by Tom Wolfe
Irv turned back toward Mary Cary and with a frantic look in his eyes mouthed the word “Now!” But she was already heading through the concealed door in the partition. Didn’t have to be prodded! Marching straight out to confront these … skinheads! … murderers! Irv Durtscher, the Maxim Gorky of the Mass Media, involuntarily crouched. He needn’t have. Gordon, Roy, and Ferretti followed right behind her. Their hulking forms filled up the opening.
Irv spun back toward the monitors. None of the hidden cameras had yet picked up Mary Cary, but he could see all three of the soldiers, sitting on the couch, staring toward her. On another monitor—there went Lola, slipping out of the RV and closing the door behind her. The soldiers didn’t even notice. They were dumbstruck. Standing before them was a big blond bombshell in a creamy white silk blouse open down to the sternum, a sky-blue cashmere jacket, and a short white skirt showing off her terrific legs … and, moreover, perhaps the best-known blond bombshell in America.
“Hello, Jimmy,” said Mary Cary, “I’m Mary Cary Brokenborough.”
I’m Merry
Kerry
Broken
Berruh.
It was precisely the way she said it every week on the show! No different ! Not a tremor in her voice! Irv was astounded, even though he had seen her do it before. His admiration, his envy, cut through his fear as he crouched behind the partition, staring at the monitors and listening over the headset.
“Aw, come on naow,” said Jimmy Lowe, his mouth open, his head cocked to one side. “I don’ believe theeus.” He tried a smile, as if somehow she might respond with a smile and reveal that this was all some kind of harmless prank.
“No, you can believe it, Jimmy,” said Mary Cary. “I’m Merry Kerry Brokenberruh, and I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, we’re not the police. The bad news is, we’re from Day & Night.”
By now, as Irv could see on the monitors, Mary Cary had moved out in front of the couch and was being picked up by the hidden cameras. What was not picked up by the cameras, and what would not be seen by Day & Night’s 50 million viewers, was the line-up of heavies who now stood there as Mary Cary’s glum-faced centurions: Gordon, Roy, and Ferretti.
Jimmy Lowe didn’t say anything. He looked at Ziggefoos and then at Flory, and then all three looked at one another. This was the pivotal moment. The three of them were no brain surgeons, but they were bright enough to know that—Gotcha!—they were now in trouble. This was the moment in which they had to make a decision. An older trio, wiser or not, might very well refuse to say another word and depart or, conceivably, attack. But these three were children of the third television generation. To them, television was not a communications medium, it was an atmosphere you breathed. TV came into your life as naturally as oxygen, and you would no more think of trying to keep it out than you would the air in your lungs. A Merry Kerry Brokenberruh came into your home every week as inevitably as the barometric pressure—and now she had been beamed down into these boys’ very presence. They were shocked, awed, mesmerized—and in that moment they lost the battle with logic. They neither fought nor fled. They stood their ground, transfixed by the aura of the broadcast goddess, who might be feared, might be disliked, but who could not be denied. She was in their lives, just like their bloodstreams, and she had her questions.
On the monitors Irv could see the boys’ skinned heads and stuck-out ears turning. Mary Cary had moved to the seat Lola had vacated and was sitting down. She gestured toward the television set. “You recognize what you just saw, don’t you?”
“Sonamabitch,” said Ziggefoos. He had a small, incredulous smile on his face. “This really is you?”
“I think you recognize me, and I think you recognize what you just saw,” said Mary Cary, motioning toward the set again. She spoke calmly and firmly as if she played a game of Gotcha! like this every day.
“Goddayum!” said Ziggefoos with such a crazy sort of exaggeration it startled Irv. “Merry Kerry … Merry Kerry … you’re jes shittin’ us, rat?”
“Didn’t it look real to you?” said Mary Cary. “You, Jimmy, Flory—talking about what happened to Randy Valentine … in your own words?”
“Merry Kerry … Merry Kerry …” Ziggefoos had a dreamy tone and a dreamy look and a silly little smile. “Watchoo talking abaout, Merry Kerry?”
“It’s what you were talking about, Ziggy, you and Jimmy and Flory, on that videotape. Why don’t you tell me—”
“All’s I saw was some hooker shakin’ her fanny aout’na pineywoods, Merry Kerry,” said Ziggefoos.
