by John Welter
“Can you swim, can you swim?” she said anxiously, leaning over to reach for me.
“Here?” I said. “I think it’s prohibited. They only allow boating and fishing.”
When she realized I wasn’t drowning, she didn’t look scared anymore but just looked puzzled.
“What happened?”
“I fell.”
“You just fell?”
“Well, it doesn’t have to be elaborate, does it? Can’t I just fall?” I said, bobbing near the boat.
“You were sitting down. How can you fall when you’re sitting down?”
“You mean if I don’t explain it right, I fell improperly? Is that it?”
“Are we arguing?”
“No. You’re arguing. I’m floating.”
“Get back in the boat, Kurt.”
“Why? You’ll probably criticize the way I floated.”
“You’re floating just fine.”
“You don’t mean it. I probably have flaws in my floating. Go on. Tell me.”
“All right, then. If you’re going to be cranky, just float then, and I’ll fish,” she said, picking up her fishing rod.
“Fine,” I said, bobbing precisely where I’d been all the time. “I’m a good floater. Not competitive, really, but adequate. My shoes are getting heavy, though.”
“Don’t go near my hook.”
“You sure are bossy today.”
“Let’s not argue. We came out here to relax.”
“I’m relaxing. Floating makes me feel calm.”
“You look calm. I’m going to read my book now,” she said, reaching into her bag and pulling out a paperback. She rested the fishing rod on her leg and opened the book.
“What book is it?” I asked, making wide sweeps in the water with my arms.
“Love in the Time of Cholera,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, nodding my head. “I didn’t bring a book.”
“I know.”
I let her read for a while, for about thirty seconds.
“Janice?”
“Yes.”
“I’m getting lonesome. Will you read to me?”
“You have to get in the boat first.”
“I hope we’re not fighting anymore. Are we?”
“If we are, I have the advantage,” she said. “I have a boat.”
“I know. It’s a nice boat. I wish I had a boat.”
“Aren’t you getting tired?” she said, putting the book down.
“And sleepy, too. I’d take a nap, but I’d sink.”
“Give me your hand,” she said as she reached for me.
“I’ll give you the rest of me, too, unless it’s just the hand you want,” I said, as we grabbed each other’s fingers and she began pulling me in.
27
On the day the Small Board of Aldermen was scheduled to vote on hiring Dalton Donner as the town’s police chief, members of the First, Second, and possibly Third Baptist churches assembled in front of town hall with pious anger and posters warning against Sodom and Gomorrah. Sallie Hind from the Journal was there, interviewing some woman and asking the predictable, dumb questions in utter seriousness.
“As a Christian, do you regard homosexuality as a sin?” she asked the woman as I stood nearby. It made me think of saying “Excuse me, ma’am. Is the Baptist church opposed to both oral sex and written sex?”
Camera crews and reporters from two TV stations ran around peevishly trying to tape interviews without getting members of the enemy TV station in their shots. When one of the camera guys realized I was a reporter and I didn’t look like an outraged Baptist, he didn’t want me in the background as he prepared to tape an interview.
“Would you move?” he said, waving me away with his hand.
I shook my head no, and discreetly gave him the finger. Instead of leaving me alone, which would have been sensible, he walked up to me with an angry expression and said quietly, “We’re taping an interview, asshole. Move out of the shot.”
He wasn’t much bigger than me, and I lifted weights, so I didn’t move.
“Shove your camera up your ass. You could call it a medical feature,” I said.
He decided then that I was part of the background, and he left me alone. I didn’t want to be on TV with a bunch of outraged Christians anyway, so I walked out of the shot and roamed across the town-hall lawn, searching for whoever appeared to be the least pissed-off Christian to interview. Talking with morally outraged people was a painful indignity. They had a tendency to assume that if you didn’t appear to be as angry and sickened as they were, you were probably one of the people they despised, or you soon would be. I saw an old woman with white hair and, instead of an expression of holy wrath made worse from all of this public attention, a fairly calm, aloof look on her face. She looked safe to interview, so I walked up to her and politely introduced myself, asking what she hoped to accomplish in the protest.
“Well,” she said, leaning her Sodom and Gomorrah poster away from her head, “as devoted servants of the Lord, we need to keep the queers out of Small. Let ‘em work in St. Beaujolais, where they already is.”
I wrote that down in my notepad, but there was a style problem.
“I’m not sure if I can use that quote, ma’am,” I said. “I don’t think we say ‘queers’ in our newspaper. Could you say ‘gays’?”
“Queers is queers,” she said, looking up at me with suspicion.
“Yes, ma’am, and roses is roses. But to overcome this style problem, it would be helpful if you either said gay or homosexual.”
“I don’t see why I have to be helpful,” she said. “Queers is queers.”
This wasn’t working, so I digressed. Pointing at her poster, which said, “No Sodom and Gomorrah in Small!,” I said, “I think the only way you could get Sodom and Gomorrah in Small is to annex Israel. I don’t think the aldermen have the authority to annex a foreign nation.”
