Begin to Exit Here

by John Welter

  “It doesn’t matter how many liberals in Vermilion County read communist homosexual novels written by gay lesbians who think the s word is a commonplace expression,” the memo said. “Other papers can wallow in the s word if they want to. Ours won’t.”

  “Is the policy clear?” Lisa said wearily.

  “If you’re interviewing Miss Manners and she says shit, can you use it?” Harmon said.

  “You probably won’t be interviewing Miss Manners,” Lisa said.

  Theresa raised her hand and said, “I have a question. Kurt asked me to ask if we’re just writing for one prude, could you tell us what his name is so we could refer to him by name in all of our stories? I’ll bet it begins with an s.”

  “If you have any further questions, write them down on a piece of paper and save it until you forget you have it,” Lisa said, turning and walking indifferently toward her office. The meeting was over.

  “Let’s go across the street and have a beer,” Theresa said, looking at Harmon and me.

  “Okay, but no more than three or four. I’m watching my weight,” Harmon said.

  “Other people are watching your weight, too,” I said.

  “Eat me.”

  “I don’t eat pork.”

  Harmon raised a fist toward my face, playfully, it seemed. “Someday I’m gonna kick your ass.”

  “You couldn’t raise your foot that far,” I said.

  “Don’t fight in the bureau. Go to Stanley’s and do it,” Theresa said.

  Across the street after Theresa and Harmon ordered their beers and I ordered a Coke, Harmon said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drink a beer or wine or bourbon or anything traditionally associated with this dissolute profession.”

  “All reporters drink,” Theresa said in her girlish, mocking voice. “You’ll ruin our reputations if people see you at the bar drinking a Coke.”

  It was terrible when people didn’t know they were cheerfully hurting you. And to tell them would only hurt you more.

  “I already had some dry sherry,” I said.

  “Today?” Theresa said.

  “Five months ago,” I said. “I quit drinking sherry because it begins with an s. And then I quit drinking altogether. I don’t drink any alcohol with vowels or consonants in it.”

  “Good Lord,” Theresa said with amazement or something. “How can you go for five months without a drink?”

  I wanted to know that, too.

  “It’s not good to stay sober too long,” Harmon said. “Sober begins with an s, too.”

  Please be quiet.

  “Do you drink at all?” Theresa said in a simply curious tone.

  I shook my head no and said, “Like a gila monster, I get all my liquids from eating reptiles and rodents.”

  “Stop it,” she said.

  “I guess you don’t like zoology,” I said, sipping my Coke. “I see why you wouldn’t. We work for one of the biggest reptiles in the business: Perrault. He’s not really a reptile, though. He’s a dick. That’s a different phylum.”

  “Speaking of Perrault,” Harmon said, “it’s your fault we’re getting all these snotty memos now. He never cared about anything until you came here and started pissing him off. He used to just write memos that had nothing to do with anything we wrote. But now I’m afraid he’s actually reading our stories.”

  “I think you’re right,” Theresa said. “It seems like all his memos used to just be these sort of remote little things about journalism in general, like the time he told us to always double-check our spelling of the names of Chinese Communist officials, even though we never write about Chinese Communist officials. But since you’ve been here,” she said, looking at me, “all his memos seem kind of harshly directed at whatever we do.”

  “Whatever I do,” I said. “Why does he need me for an enemy if he never needed one before?”

  Theresa smiled with her eyes wide open. “Well, Kurt, he never needed an enemy before because you weren’t available.”

  34

  Sometimes I was a snarling wolverine of the free press, prepared to reveal troubling developments in society that I kept learning no one really cared about, such as The Next Estate.

