“Mr. Speaker.”
Took him by surprise, which isn’t easy.
“You aren’t a member.”
“I’m Clara Buchanan, Mr. Speaker. The Boston Globe.”
“I know who you are, Ms. Buchanan. Mostly from CNN.”
“We were on the calendar, sir. You canceled.”
“Well, I don’t do interviews in the gym,” Ryan said, glaring. “This is my time.”
“You wasted three days of mine,” I countered. “So when can we reschedule?”
“Tell you what,” he offered after the slightest pause. “Hang with me for a workout and we’ll see.”
I spotted a pair of rowing machines not far from the free weights.
“How about the erg? First to six thousand meters.”
I was still rowing competitively at the time. Dawn patrol at the Union Boat Club, five mornings a week. That was before the docs found a blockage in my right descending ventricle. Yes, I have a stent in my heart. It’s not a huge deal.
At least, not until lately.
In any case, a week after I handily bested Paul Ryan on a Concept2, I was granted an interview in his spacious office. Ryan brought a sheaf of his famous charts to the meeting; I brought a three-ring binder stuffed with articles and a calculator. It’s safe to say that the speaker did not appreciate my critique of his arithmetic, but what really chapped him was that somebody with an iPhone had videoed me kicking his butt on the rowing machine.
By the time I sat down to interview Speaker Ryan, that damned video had dominated the news cycle for an entire week. My interview with the speaker—? Was a bust. There would be no coverage of Ryan’s plan for cutting taxes. Nothing about budgets or the assumptions underlying supply-side prescriptions. What voters were to believe about the most important questions guiding economic policy was completely ignored.
Instead it was the digital capture of the speaker gasping next to a forty-something woman that went viral. A froth of commentary was spawned, none of it having anything to do with tax cuts, entitlements, or funny numbers. The Clarion’s banner boiled down local reaction to the video along with a native misogyny.
Local Girl Embarrasses Speaker
In full disclosure, I should admit that the gray beards at the Globe were not impressed with my tactics either. Most regarded my blindside as a badly conceived stunt. The older heads pegged me for a Woodward wannabe. Others saw a diva in the making, or maybe just a bitch. The only person in the ensuing weeks who did not offer an opinion about my run-in with the Speaker of the House was Randall Greene.
I actually met my husband-to-be some years before my infamous interlude with Speaker Ryan. Randall was working for Common Cause at the time and had contacted the Globe to offer some inside scoop on coming legislation. I got tagged for the interview.
“Try not to piss him off,” my editor admonished.
“It’s Common Cause, chief. Nobody cares.”
“I care,” my boss replied, so I threw on my anorak and headed out.
The day was cold with the promise of sleet. The paper had arranged for me to meet Greene at a local Starbucks. I arrived, as is my habit, a little early, but was distracted by a confection of steam and roasted beans meeting the raw aromas of stale cement and pedestrians outside.
It took me a moment to note the man staring at me from a booth just inside the door. First thing I noticed was the hair. Randall has a great head of hair. I mean, like Robert Redford hair, gold and layered and thick. Then I noticed the eyes—light green with lashes almost feminine. Fair complexion—I am brown as a berry compared to my husband which led me to surmise, correctly, that Randall doesn’t spend a lot of time out of doors.
He stood to greet me.
“Randall Greene,” he announced formally.
Offering that wry smile.
“Clara Buchanan.”
I shucked my anorak and shook the damp from my hair. I expected to see some soft-gutted person in a lobbyists’ uniform—the stereotyped fella in a gray flannel suit, as it were—but Randall was lean and compact in pressed jeans and a light wool blazer. I could see he was surprised at my height. Most men are. Some try to hide it.
Not Randall.
“Is that all you, or are there stilts?”
“If that’s the best you can do, Mr. Greene, let’s just call it a day.”
“My bad.” He winked an apology. “Please. Take a seat.”
I ordered a latte, and with no other preamble the visiting lobbyist began to probe my positions on everything from affirmative action to Citizens United.
