Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

  “I’d rather not, Bill.”

  "It’s for The Stinger," McKinley insisted.

  “You’re right, but that’s all I’m giving up. Really, let it go, it’s personal.”

  “Okay, Le Doir,” said Ranger, smiling. “Be coy and don’t tell us. Just tell us this: is it about Sagrada or something else?”

  “Sagrada,” said Ram.

  “Oh, man. Come on, what is it?”

  “You’ll see it soon enough. My appointment is here, boys. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to excuse me.”

  Phil Rudd waved to Ram as he approached the table. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  “They were just leaving. Isn’t that right, boys?”

  The three got up, mugs in hand, and moved to another table.

  “You want anything, Ram?” asked Rudd.

  “Get me a medium and a blueberry scone. Want some money?”

  “Rain check for the next time.”

  Ram settled back, waiting for Rudd. A moment later, he backed out the café door balancing two coffee mugs and a small plate.

  “Here we go.”

  “Cheers. Thanks.”

  They took their pastries and sipped their coffees. When they were finished, Ram shook two cigarettes out of his Camel pack, offering one to Rudd, who took it and produced a lighter, lighting Ram’s cigarette, then his own.

  “So, you’re doing a profile on Barry for Golden State?”

  “They think his star’s on the rise. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. What do you want to know?”

  “Well, you worked for him.”

  “True, but that doesn’t mean I know him. Besides, that was a long time ago.”

  “Not that long ago.”

  “Going on seven years now.”

  “Well, what was he like and what was it like working for him?”

  Rudd inhaled, put his feet up on a chair, exhaled, and laughed.

  “I wasn’t really a part of the inner circle, so mostly what I can talk about is what he was like to work for.”

  “Tell me that then.”

  “Mercurial says it best. Mercurial best describes Barry and the environment he moves in. If you get that, then you’re a long way toward understanding his world.”

  “You think he’s serious about going for Senator?”

  “That’s what the people who are close to him are saying.”

  “What do you think?”

  Rudd paused, inhaled again, and rolled his cigarette tip around the ashtray.

  “He’s considering it, and the reason he’s considering it is because it’s open. I don’t know how much he really wants to be a Senator, to be one voice out of a hundred, instead of one voice that commands a hundred.”

  “So why would he do it?”

  “Because it’s there, and it’s there for the taking from what I hear. Jackson doesn’t want to run. He wants to be Governor. Nobody else on the field has the kind of name recognition that Barry has, so he’ll announce and go back out on the stump.”

  “So he’s just doing it because he can?”

  “Pretty much. That’s what I think, but like I said, I’m not a part of the inner circle so I’m just speculating.”

  “Is he intending to use it as a launching pad for another run at the presidency?”

  “I don’t know. He could.”

  “You think he’s still got Potomac Fever?”

  Rudd laughed. “I don’t know, Ram, it’s hard to shake once you’ve caught it, and he caught a pretty strong dose.”

  “Could he become President? Do you think he could?”

  Rudd paused, inhaled the last of the cigarette, then stubbed it out. “That’s a tough one. Too many variables involved, depends on the mood of the nation and the direction it goes, and whether that’s something that Barry also feels and can tap into or convince himself he feels and can tap into. Anything’s possible. I mean, he did become Governor and nobody gave him a chance of doing that the year before he did. Maybe lightning strikes twice. Anything’s possible, especially in politics. I wouldn’t bet on Barry Bailey becoming President, but I wouldn’t bet against him either. It’s a question of whether he can attract enough believers to support him, especially ones with big bankrolls that he’d need to fund a national campaign.”

  “What kind of negatives would he have to overcome?”

  “First, he’d have to undo some of the damage he did the last time around. There are still people with bruised feelings from his last campaign.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “I’m sure you know.”

  “Maybe I do, but it’s better if I have it from you, on the record.”

  “I don’t know if I’m comfortable getting into that.”

  “How about not for attribution?”

  “How about this: I’ll tell you a story about a guy who was an important boss and the people who worked for him and what happened. I’ll tell you this story, but you can’t use my name in any way. You can’t say that I told it to you as some sort of tale indicating anything, okay?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Give me another cigarette, Le Doir. It’s long, and I need a prop.”

  It was like this now with the news. Ram would be told a tale by someone trying to convey something that he needed to know for a story he was writing, but it had to come anonymously, told in parable or analogy, not standing for what the parable suggested factually but for what it symbolized, as this parable told by Phil Rudd about Barry Bailey was. It was almost a fairy tale, a story of children keeping faith in their dreams and what kind of negative example was provided when they abandoned that dream opting for something more palatable, more possible, more socially acceptable, at least that’s what the parable seemed to suggest to Ram, whose analysis of it wasn’t disputed or discouraged by Rudd. But when he tried to pin Rudd down to specifics of what the parable illustrated, of actual cases and living people whom it seemed to allude to, Rudd avoided a conclusive response, never acknowledging that it had any specific reference.