It was a good digression, and bewildered the woman enough that she looked away and pretended I wasn’t there. But I couldn’t go back to the bureau and tell Lisa I succeeded in making everyone pretend I wasn’t there. Unfortunately I had to interview somebody and get a fresh portion of their anger or hatred or fear. Nearby on the sidewalk was a fat man in a brown suit carrying a poster saying, “The Lord will destroy this city,” a Biblical quote the poster said was in chapter 19, verse 14 of Genesis. Trying to appear interested but neutral, I walked up to the man, told him who I was, and said, “That quote, on your poster. Is that a reference to Sodom or Gomorrah?” All I meant was it had to be one city or the other, and I wanted to know which one.
“It’s a reference to Small,” the man said, looking at me with indignation or something like it.
“Small?” I said, taking notes. “I didn’t know Small was in the Bible. This really is an old town, isn’t it?”
My lightness was a severe burden on the man, who scowled at me and held up a black copy of the Bible, which he pointed at me like a weapon.
“Small is not in the book of Genesis,” he said irritably. “If you knew anything at all about the Bible, which I don’t expect out of the left-leaning liberal media, you’d know it refers to Judea.”
Nothing was going to work. Irony and intelligence were alien forces to these people, and I was the alien general. Shielding myself with politeness, I said, “Sir, I know Small isn’t mentioned in the Bible. It’s just that when you said the quote on your poster referred to Small, that would mean, literally, that Small is named in Genesis, which we both know isn’t true.”
“Well, then quit saying it is,” the man said, refusing to grasp anything I said. Opening his Bible to chapter 19, verse 14 of Genesis, he showed me the quote.
“Does it say Small?” he asked.
I wanted to grab him around his head and fling him to the sidewalk. Instead, I acted like I was reading the Bible.
“No. It doesn’t say Small there,” I said. “I guess North Carolina is mentioned in one of the later chapters. Thank you for your ins
truction.”
I walked away before he got any madder. That afternoon at my apartment, I got out my paperback copy of the King James version of the Bible to look through chapter 19 of Genesis again and found something surpassingly weird. It alluded to homosexuality, or at least some kind of sexual sin, saying the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah with brimstone and fire because of those sins. Lot escaped. And then, a few verses later in the same chapter, there was more sex. Two nights in a row, Lot’s two daughters got him drunk on wine and copulated with him.
“Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father,” the Bible said.
In the same chapter, then, two cities were destroyed because of sexual sins, and two women received no punishment for copulating with their drunken father. Somehow, I was going to get that in the morning paper.
28
It was the largest unwanted triumph of my career in newspapers when my story came out and I was accused of irreverence for quoting scripture. The people least capable of understanding irony were the ones creating all of it. Seven people called the bureau, either to revile me personally or to ask Lisa to revile me, which she wouldn’t do.
“They all want a retraction,” Lisa said as we talked in her office.
“They want us to apologize for correctly describing the Bible,” I said.
She nodded her head and looked astonished. “I can’t imagine why this should be happening,” she said.
“It’s too weird. I like it,” I said as Rebecca walked up to the doorway and said Andrew Christopher was on the phone for me. Lisa handed me her phone and stared at me like a girl waiting to see if someone else was going to get punished.
“Hello,” I said.
“Kurt,” Christopher said.
“Andrew,” I said.
“What the fuck are you people doin’ in St. Beaujolais? Destroying all of Christianity?”
“I don’t think we have enough people for that.”
“I’m glad. I’ve already had three calls from enraged people in Small this morning sayin’ you blasphemed the Bible by quoting scripture.”
We both were silent there, wondering what could possibly be said next.
“Yes,” I said. “Did you read the story?”
“Of course I did. It says the aldermen voted to hire a prominent Colorado homosexual as police chief. It says some Baptists in Small don’t think homosexuals should be hired for anything. And then you quote Genesis, sayin’ Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed for sexual sins and a drunken old man had sex with his daughters.”
There was silence again. I sipped some Coke and lit a cigarette.
“Did you verify that?” Christopher said in a serious tone that I knew wasn’t serious.
“You mean the Bible?” I said.
“Yes.”
“No. I admit I didn’t verify the Bible.”
Christopher coughed briefly. He said, “So. We printed unverified information.”
“Yes. We did.”
“Well then, do you think we should run a retraction?”
“You mean, apologize to the public for quoting scripture, because we don’t have any witnesses or court documents saying Lot had sex with his daughters because they got him drunk?”
“Yes,” Christopher said. “Should we run a retraction saying we don’t know if the Bible’s a reliable document?”
“That would be fun.”
“Too much fun.”
“Well, we could run a clarification,” I suggested.
“Saying what?”
“Saying because the News-Dispatch was unable to verify events that happened a few thousand years ago in Palestine, our reporters aren’t responsible for the content of the Bible.”
“Type it up, Kurt,” he said. “Keep it short. Send it to me by five.”