At some point I actually raised my hand to stop him.
“Aren’t I supposed to be interviewing you?” I asked.
“You are interviewing me,” he replied. “Just not for your paper.”
I steered the conversation back to his own wheelhouse. It was not earthshaking news, just another cabal in some committee or another trying to defund the Affordable Care Act, which remains Randall’s special area of expertise.
After getting his take on that battle, I broadened my inquiry.
“So, Mr. Greene—”
“Randall, please.”
“Okay, then. Randall, who will Common Cause back for president in the coming election?”
“We’re . . . open-minded,” he said, fencing.
“Have you ever gone to bed with a Republican?” I pressed.
“Got up with one this morning,” he smiled, and with a wink of those Brooke Shield lashes, I knew I’d met my match.
He stayed an extra day, and that day turned into another day, and then another. We had a lot of coffeehouse conversations. I learned that Randall Timpson Greene had worked K Street for nearly twenty years, a scrappy forward pushing position papers and policy manifestos up a hardened court that stretched from the West Wing to the Pentagon. A K Street familiar, but never a Steve Clark or a Susan Hirschmann. Never a real player. In fact, Randall was “let go” a month after I lost my column. He probably could have hired on with some other firm, but here he is with me, laying out photographs of the local 4-H Club and posting minutes from Rotary meetings in a paper that runs eight columns and twenty pages.
I tried to believe that Randall and I were like those professionals who leave high-paying jobs to find fulfillment in a microbrewery or pet store. I strained to imagine readers stimulated by my hometown columns to Jeffersonian debate. A public forum for enlightened citizens. A new estate.
Scratch that.
I found out in a hurry it’s not print that readers are looking for in their backyard news—it’s photography. People scan the copy, sure, the banners, anyway. But it’s pictures that keep subscribers happy, not print, and it’s easy to see why. After all, who doesn’t like to see herself in the paper? Parents love seeing their sons or daughters in the local rag, whether lined up on the football field or that third girl from the right in the back row of the Glee Club. Every youngster who makes Honor Roll gets a picture. Every family reunion generates a half-dozen portraits, and of course hunters will literally kill to get their trophies displayed in black-and-white.
Hunting season always provides an added bonanza, deer season competing with football for the number of pictures published. In fact, from first frost till spring hardly an issue of the Clarion hits a kitchen table that doesn’t feature a father and son flanking a buck, bear, or boar. “No buck fever here!” That caption accompanies a photo of some boy or girl who’s just bagged that first deer, the blood of the slain animal smeared over a smiling young face in joyful commemoration of his or her first and vital kill. Of course, fishermen send in pictures year-round with detailed narratives of the expedition that hooked a redfish or snapper or largemouth bass. These are not the bloody images of a real hunt but are treasured equally with all others.
Trophies of choice have changed over the years, of course. Forty years ago, a hunter was never truly blooded till he bagged a bear or panther. Even gators didn’t count. But panthers are now protected and rare as hen’s teeth, and bea
rs vary in range and population. Hunters nowadays who are in the running for a trophy of merit take their weapons and dogs in search of wild hogs.
It’s hard to beat the challenge posed by a feral hog. These are intelligent and ferocious beasts that range with few natural predators in the acorn-rich loess of the flatwoods, or else gather in sounders in the palmetto wilderness near the coast. A boar can run anywhere from seventy or eighty pounds of tusk and tooth to a three-hundred-pound monster that can charge a hapless hunter at forty miles an hour. Wild hogs feed, forage, and attack in sounders, the sows as mean and dangerous as the boars. These are the new Grendels of the flatwoods, the Sus scrofa, a hybrid of Eurasian boars and domestic hogs turned loose from the time of Ponce de Leon. With populations of panther and bear nearly decimated, the wild hog has become the trophy de jour for hunters looking for primal thrills, and the photos these folks send to the paper can be downright kinky.
