Grievances

by Mark Ethridge

  Pennegar snorted. “You’d best be thinking more about bein’ in jail at four o’clock than thinking about bein’ at work.” He stepped into the bathroom but kept the door open so he could watch the front entrance in case we tried to escape.

  “We got to get out of here and get back home,” I whispered to Bullock.

  “What we do on our own time is our business,” Bullock said.

  “Yeah, but our ass is grass if we don’t show up for work.”

  “We’ll just call Walker and let him know.”

  By noon, I almost couldn’t take it any longer. With no protest from Pennegar, I left the table and started to pace. I glanced out the window every eight seconds. Even if Buchan showed up now, explaining to him what had happened and hearing Pennegar’s side of the story was going to take more than half an hour. There was no way we were going to get back to Charlotte in time for the start of the night shift.

  “We need to call Walker,” I finally said. “Don’t see any way around it.”

  “Still got a half hour,” Bullock said.

  “Not enough time,” I said. “Officer Pennegar, whether or not we are technically under arrest, I believe we’re entitled to make a phone call.”

  Pennegar looked up from his paperwork. “Go right ahead,” he said. Then, thinking about it, he added, “Keep it to three minutes. You can reimburse Patty later.”

  I dialed the newspaper.

  “Charlotte Times. Can you hold please?”

  “No, I—” But the operator hadn’t waited for my answer and I was greeted by a generically sweet voice which explained that the Charlotte Times cared deeply about my call. But apparently not enough to actually hire people to answer it, I thought angrily. I twisted the phone cord as I paced, alternately looking out the window in hopes that Buchan might appear and checking back in with the on-hold message which was now telling me to call a different number if I wanted to complain about a delivery problem and yet a different number if I wanted to buy a classified ad.

  “Just pick up the damn phone,” I swore. But no one did. Not after one minute. Not after two minutes. And not after three.

  “Idiots!” I exploded.

  Pennegar snickered. Four minutes on hold. Five minutes on hold. My blood pressure was clicking up another notch with each second.

  “You’re gonna have to wrap it up,” Pennegar said.

  “Relax, I said we’d pay for it,” I hissed.

  Finally, “Charlotte Times, thank you for holding.”

  Thank God, I thought. “Newsroom please.” I heard the click as the call was transferred. “Circulation.”

  “Sorry. I was trying to reach Walker Burns in the newsroom.”

  “This is circulation.”

  “This is Matt Harper. The switchboard switched me to you but I’m trying to get Walker Burns in the newsroom.”

  “Just a moment. I’ll transfer you.” The phone clicked and I heard a dial tone.

  I slammed the phone to the cradle. “Damn it!” I picked up to dial again.

  “One call’s all you get,” Pennegar said.

  “I didn’t get anyone,” I protested. “I need to tell my boss we’re going to be late.”

  “You should have thought about that before you broke in.”

  I put the phone down and returned to the desk with Bullock and Brad.

  “Well, we tried,” Bullock said. “It ain’t our fault if they don’t answer.”

  I looked at the clock. It was now after 1:00 p.m. “We’re screwed, ” I said, as resignation replaced anxiety and adrenalin gave way to fatigue. Too much tension and too little sleep had drained me. I headed toward the coffee pot.

  “Don’t,” Brad whispered. I sat down.

  Pennegar, too, was beginning to nod off. His eyes closed briefly then he suddenly jerked forward in his chair and looked around, as if he didn’t know how long he’d been asleep.

  He stood unsteadily, drew his pistol and waved it at a large closet. “Y’all get in there.”

  Before I could say anything Brad poked me in the ribs and whispered, “Go ahead.”

  We piled into the closet. Pennegar shut the door. I heard the bar latch click. It was pitch dark in the closet until an overhead bulb snapped on.

  “What’s this all about?” Bullock yelled. “You can’t lock us up like this!”

  “Just need to rest my eyes,” Pennegar slurred. “Need to keep you from goin’ anywhere until the judge gets here.”