  This was too often how stories were now becoming. In the beginning, when Ram started practicing journalism, sources like Wesley Llewellyn were bolder, more willing to point fingers and name names. But that had been changing for some time now, and in fact, it was a story that Ram helped uncover—the Paris and terrorism one that led into the Iran-Contra affair—that seemed to mark a place in time where the game had changed; where the balance of power had shifted from the besieger to the besieged.

  Before Iran-Contra, the besieger didn’t need much more than the journalist’s equivalent of a slingshot to bring down Goliath. Now, the stone had better be large if you were after big game. Lately, it was almost coming not to matter; they seemed indifferent to whatever sized stone you were using and were immune to it, beyond range somehow, and sealed off from the consequential effect of whatever action you happened to uncover.

  And it was Rudd’s fairy tale parable about Barry Bailey that wasn’t really a parable, and that Phil Rudd really didn’t tell, and even if he did tell, didn’t signify anything, didn’t have anything to do with the facts that illustrated for Ram the direction his profession was taking. Interviews like these and the deciphering of them, as to what they really meant, was why Ram Le Doir was paid to do what he did, and how accurate he happened to be in defining the mystery of whatever such interviews meant, whatever they revealed about whatever topic or personality the story assignment was that Ram and his publishers had agreed to, that almost exclusively determined his success. These past few years, Ram had been successful, as his five Society of Professional Journalists’ First Place awards and his almost nonstop work schedule indicated. Everything he tried, worked, everything he proposed, was agreed to, and all the proposals were all published as artifacts of fact, as a quantifiable geology of truth coming to define an age in California’s history.

  That was how it was of late, from the terrorist story forward, and Ram chased it, struggling to kee
p up, following his instincts and going for the heart of the matter on whatever story it was, boring in on it with calls all over the country, all over the planet, as he hunted quarry to ground.

  When the stakes were high enough, the calls would reverse direction and come to Ram instead of issuing from him, sometimes a dozen such calls in a single day, all of them related, all of them interconnected, all of them urgent. The callers all suggesting that what they were calling about was Ram’s “next story.” It was the sheer volume of the calls and the un-referred to millions of dollars that the issue obfuscated, not the impassioned pleas of those who suggested it, that eventually led Ram to concur with the assessments that this would be his next story. By midday of days like these, Ram would call his editors at Golden State or The Stinger with what he had. By late afternoon, he’d phone in an update. The next morning, FedEx would bring him the contract. Then Ram would do whatever it took to get the story nailed down.

  The calls would be cordial and the callers friendly, indifferent to past differences and threats. They would be informative (information reserved for Ram alone, they’d all confide), doctored differently by each succeeding source, arranged by them like culinary school students preparing a canapé that would be blind-tasted by judges. It was all too confined, too stage-managed to be real outside of its own unreal boundaries.

  Ram would listen to each counterfeiting phone call, making notes from whom the calls came from and when it came in; of what the callers said and what the callers led Ram to surmise while he jotted down the names and numbers of the people at the other end of the line. Usually, they were technicians whose point of view was paid for by lobbyists or the lobbyists’ parent firms through all but untraceable accounting. Ram would jot down additional names of others who, it was suggested, Ram also needed to interview, running it all down like a Labrador retrieving game. It was the nature of the beast, the way the news game was played.

  Then Ram would make notes on the margins of his notepads according to a code he’d worked out; of what was said between the lines, of what the story really was, the story that through threat of libel and imposture, that the callers and clients forced the magazine to assume, would never get into print. These were the real stories, the unpublishable truth, the spider within the web.

  But before the informants at the other end of the line would divulge their information (and Ram could hear their wheels meshing with his on this point) they wanted to know what Ram’s credentials were for factual disseminator. How did the sources know for sure that Ram was the person they needed to talk to? And, if so, how could they know for sure that whatever it was they said would be fairly represented by him? Who appointed you, their questions implied? (their airs of superiority; they were obviously “inside,” possessed of privileged, eyes-only information; they were scientists, engineers, “technical side” people; forget the fact that they’d all been bought and paid for, their lingo dialed down a one decimal point or two just so Ram could understand them); how, the sources wanted to know, will you assemble all the pieces (and no one provided all the pieces; that was Ram’s job), to determine how many pieces formed the picture, to assemble it with those he had, and manufacture the ones that were missing, which the picture could not be whole without. Then he presented the picture to the public with the published story, to “the people,” as his editor at The Stinger Les Beak called them, the ones who were supposed to be Ram’s real concern. The sources would ask Ram how the story would be when Ram finished with it, and Ram’s reply was usually the same: “I won’t know until I’ve talked with all the players and get back all the research.” Then the sources would tell Ram to call them if he needed anything. Ram always told them that he would.

  But it was nothing, really, just a function performed by all the parties who were party to the news business, performed for reasons that only the dice roll of what the moment dictated to all the different sides, the competing points of view; the crapshoot effect that masqueraded under the moniker of fair coverage, if ever such a monster could be said to exist, had ever existed, or could even possibly be possible. And the sources knew, as Ram knew, as everybody knew, that only one part of the story, the safe and obvious part, the core head without the intertwined and interlocking tentacles, would ever be published and find its way into print. Everybody slept soundly with the rest; secure that it would never emerge in public.

