All Over but the Shoutin' (41 page)

I
hated the Susan Smith story, for its hopelessness, and I guess maybe I hated it because a part of me understood her, the desire to be something else.

She will be eligible for parole in 2025. Her looks will be long gone then. She will have to live out the rest of her life as a mill worker’s daughter who killed her babies.

Who knows. Maybe some nut bag will come and rescue her in her old age, because of her celebrity. Some nut bag with money. And she will get to put on her party dress, after all.

37
Monsters

I
understood nothing of the bombers who killed the innocents in Oklahoma City, who reduced the federal building to rubble and turned the day-care center, where the babies had slumbered in the windows, to a jumble of concrete chunks and broken toys. I wrote of it because they told me to, because I wanted to, but I do not like to think much about it now. I will not, for more than few a minutes at a time. I tried to give a short talk about it once, to other reporters, and while my mouth kept moving, I stumbled in my mind over the bloody rubber gloves tossed in the rain, and the smell of, what? Dust. And the faces of men and women who had seen something we should never have to look at.

You pour it all into your stories, as your fingers hover above the computer keyboard, but when you get up, when it is done, you block much of it out. You have to feel for the people you write about or the words don’t amount to much, but you learn to put it down.

I remember one night in Oklahoma City, a dinner with the other reporters, laughing a little, whistling past the graveyard as we coldheartedly discussed the stories we had written and still had to write. And all that time, at the neighboring table, sat a woman whose little girl had been killed in the blast. Later, her friends lashed out at us, and all I could say, sitting there, white-faced, was how sorry we were to be so insensitive. There was no way we could have known, of course, how close we were to someone who could never, ever block it out.

I walked away but something made me turn around and go back, to explain myself, to try to make her understand that every reporter at that table was sick at heart, too, of what they had seen. I guess she believed me. I hope she did.

I have never been ashamed of being a reporter. I have been afraid, and angry, and heartsick, but never ashamed. I lay awake a long, long time that night, sorry about what had happened, but not ashamed.

It goes way beyond the craft itself. That assignment, the story of the year, was in my eighteenth year as a reporter, in the role, the only one I have ever felt at peace with, of paid storyteller.

It had pulled me out of poverty, literally. It had shown me the world, and I did not mind that the world was so often on fire when I got there. It gave me an education, from books at Harvard, from a thousand stories where I was forced to understand something an hour before deadline. It gave me pride and money, but more pride. It saved me. It surely did. My mother gave me the boost up, and what I found, on the other side of that wall, was this.

Of course, she was still there, surrounded by those old sadnesses. Nothing seemed to change, on her side, except the calendar.

H
ouses burn in the country all the time. The wiring is often homemade, and over the years the boards dry out and wires short out, and then one night as you drive back from town you see a dull orange glow in the distance, and you wish, quite selfishly, that the flames have consumed someone else’s lifetime of hard work and dreams. House insurance is not a given, not here. The only insurance some have—is luck.

My grandmother’s little house had burned in the summer of 1993. That should have been enough bad luck. Two years later, my little brother’s house burned to the ground. I was in the Piedmont region of Virginia, as the flames licked up into the oaks, writing about floods. The volunteer fire department came fast, but much too late. My momma came, in terror.

Was he inside? she asked the fireman.

He said he could not say for sure. He did not think so, but he could not say for sure.

She was in agony, for hours. His truck was gone from the driveway, but that meant nothing. He was always breaking down on deserted roads and walking out. My brother Sam drove his Ford Bronco through the northern part of the county, searching for Mark, but found nothing. No one had seen him.

Finally, several hours later, my kinfolks found him safe.

My momma took days to stop shaking.

I finally made it home five days later. I told him I would help pay for his lumber, if he wanted to build it back. He started laying block for the foundation less than a month after the blaze, planning a smaller house this time.

Sometimes, things like that will shake people up enough to make them change. I have seen it happen with fires, with deaths, even surgery. My momma hoped it would be so with him. We do have some luck in this life, but not that much. Momma just stepped back on the treadmill of worry and hopelessness, and kept walking.

I had been selfish long enough. It was time, past time, to begin paying her back, in the only ways I knew how.

38
Validation

O
n the eleventh floor of the building at West 43rd Street in New York, there is a long hallway lined with the faces of winners of the Pulitzer Prize. The black-and-white photographs peer down from the walls, framed beside prizewinning stories of wars and upheavals and great tragedies, datelined Berlin, Bejing, Johannesburg, Moscow, any place news has been committed. I remember one day in winter or early spring, 1994, I drummed up the courage to walk between the pictures of the educated, dignified ladies and gentlemen. As I browsed, dreaming, I heard people approaching around the dogleg in the hall. For a silly moment, I wondered if I had the right to be there. For a moment, I was that little boy in the dime store again, just before the old woman behind the counter told me I didn’t have enough money to buy what I was looking for.

It was Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, and Max Frankel, the retiring executive editor. Of all people, to catch me dreaming. But Frankel smiled, warm, not mocking. He knew why I’d come there. I wonder how many others he had seen there just like me. Hundreds?

“Next year,” he said, “it will be you.” He was being nice, to the new boy.

It was a good moment, the kind you would like to press between the pages of a book, or hide in your sock drawer, so you could touch it again.

