Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

“I’ve managed to wake up one of those back-bencher congressmen you’re so fond of yelling at to be your sparring partner,” Toni White said, her Australian accent far stronger than Richard remembered. On the other end of the line, he heard a crunch that registered as celery stick.

“You’re in early for a holiday,” Richard said. “I thought most Australians couldn’t resist the opportunity to hoist a few.”

“Up late, actually. I took a twenty-four-hour shift. Lots of people on vacation, and since I wasn’t going home, I volunteered. I don’t have to be here today, so I’m hoping you’ll do me the professional courtesy of keeping the theatrics on ice and give me some serious debate this afternoon.” She produced almost all of the higher-profile dayparts that originated from the Washington bureau. Richard wasn’t really surprised that she would be working on a holiday.

“I’m all about serious,” Richard answered, then missed about half of Toni’s reply as he wiped stray peaks of shaving foam from the mouthpiece.

“No one who saw you yesterday thinks that. You’ve got to stay on message. Keep to facts, keep it tight, nothing longer than twenty seconds.”

“So you’re just calling to make sure I’m up, on my way down, that sort of thing. You do realize it’s only ten o’clock? My call time is two p.m.”

“Actually, I’m making sure you’re at the top of your game. A friend of mine is going to be here this morning. Scouting for new talent.”

“America’s news channel gearing up for another line of layoffs?”

“Richard,” Toni White said in a tone that reminded him of an exasperated high school teacher. “He’s coming to look at you. An anchor job, news at six and eleven. A small-town gig.”

“I’m not a news guy or a small-town guy. I’m all opinion. If he’s coming to look at me, they must be pretty desperate.”

“Don’t big-time me. I sent him a tape. Some tapes. A bunch of people, and you were on there, and you’re the guy they like. They’re looking to replace the news-and-comment guy with a brilliant curmudgeon. ‘Brilliant and young.’ His words, not mine.”

“I have plenty of opinions,” Richard said, “but I didn’t know anyone did commentaries anymore.”

Toni laughed. “They don’t. No one outside of Paul Harvey, anyway. Like I said, this is a distinctly small-town operation. Small-town, small-time. You get the commentary, one minute, once a week, at the end of the Thursday-night news. But there is a catch.”

“There would have to be. The opinions in this commentary do not necessarily represent those of the management of W-so-and-so TV, ” Richard said in his best faux-announcer’s voice. “What happened to the last guy?”

“The last guy has been there for eighteen years. He’s on his way out,” Toni said.

“Retirement?”

“Lung cancer. Last of the hard-drinking, hard-smoking news guys. Won an Emmy for his reports from Cambodia. Spent time in Lebanon. He was there when the barracks blew up. He’s seen some shit.” Richard heard the hint of admiration in her voice, wondered if he could ever live up to those standards. Before he could ask another question, Toni spoke up. “Look. He’s on his way out, but he’s still working. He can hand-hold you through the breaking-in period. You’d get to co-anchor with him for three months, work together on a series about his treatment, advances in medical science. Death, the final frontier.”

“So what do I need to do?” Richard pictured animated graphics with Toni’s last words floating in, DEATH spelled out in yellow on the chyron.

Toni said, “Today, you need to show up early, do a little gripping and grinning with the headhunter, and look like a guy who’s not out of his depth with hard news.”

“That’s it? I don’t need to solve the crisis in the Middle East?”

“Nope. Just wear a serious suit, and when the congressman yells at you, don’t stoop to his level. Come down early, and I’ll introduce you, pump you up a bit.”

“Why the break to me? I’m not at all qualified for this.”

Toni tsk-tsk ed. “Maybe, just maybe, in the twenty-two years I’ve worked in news, I’ve learned how to spot someone who has a feel for this shit. Someone who has a feel for the people.” Richard did the math. He’d figured Toni to be in her late thirties, but twenty-two years in the business probably put her closer to forty-five.

“I really don’t have a feel for people. In fact, I generally don’t like them. Well, most of them, anyway.”

“Which is why you’d be a great small-town newsman. You’d have to learn to treat them with respect. Give them dignity in a way that some kid who wants to make it to New York would never bother with.”

“That’s a lot of faith,” Richard said before asking, “Just where is this dream job?”

“Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.”

The foothills of the Poconos, dead coal towns. Small cities with great granite buildings downtown, their facades chiseled with the names of banks that no longer existed, furniture and department stores that had long been bankrupted by the national chains. Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, they were all that way. That was all Richard knew. Pennsylvania was probably the worst. Wilkes-Barre, where they lopped the tops off mountains and blasted them hollow and carted away the rock and, when they were finished, left the trucks and the rail cars and the front-end loaders to rust at the bottom of an empty pit. That had been thirty years ago, but, to a man, everyone there was convinced that the mines would reopen, that someone could find the money, the ways around the blasting laws and the storm-water regulations. They could get those towns moving again. They could not fathom that the land might be like the people, ruined and empty.

Still, being a local celebrity there didn’t seem like such a bad life—free beers from the bartender at the VFW or the American Legion, throwing out the first pitch at a minor-league baseball game, riding in a vintage Cadillac in parades at St. Patrick’s Day, stuffing himself with sausages and pierogies at the annual Saint Mary’s Slavic-American picnic. Cadence’s father had grown up in that area, Luzerne County, and the only time Cadence had taken Richard home to visit, Curtis Willeford spent the afternoon sitting in an old Barcalounger he had moved onto the front porch, throwing crabapples out onto the reddish macadam of the highway and rewarding himself with a stiff pull off a pony bottle of Rolling Rock each time a car ran over one of them. Curtis Willeford thought the mines were coming back too.

Richard made careful work of choosing a tie for today’s television appearance; under the overhead lighting sometimes even the most luxuriant red silk looked flat, something out of J. C. Penney’s. Anything garish became a costume, an affectation. It took him five minutes of scrolling through his tie rack before he settled on an egg-yolk yellow tie with woven burgundy pin dots, a bit of color to pop against the background of his navy chalk-stripe suit. The tie had been a gift from his nephew, and Richard extracted a notepad from his suit jacket and wrote a reminder, another temporary resolution: Call G and wish him happy New Year.

At least he was making progress. For the first time in seven or eight years, Richard would not spend New Year’s Day recounting the half-baked resolutions of the night before. His days as a smoker were years past, yet his morning wasn’t ninety minutes old before he broke a New Year’s resolution—to get more exercise—and decided to plunge into a cab for the crosstown trip to the television studios. He knew the medical and anecdotal reasons that he needed to spend some time patrolling his neighborhood on foot, lingering in the natural foods aisle as much as he did at happy hours, trying one of those brunches with Gospel music on Sunday mornings or lurking among the Impressionists at the National Gallery on Sunday afternoons; all in all, he ought to try to get out more, avoid what faced him, avoid the hard truths he was starting to see in the mirror, stay away from his empty apartment, his empty bed.