  The Next Estate was a happy project in the wilderness of Wellington County in which happy developers purchased more than seven hundred acres on which they would build an enormously expensive eighteen-hole golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus. Splayed out around the golf course, within the ancient, hardwood forests, would be more than eight hundred condominiums and private homes. The cheap residences would cost about three hundred thousand dollars or more. The bigger ones would cost around half a million dollars or a lot more. People who lived there would be a homogeneous social group known as the wealthy but more emphatically as the really goddamn rich. Some of them probably would buy a condominium or a house to stay there just for a day or two at a time so they’d have a charming place to stay while they were in the area to watch a football or basketball game at the university. Along the entire perimeter of The Next Estate would be a wall or fence of some sort, and the entrance gate to the community would be constantly watched by uniformed guards to keep out distressingly unfortunate creatures such as myself. Not long after The Next Estate was started and it was the duty of the press to write about it, my project was to write a series of leads that I knew wouldn’t be printed. One lead was “More than three centuries after Europeans moved to America to escape the oppression of an autocratic society ruled by the rich and elite, The Next Estate is being built near St. Beaujolais as a sanctuary for the rich and elite.”

  It was automatically rejected.

  “We can’t print that. It’s true,” Lisa told me.

  I tried an alternate lead: “With a wall around it to keep out blacks, Hispanics, Indians, and newspaper reporters, The Next Estate golfing community is being built by the U.S. Game & Wildlife Commission as a preserve for rich old white people.”

  Eventually it was announced by state archaeologists that hundreds if not thousands of artifacts from prehistoric Indians probably lay buried on parts of The Next Estate land. While this was extremely interesting to the archaeologists, no state law compelled the owners of private property to look for Indian artifacts on their land, so it was a certainty that whatever artifacts were there would be soon covered up forever by a Jack Nicklaus golf course and about a thousand buildings.

  “Pricks,” Janice said as she brooded about that news. “Why doesn’t anybody ever care about the Indians?”

  “Because you’re not supposed to care about the people you stole a continent from,” I said.

  “Well, we do, and we’re going there,” she said of us.

  “Going where?”

  “The Next Estate. We’re going to drive out there and hike around.”

  “You mean trespass?”

  “I don’t care. This whole nation was based on a theft from the Indians,” she said, walking into the bedroom to put on her hiking boots. “Now they’re going to put their exclusive, elegant homes and their eighteen-goddamn-hole golf course out in a private, rich-guy sanctuary right on top of where prehistoric Indians used to wander. Well, I want to see it before it’s destroyed and whitenized and turned into a forbidden, vulgar golf preserve, as if a bunch of fat old golfers losing their balls on a fairway is culturally and historically superior to the ancient people who wandered here thousands of years before Europeans sailed over and said to the Indians, ‘We’re going to steal this country and play golf.’”

  As Janice put on her hiking clothes, I asked if we should bring the Beretta with us. If we saw a herd of golfers, we could shoot some and sell their pelts. She said leave the gun home.

  And so it came to pass that we drove on out to The Next Estate, parking her car along a rutted dirt road remote from where the construction crews traveled, and we began walking along some animal trail surrounded everywhere by pines and oaks and huge trees whose names we didn’t know, as well as a constant supply of flying bugs that bump
ed into us.

  “What if someone asks us what we’re doing here?” Janice said.

  “Are you worried about trespassing now? You weren’t earlier,” I said. “If anyone spots us and yells, ‘Hey! What’re you doin’ here,’ I’ll just say ‘We’re rich white people. Fuck you.’”

  “It might work,” Janice said. “But what if they ask why rich white people are wandering around in the woods with bugs all over them?”

  “Well, they shouldn’t ask that. If rich white people want to act eccentric and irrational from years of having sex with their cousins and sisters, it’s their privilege.”

  We walked along a creek to look for artifacts because Janice said Indians would have lived and hunted near a source of fresh water.

  “Although,” she said, “they could’ve lived anywhere and this creek might not even have existed when Indians were here, so it almost doesn’t matter where we look. Except if we look in the trees, we’ll step all over copperheads. Although copperheads could be anywhere, and we might step on them anyway. So the best place to look for artifacts is anywhere.”

  “Oh. We’re being methodical,” I said.

  “Don’t make fun of me, Kurt.”

