Begin to Exit Here (9 page)

“No it's not,” I said with quiet anger. “Someone capriciously decides we'll write about a story and never let it die. If it were responsible journalism to find out as much as we can, we'd do a story on the formation of the Earth and how, over hundreds of millions of years, natural gas was produced, discovered, and eventually used to bake the breads and pies that our readers can't buy anymore from the store that blew up.”

“You're pissing me off, Kurt,” she said.

“Good. We share that emotion,” I said. “I have to finish my story on what the fire marshall says, then begin my three-part series on cakes and pies in North America; plus try to find out if the drop in water pressure as firefighters tried putting out the fire is attributable to poor rural planning for water lines, then call someone from the Institute of State to see if anyone could be criminally negligent for allowing Earth to exist. I'm busy.”

Lisa doubled her fist, as if to slug me. Exhaling slowly, she said, “Maybe you need a break. Maybe you should go to Stanley's and have a long beer.”

“I don't drink anymore,” I said.

“You don't? That's wonderful. But how do you relax?”

“I take my girlfriend's nine-millimeter Beretta out in the country and shoot at army helicopters. Then we go dancing. Relax? Reporters aren't allowed to relax. The world is too urgent. News is too crucial. Now I have to call a psychiatrist at the university to ask if counseling groups have been formed locally to deal with the trauma of exploding shopping centers. The news never stops.”

I was quiet, then, and exhausted, and I leaned my forehead onto the cool glass screen of my computer. I felt bad for Lisa, this nice woman who only hoped to be a good reporter and a good bureau chief and who now sat tiredly on my desk, staring at me with a kind of bewildered sadness, and it was my fault.

“I'm sorry,” I said, rubbing my head back and forth
on the computer screen, like it was medicine. “You didn't deserve any of that. I apologize.”

“You don't need to,” she said in a sort of worried tone. “We've been working this story to death. You're right. Sometimes I don't know why I went to journalism school.”

“I didn't. I studied English. That's even worse.”

“It is? Why?” she said, smiling a little.

“At least with a degree in journalism, people think it's a sensible discipline and you have a moderately decent chance of being hired and taken seriously. People think English is just art, empty crap. Do you know what my first career was when I got my degree in English?”

“What?”

“I was a salad girl,” I said.

“A
salad
girl? How could you be a salad girl?”

“Well, I wasn't actually a girl, of course, but I couldn't get a job anywhere, at first. I gradually realized that employers didn't
care
that I had a degree in English, and maybe held it against me. What? You studied
lit
erature? Capitalism has no use for Chaucer or Twain or any of that poetic dog shit about being alive that you so earnestly wasted your time on in college. Boy, was I an extraneous man. So one day, when nobody else would hire me, I got hired in a cafeteria in Kansas City to prepare tossed salads. It was the position of a salad girl, because usually girls or women did it. For fun, I started calling myself a salad girl.”

Lisa smiled at me sort of peacefully then, and was
quiet, as if thinking over my stupid adventures as a salad girl, and I remembered I'd been nasty and unreasonably angry with her, so I felt bad for her again.

“I'm sorry for being so nasty. It's not your fault I was a salad girl. I should've known that, by studying English, I was preparing myself for a career in lettuce and tomatoes.”

She closed her eyes and sniggered almost silently, then shook her head.

“Don't apologize. You've been having a real bad week, and the pressure at this paper gets damned inexcusable, so don't apologize for getting pissed off at what you
should
be pissed off about.”

“Are you mad at me?” I said.

“I'm not mad, no,” she said. “I think, like you, I'm exhausted. Do you feel okay, now?”

“If you're not mad at me, I feel okay.”

“I was mad at first, but I got over it. Kurt, you're not the only one who thinks this job sucks sometimes. Sometimes I hate it as much as
you
do.”

“No, you don't. I've had more experience at hating it than you have.”

“Okay,” she said. “You hate it more than I do.”

“Thank you,” I said.