Mary Cary simply ignored the comment. “Why don’t you tell me”—she looked straight at Jimmy Lowe—“why don’t you tell me exactly what you did when you surprised Randy Valentine in that men’s room that night?”
“Merry Kerry,” said Ziggefoos. He paused. “Jewer have a vodka twilat?”
“No, and if I were you—”
“Let’s go git us a coupla vodka twilats, Merry Kerry. Rat’air inna DMZ.” He broke into a grin.
Goddamn this kid! thought Irv. “Merry Kerry.” Irv had seen this irritating familiarity before, especially among young people. The face and the voice of Mary Cary Brokenborough were so familiar, people felt as if they knew her. She already dwelt somewhere inside them. And this kid was just smart enough or just drunk enough to use this deluded sense of intimacy to try to transform the ambush into some kind of bullshit flirtation.
Jimmy Lowe’s panicked expression began to dissolve as the beauty of this strategy dawned on him, and he, too, grinned and said,”’At’s a goddayum good idy! Gitcher tail up, gal, and let’s go git it on!”
“Fuckin’ A!” said Flory.
Ziggefoos grinned at both of them, egging them on.
“Thank you very much,” said Mary Cary curtly, “but I’m not here to go honky-tonking. I’m here to get to the—”
“Awwwwww, come on, Merry Kerry,” said Ziggefoos, “don’t be lack ‘at. You got on yer party clothes, gal! If you don’ want a vodka twilat, I’ll git us a Coors lat, long neck. If I got me a beer, you got half.”
Jimmy Lowe and Flory cracked up over that. You got half! That was rich.
Thus encouraged, Ziggefoos said, “And a pack a Salem One Hunnerts, too. We don’t git many vis‘tors fum New York daown here’ta DMZ. ‘At’s whirr you fum, ain’t it? New York City?”
Jimmy Lowe and Flory were doubled over with laughter. Irv began to despair. Mary Cary had confronted them, but they were turning it into a farce.
“You’re not going to have much to laugh about if you’re faced with a charge of murder,” said Mary Cary. She said it with such stentorian firmness, Jimmy Lowe stopped laughing. She had his attention. “On that tape, which you just saw, you describe how you made an unprovoked attack on Randy Valentine in the men’s room of a bar not far from here. You—”
“Awwwwww, latin up, Merry Kerry,” said Ziggefoos. “This ain’t Day & Nat. This here’s nat time on Bragg Boulevard. Jes letcher hair daown and git it on.”
But Mary Cary kept boring in on Jimmy Lowe. “You just described how you kicked down a door, flattened Randy Valentine against a wall, and began beating him.”
She wouldn’t let up. She was staring him down. He was close enough to reach out and grab her by the throat.
“You need a drank,” said Ziggefoos. “You need to latin up.”
Ziggefoos continued to grin, but Jimmy Lowe and Flory no longer had it in them to be amused. They looked at each other and at Ziggefoos with alarm.
“You also described your motivation,” said Mary Cary. “You made it very clear what it was. It was homophobia. You assaulted Randy Valentine because he was different, because he didn’t have your sexual orientation, because he was gay. Isn’t that what you just told us?”
“Didn’ tale you any such thang,” said Jimmy Lowe. He had a helpless expression, as if he couldn’t comprehend how this national apparition, which had somehow materialized out back of the DMZ on Bragg Boulevard, was now hurling such acc
usations in his face.
“But we just heard you,” said Mary Cary. “We just saw you. You just said it in so many words.”
“All’s I said was—”
“Shut up, Jimmy,” said Ziggefoos.
“And we just heard from you, too,” said Mary Cary. “And from your friend here, Flory. You just admitted your own involvement, and you just described your own motivation. Randy Valentine wasn’t ‘from our parish.’ Isn’t that what you said, Flory? The gay lifestyle is disgusting. Isn’t that what we heard you say, Ziggy?”
Irv marveled. Mary Cary was staring them down. There wasn’t even the tiniest break in her voice. The sentences were rolling out perfectly. She had them on the ropes. If they didn’t stop talking now, they’d hang themselves for sure.
Ziggefoos hesitated. Then he said, “Whatchoo know abaout it?”
