Jake also saw Karli’s sudden look of astonishment as she learned that Barry White the Ram had huge testicles. Jake tilted his head to one side as he observed that the ram looked like someone had hung a pair of grapefruits between his hind legs.
Karli asked a few wrap-up questions about Kennedy’s plans for the rest of the fair and whether she’d bring another ram next year, thanked the girl, and shook hands. While Jake took some close-up footage of Barry White’s wooly face, he heard Karli extract from one of the judges that, as big as Barry was, he was more than fifty pounds lighter than the Fair’s all-time record-holder.
They wrapped up and left the Sheep Building—No, Shit Building—Karli said, knocking her shoes on the edge of the golf cart to clear off the sheep shit—no, ram shit. “So what makes an Iowa farm girl like her tick?” Karli wondered aloud. “She’s cute as can be, but she walks through shit every day and hangs out with animals. Why doesn’t she spend her time working on something real instead of walking around on a farm with animal turds clumping up on her work boots?”
Jake saw Karli shudder with the comment, but he couldn’t decide whether the spasm was prompted more by the manure or the manual-labor footwear.
“Were you just in there or not?” Jake asked. “That cute girl had a huge crowd around her. She raised that huge animal through a lot of hard work, and she’s a big story today.”
Jake watched as Karli whipped out her iPhone and spoke to it: “Siri, search for ‘sheep equivalent of bovine’.” She looked fixedly at the screen until it changed and she cried, “Ah ha! There it is: Ovine. I might need to know when it comes time to write Kennedy’s story.”
Jake continued to smile silently.
“Okay, Jake, so Kennedy is the champion of today’s ovine world,” Karli looked over, but Jake did not acknowledge her new vocabulary. “Unfortunately, that’s a literally shitty place.”
“Look, Karli, just because there’s manure in the livestock world doesn’t mean that it’s crappy. The wool for your awesome newswoman outfits has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it?”
Karli smoothed her skirt and looked over at Jake, who calmly started the golf cart back toward the station’s on-site transmitter so they could beam the new footage back to the newsroom for editing.
Jake sensed Karli’s attention and looked over at her. Abruptly he asked, “How’s your shoe?” His face had the strained look of someone trying very hard to look compassionate while barely throttling back a convulsion of laughter.
Karli looked down at her white high heel in embarrassment. “I didn’t think you saw that,” she mumbled.
Jake’s laughter popped out as though it had pushed a cork from his neck. “I didn’t see it until you squealed. But, oh, the second time!” In the midst of his laughter, somehow Jake managed to squeeze in an inaccurate impression of Karli’s squeal. He enjoyed the memory so much he laughed even harder.
Karli saw the humor. “I get it. It’s funny when a stylish shoe squishes into the ram’s turds.” She tried to sound irritated, but she couldn’t keep from giggling at the gooey memory. “Now, do you think we can cover a story that doesn’t require me to dance on doo-doo? Or are there any of those here?”
“Oh, relax, Karli. There’s a lot more than manure here.” Jake was still grinning, and
he leaned toward Karli with raised eyebrows, inviting her to join in his fun as he sort-of sang, “It’s dollars to doughnuts that our state fair is the best state fair in our state!” He finished and looked expectantly.
Jake saw Karli’s blank look as he urged her to join in. “Did you just make that up?”
“C’mon! Don’t tell me you’ve never seen State Fair!” Jake’s eyes bugged out and his mouth fell open in shock.
“Um, we’re at the state fair, aren’t we?” Karli gestured to the fair all around them. “Like, here it is.”
“No! The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical State Fair. It’s set right here, at the Iowa State Fair. It’s so good they made it into a musical—twice. Well, once and a half. The second one was terrible. And it was set in Texas, which is not at all right. But the original musical is fantastic. It’s all about a girl who feels stuck in an insignificant place and is hoping for something new and exciting. And about a journalist who feels stuck in Des Moines and is bucking to get to Chicago. And the girl’s brother and his fling. And a big pig named Blue Boy.”
