Dominion (7 page)

He wasn’t too worried about the women. Penny was a third-year reporter, still getting throwaway assignments. Laurie was a seasoned twelve-year vet who recently moved to sports columnist to take up some slack for Clarence’s transition to general. He hoped they would act less like conventional females than jockettes and refrain from picking the scab of his grief.

Sure enough, for his first hour back at the desk it was just a few hands on the shoulder, a few “I’m sorrys,” a few “Good to have you backs,” and more hushed conversations than usual. But at least nobody sat down to walk him through the fourteen stages of grief.

On his desk lay expressions of sympathy, one signed by the marketing department, another by the guys down in production. He tried not to be moved by them, but set them carefully in his briefcase to show Geneva.

Clarence made a quick rendezvous with the sports section coffeepot, where the coffee was always stronger than anywhere else in the galaxy, as if sportswriters needed the extra kickstart since they’d probably gotten home from a late ball game the night before and stopped for a few beers after logging their stories. He poured in the creamer, swirling it into his coffee, the black and white disappearing into each other, producing a mellow brown.

The newsroom had a feel to it, a superior feel. From here you stood and looked down at the goings on of the world in a way that let you imagine you were above it all—until you got mugged or diagnosed with terminal cancer or your child died. Journalists are a cynical lot, Clarence long ago had decided, and over the years he’d become more cynical than most. It always surprised him how many journalists remained liberals, since liberalism’s assumptions about the goodness of man were daily disproved in most stories you worked on.

Journalists had to pry beneath the surface of apparent goodness and show the corruption that usually lurked underneath. Thus, the vice they originally found repugnant became their bedfellow, especially as they tried to compete with television news. They seethed with righteous indignation but became addicted to that indignation as Type A’s become addicted to their own adrenaline. Hence their consuming attention to the titillating morbid lives of the world’s Amy Fishers, Lorena Bobbits, Menendez brothers, Tonya Hardings, O. J. Simpsons, and an endless parade of social misfits and afternoon talk show guests.

Like most seasoned journalists Clarence had long ago cast aside the idealistic notion he could change the world. If you couldn’t change the world, the next best thing was to judge the world. To become its resident critic in a way that put it at arm’s length, so you could imagine you weren’t part of the problem. Whether you were a political writer, a sportswriter or a movie reviewer, you were first and foremost a judge, a magistrate who adjudicated the mortal multitudes.

Sports had always played an important part in his life. He remembered his first baseball mitt, how Daddy had taught him to oil the leather glove, how he’d worked it in, put a baseball in the middle, drawn it tight with a few lengths of twine to make the best pocket. He remembered how he and Daddy would throw and hit the ball for hours on end. He remembered watching Aaron hit it out of the park and Mays chase down a fly ball. He’d listen to his father’s stories about the old Negro Leagues and wish he’d been able to see his father play. But Obadiah was forty-four when Clarence was born, and Ruby thirty-five. When she had her last child, Dani, she was thirty-nine, worn ragged by the years of sharecropping and the hard life of Jim Crow but with a fire in her eyes her youngest son had inherited. Yes, his parents were old when he was born. Old? His mother had been seven years younger than he was now, his daddy only two years older. How could that be? The notion struck him as too strange.

Clarence had lots of calls to make. He looked up Portland police in his Rolodex for the first and most important one.

“This is Clarence Abernathy at the
Trib.
I’d like to talk to a homicide detective, first name’s Ollie. Forget his last name. Big guy.”

“Ollie Chandler?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“Just a moment.” As he waited, Clarence sorted through three-by-five cards, narrowing down ideas for his next column.

“Ollie Chandler.”

“This is Clarence Abernathy. Dani Rawls is…was my sister.”

“Yeah. I remember meeting you.”

You don’t sound too happy to hear from me.

“I was wondering what’s happening with my sister’s case. Have you guys just given up on it?”

“No, we haven’t.” Chandler sounded defensive.

“Then…what’s happening?”

The detective sighed, then paused. “Tell you what, Mr. Abernathy. Why don’t we get together and discuss it? Have any time tomorrow? Maybe one o’clock?”

“I could be free by one-thirty.”

“One-thirty tomorrow it is. Justice Center. Fourteenth floor.”

“I’ll be there.”

Careful not to look to either side or appear less than busy, Clarence sat quietly in his cubicle, the memories falling upon one another like dominoes. He’d been raised on his daddy’s love for baseball, and when he felt drawn to a career in journalism, the idea of combining sports and writing seemed an incredible dream. Sports was about choosing sides, affirming loyalty to colors. It had the thrill of combat without its fatal consequences. It wasn’t like when men gave their lives to hold up the colors in battle, to be riddled with bullets rather than let the red, white, and blue touch the ground. You could celebrate Packer green and gold, Dolphin turquoise and orange, Forty-niner red and gold, and it didn’t require that anyone die.

That’s what he loved about sports. Great passion without real consequence. You could love your team, cheer them on, rave about them, be disappointed in them, even boo them. You could leave them, but they would never leave you. Of course, with player free agency and especially franchise free agency, it wasn’t like that now. When the Browns left Cleveland it proved even the most loyal fans couldn’t keep the team in town. The players were changing teams year to year. The guy you cheered for last year comes in and you boo him this year. Pretty soon all you were loyal to was jerseys. Cheering for laundry. Rooting for colors.

