“I mean, I wouldn’t want anyone to go through what I went through that night. It was terrible.”
They stared at her, hands above their eyes to block the sun.
“I mean, I was frightened,” she tried to explain.
The two women nodded in the sun with eyes closed.
*
“I have to go back,” she told Michael. “I have to.”
“Okay,” he said. There was no need to argue. Whatever she wanted was fine. For her.
“Eric and Diana are talking about going down to Cabo for a while,” he told her. “I thought I’d go down with them.”
“Cabo? What about the boat?”
“Hell, it would be better to build it up in the States, San Diego or up by Frisco. You know?”
She knew.
“Look, I’ll take you up to the border. Make sure you get over all right. We can spend a night at Rosarito. You remember, that pink hotel on the beach? You thought it looked nice.”
She shrugged.
“”I’ll take the bus back from Tijuana and I’ll be back up in a couple of months. Okay?”
Staying at the pink hotel meant an extra night but she wouldn’t argue with him. She needed him to take her to the border. Once across she’d be all right but she couldn’t do it alone. She would have to hold on another night.
“I knew things weren’t going that well,” Diana said and dabbed at the canvas. “Michael can be difficult.” She squinted at the face of the Mexican doll-child.
“We’re going to Cabo for a change. This place gets old,” she said, never looking at Debbie. “I’m only here because it’s close to Los Angeles and that asshole’s gallery. The stuff sells.” Her brush searched the palette for a new bright color.
“Kids, they do sell.”
*
“Gonna build me that boat,” Michael said as they drove up the wild coast.
“And sail away,” she said.
“With you?” he questioned.
She nodded. The Valium had softened the shaking.
He smiled at her. “I’ll be back up in a few months,” he said and squeezed her thigh.
At the Rosarito, they drank rounds of margaritas by the pool. Near them, an American shouted and pounded on the table for his waiter who ran between the many other tables.
“Boyo, boyo!” he yelled. “Hey, get over here!” As the day went on, the voice became louder and the words more insulting.
“Bring me another one of these and hurry up. Pronto. You got that? Christ, they are stupid,” he said to all the others who tried not to hear him.
He watched the women on the patio with narrowed eyes, sure of himself, his bare hair-speckled chest, the big rubbery nipples. The woman with him was young, quiet, and plain. Skinny white legs reached from below her knee-long cover-up.
The waiter ran to his shouts.
“Hey, fella, over here. No tip for you,” he laughed loudly.
“They expect a big tip,” he told the woman and everyone else, “for nothing.”
“What a shit,” Michael muttered. “That’s what you are going back to. That bastard will be here all day screaming for a waiter and he won’t leave a cent. You watch.”
They waited until the day had moved into the evening chill. Beyond them the surf pounded the beach.
“Look, what did I tell you.” He pointed to the table where the American no longer sat. No money had been left for the waiter.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill. He moved as though to put it on the table, then stopped. His eyes sought out the waiter.
“For you,” he said with a sympathetic smile. “For that bastard,” he motioned toward the American’s table. “You understand?”
“Si, si, thank you, señor,” the waiter bowed. His white shirt was stained with the drinks of the afternoon.
Debbie watched. He had to make sure, didn’t he, that the waiter knew who left the tip. She turned away.
“We could get married, you know,” he said to her that night in bed. “We could get married in a few months. You want to?”
She shook her head.
“Christ, Debbie, I thought that’s what you wanted. Wasn’t that what you’ve been saying for two years?”
“I guess not,” she said. “I guess I really don’t want to.”
“Well, think about it,” he said. “Think about it.”
She nodded and curled into a tight ball of fear.
The next morning, as they paid the bill, the American from the day before ran through the lobby clutching his stomach. He crashed through the bathroom door and, as the dollar bills were being traded at the front desk, his moaning and retching rang out from the tiled walls and down the high-ceiling halls. It was gut-scrapping vomiting, agony. Michael smiled.
“Serves him right.”
And, while she did not see their smiles, she could feel them as the Mexican workers moved quietly, passing the slammed open door of the bathroom.
*
“Did you ever apply for another job in California?” Ellen asked.
“No,” said Debbie.
“I did. Almost got one, in San Diego,” Ellen told her. “That is one great town, the ocean, the weather.”
Debbie was remembering the day she left Ensenada, saying good-bye to Diana on the tiny porch where she dabbed at her canvas.
“The kids sell. That’s what sells,” she was saying to the painting.
Debbie stared across the tiny lawn of dust to the parked van. Suddenly she saw them, hundreds of tiny flowers, all colors, on thin stalks, reaching out of the dust.
“Look, look,” she cried. She was filled with joy.
“What?”
“Look at all those flowers. Where did they come from?”
“I don’t know,” Diana said. “Isn’t it unbelievable? They started coming up a few days ago.”
“I never saw them,” Debbie said and laughed.
Diana smiled at her and at her painting.
6
“Read it,” Chuck Farrell ordered. “Read it out loud.”
Tears filled her large brown eyes.
“Read it, Maria,” he demanded.