I
will never forget the first journalism award I ever won. It was for sports writing, in the category of stock car racing, and when they announced my name in that banquet hall in Pell City—the same city where they make the discount dentures—I was proud, so proud. That, as near as I can figure, was about sixteen years ago. I hung it on a bedroom wall, so I could see it when I woke up in the mornings. It was a simple certificate mounted under Plexiglas on fake wood, but it was pure gold to me. I won some more, as the years went by, better ones, until finally that first one just didn’t matter to me anymore, and I grew tired of lugging it and others like it around. But throwing it away was unthinkable. I put it in a box with my baseball glove—my knees were shot by now—and some other pieces of my pleasant, obsolete past, and gave them to my momma for safekeeping. I expected it to collect dust and spiders in one of her closets.

I went home one weekend to find it on the wall in my bedroom, along with a few other plaques, a few other distant milestones. I didn’t ask her why she put it on the wall, because I believe I understood. It was proof that outsiders believed that her boy had done good. It did not matter that it was the Alabama Sportswriters Association or the Alabama Associated Press. They had my name on them, and the words, “First Place.”

The house fire ruined them in 1993, along with her GED diploma and my high school graduation picture. The fire, which started in the little room that had been my bedroom, blackened the certificates and warped the Plexiglas frames. The scrapbook of yellowed newspaper clippings—a lifetime of them—vanished in ashes, but it was the awards that she hated losing most, because they represented praise, validation.

“I don’t tell you a lot,” she told me one day, sitting in the living room that still smelled of smoke, “but I am very proud of you. I look at you and know I didn’t do no bad job, not altogether.”

No, not altogether.

When I was a baby, it was common for men in my part of Alabama to leave home for jobs in the automobile assembly plants in Detroit, a lonely crusade away from their kin and sweethearts. They cooked on hot plates and dreamed of their momma’s kitchen, and lived in rented rooms that looked out on smokestacks and black snow. They could stand it only because it was temporary. They saved their greenbacks in the company’s credit union, not for retirement but for that sweet day when they went back home for good.

It was expected of them, after they made enough money to buy a few acres of land and build a two-bedroom house. Sometimes, of course, they came home as changed men. They learned to drink and they learned to take the Lord’s name in vain, some of them. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard some old woman say: “He never did cuss none, before he went to Michigan.” But it didn’t matter, just so long as you came on home. Only the most selfish young men made their fortune and stayed away, leaving their daddies and—worse—their mommas, to grow old alone.

I used to believe my momma sat in sadness, waiting for me to come home for good. I used to believe that if my mother had had her way, I would live in a little house next to her, with children chasing lightning bugs through the dark, with a wife at my side, to chase the loneliness away.

I was wrong. “I’m glad you got out,” she has told me, a dozen times.

She worries that I will die old and alone, and she disapproves of my running around and acting a fool, a man my age. She wishes I was closer to Jesus, and I see the clouds collect in her mind when I say I can take care of myself, that I am living life as I want to live it, free and loose, that I have no regrets. But she never nags. I sat down with her once, a long time ago, and told her that this job is who I am, what I have instead of a wife and children, in place of a garden and a house with a porch swing. She understood that.

When kinfolks and others tell her, “Rick don’t come home much, does he,” she always defends me. She tells them how busy I am, and relays my latest promise to get home as soon as I can. “The only way Ricky can eat at your house,” she told one aunt, “is if it’s cooked and ready when he pulls up in the driveway. That, or you throw it in his mouth as he drives by.” She tells them I have an important job, that I fly in airplanes near every week, that I have a special card that lets me rent a different-colored Pontiac in every city I go to. And sometimes, a Cadillac.

“One day,” she told me, “maybe you can come home.” Maybe someday, she said, when I have what I want, when the car I am chasing like some mutt just stops, and I have to decide: “Fine. I’ve caught it. Now what?”

I
was in Washington, D.C., the day before the Pulitzers were announced, to interview the new president of the National Rifle Association, an ornery woman who was a champion black powder shooter and cheerleader sponsor. I had known I was a finalist for the prize, but I had come close before. The thought of sitting by the phone in our bureau office in Atlanta was abhorrent to me, so I planned a day-trip to Washington to fill my mind until the awards had been announced and my disappointment had faded. I didn’t even pack a bag; I just needed to be in motion.

Later, when I called in to check my messages, Susan Taylor, the office manager and one of the best people I know, told me that my big boss, Joe Lelyveld, was looking for me. I knew right then that I had either won the thing, or I was fired. I called him from the bathroom phone of a strip mall restaurant called Ruby Tuesday’s.

“Can you be in New York tomorrow, and have lunch with me?” he asked, and I told him yes, sir. “I can’t tell you why,” he said, “but I will demystify you, tomorrow.”

I called Susan back and told her, “We might have won.”

I didn’t have a toothbrush or a change of clothes. I got to New York too late to buy anything except the toothbrush. The night before the second-greatest day of my life, I washed my underwear in the sink with fruit-scented shampoo, and hung them on a lamp to dry. I was careful not to let the cloth droop down and actually touch the bulb. I had started a small fire in the Medallion Hotel in Oklahoma City doing that, once.

I was supposed to meet him at the Café des Artists—I truly didn’t know that this was a pretty swank place—and I got there much too early, my suit wrinkled, my shirt a day old, my underwear smelling of peaches. I had not brought a coat, and, of course, it started to snow. But I needed to walk. I walked up to Broadway, the snow and sleet stinging my cheeks and sticking in my hair, but if I was cold I can’t remember it. I was numb, but it had nothing to do with the temperature, just that odd feeling of walking outside yourself, of distance.