. City Council keeps launching various redevelopment schemes, but the downtown remains a canyon of empty storefronts and the neighborhoods continue to crumble. Only on the west side, in the hills surrounding Hemphill College, are there still some safe and tidy middle-class neighborhoods, including mine.
I’d say the city has lost a good seventy thousand people over the last couple of decades, some to jobs in the New South-Atlanta, Houston, Charlottesville, places like that-but mostly to the city’s own suburbs-Greenlawn and Brinkley, North Hannawa and Hannawa Falls-once beautiful rural townships now choking with strip malls and big showy houses with adjustable mortgages.
While a lot of the factories have closed, Hannawa has one industry that just keeps growing and growing: Evangelism.
Hannawa has more evangelists per capita than any city north of the Mason-Dixon Line. I’m not kidding. Several years ago we ran a six-part series on the phenomenon. It seems that all those southerners moving up here in the Fifties and Sixties-whites from Appalachia, blacks from the delta states-brought their own brand of Bible-believing Christianity with them. Preachers in need of flocks made the move north, too, setting up shop in vacant breweries and bowling alleys, anywhere they could put up a row or two of folding chairs. Buddy Wing was one of them. He was a high school dropout from Webster Springs, West Virginia, a young man with a knack for healing both spiritual and physical ailments. He also understood early on that God had permitted the invention of the cathode ray tube for one reason and one reason only: to save souls.