by Robert Inman
He put the casserole in the refrigerator and then went upstairs and took off his coat and tie. He hadn’t realized, until Phyllis said it, that he was still dressed for work. Work? My God, I’ve been fired. Out on my ass. It happened to ordinary people, but not to Will Baggett, Raleigh’s most popular TV weatherman. He felt a rush of pure, unadulterated rage. “Sonofabitch!” he bellowed into the silence of the house. But then the anger was replaced by something else. Dread, lying like a coiled snake at the pit of his stomach. Where once he had been so dead certain about where his life was headed, now there was just a yawning nothing. This thing they had done to him had cut him loose from his moorings. He was adrift, rudderless, at the mercy of wind and current, out of sight of all the old familiar landmarks and beacons. It was enough to fill you with dread, pure and simple.
He went back downstairs. The woman from Franklinton had given up. The phone was bleating in off-the-hook protest. It finally fell silent, leaving the house empty and still and sucked dry. He he fixed an enormous scotch and water and settled himself on a corner of the living room sofa to wait.
The evening purpled into night. He fixed another drink and was halfway through that one when he heard Clarice’s car pull into the driveway. He glanced at his watch. Almost eight o’clock.
After a moment she came noisily through the back door, dropping keys and briefcase on the counter, placing the telephone back in its cradle, flipping on lights. The phone rang almost immediately. She picked it up. The conversation was a mumble. Then she hung it up again. “Will?”
“In here,” he called.
She stood for a moment in the doorway, framed by the rectangle of light from the hall.
“You’re late,” he said.
Clarice ran her fingers through her hair, a nervous habit he had noticed lately without knowing just when she had picked it up. She was forever mussing her hair and then searching frantically for a mirror to repair it. “Sales meeting,” she said, “about the new development. Fincher got the exclusive.”
“That’s good,” he said. “I’ve been fired.”
“It’s on the radio. But they didn’t say you were fired.”
“What did they say?”
“That you’re leaving Channel Seven. Something about new owners.” She stood there for a moment longer, her face in shadow. Then she crossed the room and sat down beside him on the couch and took his hand, her long, slender fingers cool against his fevered skin. “What happened?”
He told her about Spectrum, Old Man Simpson, the contract. He could feel the words tumbling out and stumbling over each other, tight and strangled, as he said it all for the first time out loud -- putting voice to the mad welter that had been boiling in him since he had driven out of the parking lot at Channel Seven. She listened, perfectly still. When he finally fell silent, she said, “Channel Seven’s not the only TV station in Raleigh.”
“It might as well be.” He told her about the non-compete clause.
She waited for a moment and then said, “I see.”
“You see?”
“Well, I just don’t know what to say.” She let go of his hand and spread her own in a gesture of helplessness.
Will shook his head. A long silence. “The bastards will rape the place. I’m just the first.”
“Will, I’m sorry.” Her voice floated in the semi-dark. There was just enough light filtering in from the hallway that he could see her lovely form there on the sofa, but not enough that he could tell what she was doing with her face. She was, for the most part, an open book. Her face revealed everything. But he couldn’t see that now. He could only hear her voice. Sympathetic, yes. But not what you would call agonized. He wanted her to be agonized. As he was.
She touched his cheek with her cool hand. “I know you’re upset. Take a few days to get over this, figure out what you want to do. Money’s not a problem.”
“No. They offered me fifty thousand dollars to go quietly.” But, he realized, she was talking about herself, about her own career, her own money-generating machine. Homes and land. Multiple listings. Emigrees from Cincinnati and Newark.
“Then you should go quietly,” she said.
“They took my job!” he burst out.
She withdrew her hand, leaving the cool imprint. “Well, that’s all they could take,” she said.
No. She didn’t understand. How could she?
“ I can’t believe I’ve been so goddamned naïve.”
“Naïve?”
“It’s just business. That’s all it is. Just business.”
“Well, what did you think it was, Will?”
“It’s my…”
“Life?”
