Prophet (14 page)

Mom’s eyes were filling with tears. “I’d better not stay out here long. I can see Dad everywhere I look.”

Carl knew what she meant. This room was just full of Grandpa. His touch and his personality were everywhere. Carl could feel it.

“But see?” Mom pointed, wiping her eyes clear with her other hand. “Down there at the end, right by the windows. Couldn’t you use that area?”

They walked down to the south end of the room where a row of large windows would welcome the daylight. Carl looked the area over thoughtfully. In the corner was a large pile of lumber, some kind of project under a tarp, but apart from that there was plenty of open space here. Near the windows was a perfect spot for an easel, and on the next wall plenty of room to hang his paintings. This end of the workbench had space for his paints, palettes, and brushes, and in the center of the area was a fine worktable. During the day the light would be ideal.

He wanted to be here. “It’ll be a beautiful place to work.”

“Then that’s that.”

“But I don’t want to cause any problems, you know?”

“You belong here.”

“Well, I mean, with my father. He doesn’t know I’m staying here, and I was afraid to tell him.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll find something to fuss about. But that’s because he doesn’t know you and you don’t know him, and he’ll be concerned for me.”

“What kind of a person is he?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Ask him yourself. That’s why you’re here.”

Carl looked around the room again, fascinated, captivated by this world—his world—he’d never known. “I still feel like I’m intruding.”

“No, now remember, this was my idea.” She touched him, got him to look at her. “Carl Barrett, my name is Lillian Eve Barrett. I’m your grandmother, the mother of your father. And you, young man, are my only grandchild.” She put her arms around him and gave him a squeeze. He didn’t know how to respond to that and just stood there stiffly, his hands awkwardly at his sides. “This is called a hug, Carl. It’s one of the things I do to people I love. You’ll get used to it.”

He absorbed the hug and the words that came with it and then shyly agreed, “Okay.”

She let him go and stepped back to smile at him and to even point a motherly finger in his face. “If you get to be a nuisance, I’ll let you know, so don’t be. I expect you to keep this place clean, like your grandfather kept it and your father never did. You can have your father’s old room. The bed’s still there and his dresser. Right now I’ve got my sewing in there and a bunch of boxes from the Women’s Missionary rummage sale, but we’ll cart all that stuff upstairs and out of your way. If you start feeling guilty for mooching off a little old widow, I’ve got plenty of work for you to do around here to earn your keep. I’ll give you a list.”

He smiled, nodded, feeling a bit nervous, on the spot. “Yeah, okay. Fair enough.”

“Any questions?”

“Oh. Well . . .” His eyes drifted toward the pile of lumber and whatever else under the tarp. “Would it be okay if I moved that stuff there? Then I’d have this area all clear. It’d be perfect.”

She stepped over to the pile and lifted one corner of the tarp, folding it back over the top. Underneath were several planks cut to precise, curved shapes, mingled with finely cut wood ribs.

“Looks like a boat,” said Carl.

Mom didn’t answer right away. She seemed drawn by those unassembled parts into another world. Her eyes filled with tears again. “I’d better get inside now. I see Dad everywhere I look . . .” Her hands went to her face and she turned away, heading for the door. “Come in when
you’re ready, and we’ll get you moved in.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s all right.” She stopped and turned toward him one more time, wiping her eyes, speaking with quaking breath. “I want you here. Dad wants you here too. I know.”

She went out the door. Carl stood there, unsure of what to do next. He finally heard the back door to the house open and close again. She was safe inside now. She was home.

Who is she anyway?
he found himself wondering.
Who was Grandpa?
Then he chuckled.
Who’s my old man?

He reached out and touched one of the boat ribs. And for the longest time, he just couldn’t take his hand away.

MONDAY AFTERNOON, AT
ten to 1, John parked in his designated stall under the building, punched in the security access code at the stairway door, and entered the bowels of Channel 6, The City’s Premier News and Information Station. Up one flight of stairs, through the steel fire door, and straight ahead was the newsroom.

“Hey, George.”

George Hayami, assignment editor, waved from the assignment desk, an elevated station everyone passed on their way into the newsroom. From the newsroom floor it resembled a sort of lunch counter, built at chest height, from which George, Ruth Sutton, and Diane Bouvier served up a constantly changing menu of fast information. The Desk, as the staff called it, was in many ways the only window in this windowless room, the station’s electronic, telephone, fax, and print eyes and ears that were open to the outside world. On the left end a bank of radios tuned to police and fire frequencies carried the chatter of dispatchers, fire trucks en route, and cops on capers. In the left back corner a radio and telephone switchboard kept the Desk in touch with reporters in the field via radio, cellular phone, and, when all else failed, public telephone. Just under the back counter all the latest City newspapers, plus the
Wall Street Journal
, the
New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and the
Washington Post
, were stacked in wire bins, already divided up, folded over, highlighted, and clipped. On the back wall were large maps of The City proper, The Greater City, the county, and the
state for quick reference by the assignment editors so they could tell reporters where a story was happening and how best to get there. On the desk below the maps were the computerized feeds from the news services—United Press International, Associated Press, and Reuters. At the other end, sifting and selecting, George Hayami and Ruth Sutton sat at computer consoles updating the “24-Hour Outlook,” a multi-paged, computer printout, the day’s menu of what news was happening and where, what stories were being covered and by whom, who was working, who was sick, who was on vacation.