“A body was found on the Gila Indian Reservation last night. According to a spokesperson for the Department of Public Safety, the body found near the reservation was that of a male Caucasian, approximately …”
“Stop, stop there,” he ordered. “What does that mean?”
“What?” She turned the large eyes to him.
He grabbed the script page.
“First you say the body was found on the reservation and then you say it was found near it. Which one is it?”
“I don’t know,” she cried. “I took it off the wires. That’s what it said.”
Chuck exhaled in loud exasperation.
“Look, Maria, sometimes the wires are wrong. You have to read them first. But, anyway, this doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why?” She was moving into a hurt pout. “That’s what they said. First it said the body was found on the reservation, then later they said it was found near it. What’s the problem?”
“What’s the problem? It doesn’t make any sense, Maria,” he yelled. “It has to be one or the other. You have to read these things out loud to see if they make sense. I keep telling you that. Read them out loud. And, if it doesn’t make sense you are going to have to make some calls and find out what it should say.”
“Okay, okay,” she sniffed, “if that’s what you want.”
“It isn’t what I want,” he said through a clenched jaw. “It is what is right. Don’t you understand that?”
Debbie and Ellen leaned out of their cubicles and looked at each other.
“Doesn’t matter,” Ellen said in a low voice. “Somebody will soon be writing all her stuff. She’ll read it and make a hundred thousand a year in LA. You watch.”
“She is beautiful,” Debbie said of the olive-skinned woman with the big eyes and the silky black hair.
&
nbsp; “Yeah, as she’s got the right name too.”
Each of the stations in town had their Hispanic or two and each had their blacks, fewer blacks than Hispanics.
“So does Tommy Rodriguez,” Debbie said of the evening and weekend reporter. “Have the right name, if that’s what you mean.”
Ellen laughed. “That’s not his real name.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Nope. I asked him once where he got the Rodriguez, who in the family. He said he didn’t know, something about his grandmother or someone. Come on. He doesn’t know?”
Debbie giggled.
“He’s from New York, right? So, I said, ‘Are you Puerto Rican?’ and he said no, he didn’t think so. Do you believe it?” She laughed again.
“Of course, he made it up. I knew that from the beginning. I asked Sandi in Accounting and she said he had a different name on his Social Security, some Anglo name. He’s about as Hispanic as I am. It’s easier to get a job as Tommy Rodriguez, that’s all.”
“Did you ever think about changing your name?” Debbie asked.
“No. I think I’d feel different with another name. Names make people. Think of all the Bruces you’ve ever known or the, um, Berthas.” She rolled her eyes. “All alike, huh? Names make you who you are, the way you are. I believe that.”
“What’s Jean Ann’s real name?” Debbie asked.
“Cracker Sue,” Ellen said and laughed.
*
Debbie easily slipped into the talk and the work of the newsroom. She was on five days a week with one stretching into the night. No weekends but that could come. There were never any guarantees about what you might have to do for the good of The Best.
The first few weeks she got none of the run-and-gun stores, the spot news, the accidents, shootings, fires. It was slow, the end of the tourist season, not too hot yet, and the floods had passed them by this year. She had a month or so of city council meetings, county supervisors, new programs at the university. Standard, everyday, everyman’s newsroom kind of stories.
“I like it here,” she told anyone listening. “I really do.”
“Sure you do,” seemed to be the unspoken response.
She filled her small apartment with all she had carried, hauled, and shipped from Bakersfield and from the house in Oregon. That made the apartment sidestepping crowded. Still, she moved easily through the rooms, touching at her things as she did so. The apartment and all within it seemed a part of her, an invisible cape that swirled around her.
Someone once told her she was a homebody, a nester. She was also a good basic cook. It was the way she first opened herself to them, the others in the newsroom. Although shy, she pushed herself to say, “I am making some spaghetti tonight if anybody wants to take a chance.”
“Sure,” came the answer. Why the hell not.
She offered a free meal and they didn’t get many of those. Free meals came with a story attached, some luncheon or breakfast. Why not stop by the new reporter’s place? You didn’t have to pay with work. Some of them thought that way.
Debbie’s, “I’ll have lots, so come by,” may have sounded like a casual invitation but it wasn’t. She worried about whether or not they would come. They might dislike her just for asking. She was nobody, the new girl. They didn’t need her.
At first, the few who did come acted embarrassed if alone, or boisterous if with others.
“Here for a free meal,” they would yell and push past her. “Nice place. When do we eat?”
Those were the married men. They came at least once. Both Jack Benton and Frank Kowalski shared the unspoken feeling that there might be something going on over at the new reporter’s place. They weren’t exactly sure what but they both had the feeling that whatever it was, they should know about it.
“Fresh meat,” is what Benton said when Debbie first walked into the newsroom.“Right off the farm,” said Ferguson.
All they saw at her apartment was a blushing serving of lasagna and a few glasses of jug wine. It was dumb, too dumb and too tame to go back.
