DISPATCH

by Bentley Little

  That was the thought that occurred to me, and it didn’t even give me pause. I still felt proud rather than abashed about my part in the witch’s death, and I knew that if the need and the opportunity arose, I would not shy away from doing such a thing again.

  I gave things a week to settle down, then started asking around, but since it was well into the school year, I was told, one of the vice-principals would become acting principal, and a new full-time replacement for Mr. Poole would not be hired until September. Mrs. Zivney would move up to the position of acting VP for the remainder of the year.

  I calculated the angles. I was off the SAC, and Zivney no doubt knew why. But I now had a new counselor, Mr. Tate, and with all of her new added duties, I could probably stay under Zivney’s radar. I could still apply for all of the loans and grants I’d originally intended to pursue.

  Except that I needed a recommendation from someone impressive, someone higher up, someone farther along the chain than a teacher. Anyone from this administration was out of the question. Alerting one of them to my intentions could derail everything.

  The mayor!

  Yes. I’d sent him my original packet of letters, too, and I doubted that Poole had had a chance to talk to him about me yet—even if he had, Poole’s reputation was now lower than shoe-wiped dog shit.

  The mayor would work.

  I still had a chance to escape my life.

  After school, I told Robert and Edson I couldn’t hang out with them, that I had something to do. I caught a ride with Frank, who passed by city hall on his way home each day, and had him drop me off. I should have called ahead, but as it happened, the mayor was in, and he agreed to see me. A secretary led me to his office, and I put on my Joe Humble act. “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Mayor. My name’s Jason Hanford and I’m a student at Rutherford B. Hayes High—”

  As I’d hoped, he remembered my name.

  “Jason, of course! Our star humanitarian. How are you doing?”

  Had he been told? It didn’t seem so. He appeared genuinely happy to see me—or at least as happy as a smarmy local politician could get.

  “Oh, I’m okay,” I said.

  “What brings you by these parts?”

  “Well, actually, I’m here to ask you a favor.”

  He suddenly grew more wary. The “Anything I can do for you” that I was hoping to hear failed to materialize. Instead, there was only a cautious, “Yes?”

  “I need a letter of recommendation,” I told him. “For a scholarship application. I have one from my English teacher, but I was supposed to get one from Mr. Poole, too. Now he’s gone. I could get one from one of the vice-principals, but it would carry more weight if I could get one from somebody higher up. That’s why I thought maybe I could get one from you.”

  The recoil was almost physical, but his voice when he spoke was smooth and calm, inflected slightly with false regret. “I’m sorry,” the mayor said, “but I can’t be seen as playing favorites. I was elected mayor of the entire city. If I gave you a recommendation and did not give recommendations to other students at your school—or students at the other three high schools in the Acacia district—then I would be saying, in effect, that you are better or more qualified than all of the other students.”

  Yes, I wanted to tell him. That’s the whole point. That’s what recommendations are for.

  But I nodded as though I understood his predicament and sympathized.

  He must have sensed how he was coming across. “Besides,” he said, “I’m really busy right now. I’m not sure I’d have the time to do justice to your achievements. You’d probably be better off getting the superintendent or someone from the district to give you a recommendation. Or, better still, one of the community leaders you work with. It would make you seem more well-rounded.”

  “I can write it for you if you don’t have the time. It won’t be too gushing. It won’t say I’m better than anyone else. It’ll just say that I’m a good student, a valued member of the community, et cetera. All you’d have to do is sign it.”

  “I can’t do that,” the mayor informed me with insincere sadness. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

  I nodded, said nothing.

  You’re going down, motherfucker, I thought.

  The word processor was quiet. Not like a typewriter. It was loud when I printed—both the dot matrix and daisy wheel printers I’d purchased were quite noisy—but the actual keystrokes were practically silent. Still, as I wrote my letters to the city council, my dad banged on the door, yelling that it was late at night and I was disturbing his sleep and if I was going to wake up the entire goddamn house with my typing, then by God he was going to come in and smash my—

  “You’re drunk again,” I said through the door, my voice dripping with disgust. “Go back to bed and leave me alone.”

  “Rick!” my mom yelled at him from down the hall at almost exactly the same time.

  Amazingly, he retreated, returned to his room, left me alone. I knew he’d been feeling guilty about losing his job, and shame over not being able to provide for his family had made him more compliant with my mom’s bitchy demands. Even drunk and mean, he was still a shell of his former self, and I felt glad. No one deserved emasculation more.

  I continued typing.

  I’d been thinking all afternoon and all evening about how to take down the mayor, and I’d finally come up with a plan. I dusted off my old buddy Carlos Sandoval, president of the Hispanic Action Coalition, who had amassed an impressive array of statistics showing that under this mayor, the hiring and promotion of Hispanic employees had dropped to a historic low. There was a consistent pattern of discrimination that tied in with the mayor’s aborted push to redevelop the Eastside. What’s more, though they refused to come forward for fear of reprisals, several employees admitted privately to having heard the mayor use racial slurs.

  I made this up off the top of my head, but I trusted that someone would investigate under the old where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire theory and discover whether or not any of it was true. If there did happen to be some sort of hiring discrepancy, everyone would assume bigotry was the cause.