“Well, not all of it, of course. But some. You have your work, that has a lot to do with who you are. I worked like a sonofabitch for that station. I earned what I got -- not just the money, the place. And quicker than you can blink your eye, it’s gone. Twenty years. What’s it worth? Fifty thousand dollars and get-the-hell-out-of-our-TV-station. Go away and vegetate for a year while everybody forgets there ever was a Will Baggett.”
“You feel betrayed.”
“Betrayed, stupid, maybe a little scared.”
“Why? Will, you’re a smart, attractive, personable man. There are all sorts of things you can do.”
“Such as?”
She thought for a moment, her hand in her hair again. “Radio? The newspaper? Public relations. Run for office. You’d make a good politician.”
“I’m a TV weatherman, Clarice.”
They sat for a long while in silence and then the telephone rang back in the kitchen again. Clarice started to rise.
“Let it ring,” he said. “I don’t want to talk to anybody.”
“It might be for me,” she said. But she sat back on the sofa and they listened while the answering machine took the call after four rings, the message and the caller only a rattle of garbled sound. Whoever it was went on for a long time and then finally hung up.
Silence again. And finally Clarice said, “You know what I thought when I heard it on the radio, Will? I thought, well maybe he just got tired of it and left. Maybe he got worn out with the celebrity and people honking their horns and pulling and tugging on him. Maybe he got up this morning and looked in the mirror and said to himself, ‘What’s going on here? Why am I doing this? What does it matter?’ Maybe he just said, ‘I want to be somebody else for awhile.’ And you know, Will, I felt a great sense of relief when I thought that. I felt happier than I have in a long time. For you, for me. For us.”
“Well, sorry, but I don’t want to be somebody else.”
“What if you don’t have any choice?”
He shook his head. It wasn’t something he wanted to talk about, to even think about. No, what he had to talk about was what he had been thinking since he sat down here on the sofa. “We might…have to move.”
“Move?”
“Charlotte, maybe. Atlanta. Denver. Wherever there’s an opening.”
She waited for a long time before she spoke, and before the first word came out there was a loud exhaling of the breath she had been holding. “Will, I’ve got a business here. You don’t rush into real estate and become an overnight success. You have to work at it. Build up contacts. Referrals. I’m just now getting good at it.”
Will felt a sudden emptying, everything in his body from just below his hairline on down rushing to his lower extremities, as it dawned on him how utterly things had changed between them, how the delicate balance of action and reaction and transaction they had constructed over twenty-five years of marriage no longer held true. They spoke now in different languages, untranslatable, across a gulf of time and space.
More than that, he realized, what had transpired in Old Man Simpson’s office in the space of a few minutes this afternoon had altered geography. He and Clarice had changed places. She was no longer his appendage. He was hers.
*****
She was in bed, reading, when he came up about nine. She looked up
from her book. “Have you talked to Palmer?”
He hadn’t thought of Palmer, not for a moment. It caught him off guard, this mention now of his son’s name, surprised him with a rush of guilt.
“Don’t you think you should?”
“I don’t want to bother him tonight. He’s got that exam tomorrow. I’ll call then, after he’s done.”
She gave him a long look, then she picked up the phone on her bedside table and dialed. She waited. “Palmer, call home.”
It was almost ten when the phone rang. Will was in the bathroom brushing his teeth. He heard the mutter of Clarice’s voice. Then, “Will…”
He rinsed his mouth and went to the bedside and took the receiver from her.
“Dad?”
“Hi, son.”
“Hey, I’m sorry. A friend heard it on TV and told me. I tried to call earlier, but the line was busy.”
“Yeah,” Will said. “A lot of calls. Then I took it off the hook.”
“Is it really like they said on TV? You quit?”
“No. That’s not the way it is at all.”
“Oh.” Then, “That’s really rotten.”
“Ah well, anybody can do the weather. It’s not the end of the world.”