The unmarried photographers felt better about it, the ones who went. They made it a few times. Steve Kramer stopped by when he was drunk or needed someone to drink with him. He was forty-five but, as hung over and miserable as he might be every morning, he could still out-hump all of them. No amount of drinking could blur that fine eye he had for a story. He told Debbie about his third story theory.
“See, first you get the story you see as a reporter. Then the photographer brings back the story he’s seen through his camera. You put them together and sometimes you end up with this third story, something neither of you saw. You may never see it but the people watching do.” He sighed.
“It’s really wild when that happens. Ask Ellen,” he said and reached for his drink. “She knows.”
The young editor Mark Cunningham also tapped on her door.
“Hey, hi, do you mind? I mean, you said anyone could come.”
He wasn’t sure he was allowed to be there. He had only been at the station for a few months and he seldom left the editing room. He was hoping he’d get a chance to shoot, maybe with Debbie. She was nice to him. She was nice to everybody.
Paige Allen came. She lived in the same massive complex of balconies and pools and bending palms. Kim Palmeri and Maria Lopez also became regulars of a sort.
The one person Debbie wanted to see never came. After the first few tries of asking Ellen to drop by, Debbie stopped. Ellen filled the newsroom with laughter and excitement and a good static, loud and demanding, but the camaraderie ended when the newscast did or after a few drinks at the nearby bar. With Ellen, there seemed to be a strict, almost frightening sense of privacy.
“I keep my own weekends,” Ellen told her.
By the second month, some of The Best made it a habit to go to Debbie’s for dinner on Sunday night. Even the television critic from the afternoon paper gave her a call followed by a knock on her door, often with a date standing behind him.
“I don’t watch much television,” he told one Sunday night group in Debbie’s living room. “I mean, not really.”
He knocked his pipe on the side of the ashtray.
“I was in radio, you know.”
*
Besides filling the apartment with herself and a few people from the station, Debbie managed to create a garden on the tiny patio with its thin strip of dirt bordering the concrete slab.
“Tomatoes,” she told Paige Allen one bright Saturday afternoon in
May. “I can grow tomatoes in this corner.”
“You can’t grow many.”
“Sure, I can. In the summer, I can.” Debbie stood on the patio holding a trowel and surveying her patch of land.
“I like tomatoes,” Paige said.
“And here I can put in some carrots or strawberries,” Debbie continued.
Paige smiled and dimpled. Those dimples would take her to a weekend anchoring job somewhere in the Midwest. Those same dimples would keep her out of the top ten markets.
Debbie already had the plants, more than she would ever need. Perhaps she should buy pots and fill them with the plants and give them away, little presents. She knelt down and began turning the hard soil with the green-handled trowel.
“I could give you a couple,” she said to Paige. “Some little plants.” She smiled.
Paige smiled back. “I don’t think so, but you could give me a couple of tomatoes when they get big.”
“Okay, but, you might like a plant,” she tried again.
“I’ve got a date tonight,” Paige responded, looking at her nails. They were perfect and painted a soft gold color.
SEGMENT TWO
“There’s a new plan to bring help to the homeless in our valley. It was introduced at a press conference this afternoon.”
Carter’s voice was clipped, to the point. This afternoon. Period. Pause.
Jean Ann watched him and, as her camera jockeyed for position, looked down at her script.
“Reporter Frank Kowalski was there,” Carter continued, “and has this story for us.” The tape was on.
She licked her lips. She would need the spit gloss for the next intro. She waited for the story to end and hers to begin.
7
“You know what I’d like to do?” Debbie looked up from the memo. “I’d like to do stories on Indians.”
“Indians,” she said again. “You know. I think they are really interesting people.”
“What’s that?” Ellen asked with a nod to the paper Debbie held.
“The memo about beats, what beats we want. It’s not beats though, areas of interest is what it says. What are you going to put down?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t do any good. You only end up going out and doing what George says.”
“Well, I’d like to do Indians.”
Ellen shrugged. The less they knew about what she wanted to do, the better off she was.
George Harding sat at his desk, one shoulder hooked to the phone, one hand reaching for a second phone. His job was simple, feed the news animal, feed it three times a day, twice a day on weekends. Find the stories and the people to cover them. Work twelve to fifteen hours a day, be on twenty-four hour call.
Have fire and police scanners set up in your bedroom so you can be making assignments at four o’clock in the morning for reporters who refused to answer their phones. Be the most hated man in the newsroom and the most pitied. Make thirty thousand a year and hear the word fuck in almost every sentence spoken to you. Be the first one there in the morning, the last one to leave at night and someone somewhere will have the feeling that what you do is interesting.
He had no idea why he did it. He hadn’t the time to think of one. He had never been a reporter or a photographer. That was one of the things the newsroom disliked most about him.
“He’s got no fucking idea what it takes to do this,” photographer and reporter would whine to each other on the way to a story.
“Shit, if he ever carried a camera, he’d know this is ridiculous.”
“Hell, he couldn’t write a story if his life depend on it.”
George Harding thought he could write a story. He had ideas about how stories could be done. He wrote suggestions on the assignment sheets. More often than not, they were met with either silence or a shout.
The Best in the West Page 5