She got off my desk and stretched her arms, then said, “So. Are you going to call the Institute of State and ask if someone could be found criminally negligent for letting Earth exist?”

“Yes. Someone should be in jail.”

T
hings slowed down in St. Beaujolais, and after an alarming week in which reporters at both papers found nothing seriously wrong, injurious, decadent, stupid, horrifying, or controversial to write about, the weather changed and we had a tornado.

“This is great!” Harmon said exuberantly when he heard the first report of the tornado over the scanner in a warning from the National Weather Service. Jumping away from his computer and the story he'd sullenly been writing about a request for a permit to build a mosque in St. Beaujolais, Harmon ran up to the scanner, knocking a chair out of his way, to write down more details on the tornado. His eyes looked gleeful, somber, and insane.

“A tornado. It's mine,” he said jealously.

I walked to the scanner to give Harmon some experienced guidance.

“Stupid fucking bastard,” I said. Tornadoes aren't fun. They kill people.”

“Kiss my ass,” he said, scribbling down the reported location and possible path of the tornado. The National Weather Service man said it was spotted touching down in a forest about two miles west of Small, where it was traveling northeast at approximately thirty miles an hour. All of us were gone in an instant, running to our cars to try and catch a swirling, evil mass of clouds that would indifferently destroy whatever they touched. There were three reporters and a photographer running across the street for cars.

“Shouldn't we go in
one
car?” Rebecca yelled.

I yelled, “No. We might all die together. Dying is private, don't you think?”

She looked like she was going to smile, and we kept running. Harmon raced away first in his black Nissan, eager to look at death and ruin, which made front-page copy in any paper in the world. I felt adrenalin and mild, dumb panic while looking up to study the dark gray edges of the thunderstorm swelled above us, but I told myself to be calm. I knew, from all those years in Kansas and Missouri, where all sane people become minor authorities on thunderstorms,
that we were on the safe edge of the storm and that the tornado, traveling away from us, wouldn't be here. I bought a Coke at McDonald's. There was time.

The storm and the tornado already had moved far north of town by the time any of us could have gotten onto the Interstate to chase it. There was some very light rain, almost pleasant, while I could see, a few miles beyond my car and over some of the forests on the hills scattered around town, the nearly solid black darkness along the horizon where the storm was still tearing things up. Behind it, to my left, the sun was coming out. Right where the clouds appeared to have been torn away was a rainbow, like a child's drawing superimposed over a vanishing horror. As I thought how pretty it was, I wondered if anyone was dead.

They weren't. No one was even injured, except some pigs and one big sow whose body was found about twenty-five feet up in an oak tree. Highway patrolmen, sheriff's deputies, and other sudden authorities agreed on estimates that the tornado had destroyed itself a path about three hundred feet wide and slightly longer than four miles, missing the few farm homes and mobile homes in the area. Destroying some power lines that weren't very hard to replace, the tornado's main physical effect had been to knock down hundreds of trees in a fairly straight line, after which we had a rainbow. That was how I wanted to write it in the newspaper:

A tornado knocked down hundreds of trees in a fairly straight line north of St. Beaujolais Thursday, after which there was a rainbow.

There were no deaths or injuries from the storm, although a sow weighing about 300 pounds apparently was in the path of the tornado and was propelled about 25 feet into the limbs of an oak tree, where the pig was found dead.

No autopsy has been scheduled.

Back at the bureau, Lisa said no.

“No,” she said, shaking her head and smiling nervously as nearly all of us frantically made phone calls and pieced together the unruly elements of two or three tornado stories for the morning paper. “You can't have a rainbow in the lead of a tornado story.”

“Yes, you can,” I said. “We had a tornado, and then a rainbow. It's factual. I don't invent reality. It's just
out
there.”

“No,” she said. “I
know
how important it is to you to write well and be distinctive, and I'm glad we have you, Kurt. But no. A tor-NA-do struck.”

“And then a rainbow struck,” I said. “There was no damage from the rainbow. I think the readers would like that.”

