Creamy White Thighs

An Audible Gasp

He stood by the front counter, next to his cameraman, a tall brown man name Jeff who Tooth had never heard say any words that weren’t directly related to technical aspects of his big camera. Jeff stood stoically. Tooth supposed he was bored, though it was hard to say for certain, since Jeff stood stoically in most circumstances, but boredom would be a logical reaction just now. They’d been standing in the paper-and-ink air next to the counter in front of the newsroom for maybe fifteen minutes, waiting for the clerk to return. The newsroom consisted of a dozen battered metal desks positioned haphazardly around the room, most of them stacked high with teetering piles of paper but just two of them occupied—one by a young man talking on a desk phone and writing in his notebook, and the other by an older man peering into the dark-green screen of a boxy computer while occasionally swigging from a plastic bottle of soda. They both wore nondescript khakis, the older man in a rumpled button shirt, the younger in a pale collared pull-over with what looked like coffee stains on the front of it. Tooth thought: Ah, newspaper reporters!: Always dressing like they were trying to get away with something. The younger man, almost a boy, really, was engaged in what sounded like an escalating argument with someone on the phone about a court record that might or might not be publicly available. The older man seemed to be more intrigued by his plastic bottle of soda than by whatever he was reading on his green computer screen.

The clerk returned, carrying a half-foot-thick binder of newspapers. She was middle-aged and bookish-looking but for her notably big arms, the result of years of hauling around those big binders of newspapers, Tooth imagined. When she set the binder on the countertop, it thumped loudly enough that the older reporter in the newsroom looked up from his soda bottle.

The clerk said: “These are some of the more recent stories about them. From the ‘90s, mostly.” Tooth flipped open the binder to the first marked page: Olney Daily Mail, it announced, in grand Old Gothic script. The paper was dated from three years earlier. The white silhouette of a squirrel perched next to the word Mail. The top headline announced: White Squirrel Population Drops Again in Latest Citywide Count. It framed what looked like a stock photo of an albino squirrel sitting on a branch in winter. “It’s gotten worse since then,” the clerk said. “It’s a shame, what’s happening. But how do you tell squirrels they’re not allowed to interracially marry?” She laughed in a way that made it clear to Tooth that she’d been telling that joke for years.

Tooth glanced around the rest of the front page: a story about a city council debate over a tax levy for improvements to the town library; an Associated Press piece regarding questions being raised about the expense of President Clinton’s second inauguration that year; a feature about a child in town who’d won the state spelling bee.

Tooth grimaced, and thought: Newspapers. Then he said to clerk: “And you’re the only paper in town?”

“Oh yes. There’s been just us for, oh, almost a hundred years now. And barely enough readers to stay in business even at that.”

Tooth glanced again the binder. A story about a library tax levy. On page one. No wonder they were all dying.

Tooth looked again at the photo of the squirrel, then pulled out his notebook and began taking notes from the story. He said the clerk: “And their legs are white, too, right?” She looked at him as if it she thought it might be a trick question. She said: “They’re white all over. Except the eyes.”

Cole “Tooth” Smiley smiled broadly at her. He turned to his silent cameraman and said: “All right! Let’s go find some squirrels.”

Garrick Martin stared dumbly at the words, the printout of Harpinger’s “blog,” hanging from the bulletin board in the press room lobby. The others stared with him. He was numb everywhere, unable to fully absorb anything but the colon and end-parentheses:

:)

It was like a stray piece of sloppy punctuation which, by happy coincidence, had formed itself into a smiling face. After a moment, Garrick understood the smiling face was deliberate. Right after the words about the difficulties of staying employed.

Garrick, his career teetering over the abyss, stared icily at Worm. Then he looked back at the hanging page and said: “Who’s the source?” The terror in his own voice surprised him. There was no attribution, only Harpinger hears. And no clue as to which of the two Post bureau members was being fired.

Harvey the Third said: “I don’t think it counts. The words have to be part of the story.” Then, noting Garrick’s glare, he cleared his throat and added: “Anyway, I’m sure the story’s wrong.”

For Garrick, it was a lousy contribution to a lousy week. Alice, that shining blonde beacon who had suddenly disappeared from his world, had reappeared just as suddenly the night before, on the television screen in his living room, in a way that made Garrick wish she'd disappear again. Her interview with Baby John’s biological mother, the wispy, weeping Ukrainian woman, was surely ricocheting around the Capitol this morning. The boy’s biological parents had, until then, been faceless villains, henchmen to the chief villain, Chief Justice James D. Tipple. But after watching the boy’s mother plead in her barely decipherable English for the right to raise the son she bore, even Garrick suddenly found himself wondering what the hell they were all doing down in Room One-Twelve.