“I know what I’ve just heard you say—you and Jimmy and Flory—in your own words.” She looked at Jimmy Lowe again. “If it wasn’t for the reason you said, why did you attack Randy Valentine?”
Jimmy Lowe said, “All’s I did—”
“Jes shut up, Jimmy!” said Ziggefoos. “You don’ have to tale’er a dayum thang.” Then he looked at Mary Cary. To Irv, watching on the monitor behind the false wall, Ziggefoos’s narrow eyes and long, lean face looked more menacing than ever. “I’m not talking abaout thayut, Merry Kerry. Didn’t none a us have nothing to do with Randy Valentine. Don’t none a us know what the hale happened to him. But I kin tale you one thang.”
“What’s that?”
“I kin tale you one thang abaout yer ‘gay lafstyle.’”
“All right—go ahead.”
“It won’t never made fer the U.S. Army.”
“Oh? And why is that?”
“You ever knowed anybuddy in the U.S. Army?”
“As a matter of fact, I have. My father was in the Army. He fought in Korea.”
“You ever ask him what he thought a having homoseckshuls ‘long-side him?”
“No, I never did, but I’m sure he wouldn’t have been in favor of kicking down doors and beating them senseless.”
“You know what a soldier’s spose a do? You know what he’s spose a be there fer?”
“Tell me,” said Mary Cary. There was irritation in her voice. She didn’t like what this redneck kid was doing, taking over the role of interrogator.
“A soldier’s ther to fat,” said Ziggefoos. “He’s ther to risk his laf.” By now Irv knew the boys’ redneck elocution well enough to figure out that fat meant fight and laf meant life. But Christ—did Mary Cary?
“’At’s what h‘it balls daown to. Ever nawn’n’en, a country, any country, h’it needs men to fat and risk their laf. And do you think ther’s any man ‘at jes natch’ly wants to risk his laf?” He waited for her to answer.
Mary Cary, irritably: “Go on.”
Damn! thought Irv. This kid was fulla shit, but he had a knack for taking over the script and turning things around. If only she could have gotten Jimmy Lowe talking! But Ziggefoos had cut him off. Jimmy Lowe and Flory were just sitting there with their mouths open and their eyes blinking, looking from Mary Cary to Ziggefoos and from Ziggefoos to Mary Cary. Well, maybe he could—
“Hale, no,” said Ziggefoos, “ain’t nobody jes natch’ly wants to risk his laf. You know what I’m trying to tale you?”
“Go on.”
“You got to take ‘ose ol’ boys and ton‘em into a unit. A unit. You know what I’m saying? The unit’s the onliest thang that don’t know no fear. When you’re in the field and you’re pinned daown by spear far?”—once more it took Irv a couple of beats to translate: spear far meant superior fire—they’d have to use subtitles—“the unit’s the onliest thang’at don’t run away. The ind‘vigil? He’ll run on you, Merry Kerry. I’on keer who he is. He’ll run on you. But when he’s in a unit—ain’t jes his own mind and his own heart working no more. He’s got evvy mind and evvy heart in the platoon inside uv’im, whether he wants’em’air’not, and even if he don’t want to hear it, they’re saying to him, ‘A man don’t run, a man holts his graound, a man risks his laf if he has to.’ Being in a far fat’s—”
Mary Cary broke in: “Well, the only man whose life was risked in this case—”
“Being in a far fat’s—”
“—was a man who wasn’t trying to—”
“Lemme finish, Merry Kerry. Being in a far fat’s—”
“All right,” said Mary Cary, “if you’re so hipped on your firefights, let’s talk about your firefights.” Good girl, thought Irv, you figured out “far” and “fat.” “When were you ever in a firefight? Not a training excercise—a real one? Or—”
“I was—”
“Or is this some grand military theory of yours?”
“I been in a far fat.”
“Really? How interesting. When exactly? In Korea? In Vietnam?— which happened to have ended before you were born probably? You’ve never actually been in a firefight, have you?”
“Deed, I have, too.”
“Oh?—exactly when? Exactly where?”
“In Somalia.”
“Somalia,” said Mary Cary, pouring on the derision. “A UN mission to provide food to starving people. And you were in a firefight?”
“Jewer hear a Bloody Sunday?”