As he named each character, Jake’s smile grew along with his enthusiasm for his subject. After a pause, a look of sudden realization flashed across his face and he threw his head back with laughter. Then he met Karli’s eyes with his own twinkle.
“Oh, and I almost forgot. The girl who feels stuck—she wears white heels all over the fair. But she never steps in any manure.”
“You’re pulling my leg, right? Like Broadway would ever do a musical about this fair. No way.”
“Really, Karli, I’m giving it to you straight. It’s a real musical, and there really are two movie versions. In fact, I have a copy of the good one. What say we have a pizza delivered and watch it in an edit suite? I can’t do it tonight, but we could watch it right after work tomorrow.”
As Karli met his eyes frankly, Jake realized that he hadn’t had many chances to look directly into her eyes. He was usually looking all around her to check the background or at parts of her to check the lighting. They were a dark, speckled, complicated blue, and they were beautiful. Those eyes could melt me if I’m not careful, he thought.
Realizing that he’d been drifting away into her eyes, Jake blinked and brought himself back to the moment. “Well? What do you say? It’ll be fun,” he said.
“Um, sure. I mean, it’ll be background for the rest of next week’s stories, right?”
Jake looked around again at all the people, then nodded his head sharply as though he’d made a decision. He turned again to look Karli directly in the eye. “What do you say we beam this video back and then I take you around the fair for a bit without the Citizen Magnet?” he said, patting the bold Three NewsFirst sticker on his camera affectionately. “We’re due for a break, and we’ve already got a bunch of video in the can from today. And I promise—no more manure.”
***
After the gear was all locked up, Jake strung a camera around his neck and stuck a small wad of miscellaneous batteries and dongles into his pocket.
The camera wasn’t much smaller than his usual television rig, but it was shaped very differently—like an old-school 35 mm still camera with a giant lens.
“It’s my own Canon,” Jake told Karli in response to her unspoken question. “It’s an unbeatable still camera, and it captures video at least as well as the station’s cameras. Kinda hard to hold steady for video though, without a shoulder mount. And it gets really hot if I shoot video for too long.”
He swung the strap over his left arm, bracing the camera against his hip with practiced grace. “C’mon, Karli. Let’s go see the fair like people instead of like outsiders.”
“What makes you care so much about this fair, Jake? You’re going to a lot of trouble to convince me it’s more than death food and turds.”
“There isn’t that much to figure out, Karli,” Jake said. “It’s a big celebration—people and food. And the people all come together to share their interests and food with each other. That’s a party, no matter where you hold it or what you call it.”
Jake continued, still intent on looking directly into her eyes. “And this is your home now, too. You should get to know these people so you can cover their stories better.” Jake saw Karli as she looked away to keep him from looking even more deeply into her eyes.
Jake took Karli’s reticence as a challenge, and he welcomed it by leading her on a long march through the fairgrounds. She followed him through the exhibit halls where the competing entries in countless divisions were on display. The museums and historical societies had assembled elaborate recreations of Iowa frontier life. Huge areas were devoted to homemade beers and wines, doll houses and m
iniature rooms, wood crafts, arts and crafts, and a tremendous array of other creative efforts. Jake kept Karli moving along, pointing out that it would take nearly an entire week to pay close attention in just one of the many exhibit halls.
Every now and then, Jake stepped away when she dwelt on an exhibit longer than usual. He moved gracefully and quickly, raising his Canon and snapping frames of her while she took in the sights and eavesdropped on the conversations.
“Hey, I thought we had enough in the can,” she asked. “What are you doing with that camera?”
“I don’t like to miss opportunities.”
Jake smirked as he framed the next shot. He knew what he was about; he had looked into her eyes and had seen more than a careerist reporter. Giving her the genuine fairgoer experience gave him the chance to capture her image when she was unselfconscious, not projecting for the viewing audience—when she was authentically herself.