Then had come the call, on his home phone, not long after her story aired. Her vowels were stretching around like chewing gum in the teeth of a teenager. She said: “You saw th’ inta’view?” He had. He congratulated her and she thanked him, and then they sat in electronic silence. “I’m goin’ back to Mississippi,” she finally said. “Got ’n offer from the station in mah hometown.” Then, with a self-depreciating laugh: “I’m gonna try m’ hand at doin’ th’ weather.” Her accent, previously hidden like a shameful secret, now sounded unrestrained-verging-on-exaggerated, and he wondered if perhaps the prospect of going back to the place where she had no accent at all—where he’d have been the one with the accent—was the reason. Histories like handbags. “Weather, huh?” he said. In the movies, that was the part of the conversation where they'd have said meaningful things about what they’d had together and why it was over. Instead, she politely thanked him for everything, told him she’d never forget him, then said goodbye and hung up quickly enough to make him wonder if that was true.

Now, in the press room lobby, Garrick took one more look at the ominous printout to Harpinger's blog, then walked down to his office and stepped into it and almost walked into Colleen, standing with her back to him, looking out the low half-window. It was a startling sight; Colleen wasn’t the pensive type. She turned her gaze on him for what felt like the first time in the four years that they'd shared this space. He braced for the blunt force of a creative obscenity or a colorful insult, but received instead a stoic, silent stare. The stare conveyed it all: She’d seen the Harpinger's blog, announcing the impending end of one of their jobs. He looked, earnestly, for some sign of fear or resignation or determination or something on which he might tie a thread of camaraderie. He found nothing but stone.

Garrick said: “This is bullshit. I’m calling her. She’s going to explain this.” He stepped to his desk and picked up the phone. Colleen exited the office, wordlessly, and he knew then that she had already tried to call Helen herself—she probably had just hung up the phone as Garrick arrived. He dialed, and listened. He wasn’t surprised to get no answer.

He tried the main desk and got a woman named Jane Something whom he’d known for years but wouldn’t have recognized on the street. She told him: “Helen’s been moved to features. She’s going back to being a reporter. Just announced.”

Garrick said: “Um.” Then: “So, Colleen and I are answering to—who?”

Jane was silent and in the silence Garrick felt the queasy warmth of sympathy. Then she said: “There’s a meeting Monday. In Peoria. You’re both supposed to be here for it. Colleen didn’t tell you?”

The hush still hung over the room. Something had turned down the volume, turned it down to almost nothing. As if waking from sleep, Garrick shook out his mind and peered around the room, periscope-like, looking for the source of the hush.

He found it, there in the front row: Just behind the table where former Governor Jamison and Judge Tipple sat, there sat a youngish woman in a light purple frock—that was the only word, “frock,” that Garrick could put to the plain, straight dress she wore, “dress” seemed too formal for it. She was pale and young, lacking any makeup and with her hair pulled into a rumpled bun. Garrick thought he recognized her and he was just puzzling it out when he saw that, with one lingering hand, she tended a child in the chair next to her—a boy, blond, maybe three years old, playing with what looked from a distance like a “G.I. Joe”-type action figure. Garrick craned his view around the seated crowed to get a better look at the boy: Baby John! Last seen crying in terror during his court-ordered kidnapping, now sitting there playing peacefully under arm of one of the kidnappers. Under the arm of the woman who was, after all that, his mother.

Now Jamison twisted his big frame around in his chair to look directly at the mother. He leaned toward her and he whispered something. She listened and she whispered back. Then the man in the gray business suit next to her, who had the dusty demeanor of a lawyer, re-whispered it for Jamison, apparently translating. Jamison nodded at the lawyer and smiled reassuringly at the woman and patted her hand. The judge sat staring forward the whole time, his face fixed in the scowl with which he had apparently been born.

Jamison leaned to the small black microphone and said into it: “Ladies and gentlemen of the committee, I’d like to call as our last witness Mrs. Valeriya Tereshchenko.” He pronounced the unpronounceable name with the focused competence of one who had recently practiced it.

Behind the half wall, Senator Glenda Kowalski looked up from her bundle of papers as if someone had called her name. She signaled the chairman for the floor, then adjusted her microphone and spoke into it without waiting for his response. She said: “Excuse me, Mr. Jamison, but what does this witness have to do with the issues at hand?” The mister echoed like a slap.

Jamison smiled, and said: “Good morning, Ms. Kowalski,” stretching out the mizz. Even from out in the audience, Garrick thought he could see Ms. Kowalski redden.

Jamison said: “This young lady is the mother of the child known through the media as `Baby John.’ She’s here to speak on behalf of Justice Tipple.”

Kowalski, angrily: “Governor Jamison, this is completely out of line!”

Young Representative Bradley, the Republicrat committee chairman, cleared his throat nervously and eyed the humming television cameras gathered like a stand of trees to the side of the room, and he said: “Now, Senator, Governor, I’m sure we can reach some—”

Kowalski, ignoring him, said: “Governor Jamison, I have told you, repeatedly, that this impeachment has nothing to do with Justice Tipple’s heartless, terrible, unwarranted removal of this child from his home!”

Jamison, smiling small, said: “Yes, you have said that repeatedly.” Then, still smiling: “I simply don’t believe you. Senator.”