  I sent copies of the letter to the Acacia Ledger, the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Times, the other members of the city council, the city manager and the city attorney. Someone would bite, I knew.

  It turned out to be all of them. Carlos Sandoval’s diatribe appeared in both the Times and the Register unedited on exactly the same day—a first, I believe—and when the Ledger came out a few days later, it ran an article on the fact that Sandoval had dared to criticize Acacia’s wonderful mayor. POISON-PEN LETTER CAUSES CHAOS, read the asinine headline on the front page. The editors were all part of the mayor’s circle, cronyism at its most obvious and sickening, and it was with righteous indignation that I fired off a series of letters from various members of the public taking the Ledger to task for making more of an effort to discredit Carlos Sandoval than to investigate the charges he made. In my senior government class, we’d just finished talking about the role of the press in a free society, and I was genuinely incensed by the Ledger’s actions. My letters were filled with quotes from Thomas Jefferson and other First Amendment heroes, and I assume my passion shone through because all of the letters got in.

  That surprised me. I mean, it didn’t surprise me that the Times and the Register printed my letters of support for myself, but the Ledger was so actively hostile that I would have thought they’d want to silence all dissent. They printed my letters, too, though, and they even printed a real letter from someone who agreed with me, which was both shocking and thrilling.

  I felt like I was making a difference.

  I knew I was making a difference when the mayor resigned.

  The resignation of a faceless bureaucrat from one of Southern California’s hundreds of cities was not news enough for the Los Angeles Times, but the Register wrote an article about it and then a follow-up. The Ledger devoted its whole damn issue to praising t
he greatness of Peter Greene, the finest mayor Acacia had ever had, who, for some unspecified reason, had decided to quit his post in midterm in order to “pursue other options” and “spend more time with his family.”

  I smiled as I read the articles. Serves you right, I thought. Teach you to mess with me.

  But I was back where I started—with no one to write me a recommendation. So I decided that I’d write my own recommendation. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. Why should I beg and grovel for the halfhearted endorsement of someone who barely knew me, when I could write a glowing testimonial to myself and attribute it to a person of truly impressive stature? Hell, the president of the United States could write me a character reference.

  No. Public officials wrote on authorized stationery with embossed letterheads. I couldn’t use the president or the governor or anyone like that. I needed a civilian, a very illustrious civilian.

  I’d have to think about this some more. It deserved some serious consideration.

  I had a dream that night, a strange dream in which I was walking along a dusty road in the middle of the desert. Before me was a lone circus tent, its colors faded by the sun, visible tears in the worn fabric. There seemed to be some kind of noise coming from the tent, a low, almost subliminal hum, but the sound was muffled by the heat, by the heavy oppressive air, and it did not increase in volume as I approached.

  I reached the tent and walked inside, and there was a single ring made from chipped unpainted concrete. Wandering about in the cool darkness of the tent were children with gray hair and prematurely wrinkled faces, tiny terrors who walked around each other and passed by one another as though they were choreographed extras in a musical. In the center of the ring was the skeleton of what could only be some sort of prehistoric man, an apelike human with thick bones, hunched posture and a flat blunt face with protruding lower jaw. At the air-blasted note from an unseen calliope, the children gathered in a circle outside the ring, holding hands. They began to sing a song of praise, a lilting ditty somewhere between nursery rhyme and hymn, and I realized that this skeleton was their god.

  I tried to back up, to make my way out of the tent without being seen. I knew that I would die in the desert, but that seemed infinitely preferable to remaining in here with these aged children and their skeletal deity.

  I was almost to the door when the children stopped singing.

  And the ape-man’s skull swiveled toward me.

  I awoke feeling both frightened and despondent, filled with a blackness I had not known before. I had the sense that I had narrowly escaped some horrible fate, that if I had not awakened but peered into the deepset eye sockets of that prehistoric skeleton, I would have been lost forever.

  It took me several hours before I finally fell asleep again, and I awoke in the morning feeling tired and ill at ease.

  The next day, I received a letter in the mail with no return address, the postmark Los Angeles. Inside was a handwritten letter that described my dream exactly, down to the last detail. It was extremely well written because it also captured the feeling of the dream, that nightmare sense of foreboding.

  It was unsigned.

  I read the letter again. And again. But the chill in my bones did not diminish. If anything, it intensified.

  Folding the paper carefully, I put it back in its envelope and found for it a safe hiding place. Who was this from? Why had they sent it? How had they known? I had questions but no answers, and the more I thought about it, the more it frightened me.

  I saved the letter, waiting for another.

  But none came.

  At least not for a while.

  SIX

  1

  Bill Tate

  453 Palmera Dr.

  Anaheim, CA 92801

  Dear General Manager,

  I want you to know that I will no longer be watching KABC news. Your newscast was once my favorite, but I am so annoyed with your weatherman that I can no longer stomach watching the program. The inane chitchat of your anchors is bad enough, but your clownish weatherman is truly offensive to me.

  From now on, I will be watching KNBC.