I hung up before either of us could change our minds. Such a clarification was to me more precious than most stories I’d ever written. It represented humanity and absurdity in a dangerously pure form, and I admired it and was grateful that Christopher and I had been in precisely the right moods to envision the minor greatness of apologizing to the public for the troubling existence of scripture. And so it came to pass that this was printed the next morning in the paper:
Clarification: The News-Dispatch regrets that some readers of a religious bent might find this paper irresponsible for a statement made in an article in yesterday’s edition that Lot’s two daughters took turns getting him drunk and engaging in sexual acts with him. Our authority for the statement was Genesis 19:32–37, Holy Bible, Authorized Version, known as the “King James Translation.” In the absence of corroborative historical documentation for the event—which occurred approximately 2,000 years prior to the date of the King James translation—we hope that our readers will accept both that statement as well as others cited in the same article concerning the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 18:20-33, 19:1-5) and the turning of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt (Gen. 19:26) as having been made in good faith by the translators of the Authorized Version, in accordance with the evidence available to them at the time.
You could never be sure, really, what overall effect this had on the reading public. But in our bureau, we liked to believe we could have won a Nobel Prize for clarifications.
And Chief Donner liked it. Having never spoken with me before except over the phone, Donner and I met at the Crystal Palace Bar & Grill two nights after his employment was confirmed by the aldermen, and Donner was just studying the night life in his new town and meeting people at the Crystal Palace. I was there with Janice.
Donner sipped a glass of National Bohemian beer and thanked me for my recent story that kind of gently satirized people for using the Bible to condemn homosexuality while ignoring Lot’s daughters screwing their father. Sitting at the bar next to me and Janice, Donner said, “Usually when I deal with the press, I get scrutinized, analyzed, and victimized. So I have to admit I was pleasantly astonished to see your article about the little protests, and also that unusual clarification.”
“I don’t think clarification is the word,” Janice said. “I think ‘taunt’ is the word.”
“I like to taunt the readers,” I said.
“Yes, and they’ll nail you someday for it,” Janice said.
“I don’t know about taunts, but I personally enjoyed it,” Donner said.
“Well, I hate to sound selfish, but I didn’t do it for you,” I said. “I did it for me. I just thought it was unfair for people to pretend that scripture justified their anger and hatred when they were plainly ignoring another part of the scripture showing a drunken man having sex with his daughters, as if that were fine.”
“Most newspapers wouldn’t print such a contrast, even if it is plainly in the Bible,” Donner said. “Is your paper different?”
Janice shook her head, saying, “No. But Kurt sure as hell is. You never can tell who he’ll outrage next.”
29
The next curious thing that happened was that an angry and kind of horrified woman called the bureau to announce that she and several other parents were filing complaints of child abuse against an employee of a kindergarten who tried disciplining the children by saying she’d suck their brains from their ears if they weren’t quiet. I wondered if this was similar to eating crawdads in New Orleans. I’d seen people suck the brains out of crawdads before, but I didn’t know if there was a Cajun recipe for kindergarteners.
“My four-year-old son came home from the Five Ducks Kindergarten and told me that Miss Beasley at the school had threatened to suck the childrens’ brains from their ears if they didn’t stop making noise and behave themselves,” the woman said in an agitated and somewhat angry voice over the phone. I couldn’t imagine any proper way to react to what I’d just been told.
“Did the woman suck anyone’s ears?” I said, deciding not to ask the woman if her son still had his brain.
“As far as I know she didn’t, but we still regard it as assault for a grown a
dult telling harmless children that she’ll suck their brains through their ears. And we’ve called the district attorney’s office to seek criminal charges.”
I called Susan Crewes, the district attorney, trying to pose my questions to her tersely and with vast disinterest.
“Is it illegal to tell children you’ll suck their brains out?” I said.
“Off the record, Kurt, I don’t think you could. Their ears are too small,” she said.
“Well, if you attempted to suck their brains out, even though you knew it wasn’t possible, is it illegal?”
“Are you really doing a serious news story on this?” she asked.
“Sure we are. You’re taught in journalism school that it’s always news if people threaten to suck your internal organs.”
“They actually teach that?”
“I wouldn’t know. I studied English.”
“I don’t know why you’re trying to make a big deal out of this, Kurt.”
“I know. Brain-sucking is so ordinary. I hate the press, don’t you?”
“You despise your own profession?”
“I could despise yours, too, if it makes me seem more broad-minded.”
Looking for more balance or thoroughness in the story, I called the head of the university medical school for professional views.
“Even if you could generate enough suction through the human mouth to make a brain move, which I can’t imagine is possible,” he said, “it’s reasonable to argue that the ear is too small an orifice to allow for the passage of a relatively bulky organ like a brain.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said.
“Was it necessary to call a physician to confirm an obvious opinion?” the head wanted to know.
“In journalism it is. Reporters are ordered to make believe that their own intelligence and common sense don’t matter unless it’s gained in an interview with someone else. In other words, editors wouldn’t dare allow me to simply say in this story that it’s probably impossible to suck a child’s brain through his ear, even though no one would argue with that, because reporters aren’t supposed to put their opinions in a story. So you need an authority to state the obvious.”