  Brad put his finger over his lips, telling us to hush.

  We heard Pennegar sit. A moment later we heard a thud that could only be one thing: the officer hitting the floor.

  “Well,” Brad said. “I guess that did the trick. Now let’s get out of here.”

  Bullock and I looked at him like he was crazy.

  “Lady slipper,” Brad explained with a smile. “The flower’s a natural sedative. Puts you right to sleep. I collected some this morning. Dropped it in the coffee pot while he went to the bathroom.”

  Bullock and I looked at each other.

  “Don’t worry,” Brad said. “He’ll be fine. But for the next two hours, he’s going nowhere except dreamland.”

  Bullock crashed into the door with his shoulder. It wouldn’t open, held by the latch on the outside of the door. He tried it again but the closet wasn’t big enough for him to get any speed.

  Bullock hitched up his pants leg and drew the derringer. “We got one shot,” he said. “It has to be a good one.” He examined the door to determine the precise location of the latch. He raised the derringer and pressed it against the wood. I closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears but there was no need. The bang when Bullock shot through the latch was barely louder than a cap pistol. Bullock turned the knob and we stepped out of the closet and over the form of Olen Pennegar Jr., who snored away on the floor.

  Bullock put the derringer back in the holster. “And you thought this wouldn’t come in handy.”

  “C’mon, Ronnie,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Hold on,” he said. He took out his wallet and left a twenty dollar bill on Patty Paysinger’s desk. “That ought to cover the lock and the door repair.”

  “Don’t forget the phone call,” I reminded him.

  He took out another twenty and left it on the desk.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “I’m driving.”

  Walker Burns was in the 3:00 p.m. news meeting when I called. So I left a message with the receptionist that Bullock and I had been unexpectedly detained by authorities in South Carolina but would be in the newsroom by seven o’ clock. I could have said six-thirty but we were already so late there was no reason for Bullock to race.

  “Did you tell them that we’d been arrested?” Bullock asked when I returned to the Dodge.

  “I don’t think we ever were. Detained is the right word.”

  “What do you think Pennegar’s gonna do when he wakes up?”

  “I’m thinking he says nothing. It ain’t gonna look too good if he says he caught three criminals but they got away when he fell asleep.”

  “He’s going to have to explain the lock.”

  “He just has to face Miss Patty. We got Walker.”

  Journalists are gossips. We get paid to find out information that people want to know and we delight in telling them. The more shocking the information, the greater the delight. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the newsroom receptionist was driven by the same instincts. By the time Bullock and I walked into the newsroom, everyone knew something had happened between Bullock, me, and the authorities in South Carolina, and they were waiting.

  “You guys okay?” I heard someone ask as we headed for Walker’s desk.

  “Free at last!” someone else called and Bullock raised a clenched first. A smattering of applause broke out among some of t
he reporters in Metro. All they knew is that we had clashed with authority and authority hadn’t won. I gave a little wave. The respect felt good.

  Wow, I thought. Even the publisher has shown up to herald our return. Tall, tanned, and tailored, Warren Reich stood talking with Walker at the Metro Desk, with his arms folded protectively against his chest, his massive gold cufflinks on display. As we got closer, I could tell that neither was happy.

  “What’s that asshole doing here?” Bullock whispered.

  “I think we’re about to find out.”

  “Howdy, men,” Walker greeted us. “Had a little dust-up, did we? Everybody okay? Anybody hurt or facing a felony?” He smiled weakly.

  There was no smile from Reich, who made a point of looking at his watch. “Fine. Just a little misunderstanding. It’s worked out.” I harbored the hope that we could skate through this with just a reprimand, that maybe even Reich’s presence was unrelated. “Sorry we’re late.”

  “Carmela tells me you were back in South Carolina,” Reich interrupted, his arms still crossed

  “Yes, sir,” Bullock answered.

  Reich turned to Walker. “I thought we had agreed that we would stick closer to home.”