Between baseball strikes and football franchise moves and basketball scandals, Clarence’s idealism about sports, about the love of the game itself, had been tempered. Maybe it wasn’t sports that had changed so much as he had. While he still loved a good game, especially football, maybe he’d just outgrown his unbridled enthusiasm, maybe he was less naive about life. For years he’d wanted to make the jump to general columnist, to leave sports as a career behind him. He’d thought it would be impossible, given his conservative politics. But things had changed at the
Trib.
A year ago he’d been allowed to shift to one general column a week, keeping two sports columns. Just five months ago they’d moved him to two general and one sports.

Jake Woods had been the only non-liberal in-house columnist, coming down moderate or conservative on most issues. There’d been the predictable negative responses, but mainly positive ones to Jake. Many readers thought the
Trib
was becoming more balanced. Next thing he knew, Clarence stepped through the door Jake opened. In fact, Jake had lobbied to get Clarence in there.

As Jess Foley, managing editor, often reminded them, newspapers were fighting for survival all across the country. They’d once had a monopoly on the delivery of information; they’d been the gatekeepers and hadn’t had to listen to their critics. But with fewer people reading news and more looking to the network tabloid fare, the trashy pseudo-news, the
Trib
had been forced to make sure it did less to alienate its constituency. The radio talk show phenomenon at both the national and local levels had bypassed the gatekeepers of the media elite and brought conservatives out of the closet. Many of them dropped their subscriptions to the
Trib.
As Jake put it, “That drew the attention of management like getting hit with a two-by-four draws the attention of a mule.”

But what really paved the way for Clarence’s breakthrough to general columnist, he believed, was the nation’s slap in the face of the mainstream press in the fall of 1994. The vast majority of newspapers endorsed liberal candidates, but in all but a few cases the voters went against the papers. The American people didn’t trust the press, didn’t follow the press. And they didn’t just send a message to Washington, D.C. They sent a message to the entire newspaper industry. Including the
Trib.
That’s when Raylon Berkley and Jess Foley first talked to Clarence about the possibility of doing a general column. He now basked in the thrill he’d felt, this moment from the past a drug to kill the pain of the present.

Clarence opened mail and sorted through mounds of papers. It was good to be back at work, where a man could forget his problems, or at least paper them over with other ones.

“Clarence?”

“Yeah?” He looked over his right shoulder to see Tim Newcomb. Twelve years younger than Clarence, red headed and energetic, Newcomb had already proven himself in his first three years out of J-school. He was a solid reporter.

“I’m sorry about your sister,” Newcomb said. “And your niece.”

“Thanks. My niece is going to be fine, though.”

“Really? So she’s out of danger now? That’s great.”

“Well, not out of danger. But she’s going to make it.”

“I’m really glad. It’s hard to get facts in a newsroom, you know. Somebody told me she was still in critical condition.”

Clarence didn’t want to discuss it.

“Anyway,” Newcomb said, “do you want an update on stories we’ve been covering while you were gone?”

“Sure, Tim. Pull up a chair.”

Actually, since Clarence was a columnist, he didn’t really need the update to do his job. But he welcomed it. He’d read the sports page every day the last week, but the real story was in the newsroom, where reporters and editors and columnists bantered about what should go in and what shouldn’t. Often the most interesting angles on the story never got reported, either for lack of attribution or in the interests of taste. Yes, taste was still an issue in journalism, even if the old standards of taste had gone out of style with bobby socks and saddle shoes.

Clarence looked around his workspace, comfortable as an old pair of bedroom slippers. Above his computer terminal were two rows of shelving, filled with about forty books, most of them on serious topics. He liked to think. He loved a good argument. He was serious about issues. Too serious, Geneva told him.

Posted on the cubicle walls to his right were a variety of typed or neatly written quotes and political cartoons, many of them lampooning the press itself. One clip was a 1995 snippet from the
Washington Post.
It read, “Correction: Yesterday’s Post incorrectly identified a D.C. monument. The building pictured was actually the Lincoln Memorial.”

Next to this was a group of actual headlines clipped from various major newspapers: “Asbestos Suit Pressed” and “Tuna Biting Off Washington Coast” were the
Trib’s
own. “Defendant’s Speech Ends in Long Sentence” and “Man Held over Giant LA Brush Fire” came from the
L.A. Times.
A half-dozen comparable clips from other papers accompanied them.

Taped on the top of his computer was a quote from President John Adams: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Tacked up on the corkboard to the side was one of his favorite letters, which he made a point of showing everyone. “Please get off your soapbox on abortion and come to terms with some of the real problems out there. For instance, our continued serial killings of animals, our brothers and sisters. The cannibalism must stop. George Bernard Shaw asked, ‘How can we expect peaceful conditions on earth, as long as our bodies are the living graves of murdered animals?’”

He loved getting letters like this. They made great fodder for columns. Besides, this one made him feel more literate. Whenever he ate a hamburger, he thought of George Bernard Shaw.

On the left side was a collection of some of his favorite leads, such as “NBC and the Titanic are the same, except the Titanic had an orchestra.” He looked absent-mindedly at one he’d once been impressed with—“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Attention getting. Astounding. Right to the point. But for the first time he could remember, Clarence found himself wondering whether or not it was true.