John picked up a copy, updated at noon, and at a glance could see what was happening and what might be news:

And so it went. Three pages of it. They wouldn’t all make it on the air, but John always found the wide selection fascinating, especially when compared to the final script for the evening news.

He sat at his desk in the back of the newsroom and clicked on his computer monitor. A small, blinking mailbox in the upper-right corner of the screen meant he had a message in his mailbox. Of course, this
didn’t mean a physical mailbox, but a message left for him in the computer. He called up his mailbox to retrieve the message.

Well, messages, plural. A lot of them. “We’re thinking of you, John.” “Much sympathy in your time of loss.” “Chin up, sport, and remember, you’re the greatest.” “God bless you, John.” “Condolences to you and yours.”

Oh. And here was a message from Leslie Albright. “John, my sincerest condolences. Please come around to talk. I owe you an explanation and apology for last Friday. Leslie.”

Well, what do you know. He pushed the tears back down, smiled warmly, and typed in a return message for general distribution through the system: “Many thanks to all of you for your good wishes and support at this time. We’ve got a great team. God bless.”

He hit the enter key, and the message went into the system just that quickly. He looked around the newsroom. Leslie wasn’t at her desk. She was probably out covering a story, as usual for this time of day.

He entered the code for her computer mailbox and left her a message—“Thank you for your kind thoughts. Sure, let’s talk”—and hit the enter key.

Now back to work. Back to business. It was time to look forward, time to lose himself in the rush and hubbub of the daily news. He loved it.

He hit a series of keys, and the script for the Five Thirty came up on the screen, still under construction. Now he’d find out which stories from the “Outlook” survived the sifting process and would actually be on the air.

He was betting the fires with the “good flame pictures” would make it. Good video was always a strong seller.

As for the plane crash in Manila, the plane’s manufacturer was a major employer in The City, so that story was of great local interest and would get into the lineup somehow, whether there was any fresh information or not.

Two pervading questions that guided news reporting in a local market were, How can we localize this? and What’s hot? If a Benson Dynamics plane crashes overseas, you definitely have local interest because people in the area probably built that plane. As for “hot,” well, if
enough planes were crashing and enough people wondering why, that topic would be hot; there would be plenty of cause for related spinoff stories and sidebars. Even if there were no new news, you could still get reactions from people on the old news, you could take a poll, find a relative, look for another angle.

John could recall other “hot” topics over the past few months. AIDS was hot since two more celebrities had tested positive for HIV; NewsSix localized the story by running a piece on the local gay community and what they were doing to curb the epidemic. The Middle East hostages were hot because they were finally being released after years of captivity, and since the sister of one of them lived in the area, NewsSix had a perfect opportunity to “localize” the story. Sexual harassment on the job was hot since a major politician was accused of it. Gun control was hot after another mass shooting. Crooked televangelists were hot after another TV preacher got caught with a prostitute. News fed news, and hot news fed a lot of news.

But this was all part of the gauntlet, the gathering and sifting process every news story had to run through before it got on the air. The broadcast news business involved a day-long chain of human, journalistic, and business elements that tugged on the news, often from opposing directions, here promoting it, there opposing it, other times shaping, discarding, or rebuilding it.

Even though the people who gathered the news made every effort to be professional—meaning
objective
—news gathering was still a human business. Reporters, producers, and even viewers perceived things differently and held different facets of the news to be important, and that alone was enough to reshape reality, however unintentionally.

But even after that, the news gathering process still involved a balancing of journalism and business: What are the people out there interested in, what are we as journalists interested in and concerned about, and—this one nobody talked about openly—what material is in the best interests of our News Department as far as ratings and advertising accounts are concerned? It was a complex world.

Bingo. John saw the Summerville fire in the script for the Five Thirty. The good video of the flames must have sold it to Erica Johnson, the managing editor. And here was the plane crash story. No new information on the crash itself, but to keep the story alive—right now it
was hot—Wendell Southcott had filed a piece on how thrust reversers work and how they might have had something to do with the crash.

These were stories passed down from the assignment desk and then approved and assigned at the 9
A.M.
meeting around Erica’s desk, where Ben Oliver, the news director, Tina Lewis, the executive news producer, and the producers for the Noon, Five Thirty, and Seven O’clock shows met with reporters and writers to decide what would be news that day. From there, with their marching orders from Erica, the reporters went out in company cars with their assigned cameramen and got the video footage and pertinent information so they could put together their video packages, their perception of what was happening. The writers would remain in the newsroom and get their information over the phone, from the papers and wire services, from the public information officers of the police departments, or any other reliable source, and then write a story to accompany some separately shot video—or perhaps no video at all, the anchor would simply read it.