And if she needed an explanation, it was simple enough to point out that she hadn’t posed for any promotional photos yet. It made sense that he would take care of that business while they were goofing off so they would have a legitimate work excuse for simply enjoying the fair. He was sincerely interested in teaching her about this fair. And she had to admit after two solid hours of looking and listening that, when the fair was taken one person or group at a time, it was captivating.
“Jake, let’s get back and watch your movie. My feet hurt. At least your homework assignment is something we can do while my heels are up.” Karli stopped short, and Jake caught her cautious glance. He couldn’t help grinning at her inadvertent double-entendre. Nor could he help thinking that the two of them doing things together with her heels up sounded like an exciting prospect.
“Like I said, I can’t make it tonight, Karli,” Jake said, and as he said it he realized that he genuinely regretted not having the opportunity to discuss double-entendres with her in a less-public setting. “I have to be somewhere. But can we watch it during the 6:00 show tomorrow?”
Chapter Four
Des Moines, Three NewsFirst newsroom
during the 6:00 p.m. newscast
Friday, August 9
At 6:15, the newsroom still crackled with energy even during the lull that came with each of the day’s many newscasts. Tonight the raised central island that was the assignment desk emitted the usual sounds of several police scanners and of two editors trying to pry the last of tomorrow’s planned stories from the far reaches of their telephones. As they spoke, their fingers flew over computer keyboards, taking information they’d need to send news crews out in the morning.
Crowding down from the ceiling and leaving a narrow space above the assignment desk’s fortresslike wall, large monitors displayed the live broadcasts from competing Des Moines and Ames stations alongside the Three NewsFirst broadcast.
At floor level and several cluttered desks away from the noise and activity of the assignment desk, bright lights and a camera glared at a nervous young reporter about to go live from the newsroom—an unimpressive twenty or thirty feet from the studio—with a late-breaking and almost completely non-visual courthouse story. Jake walked briskly behind the shot and in front of the assignment desk, knowing that his motion through the out-of-focus background of the shot would add to the visual impression of a busy newsroom, even though he was just carrying a pizza back to watch a movie.
Jake nodded to production assistant Mary Rose Mayer where she stood behind a live-from-the-newsroom camera. She wore her short hair in contrasting shades of bright blue and platinum blonde, her eyeliner was heavy, her face was pierced in several places, and her jeans were artfully ripped. The sleeves were torn from her Three NewsFirst polo to reveal colorful tattoos on her deltoids, and the shirt was pulled tight over her flat stomach with a knot at her back. She smiled cheerfully and stuck her pierced tongue out at Jake before turning back to the camera.
Jake reached the edge of the newsroom and turned the gentle corner that led to a row of desks separated by small vertical fabric dividers. Contrasting with the newsroom’s loud logo-colored blues, reds, and silvers, the warm browns and greys in the shooters’ space were calm and quiet. And unlike the papery clutter on the newsroom desks, the photographers’ spaces were filled with tangles of audio and video cables as well as variously disassembled cameras, microphones, battery packs and other field gear. The shooters, Jake among them, preferred to customize their gear and to handle maintenance and repairs on their own. That way their equipment could be kept out of the standardizing and sterilizing hands of the stations’ and manufacturers’ engineers as much as possible.
Snatching a Coke off his own worktop and reaching the end of the shooters’ stations, Jake balanced easily on one foot to reach up and open the door handle of an edit suite with the other. “Don’t tell anyone we’re eating in the suite, please,” he said. “There’s about a jillion dollars worth of gear in here, and the engineers and front office folks would have a fit.”
As he squeezed into the tiny room, Karli put down her diet Dew and offered to pay for half of the pizza. Jake smiled at Karli, surprised at the prickly reporter’s show of decency.
Of course, her pizza had been an unusually special order: onions, but only if they were red; mushrooms, but only if they were portabella; pepperoni, but only if it was on top of the cheese. The sausage was the biggest challenge to get right. If it had fennel as a seasoning, Karli didn’t want it anywhere near the pizza, not even if it was only on his half. Jake didn’t trust the pizza joint’s ordering system enough to make his own special half, so he contented himself with whatever turned out from Karli’s exacting requirements.