  “I’m not. You go over there and look anywhere, and I’ll go over here and look anywhere. And look. I already found something. A skink.”

  “We don’t want skinks.”

  “Skinks are neat. See his metallic blue tail? Why do skinks need metallic blue tails? It can’t be camouflage, unless they’re going to hide in an art-supply store.”

  “We’re looking for arrowheads and spearheads,” Janice said as we slowly walked along the creek bank, squinting down at moss and weeds and thousands of pieces of decaying plants layered all over the rocky ground.

  “And golf balls,” I said.

  “Prehistoric Indians didn’t play golf, I don’t think.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because we’ve never found any Indian burial grounds with golf clubs in them,” she said, looking up to smile at me with her lovely dark eyes and stare at me for a while.

  “Will we be famous,” I said as we slowly walked, “if we find a prehistoric golfing tribe?”

  “Infinitely. But we’re not likely to find any bones. And if we do, it’s more likely to be a deer than an Indian.”

  “We could do a Piltdown golfing Indian, you know,” I said as I squatted next to Janice and watched her pick up some little black stones from the creek.

  “What’s that?” she said in a doubtful tone.

  “Those are little black rocks. You picked them up.”

  “No. I mean what’s a Piltdown golfing Indian? Some fraudulent project of yours?”

  “Yeah, like the phony discovery at Piltdown, England. We could get some old bones and a round, black rock and say it was a golf ball. Then we’d take the bones and the rock to the university and say, ‘My God. We’ve found the remains of a Paleolithic golfer out at The Next Estate.’”

  “Okay,” Janice said cheerfully. “You find some old bones. I’ll look here in the creek for a ten-thousand-year-old golf ball. What will we name the tribe?”

  “I don’t have a name.”

  “All discoverers get to name their discoveries. You’ll have to think of a name for the tribe.”

  “The Nicklai,” I said. “An ancient Indian tribe named after Jack Nicklaus.”

  “That’s a good one. We’ll use it. Have you found any old bones yet?”

  “I’m still looking.”

  “Here. I think I found a primitive golfing tee older than the Assyrian Empire. No. It’s just a rock,” she said, smiling and throwing it back in the creek.

  “Janice? What’s that? The skeletal remains of an Indian caddie born before Christ?” I said, pointing across the creek. “No. It’s just a pine tree.”

  I had to go back to the bureau that afternoon, a Saturday, and do a Sunday piece about Indians and golf and The Next Estate. It wasn’t, to me, just a routine, abstract matter of telling the indifferent public that some archaeologists were complaining that some old stones and bones belonging to vanished humans could be damaged or covered up forever because wealthy people wanted to golf in haughty seclusion. I tried to write it with the kind of personal insight and attitude that I sensed was most appropriate to that small fragment of the reading public most likely to care what I wrote: me.

  Janice got the paper from the yard late Sunday morning and brought it to bed where we could sit together and see if what I wrote got printed. It did. It started off:

  State archaeologist Gerald Litner said the prehistoric Indians who once wandered where The Next Estate golfing community is being built might as well be named the Nicklai Indians, after Jack Nicklaus.

  “Since we don’t know who the Indians were,” Litner said Saturday, “and many of their artifacts are likely to be covered by The Next Estate and an 18-hole golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus, you could call them the Nicklai Indians. There’s no evidence that they golfed, though.”

  Litner said in a letter in June to Next Estate officials that it was probable that prehistoric Indians commonly roamed the area and that it would be ‘desirable’ to conduct an archaeological survey of the lands to search for Indian artifacts before any widespread construction begins at The Next Estate. Overall, Litner thinks the study of vanished Indians is more valuable than an exclusive sanctuary for amateur golfers.

  “Archaeologically, we can gain more useful knowledge from examining Indian artifacts than from examining golf balls,” he said. “If we wanted to study golf, we’d watch the PGA tour on TV. Prehistoric Indians, on the other hand, aren’t shown on the Saturday programs.”

