Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

Shep barked again in the background. “Oh, give or take, about one hundred thousand smackeroonies.”

No shit, I thought. So that was what Haskell meant by “a bit of help”-a pretty hefty bit for a town that had to have bake sales to raise the money to buy a new backstop for the softball field. I doubted the town council had a hundred grand cooling in a bank vault somewhere. I sat up a little straighter in my chair, happy for the interesting turn of events, even happier that I knew and Haskell didn’t know that I knew. Philo was watching, so I tried not to look too happy. Plus I’d still have to get it confirmed elsewhere.

“Impressive.”

“Maybe next he’s going to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge, huh? You know, it might be nice to have all of this in the paper before it suddenly shows up at Wednesday’s council meeting. Otherwise, it’s a done deal, and I got a feeling we ain’t never going to see that hundred K again.”

“Well, thank you, sir,” I said. “Not sure we’d be interested, though.”

Perlmutter paused a moment, then let loose with a guffaw. “Oh, someone listening in, huh?” he said. “You are a regular Geraldo Rivera, sir. A regular Geraldo Rivera. Over and out.”

I ended the call and looked up at Philo.

“What’s up?” I said.

“Who was that?”

I riffled through my mail for the town council agenda and tore open the envelope. “Some whack job,” I said. In the middle of the agenda, below old business, an item had been added: “Executive Session re: capital construction.” That would be where the council went into a private caucus and wrote Haskell a big check.

“Are you sure?” Philo said.

He had watched me carefully. But before I told him anything, I wanted to do a little more reporting on Perlmutter’s tip. Bosses couldn’t always be trusted with good stories. The more time they had to think about them, the more time they had to mess them up or kill them outright.

I tossed the council agenda on my desk. “Would you like a story about how the White House is scheming to poison our lake so it can be turned into a cooling pond for alien spaceships?”

“Hmm,” Philo said. “I think not.”

“OK. Going for another correction tomorrow, Philo?”

“Pardon me?”

I gestured at my computer screen. “I was looking at the obit you wrote for old Mrs. Guthaus. Where the hell is Toussaint, Arizona?”

He looked at me, dumfounded. “Two what?”

“Tou-SANT.” I said it with what I fancied to be a French flourish.

“Oh,” he said. “Tucson. I would have caught it.”

“Let’s hope. You know, you’ve kind of got to imagine your corrections ahead of time. That’s the best way to avoid them. If you can imagine a correction-“ Tucson is a city in southern Arizona. A story in Tuesday’s Pilot misspelled the city’s name” — then you have to double-check it.”

I prided myself on this. Once I got out of bed in the middle of the night and called the printing plant to make sure that a caption referring to a shotgun said shotgun and not rifle, a common mistake among pointy-headed journalists who’d never held a real gun in their hands.

“So you’ve said,” Philo said. He uncrossed his loafers. “How did your meeting with Mr. Haskell go?”

“Fine.”

“Did you get a story?”

I thought for a second. “At least one.”

“Right.” I figured he already knew about the new Rats coach, courtesy of his Uncle Jim. “And how was the body language?”

“Fine. Everyone’s fine.”

Philo cleared his throat. “My meeting in Traverse was unnerving, to say the least.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yes. Long story short: revenues are way behind budget, and the budget was conservative to begin with.” Philo looked nervously around the room. “I don’t know where else to cut.”

I recalled him on his first day at the Pilot. A week before Christmas, he bustled around the newsroom like a kid about to open his presents: just twenty-eight years old and the managing editor of a real newspaper. A tiny newspaper, an obscure newspaper, a newspaper that didn’t report much news that anybody outside of Starvation Lake cared about, but a newspaper nonetheless.

He had told me then how he had decided to eschew the route taken by his grad-school peers, which was to turn summer internships at the big dailies into full-time jobs that would someday have them covering the White House or Wall Street or wars in foreign hells. “I want nothing to do with the Washington media mob and the whole backstabbing New York scene,” he’d said. “I want to learn this from the ground up, get the ink in my veins, if you know what I mean.” Part of me found his purity and naivete endearing. Another part wondered if Philo had failed to land any internships and had fallen back on his uncle.

Either way, I couldn’t help but feel for him now as his eyes darted around our wretched little newsroom, looking for ways to clip a few pennies off our monthly outlay. There in the corner was the desk of our old photographer, who had worked on and off at the Pilot longer than Philo had been alive; Philo had had to call him up and fire him on New Year’s Day. There on Philo’s desk was the mug jammed with ballpoint pens Philo had sneaked one by one out of the Pine County State Bank. There on a shelf were the last three legal pads in a package that had to last until the end of the month.

“Philo,” I said. “You went to journalism school.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

He laced his fingers together in front of his argyle sweater. “Because I like the way newspapers can knit communities together.”

He must have read that somewhere, I thought.

“And you understand how newspapers do that, right? They do it by telling people things they don’t want to hear.”

“Please,” Philo said.

“Well, why aren’t you doing journalism then, however you want it?”

“I’m the managing editor of this newspaper.”

“You’re the Bob Cratchit of this newspaper.”

“You must mean Scrooge.”

“Nope. Scrooge was the boss. You aren’t the boss by a long shot.”

I saw him look at the thermostat on the wall near the back door.

“Go ahead,” I said.

He couldn’t help himself. He slipped off the desk and walked to the thermostat and actually turned the heat down. I laughed.

“It’s not funny,” Philo said. He came back to where I was sitting and stood over me. “We could let you go. Would that be funny?”

It didn’t hit me as hard as he might have hoped, because I didn’t think he was serious. After all, who would actually put stories in the paper if I was gone? Philo spent most of his time writing e-mails and going to meetings about all the other businesses Media North was now in, cell phones and television and the Internet and billboards and video rentals.

“Hilarious,” I said. “Tell you what, why don’t you just fire yourself? Get the hell out of here and see the world, get drunk, get laid, do the things you really want to do. What’s that you always say? ‘Earth’s turning faster on its axis.’ What are you waiting around here for?”

“What makes you so high and mighty? What are you, thirty-seven, and you’re still messing around in Starvation Lake?”

“Thirty-five. And, hey, it pays the bills. I don’t have a trust fund, pal.”

“Pardon me?”

“Come on.”

“What do you know about me? You know nothing about me.”

“No offense,” I said, “but you’re miserable and you know it.” I felt Mrs. B move into the newsroom doorway. “You came here thinking you were going to run this little empire and knit these nice little towns together and take over for Uncle Jimbo. But it’s not working out, is it? You fire me and you won’t have time to worry about the Internet anymore. You’ll have to go to things like drain commission meetings. Ever go to a drain commission meeting? It’s actually even worse than it sounds.”