  Sincerely,

  Bill Tate

  P.S. I have a Nielsen box.

  There is no one more self-congratulatory than a Southern Californian. It’s as if living here automatically makes people jingoistic jerks. Each night on the local newscasts, comical weathermen act as boosters for the region, gloating about the mild temperatures, rhetorically asking the television audience why anyone would live anywhere else, in a lamebrain attempt to make people feel better about the smog and overcrowding, as though repeating over and over again how great we are, how fortunate we are, might make someone actually believe it. Two days a year, we can see the mountains located right next to us, and invariably the Los Angeles Times pastes a big color photograph of the miracle on their front page, along with some caption about how lucky we are to live in such a beautiful environment, apparently unaware of the fact that most of the United States sees such sights daily, not merely when the smog clears after a big storm.

  Fuckheads.

  Fed up with this mindless boosterism, I wrote letters to all three of the network affiliates complaining about their weather forecasters. I realized they were just weathermen (or a meteorologist, in the case of one), but since they were on a professional newscast, weren’t they considered journalists, too? Shouldn’t they make an effort to appear impartial? I must have made my point because, lo and behold, they stopped telling me the weather was “nice” or “good” or “beautiful,” and just provided me with an objective description of the atmospheric conditions. For a week. Two weeks in the case of NBC. But then they went back to their usual rah-rah buffoonishness like a truck tire returning to a rut in a dirt road.

  It became a game. As a linguistics instructor, I informed a male news anchor that the word junta was pronounced “hoon-ta,” not “jun-ta” as he’d been saying, and was gratified when he caught himself on air and corrected himself. As an offended Japanese American man, I let a white female reporter know that Hiroshima was “He-roe-shee-ma,” not “Hih-row-shih-ma,” and chuckled to myself when she did a one-eighty on the word.

  My dad still hadn’t found another job, and sometimes I felt bad about that, but his insistence on remaining a complete asshole—hanging around the house all day drunk, making no effort to look for work—made it hard to feel sorry for him. He didn’t seem to be all Jesused out anymore—alcohol was once again his crutch of choice—but he was the same nasty fat fuck he’d always been, and even my mom had gone out and gotten a part-time job at the Broadway, as much to get away from him as to bring in some money to the household.

  I was asked to contribute, too, but steadfastly refused, relying on the old I-didn’t-ask-to-be-born line and letting them know that it was their responsibility to take care of me.

  At least until I could get the hell out of there.

  In some ways, I thought, I was becoming like my dad, which was not a prospect that filled me with great joy. I was angrier than I used to be, though for no real reason, and even my friends noticed that I didn’t seem to have much fun anymore. This was my senior year. I should have been cutting classes and hanging out and going to parties and picking up babes and doing the things that everyone did during their last semester in high school. Instead, I glumly went on with my life, my only real enjoyment coming from collecting records and writing letters, two solitary pursuits that led me even farther from the mainstream.

  I’d decided that my fake recommendation would come from Paul Newman. He was so famous that everyone would know who he was and be suitably impressed. He also stayed out of the limelight for the most part, so my lie wouldn’t be easy to track down. To top it off, Newman was a philanthropist, well-known for his charitable donations and work. His words would carry weight. I went about creating my recommendation with a dedication I had never shown to my actual schoolwork. I could hear my mom’s voice in my head, telling me that if I
spent as much time and effort studying as I did writing fake letters, I might get somewhere in life. That was true, and I knew it was true, but here was where my interests lay. For example, although it was not something I would admit to anyone, I’d taken to reading “Ann Landers” and “Dear Abby” each day. I liked learning about people’s personal problems, and finding out about them through their letters seemed particularly appealing. Of course, “Letters to the Editor” was still my favorite part of the newspaper—and not just because my own words were often printed there. This was where reporters didn’t tell us the news, but we told them the news. It was a forum for the public to make clear its opinions and priorities, and I guess what I liked best about it was the fact that it could be so easily manipulated. One or two letters, properly written, could make it appear as though there were a huge groundswell for or against an issue.

  Using my employee discount, I bought a papermaking kit from Gemco’s arts and crafts section and used it to design a sheet of stationery based on a sample the instruction booklet called “Royalty.” At the top, centered, gilt embossed, was Paul Newman’s name. I’d considered adding a P.O. box number, but I didn’t even know what state he lived in, and something like that could easily trip me up. I decided to keep it simple. The paper itself was expensive looking. Personalized. Off-white, rough and flecked with tiny pieces of olive green that made it appear to have been made from flower stems.

  I did this in our backyard, making four identical sheets. My dad saw me working and muttered something under his breath that sounded like “pansy,” but he was too drunk to really care what I was doing, and when I ignored him he went away.

  It was pretty damned impressive, I had to admit. I dried the paper in my bedroom, and once it was finished, ran it through my word processor. I had purchased a special daisy wheel for my printer that typed in cursive script, and I created four identical letters of recommendation, signing them with a Paul Newman signature I’d copied from a jar of Newman’s Own spaghetti sauce. The signature was the cheesiest part of my presentation, the weak link that could potentially give me away, but everything else looked so good that the total package appeared completely legit.