“Kurt. I don't want to argue.”

“Then stop.”

“Take the rainbow out of your lead.”

“I like it. It's pretty.”

“If you don't take it out, I will.”

“All right, all right, goddammit. I'll mutilate the lead. I'll rob it of all the natural wonder and drama anyone would feel and pretend I'm a dispassionate, emotionless reporter armed with dead facts.”

“Thank you, Kurt,” she said, walking away to her office.

After Harmon realized there were no deaths or injuries, no neighborhoods destroyed, no gasoline trucks burning like in a war, and no mass panic of any sort to coldly describe and win an award for, he soothed himself by concentrating on the forests that were flattened, and the big dead pig in the tree. I walked to his desk to read his lead. It said:

Although yesterday's tornado miraculously avoided leveling 14 homes in a subdivision next to its path, the afternoon twister flattened as many as 1,000 trees, flung a huge pig into the limbs of an oak tree and caused scattered power outages from downed power lines.

“I think the Lord was watching over us,” said Anna A. Lesters, whose home in the Scarborough subdivision was about 20 yards from the edge of the tornado's path. “A tree limb went through the bedroom window, but no one was hurt.”

“Idiot,” I said.

Harmon was alarmed. “
Who's
an idiot?” he demanded.

“That woman in your story,” I said. “A tornado roars by her house, rips up a forest and heaves a tree limb into her bedroom, and she says the Lord was watching over her. I don't know why you'd want to compliment God for a tornado.”

“Go away,” Harmon said.

“Maybe I should call a priest and do a story on how many people are spiritually grateful for cataclysms, accidents, and disasters,” I said.

Harmon smiled at me. “Did you see the pig in the tree?”

“No. I didn't go to that neighborhood.”

“It was gross. I'm going to describe it as well as I can,” he said with enthusiasm. “Also, look at this, look at this,” he said like a boy with a weird discovery to share, and he flipped a few pages in his notebook until he found something.

“Okay. Where is it?
Here,”
he said. “I need to see if I can get this in my lead.”

“What?” I said. “I can't read your notes. You write like an inebriated baby.”

“This old farmer off the Interstate said after the tornado he walked out to look at his chickens to see if any of them had blown away, and he said he found a dead rooster stuck into the trunk of a pine tree by its beak. So there's
this crumpled rooster with its beak driven into a tree, like a nail.”

“Wow,” I said. “That should definitely go into the story. Tornado lore. Some people will find it offensive, but screw them. All we're doing is describing the world. It's not our fault if reality keeps existing.”

Then for a while I just sat at my desk, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette and realizing I wanted to go across the street to Stanley's and drink some Bass Ale or wine, flood my body and my blood with the secret warm peace that no one could give and no one could share, either, a kind of trapped warm peace, glass by glass until I was numb and kind of distantly serene, where you don't remember you're bones and flesh and nerves and blood that all will leak irretrievably one day and decay and you don't remember being set loose in this world with no more hope than a dog or a bug, waking up each day with stupid dim faith that, before you perish indistinctly and vanish beyond understanding, or touch, or eyes to see you going away, someone will hold you, just you, and say,
Here I am, here I am. I always wanted to know where you were.

Which scared me then, imagining death again, the final absence of love, I could drink dark warm sherry until being remotely serene even though it was a trick, a wondrous trick leaving me distant both from what I hadn't escaped and from what I hadn't found, although when you drain enough alcohol into yourself that an aura of warmth
swells peacefully inside your head and you can smile without a truth to have caused it, it doesn't matter what you're distant from. I could advance so far into the daily aura of warmth secretly in my head that if I were going to serenely destroy myself, I was the right one to do it. At which point there was a distant audience watching me, unable to see my aura now swollen, the peace that, given a chance, quite patiently kills your need to see a psychiatrist, and I went. As if, I supposed, asking myself this question: Do you want to die alone or do you want someone to watch you? You don't have to die yet. You can wait.