  What Janice wanted to know was how I got Litner to call them the Nicklai Indians.

  “I just told him that’s what we decided to call them,” I said. “And in the interview, he decided he might as well call them that, too.”

  Janice grinned and put her leg over mine, saying, “So now we’ve named an Indian tribe. It’s got to be true. It’s in the paper.”

  “I know. Isn’t it fun?”

  35

  Sometimes a newspaper story was like a handful of rocks thrown with your eyes closed. You were likely to hit someone, but you didn’t know who until they screamed.

  Daniel Garn screamed. Garn, a professor of archaeology at the university, was mad at Gerald Litner and me for the invention of the Nicklai tribe. Janice and I saw Garn on the TV news Monday night denouncing Litner and, he said, “the idiotic reporter for the News-Dispatch who wrote that irresponsible refuse.”

  “That’s you,” Janice said in a slightly alarmed tone.

  Garn was mad that Litner and the idiotic reporter “shamelessly defamed and trivialized the admirable and extremely difficult lives of unknown Indians who struggled on this continent centuries before the first European profiteers set foot on North America.”

  “Stupid dick,” I said to the TV.

  “In a time when America is supposed to be working toward more social enlightenment. . .”

  “Oh, kiss my ass.”

  “. . . and an intolerance of bigotry,” Garn said, “I find it embarrassing and repugnant that a supposedly respected archaeologist and a major daily paper have slandered Indians by suggesting they might be named after Jack Nicklaus.”

  It wasn’t even news. It was dumb drama from a man who had no grasp of irony and why I’d even thought of naming the Indians the Nicklai tribe. But thousands of people saw it on TV, so now they thought it was news and that I’d demeaned the Indians I’d actually defended. Garn’s moralistic blather on TV was fundamentally repeated in tedious letters mailed to the various local papers, the text of which was printed in our paper and included a demand that I apologize to all American Indians for my “senseless and odious slander of Indians.”

  Perrault used this occasion to write another bombastic memo from the depths of his shallow brain:

  A recent public outcry accusing this paper of defaming American Indians u
nfortunately has some merit. Again we find lazy editing and lazy reporting in a story that named prehistoric Indians who once lived where The Next Estate is being constructed as the “Nicklai Indians,” even though no such tribe ever existed and it’s obviously a clever and atrocious reference to professional golfer Jack Nicklaus.

  Explanations for this error are due.

  Christopher called me at the bureau and said he was told by Perrault that we had to write a correction.

  “It’s impossible to write a correction. I didn’t make a mistake,” I said.

  “Of course you didn’t. But Perrault insists we run a correction,” Christopher said.

  “Doesn’t he know a fucking thing?”

  “He knows his name, and he knows yours. That could be dangerous for you.”

  “Well, I can’t write a correction.”

  “Be imaginative, Kurt. That’s what keeps getting you in trouble. Use it to your advantage. You don’t have to write a genuine correction. I recommend you weasel your way out of it and think up something wry, but not too snotty, and make believe it’s a correction. If all we do is put the word ‘correction’ at the top of it, Perrault will think it’s a correction. And keep the fucker short. Perrault tires easily.”

  Writing a correction when an error wasn’t made was hard. To concentrate, I had to go to the Bookmark Cafe & Bookstore, sit at a little table and drink coffee and twirl my hair absentmindedly while trying to write a correction that wasn’t a correction. After nine or ten experimental drafts, I decided this was close:

  Correction: An article in Sunday’s edition of the News-Dispatch referring to the “Nicklai Indians” in Wellington County might have mistakenly led some readers to believe that Jack Nicklaus was named after prehistoric Indians. Archaeologists have no evidence that prehistoric Indians golfed. Indians did, however, invent lacrosse.

  To me, it seemed confusing enough to avoid being a correction while still resembling one. I was pleased.

  36

  One ordinary morning after everyone arrived at work, we faced the eerie and metaphysical emergency that all newspapers eventually couldn’t avoid. There was no news.