“That’s okay. I’ll get it. I need to keep you fueled so you can learn that the Fair really has earned its state-symbol status.” His voice sounded intimate in the claustrophobic space. Because it doubled as a sound booth for reporters voicing their recorded stories, the walls and ceiling were covered with dark grey Escher-patterned foam tiles.
Jake reached into his pants pocket and produced a slender, rectangular present, wrapped tightly in heavy, tasteful paper topped with a ribbon and bow. “Open it up,” he said as he handed it to Karli. She unwrapped the gift and found a brand-new, shrink-wrapped DVD of State Fair inside. “I thought you should have your own copy,” Jake said. “So now we can watch your very own movie.”
Karli murmured her puzzled thanks and began fighting with the shrink-wrap and then the adhesive factory stickers holding the sides closed while Jake moved a microphone boom back to the wall, asked Karli to pick up her diet Dew, and slid the pizza box to a delicate balance on the tiny work surface underneath the microphone where reporters put their notes. He gestured for Karli to take a seat, then turned to the complicated array of computer controls, audio mixer controls, and various drives and ports for video ranging from the outdated-but-still-used-for-file-footage broadcast-Beta tapes to digital card readers and DVDs. The suite was several times more complicated than the simple editing equipment Karli had used but never mastered in her last job and at college. As Jake reached back toward the door to dim the lights, he saw her eyes moving over the many control surfaces with more apprehension than understanding.
With the ease of much practice, Jake pressed, flipped, or spun a dozen or more controls to prepare the suite to play State Fair, powering speakers and drives and monitors, opening audio channels, and sliding open an optical drive tray. He put the movie in, waited for the menu, and selected play.
Reaching across Karli to snare a slice, Jake put his feet carefully up on an edge where they wouldn’t bump any equipment, took a too-hot bite of pizza and breathed hard around it. As he struggled to chew and huff and swallow the cheesy heat, he twirled an audio control down to quiet the long title sequence. With his feet up, Jake’s long legs pushed his chair all the way to the suite’s back wall, taking up more than half of the room’s free space.
“This movie is great, Karli,” he said, breathing and mumbling around his cooling mouthful of pizza. “
Not only is the story classic and the score fantastic, the technical work with the audio is awesome. Not just for the period but for musicals in general.”
He looked over at her and saw that she wasn’t paying attention to his cinematic insights. Instead, she was returning a steaming slice of pizza to the box and quickly blowing in and out around her own scalding mouthful, her brows furrowed in pain. She reached for her diet Dew, took a long pull, and waved Jake back to the screen, where an old man was driving along and silently singing.
Jake turned back to the controls with a sympathetic chuckle and rewound the movie back to the end of the opening credits. As it began to roll, he turned the volume up for the song. The sound poured from the studio speakers and filled the edit suite, making it their own, very cramped, private movie theater.
Having seen the movie before, Jake sang along with most of the score in a confident tenor. He knew the story would play just as it had every other time: the trapped-on-the-farm heroine falls in love with the world-weary and restlessly ambitious reporter from the Des Moines Register, her brother falls for the glamorous singer, the family’s hog wins grand champion, and the mother’s pickles and mincemeat beat the obnoxious incumbent’s entries.
The edit suite was so small that every time Jake reached for a piece of pizza, his arm brushed across the warm, satiny-smooth skin of the legs Karli had propped up against the worktop. And she brushed her arm against his every time she reached for her Mountain Dew. Each touch surprised a hot electric tingle through his veins in spite of the extra-cold, equipment-preserving air conditioning. Jake hadn’t consciously arranged the movie as a kind of a romantic encounter, but millennia ago some sequence resident on the Y chromosome had programmed him and all men to seek, repeat, and intensify the sensation of touching warm, silken skin in a small, cool room. And he could smell her perfume waft from her skin with each touch, too. Something vanilla and somehow asiatic teased his sense of smell and combined with the touching to make him ache on the level of instinct and hormone.
Love. Local. Latebreaking.: Book 1 in the newsroom romance series Page 5