  Playing the game, Ram followed his instincts, which were usually right, but only sometimes supported by his editors, and almost never supportable by the initial factual data at hand. Calls and messages piled up with paper documentation; the interviews conducted in fancy offices or side tables of restaurant bar rooms, where the exterior show of it, the documentary evidence attesting to the charade of facts, the story pot brought to a boil regulated by objective flame, calls near deadline in the middle of Ram’s sleep, which was sporadic and unscheduled. Ram taking it as it descended like a deliverance; discussions with lawyers, voice to disembodied voice, the lawyers reeling off case numbers barely recalled, plaintiffs and defendants from distant states, which Ram was supposed to comment upon knowingly, suggesting changes in the text and tone of the story as it molded between them undergoing a fate analogous to the effect of tide on a sandcastle, its crenellations and buttresses washing away, leaving just the foundation traces. Such was the process of news, of assembling facts and selecting those to display most prominently, of honing and shaping the “blunt instruments,” as Les Beak liked to call stories, into sharp tools. And afterward, when the deadlines had passed, fatigued from the accumulated sleepless nights and sixteen-hour-days, Ram would sometimes wonder whether he’d awakened from a nightmare or walked into one with eyes wide open, or eyes wide shut.

  Still, during those first years when his career was in full flower after the Llewellyn profile in Golden State, it seemed it was worth the effort. Ram was filled with praise from his peers and financial rewards from his publishers, and it launched his bylined star into a firmament that provided him the recognition he hungered for and felt necessary; that in the end, and only when it was too late, did he see it for what it really was.

  Sometimes when he walked up the Capitol steps, he would pause before entering The Building, nodding hellos to lobbyists and legislators hurrying past him with great purpose, Ram taking it all in, coming to the conclusion that, in the end, as their chronicler, all that he did was present a reaction that both he and his editors agreed was a fair response to the stimulus that prompted it. But, in Ram’s eyes, at least, it was one whose lupine nature was no better or different from those of the wolves who inspired it.

  …It was time to leave, nine o’clock and the fog was lifting. The weather called for fifty percent chance of showers. If Ram was lucky, they wouldn’t start until he’d finished the drive to Red Bluff.

  Where the Barry Bailey story was only political, a function of business performed for a fee, the other story was personal, for it involved Ram’s family, whose legacy Ram was determined to unravel and come to terms with. He had one last stop to make before he hit the road, at the State Library where he was picking up copies of news stories on the Le Doir family from documents kept there in storage. Ram collected the rest of his things and walked to his Porsche 911 parked one block west on Capitol. The car was about to be ticketed but Ram wormed his way out of it, presenting the traffic cop with his press card and claiming he’d stopped for an emergency. She glared at him. “Don’t make a habit of this, Mr. Le Doir. That’s what you told me the last time.”

  He pleaded forgiveness. “Believe me officer, I won’t,” he lied.

  At the library, a stack of documents was waiting for him in his Golden State mailbox. He signed for them and scanned them as he walked to the elevator. The story on Sagrada City Treasurer Charles Le Doir’s resignation in 1927 was on top of the stack. Another story concerned the death of the first Charles Le Doir, the first of the Le Doir family in Sagrada; another dealt with Ram’s great-uncle, Ice Box Ike Le Doir and his animal farm near
McLeod in Shasta County. Another was the Stinger front-page story from May 1968, telling of the death of Ram’s Uncle Jack, known to his friends as “Yick,” in a helicopter crash. The last one was a copy of the March 18, 1924 story in The Virginia City Star-Bulletin announcing the death of Ram’s namesake, Ram Le Doir.

  The first two seemed the most important—at least in terms of the story he was planning to write. The May 23, 1968 story rekindled Ram’s recollections of Yick’s death and the funeral and wake that followed it.

  He also recalled the St. Patrick’s Day bashes in Yick’s house in Red Bluff, when Ram and his brothers and friends would go each spring and celebrate the day in glorious style. That story in The Stinger brought it all back, the submerged history of then, and what that then was, and what it was like to be a Le Doir. The burnt-out helicopter was pictured under a byline that read: ‘Thirty-Four Die in Chopper Crash’; the subhead read,’Red Bluff’s Mayor among the Dead.’ The other story that caught his attention was the Virginia City photograph of the original Ram Le Doir.

  It was taken some twenty years before the first Ram’s death. When Ram from the present looked into the photo of Ram from the past, what was most remarkable was that he was an almost exact replica of the original. While the latter sported a broad mustache and Ram himself was clean-shaven, their other facial features were stamped from the same mill. Their noses were strong with wide flaring nostrils, their lips full and sensual, their cheekbones high, their foreheads domed, their necks long and strong.

  But it was the eyes where the resemblance was most startling. They were large, clear, lucid, and expressive, with a gaze fixed at some point in the distance, and whose regard of this far-off phenomenon, whatever it might be, seemed to look upon it with an attitude of resignation, like the look on the face of a father taken at the anniversary of the death of his son. “Your survivor of the Holocaust face,” was how Vera described it, shuddering whenever she said it. Until Vera noticed it, Ram hadn’t even recognized it. Afterwards, he saw it in many photos taken of him during his youth.