On the monitor in the rear compartment, Irv saw the consternation on Mary Cary’s face immediately. A sixth sense told her not to say no, because “Bloody Sunday” rang some kind of bell, but she didn’t know what the bell was tolling. Her expression went blank. The wheels spun—and she came up with nothing. Mary Cary might occasionally bone up on a subject for a Day & Night segment, but she was no daily devourer of current events, not via newspapers, not even via the nightly TV news; not the way he, Irv, was. Like a lot of people in television news today, Mary Cary had come into the business not from journalism school but from drama school; at the University of Virginia, in her case. The star in television news was not the newshound but the on-camera performer. When people like Mary Cary—and she was far from being the only one—were starting out as correspondents, they prided themselves on being able to go anywhere in the world, arrive with information zero, get briefed for ten or fifteen minutes by whatever researcher was on the scene, and then go on camera and regurgitate the stuff with an air of profound, fathomless, even smug, authority. That was … performing. Mary Cary’s ascent from the lower ranks had begun one evening in 1979. Her producer, a lovable but carbuncled gnome named Murray Lewis, had sent her from New York to Teheran on the spur of the moment to cover the Iran hostage crisis. She raced from the Teheran airport, reached the American Embassy just in time for the evening news in the United States, stood in front of hordes of screaming, placard-waving, flag-burning, effigy-stomping Iranian demonstrators, looked into the camera, and, with information zero, with not so much as thirty seconds of briefing from the network’s local researchers, flawlessly rephrased the Associated Press copy concerning the event as Lewis, who was in New York, read it to her over a satellite hookup and into a corded plug stuck in her ear and concealed by her luxuriant blond hair. Made it all roll out of those big lips of hers, she did, with an air of foreign-affairs profundity that would have made a Bismarck’s or a Kissinger’s jaw drop.
But at this moment she didn’t have Murray Lewis or even Irv Durtscher to whisper in her ear, and so she fell back on her standard device for those rare moments when she was stymied or nonplussed.
“Go on,” she said with a tone that always insinuated that the poor devil could only dig his own grave deeper.
Irv braced. Irv knew exactly what Bloody Sunday was.
“H‘it was Sunday, October the thud, nanteen-nanny-three,” said Ziggefoos. Suddenly he was giving Mary Cary a stern, unblinking look of rectitude. “Our unit, we was over east a the Bakhura Market, and our CO, Major Lunsford, he says—wale, the thang was, some informer or sump’m, he’s tipped us off that this Mohammed Aidid?—some of his top lieutenants, th
ey’re having a secret meeting up’eh at the—”
Mary Cary broke in: “That’s very interesting, I’m sure, but let’s get back to the point, and the point is the murder of Randy Valentine.”
Ziggefoos was having none of it. The look in his eyes became even sterner, more accusatory. The boy did not blink, not even once. He just sawed away with his story in his rasping redneck twang.
“They was having a secret meeting up‘eh at the Olympic Hotel, Aidid’s people was, and so the CO, he puts forty uv’us into a buncha MH-60s. They’s helicopters. They call’em Black Hawks. It’s abaout three-thuddy inny afternoon, inny brat sunlat, and they’d already sent another unit a Rangers fum the HQ, and them and some Delta Commandos—”
“I’m not interested in—”
But Ziggefoos’s new voice ripped right through her. “—and in a couple minutes, all uv‘us, and the units fum the airport, we’re rat over the Olympic Hotel, and if you ever hud prakly twenty MH-60 helicopters up inny air at oncet—I mean, you talk abaout thunder—ever’buddy in‘at whole goddayum moth-eaten town’at had a gun, they strapped h’it on, because they knowed sump’m big was coming down.”
Mary Cary seemed stunned by the onslaught of his words and the damning stare. Goddamn it, thought Irv, you got to cut him off! He was aware that his heart was beating much too fast.
“Our unit,” said Ziggefoos, “we come rappelling down abaout fifty feet a rope to the hotel roof fum the helicopters, and the units fum the airport, they’d already broke in’at hotel and they’d got holt those summitches, Aidid’s people, and them and us, all the units, we jes waitin’eh for the Humvees to come transport the pris’ners when all hell broke loose.”
“You know about all hell breaking loose, don’t you?” said Mary Cary. That’s it! That’s it! But she doesn’t have her usual air of command. “Hell broke loose for Randy—”