  “We were on our own time,” I volunteered. “We intended to be back to start our shifts.”

  But Reich had stopped listening. His attention was distracted by an open bottom drawer on one of the metro desks. He reached in and extracted a shiny, almost-new, pair of black men’s shoes. “Walker,” he asked, “what’s this?”

  “Shoes, sir. Size ten, if I remember.”

  “I see they are shoes,” Reich said. “What are they doing here?”

  “They’re staff shoes, sir.”

  “Staff shoes.”

  “Yes, sir. We purchased them for use by the staff whenever it might be necessary.”

  “You bought these shoes with company money?” he exploded. “Who in hell authorized this?”

  “You did, sir. Do you remember when Les Becker won first place in the state press association contest and he wanted to go to the awards ceremony and you said he could but only if he wore a decent pair of shoes?”

  “I did not want the Charlotte Times publicly embarrassed when he walked up on stage to accept the award in his sneakers,” Reich said. “With no laces, no less.”

  “Right. Well, he bought the shoes and wore them to the awards ceremony and then turned in the cost of the shoes on his expense report.”

  Reich was livid. Livid doesn’t mean angry, it means purple. Despite his deep tan, Reich was purple.

  “He expensed the shoes,” Walker explained. “Claims he was required to buy them by the company, that he wouldn’t have bought them otherwise and therefore they were a company-mandated business expense.”

  “You approved the expense report?” Reich was incredulous.

  “Yeah, but if the company paid for the shoes, then they are company shoes. So I made Becker turn them in. We keep them right here.”

  “In case he wins again,” I joked.

  Reich was steaming. “This is an abomination. Staff shoes. Reporters wandering around down in South Carolina wasting the company’s money and doing things you don’t even know about. Getting arrested! Walker, I told you I would not have the Charlotte Times embarrassed again. Your people are out of control!”

  Ordinarily, the publisher’s contact with the newsroom is confined to top editors like Walker. But the high-level pow-wow had caused reporters and copy editors alike to find work that called them to a spot where they could hear what was going on. Reich’s outburst marked the first time many of them had been directly exposed to the business-side pressures that good editors fight against. I decided I needed to step in.

  “No one got arrested,” I said to Reich. “If you’re going to get involved in journalism, you ought to learn to get your facts straight.”

  The crowd behind me murmured. I watched the shock on Reich’s face. “Easy,” I heard Bullock say. I didn’t care. I was tired, cranky and pissed.

  “Then what are the facts?” Reich challenged.

  “The facts are that we were down in South Carolina doing investigative reporting. We were committing journalism and we were doing it on our own time because apparently the Charlotte Times is either no longer willing or able to pay for it.”

  I paused to see if Reich would take the bait and pronounce there in front of everyone that the newspaper was indeed committed to investigative journalism. He was silent so I summarized what had happened, leaving out the part about Bullock, the lock, and the derringer.

  “You missed the first part of your shift,” Reich said. It sounded weak and he knew it.

  “You’re right,” I said with all the contempt I could manage. “Tell you what. How about if I just put in an extra three hours on the day that I retire?” Reich turned from an angry purple to an embarrassed red. Someone whooped.

  “That’s enough,” Walker said sternly. “We’ll have the rest of this discussion behind closed doors.” He started to head off to the conference room, but Reich stopped him short.

  “I will brook no more discussion about this,” he yelled. “We are done spending this newspaper’s resources making fools of ourselves on a story hundreds of miles away that will not sell us one more newspaper or one more ad.”

  “Making it easy for you to sell an ad is not why I got in the business.”

  “Selling ads pays your salary. Newspaper people like your father and grandfather understood that when they were in the business,” he answered. “What happened to you?”

  I thought of Dad stepping off the curb and marching in the streets for civil rights. I thought of him using the editorial page to oppose the Vietnam War. I thought of Glenn Hudson’s editorial about Wallace Sampson and his son’s smashed bike.

