John Case - The Murder Artist

“What are you guys doin’, anyway?” Sean blasts into the room with an impatient look, then shoots back through the doorway. “Come on!”

“Yeah,” Kevin says, hurling himself into his brother’s wake. “Let’s go!”

I’m grateful for the interruption, not at all sure I buy my own rap. It’s a fine line. What’s hard-hitting, unblinking coverage? And what’s exploitation?

In Kandahar, the camera crew freaked. I was the one that kept the film rolling. It still gets to me. Sometimes I can’t help feeling guilty. The deal is that I make a living from suffering and death; hell, I even win awards for it.

“Daaaaaad!” the boys yell from the front room as I slide the disk into a plastic sleeve. “Let’s go!”

“Tears are good,” Jerry Tumolo, the first producer I ever worked for used to say. “Tears are good, but blood is better. A little blood really gets their attention.”

Kevin and Sean are on their best behavior at the station, where I turn over the segment to Kathy Straight, one of the techs.

Back in the car, they point out the monuments as we head out of town.

Taking the curve off the parkway, they shout, “Lincoln Memorial.”

A few minutes later, they yell, “Big french-fry!” This bit of enshrined toddler wit celebrates Sean’s keen observation, at age two, of the similarity between the shape of the fast food staple and the Washington Monument. It never fails to trigger a cascade of cackles.

Then there’s the one whose name they’ve forgotten until I tell them: the Jefferson Memorial. “Jefferson, Jefferson, Jefferson,” they chant, as the Jeep passes the Tidal Basin.

“Can we go on those sometime?” Kevin asks, pointing to the flotilla of blue-and-white paddleboats.

“How about right now? We could skip the festival.”

“Daaaaaaad.”

They don’t mind my lack of excitement. I used to fake it, revving up bogus enthusiasm on those occasions Liz guilt-tripped me into going along on some kid-centric outing. It didn’t fly, so it’s a relief to realize that they don’t actually care if Dad is having a good time. They’re kids; it’s about them.

The stop at the station means we end up taking the long way out of town, looping down along the river before heading out the Southwest Freeway to New York Avenue. Volleyball games on the Mall give way to the Mint. Five minutes later, we’re heading east through a canyon of crumbling town houses and burnt-out stores.

“Is this the hood?” Sean asks.

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

Soon, the zoning changes from gang-related residential to light-industrial. Abandoned warehouses with punched-out windowpanes, fast-food restaurants and welfare motels with drawn curtains. Sean can’t get enough of it.

But Kevin couldn’t care less. “Are we almost there?” he asks. And laughs. “It’s a joke – get it? Becuz: we just left !”

An hour-and-a-half later, we are there. I park the Jeep amid thousands of other cars baking in an open field in tiny Cromwell, Maryland. The boys are excited, running ahead toward a pair of crenellated towers (don’t look close, they’re made of plywood). Banners flutter from the ramparts on either side of a lowered drawbridge across a “moat” that seems newly enlarged. A muddy backhoe sits outside a shop where costumes can be rented for the day. “Slow down,” I tell the boys as the three of us join a stream of families ready to cross the bridge into another world.

“One lord, two squires, is it?” the costumed woman at the gate asks, taking my credit card. “On Her Majesty’s royal Visa.” And then we’re in.

Suddenly, it’s four hundred years ago. Wood-chip paths wind through a forested Elizabethan settlement of shops and food stalls, open-air amphitheaters and “living chess” games. The dividing line between imagination and reality is blurry, at best, with many of the fairgoers also in costume, some simple and homemade, some as elaborate as those of the actors – and probably rented from the shop near the entrance. It’s like one of those Civil War reenactments, I decide, thinking that it might be interesting to make a film about people who have given their hearts to another age.

Meanwhile, the boys dash this way and that, tracing in the air a sort of five-pointed star that connects a falconer to a shop selling armor, a magician doing card tricks to a jester, a group singing madrigals to a man making candles. And everyone, even the foodmongers and shop clerks are in costume, holding forth in a semblance of Elizabethan English, with lots of ye s and thee s and thine s.

The boys’ excitement is contagious and before long, I realize that I’m actually having a good time. The place is interesting and impressive, half amusement park, half time machine. And educational, too. Liz would approve. And she’s right: it’s great to be with the kids when they’re having such a ball.

Liz, sweet Liz. She should be here; she’d love it. For a moment, my longing for her nags at me. She left only after a series of failed promises about how I was going to change my workaholic ways, but I still felt blindsided by her departure. I knew she was right, that’s the thing… but I just never quite got around to making the changes I promised to make. News can become all-consuming. You can always do more, edit a little better, write better, check out one more source – but you always have to do it now because you’re always on a deadline.

So yes, Liz was right, I concede that. I’m a workaholic. I neglected my family. I admitted all that to the marriage counselor. I just thought we had time; I thought we were making progress. I guess I never thought she’d actually leave . And then she and the boys were gone, leaving a hole in my life the size of the Grand Canyon.

The campaign to get them back is not going so well, either. This summer is kind of a last shot.

In the meantime, I’m worried she’ll find someone else, some new age guy. Attentive, sensitive, one of those guys who wears a T-shirt that proclaims I’M THE DADDY. One of those guys willing to carry a baby around in some marsupial pouch. This is a repulsive thought – Liz and some other guy with their baby – and I cast it out of my mind. “Let’s go get some food,” I say.

“Yeah!”

We line up at a stall selling hot dogs. “Would the young squires like a widgeroon of the King’s mustard on thy flaming mongrels?”

The boys look stunned, then collapse into paroxysms of laughter. Get it? Mongrels? Dogs? Hot dogs? Flaming mongrels!?

Me – I’m surprised they know what mongrel means.

The three of us spend the afternoon wandering from surprise to delight. Kevin and Sean gasp at the sword swallower, a handsome sweaty man in a leather vest who leans back and gulps down the blade of an outrageously big scimitar. Along with all the other kids, they can’t decide whether they’re impressed or grossed out. A street magician tears up a card picked by an onlooker, does some elaborate shuffling and fanning of the deck, then plucks the magically restored card out of a woman’s hair. Kevin gapes at Sean. (“How did he do that?”) They watch wide-eyed as mud wrestlers dump one another in the muck, and stare at the bulb of glowing glass expanding at the end of the glassblower’s tube.

The three of us watch as fairgoers, kids and adults, try their luck at climbing the Jacob’s ladder. No one makes it more than two rungs up the wobbly affair before a failure of balance causes the whole contraption to pivot with a savage twist. Dumped hard, challengers land on a big pile of soft hay, most of them laughing in surprise. Some keep at it two or three times before moving on. It’s a buck a pop, and even though the twins are strong and athletic for their age, it’s pretty clear they don’t have a prayer. Still, they want to try it and I give in. Wiping out is obviously half the fun.