This morning, for example, I received a digitized photo of a good-looking young lady bursting out of a polka-dot top and denim shorts posing with a two-hundred-pound hog that she killed with her boyfriend’s Remington.
“Randall, take a look at this.”
There she is, smiling into the camera, a straw hat over strawberry hair. A wink of something metal piercing her navel. I wasn’t surprised to see in the file’s accompanying text that the young hunter was a coed at Florida State.
I remember when bowhunting was regarded as an exotic pastime; now we have babes in bikinis cruising the woods for the rush of a well-tusked slaughter. College kids used to sow their wild seeds at Daytona or a Grateful Dead concert. Now they hire guides to go after feral hogs.
We can get dozens of these photos in a single week, a Roman triumph of bears, deer, hogs, and fishes freshwater and salty. In the days of emulsion and linotype it would take hours and hours to lay out the visuals for that volume of material, and hours more to arrange the elucidating copy.
Thank God for In-Design and Sheryl Lee Pearson. I don’t know how Randall and I would have gotten through our first year at the Clarion without Sheryl Lee’s help. Pearson has honchoed the high school yearbook ever since joining the faculty and knows more about software and photography than I will ever forget. Virtually everything is digitized. Photos come to the paper attached as a file to an e-mail. Sometimes people walk in and download directly from a smartphone or camera. My newspaper, in case you want to visit, is located on Main Street just down from the courthouse in an overbuilt brick building that used to be a bank. We still keep our cash and valuables in the old Diebold vault, which is a joke, because that stash is always open. Not sure I’d know how to open the damn thing if it shut.
Anyway, there’s nothing between the vault and the streetside entry but a half-dozen computers and desks and a maple counter interrupted on one end with a saloon door and a brass-framed mirror. Every now and then I’ll find my reflection in that antique speculum, a forty-something female in a pair of stained chinos and a frayed Tamrac vest. A wind-burned face below a mop of salt-and-pepper hair. Broad shoulders. That and prescriptions for medicine to lower cholesterol describe your intrepid reporter.
A bay of windows older than my antique mirror gives a great view of Main Street. These are huge squares of leaded glass beveled on each side and fitted into oaken frames. The sills are big enough to sit on. The mirror, windows, and pressed-tin ceiling remind me of days gone by, along with some of the paper’s archaic equipment. We still have the two-cylinder, water-cooled Johnny whose belted drive used to turn the old press, and job sticks and linotype mount like museum pieces on the walls. Typesetters in those years could read type upside down as easily as right side up, a skill now esoteric and unnecessary.
“You’re lingering over that photo, husband.”
“A bikini, a gun, and a hog—who wouldn’t?”
“You are a priapic old goat.”
“If that’s what I think it means, I hope so.” He smiled. “Oh. And we got another sighting.”
“Good Lord.”
“Rod Hamlin.” Randall retrieved the name from a scrawl of handwritten notes. “Appears Mr. Hamlin was having trouble sleeping last night so he gets up to pee and before he can finish that business he hears something outside.”
“Tell me it was a possum. A twelve-point buck.”
“Try a ball of light.”
“ ‘Ball of light’?”
“What the man said.”
“We’re talking softball? Baseball?”
“Larger than athletic equipment of any kind, apparently, though Mr. Hamlin was careful to say that it was hard to judge the distance. But he insists this thing was floating over his yard like some kind of jack-o’-lantern, green and round and emitting a steady, high-pitched tone—‘Like old TVs used to make.’ ”
“Drone, maybe?”
“Rod says not.”
“I assume the wraith has moved on to The Twilight Zone?”
“Or maybe Tampa. Hamlin’s saying he observed the thing for a good four or five minutes before he went back inside for a camera. Or was it a rifle? Can’t remember.”
I unzipped my vest.
“Resurrected relatives. Slaughtered dogs. Balls of light. Has the county gone Ghostbusters?”
“More likely the power of suggestion. This E.T. theme and homecoming have got people imagining things.”
“Balls of light, dead husbands, and gnomes?” I said, snorting. “This in a county with more churches than stop signs?”