Palmer didn’t say anything for a moment and beyond his silence Will could hear music, voices, the clink of glass, laughter. Finally he said, “Dad, don’t shit me.”
“What?”
“I know how much it means to you. So don’t shit me by telling me it doesn’t matter.”
Will was taken aback. Palmer’s voice was raw, almost angry. “Son…”
“Just be honest, huh?”
“Okay.”
“It hurts.”
“Yeah. It hurts.”
“Okay.”
“Where are you?” Will asked.
“In a bar.”
“Don’t you have an exam tomorrow?”
Another silence. “I can handle it,” Palmer said.
“Palmer, are you okay?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t shit me.”
Palmer laughed -- a short explosion of sound with no mirth in it. “Yeah,” he said. “We have to be upfront with each other, don’t we. Just the guys, speaking plain truth and so forth.”
Then he hung up.
Will handed the phone back to Clarice.
“So?”
“He told me not to shit him.”
There was a tiny trace of a smile at the edges of her mouth. “He told you that?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you want to talk to Palmer?”
“It’s not that.”
“Don’t shit me,” she said. The smile was gone.
“I guess,” he said, “I just didn’t know what to say. You want your son to think you’re pretty special.”
“People get fired all the time, Will. Some of them have sons. They deal with it. Don’t you think yours is capable of that?”
He shrugged.
“You’ve always presented a moving target, Will. Maybe now you’ll have to stand still long enough for somebody to get a shot at you.”
FOUR
Will was blasted from sleep the next morning by an explosion of splintering wood. He jerked upright in bed. “Aaaaghhh!”
He thought at first of the teenager down the street with the new Camaro. Had he failed to make the curve and crashed into Will’s house, ripping up the lawn in the process? But no, this commotion was at the back of the house. And it continued. He glanced at the bedside clock radio. 8:43.
He struggled out of bed, wrapped himself in a robe, and stumbled into the hallway. “Clarice,” he called from the top the stairs. No answer except for the screeching protest of nails being pried from wood. He struggled down the stairs, wild-eyed with shock. The front doorbell was ringing, barely audible over the deafening racket coming from somewhere beyond the kitchen. “Just a minute!” he yelled toward the front door, and kept moving toward the smashing sound, fixing it at the kitchen’s exterior wall. He bolted for the back door and flung it open to see a trio of rough-hewn men, armed with crowbars and sledge hammers, ripping the back off of his home. Two of them were on ladders and another was working at ground level, prying off boards and tossing them into a growing heap on the ground. They seemed to be having a grand time of it. At the bottom of the steps, a boom box was blasting a Willie Nelson song. “I gotta get drunk and I sure do dread it.” Will stared in horror. “What in the hell are you doing?”
The workmen stopped momentarily and the one at ground level, a wiry man with bad teeth and a Durham Bulls baseball cap, gave Will a close look and said, “Hey, you’re the guy on TV.”
“Yeah. No.”
“Sports on Channel Four. Right?”
Forgotten already. “Yeah. What’s going on here?”
“Lady said take out the wall. We’re taking out the wall.”
“What for?”
“The addition.”
They went back to work, ripping and crowbarring and smashing. Willie Nelson went on getting reluctantly drunk on the radio. Will spotted a makeshift table in the yard, a sheet of plywood laid across two sawhorses. He clambered down the back steps, side-stepping the boom box, and crossed to the table where some kind of drawing had been unrolled and was being held down at each end by bricks. He studied it, recognizing it as Clarice’s plans for the addition, the ones she had shown him four years ago. “You can’t do this!” he cried, waving his arms.
The man in the Bulls cap gave him an arch look, then tossed his crowbar on the ground and joined Will at the table. The two on the ladder went on with their demolition, paying them no attention. Will lifted the bricks off the plans, rolled them up and handed them to the man. “You can’t do this,” he repeated.
“Why not?” the man asked.
“We’re not ready. Not now.”