  “Newspaper people like my dad also understand that one of the reasons to make a profit is so the newspaper can be used to fight injustice and to right wrongs.”

  “Enough,” Reich barked at Walker. “I command you to end your ceaseless thrall with Wallace Sampson.”

  I thought of the town of Hirtsboro, of the lynching cross, of the faces of Mrs. Sampson, Reverend Grace, Mary Pell, Vanessa Brown, and Brad Hall. I recalled Delana’s words: Someone killed Wallace Sampson and has gotten away with murder.

  Walker was silent. I looked at Bullock. He wasn’t about to intervene. I looked at my colleagues who stood hushed on the periphery too frozen to act, like they were watching a car wreck in progress. I was on my own.

  “You can command our hours and you can command our assignments and you can command what goes in our paychecks,” I said, shaking with rage. “You can even command if we get paychecks. But as long as it is on my time, I, not you, will decide when I end my involvement in what you refer to as our ceaseless thrall.”

  I slammed my fist on the metro desk with such force that the baseball cap flew from the urn containing the ashes of Colonel Sanders, his cigar went cart-wheeling across a stack of old newspapers, and the urn itself did a slow motion topple, spewing the fine dust of what had been the Colonel onto the desk.

  My newsroom colleagues stood in stunned silence. Then someone in back began to clap. Someone joined. Soon sustained, dignified applause echoed from around the room. I felt my face redden.

  Reich dusted Colonel Sanders from his sleeve. “I’ll talk to you later,” he said to Walker, before he escaped though the double doors of the newsroom.

  Walker grabbed me by the elbow and hustled me in the same direction. “Let’s go, pardner,” he said. “I’m getting you out of here before you shoot the other foot.”

  “Sorry, Walker. The son of a bitch made me lose it.”

  “Yeah, but it was spectacular. I’ve seen a publisher told off before but seldom have I seen it done better.”

  Halfway through the door I heard the whine of an unf
amiliar newsroom machine. I looked up to see assistant managing editor Bob DeCaprio vacuuming the ashes of Colonel Sanders from the desk and the keyboard, crossing himself and muttering as he did so.

  I could not hear what he was saying but I knew it anyway: Thank God it wasn’t Coca-Cola.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I dreamed strange dreams, dreams that jumbled my past and present, dreams that joined the living and the dead—the publisher marrying Delana; my brother Luke dead on the ground outside De Sto; Dad and me breaking out of the Hirtsboro jail, triggering a ringing alarm bell. The dream ended but the ringing did not. It took me a while to emerge from my fog and realize I’d been asleep for more than fourteen hours. I answered the phone.

  “Mr. Harper, this is David Riley. I’m a reporter for The Daily Collegian up at the university. I’d like to talk to you about a story I’m doing on your father and his illness.”

  My stomach flip-flopped. I hadn’t begun to make peace with the idea of Dad having a fatal disease and the thought of it being in a story, of it being public, wasn’t something I was ready to deal with. Nor was it something Dad should have to deal with.

  “People get sick all the time,” I said breezily. “What’s the story?”

  “Well, we understand that it doesn’t look so good. We’re told his illness is generally . . .”

  “Fatal?”

  “Yes.”

  “No one knows,” I said hoping to destroy the premise of the story while being reasonably truthful. “Besides, life’s fatal.”

  I figured this kid was just a student and I’d be able to blow him off, but David Riley didn’t buy it. Today’s Live Toad wouldn’t go down easily. “I was hoping you could give me some quotes. And I’d like background on his newspaper days.”

  “David, you’re a good kid and if there’s ever a time for a story, I’ll let you know. But right now, it’s a private matter and we’d like to leave it like that.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s a public matter,” he said firmly. “Your father is a state university professor. He’s on the public payroll. He’s paid with public money. I’m sorry about his illness but the public has a right to know.” Who was this arrogant little jerk? I didn’t need to be in a story debate at the moment, especially one concerning my own father. I tried to be patient and reasonable.