In the following day’s newspapers—not just in a few of them but virtually all of them—the phrase “audible gasp” would be used to describe the reaction of the audience. Not one reporter or copyeditor would pause at the cliché long enough to ponder the fact that there was no such thing as an inaudible gasp. The complication was, it wasn’t a loud gasp, it was more like just the whoosh of air entering a tire, but the underlying shock within the gentle sound was so clear and sharp that to simply write the word “gasp” wouldn’t have sufficed. For one politician to bluntly call another politician a liar within the staid sanctum of a public hearing was something that happened on television shows all the time but happened in real life never at all. Garrick wondered if it was one of those moments that breaks a seal, never to be re-sealed, like the first appearance of nudity in movies. Now that this particular seal had been broken, how long would it be, he wondered whimsically, before the President of the United States himself couldn’t address Congress without fear of political pornography—of some jackass in the fourth row standing up and yelling: You lie!

Jamison guided the Ukrainian woman to a seat at the conference table, the blond boy in her lap. Kowalski was escalating her objections—“Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman!”—as Jamison adjusted the microphone toward the woman’s mouth and motioned for her to speak. She did, tearfully, her voice running headlong into Kowalski’s. For a moment, the two women’s amplified voices wrestled in the space over the room, before Kowalski—forced to choose between shouting down a weeping mother clutching her toddler son in front of a roomful of cameras, or yielding—reluctantly yielded. Garrick looked at Jamison in awe. It was as seamless a parliamentary-judo move as he had ever seen.

With Jamison gently urging her, the woman pressed on, her testimony a jumble of tearful sentence fragments spilling into the microphone, the same Ukrain-glish gibberish most ears in the room had heard from her on television the night before in Alice's report. Now, as then, the central message seeped through the language barrier clearly enough: “My son. My son!” Through it all, Judge Tipple continued looking straight ahead as if this had nothing to do with him. To Garrick, to the crowd, the judge looked mostly the same as he had throughout the proceedings: imperious, impervious. But not so villainous as before. The more the Ukrainian woman babbled and sobbed and implored, the less villainous Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice James D. Tipple looked. “My son!” she wept, clutching the boy, leaving no question about it to the watching room: Before their very eyes, a judge who had taken a child from his mother morphed into a judge who had sent a child home to his mother.

Jamison waited for a lull in the woman’s disjointed monologue. Then he pulled the microphone toward himself and said to the silence: “Ladies and gentlemen of the committee: For those of you who believed these proceedings were really about an allegation of abuse of power, we have more than answered that claim throughout these hearings.” Then: “And for those of you to whom it was about something else—well, I think we’ve just answered that as well.”

Senator Glenda Kowalski was on her feet before he finished the sentence. She shouted directly at Representative Bradley: “Mr. Chairman, that’s enough! I demand that you strike this testimony as irrelevant! And I demand that you admonish Mr. Jamison to cease his ridiculous and false characterization of this committee’s motives!”

Chairman “Benedict” Bradley looked wearily at Kowalski. He looked at the conference table, at the former governor and the formerly villainous judge. He looked at the audience, all faces awaiting his next words. He looked at the cameras, their humming now the only sound in the room. He looked at the little boy, sitting angelically in the lap of the still-weeping Ukrainian woman. He looked into his own future, to his next election, and he saw there news footage of her weeping, now repurposed for what was sure to be a devastating campaign commercial against him.

With that image casting its long shadow in his mind, Representative Bradley looked at Senator Kowalski and said, calmly but loudly enough to ensure the reporters’ microphones caught it: “Senator—please sit down and shut up.”

And there was an audible gasp in the room.

It was barely five o’clock, barely quitting time from the office, but Garrick had been home for hours and was on his third beer. It was the first time in his career that he had left, just left, in the middle of a work day for no particular reason. His final installment in the saga of Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice James D. Tipple had practically written itself, there being little to say except that the committee voted almost unanimously against impeachment. Senator Glenda Kowalski cast the sole dissenting vote, announcing it during a seething speech about how they were failing the children of Illinois and the rule of law and democracy itself—though her fury was directed largely at vacant chairs, the room having mostly emptied out by then. The reaction of the Peoria Post’s news desk was similarly unceremonious. A copyeditor confirmed to Garrick they had received his story, and that it was going inside rather than page one, what with the presidential campaign battle heating up between Vice President Gore and that Texan. Garrick knew it was more than that, and more than the fact that Helen couldn’t fight for the story because she'd been demoted to the features staff, and more even than the fact that Garrick’s job was possibly gone. Alice’s interview with the Ukrainian woman had shriveled and shrunken the story, just like that, shrunken it to almost nothing, in the hearing room and in the newsrooms across the state and in the nation beyond. Garrick tried to work up some professional grief over it—this had been his story, The Story, the one that made him, for a time, a Giant-Killer—but he found he cared as little about the end of the story as everyone else did.

Of course, he had bigger things to care about now. He was scared, in a way he’d not been scared since maybe any time in adulthood. He would drive to Peoria on Monday and enter the newsroom that he saw a few times a year, and sit down with—with whom? He didn’t even know. And he would learn whether he was being called back to Peoria, or left to work alone in Springfield, or fired altogether—the latest casualty of the Internet, a thing (place? format? concept?) that had always, before now, seemed to have nothing do to with him.