The man placed the rolled-up plans back on the table, reached in his rear jeans pocket and pulled out a pouch of chewing tobacco. He pinched off a wad and jammed it in the corner of his mouth between cheek and gum. “Look,” he said to Will, “the lady done paid half the money. Your wife, I take it.”
“Yes. My wife.”
“Well, we got orders to take off that,” he pointed at the back of the house, “and put on that,” he tapped the plans with a bony finger. “I reckon you’ll have to take it up with the lady.”
“Good God,” Will groaned, and retreated to the house, slamming the back door just as a sledgehammer smashed a hole in the plaster above the breakfast room table. Will fled down the hallway, heading for the stairs. The doorbell rang again.
Dinkins was standing on the front stoop. He was wearing his security guard uniform and cap. Both looked slept-in. He was holding a copy of the Raleigh News and Observer. “Morning, Mister Baggett.”
“Mister Dinkins.”
Will looked past Dinkins at the panel truck in the driveway:
CHRISTIAN CONSTRUCTION AND RENOVATORS
SPRUCING UP RALEIGH ONE JOB AT A TIME
JESUS SAVES.
Dinkins’ ancient, rusting Ford was parked at the curb. From the rear of the house, the smashing and rending went on.
“You and the missus doing some work?” Dinkins asked.
“The missus,” Will said with a grimace.
Dinkins held up the newspaper. “I ‘speck you’ve seen this.”
“No. I just got up. I’d ask you come in, but…” he gestured helplessly toward the noise.
“No bother,” Dinkins said, and sat down on the steps. Will joined him and took the paper. The headline was at the bottom right corner of the front page:
CHANNEL SEVEN SELLS, BAGS BAGGETT
In a move that stunned the Raleigh broadcasting community, television station Channel Seven was sold Monday to Spectrum Broadcasting of Chicago. An immediate casualty was veteran weathercaster Will Baggett, who left to “pursue other business ventures,” according to a statement by the new owners.
Spectrum Communications spoke
sman Arthur Krupp said his company would employ a college-trained meteorologist to forecast weather on the station. “It’s a nationwide trend,” said Krupp. “Meteorologists have more credibility with viewers.”
Krupp’s statement said that since Baggett’s contract with the present owner of Channel Seven had expired last month, Spectrum decided to release him immediately. “We wish Mr. Baggett every success,” said Krupp. “Spectrum Communications looks forward to further operational changes to better serve viewers in the Raleigh area.”
Channel Seven president Barfield Simpson declined comment on the sale and Baggett’s release. Baggett, reached at his Raleigh home, also had no comment.
Sources in the Channel Seven newsroom told the News and Observer that Baggett’s dismissal was Spectrum’s decision and apparently took Baggett by surprise. Baggett had been the station’s chief weathercaster for more than 20 years and is credited by station insiders with helping Channel Seven maintain top newscast ratings in the Raleigh market.
Both parties to the sale declined to disclose the price Spectrum paid for Channel Seven, which has been privately held by the Simpson family since its founding…
There were two photographs: one of Will at his desk in the weather center, another of Old Man Simpson standing in front of the studio building.
Will handed the paper back to Dinkins, who folded it neatly and placed it on the steps at his side. “They shouldn’ta done that,” he said.
“Well, it’s their station now, or soon will be. I guess they can do anything they want.”
They sat quietly for awhile. It was a lovely Spring morning, warm and budding. Showers expected by late afternoon, possibly even some heavier stuff. A cold front had moved through from the northwest, then turned stationary over Georgia and was drifting back north toward the Carolinas. A late-April day like so many that had passed across his weather maps over the years. Only this one was somebody else’s. Brent’s. He had a degree in meteorology. He was just two years out of college, but he would be cheap. They would give him a piddling raise and responsibility for the weekday weathercasts and he would think he had died and gone to heaven. His face on billboards. His voice on the radio. But he wouldn’t stay around long enough to become a fixture. Not that that counted for anything, Will thought. Being a fixture and being bulletproof, well it turns out they’re two entirely different things.