“Could be a whole new plane of enlightenment has descended.”
“The school board’s still pissed off with Darwin, for God’s sake.”
“So broaden their horizons,” Randall rejoined breezily.
“This from a man leering over a half-nude coed and a feral hog.”
“And a gun.”
“Rifle,” I corrected him. “Words matter.”
Randall was about to tell me where I could stuff my words when the brass bell anchored above our oaken entry tinkled a warning. I turned toward the complaint of iron hinges and a squeak of neoprene soles to find the sheriff of Lafayette County at the door.
Sheriff Colt Buchanan is my first cousin. Colt inhabits his uniformed tans as lean and hard as a split of rails. A black belt heavy as a lumberjack’s cinches onto a waist almost slender to tote a radio, mace, and handgun of formidable caliber. Looking at Colt you’re reminded that we live in a place where Creek Indians used to hollow out dugouts from cypress trunks and hunt gators and bears with spears and axes of flint.
Half the people in our county claim to be descended from some Creek or Cherokee or Seminole in a lineage invariably matriarchal. In actual fact, local white residents are more likely to have black slaves in their family tree than Native Americans, but no one rushes to claim that heritage. Much more chic to have a Native American’s blood in your veins than a slave’s.
But Sheriff Buchanan’s ancestry is well documented, Colt’s mother being a blood relative and only two generations distant from a Creek woman who married Tink Buchanan sometime in the early 1900s. Martha had a brother and two half-sisters. The sisters married inside the tribe; the brother took a wife in Taylor County before getting himself killed in the Turpentine Wars. There are all sorts of stories about Tink and his gator-skinning wife, but no one doubts her tribe’s provenance, that ancestry evident in Colt’s mother and in Colt himself.
His face is chiseled in planes, a high forehead with eyes wide set and the color of coffee. He has a nose like the warrior on a can of Calumet baking soda, and perfect teeth. His skin is more dark than red, but the hair is black as the feathers of crows. Blackest black I’ve ever seen on a human being. Blacker than coal. Preternaturally black.
Colt has been county sheriff for, lessee, three cycles of elections, which is a pretty good run. He presides over four deputies, widespread domestic violence, and a thriving drug trade dominated by the traffic of methamphetamine. The flatwoods offer endless cover for the production of crystal meth, that product easy to
brew in RVs or mobile homes or deer camps and invisible in the endless tracts of slash pine that stretch from Perry to Old Town.
Sheriff Buchanan is always busting some lab or another, usually with a local cooker in tow, which always makes for good copy. I suppose I should mention that we used to be close, Colt and I. By that I mean kissing close. Not uncommon in a county where practically everyone is related.
“How’s my closest cousin?” Colt greeted me.
“Steady by jerks.” I lapsed into local patois and then, “What can I do you for, Sheriff?”
“Dunno. Get me a paper, maybe?”
He took his time strolling to the counter. Worrying a seam of Formica with the nail of his thumb on his way to greeting my husband.
“Mornin’, Randall.”
“Sheriff Buchanan,” Randall acknowledged cheerfully. “I got your birthday request for Miss Briar. Had to squeeze her onto the inside fold, but she’s there.”
That would be Hattie Briar. Yet another relative.
“How’s Aunt Hattie getting on?” I asked.
“She’s good,” our sheriff replied absently. “Ninety-six years old this Sunday and can’t wait for Heritage Week.”
I stifled a groan. The town’s annual paean to its mostly imagined history always involved a trip to Dowling Park and an interview with the county’s oldest native born. Hattie Briar’s yearly interview had become a staple for the paper that I could not change, cancel, or discard.
Colt chuckled. “She’s not that bad, Clara Sue.”
I shook my head. “I’ve interviewed heads of state and jihadists with no problem at all, but with Hattie—? It’s my second time around and I have no idea where to start.”
“Set there long enough, she’ll start herself. And once she gets goin’, forget about stoppin’ her.”
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